Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

me. Hadn’t I learned after all these years that the images from the fire could not be hunted down? I would not find them; they wouldfind me. As soon as I relaxed and stepped back a pace from the fire, things became much clearer. And what I saw truly terrified me.
    There was a Nacht Ga’ cast upon the sisters of the island. It bound them and their gizzards as tightly as if they were trapped between two crunching ice floes. But there was no sign of Siv. Yet instinctively I felt she must be nearby. I had found feather traces of her here. And it was only reasonable that she would have gone to visit her dear cousin at this desperate time. My problem was trying to reason at all. I was caught between the evil magic of the hagsfiends and my own powerful magic. Reason is not a fulcrum for magic upon which decisions should be made. Nor is magic a fulcrum for reason. To mix logic with magic can be catastrophic. I was about to find this out.
    I smothered the fire and thought. Reason commanded that I must go to Elsemere because, logically, Siv must be there, even though she was not brought forward by the flames. I knew that flames had their limitations. I also knew that the Nacht Ga’ must be broken, whether Siv was there or not. It was sheer brutality to have enslaved the gizzards of these good sisters in such a manner. I must save them. There was only one way in which a Nacht Ga’ spell could be broken and that was with a splinter made of issen blaue, which is the hardest of what we call the“strong ice.” Normally, a single stab with one of these ice splinters was instantly fatal, but in the peculiar case of a spellbound owl, the wound broke the spell and restored the owl’s gizzard.
    Some of the very best ice splinters could be struck off the Ice Dagger itself. The Ice Dagger was a blade of rock soaring from the sea and sheathed in ice. One of the first lessons in our youth was to learn ice knapping. Old King H’rathmore sent us with his master-at-arms, Proudfoot, a Snowy, to this very Ice Dagger where we learned the craft of making weapons from ice. We learned how to use stones and various kinds of ice shards to strike off other pieces of ice and to fashion them into weapons. It was a craft known only in the N’yrthghar and it demanded real skill. Both H’rath and I became fairly good ice knappers.
    I now made three sliver swords. They were minuscule. I carefully wrapped them in protective layers of moss so I would not cut myself and tucked them close to my shoulder between by my coverts and my flight feathers.
    I circled Elsemere Island twice before lighting down on its eastern shore. An elderly sister, a hunched Barred Owl, waddled out of a burrow hole near one of the few trees and approached me. I knew immediately that what I had suspected was true. She was in the grip of the Nacht Ga.’ Her normally warm brown eyes were dull, and therewas a hint of that intense yellow behind them that is the mark of all hagsfiends.
    “How may I serve you, good sir?” Her voice was mechanical, without the usual low melodious tones of a Barred Owl’s speech.
    “Just need a bit of a rest,” I replied.
    “A bit of vole might do you some good,” she said.
    “That would be very kind of you, madam.”
    “Follow me, then.”
    I followed her into a burrow opening, one of many that were scattered across the island, and soon found myself wending my way behind her through the twisting passageways of the sisters’ retreat. I kept alert for any signs of Siv. It could be easy to be lulled into a sense of false security with these spellbound owls. Yes, their gizzards were deadened and they appeared to be in a daze, but they were entirely controlled by hagsfiends and capable of rendering great harm. I needed to know if Siv was here, and I needed to see the Glauxess because it was my guess that it was through the gizzard of the Glauxess that the hagsfiends had gained control.
    I soon knew I was right. The Nacht Ga’ had been cast not just on this one owl, but the entire lot. I entered a large central space in the network of burrows and immediately noticed the strong scent of crow as a Spotted Owlapproached. And there was something else. That unmistakable yellow of her eyes was only thinly veiled. One cannot imagine the intensity of the yellow in the eyes of a hagsfiend in the rage of battle. It is said that if one stares straight into a hagsfiend’s eyes, one can go blind. But I have long believed that it is not blindness that