Guardians of Ga'Hoole 13 - The River of Wind

earth is round. Here, it is day right now. On the other side of the earth it must be night. The sun cannot be everyplace at once. Tomorrow has to start somewhere, and I think it begins out there, far over the Unnamed Sea. It all makes so much sense now. The way into the windkin is easy if you can find this point. And if you start now, you’ll be well ahead of Nyra.” She smoothed the chart with one talon and set down the key, then began tracing a path. “Due west. I think if my calculations are right, there will be sudden blackness and then you will be blown into tomorrow.”
    Blown into tomorrow? Whatever did that mean? both Eglantine and Primrose wondered. “You have the crow feather. It’s broad daylight but you’ll be safe to fly now. You should go immediately.”
    “What do you want?” Bell jerked awake. Someone was outside the burrow. She nudged the blue owl. “Striga, someone’s out there. Not one of those Pure Ones. Someone else,” she whispered.
    It was a new voice. One they had not heard before. “Your commander, General Mam, sent for these potions. Tonic for her gizzard. She’s been taking it for a moon cycle now. It goes down best with some bingle juice. So I brought some of that as well. But of course the bingle juice doesn’t keep that long. I’d hate to have to fly all the way back with it.”
    “Well, she won’t be long. We’ll take care of it until she returns,” one of the guards answered.
    I am sure you will, thought Cuffyn as he handed over the pouch of bingle juice that he had laced with a powerful sleeping draft. I am sure you will, idiot owls!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Owlery at the Mountain of Time
    O tulissa ruminated, What of this owl who now leads us, this three-hundred-year-old owl who is flying almost as strongly as Ruby, whose mother had traveled to our kingdom, perhaps in the time of Theo? It was all so mystifying. Tengshu had said that the owlery was located in the Mountain of Time. He had explained that it was also called the Hollow Mountain, as the word “time” and “hollow” in their language were one and the same—hulong. There was no Krakish word that even vaguely resembled it.
    Blades of moonlight stabbed through the clouds, illuminating rank upon rank of icy peaks ahead. From the ground, however, there was a sudden swirl of the smell that they had learned to associate with the lamps that these owls burned in their hollows. “It’s a buttery below!” Tengshu called back. “The yaks gather to yield their milk that pikyus churn into butter.”
    Soren swiveled his head toward Twilight, who was flying next to him. “Amazing!”
    “I’d like to bring some back,” said Gylfie, who was flying in Twilight’s wake for protection against the strong icy gusts.
    “Are you yoicks?!” Twilight said. “It stinks!”
    “I’m getting used to it,” Gylfie replied. “You have to get a little more adventurous in your taste.”
    “I don’t want to taste it.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “You don’t call this adventurous? Flying behind a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old blue owl—from a jeweled palace full of dragon owls who can’t fly—to this ‘owlery’ to consult with a whatever they call it—you don’t call this adventurous?” Twilight spoke with exaggerated wonder drenching his every word.
    “H’ryth,” Otulissa broke in. “I just figured it out.”
    “Figured what out?” asked Martin, who was flying under Otulissa’s port wing for protection.
    “The word. What it means.”
    “Yeah?” said Twilight. “So, what does it mean?”
    “Innermost part of the gizzard in old Krakish. These owls’ connections with the Northern Kingdoms are much greater than we ever imagined,” Otulissa said.
    The wind was now shrieking through a corrugatedlandscape of ice cliffs and spires, not dissimilar from parts of the Northern Kingdoms, especially before the time of the first Great Melt, which was a period just after the era of the legends. At that time, a warm maverick wind from the south had blown for moon cycle after moon cycle, year after year, and the vast glaciers and towering icy peaks had begun to dissolve. But now as they flew, they could feel a wind snaking through narrow valleys, piling up amid ice and rock ridges and escarpments, creating a violent high-pressure strata of air in which their flight became quite tumultuous.
    “Be careful here!” Tengshu called out.
    “Careful!” Ruby said. She, however, was mad for this air and was