by Josh Lieb
“So what’s our primary attribute?” repeated Uncle Patrick.
Princess Yislene looked at Sir Parsifur, who shrugged. Then she turned to Uncle Patrick and said, as gently as possible, “The primary attribute of people . . . is sadness.”
“Sadness. Huh,” said Uncle Patrick. “Well, that’s depressing.”
Joey thought so, too. “So, we just have this weak little -agic, and it’s powered by sadness.”
“I said ‘primitive,’” said Yislene, “not ‘weak.’ Your kind has never learned to control your Magic . . . but it can be an overwhelming force when let loose.”
Parsifur grinned. “People are full of a powerful lot of sadness.”
Joey frowned and opened his mouth to respond, then suddenly shouted “Ow!!!” A fiery poker had just stuck him in the side. He put his hand to the source of the burn— Ratscalibur—and pulled it from his belt. He held it high and watched it glow with a fierce internal heat. “Well I don’t know much about Ragic,” he said, “but I think we’re about to be attacked. Brutilda! There are enemies near here!”
At the front of the line, the guinea pig swiveled her head like an owl, looking at the trees in every direction. “Where?” she replied. “I see noth—”
That’s when the spear knocked her out of her saddle.
MORE SPEARS CAME, and quickly, whistling high out of the trees at them: thwik thwik thwik. Before Joey had time to think, Uncle Patrick had grabbed him and thrown them both off Squamish’s back. Joey found himself deep in a pile of leaves: protected, maybe just for a second, from the flying spears.
“You okay?” asked Uncle Patrick, who was on top of him.
“Uh-huh,” croaked Joey. His fangs chattered against each other. What was happening?
“Good,” said Uncle Patrick. “Stay here.” And with a roar like an animal—which Joey suddenly realized his uncle was—the giant black rat ran out to fight whoever was attacking them.
Uncle Patrick wasn’t the only one roaring. Joey worked up the nerve to peek out from under the leaves and saw dozens of rats pouring out of the bushes, shrieking and yelling as they came. These were lean rats, with cold eyes and rough fur. They didn’t carry weapons, but some of them were wearing leather helmets, and some of them—Joey blinked—some of them were wearing helmets with horns sticking out of them. . . .
“Viking rats?” said Joey. No, not Viking rats—his stomach went cold when he realized what they really were—sewer rats. And so many of them . . .
Uncle Patrick was with the cats, throwing his huge body at the invaders, slashing at them with his cruel teeth. He didn’t have a sword, but Joey didn’t think he would use one if he did. It looked like Patrick was enjoying wrestling with the crazed rats on their own terms.
Parsifur was fighting much more daintily, dancing around on his back paws and using his sword, expertly and delicately, to trip the attackers and spear them with its tip, until they ran off screaming and bleeding into the woods. Every attacker who fled heard Parsifur’s hee-hee-hee jingling in the air behind them.
Brutilda stood in one place, solid as a mountain, swinging her enormous broadsword back and forth so that it knocked down the Viking rats like bowling pins. She had a couple of the wild rats’ tiny spears sticking out of her chest and shoulders, but she didn’t pay any attention to them.
They all fought with their backs to each other, in a circle around Princess Yislene, who was waving her paws in front of her mouth and whispering again. What was she . . . oh. Joey saw that though spears were still flying down out of the trees at his friends— thwick thwick—they were now bouncing off an invisible umbrella before they could hit anyone. The princess was throwing up a force field.
It was so terrifying (and thrilling) to watch that Joey felt like he was right in the middle of it. So he was kind of surprised when he realized that he wasn’t in the middle of it at all. He was off to the side, stuffed under some leaves, completely forgotten. In fact, if he wanted to, he could probably just tunnel away, under the leaves, and be long gone before anyone noticed he was missing.
He had acted brave before, when he’d thought Patrick was Salaman, and he’d stood with Parsifur and Brutilda to defend the princess. But this was different. This wasn’t acting brave. This was being brave. Real battle.
It didn’t look like his friends really needed him, anyway. They were fighting really well. . . .
Except that no matter how many invading rats they fought off, more kept coming. A new kind of rat was attacking, too, and these ones looked crazy: long and scabby and wild-eyed, with their fur painted blue and red and other bright colors. They seemed to scream and cry and laugh, all at the same time, as they tumbled through their brown-furred brothers into battle, fighting like maniacs. They were attacking the cats mostly, crawling all over them, biting and scratching, overwhelming them. . . .
The princess’s chanting was getting slower: she was getting tired. All of Joey’s friends seemed to be moving more slowly, actually. Brutilda had a broad slash on her pink nose that was dripping blood. Uncle Patrick had a few of the little spears in his shoulders now, too. And Parsifur was giggling less and less.
And still the invading rats kept coming . . . and coming . . .
In front of Joey, a battle raged. Behind him, the leaves were quiet and cool . . . untouched. He could feel them almost inviting him to tunnel away through them, to where it was safe. He could find a hole in the stone wall around the park, cover the entrance with a rock, and be done with this battle . . . with everything . . . forever.
But right in front of his eyes, he could see his friends struggling against impossible odds. He could hear their breathing turn to gasps as they got tired.
And he could feel Ratscalibur burning in his grip.
Suddenly Joey knew that running wasn’t even an option.
He leaped out of the leaves with a piercing scream and followed his sword into a wall of doom.
JOEY HAD GOTTEN beat up one time at his old school, but he hadn’t even fought back, so you couldn’t call that a fight. Now he was in more than a fight. Now he was going to war.
He had no idea what he was supposed to do.
Luckily, it seemed like his sword did.
Glowing red, Ratscalibur led him right into the middle of the Viking rats. One moment, Joey was safe in the leaves; the next he was surrounded by a sea of snarling, slobbering savages. They didn’t pay any attention to Joey at first—maybe he was too small to notice—but as soon as he made his first jabs at them with his spork, they turned on him with a vengeance. A huge rat with a hole where his nose should have been lunged at Joey, swinging his claws like talons. . . .
This is the end, thought Joey.
But he also thought, If I put my sword there I can block him. . . .
And as soon as Joey thought it, Ratscalibur was there. The hollow-nosed rat squealed as his claws banged against the red-hot sword. He swung his other paw at Joey . . . but Ratscalibur was there, too. The rat shrieked with displeasure and ran away.
Others took his place. More and more and more. Big rats, small rats. Rats with empty eye sockets, rats that smelled like week-old fish. And Joey was fighting them all. Thrusting with Ratscalibur, slicing with Ratscalibur, spinning around with Ratscalibur to hack at the rats who were leaping at his back. He didn’t have time to be amazed by what he was doing or by what his sword was doing . . . he just knew that he only had to think of where Ratscalibur needed to be, and the sword would almost instantly be there.
The bloodthirsty rats towered over Joey, but they couldn’t stop him. He slashed and slashed and slashed till they ran. Then, through a gap in the enemy’s ranks, he saw a familiar black-and-white form, curled up into a ball, howling in pain as it was overrun by red-painted wild rats. Chequers.
Without a thought Joey sprinted through the Vikings to the fallen cat. He leaped on her back and hacked at the
biting, frothing Under-Realmers that were swarming her, cutting them, knocking them off, kicking them. . . .
Now a wild rat had its arm around Joey’s neck, its head pressed next to his, with breath that smelled like something scraped from the bottom of a porta-potty—which, even to Joey’s new nose, didn’t smell good. The wild rat hissed, “You will die now, young one. . . .”
But before it could follow through on its threat, Ratscalibur had hacked at its fingers, slicing three of them clean off. The evil rat screamed in pain and leaped off Chequers’s back to scamper into the underbrush.
Now the ground was moving under Joey’s feet. It’s an earthquake, he thought for a second, until he realized that Chequers was just getting out of her protective crouch and standing up. The cat looked back at Joey—her face was covered with rat bites and broken whiskers—and she purred gratefully as she shook her head, throwing the last wild rat off her ear. Then she looked forward, and Joey knew what he had to do. He sat in her saddle, grabbed the reins, and held on for dear life as she leaped into the fray.
It was all sort of a blur after that. Later, Joey remembered riding Chequers around and around the circle his friends had made around Yislene, leaning down out of his saddle to spear the invading rats. At some point Joey must have fallen off Chequers—or was it possible he’d leaped down?—because at the end he was on the ground, swinging his mighty sword at a blue-painted giant who would not give up until Joey sliced a hunk out of his generous belly. Then the wild blue rat ran for the bushes. Joey looked around to see whom he had to fight next. . . .
Except there was no one left. The invaders were all gone. Nothing but their stink and their blood remained.
His friends and their cats were all scattered on the ground, wounded to various degrees, breathing heavily, too tired to talk. Yislene was lying motionless, like a statue. Was she . . . ? Joey knelt down next to her and smiled: she was breathing. She was just asleep.
He felt a paw on his shoulder. He looked up to see Parsifur, staring at him with serious eyes. “That,” said the little white rat solemnly, “that . . . was some very fine swordsmanship.”
Then he looked to the trees above them. “Now let’s get to cover before they find more spears.”
“OW!”
Brutilda was trying to pull a spear out of Uncle Patrick’s side, and Uncle Patrick wasn’t happy about it. Brutilda didn’t care. “Stop whining, you big baby, and hold still.”
“I will not,” said Patrick. “That one’s . . . stuck in something. It’s not like the others.” He looked down at the two bloody-tipped spears that had already been removed. They were just long slivers of sewer-soaked driftwood, crudely sharpened to points. “Just break off the end and leave the rest of it for now.”
“Don’t be stupid—”
“Leave it, I said. I like the way it looks.”
Brutilda grunted, but she was clearly too tired to argue about it anymore. Besides the cut on her nose, there were several holes in her own hide, and she set herself to curling up and licking her wounds clean.
They were all wounded, except for Yislene, who, untouched but exhausted, was lying passed out in the middle of the cave. It wasn’t a cave really—more like a hollow place beneath an old dead tree, but it was big enough for all of them, including the cats, to rest in.
Joey licked the stump of his tail. He’d been surprised to discover, once they’d gotten to safety, that someone had bitten most of it off in the battle. Joey felt bad about that; he’d kind of liked having a tail.
“I am most grateful,” said Sir Parsifur, as he cleaned the gouges in Chequers’s fur, “for your service to my beloved Checky in her time of need.”
“It was nothing,” said Joey. “Anyone would’ve—”
“No, they wouldn’t have,” said Brutilda.
“Where did you learn to work a sword like that, honcho?” asked Uncle Patrick. “Did they have a fencing team at your school or something?”
Joey shook his head. How could he make them understand? He was proud that he’d done well, but he wasn’t suddenly some great hero. “I didn’t really do anything. It was Ratscalibur that did all the work.”
“Oh, sure . . .” said Uncle Patrick, like he didn’t believe his nephew.
“It’s true!” said Joey. “In fact, I . . .” He swallowed. This was going to be hard to say. “I . . . I almost ran away,” he confessed. “I was so close . . . but then, you know, I just decided to stay. Ratscalibur did everything after that.”
Brutilda paused from licking her fur and looked at him. Joey was scared she was going to say something terrible, about him being a coward . . . something he deserved. Instead she said, “The great battle was the one you fought against yourself and won. When you decided to stay. That was when you proved yourself a hero. What Ratscalibur did after that . . .” She waved her paw. “That was merely . . .”
“Icing on the cake,” said Uncle Patrick.
Brutilda glared at him. “I was going to say ‘a scab on the frog’s guts,’ but I think it means the same thing.” She went back to licking her wounds.
“I think she likes you,” Parsifur whispered to Uncle Patrick.
“I have ears,” said Brutilda.
Joey felt something wet at his ankles. He looked down and saw Chequers’s tongue, slithering around him like a pink boa constrictor. He kicked the tongue away, but gently, and smiled at her. He turned to Parsifur. “What do we do now? Wait until the princess wakes up?”
Parsifur sat down and sighed. “We can’t wait that long. We’re not safe in this park. I regret to say that the situation is worse than we’d thought.’”
“Why?”
“Because of the Under-Realmers,” moaned Brutilda.
“So those were sewer rats,” said Joey.
“That they were,” said Parsifur. “Woe betide us.”
“Who were the painted ones?” asked Uncle Patrick.
“Berzerkers. The worst of the worst. All Under-Realmers are savage, but Berzerkers lack any soul at all. They’ll gnaw your face off if given half a chance.” Parsifur looked with pity at his wounded cat. Chequers snuggled against him.
“Why is it so bad that sewer rats are in the park?” asked Joey.
“Because Squirrelin wouldn’t allow it,” boomed Brutilda. “Or he never used to. He doesn’t even allow other squirrels in this park. Under-Realmers here? Never. And yet”—she stretched the little word out like a long low note in a song—“here they are. It . . . seems possible that Squirrelin’s grown too old or too weak to ward them off anymore.”
“Mayhap he’s grown too dead,” said Sir Parsifur.
“That is possible, also.”
“And if any of these possibilities are true,” said Parsifur, “then I’m afraid old Squirrelin wouldn’t be much help to us.”
“Which means,” said Uncle Patrick, “that we’ve come all this way for nothing.”
“So . . . where are we going to go for help?” asked Joey.
Parsifur exposed his daggerlike teeth. It took Joey a second to realize he was smiling. “To Squirrelin, of course.”
“But you just said—”
“Hee-hee-hee,” the white rat giggled, “You act like we have a choice!”
IT WAS LATE afternoon when they got to Squirrelin’s oak. The progress was slow. The rats walked alongside their tired cats instead of riding them, except for the sleeping Princess Yislene, who was strapped onto Questel’s back. Everyone seemed to be limping, or dragging. But no one complained.
Joey kept an eye out for sewer rats, even though he knew that if they decided to attack again . . . well, there wasn’t much Joey or his friends could do. He tried to sniff for them, to get a location, but it was like his nose ran up against a wall. Hopefully they had gone back underground.
Just when Joey didn’t think he could walk another step, they reached a
clearing. In the center stood an oak tree. It was ancient and enormous, tall and black, with long, twisted branches that reached out from its trunk like greedy fingers. “See there?” said Parsifur, pointing to a hole about halfway up the tree. “That’s the entrance to Squirrelin’s lair.”
“How will we get up there?” asked Joey.
Parsifur winked. “You’ll see.”
Brutilda climbed up on Questel, untied the princess, and then jumped down, carrying Yislene on her back. The princess was sleeping so deeply that she didn’t even stop snoring. Parsifur approached a fat brown squirrel that sat gnawing on a walnut at the foot of the tree. “Greetings, Squire Jellybelly,” said Parsifur. The squirrel didn’t look up or anything, just sank his teeth into the walnut and spat when the insides turned out to be rotten. Parsifur didn’t look insulted. “Mind our mounts, O greedyguts, while we confer with your master. They need food, water, and cow’s milk if you have it.” The squirrel didn’t even nod. He just stood unhappily, grabbed the reins of the cats, and led them around the back of the tree. He must be Squirrelin’s stable boy, thought Joey.
Then Parsifur looked up, to the hole in the tree—so far above their heads that Joey could barely see it—and whistled, long, high, and piercing. There was no response. He whistled again. Finally, a voice as dry and crackly as a falling leaf came down to them: “No visitors.”
“My liege,” said Sir Parsifur, “we are a questing party come from King Uther, and we seek to consult with your master, Squirrelin—”
“No visitors.”
“It is a matter of great importance—”
“No visi—”
“We brought presents,” yelled Uncle Patrick, interrupting the voice.
There were several seconds of complete silence. Then, suddenly, a long rope uncoiled from the hole and came right down to them. Brutilda grunted appreciatively and started to climb the rope, with the princess still strapped to her back. Parsifur gave Patrick an odd look.
