The Capture

engulfed in shadows, and yet the shriek came. Soren and Gylfie moved, following 47-2, but stopped at the edge of area three.

    "Look!" Gylfie said. "Look at what they are doing." Soren and Gylfie both stared in disbelief as hundreds of owls flung themselves flat onto their backs with their breasts exposed to the sky and their wings spread out.

    "Never," Soren said, "have I seen an owl perch that way. It looks as if it might hurt."

    "I don't think it's called perching," Gylfie said. "I think its called lying down."

    "Lying down? Animals do that, not birds, and never owls." Soren hesitated. "Not unless they're dead."

    But these owls were not dead.

    "Listen!" Soren said.

    The sky high above the glaucidium seemed suddenly
    to pulse with a throbbing sound. It was the sound of wing beats but not the soft, almost silent, wing beats of owls. Instead, there was a tough leathery snap. A strange song began to rise in the glaucidium.
    Then, blacker than the blackness of the night, printed against the sky, ten thousand bats flew overhead as the owls called to them in an odd wailing lament.

    Come to us and quackle and quank.

    Relieve us of our stirrings

    With your fangs so sharp and bright

    Take this blood that's always purring.

    Through our hollow bones it flows

    To each feather and downy fluff

    Quell the terrible, horrid urge that so often prinkles us,

    Still our dreams, make slow our thoughts

    Let tranquillity flood our veins.

    Come to us and drink your fill

    So we might end our pains.

    Soren and Gylfie watched in unblinking wonder as the vampire bats fluttered down. Using their tiny wing-thumbs and feet, they began to crawl up onto the owls' breasts. They seemed to forage for a few seconds, seeking out a bare spot on the owls' breasts. With gleaming sharp teeth they made a quick tiny cut. The bats' tongues, narrow and grooved, slipped into the nicks. The owls did not even flinch but seemed merely to sigh into the night. Soren and Gylfie were transfixed and could not move. 47-2 turned her head toward them, her eyes half shut, a mild, contented expression on her face.

    "That must hurt terribly," Soren spoke softly.

    "No, lovely, lovely. The stirrings go. No more ..." Her voice dwindled into the darkness of the night.

    Soren and Gylfie were not sure how long the vampire bats were there, but, indeed, they seemed to swell before their eyes. And then they appeared so gorged, it was as if they staggered rather than lifted into flight. The moon had vanished now for days. The grayness of a new dawn began to filter through the black and, in drunken spirals, the bats wheeled through the remnants of the night.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

    To Believe

    Ever since that bloody night, Soren and Gylfie had thought of nothing but flying. It had become abundantly clear to them why none of the owlets of St. Aggie's had the sleek glossy feathers or any of the fluffy down of normal owls who had grown beyond the chick stage. Growing flight feathers for an owl was normally not a complicated business, but deprived of the blood supply, these feathers from the primaries to the plummels would wither and die. With that, stirrings, dreams of flight, notions of skyful joy and freedom shriveled and died as well. Soren and Gylfie's mission was unmistakable: They must learn how to fly despite lacking any opportunity to ever branch, or hop, or practice for flight in any way.
    They must keep the dream of flight alive in their minds. They must feel it in their gizzards and in that way they would learn to fly. Gylfie repeated the words of her father to Soren: "He said, Soren, that 'you can practice forever and still never fly if you don't believe.' So it's not just practice, Soren. We must believe, and we can because we are not moon blinked."

    "But moon blinked or not, we have to have feathers. And I am still short of flight feathers," Soren replied.

    "You are going to have them. You will have enough by the next newing."

    "Well, that's just the problem. That's when the vampire bats come back."

    Gylfie looked at Soren gravely. "That is why we must learn how to fly before the next newing."

    "But I won't be ready. I won't have enough feathers," Soren said.

    "Almost, though."

    "Almost? There's a difference, Gylfie, between almost and enough."

    "Yes. The difference is belief, Soren. Belief" The little Elf Owl said the last word so fiercely that Soren took a step back. "You have a large and generous gizzard, Soren. You feel. I know this. You feel