Mintpaw’s eyes glowed. “I’ll terrify them,” she hissed, extending her claws.
Dawn light was strengthening as Leafstar padded around to the back of the heap, following Tinycloud, Petalnose, and Patchfoot. On the way they passed Bouncefire, who was struggling to push a chunk of wood up the side of the heap, toward a gap between two shiny black pelts. Leafstar gave him a nod of approval as she crept past, silently thanking Stick for all the practice in the gorge. Her confidence grew with every paw step as she saw how focused and determined her warriors were. Pride stabbed through her as she watched her Clan working together.
Then she remembered the fight with the rats in the barn, and her confidence ebbed as she pictured the hordes of evil creatures who had poured out from their hiding places with only one thought in their narrow skulls: Kill cats! Her breath choked in her throat as she recalled the horror of being overwhelmed in a tide of brown bodies, drowning in their reek and their stifling fur. She had barely fought her way out then.
Are there enough of us here? Maybe I should have brought the daylight-warriors, too.
She hadn’t included them, because the attack had started too early for them to arrive from their Twoleg nests. Now she wondered whether it would have been better to wait.
But Sharpclaw didn’t include them in the practices, so maybe he didn’t think they’d have the strength to tackle the rats.
Shaking her head to clear it, Leafstar told herself that it was far too late to call up reinforcements. She halted and gazed up at the mound.
Great StarClan, it’s big!
She had checked out the waste pile several times before, but she had never come as close as this. The towering heap seemed to fill the whole sky, and its reek was all around her. It looked far more difficult to climb than the pile of sticks they had used for practice in the gorge. Rustling and scraping and the high-pitched squeaks of rats came from deep inside it, and Leafstar suppressed a shudder.
Beside her, Petalnose, Patchfoot, and Tinycloud were collecting sticks and lumps of wood and stone to block the three exits on this side. Cora padded up to her.
“Should we be climbing up now?” she murmured. “We need to be ready.”
Leafstar nodded. She beckoned to Mintpaw and Shrewtooth, who were waiting a few tail-lengths away, and began to claw her way up the pile.
The stench grew stronger and flies buzzed around Leafstar’s head as she climbed. Every hair on her pelt stood on end. Sometimes the heap felt sticky underpaw, and she tried not to imagine what might be clinging to her fur. I don’t look forward to licking that off, whatever it is! Sometimes the pile gave under her weight, and she imagined it collapsing altogether, pitching her down into the rat-filled darkness. She could still hear the tiny rat noises; to her relief their enemies hadn’t yet realized that they were under attack.
Leafstar had nearly reached the top of the pile when she heard the beginning of a yowl of alarm, quickly cut off. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted Mintpaw a tail-length below her, clinging by her forepaws to a jutting piece of wood while her hind paws dangled in the air, her tail waving wildly.
“Sorry!” the apprentice squeaked, meeting Leafstar’s gaze. “I slipped.”
Scrabbling with her hind paws, she managed to haul herself up again. Leafstar tensed, all her senses alert for the rats to start pouring out before they were ready, but there was no change in the busy scratching and squeaking just beneath her paws.
“It’s okay,” she murmured, with a nod to Mintpaw. “They didn’t hear you. Try to be more careful.”
A fox-length below Mintpaw, Shrewtooth had frozen with his paws splayed out across one of the squashy Twoleg pelts and his eyes glazed with terror. Before Leafstar could speak, Cora scrambled up beside him.
“Come on,” she whispered. “You’re doing fine.”
As Shrewtooth managed to put one quivering paw in front of the next, Leafstar felt grateful for the Twolegplace cat’s level head and steady courage. This would be a lot harder without Cora and her friends, she admitted to herself.
At last Leafstar found a firm paw hold on a squared-off piece of stone, and let her gaze travel around the clearing. At the bottom of the pile, just below her, she could see Patchfoot, Tinycloud, and Petalnose, each braced against the blocked exits. Farther around, Bouncefire was in position; she couldn’t see Cherrytail on the far side. The curve of the mound cut off her view of Sharpclaw and his patrol, but she had to assume that they were ready.
The SkyClan leader let her gaze sweep around one last time. Then she threw back her head and yowled, “SkyClan, attack!”
Her voice echoed through the forest, and the mound came alive beneath her paws. The rats’ voices rose in squeals of mingled panic and fury. Leafstar could hear their frantic scrambling underneath her paws, and felt the stone she was standing on shift.
A rat’s head popped out of the hole that Tinycloud had blocked, trying to force its way past the barrier of sticks and brambles. The small white warrior slashed it twice across its nose with one forepaw, and the rat vanished again.
“Well done!” Leafstar called out as Tinycloud shoved the sticks back into place. “Force them back! Sharpclaw and his cats will do the killing.”
Petalnose was hissing furiously at two rats who were trying to escape through her exit, and Patchfoot darted across to help her. The sight of two enraged cats terrified the rats, who slid back into the mound without a blow being struck.
Reassured that her warriors knew what to do, Leafstar scrambled up to the very top of the heap, digging in her claws and yowling to frighten the rats out of the mound and into the claws of the waiting fighters. She caught glimpses of Cora and Mintpaw doing the same, while Shrewtooth perched on a spiky and battered Twoleg object with his pelt bristling and his jaws gaping in a spine-chilling shriek. The mound lurched under Leafstar’s paws; new gaps were starting to open up. A wiry rat body broke into the open a couple of mouse-lengths from her nose, fleeing down the side of the heap before she could swipe at it. A sharp squeal from below, abruptly cut off, told her that another cat had been waiting for it.
Mintpaw appeared, clawing her way over the top of a Twoleg chair, her lips drawn back in a threatening snarl. Suddenly the chair gave way, sinking deeper into the waste, carrying the apprentice down with it into a gaping hole. Mintpaw let out a terrified screech, scrabbling vainly at loose debris as she sank into the depths of the mound.
Leafstar leaped forward and grabbed the she-cat’s scruff before she disappeared altogether. Digging in her hind claws, she hauled Mintpaw upward. Two or three rats followed; one of them snapped at Mintpaw’s tail. Leafstar, with her teeth still sunk in the apprentice’s scruff, had no way of attacking, but the apprentice kicked out with her hind paws and caught the rat across the side of its head. It toppled off the mound in a flurry of waving paws and tail and vanished.
“Thanks,” Mintpaw gasped as her Clan leader set her down on a more solid part of the heap.
“You did well with that rat,” Leafstar panted.
From where she stood now, Leafstar could look down and see the battle at the front of the mound where the exits had been left open. Horror cramped her belly when she saw Sharpclaw and his patrol surrounded by a surging mass of rats. Every cat was spattered with blood.
StarClan, please let it be the rats’ blood and not their own!
Stick’s plan had been for two warriors to attack each rat, but the rats were too many, and too fast, for that. They squealed and scrabbled as the SkyClan warriors pounced on them, but there were always more to replace them. Leafstar spotted Rockshade just below her, struggling with a massive rat. His paws slashed at the rat’s flanks, but the creature had its teeth fastened in his shoulder, and Rockshade couldn’t throw it off.