The Rescue (Guardians of Ga'hoole) (14 page)

The time had come, Soren realized. If there was any chance of rescuing Ezylryb they must do it now before winter set in. There was no choice. The first blizzard could happen any day now and by then it might be too late. Soren ordered Eglantine back to the cliff. Then he
stood before the chaw and spoke in a quiet but strong voice that did not waver as he gave the order. “Flight positions. Get ready to fly. Lift!”

And six owls rose into the night.

The plan was to first fly back to the place where Eglantine had been found in the Forest Kingdom of Ambala. They would then somehow try, with Eglantine’s help, to find their way to the castle ruins and hopefully to Ezylryb. As they flew, Soren wondered that if they were successful in reaching the castle, and if Ezylryb was there, how would they actually rescue him? Perhaps he shouldn’t think so far in advance. When they got there, maybe a plan would come to him. The first task was to get there—to this awful place where young owls were forced to sleep in crypts with bones of these so-called Purest Ones, whatever that really meant.

Twilight was flying point at the moment and Digger flying below, for they were the ones who knew the territory where Eglantine had been found. “We are in Ambala and approaching the area of the Great Downing,” Twilight called down to Digger. Digger immediately went into a ground dive. Gylfie began to hover over him.

Twilight turned to Soren and nodded. This was the place. Soren looked up and found the Star That Never Moves.

“Gylfie, take a sighting of our position between Never Moves and the first head star of the Great Glaux constellation.”

When Gylfie had their position fixed, they all began to spiral down, except Twilight. Twilight continued to hover above—alert for any other owls in the region. Then, with Digger and the others, they would try to work backward from the spot where Eglantine had been found and reconstruct a path to the castle ruins.

They lighted down in the dry creek bed. “Well, the tracks are gone by now as I expected,” Digger said. “But I do remember where I first picked them up.”

“Let’s start with the actual bush where you first found her, Digger.”

With long strides, the Burrowing Owl was there in no time. The others followed.

“Oh, my!” said Eglantine. “This is surely the place. I wouldn’t forget it. It seemed as if I spent forever here.”

“Now, Eglantine,” Digger said, “fly along this creek bed and try to remember where you were dropped.”

They had flown less than a minute. “Do you think it was here?” Digger asked. For this was where he had picked up her tracks.

“No, I think it was farther. It was pretty wet.”

They flew a few more minutes. “Here! Here!” Eglantine
suddenly said. She lighted down. There was a very small, gurgling stream of water, no more than a few inches deep. “I remember that rock!” She lifted a talon and pointed. “I remember thinking, ‘Lucky I didn’t fall on that.’”

“Good! Good!” said Soren. “Prepare to fly! We’ll make at least three circles overhead and, Eglantine, you try and sense which direction you came from.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Soren. That’s going to be hard. I was so scared, and there was so much commotion. I mean, it was a battle up there.”

“Just do your best, Eglantine. That’s all you can do. If we have to, we’ll fly out in every direction from this spot—Gylfie, you’re navigator, so keep track of our position.”

Eglantine couldn’t remember, and they did begin the slow process of flying out in all directions.

The night is not simply black to an owl. There are layers of blackness of different densities. Sometimes the black is thick, a gooey black unleavened by starlight or the moon, and sometimes the black is thin—still black, but an almost transparent sort of blackness. It all has to do with the shine and the set of the moon above, of the constellations rising or vanishing, and the features of the earth below—whether the land is clad in forests or barren
and hard with rock. Just as Twilight was an expert at seeing through the very deceptive grays of twilight and dawn, so Soren was skillful in “reading the black” of the full night.

“Thin-to-coarse black,” he called out as they flew over a sparsely wooded area. Then, half an hour later as they flew in another direction, “Water black turning to crunchy.”

“No!” said Eglantine, “I know that we never flew over water.”

The owls banked steeply and went back to their starting positions. As they settled down on the limbs of a tree, Gylfie suddenly had a brilliant thought. “If these owls just wanted Barn Owls, and mostly Tyto albas, at that, doesn’t it make sense that their castle might be located either in Tyto or very near one of its boundaries? More specifically, the boundary it shares with Ambala, which is very small.”

So they headed in the direction of the Ambala-Tyto boundary. Soren asked Otulissa to fly out as a scout. It was not long before she came back with the report of a meadow. “Upwind and to the west, but I spotted a forest fire just a little bit north of west. I would say two points off the second head star of the Great Glaux. I don’t think we need to worry with the wind in this direction.”

“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!

I
n 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 heartbreak. 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.

T
hat horrid old St. Aggie’s song began to worm its way into Soren’s and Gylfie’s brains.