“You and Longfang O’Niel were already clinging to him when I joined in.”
“O’Niel, for what did you do crazy like that!?”
“Foin,” said the normally taciturn O’Niel, “make it my fault then. When you know it was yourself who was first, Eamon.”
“Whoever it was, I owe you,” interrupted Chip.
“Well, if you owe me . . . then I have favor to ask,” said Eamon.
“Ask away.” Chip was feeling sick. Luckily, there was nothing much in his stomach to come up.
“Just don’t tell everyone. The other Batties would expel me,” muttered Eamon. He fluttered off into the darkness.
Chip stared after him. He’d known the bats were divided up into a jillion factions. They seemed to compensate for their infrequent mating by devoting their energies to political disputes. But he’d never once imagined that even the surly Eamon belonged to the extremist “Bat Bund.”
“Ha,” said Siobhan, landing on the strut. “He forgets I am not of the Bund. And I was here too—precisely because Bronstein didn’t trust him alone with a human. And he was the first to try to hold you! All big talk, that Eamon. His mouth will get him into trouble his teeth can’t get him out of, one day. Now, you must go on, Chip. Bronstein reckons that you and the rats must be off the mound by first light, and that is a bare four hours off.”
Chip pressed on, somehow. As the angle eased, so did the climbing. He dislodged a few more fragments of Magh’ adobe, but by now it was not enough to make him fall.
Eventually, Chip and the rats stood on the very top of the Maggot tunnel-mound. They had climbed the entire way in near total moonshadow. Now they could see a last moon-sliver poking its way into a shimmer of sea, perhaps thirty-five miles off. Thirty-five miles with many many stark folds of Maggot tunnel-mounds between them and it.
The bats hung in the air, twisting about them. “It’s a long way to the sea, Bronstein,” said one of the rats quietly. It was Fal. Obviously the distance, and perhaps the climbs that lay between them and it, had overawed the normally bumptious rat’s nature.
“I’ faith. A long and wearisome way.” Doll looked at her paws, as if asking whether they were up to this.
“To be sure,” agreed Bronstein. “It is a long way, for you earthbound creatures. And then we’ll have to wait our chances for the force field to go down. Find driftwood. Make a raft. Do you rats have any other ideas? If not, you’d better get to climbing down.”
Chip sighed, and began walking forward. “No other ideas, Michaela. We’d never get through the front lines. The sea is the only option. But it is a damned long shot.”
“So is our surviving behind enemy lines. And what else can we do?”
“Nothing.” Chip frowned. “But a length of rope and a grappling hook or even a few spikes would up my chances of making it.”
“We’ll look, then,” stated Bronstein. “The forager-Maggots don’t take metal away. Perhaps we can find something. But I think you are wishing for a great deal.”
“Right now, all I’m wishing for is getting down from here fast, without getting down too fast,” said Chip, looking nervously into the darkness ahead of him.
* * *
The climb down was the same again, but worse. It was also nearly the end of Melene. The rat-girl was the lightest and smallest of them, and had found the climb the easiest. Then, having paused to help Phylla, she missed her footing. Plunging headfirst past Fal she frantically tried to grab him. Fal’s prehensile tail wrapped around her. The plump Fal stood as firm as a pylon as she found holds.
“I’ faith, my hempseed lass, I know you like exotic positions. But this is a bit too bizarre a tail-twisting even for me. Besides I’m getting a little too fat for such athletic cliff-ledge frolics. Couldn’t you have waited a few minutes? Was your desire for my body just too inflamed, to even hang on for another moment?”
Mel was too shaken to say anything at first. Then she started to swear. Chip was impressed by the extent of her vocabulary.