“And now?” Hamish asked. “Why have you come, old friend? Have you found out what you want to know?”
“Not really, but I have found out that she still lives and that in her possession is a book that is very dangerous. You’ve heard of hagsfiends?” The three wolves exchanged glances. Although it was fairly clear that the word was unfamiliar to them, they seemed disturbed. The hackles on the backs of their necks suddenly were erect, their eyes narrowed to green slits.
“Let us not talk out here. Follow me to my cave.”The cave shook with the thunderous eruptions of the volcanoes, and outside the night flinched with the red light of flames that scoured the sky. “And you say,” Hamish spoke slowly, “that these creatures are no more?”
“Yes, they are extinct, yet not entirely gone,” Gylfie said.
“I don’t understand,” Gyllbane said. “Either something is or it isn’t, correct?”
Soren now spoke. “These hagsfiends that your ancestors - and ours - fought alongside Hoole, these creatures in their ancient forms are dead and gone. But they have left behind dim shadows____” How to explain it?
Soren thought. “Like whispers from another world they come to us, fragments from a bad dream. But it is not a dream. We have all had brushes with them. Haven’t any of you dire wolves ever been haunted by such?”
Gyllbane shook her head. “Never. My old chief, MacHeath, was trouble enough. I surely didn’t need a hagsfiend or even a dim shadow of one to cause more.” Coryn felt a slight tremor reverberate in his gizzard when she spoke of the wrathful old wolf who had maimed her son, Cody, when he was just a pup. “What are these dim shadows of hagsfiends like?”
Soren continued. “Somewhat like scrooms, yet far less powerful.” There was an undeniable nervous reaction among the three wolves in the cave when they heard this.“We have not read the legends as you have and we need to know more about the ancient forms of the hags-fiends. Describe them to us.” Then Gyllbane asked with a sudden urgency, “What do they look like, wherein lie their powers, and what exactly could they do to ordinary creatures?’
“You have to begin,” Gylfie said, “with magen, for it was a time of magen in those ancient days - both good magen and evil magen.” So Gylfie, the rest of the Band, and Coryn described as best they could what they had learned from reading the legends. But it was when they came to the peculiar yellow light that emanated from the hagsfiends’ eyes that the three wolves stood up with every bit of their coats bristling, their eyes flashing white in a terror that Coryn had never in his time in the Beyond witnessed.
“Fyngrot, you call it?!” Gyllbane asked in a trembling voice.
“Yellow? Yellow pouring from their eyes?” Cody asked in nearly strangled words.
Soren explained in detail how the hagsfiends used fyngrot.
Hamish stepped forward. This time there were no gestures of homage. Rank was forgotten. “We have something similar among dire wolves. Vyrwolves,” he said in a low growl. “We thought they were gone, too. A relic of our past, as I suppose you thought the hagsfiends were.” A cold silence fell upon them all. Great Glaux, thought Soren, can there be some connection between the two - between hagsfiends and vyrwolves? Soren sensed that the same thought was occurring to Coryn. For indeed, once there had been a connection between the most evil wolf-MacHeath - and the most evil owl - Nyra.“And they’re not gone?” Coryn asked.
“We fear not,” Gyllbane said.
“But I don’t understand.” Soren spoke now, his black eyes flickering with confusion. “How can they possibly be like hagsfiends? Wolves are not birds.”
“Think of them as wingless hagsfiends.” It was Digger who said this. They all spun their heads toward him and the three wolves regarded him with a measure of surprise.
“Precisely,” Hamish said. “Wingless. But still very-dangerous and sharing much in common with these hagsfiends that you described.”
“This fyngrot,” Gyllbane whispered tremulously. The incoherent roar of the erupting volcanoes mingled with the pounding of eight creatures’ hearts. “It is like the jaunyx.”
“The jaunyx?” the five owls asked in unison.“Our eyes,” Hamish said. “Our eyes are naturally green.”
“A bright intense green, the same as the rim of the ember’s center,” Soren said.
The owls’ gizzards were all astir now, for each one of them was remembering the, passages from the legends in which King Hoole had, with the help of the bright beams from the wolves’ eyes, broken through a powerful fyngrot and brought down a troop of hagsfiends in the Desert of Kuneer.
“They are still green,” Gylfie whispered almost desperately. “Tell them., Soren, tell them of the passages from the legends where the. wolves broke the fyngrot of the hags-fiends with the green of their eyes.”
There was now a stirring among the wolves. They rose and turned in tight circles, then settled down again. “Is this true?” Gyllbane asked. “If so, we have lost this part of the tale as it was nassed down since the first, Fengo.”
“Are legends true?” Soren asked no one in particular. “It was written down.” He left the rest of what he was about to say unspoken. But legends can inspire, he thought. Soren knew that inspiration could not be told, or preached. It must be felt truly to be acted upon.
Gyllbane sighed. “Dunleavy MacHeath, the lord of my clan before I left it, his eyes began to fade soon after Coryn retrieved the coal.” She paused.“And?” Coryn asked.
Gyllbane turned toward her son, “Cody can tell you what happened.”
“He’d always been a brute. Lord MacHeath, Thanks to him I am lame with two half paws, bitten off by my own chieftain in the hope that this would qualify me to become a gnaw wolf of the Sacred Watch.”
“He lusted so for that ember, he maimed a defenseless pup,” Gyllbane added, “just to be close to it. Then when the right Owl came, he thought that owl would .,.” Her voice dwindled off.
“And Nyra was the right owl,” Coryn said.
“Yes, but you, Coryn, retrieved the ember instead,” Cody continued. “For a while he thought all was lost. He became increasingly deranged and then fell into a distemper that was worse than the foaming disease. He staggered into the far southwestern range of hills and went deep into a cave somewhere there. For a long time we thought he had died. Many of the clan hoped and prayed and watched the spirit trail of stars that led to the soul cave where dead wolves go upon death, though few thought he deserved a place there. Then one day he came back with a new mate — Brygdylla. He looked ragged and his eves had faded to almost no color - at least none that could be named. His new mate looked equally ragged and had the same colorless eyes. We thought she had suffered from the same illness. But then one night shortly after he had. returned, he. called a meeting of the clan in the Gadderheal. It was the night of a full moon, and he told us to follow him out. of the Gadderheal cave and to stand across from him. As the moon rose and cast a perfect pool of silver light on the ground, he and. Brygdylla stood in the center. A strange transformation began to occur.’
There was a pause in the thunderous eruptions, and a quiet engulfed the cave that, in its own way seemed as loud as the roar of the volcanoes. Cody continued. “MacHeath and his mate grew to three times their normal size, their dull, shaggy coats turned a dark glistening bluish-black, and their eyes were suddenly yellow. They pulled back their lips in a grimace not. of fear but threat, revealing fangs - fangs the likes of which none of us had ever seen and twice their normal size, their edges no longer smooth but jagged with sharp little points.”“They had become vyrwolves,” Hamish said. “And those MacHeaths who would not join them were slaughtered.”
“But what about you, Cody? Why not you?”
“I never thought I would thank my lameness for this.” He held up one of his mangled paws. “But since I’m maimed, I was of no use to them. Easily overlooked. And what was there to brag about in killing a maimed young wolf barely out of his puppy days?”“And then what happened?” Soren asked. He did not l
ike the sound of this at all. It had an eerie familiarity, a resonance with a dark legendary past. This must have been why Ezylryb had insisted on his deathbed that Soren, the Band, and the young king read the legends.
“And then MacHeath, Brygdylla, and a small remnant of the MacHeath clan - the ones he spared - went with him.”
“But where?” Gylfie asked.
“To that cave in the southwestern hills.”
“That cave!” Digger stepped forward. “I think I know of that cave.” They all blinked and looked toward the Burrowing Owl.
“What?” Gylfie asked in a hoarse whisper.
“I think that cave leads to what is known among Burrowing Owls as the Tunnel of Despair.” He paused. “A place where strange transformations took place. But none of us thought it was a real place. We thought -” He stopped, his voice almost broken. He peered down at his strong featherless legs, which had dug plenty of burrows and tunnels over the years in some of the hardest, most scrabbly earth imaginable. “We thought that it was just a mythical place, a legend.” Digger paused, then began again. “But as we now know, legends have a way of revealing truth.”
CHAPTER NINETEENAn Owl with a Mission
How miserable can this get? Madame Plonk thought as icy slop from the Sea of Hoolemere dashed her in the face. She was wedged in between head-buffeting winds above and a tumultuous sea below. If she flew high to avoid the sea slop, the winds were too strong, at least for her, a frankly fat Snowy who had not been on a serious flight in years. Flying too low she encountered the rowdy breaking waves, which she felt took absolute delight in drenching her. Madame Plonk had to admit she was definitely out of shape. But she flew on. She had gotten Otulissa into this mess back at the tree and she would get her out of it. She felt terrible about asking Otulissa to hide the frinkin’ coronation teacup, which she hoped she never laid eyes on again. But most of all she felt deeply ashamed for ever partaking of, and lending her voice, her most precious possession, to these yoickish rituals dreamed up by the GGE. She was as fed up with the frinkin’ ember as she was with the teacup.
All these thoughts assailed her as she flew on. Despite her vanity and frivolous habits, she was in many ways a practical owl. She knew that it would do her no good to dwell on the past. She must not squander her strength, but conserve it and fly on. A fuzzy line began to break through the thick vapors of mist and fog and spume-tossed air. Land! she thought. Then the fuzzy line grew bolder and assumed a shape. It must be Cape Glaux She hadn’t seen it in years and although it was a barren windswept promontory, to Madame Plonk it seemed like the most welcoming place in the world. She would only allow herself a short rest, for night was now falling and to fly in the daylight would be dangerous. Crows! How long had it been since she even had to consider the foul creatures? But it wouldn’t do to become the victim of a mobbing. She had to find Soren, the Band, and the young king. Bubo had told her the whereabouts of a grog tree. “When you get to the Cape, fly off the bottom port star of the Golden Talons, not the starboard star.”
“Port? Starboard? What do I know of such things? Tell me plain, Bubo,” she had demanded.“All right. Go to the Cape, turn left, fly straight for two hours. You’ll get to Silverveil, and that forest on its far western side meets up with the Shadow Forest. If you fly a straight course, on the border between the two forests you’ll find the grog tree in a stand of sycamores.”
She was absolutely starving by the time she arrived on the Cape, and luckily a rock rat was perched almost smack dab beneath her in a thicket of coarse winter grass. She looked about for a tree and a hollow even though she knew it was foolish, but it had been so long since she had holed up in a ground scrape, although this was the customary shelter of her kind. She had grown accustomed to more luxuriously appointed residences during her time at the tree. Indeed, she did not even call her hollow a hollow but an apartment and had lined it with the plushest of mosses, and all manner of decorations she had acquired through her dealings with Trader Mags.
“Aaah, dear Mags!” She realized that she would be flying right through Mags’ home territory in Silverveil. How she would love … She cut off the thought almost immediately. How can I be thinking about shopping at a time like this?’. She gave herself a stern talking-to: “Time to shape up, old gal! You’re on a mission. You sybaritic hunk of feathers, you gluttonous, high-living lowlife of a fat owl.” She looked down at the rock rat she had just killed and felt her hunger vanish. Well, maybe I’ll get thin. But she knew she had to eat something, for soon she would have to fly on. Not a drop of the night could be wasted. She tore off the rat’s head, then swallowed the rest. Normally, she would have eaten the head but she knew there was little nutritional value in it, so why
take on the extra weight? It would only make flying into a headwind - Pardon the pun, she thought - more difficult. For exactly five seconds she felt proud of her willpower, but she suddenly burst into tears. “I’m such a fool, a vain old fool.” She crammed herself into a shallow ground scrape beneath a rock shelf overhang, collapsed in an exhausted heap, and instantly fell sound asleep.
Madame Plonk was dreaming of bars, vertical iron bars, and behind them the dignified face of a Spotted Owl. “Sorry! So sorry! Stupid teacup!” Her own sobbing woke her up and then her eyes flinched in the blinding white light. “Great Glaux, I’ve slept into the day! How could I! How could I!” She was hysterical now. She would have to wait until night, and even though these winter days were short, any delay was risky not just to the well-being of Otulissa but of the entire tree. The Band had to come back as quickly as possible. Shaking and awash with a mix of anger at herself and fear, she was dissolving into a complete panic. The glare of the sun was a scorching mockery. But through her panic she saw something even whiter than the sun. Whiter than the sun but with a sudden dash of black, a black that looked rather crowish …Oh,great Glaux! I’m done for! she screeched, and swooned, collapsing, in a heap.
Madame Plonk was not sure how long she was out, but when she came to an astonishing sight met her eyes. It was a Snowy bending over her: a large male, pure white except for a black feather tucked into the plumage behind his head. How very odd. Madame Plonk blinked.
“Madame, may I be of service? You seem most distressed.” It was a gentleman speaking, no doubt about that, Madame Plonk thought. She tried to compose herself before she spoke. “I was having a bad dream,” she began and then blurted out, “but I deserve it. I’m a terrible owl. I have done a terrible thing!”“Now, now, madame, I’m sure it can’t be all that bad.”
“Oh, but it is!” Between sobs and gulps, Madame Plonk spilled out her story. It was a jumbled tale of teacups, ashes, cracked voices, a Spotted Owl named Otulissa, and Coryn.
“Coryn!” the male Snowy exclaimed.
“Yes, Coryn. the king of the great tree.”
“So that is where you are from.”
Madame Plonk nodded.
“You must be the famed singer of the tree.”
“Once,” she replied cryptically.
He blinked, not quite understanding her, but went on. “Oh, yes, I know about you and the great tree and the new king, Coryn,” He paused, “‘You see, I knew him when he was still called Nyroc.”
“You did?” Madame Plonk blinked.“Well, I am rather ashamed of how J came to know him, but yes, I. did make his acquaintance briefly.”
“I must find him. I must find him and the Band.”
“Oh, you shall, Madame Plonk. You see you have come upon the right owl. I am Doc Finebeak, the finest tracker in the Southern Kingdoms. Once upon a time, I was hired by Nyra to track down her errant, son. I know this young owl. I know his flight track. If anyone can find him and this Band you speak of, it’s me. We can leave immediately.”
“What? It’s broad daylight. Are you yoicks? What about, crows?”
“What about crows?” He cocked his head so that the black feather showed. “The crows and I, well, how shall I put it? The crows and I have an arrangement. This crow-feather
I wear - it’s a long story how I got it, but basically it gives me a free passage for daytime flight - a get-out-of-mobbing-free feather, so to speak.”
“Oh …” That was all Madame Plonk could say. Just “oh” and deep in her chest she felt a shimmering flutter in her gizzard. She hadn’t felt that in years! My, my! I mustn’t be distracted. just think mission, you old fool!
CHAPTER TWENTYThe Tunnel of Despair
Gylfie was chosen for the mission of exploring the Tunnel of Despair for two reasons. First, she was small and could thread her way undetected through the bizarre underground twisting channel that sometimes narrowed to the width of a Barn Owl’s wingspan; second, she was the premier navigator of the great tree. Of any of them, she would never get lost. Take away every starry reference point, take away the sky, as indeed was the case, and it mattered not to Gylfie.
Stone flowers bloomed in the dense shadows as Gylfie flew through the twisting maze of passages. A lesser owl, one of inferior intelligence or unsteady gizzard, might have found these weird contortions of rock frightening. They seemed to grow magically from the floor, ceiling, and sides of the tunnel in myriad shapes ranging from needlelike protuberances to blossoms locked in an eternal spring, But Gylfie was no lesser owl. Her mind buzzed with star charts and the configurations of the constellations in the sky above. Her brain and gizzard tingled with the minute vibrations of the Earth’s magnetic poles. Within her were both chart and compass.
Still, Gylfie was not used to being underground. Although she was flying, she felt as if she were being buried alive because with each wing beat she was moving deeper into the Earth. Earth is not a place for a winged creature, she thought. The damp smell of clay, rock, and soil offended her sensibilities. She hated not seeing the sky. That’s how it had been at St. Aggie’s when they were imprisoned deep in the stone maze, exposed to the full shine of the moon for moon blinking. She felt, her gizzard grow squish}’ with dread and her heartbeat accelerate. Keep calm! Keep calm! The sky is there. You just can’t see it. I’ve had worse experiences — like when I was captured by kraals in the Northern Kingdoms. I have to do this for the Band. For the tree. For owlkind, birdkind, animalkind. Don’t be some weak-gizzard moon calf freak gizzle, idiotic owl. Gylfie kept up the self-scolding. She would fly on. She had flown in battle, through hurricanes, and through fires. She could fly through this frinkin’ stupid tunnel!The only other owl of the Band who would have possibly been adeauate for the lob, despite his lack of celestial navigation abilities, was Digger. As a Burrowing Owl he had an extensive knowledge of caves and tunnels and the topography of the underground; not only the topography but the cave dwellers, the peculiar animals that lived in caves. But with a wingspan of nearly two feet, Digger was too big. He told Gylfie as much as he could about the natural history of caves and tunnels in general. However there was not much time. For the moon had long passed its dwenking and was well into its newing, growing fatter and fatter each night. The strange transformation of the dire wolves into vyrwolves took place, they had been told, on the night of a full moon. But even before they were told this, Coryn had been nervous about the newing moon because this time there would be an eclipse. Coryn’s words now flowed back to Gylfie as she flew the twisting channels of the earth: “Do you know the significance of an eclipse?’ Coryn had asked with a quaver in his voice.