Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane - 2 (9 page)

Dulcet helped him secure the life jacket on Boots. It was too big, really, but they belted it on as best they could. Gregor wasn't sure what to do with the second jacket — he could swim pretty well — until he saw Temp shivering at the edge of the dock, looking at the churning river below.

"Hey, Temp, are you going with us?" he asked.

"Vikus says I may, he says," said Temp. So Gregor put the extra jacket on Temp. The bug allowed it because the princess was wearing one, too, and because Gregor got through to him that it would help him float.

As he stood up from strapping Temp in, he saw Luxa, Solovet, Mareth, and Howard come out of the palace. Luxa and Solovet were wearing gowns, not the long pants they had traveled in before.

"Wait a minute — you're going with us, right?" Gregor said to Luxa.

"No, Gregor, I cannot. I was only allowed to join you on the first quest because 'The Prophecy of Gray' dictated it. This has been deemed too unnecessarily dangerous for a queen,"

Luxa said, glancing at Vikus.

Gregor thought she at least could have put up an argument. Maybe even Luxa wasn't keen on chasing down the Bane. It made him kind of mad, though.

"So, who's going, then?" asked Gregor.

"Well, first you should know that we had no lack of volunteers," Vikus said, as if to reassure Gregor that this was going to be a guaranteed good time. "But the openings were very limited. Besides yourself, Ares, Boots, Temp, and Twitchtip, we will be sending Mareth and Howard and their fliers."

"Howard?" said Gregor. He liked Mareth a lot, but he didn't want Luxa's cousin going along. Howard was part of that Fount crowd, and who knew if he'd ever seen a rat — besides that dead one on the beach?

"Apart from being a most excellent fighter, he is well versed in the ways of water travel,"

said Solovet. "We are most fortunate his visit coincided with yours."

"Uh-huh," said Gregor. "So Ripred's not coming, either?" Nobody made him feel safer than Ripred...when he wasn't wondering if the big rat would kill him.

"He left this morning for the Dead Land," said Vikus. "Oh, I see the boats are loaded! We had best get you on your way!"

Ares landed beside them. "The river is too hazardous. We will fly to the Waterway and then board the boats."

"Glad you're coming, anyway," Gregor muttered, shooting a resentful look at Luxa and, while he was at it, Vikus. He climbed on Ares's back.

Dulcet handed Boots up to him with a slight sound of exertion. "Oh! Boots, you have been growing well!"

"I big girl! I ride bat! I ride bat!" Boots squealed in delight, bouncing in front of Gregor.

On the first trip, Gregor had carried her in a backpack, but she was getting too big for that, especially with the life jacket.

"Temp ride, too!" said Boots. The cockroach scurried up behind them, his movements somewhat restricted by his bulky flotation device.

Twitchtip slid into one of the big boats and flattened herself in the middle. Her nose poked over the side, trying to catch the breeze that blew up the river. Gregor felt a twinge of sympathy for the rat. She might be the only one more miserable about this journey than he was.

Teams of bats lifted the two loaded boats by rope loops and started down the river. As Ares took off after them, Gregor wrapped his arms tightly around Boots. He was becoming familiar with the journey now, the fading lights of Regalia, the glimmer as they passed the crystal-walled beach where he had had his first encounter with rats, and finally the wide-open expanse of the Waterway.

They flew a few miles out over the Waterway before the teams of bats lowered the boats into the water and took off. Howard's bat landed in the boat with Twitchtip. Ares settled in the second boat, as did Mareth's bat.

"This is Andromeda. She is my bond," Mareth said, touching his hand to the wing of his gold-and- black-speckled bat. Gregor remembered Mareth had been riding her during the rat fight back on the crystal beach. She'd been so badly injured that she had not come on "The Prophecy of Gray" trip. Gregor still felt kind of responsible for that fight because it had happened when he'd tried to escape.

"Hey, nice to meet you," he said. Did she still blame him for that night?

"I am honored to meet you also, Overlander," she said. Maybe, like Mareth, she had forgiven him.

Mareth also introduced him to Howard's bond, Pandora, a graceful bat with beautiful rusty red fur. All she said to him was "Greetings."

Vikus had flown out after them to bid them good-bye. "Gregor, I forgot to deliver you this," he called. His large gray bat swooped over Gregor's boat, and something fell to the floor.

Gregor picked up a scroll and found a copy of "The Prophecy of Bane" written in Nerissa's elegant hand.

"Fly you high!" Vikus headed back toward Regalia, giving them an encouraging wave.

Gregor managed a nod back.

Boots was wriggling madly to get out of Gregor's arms. Letting her loose in the boat made him nervous, but he couldn't hold her for days at a time. He set her down on the floor with strict instructions to "Stay in the boat!"

Fortunately the vessel was so deep that she couldn't get out, anyway. When Gregor stood in the middle, the sides rose up to his shoulders. It was about twenty feet long and made of some kind of animal hide stretched over a bone frame. A two-foot-wide strip of floor ran down the center of the boat. About a third of the way from the front of the boat, Mareth hoisted a wooden mast into the air and secured it at the hinged base. It was only the second wooden object Gregor had seen used in the Underland, the first being the door to Sandwich's room. There were a few seats fashioned from leather, and a lot of supplies. Especially food.

"Are we really going to eat all this?" asked Gregor.

"Not by ourselves. But the shiners will require a great deal of food," said Mareth.

"The shiners?" said Gregor.

"Vikus did not tell you?" began Mareth.

Gregor wondered how many times he was going to hear that in the next few days.

"On long voyages, we cannot carry enough fuel to provide light. So we hire shiners to aid us," said Mareth. "They should be here directly — yes, see...here they come now."

Gregor looked out into the dark and spotted two points of light. They went out, and then turned on again, closer this time. As the flickering light continued to approach, he could make out the forms of flying insects. By the time the two giant bugs had landed on the bows of the boats, he had identified them.

"Oh, they're fireflies!" he said. Back at his dad's family's farm in Virginia, they flew at the edge of the woods at night. Their little twinkling lights made the whole place look magical.

The three-foot-tall versions perched on the boat weren't nearly so enchanting. But he had to admit that when their butts lit up, they put out some light.

"Greetings, Shiners," said Mareth with a bow.

"Greetings, all," one of the fireflies said in a high and impossibly whiny voice. "I am he called Photos Glow-Glow and she is Zap."

"It was my turn to make the introduction," wailed Zap. "Photos Glow-Glow made it last time."

"But we both know that, as a male, I am more visually pleasing to humans," Photos Glow-Glow said, his rear end blinking in a variety of colors. "Zap can only make one color, and it is yellow."

"I hate you!" shrieked Zap.

And Gregor knew this was going to be the longest trip of his life.

***

Gregor had never bitten his nails before, but he started doing it about five minutes after the fireflies arrived. They were unbelievable! They argued about where they would sit, they argued about who should take the first shift, they even argued about whose servant Temp should be since he was obviously just a no-account crawler, until the roach spoke up with uncharacteristic force, "Only the princess, Temp serves, only the princess."

Mareth tried to feed them to distract them, but they just bickered about each other's table manners.

"Must you talk with your mouth full, Zap?" Photos Glow-Glow said. "It kills my appetite."

"This from someone who just sat in his milk!" Zap said, and apparently she had him there, because his rear end went bright red in anger, and he chomped on a mushroom in silence for at least thirty seconds.

"Are they always like this?" Gregor whispered to Mareth.

"In truth, these two are not as bad as some others I have traveled with," whispered back Mareth. "I once saw a pair try to fight to the death over a piece of cake."

"Try to?" said Gregor.

"They are not very capable fighters, and they tire quickly. So they ended up accusing each other of cheating, and giving up. Then they sulked for several days," said Mareth.

"Do we really need them?" asked Gregor.

"Unfortunately, yes," said Mareth.

Even Boots, who had stationed herself on the floor of the boat to roll a ball around with Temp, seemed aggravated by the newcomers.

"Fo-Fo, too loud!" she said, tugging on one of his wings. "Shh, Fo-Fo!"

"Fo-Fo? Fo-Fo? I am he called Photos Glow-Glow and will answer to no other name!"

said Photos Glow-Glow.

"She's just a little kid. She can't say Photos Glow-Glow," said Gregor.

"Well, then, I cannot understand her!" said the firefly.

"Allow me to translate," Twitchtip said, not even bothering to move. "She said if you don't stop your incessant babble, that big rat sitting in the boat next to you will rip your head off."

The silence that followed was blissful. Gregor felt positively friendly toward Twitchtip, and decided he wouldn't mind riding in her boat at all.

They were far out into the Waterway now. The torches had been extinguished when the shiners arrived, and the fireflies' glow only illuminated the immediate area. Gregor snapped on his best flashlight for a minute and shone it around. All signs of land had vanished.

There were waves, too, now. And even a decent breeze. Mareth and Howard ran silken sails up the masts and were preoccupied with steering the two vessels. Their bats settled comfortably together and dozed off. Gregor noticed that Ares didn't join them. On the first quest, all the bats had gathered in a clump to sleep together after flights. But maybe Ares wasn't welcome now.

"Hey, Ares, do you know how long it will take us to get to the Labyrinth in this boat?"

asked Gregor.

"At least five days," said Ares. "If we flew, we could make it in less time, but it is believed that very few bats could make the journey. No one has ever tried it."

"I bet you could make it," said Gregor. He meant it, too. Henry hadn't chosen Ares just because he was a troublemaker; the bat was also impressively strong and swift.

"I have thought that I might try it someday, to see if I could accomplish it," admitted Ares.

"Like Lindbergh. He's the first guy who flew across the Atlantic Ocean by himself," said Gregor.

"He had wings?" asked Ares.

"Well, mechanical ones. He was a person. He had a plane. That's a machine that flies.

Now people fly across the ocean all the time in great big planes, but not when Lindbergh was flying," said Gregor.

"He is famous, in the Overland?" asked Ares.

"Yeah, I mean, he was. He's dead now, but he was real famous. People were mad at him, too. Because of something about a war," Gregor said, unsure about that part. There was a sad thing, too, about a baby. But he couldn't remember that exactly, either.

Gregor picked up the scroll with "The Prophecy of Bane" and opened it.

DIE
the baby, die his heart,

Die his most essential part.

He let the scroll snap shut. He looked at Boots, who was quietly singing "Row Row Row Your Boat" while she drummed on Temp's shell. She was so perfect, somehow, in that way little kids are perfect. So innocent. How did anyone think they were going to solve anything by killing her? And yet at this moment, Gregor knew squads of rats were scouring the Underland to do just that.

"Can rats swim?" Gregor asked, peering out into the water.

"Yes, but not as far out as we are. The rats cannot reach her here," Ares said, following his thoughts.

But eventually they would have to land. And there would be the Bane.

"Have you ever killed a rat?" asked Gregor.

"Not alone. Together with Henry, yes. I flew while he held the sword," said Ares.

Then Gregor remembered he had seen the rat Fangor die on Henry's sword, back on that crystal beach. But it was sort of a blur.

"How do you do it? I mean, where exactly is it best to...where do you stab it?" The words felt strange in his mouth.

"The neck is vulnerable. The heart, but one must get past the ribs. Through the eyes to the brain. Under the foreleg is a vein that bleeds greatly. If you strike at the belly, you may not kill instantly, but the rat will likely die within days from infection," said Ares.

"I see," said Gregor. But he didn't. That is, he couldn't really see himself doing it. Killing the giant white rat. The whole thing was surreal.

"Is it okay if I'm riding you? Or do I have to be on the ground?" asked Gregor.

"I will be there, if it is at all possible," said Ares.

"Thanks," said Gregor. "Sorry I got you into this mess."

"You also freed me from one," said Ares. And they left it at that.

Mareth called a dinner break and passed around food. The fireflies ate with gusto, even though they had just been fed.

After everyone had eaten, Mareth lowered the sails in his boat and hooked the front of his craft to the back of Howard's with a towrope. "Howard and I will take turns sailing the lead boat while the rest sleep. But we need someone on guard and one shiner on duty at all times."

"Zap will take the first shift," said Photos Glow-Glow. "My light requires more energy."

"It is a lie!" howled Zap. "I can only make one color, but the effort is the same. He only says this so that he will be given more food and less work!"

"Photos Glow-Glow will take the first shift," said Twitchtip. "Or I'll shred his wings into ribbons." So that settled that. "Who wants to watch with him?"