The Warriors of Brin-Hask (6 page)

The pizza was cold by the time King Hibble and his warriors finally staggered through
the daffodils and reached the main steps of the hotel, and the sun had set long ago.
Amelia and Charlie were waiting for them. They had spread out an old picnic blanket
on the grass and put four pizzas in the middle, with a bowl of water for the soldiers
to refill their canteens.

The soldiers all but fell on the pizzas and after only a few minutes Amelia knew
she’d have to go and get at least eight more. Small as they were, the Brin-Hask ate
like piranhas. When at last they had rolled onto their backs, patting their stomachs,
King Hibble clapped his paws and called, ‘Enrick! Enrick the bard – where are you?
Your king wants a poem!’

Charlie groaned quietly. ‘Singing?’ he whispered to Amelia. ‘Poetry?’ Then he mouthed
silently,
lame
.

‘Your grace,’ Enrick stood, a little stringed instrument in his paws,
‘what will you hear?’

‘“The Ballad of Queen Gorrick and the Grawk”,’ said King Hibble.

The soldiers all murmured their approval, but Charlie rolled his eyes.

Enrick coughed once, strummed his tiny instrument and began to sing in a high, beautiful
voice a story that was so frightening, all the hair stood up on Amelia’s arms. It
began with a Grawk invading the Brin-Hask’s land. Enrick didn’t say what a Grawk
was, but it sounded monstrous: a huge creature, as large as ten Brin-Hask warriors,
with pure black fur and eyes that glowed like molten metal. It was silent, cunning,
and so quick that no-one even saw its shadow before it fell on them. It avoided every
trap, outsmarted every ambush and was stronger than every weapon.

Amelia was entranced until she saw King Hibble walking toward them.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘Is it rude to listen? We can go away.’

But even as she was saying it, she was listening to Enrick describing how Queen Gorrick
went out to take on the Grawk in single combat.

‘No, cub,’ said the king. ‘But I have a question for you.’

Amelia nodded.

‘When you left us at the gateway, and ran ahead to prepare for our arrival – was
not the grass of the sea prepared for my warriors?’

‘Oh.’ Amelia gulped. ‘Yes. Lots of it.’

‘But we did not have it.’

‘No.’

King Hibble looked at her silently, his little button eyes stern. Amelia tried again.

‘No, sir. Your highness.’

‘What happened?’

‘The rats,’ said Charlie bluntly.

‘What is
rats
?’

‘Oh, vicious things,’ said Charlie. ‘Well, normal rats are vicious, but these are
even worse. They’re some kind of alien cyber-rats, and they’ve taken over the hotel.
Amelia’s dad won’t let us into the kitchen, where we left the seaweed.’

King Hibble looked sharply at Amelia. ‘You’ve been forced out of your home by these
creatures?’

Amelia nodded. ‘Yes, sir. And tomorrow the Control people are coming to throw us
out. Or into jail. We don’t know yet.’

All the fur on King Hibble’s body bristled. His eyes glinted, and he turned back
to the picnic blanket of drowsy soldiers.

‘Warriors of Brin-Hask!’ he shouted.

Enrick the bard stopped singing, and instantly every warrior was on their feet and
at attention.

‘Tonight we were denied our traditional feast of the grass of the sea – denied it
by a plague of filth that has fallen on this house!’

There was a general grumbling and jostling among the soldiers.

‘A plague,’ the king went on, ‘that has driven these massive humans from their home,
and will tomorrow result in their shame and expulsion. Do you know what this means?’

The warriors shouted in excitement, and Amelia saw swords and clubs waved in the
air, shields raised and clanged together.

‘Yes!’ King Hibble cried. ‘We have a foe worthy of battle! We have a chance to burn
away our disgrace, and if any of us live to tell the tale, we will return to our
homes with glory! For we have a
fight to the death!
’

King Hibble blew a hunting horn, and the warriors leapt into rough lines.

‘Charge!’ he screamed, and the mass of tiny, colourful warriors swarmed across the
lawn and up the steps. They swept past Amelia and Charlie in a wave of fury and disappeared
through the front doors of the hotel.

Amelia blinked. The Brin-Hask could move with incredible speed when they had a battle
to win. She and Charlie scrambled to their feet and ran after them.

Amelia and Charlie raced along the veranda after the charging Brin-Hask army, almost
knocking over the card table the parents were sitting at.

‘Hey!’ Dad yelled. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Charlie!’ Mary was shocked. ‘Are you chasing those aliens?’

‘Not chasing, following,’ Charlie corrected her over his shoulder.

‘They’re attacking the rats,’ Amelia yelled back, already in the lobby where the
Brin-Hask were now paused – scouts jogging off toward the library in one direction,
the ballroom in another.

‘It’s straight ahead!’ Amelia called. ‘Follow the seaweed smell!’

‘I’ll get the door for them,’ said Charlie, but instead of racing after the army
he stopped dead and stared up at the gallery. Amelia followed his gaze and her mouth
fell open. After a day where she had seen the kitchen floor vomit up ranks of cyber-rats,
and met the universe’s cutest-slash-most-bloodthirsty creatures, with a strange bouncing
alien in a maze in between, there ought to have been nothing much that could surprise
Amelia.

But there she was: Lady Naomi herself.

She was standing in the gallery and gazing down at them. Amelia just stared. She
was really there. A young woman, straight-backed and graceful even in the way she
held herself, like a dancer on stage. Or a ninja. She had slanting grey eyes, long
black hair and an elegance that reminded Amelia of the foreign dignitaries Mum had
sometimes worked with as a diplomat.

For once, Amelia couldn’t blame James for falling in love at first sight. Not that
James would ever have a hope with a woman like this.

As Lady Naomi stepped closer to the railing, light fell on a long, twisted scar that
ran from the shoulder of her right arm, down to the wrist. It was raised and jagged,
as though the healing had been difficult. Yet somehow, she made even that terrible
injury look glamorous.

‘Did I really just see the warriors of Brin-Hask streaking past?’ she asked. Even
her voice was lovely.

Amelia nodded, and then cleared her throat. ‘Yes!’

‘What are they doing? You didn’t offend them, did you?’

‘Not us!’ said Charlie. ‘They’re after the rats!’

Lady Naomi let out a stifled squawk of excitement and rushed down the stairs. Despite
her haste, she moved as silently and fluidly as a cat. When she reached the lobby,
grinning brilliantly, she stood between Charlie and Amelia – a little taller than
Charlie, an inch or so shorter than Amelia – and seized their hands in hers.

Before Amelia could process the fact that not only was Lady Naomi real, but actually
touching her, she was being dragged off to the kitchen.

‘Come on,’ Lady Naomi cried. ‘We’ll never see anything like this again, I promise!’

They burst into the kitchen through the empty doorway that once housed the kitchen
door, now shattered to pieces by Brin-Hask axes. The warriors were already arranged
around the loose floorboards by the oven. Nothing had happened yet, but there was
the same intense excitement in the air as if a bomb were about to explode.

King Hibble glanced up at them. ‘My lady, you look well. Keep the cubs out of the
way, will you?’

‘Yes, your grace.’ She curtsied, then said, ‘All right, we need to
get up off the ground.’

They climbed onto the far work bench, Charlie standing in the sink like Mr Snavely
had, Amelia sitting on the draining board with her feet tucked under her. Lady Naomi
sat on the wooden breadbin, and after looking around, armed herself with a long knife-sharpener.
They had a perfect view of the whole kitchen.

At a signal from King Hibble, the front line of his warriors approached the floorboards
and began levering them up with their swords. Before they had lifted as much as the
corner, though, the whole section of floor exploded up from below – not just the
couple of boards that had been moved when Dad and Mr Snavely investigated, but almost
a metre square blasted out. The entire Brin-Hask army was caught out – the back lines
thrown violently against the walls, the rest tumbling down into the gaping cavity
that had opened below them.

Taken by surprise, and all but knocked out by the force of the explosion, falling
helplessly into a pit of enraged, glowing-eyed cyber-rats, King Hibble and his army
simply disappeared.

Charlie sucked in a breath. ‘It’s going to be a massacre!’

The remaining Brin-Hask warriors staggered to their feet, obviously partly concussed.
They gathered up their weapons and, without a word, charged back toward the hole
in the floor, diving into the abyss to join their comrades.

‘It’s going to be carnage,’ Amelia whispered, horrified.

Lady Naomi gave a wicked grin. ‘Yeah.’

The kitchen was filled with screams of outrage. It was impossible to know what was
going on, as the battle was all below the floor, but Amelia quickly learnt to tell
the difference between the high-pitched squeals of the rats and the joyous battle
cries of the Brin-Hask. All they saw were the long, scaly rat tails as they flicked
past the blast hole, and the occasional flash of a sword or shield.

Then a massive thump shook the hotel, and all the floorboards in the kitchen pulverised
– instantly dissolving into dust and falling back into the cavity.

‘What was that?’ Charlie yelped. ‘Did the Brin-Hask do that?’

Lady Naomi laughed in amazement. ‘I don’t know. The Brin-Hask don’t use bombs or
machinery of any kind, although they know how to manage them when they find them.’

‘The rats had rigged the whole floor to explode?’ said Amelia.

‘It looks like it,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘Probably supposed to be a last resort for mass
escape if they ever needed to flee the hotel. I doubt it offers them much advantage
in a fight like this.’