“Good work, Otulissa,” Soren said.
Soon the walls of the castle ruins rose in the dawn mist. Only one tower had remained complete. The rest had crumbled down, so they stood only slightly higher than the castle walls. A peaceful haze rolled over the meadow below.
“We’d better fetch up in that small grove of trees,” Soren said. “I have a feeling there might be crows around.”
From their perches in an alder, the six owls had a good view of the castle. It must have been lovely in its time, Soren imagined, and even in its ruined state, two stained glass windows could be seen in the still-standing east wall. An embroidery of ivy and moss crept over the stone.
“It seems different,” Eglantine said after several minutes.
“How?” asked Soren
“Well, it seems very still.”
“But it’s almost full morning. They are all probably asleep.”
“I know, but at full morning the guard usually changes. That’s why I said we had to get here just before dawn—exactly at twixt time. The tower has no view toward the east and, at twixt time, the guard changes so we are really safe. But I would be able to see the changing of the guard, for the old guard usually circles the tower one time upon leaving.”
“I haven’t seen any owls circling,” said Twilight.
“And the hunters usually went out to catch a few meadow voles. It’s a good time just after twixt time for catching them,” Eglantine added.
They waited a good while longer. Finally, Eglantine sighed. “I think something is very odd. It is just too still. Look—see that deer going up to the east wall? That would never happen if the owls were there…But I wouldn’t want to be wrong. I mean, I wouldn’t want us to go in there and then be attacked.”
Soren had been thinking the same thing. He had an idea. “Gylfie, do you think you could fly through that meadow grass without getting tangled up and have a closer look?”
She gave him a shocked look. “Of course. Look, Soren, with all due respect, I might be a noisy flier compared to some but I can thread my way through that grass like a nest-maid through harp strings.” Elf and Pygmy Owls, although quite small, were considered noisy fliers for they lacked the soft fringe feathers known as plummels that swallowed the sound of their wings passing through the air.
“Good. I was never doubting your abilities, really. Now, why don’t you go up and take a look? But be careful. Come back at the first sign of any danger.”
Gylfie was off before they could wish her well.
“Great Glaux,” Otulissa sighed. “Look at her go. She might be noisy but look, the grass is hardly moving where she flies through.”
Gylfie was back in less than a quarter of an hour. “It’s empty. Completely empty.”
“No sign, I take it, of Ezylryb?” Soren asked.
“Not that I could see.”
“Well, we better have a look for ourselves, then.” Soren paused a moment and gazed toward the castle. “All right. We’d all better go together in a tight formation in case of crows. At the first sign of crows, we’ll all pack in tight. There are six of us. I can’t believe they’d mob us.”
A thrush whistled softly in a gallery as the owls lighted down within the cool shadows of the highest wall of the castle ruins. There were things in this place that Soren had never seen before, things that were not of the forest or the meadows or the deserts or the canyons. An immense gilded—but rotting—thing that Eglantine called a throne, where she said the High Tyto perched. There were stumps of broken stone columns with grooves carved in them. “What is that?” asked Soren, pointing with his talon to a high stone perch with stone ledges leading up to it.
“Well,” said Eglantine hesitantly, “it was from there that the High Tyto often spoke to us when he was not perched on the throne.”
“The High Tyto?” Soren asked. “You mean Metal Beak?”
“Yes. Sometimes they called him ‘His Pureness,’ but never Metal Beak.”
“Great Glaux, it makes me want to yarp!” Twilight snarled. “This purity stuff sounds deadly.”
Soren thought that perhaps Twilight didn’t realize how true his words really were.
“But I know no one is here,” Eglantine continued. “Because of that thrush in the gallery. No one was ever allowed up there.”
Eglantine stood quietly peering one way and then the other. It was hard for her to believe that she was back here, but back now with her dear brother, which was even stranger.
She sometimes wondered about Kludd. But she had a bad feeling about him. She had a feeling that he might have had something to do with her fall, as he had with Soren’s. She was never absolutely sure. By the time she fell, he was flying about all over, even when he was supposed to be in the nest with her when their parents were out hunting. He made her swear that she would never tell that he’d left her. One night, he came back with blood all over him. She had no idea where he had been, but when their parents came back he told a lie. He said that a fox had been scuttling around at the bottom of the fir tree, and he thought he could get it. Their father was furious. “You could have gotten yourself killed, Kludd.”
“Well, it was just a small fox. I wanted to do something nice for you and Mum.”
It was a complete lie.
“What’s this?” Gylfie said. She was perched in a wooden niche.
Eglantine gulped. “The shrine. That’s what they called it, but it’s empty!”
Gylfie cocked her head to one side then the other. Then she flipped it back so her beak almost touched the feathers between her shoulders. “It sure is!”
“And they’re gone!”
“What’s gone?” Soren asked. It was clear that Eglantine was very agitated.
“The Sacred Flecks of the Shrine Most Pure.”
“Flecks!” Soren and Gylfie gasped in horror. Flecks—like the ones at St. Aggie’s!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A Muddled Owl
In a large spruce tree, the old Whiskered Screech Owl wrapped his seven talons tightly around a slender branch. His head was so muddled it was all he could do to concentrate enough to stay on the limb. He was completely disoriented and had been since he had flown across the small river at the edge of the Kingdom of Tyto. He could have sworn he was flying north, but then none of the stars seemed to line up properly. The Golden Talons, so beautiful this time of year, appeared to him upside down in the sky. And when he thought he was banking for an easterly turn, instead of flying into the glimmer of a rising sun at dawn, he was flying into the darkness of the west. He had known he might be going yoicks when for a trace of a second he thought, well, maybe the sun does rise in the west. And then he realized he had been flying around in circles for days. Finally exhausted, he had settled on the branch of a spruce, so confused he could hardly hunt. Luckily, the food supply seemed plentiful or he would have starved. But summer had passed into autumn and soon autumn would be chased away by the first bitter winds of winter. He would starve, he supposed. One can never plan these things, he thought. He had always imagined he would get snuffed into a hurricane’s eye and spin around until he died or be sucked up by a rogue tornado wind—the kind they called a torque demon—that tore across the landscape and could pull up not just one tree or two but an entire forest. There was even a story that one torque demon had sucked up a raging forest fire and dumped it on another forest, igniting it as well. Ezylryb snorted. A fitting end for an old weather owl like me.
Every day, and he was not even sure how many days had passed now, but with each day he grew more and more confused. Soon, he imagined he would be too confused to even hunt in the very small area that he was able to manage now. So this was what it had all come to. This was to be his death. He shivered as a cool autumn breeze with more than a hint of winter in it ruffled his feathers. He tried to be philosophical about it. He had, indeed, led a grand life—full of adventure, books, and young owls to teach—scholar, sports owl, lover of a dirty joke or two. There had been danger, yes, and he
artbreak. He closed his eyes and a tear squeezed out as he thought of his dear Lil. But he had tried to serve well. He hoped, nobly. Now, he thought, in the deep winter of my life, I am on the brink of another winter, my last.
Ezylryb tried to imagine what he would miss the most. Perhaps the peace of the dawn, the moment of twixt time that hung like a sparkling jewel between the gray of the night and the pink of a new morning. The young’uns—yes, undoubtedly, the young owls whom, throughout the years, he had brought into his chaw and taught to be fair navigators through any weather. Weather, he did like weather. He supposed that was what he did not like about this particular end. It wasn’t a torque demon, and it wasn’t the eye of a hurricane. It was in fact rather humiliating to die teetering and confused in a forest that he had thought he knew so well.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Nightmare Revisited
That horrid old St. Aggie’s song began to worm its way into Soren’s and Gylfie’s brains.
We shall dissect every pellet with glee.
Perhaps we shall find a rodent’s knee.
And never will we tire
in the sacred task that we conspire.
Nor do our work less than perfectly
and those bright flecks at the core,
which make our hearts soar,
shall always remain a mystery…
This was the song that Soren and Gylfie had been forced to sing as they worked in the pelletorium of St. Aggie’s. Now it began to roar silently in their heads as they stood in the ruins of the castle and looked up at the empty shrine. Eglantine’s dreadful words, “the sacred flecks,” still rang in their ears.
“The flecks!” Soren and Gylfie both exclaimed again and stared at each other. The other owls were silent. Finally, the mystery of the flecks, which they had never unraveled, had begun to reveal itself. The image of Skench storming into the library in full battle regalia came back to them in all its terror. They had been just about to fly out of the library, the highest point in the stone maze of St. Aggie’s, which offered the best escape route, and Skench, twice their size, advanced toward them, battle claws extended, a fearsome, horrific figure. And then suddenly, for no explainable reason, she slammed into the wall, drawn by some incredible force, and was rendered helpless. Thus, they had escaped. Now Soren remembered one of his very first conversations with Bubo as to why the blacksmith was “drawn to live in a cave.” Bubo’s words came back to him: It be a strange and most peculiar force. It’s as if all these years working with the iron, we get a bit of the magnet in us. Like them special metals—you know, iron. It’s got what we call a “field.” Well, you’ll be learning this in metals class, in higher magnetics, where all the unseeable parts are lined up. It makes this force that draws you—same thing with me—I get drawn to the very earth from which them little flecks of iron come from.
Now, finally, Soren realized what the force was.
“The flecks were stored in that wall in the library,” Gylfie said.
“Yes, and Skench was wearing metal. There was a strange interaction. But she was so stupid, she didn’t know,” Soren replied.
“It’s simple,” said Otulissa.
“Simple?” Digger asked.
“It’s higher magnetics. The second volume of Strix Emerilla focuses on disturbances and abnormalities in the earth’s magnetic fields. The St. Aggie’s owls might not have known what they were doing with flecks but, believe me, these owls of the castle know exactly what they are doing.” Otulissa paused dramatically.
What are they doing? The question hung silently in the air.
“Should I go on?” Otulissa asked. She was clearly relishing her superior knowledge.
“Oh, for Glaux’s sake, yes!” roared Twilight, seeming to swell to twice his size.
So Otulissa explained how an owl’s brain could become muddled to the point of complete directional confusion so that it would be impossible for him to navigate. She was talking on and on, becoming increasingly technical, when Soren finally interrupted. “Eglantine, how many sacred flecks were there?”
“Three golden bags full.”
“How big were the bags?”
She thought a moment. “Oh, about the size of”—she hesitated—“an owl’s head, say, a Great Gray.” She looked at Twilight.
“But how, if the sacred flecks were kept in this shrine, as you call it, how did the owls here protect themselves against the disturbances?”
“Especially Metal Beak,” Gylfie added. Soren hadn’t thought of this, but why wouldn’t Metal Beak slam right into the bags in the same way Skench had in the library?
“I don’t know,” Eglantine said. “But we never felt anything.” She hesitated again. “But maybe we did. When they forced us to sleep in the crypts. Sometimes I felt a strange buzzing in my head, and I would get very confused.”
“Aha!” Otulissa exclaimed. She had flown up to the shrine and was investigating the doors that shuttered it closed. “Just as I suspected.” She tapped her beak on the lining of the doors. “Mu!”
“Mu?” All the owls said at once.
“Mu metal—magnetically very soft. Surround a magnetic object with it, and it blocks the field. That’s what protected you, Eglantine.”
“Except when I was put into the crypt.”
“And that is what protected Metal Beak,” Gylfie said. “His mask and beak must be made of mu metal.”
“Precisely,” Otulissa nodded sagely.
Soren had said nothing. He was listening and thinking. “There were three bags, Eglantine, right?”
Eglantine nodded.
“But now they are gone.” Soren turned toward Otulissa. “Otulissa, what would happen if you set up these three bags of flecks at certain points?”
Otulissa began to tremble, then in a barely audible whisper, she spoke. “There would be a Devil’s Triangle.”
“So the mu metal protects one from the magnetic disruption. But is there anything that can actually destroy the flecks, the magnetism itself forever?”
Otulissa nodded solemnly. “Fire!”
“Fire…mu…fire, fire!” Soren spread his wings and rose in flight. He swept from one corner of the castle ruins to another. It was the owl manner of pacing. To fly, to move, helped him to think. Gylfie soon lifted into flight. How often during their long imprisonment at St. Aggie’s had the two of them plotted and planned together? Soren felt the comfort of Gylfie’s presence as the Elf Owl fell into flight beside him. The other owls were very still except for the smooth turnings of their heads as they followed the two owls’ flight with their eyes. Several minutes later, Gylfie and Soren lighted down.
“Is there any way we can get that mu off the doors of the shrine?”
“That shouldn’t be hard, especially if it’s soft metal,” Twilight said, and flew toward the niche. Then with a force that would have torn a fox in half, he ripped off the metal.
“Good!” Soren said. “Now we must leave our battle claws behind and fly out to find that forest fire that Gylfie spotted earlier. Twilight, seeing as we have no coal-carrying buckets, could you somehow bend one of those sheets of mu metal into something like a bucket?”
“Sure thing, Soren.”
Thus, a plan had been devised by Soren and Gylfie with the mu metal to protect and shield them. Since the bags were missing, it might be very easy for the owls to accidentally find themselves smack in the middle of a Devil’s Triangle. As an ultimate precaution, they intended to first fly to the forest fire and collect burning coals. And, if they did fly upon the bags of sacred flecks, they could, with the coals harvested from the forest fire, destroy the flecks’ power. If this triangle existed, they must destroy it. It would be a hazard to all bird life—owls, eagles, seagulls—yes, even crows—as much as they loathed that latter species. Something like this simply could not exist in nature. Otulissa thought that because she was indeed so sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure she might be able to sense the perimeter of the triangle. So it was decided that
Otulissa would fly in the point position.
They had been in the castle a long time. The light was seeping out of the day. Soon it would be First Black. The owls perched on the jagged edges of the north wall of the church and watched the smudge of smoke from an immense forest fire roll up to meet the coming darkness of the night. Gylfie stood beside Soren, hardly reaching his breast feathers. Six owls they were, Soren thought as he slid his head around to look at them. Six strong, quick-witted owls about to fulfill a destiny. They had indeed become a band of owls who would rise into the blackness and embark on the last part of a dangerous quest—to find the lost, to mend the broken, to make the world a better place, and to make each owl the best he or she could be. Soren knew that he was in fact the leader of the best of the best. And so he vowed that no matter how difficult this was, he would do all in his power to not only rescue Ezylryb, but to bring each one of these owls home safe to the Great Ga’Hoole Tree.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Into the Devil’s Triangle
It was, of course, Soren and Otulissa who, as trained colliers, would plunge into the forest fire to retrieve the coals. They had found a high rock ledge downwind of the forest fire that offered them the best point of observation. All the owls were massed on the ledge and listened carefully as Soren began to speak.
“Now, you understand that it is only myself and Otulissa who will go into the fire.”
Twilight, Digger, Gylfie, and Eglantine nodded gravely. There would be no argument, not even from Twilight. They all knew that only these two owls had been trained in this very dangerous work that demanded skills far beyond the ordinary. From breathing and flying, to the beak work of seizing a live coal, these owls had received the most specialized of instruction of any chaw.