“Firestar, over here!” Sharpclaw was sniffing a little farther along the fence, beckoning his leader with his tail.
When he joined the ginger tom, Firestar saw the ground torn up by claws, and patches of soil still darkened by clots of blood.
“This must be where the attack happened,” Sharpclaw mewed.
Firestar nodded. Just beyond the clawed-up area was a gap at the bottom of the shiny fence, big enough for a cat to squeeze through. For a heartbeat his paws froze to the ground; then he gave his pelt a shake. This was just a gang of rats, nothing that he couldn’t cope with, as long as he had strong warriors to back him up.
“Okay,” he murmured. “We’re going in. Cherrypaw, follow me. Sharpclaw, keep a lookout behind.”
Ears pricked and whiskers twitching, he slid through the gap and padded softly across the white stone surface toward the barn. There was still no sign of movement. Firestar would have liked to think that Sandstorm’s patrol had frightened the rats off, if it weren’t for that overwhelming sensation of being watched.
“Are we going inside?” Sharpclaw asked.
“Not if we don’t have to,” Firestar replied. “They can do what they like on their own territory. We’ll just take a look around outside and then—”
He broke off, every hair on his pelt rising in horror. With a patter of tiny paws, rats had begun pouring out of one of the holes in the walls of the barn, more rats than he had seen in his life, more than he could have imagined living in one barn.
Whipping around, he saw yet more emerging from another hole. The two streams flowed around the three cats, a whispering torrent of brown bodies and long, thin tails. None of them squeaked; there was just the small, terrible sound of their scampering feet as they moved steadily, purposefully, into position. Firestar and his patrol were surrounded; an unbroken mass of rats stood a tail-length away from them, blocking the route to the gap in the fence. Their tiny glittering eyes were filled with malice.
Shortwhisker didn’t exaggerate! Firestar thought in horror. You really can’t see the ground for rats.
Sharpclaw had dropped into a crouch, ready to spring, his teeth drawn back in a snarl. Firestar stood beside him, flicking a glance at Cherrypaw. The young tortoiseshell’s eyes were glazed with terror, but she was facing her enemies and trying to stand firm, even though her legs were trembling.
“Okay,” Firestar murmured. “When I raise my tail, head for the fence.”
Sharpclaw acknowledged the order with a lash of his tail.
Firestar tensed, ready to give the signal, and wished he could have said good-bye to Sandstorm. But before he could move, the mass of rats parted and a single rat stepped out into the gap between them and the cats. It was bigger than most of the others, with a wiry, muscular body and curving yellow teeth.
“Fine,” Sharpclaw growled. “You want to die first, do you?”
The rat’s wedge-shaped head swung back and forth as its malignant gaze flicked from cat to cat, and it began to speak.
To Firestar’s astonishment he could understand what it said, though the words were so twisted it was hard to make them out.
“Rats not die.” Its voice grated like a claw dragged over stone. “Cats die.”
Sharpclaw slid his claws out. “You’re sure of that, are you?”
“Leave,” the rat went on. “All cats leave. We killed you before; now we kill you again.”
“You killed us before?” Firestar exclaimed.
“This time we let black-and-white cat live.” The rat’s eyes glittered with hatred. “But only this time. You stay by river, you die.”
It kinked its tail over its back, and as if they had been waiting for the signal the other rats separated into two streams again and flowed back into the barn. The rat who had spoken slid in among them and was lost to sight.
Firestar flicked his tail toward the gap. “Go!”
While Cherrypaw and Sharpclaw squeezed out into the scrubland, Firestar turned to face the barn. His heart was thumping hard enough to break out of his chest. “The gorge is our place,” he yowled after the river of retreating bodies.
“We will not leave.”
Then he spun around, slid through the gap, and raced across the open ground with Cherrypaw and Sharpclaw by his side. They didn’t stop until they reached the shelter of the bushes at the top of the cliff.
“I’ve never seen so many rats!” Cherrypaw panted, her eyes wide.
“Nor have I,” Firestar admitted. “And I’ve never come across a rat who could speak to cats before.”
Sharpclaw was giving himself a quick grooming, as if he was trying to hide how troubled he was. “I’ve never met one, but I’ve heard of rats like that—rats who could think, and plan, and hate. My mother used to tell me stories, and I thought that’s all they were—just stories.”
“I wish they were.” Firestar’s alarm was growing. “He said, ‘We killed you before.’ I’ve got a horrible feeling I know what he meant.”
“What?” Cherrypaw asked.
Firestar wasn’t ready to reply; there was something he needed to check. Waving his tail for the others to follow, he pushed through the bushes to the cliff top and down the trail as far as the warriors’ den.
“Look at that,” he mewed, pointing with his tail to the scratches on the column of rock by the entrance.
“Yes, our ancestors’ claw marks.” Sharpclaw nodded.
“Look at the smaller claw marks at the bottom, the ones that go across instead of up and down. I always assumed that kits made them, but now I think they’re the marks of rats.”
Peering more closely at the marks, Firestar matched them in his memory with the tiny claws of rats. No kit would have claws so thorn-sharp.
Cherrypaw’s eyes stretched wide. “Rats came here?”
Firestar nodded. “We’ve always known that something drove the first SkyClan cats out of here and scattered them so that the Clan was destroyed. Now I think we know what that ‘something’ was.”
“Rats!” Sharpclaw snarled.
“Rats,” Firestar agreed.
Gazing down at the thin claw marks, scored across the ones made by cats, Firestar found it was easy to imagine hordes of rats pouring into the gorge and overwhelming the SkyClan warriors. They had set their marks in this cave to proclaim their victory. Firestar had no doubt that he was looking at a record of SkyClan’s defeat.
This was the secret that Skywatcher had refused to tell him, the secret of how the first SkyClan had been driven from the gorge. The rats’ hatred had been passed down and now it was being nourished by the leader Firestar and his patrol had met outside the barn—the rat who spoke cat, who must have learned to speak the language of his enemies to let them know exactly what he would do to them. He would stop at nothing to rid his territory of cats, just as his ancestors had done long ago.
Firestar worked his claws in the sandy floor. Were SkyClan doomed to be driven out of their homes again, just as their ancestors had been?
He padded out of the den and gazed across the gorge.
Clouds covered the sky, though there was a pale gleam of light where the sun was trying to break through. Slowly the clouds shifted into a pattern of light and dark, until the SkyClan ancestor’s face was looking down at him with eyes full of wisdom. Firestar’s paws seemed to freeze to the rock, and every hair on his pelt tingled. Why should the SkyClan ancestor appear now, when Firestar had not seen him for so long? Somehow Firestar was convinced it must be because there was a way to defeat the rats and save the Clan.
The clouds shifted again and the face of the ancestor disappeared. But the encouragement he had given Firestar flowed through his body from ears to tail tip. “Come on,” he meowed, glancing over his shoulder at Sharpclaw. “I’m going to call a Clan meeting.”