Chapter 43: Third thoughts.
Getting them up the shaft was slow, and awkward. The oppressive warm darkness was overfull of depressed rats and bats. Bronstein was getting to the stage where if she heard another sigh, she was going to bite whoever did it. Given the way things were going, it would be Eamon or Nym.
She sighed. Then realized what she’d just done.
Oh, well. Fair was fair. She bit herself. “Yow!”
“Hwhat is going on now?” said O’Niel, in a “hope-I-can-bite-somebody” tone.
“Nothing,” she said grumpily. Then reconsidered it. “Oh bejasus, O’Niel. There is a decent bit of ledge here. The rats and that galago can stop here. You and I can go for a fly up the shaft and see whether it actually does lead out or not.”
O’Niel plainly liked the idea, even if it involved flying. “If it doesn’t, we can go back, indade.”
“Go to it,” grunted Nym from the ledge. “I’ll bring the rest up. ‘Tis a ridiculous idea to keep climbing, if we just have to come down again. And methinks you should take Eamon. He keeps sighing like a leaky gasbag.”
The bats fluttered upwards. And upwards. The shaft curved slightly so that they could not sonar too far ahead but, at length, Bronstein detected what she both longed for and dreaded. Space. And then there was a circle of light.
They flew out into the first rays of early morning sunlight. Daylight was never a bat’s favorite. Still, being out of the Maggot mounds felt . . . free. Looking back, and carefully substituting the word “Crotchet” for another word which must not even be thought, Bronstein could see that it had all been rank insanity. All driven by that Crotchet wanting to get back to its true allies. Treacherous, foul alien. She would hate it forever and ever.
She thought about their journey through the tunnels. Scenes came unbidden and clear. Madness! But, ah! What a glorious madness it had been. And they might even have succeeded, despite the traitor. They’d come so close to the group-mind before the Crotchet had misled them. It had taken them down instead of up.
It hit her like the morning sunlight. Warm, beautiful and wonderfully liberating. “Let us go down, fellow bats. Let us go down and finish what we came to do, to be sure!”
Eamon blinked at her “Bring them up here, you mean. ‘Tis daylight. It will . . .”
Bronstein shook her head. “No! Eamon, it goes against my grain to admit this, but you are a better bat with explosives than I. Could we be bringing down that roof above the place where we saw the . . . Crotchet?”
Eamon’s face shifted from gloom to a savage crinkled grin. “Michaela Bronstein, it goes against my grain, but you are a better thinker than I. Yes, indade, it’d take most of what we still have, but if we blew away those trusses . . . I am sure that the ceiling would fall, anyway. The whole roof it could be. And at the very least we’ll avenge them!”
O’Niel looked somber. “We will have to explain it to the rats.”
Bronstein bit her lip. Eamon too was silenced. The big bat looked shrunken. He looked like a bat carrying all the weight of the world on tired wings. Then he straightened his shoulders and spread his wings in Harmony And Reason’s bright sunlight. “Indade. And you may put the blame on me, where it rightly belongs. But I’ll not let my pride stand before our vengeance.” He stepped backwards and fell into the shaft.
O’Niel chuckled. “Pistol has the right of it. When he does that, he looks like he’s most terrible constipated. Come. Let’s get to it, then.”
Bronstein dropped into the shaft, and nearly hit the swearing Eamon on his way back up.
* * *
The rats and the galago perched uncomfortably on the ledge. Bronstein addressed them even as she fluttered down. “There is a way out. It is morning out there.”
“Methinks, not for Chip and Ginny,” said Fal lugubriously. “He was just like a rat, that human. Aye, and he was.”
“Down to the tail,” said Bronstein tartly. “Now listen. We could go back and die beside them.”