Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue

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’dleft 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