At least a hundred mice lay twisted and motionless at the bottom of the tunnel.
Chapter 14
"The mouses take a nap?" said Boots. "Kill the lights!" Gregor shouted at the fireflies. In another few seconds even Boots would realize that the mice were not sleeping but dead. Some lay in pools of dried blood. The eyes of others were wide open as they stared frozen into space. "Turn them off!"
The bulbs on Photos Glow-Glow's and Zap's rear ends went dark. Gregor flicked on the flashlight at his belt but did not direct it to the ground.
"What did Boots say? What mice? Did we find the nibblers?" asked Hazard, struggling to sit up.
"Lie back, Hazard; there is nothing to see," said Howard.
"What is that smell?" Hazard insisted.
"It comes from a foul stream. We will fly on," said Luxa.
None of them wanted Hazard or Boots to see the corpses. But there was no concealing them from Thalia. When they found a place to land about a thousand yards beyond the graveyard, Gregor noticed the little bat was trembling. He felt pretty shaky himself.
Howard made a bed for Hazard and then pulled Luxa and Gregor aside. "One of us must stay with the young ones while the other two go back."
"I must go," said Luxa.
"You stay, Howard. In case Hazard feels bad or something," said Gregor.
They left Howard, Nike, and Temp to watch over Hazard, Boots, and Thalia. Photos Glow-Glow stayed at the campsite while Zap escorted Gregor and Luxa and their bonds back to the mice.
Before they left, Howard provided them with cloths wetted with an antiseptic solution to hold over their noses as a barrier to the smell of decomposing flesh. "Do not touch any of them," he instructed. "You do not know what contagion they might carry."
The cloths helped, but when they reached the mice Gregor still could not help gagging at the stench. Zap's light was enough to illuminate the whole area. The bottom of the tunnel had ended with a sheer drop of about forty feet. The mice must have been driven straight off the side of the cliff and fallen to their deaths. Some, by their squashed and battered appearance, had clearly broken the fall of others. Several pups were crushed completely. There were no rats among the dead.
Even Zap, who showed remarkably little compassion in general, seemed affected by the scene. "What a waste. What a waste. I do not pretend to like the nibblers, but what a waste."
"I guess they ran right off the edge of the cliff," said Gregor.
"They would have found a way to scale the wall, had they been given time," replied Luxa bitterly. "This was the gnawers' work."
"Should we do something with the bodies?' asked Gregor.
"There is nothing to be done. If we place them in the water, we pollute our own drinking supply. We do not have enough hands to bury them in stone, nor the fuel to burn them properly," said Luxa. All this was true. Yet somehow they couldn't just fly away and do nothing.
"We should leave something, a headstone or some message," said Gregor. But writing in stone was no small matter. He had intended to write a few sentences about what happened, but it was an effort even to scratch one straight line into the side of the cliff with his sword. As he stood considering the wall, waiting for inspiration, Luxa came up and added the thin, beaklike appendage that turned the line into the scythe. Into a mark of secret.
"It will be a warning to any that follow us," she said. "And it will be a fitting marker for the nibblers' graves."
And then Luxa did something that made Gregor feel both remarkably close to and a million miles away from her. Flinging away the cloth from her nose, she kneeled on the ground and placed her crown in front of her. Crossing her wrists, she held her hands, palms down, over the gold circle, and said in a loud voice:
"Upon this crown my pledge I give.
TO MY LAST BREATH, I HOLD THIS CHOICE.
i will your unjust deaths avenge, All here who died without a voice."
The words reverberated around the tunnel. It was not an impromptu rhyme, something she had made up off the top of her head. There was a specific ritual and a grim, formal tone to the lines. Gregor was certain it was an oath. Something you swore to fulfill or died trying to. It came from such an agonized place within Luxa that Gregor wanted to wrap his arms around her. But the oath had pushed him away from her, too. Had reminded him that he was just a visitor in a strange land where people vowed vengeance and crowns mattered and queens were off-limits to him.
Watching her rise, Gregor could no longer see Luxa the twelve-year-old girl who'd been searching for clues about her mouse friends. What he saw was the future head of Regalia, and its considerable armies, and that the rats were somehow going to pay with their blood.
Something was happening in the tunnel. Faint whispering sounds, buzzes, a rustle of wings. Gregor remembered what Howard had said, about how a lot of creatures lived in Hades Hall. They had been keeping a low profile so far, but they were around, watching, listening, and now reacting to Luxa's little speech. She heard the reaction and for some reason that Gregor didn't understand, she smiled.