The Warriors of Brin-Hask Read online

  Dad gave him a look.

  ‘Well, I’m starving,’ said Charlie. ‘Why wouldn’t he be?’

  ‘Why are you starving?’ said Mary. ‘What did you do with the money I gave you?’

  ‘We didn’t go down to the bay,’ said Charlie.

  ‘We were down at Tom’s,’ said Amelia quickly, not sure why she was skipping over the Leaf Man part.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to wait about …’ Mum checked her watch, ‘another ten minutes. James has gone to get pizza because your dad’s scared to go back in the kitchen to cook dinner.’

  ‘I’m not scared!’ Dad protested, then added with dignity, ‘I’m terrified.’

  ‘Fair enough, too,’ said Mum, lifting her drink in salute.

  ‘So what’s going to happen to the Brin-Hask’s feast?’ said Amelia.

  ‘It’s all covered,’ said Dad. ‘We’ve ordered thirty-eight family-sized pizzas. That should be enough for every soldier to have half a pizza, with plenty left over for us.’

  ‘I’ll say!’ Charlie snorted.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Didn’t Tom tell you anything about the Brin-Hask?’

  ‘Only how many were coming.’

  Charlie hooted, and Mum raised her eyebrows at Amelia. ‘Well?’

  ‘They’re very small, Mum.’

  ‘You mean, they’re micro,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Well, at least we haven’t under-ordered,’ said Mary.

  It wasn’t until James pulled up and started unloading the boot that Amelia appreciated just how much food thirty-eight family-sized pizzas was. The whole lobby was filled with the smell of hot cheese and bread crusts. It was fantastic. It was amazing how quickly hot food could cheer you up when you were seriously hungry. For the first time all day, Amelia began to feel a bit more hopeful about Mr Snavely’s return the next day. Leaf Man said it would be OK – and who knew? Maybe he was right.

  Then James, chowing his way through a slab of anchovy pizza, broke off a chunk of crust and took the lid off the top of the cyber-rat’s tank.

  ‘Here you go, little buddy,’ James said, dropping it in.

  ‘James, no! Don’t –’ shouted Dad, but the rat had already leapt onto James’s wrist, raced up his arm and launched itself off his shoulder. Sailing across the room like a furry ballistic missile, it landed square on the rug next to Mary before bolting out to the kitchen.

  ‘… take the lid off the tank,’ Dad finished faintly.

  The pizza was cold by the time King Hibble and his warriors finally staggered through the daffodils and reached the main steps of the hotel, and the sun had set long ago. Amelia and Charlie were waiting for them. They had spread out an old picnic blanket on the grass and put four pizzas in the middle, with a bowl of water for the soldiers to refill their canteens.

  The soldiers all but fell on the pizzas and after only a few minutes Amelia knew she’d have to go and get at least eight more. Small as they were, the Brin-Hask ate like piranhas. When at last they had rolled onto their backs, patting their stomachs, King Hibble clapped his paws and called, ‘Enrick! Enrick the bard – where are you? Your king wants a poem!’

  Charlie groaned quietly. ‘Singing?’ he whispered to Amelia. ‘Poetry?’ Then he mouthed silently, lame.

  ‘Your grace,’ Enrick stood, a little stringed instrument in his paws, ‘what will you hear?’

  ‘“The Ballad of Queen Gorrick and the Grawk”,’ said King Hibble.

  The soldiers all murmured their approval, but Charlie rolled his eyes.

  Enrick coughed once, strummed his tiny instrument and began to sing in a high, beautiful voice a story that was so frightening, all the hair stood up on Amelia’s arms. It began with a Grawk invading the Brin-Hask’s land. Enrick didn’t say what a Grawk was, but it sounded monstrous: a huge creature, as large as ten Brin-Hask warriors, with pure black fur and eyes that glowed like molten metal. It was silent, cunning, and so quick that no-one even saw its shadow before it fell on them. It avoided every trap, outsmarted every ambush and was stronger than every weapon.

  Amelia was entranced until she saw King Hibble walking toward them.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘Is it rude to listen? We can go away.’

  But even as she was saying it, she was listening to Enrick describing how Queen Gorrick went out to take on the Grawk in single combat.

  ‘No, cub,’ said the king. ‘But I have a question for you.’

  Amelia nodded.

  ‘When you left us at the gateway, and ran ahead to prepare for our arrival – was not the grass of the sea prepared for my warriors?’

  ‘Oh.’ Amelia gulped. ‘Yes. Lots of it.’

  ‘But we did not have it.’

  ‘No.’

  King Hibble looked at her silently, his little button eyes stern. Amelia tried again.

  ‘No, sir. Your highness.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The rats,’ said Charlie bluntly.

  ‘What is rats?’

  ‘Oh, vicious things,’ said Charlie. ‘Well, normal rats are vicious, but these are even worse. They’re some kind of alien cyber-rats, and they’ve taken over the hotel. Amelia’s dad won’t let us into the kitchen, where we left the seaweed.’

  King Hibble looked sharply at Amelia. ‘You’ve been forced out of your home by these creatures?’

  Amelia nodded. ‘Yes, sir. And tomorrow the Control people are coming to throw us out. Or into jail. We don’t know yet.’

  All the fur on King Hibble’s body bristled. His eyes glinted, and he turned back to the picnic blanket of drowsy soldiers.

  ‘Warriors of Brin-Hask!’ he shouted.

  Enrick the bard stopped singing, and instantly every warrior was on their feet and at attention.

  ‘Tonight we were denied our traditional feast of the grass of the sea – denied it by a plague of filth that has fallen on this house!’

  There was a general grumbling and jostling among the soldiers.

  ‘A plague,’ the king went on, ‘that has driven these massive humans from their home, and will tomorrow result in their shame and expulsion. Do you know what this means?’

  The warriors shouted in excitement, and Amelia saw swords and clubs waved in the air, shields raised and clanged together.

  ‘Yes!’ King Hibble cried. ‘We have a foe worthy of battle! We have a chance to burn away our disgrace, and if any of us live to tell the tale, we will return to our homes with glory! For we have a fight to the death!’

  King Hibble blew a hunting horn, and the warriors leapt into rough lines.

  ‘Charge!’ he screamed, and the mass of tiny, colourful warriors swarmed across the lawn and up the steps. They swept past Amelia and Charlie in a wave of fury and disappeared through the front doors of the hotel.

  Amelia blinked. The Brin-Hask could move with incredible speed when they had a battle to win. She and Charlie scrambled to their feet and ran after them.

  Amelia and Charlie raced along the veranda after the charging Brin-Hask army, almost knocking over the card table the parents were sitting at.

  ‘Hey!’ Dad yelled. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Charlie!’ Mary was shocked. ‘Are you chasing those aliens?’

  ‘Not chasing, following,’ Charlie corrected her over his shoulder.

  ‘They’re attacking the rats,’ Amelia yelled back, already in the lobby where the Brin-Hask were now paused – scouts jogging off toward the library in one direction, the ballroom in another.

  ‘It’s straight ahead!’ Amelia called. ‘Follow the seaweed smell!’

  ‘I’ll get the door for them,’ said Charlie, but instead of racing after the army he stopped dead and stared up at the gallery. Amelia followed his gaze and her mouth fell open. Afte
r a day where she had seen the kitchen floor vomit up ranks of cyber-rats, and met the universe’s cutest-slash-most-bloodthirsty creatures, with a strange bouncing alien in a maze in between, there ought to have been nothing much that could surprise Amelia.

  But there she was: Lady Naomi herself.

  She was standing in the gallery and gazing down at them. Amelia just stared. She was really there. A young woman, straight-backed and graceful even in the way she held herself, like a dancer on stage. Or a ninja. She had slanting grey eyes, long black hair and an elegance that reminded Amelia of the foreign dignitaries Mum had sometimes worked with as a diplomat.

  For once, Amelia couldn’t blame James for falling in love at first sight. Not that James would ever have a hope with a woman like this.

  As Lady Naomi stepped closer to the railing, light fell on a long, twisted scar that ran from the shoulder of her right arm, down to the wrist. It was raised and jagged, as though the healing had been difficult. Yet somehow, she made even that terrible injury look glamorous.

  ‘Did I really just see the warriors of Brin-Hask streaking past?’ she asked. Even her voice was lovely.

  Amelia nodded, and then cleared her throat. ‘Yes!’

  ‘What are they doing? You didn’t offend them, did you?’

  ‘Not us!’ said Charlie. ‘They’re after the rats!’

  Lady Naomi let out a stifled squawk of excitement and rushed down the stairs. Despite her haste, she moved as silently and fluidly as a cat. When she reached the lobby, grinning brilliantly, she stood between Charlie and Amelia – a little taller than Charlie, an inch or so shorter than Amelia – and seized their hands in hers.

  Before Amelia could process the fact that not only was Lady Naomi real, but actually touching her, she was being dragged off to the kitchen.

  ‘Come on,’ Lady Naomi cried. ‘We’ll never see anything like this again, I promise!’

  They burst into the kitchen through the empty doorway that once housed the kitchen door, now shattered to pieces by Brin-Hask axes. The warriors were already arranged around the loose floorboards by the oven. Nothing had happened yet, but there was the same intense excitement in the air as if a bomb were about to explode.

  King Hibble glanced up at them. ‘My lady, you look well. Keep the cubs out of the way, will you?’

  ‘Yes, your grace.’ She curtsied, then said, ‘All right, we need to get up off the ground.’

  They climbed onto the far work bench, Charlie standing in the sink like Mr Snavely had, Amelia sitting on the draining board with her feet tucked under her. Lady Naomi sat on the wooden breadbin, and after looking around, armed herself with a long knife-sharpener. They had a perfect view of the whole kitchen.

  At a signal from King Hibble, the front line of his warriors approached the floorboards and began levering them up with their swords. Before they had lifted as much as the corner, though, the whole section of floor exploded up from below – not just the couple of boards that had been moved when Dad and Mr Snavely investigated, but almost a metre square blasted out. The entire Brin-Hask army was caught out – the back lines thrown violently against the walls, the rest tumbling down into the gaping cavity that had opened below them.

  Taken by surprise, and all but knocked out by the force of the explosion, falling helplessly into a pit of enraged, glowing-eyed cyber-rats, King Hibble and his army simply disappeared.

  Charlie sucked in a breath. ‘It’s going to be a massacre!’

  The remaining Brin-Hask warriors staggered to their feet, obviously partly concussed. They gathered up their weapons and, without a word, charged back toward the hole in the floor, diving into the abyss to join their comrades.

  ‘It’s going to be carnage,’ Amelia whispered, horrified.

  Lady Naomi gave a wicked grin. ‘Yeah.’

  The kitchen was filled with screams of outrage. It was impossible to know what was going on, as the battle was all below the floor, but Amelia quickly learnt to tell the difference between the high-pitched squeals of the rats and the joyous battle cries of the Brin-Hask. All they saw were the long, scaly rat tails as they flicked past the blast hole, and the occasional flash of a sword or shield.

  Then a massive thump shook the hotel, and all the floorboards in the kitchen pulverised – instantly dissolving into dust and falling back into the cavity.

  ‘What was that?’ Charlie yelped. ‘Did the Brin-Hask do that?’

  Lady Naomi laughed in amazement. ‘I don’t know. The Brin-Hask don’t use bombs or machinery of any kind, although they know how to manage them when they find them.’

  ‘The rats had rigged the whole floor to explode?’ said Amelia.

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘Probably supposed to be a last resort for mass escape if they ever needed to flee the hotel. I doubt it offers them much advantage in a fight like this.’

  ‘Then why did they set it off now?’ said Charlie.

  ‘They probably didn’t. I imagine the Brin-Hask decided to see what would happen if they triggered it.’

  ‘What?’ Charlie gaped. ‘The Brin-Hask set off a bomb without knowing what it would do? Are they crazy?’

  ‘A little bit,’ Lady Naomi smiled. ‘They can’t stand suspense but they love chaos – setting off the bomb put the fight more on their terms.’

  ‘You mean …’ Amelia paused as she took in the new scene of battle. From under the thick layer of wood dust that had fallen into the cavity, hundreds of small furry bodies leapt up once more, shook themselves off, and threw themselves back into combat. Now that she could see the entire arena of the war, she realised it was even worse than it had sounded. The rats were far larger than the Brin-Hask – more heavily built, and there were many, many times more of them. The sixty-odd little aliens were swamped.

  Here and there, Amelia saw two of the Brin-Hask stand back to back, holding off a circle of ten or more attacking rats. One warrior was snatched up in a rat’s mouth, and kept slashing at it with his sword even as it shook him like a doll. The rats kept coming – up out of the ground, their eyes all shining red, and every now and then she caught a flash of silver from their electronic implants. For all Amelia knew, they could communicate with each other instantly – how could the Brin-Hask compete with that?

  And yet somehow, she noticed, the number of dead rats was growing. Where there had first been nothing but seething movement, now there were little islands of slumped bodies.

  ‘You mean,’ Amelia said, wondering, ‘the Brin-Hask could actually win this?’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ said Lady Naomi.

  Charlie cheered as a great chunk of rat fur and whiskers flew into the air off a Brin-Hask sword, and Amelia felt a tremor of excitement.

  Another explosion shook the kitchen, this one spraying out a stinging cloud of gravel. Amelia coughed and wiped dust out of her eyes with her T-shirt.

  ‘How many bombs do they have?’ Charlie spluttered, half-fuming, half-admiring.

  Quite a few, it turned out. None as devastating as the first one that had disintegrated the floor, but all of them nasty.

  ‘How can the Brin-Hask match this?’ Amelia asked Lady Naomi, but Lady Naomi just nodded and said, ‘Watch.’

  As she watched, Amelia began to notice a pattern. A bomb went off every time an attack by the rats failed. They would rally in their perfect lines, charge shoulder-to-shoulder against the Brin-Hask, and try to overpower them with numbers, but the sheer fury of the Brin-Hask swords drove them back every time. Each time the rats retreated, they would make up for the loss by triggering another bomb.

  And the blasts were getting closer together. What had at first sounded like the thundering superiority of the rat forces
was actually proof that the Brin-Hask were gaining ground.

  ‘They’re winning!’ Amelia cheered. ‘The Brin-Hask are going to win!’

  Another bomb blast splintered all the cupboard doors, and the workbench they were all sitting on rocked alarmingly. This was followed almost immediately by another cloud of gravel, and the rats seemed on the verge of panic. They weren’t holding their formations any more, and were even scrambling over one another in their desperation to get away from the Brin-Hask.

  ‘It’s over,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘King Hibble won’t fight them once their defence has collapsed. Look – can you see him there with his broadsword? He’s going to call for their surrender and start taking prisoners.’

  But as King Hibble raised his voice to shout out his willingness to show mercy, there was a harsh fizzing noise and all the lights in the kitchen flickered, then went out.

  ‘What’s this?’ roared King Hibble.

  The fizzing noise grew louder and in the dark, Amelia saw all the glowing red rats’ eyes flicker and die. Without the glowing eyes, she could see nothing, not even the moon outside gave any light, but the air around her began to thicken with the foul, wet smell of burnt fur, and here and there came a slow sizzling pop, as though something big had flown into a bug zapper.

  When the lights came back on, King Hibble stood astounded, before his face fell in disgust. Every rat lay dead on the ground, electrocuted and slightly smoking.

  ‘The rats exploded themselves?’ said Charlie.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘Or someone else did.’

  ‘Who?’ said Amelia. ‘Not King Hibble?’

  Lady Naomi shook her head. ‘Never. None of the Brin-Hask would act so dishonourably.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘A good question. Perhaps if we knew who put the cybertronics into ordinary Earth rats in the first place?’

  ‘They weren’t alien rats?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘No, poor things. They were just the hosts for someone else’s technology. Right now, though, I don’t know who that someone else would be, or what they were trying to achieve. The only thing we can tell from this is that they would rather destroy their entire operation than risk having us capture even a single rat intact.’