“I still think it’s a crazy plan,” he said, looking at the dark bulk of the mound. In daylight, with ropes and things it would be hard enough to climb. They wanted him to undertake a six hundred foot climb . . . as soon as the moon was low enough to have this wall in darkness. And then, on the other side—six hundred feet down again. By that point the moon should be down.
“All right. Stay here forever then,” hissed Eamon.
“Until you starve or get caught and eaten,” Behan backed Eamon up.
“Until I lose my temper with you,” said Bronstein, far more frighteningly. “Now climb!”
Chip climbed. So did the rats. It was easier for them as their paws were smaller, enabling them to use tiny pockmarks in the rock. Their strength to weight ratio was also much better than Chip’s. The rats’ problem was simply reach. A handhold Chip could grab, they had to do three extra moves to get to. Chip just had to face up to being too big and too wide and too heavy for the climb. He still had to do it though, feeling for handholds and footholds in the darkness. The rats could see better than he could in low light conditions, and of course the bats, to whom it mattered not at all, were at home in total darkness.
They’d chosen a zigzag Maggot construction ramp, which began perhaps thirty feet above ground level. Without that they really would have battled. The ramp was about eight inches wide and zigged and zagged its way at a forty-degree angle up nearly a third of the mound’s height. For the rats it was a highway. An uphill highway so that they could complain, but a highway all the same. For Chip it was sweating terror and purgatory. He edged his way along, upwards, upwards, not daring to look down . . . again. He’d nearly plummeted off into the hungry darkness when he’d risked that first brief look. He’d gone all giddy and had to clutch frantically while Siobhan flapped around him like an annoying mosquito, telling him to “be climbing not shaking.”
The rats, by now near the top of the ramp, were pretty full of their climbing ability. “Easy this. Methinks ’tis like a Sunday afternoon stroll, if it wasn’t uphill,” said Mel.
“The uphill will waste me away,” grunted Fal. “I’m sweating my whoreson chops off.”
“You’ve plenty to spare, before your waist’s away,” said Doll.
Then Eamon and O’Niel had fluttered up. “Over the side. And be quick about it! There is a builder-Maggot coming!”
“Uh. Over the side?”
“Now!” snapped the bat.
They had to cling there in the darkness, while just above them the Maggot click-sauntered past. By the time they got back onto the ledge, the rats were considerably chastened. There was nothing like hanging by your hands in the darkness over a huge drop to make you more appreciative of having something under your feet. At the top of the zigzag ramp, there was an entry into the Maggot-mound. They avoided this and had to traverse across a hundred yards or so to the next ramp.
From being near-vertical, where Chip had had to use tiny holds to hang on, the angle of the mound had eased off. He discovered that once he pushed away from clinging like a slime mold to the wall, he could actually stand on his feet on the tiny knobs. He was getting quite blasé about it when a knob of Magh’ adobe decided it wasn’t designed for a hundred and sixty pounds of human. He managed to jerk back. Overcorrected. He scrabbled for a real handhold . . . started to slide.
Claws dug viciously into his back. Several sets. “Get a hold, Connolly,” huffed some bat behind him, obviously through clenched teeth. Whether by bat-lift or luck, his slipping foot found purchase and his hand one of the occasional Magh’ adobe struts. Chip clung there, panting. From far below came the sharp sound of the knob hitting the bottom, and bouncing away.
“I nearly gave myself a hernia,” grumbled Eamon, settling on the wall. “What did you go and do a silly thing like that for, Siobhan Illich-Hill?”