"Shh. Too loud. You like Fo-Fo," he heard Boots say.
"It is Photos Glow-Glow!" said an offended voice in the next boat.
"Oh, be quiet, Fo-Fo," said Twitchtip, and Gregor had to pretend to cough to conceal he was laughing.
Boots's feet pattered up by Gregor's head. She leaned over, looking upside down at him. "Hi, you!"
"Hi, you," said Gregor. "What's going on, Boots?"
"I do toes. Whew! I do bekfast. Two times," Boots said, holding up four fingers. She squatted down and pressed her nose into his forehead so their eyes were blinking at each other upside down. "I see you," she said.
"I see you, too," said Gregor.
"Bye," Boots said, and trotted off to the other end of the boat.
Gregor struggled to a sitting position. His whole body ached like he had the flu. He leaned against the side of the boat and looked at his bandaged arm. "So, what's it look like under the bandage?"
"It is not for the faint of heart," said Mareth. "You may thank Howard for saving your arm."
"Saving it? You were going to cut it off?" Gregor asked, instinctively pulling it closer.
"We would have had no choice if the venom spread further, but Howard was able to suck it from the wounds," said Mareth.
"Ugh. Thanks, Howard," Gregor said, gingerly flexing his fingers. Luxa scowled at him. "What? He sucked venom from my arm! I can't say thank you?"
"I am trained in water aid. I have sworn to save anyone in peril related to the water," said Howard.
"If my cousin had been paying attention that night, there would be no need to be so grateful," said Luxa.
Gregor remembered waking, seeing the tentacle...."No, it was my fault. I was supposed to be on guard and I...I fell asleep." He felt ashamed to admit it, but it wasn't fair to let Howard take the blame.
Everyone was quiet for a minute, then Mareth spoke up. "We probably would still have been attacked. But it is crucial to stay awake on guard. Not only our own survival, but that of many hangs on this journey."
It was even worse than Gregor thought, then. "Sorry. I was tired, but I thought I could stay awake."
"It is something you learn, how to stand guard. There are tricks to keeping your mind alert. You will find them," said Howard. But Luxa and Mareth said nothing, and Gregor knew that, for them, what he had done was inexcusable. Howard came from the Fount; it was not so dangerous there. Luxa and Mareth had fought too many rats to let him off the hook.
Mareth called a break for dinner. Gregor was famished. He stuffed way too much in his mouth, choked, and had to take a piece of bread back out. "Excuse me. I guess I haven't eaten since dinner last night."
"That was two nights ago," said Howard. "You have been out for almost two full days."
"Two days!" exclaimed Gregor. He had never been out that long before. Two days, plus the one he had traveled. They must be at least halfway to the Bane, and he felt no more prepared to face it than when he had left Regalia. He should be doing something! He thought about asking Mareth to give him a few more sword lessons, but he was so wiped out from the squid venom, he doubted he could lift the sword.
Besides, hitting things with a sword didn't seem to be his problem. In fact, if anything, he couldn't stop hitting things. It was like something took over his whole being, something beyond his control.
In a weak attempt to better his chances with the Bane, he lay on his back for a while, practicing echolocation. Click! But his mind kept going back to the squid and how he hadn't been able to stop hacking away at it. He couldn't really even remember fighting it, the same way he couldn't really remember hitting all the blood balls. Click! Sometimes that happened to people who were crazy....They had blank spots and couldn't remember how they'd gotten somewhere or what they'd been doing. Click! Oh, and there was that guy in that werewolf movie, same thing happened to him. He'd just wake up all bloody, wondering what had happened to his clothes. Click! Gregor knew there weren't really werewolves. Click! Then again, how did he know that? If you'd asked him six months ago, he'd have said there weren't giant, talking rats!
Click! Click! Click!
He was getting nowhere with this echolocation stuff. Maybe Ripred was right, he had to focus. But who could focus when they were in the middle of an underground sea, full of squid venom, on their way to killing a monstrous white rat? Not him.
Gregor sat up and saw Luxa sitting nearby, sharpening her sword on some kind of stone.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Better since I ate," said Gregor.
Luxa tested the edge of her blade by splitting a strand of rope. She frowned in dissatisfaction and continued to work on it.
"That looks pretty sharp to me," said Gregor.
"Not sharp enough for what lies ahead of us," said Luxa. "It is doubtful many of us will survive."
"So why did you come?" asked Gregor.
"I thought you might need my help. You have depended on it before," said Luxa. "And Aurora and I, we have Ares to think of as well."
While all of that might be true, Gregor had a feeling there was more going on inside Luxa. "Is that all?"
"Is that not enough?" Luxa asked, avoiding his gaze.
"Sure, I just thought, well, maybe it had something to do with..." Gregor stopped himself.
"With what?" said Luxa.
"With nothing," said Gregor. "Forget it."
"I can hardly forget it now," said Luxa. "Why else would I come?"
"Because of Henry. I mean, if I were you, I might come to show people I wasn't like him. I might come to make Stellovet shut up," said Gregor.
Luxa didn't admit that what he said was right, but she didn't deny it, either.
"So, what's the deal with who gets to be king and queen here?" Gregor asked after a while.
"My father's family has been on the throne for some time. As his only child, I am to rule next. If I have children, the oldest will follow me," said Luxa.
"Even if it's a girl and she has brothers?" Gregor thought that girls only got to rule if there were no boys in the family.
"Oh, yes. Girls have equal claim to the throne," said Luxa. "If I have no children, the crown will go to Nerissa. But she is the last in our line. So if she dies, or abdicates without children, Regalia will have to choose a new royal family."
"And Stellovet thinks it will be her family," said Gregor.
"She is probably right. Vikus and Solovet will be the most likely choice. Their oldest child, my aunt Susannah, would follow. And then her children, my Fount cousins. Howard is the eldest," said Luxa.
"Sounds like Stellovet's a long way from being queen, anyway," said Gregor.
"Not as long as you might think. Not in the Underland," said Luxa.
The bats, who had been out flying around, came in for bedtime. Mareth put Howard's red bat, Pandora, and Ares on guard. Gregor had a feeling he wasn't going to be assigned that duty for a while.
Twitchtip was restless. "Something's not right," she said. She lifted her nose into the air, and her head made an involuntary jerk to the side.
"Is it more squid?" Gregor asked, looking into the deep.
"No, it's not animal. But something's not right," she repeated.
"In what way?" asked Ares.
"With the water," she said.
"Is it tainted? Frigid? Filled with debris?" asked Howard.
"No," said Twitchtip. "I'd recognize those things. It's something I don't have a word for." But she could not explain further, so there was nothing to do but settle down to an uneasy sleep.
A few hours later, Gregor awoke to the sound of rushing water and Howard's frantic voice screaming the word that Twitchtip didn't have:
"Whirlpool!"
CHAPTER 14
Whirlpool? The only thing Gregor could think of was that game. His cousins had an old, round, aboveground pool. All the kids would try to run around in a circle and make the water swirl around so there was a sort of funnel effect in the middle. He knew there were real whirlpools in the oce
an, but he'd never even seen a picture of one.
Gregor jumped to his feet and tried to make sense of the situation. Everyone was up, but they were confused, too. The Underlanders usually faced an emergency with precision, as if they'd drilled for the crisis a million times. Gregor had a feeling that none of them had ever dealt with a whirlpool, either...and that they had no emergency response at the ready.
Photos Glow-Glow and Zap were burning at full brightness, but there still wasn't enough light to see far out into the water. Gregor pulled out the biggest flashlight he had, one with a wide sweeping beam, and clicked it on. What he saw took his breath away.
The boats were on the outer edge of a huge vortex. The whirlpool must have been at least a hundred yards wide. The water was rushing at a dizzying speed, grasping at anything in its reach, carrying it around and around until it was sucked down into a black gaping hole in the center.
Howard and Mareth were shouting at each other across the rope that tethered the two boats together.
"I am cutting loose!" Howard yelled as he began to hack away at the rope between them.
"No!" Mareth cried. "The fliers will carry us out!"
"They can only take one boat! Do it, Mareth! Pandora can come back for me!" Howard shouted, and the rope severed under his sword. It was just in the nick of time. The lead boat containing Howard, Pandora, Twitchtip, and Zap was snagged by the outer ring of the whirlpool and carried off into the maelstrom.
It was only a matter of seconds before the second boat would meet the same fate. Gregor lunged for the stern for Boots, who was half-asleep, so he could get her back in her life jacket. He'd taken it off so she could sleep comfortably. Obviously that had been a bad decision. He fumbled with the jacket's tangled straps.
The boat suddenly yanked to the side. "It's got us!" Gregor cried out. But then there was an upward jerk. Gregor sprawled forward, barely avoiding crushing Boots, and found they were rising out of the water. The bats! The bats were lifting them using the rope loops on the sides of the boats. Aurora and Andromeda were in the front, Ares and Pandora in the back.
"Go, Pandora. Ares can take it! Go!" Gregor heard Mareth order.
Ares spread his feet, holding his own loop in one claw and grasping Pandora's in his other. The boat dipped down a bit, but the big black bat soon had it under control. "Man, he's strong!" thought Gregor.
Pandora hovered for one moment, to make sure Ares had things covered, then dove. Gregor leaned over the side of the boat to see what was going on.
They were fifty feet above the water now, safe from the clutches of the raging whirlpool, but below them it was another matter. The lead boat, with Howard and Twitchtip clinging to the mast, was spinning helplessly around in the whirlpool, smashing into debris, buckling under the pressure of the current. Except for the light from Gregor's flashlight, the boat was in complete darkness.
"This is certainly an inconvenience," said a whiny voice by his ear. Gregor turned to see Zap sitting on a coil of rope. "It was my time to sleep, too. I hope Photos Glow-Glow does not think this means I will cover his next shift."
"Zap! What are you doing? Get down there so they can see!" said Gregor.
"Oh, no. We never agree to go into dangerous situations. We are not fed enough for that," said Photos Glow-Glow. And then he actually yawned.
Gregor spun back around to the whirlpool in time to see Howard launch himself out over the water, arms straight out to his sides. Pandora caught him by the arms and carried him straight up to safety. She set Howard in a soggy pile on the floor and took her rope handle back from Ares.
Down in the water, Twitchtip still clung desperately to the mast. The boat was quickly approaching the inner rings of the whirlpool and the black hole in the center.
"Wait a minute!" Gregor cried. "Aren't you going back in for Twitchtip?"
There was no answer. He looked to Mareth, to Luxa, to Howard dripping and panting on the floor. Something in their faces made a chill go through him. "She's going to drown, you know! We've got to get in there!"
"It is not possible, Overlander," said Mareth. "We cannot reach her by boat. A single flier could not get hold of her. It is not possible."
"Luxa?" said Gregor. She was a queen; she could probably make them if she wanted to.
"I think Mareth is right. We will risk more loss in the effort, and the likelihood of success is almost nonexistent," said Luxa.
"But we need her! We need her to navigate in the Labyrinth!" said Gregor. Why were they just standing there?
"The bats will be sufficient," said Mareth. "And they can be trusted."
So, that was it. Now he understood. "It's because she's a rat," he said. "You're just going to sit here and watch her drown because she's a rat, right? If it were Howard or Andromeda or even Temp, you'd be down there, all right, but not for a rat! You'd probably have killed her already if you could have!"
Below him, Twitchtip's boat snapped in two. She clung to the wreckage for a few seconds, and then it was swept out of her grasp. She clawed her way through the water, fighting to keep from going under, but she wouldn't last long.
The life jacket was on the floor next to Boots. He shoved his arms through the straps and buckled it with shaking hands. The small flashlight, the one Mrs. Cormaci had given him, was in his pocket. He flicked it on. Maybe he could hold it between his teeth.
Hands grabbed him as he climbed up the side of the boat. "Do not be a madman, Overlander," said Howard. "You cannot help her!"
"You make me the sickest of all!" said Gregor. "You were just down there a minute ago. You got rescued! And what about what you swore? About saving anyone in water trouble! In peril! What you said! What about that?"
Howard's face flushed. Gregor had touched a nerve.
"Gregor!" Luxa had his hand. "I forbid you to go, Gregor! You will not survive."
"Not with you guys as backup!" said Gregor. He was so furious, he could have thrown her over the side of the boat. See how she liked it down there. "Ripred brought her for me. He brought her to help me, so I could help you guys and your whole stupid kingdom!" he said. "That's why we're doing this, right?"
He stood on one of the seats and shone his light down in the water. Man! Was he really going to jump down into that? They were right, it was insane. Even if he'd been the best Olympic swimmer in the world, he'd never swim his way out of that, especially pulling some big old rat. But he knew something else, too. He knew that the Underlanders needed to keep him alive at all costs. If he went in, they'd come after him. And if he could get to Twitchtip, they'd have to save them both.
Howard started lashing something around his body.
"Untie me!" Gregor said, taking a swing at him.
"It is a lifeline!" Howard said, ducking the blow. "We will hold on to you from this end!"
"You will?" said Gregor.
"Do not fight the current. It will have no effect. Ride it as best you can!" said Howard.
Gregor balanced on the edge of the boat for one second, stuck his flashlight between his teeth, braced himself, tried to forget about how much he hated high dives, and jumped.
The shock of the cold water occupied him for about a millisecond before all his attention was on the current. He was nothing — a twig, a gum wrapper, an ant being carried along by the immense force of the whirlpool. He felt himself yanked back up by the rope. They had him from above.
He was being lifted, swung out over the dark, sucking hole at the center of the whirlpool. For a moment, he had the crazy idea that they were going to drop him into it, and then he understood. Twitchtip was on the inner rings of the vortex. Maybe one, maybe two times more around, and then she was gone.
As they swung him in to meet her, Gregor tried to think of how he could get hold of the rat. There was no time to work out a strategy. As he came in, he did the one thing that came naturally: He opened his arms. They smacked into each other, chest to chest. His arms encircled her neck, his legs wrapped around her body. Twitchtip dug her claws into
the front of the life jacket. They spun around the whirlpool again. The current locked on them, pulling them down, not wanting to let them go.
"They can't do it!" thought Gregor. "We're going under!" He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, waiting to be engulfed. Instead, there was a rib-crushing tug and suddenly they were swinging free. Twitchtip's full weight hit him. If the rat hadn't gotten one claw embedded in the rope, he would have lost her.
"Don't — let — go!" she choked out.
Gregor couldn't free his teeth from the flashlight, he had bitten down so hard. He managed to open his mouth enough to say, "No."
They were carried over the water for a while, until they were out of the whirlpool's reach. Then they were in the waves, half-treading water, half-using the life jacket to stay afloat, as the Underlanders reeled them in. Hands pulled them into the boat. When he felt the floor beneath him, he released the rat.
They lay side by side, gasping, coughing up water. This was extra tricky for Gregor, since his teeth were still stuck in his flashlight. His ribs hurt from the final tug that had freed them. He hoped they were just bruised, not broken. If they ached, the pain was minimal compared to his arm. The bandage had been torn away by the current, and Gregor could see it in all its glory. The whole forearm was badly swollen. The sucker wounds, which had turned a revolting shade of purple, oozed fluorescent green pus. They burned as if they were on fire.
Howard was at his side. He helped Gregor free his teeth from the flashlight and laid it on the floor. Gregor had a funny memory. When Mrs. Cormaci had given him the flashlight, she had made a point of telling him it was waterproof. It even had a little sticker on the bottom that said so. He'd thought at the time that was silly, why would he need a waterproof flashlight? Now he knew.
Gregor gritted his teeth as Howard flushed out the wounds on his arm, poured a cooling solution over the skin, and bandaged it in fresh fabric.
"I know this comes a bit late," said Howard. "But try to keep it dry." There was something in his eyes that reminded Gregor of Howard's grandfather, Vikus. An odd twinkle, even while the rest of his face remained serious.
The Underland Chronicles: Books 1-5 Paperback Box Set Page 25
