13
Foremole Griggs found the excavation much simpler than he had planned. The stone was soft, more dull clay than rock, having seen countless seasons of erosion and rot from the seeping liquids of the kitchen. He and his crew had little to work with, but little was all they needed. They may have been able to do the job with their bare claws.
The floor was caked with red dust. Dibbuns picked up the dust and hurled it into the air and at each other, playing a game. Soon old wives were roped into the mess, trying to stop the raucous activity and winding up with faces full of dust for their trouble, to which even Laramie could not resist laughing.
"How now, Fluvanna," she said to a flustered mousewife wrestling with a pair of uncompromising Dibbuns, "I can't tell if your face's red from the dust or if you've just worked yourself into a tizzy!"
A tiny mole wriggled her way from Fluvanna's paws, leaving holding nothing but her own apron. With a huff, she brushed at her face. "'Tis unsafe for the little ones to be runnin' around down here, methinks," she muttered before swiping at a passing squirrelbabe.
Laramie thought to respond—it was nice having a somewhat normal conversation, for once—but she noticed Jareck striking up a conversation with Foremole Griggs and moved closer to eavesdrop.
"Now, my friend," said the stoat, indicating the work. "I've noticed you've made fine progress cutting our little escape route. I'm no digger like yoreself, friend, but in my humble opinion you an' yore crew've done a swell job."
Griggs beamed with pride. "Thankee zurr, diggin's moi job, so oi'd bee best suited t'doin' it gudd, oi think."
"That's good t'hear," said Jareck, clapping Griggs on the back. "Anything I can help with? I ain't no skilled digger like you, friend, but there must be somethin' I can do."
"Burr, th'crew's got most it thumselves, but if yore lookin' t'help, here's a good dustpile needs clearin'."
Jareck immediately set to work sweeping the offending pile of dust with a makeshift broom he seemed to have been holding the entire time. His sweeping caught the attention of the Dibbuns, who gathered around and started hurling dust at him.
He was up to something, Laramie knew. He picked up the same molebabe with which Fluvanna had wrangled and amused her with the old coin-behind-the-ear magic trick. The stoat had a game, it was a matter of figuring out what it was before it came back to hurt them.
She decided to ask him.
"Excuse me. You said your name was Jareck?"
Jareck let loose the molebabe and tipped an imaginary cap to her. "Charmed, m'dear. I'm afraid you ain't told me yores yet."
"Laramie. I'm the Abbey Recorder."
"Recorder, eh?" He gnawed the coin thoughtfully. "So yore the only one around here knows how to write?"
"We all know how to write. We're taught it in our youth. But I'm the one who marks down our day-to-day lives, for posterity. In case anybeast in the future grows curious and wants to know. Many have done the job before me, and many after."
"Oh yeah? I can write too, y'know."
Laramie tried to ascertain whether he were joking or not. "And who taught you how to do that? Lady Alagadda?" A stupid question, she realized as soon as she said it. Alagadda was at least half Jareck's age.
Jareck snorted. He had gotten the better of her yet again, and he probably hadn't even tried. These small victories kept piling up, Laramie disliked it. "Alagadda don't know a single thing about letters other than that they don't go away. No, you wanna know who taught me? A king, from a foreign land."
He had to be pulling one on her, but his tone of voice never changed from the same blithe conviviality, the same wretched smirk etched on his face with a coin of offering wedged between the ivory fangs.
She changed the subject. "Why are you sweeping the dust?"
"The quicker this excavation business gets settled, the quicker I get outta here."
"Why are you ingratiating yourself to us? What's in it for you?"
Jareck shrugged. "I like creatures to like me. You can have all the knives an' soldiers in the world, but a single stroke from what you thought was a friend can undo all that. If creatures like you, they less apt to do you in. How else you think I made cap'n 'round here without wieldin' a single weapon?"
"So conning your subordinates out of all their possessions, that makes 'em like you?"
"You see, problem there was, our game got interrupted a little early by some unfortunate events. Usually I let 'em win it all back at the end, makes it feel like they won, but I didn't lose a thing."
Laramie decided to take a stab at something. "And the reason you're telling me all this right now is because you've pegged me as the type of creature who doesn't like not knowing things, so you've fed me a few bogus answers to sate my curiosity, is that it?"
Jareck only smiled. For the first time, Laramie felt she had gotten a pawhold on him.
Before either could add anything further to the conversation, Foremole Griggs bustled up and raised his claws for attention. Every head in the cellar turned toward him at once; even the Dibbuns ceased their playfighting in the dust.
"Burr, oi think 'tis done."
The hole led to the kitchen storeroom, more or less a glorified pantry. The storeroom was as dark as the cellar, the only light coming from the cracks in the door to the kitchen proper. Laramie had elected to be the first up, and peered between the cracks for any glimpse of the lizards. She saw nothing.
She dropped down.
"The immediate area outside the storeroom is clear," she said. "That's all I know."
"Then it's as I said," said Jareck. "Kitchen's our best bet out."
Laramie tried to strip as much satisfaction as possible from his victory by acting as if she were glad it were so—because shouldn't she? They hadn't had a way of escape before, and now they did. What did she care who first suggested the plan, as long as it worked?
Raising a paw for attention, Abbott Walden bumbled to the fore. "Let us not delay, lest the situation change. I will not waste words on a tired speech. I ask for volunteers who would scout the best route of escape from the Abbey. This is a perilous task, and survival is not guaranteed. Those we pick must be fleet of paw, quiet, of calm mind and disposition—"
"I volunteer," said Laramie.
"Me an' my crew are goin'," said Jareck.
"What?" said Laramie.
"What?" said Letcher, and most of the other vermin.
"Well, lemme rephrase that. I'm goin' fer sure. I assume my crew will wanna come with me, instead of stayin' down here all on their lonesome with a buncha creatures don't look at them too kindly."
Letcher pulled in close to Jareck and whispered, "What about our plan?"
"Your plan's terrible. What say you, Laramie? I help you scout, an' then I bolt, an' you don't have to deal with me anymore. I get what I want, you get what you want."
Laramie folded her arms. "You and your crew are raucous louts who'll grab the attention of every single lizard out there."
"All the better you get rid of us now rather'n when you're tryin' to escape with all these goodbeasts in danger."
"We'll lose the element of surprise—they'll know we're coming—"
Before she could protest further, Abbott Walden seized her and pulled her aside. Although he was much shorter than her, he had mustered up a considerable degree of gravitas. "Laramie," he whispered. "I believe it would be best to let them go. We've all been on edge having to keep an eye on them, and it's no secret they're plotting something. The big rat has said as much aloud, and I trust that stoat as much as you do. The sooner we get them out of our paws, that's another variable off the table, another thing that can no longer take us by surprise and hinder us in our goal, which is and always has been to preserve the lives of our friends and family. Do you understand?"
At least somebeast besides herself had not been taken in by Jareck's charm. She didn't like Walden's reasoning, though. The vermin were a variable, yes. But a variable they could control, a variable they at least knew something about. But the effect turning them loose might have on the behavior of the lizards was unfathomable, and while she didn't care for Jareck's antics she had decided that the reptiles were the far more life-threatening aspect of their current predicament.
But she was not one to argue with the Abbott, not now, with everybeast watching them and wondering what was to come next and the window for action dwindling deeper and deeper into the crevices of their rotten cellar. Already creatures were complaining about the lack of food.
So she relented.
"Fine. Jareck and his crew can leave. But I will commence my scouting expedition concurrently, as we may have no other chance for reconnaissance."
"You'll go alone?" asked Walden. "Well, alone besides the vermin, of course."
She waited for Jareck to comment but he said nothing. "Alone is the best way to scout. More creatures will burden me. I'll be safest alone."
"But… But what if you get hurt? What if something happens?"
Tucked between the knot of creatures gathered beneath the hole in the ceiling was Brother Roane the Bellringer, who had not spoken much since his stint as a hostage earlier in the night (or was it now day? Down here there was no time).
"Nothing will happen," said Laramie. "I'll be fine."
Roane forced his way forward. "I'm going with you. It—I know you'll say no. But it's important. I can help—I have to help. I'm fast, I'm a squirrel just like you, Laramie. If there's trouble I can climb, fast as anybeast. Please, let me come."
She didn't have time to argue.
The storeroom door creaked open. Laramie slid her head out, glanced around the kitchen. It had been ransacked, pots and pans and foodstuff everywhere, a veritable maelstrom of material on the floor. But she had a feeling much of the damage had been done by Alagadda's vermin the day prior. There were no lizards.
Tightening her grip on her sword, she motioned to the others. "Quiet as possible," she whispered.
Jareck exited behind her, followed by the rest of his crew one-by-one, and lastly Roane, almost comical clutching a flail to his chest. "Shut the door, quietly," she told him. "If we're captured or worse, they mustn't find where we came from."
Roane nodded, his head bobbing on its neck as if only barely attached. He shut the door. He didn't do it quietly. She shot him a stern glare, and he started to ooze apologies until she hissed at him to shut up.
This was not going to work.
Jareck was already at the kitchen window, peering onto the corridor that led from the cellar to the south gate—the logical route of exit. "Lookit this. Wow."
She looked. There must have been at least fifty lizards, each as large and horrific as the one she had slain, packed tight into the small passage, surrounded by a mountain of bones. She tried not to look at the bones and instead analyze the situation uncompromised by nausea. It only somewhat worked.
"Why're there so many right there, right at the exit," said Letcher, louder than Laramie liked.
"They go where the meat goes," said Laramie. "The vermin who weren't slain outright must have run for the exit, just as we planned to do. But it's a tight bottleneck, there's only that small gate. Either the lizards caught them as they scrambled over each other to escape, or perhaps more frightening, they're smart enough to wait in ambush for when they came."
Silence. A grim thought.
One of the vermin, the one nobeast could tell what he was, Switz or something—he poked his head out of a cupboard and basically shouted, "'Ey, lookit wot I found!"
Laramie shot him a glare that ricocheted off his thick skull and made not the slightest impact while Letcher stormed up and started whacking Switz with the hilt of his blade, snarling at him to shut up, don't he know they s'posed to be sneaky-like, and of course making even more noise, both by his snarling and Switz's pained squealing. A couple of other vermin joined in, telling them quite loudly to be quiet, and Laramie wondered if it wasn't too late to bolt for the storeroom door with Roane in paw and get back to safety before the lizards streamed in full force when Jareck flicked a card out of his deck and hit Letcher in the head with it. It drifted harmlessly to the floor.
"Quiet," he said. They went quiet.
"I was sayin'," said Switz, in a hoarse whisper this time, "Lookit wot I found. It's Spink."
He held open a cupboard. Curled up inside was a diminutive rat, wide eyes peering out in fear.
"Spink," said the ferret Iredell, "How're you still breathin'?"
The little rat's eyes flitted from figure to figure, before he shot out a trembling paw and slammed the cupboard shut, nearly jamming Switz's fingers.
Letcher strode forward and wrenched the cupboard back open. "Come now matey, we're high-tailin' outta 'ere an' yer comin' with us. Come on." He reached inside and struggled against the lump of matted fur that resisted. "Come on!"
"There's no time for this," said Laramie. "If he doesn't want to come, don't make him."
"Nobeast asked you, an' you ain't even with us, yer doin' yore own scoutin' thingamajib. Spink, I said come on!" Letcher started pounding his shoulder against the cupboard door as he struggled with Spink, breaking the hinges and sending it clattering to the ground.
With a sigh Laramie turned to Roane, who stared as if to ask what they should do. "Let's go back, Roane, an' wait until these fools are gone afore we head out again. I expected a little more competence, no idea why."
Roane's expression did not change. He was not staring at her. He was staring at something beyond her. Next to him, Switz held an outstretched paw in the same direction, his eyes fixed on the same something.
Slowly, she allowed her head to turn.
Staring at them through the kitchen window was a lizard, a claw pressed against the glass.
"M-maybe," said Roane in an almost inaudible whisper. "Maybe we should head back."
The lizard's tongue flicked out and slid across the window, leaving an unctuous trail of saliva in its wake. A fog manifested from its nostrils and obscured a pane.
At the cupboard, Letcher and Spink continued to struggle, oblivious. A few of the other vermin had joined in.
"Roane," said Laramie. Keeping her tone calm, moderated. As if she knew what she was doing. She did not know what she was doing. "We can't go back to the cellar. Not now. We'll lead them straight to it."
The lizard began to tap its claw against the glass.
"'Ey," said Switz. "'Ey, Letcher!"
"What," snarled Letcher. They had gotten Spink halfway out of the cupboard, even as he thrashed against them.
"It's a lizzerd, Letcher!"
As if Switz had somehow summoned it to action, the lizard loosened a feral snarl from its maw and hurtled through the window, shattering the glass into a glitter of shards and fragments. It hit the ground with a skitter of scales and legs and claws and in the distance behind it the head of every single lizard lazing in front of the south gate perked up in unison, a wave of yellow eyes piercing them with unnatural gazes.
One of the vermin, a weasel, sprinted for the storeroom door. Laramie lunged at him with the sword to cut him down before he could slay every last Redwaller in his panic, but the lizard got to him first, coiling claws into the weasel's belly and rending flesh like cream, the weasel screeching as it came colliding against the floor in a wash of blood.
Laramie seized the unresponsive Roane by the wrist and jerked him out of his stupor, pushing past Switz and Letcher for the door to the hallways of the Abbey. Her vision narrowed, black bands creeping at the edges, focused only on the door and its brass handle. The ferret Iredell got to it first, grasping and fumbling at the simple mechanism as if it were a device of endless complexity, and Laramie without thinking almost smote her with the sword just to get her useless body out of the way before the barbarity of the action struck her and she simply nudged the ferret aside. She seized the handle and pulled only for her own paw to slip and a sickening wetness spread across it. Her paw was covered in blood, the handle was covered in blood, the door was covered in blood, a streak of blood spread from the crack beneath like a dried river, and the realization of so much carnage almost stopped her cold but that Roane and Iredell and probably all the other vermin not currently being eviscerated by the cold claws of the lizards pressed against her, pressing her against the wood and the blood and the handle, which she grasped and with a determine pull got to work the way she needed it to.
The door opened onto the dining hall.
The long oaken table that spanned the hall still held remnants of the feast the vermin had prepared for themselves the night prior, platters of foods pilfered from the kitchen, vats of ale and other liquors, many things shattered and smashed beyond recognition. But most of the table was piled with carcasses, empty things with long red gashes running across throats or stomachs or limbs, a veritable mountain of carcasses, piled high enough to deny vision of the other side of the table.
She dragged Roane into the madness, not even seeing the lizards until she was well enough inside. They lounged fat and drenched in blood with raw bones and flesh curled in their claws, eyes closed, long sprawling camouflaged things, camouflaged in blood, because that was the dining hall, it was nothing but a giant red splotch, everything was red, the ground was wet, Roane was sliding and slipping behind her and she continued dragging him along even as he fell. She turned around to yank him up, afraid he would freeze on her, start to stammer and cry, anything to impede her, but the fear had not paralyzed him and he managed to rise as the first of the lizards in the dining hall lifted their listless heads and opened their eyes to see what poor prey had intruded on their den.
The vermin filed hapdash behind her, slipping on the slick floor as well, one creature tripping over a prostrate lizard and being seized immediately, as although the lizard had been asleep its reflexes had caused it to lash out at any creature living and breathing, lash out and clutch away the life, to devour that life with its own jaws and absorb it into its own pestilent being. Laramie could not look anymore. She ran.
Where—where to run. Outside, out of this nightmarish landscape, but the lizards were everywhere, the blood was everywhere, endless, infinite, no escape. She reached the dining hall door and threw it open, unsure where she was anymore even though she had lived in these halls her entire life and knew every single nook and cranny, but this was not the same place anymore, this was something transformed and macabre, something grim and deadly, a trap from which creatures did not escape. She was confronted with a staircase that only went up. Up was good, up was her element, if the lizards were behind her she could get them all to follow and then she'd jump from a window and that might confound them long enough to escape.
She ran up, Roane still jerking behind her.
The stairwell coiled tighter and tighter until she emerged on the second floor, somewhere in another long hall, and at first she thought that the walls of blood had spread even here, that even here there had been enough slaughter to paint them, but she realized the walls were red because they were made of sandstone, that the walls were red because that was the name of the place, Redwall.
The second story was almost tranquil. She kept running nonetheless, running for the nearest door, which now that she had started to orient herself to the geography of the place she could faintly remember as being the door to a closet.
She flung the door open and pushed Roane inside and only then did she check behind her to see if there were lizards ready to leap in after them where they had no room to run and no room to fight and where they would most certainly die, but the ferret Iredell crashed into her and pushed her inside and slammed the door shut behind them.
They sat in total dark, all three breathing heavily, all three trying not to breathe heavily.
Somebeast somewhere in the innards of the abbey screamed. The scream died.
Laramie's eyes adjusted to the dark and she could make out the faint outlines of Roane and Iredell contorted around her. She tapped Iredell on the shoulder. "What happened to Jareck?"
Iredell's wide eyes only stared.
"Did you see what happened to Jareck," said Laramie.
Iredell shook her head.
"Is Jareck dead," said Laramie.
"I don't remember seein' him."
"W-we're safe here, right," asked Roane.
"Just—keep quiet and let me think." Laramie wrapped her paws around her head and tried to construct ideas and thoughts to drown out the images imprinted on her mind.
The patter of paws came from outside. "Help, help me!" somebeast screamed. It was Letcher. Behind him came the clatter of claws.
Laramie tensed. He was leading the lizards straight to them. All he had to do was open the closet door and that was it, done, there was no other way out. Either Roane or Iredell wrapped their paws around her, maybe it was both of them.
"Help, h—" A thump. Something hit the ground. Something snarled. Something screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
And finally stopped screaming.
After that the only sound was of gnawing.
Eventually even the gnawing stopped and all was silent.