Sword Mountain (31 page)

“We have secured the gemstone. The party's spoiled, but the furnace is ready. Give the Leasorn gem to me!” He held out a claw toward Kawaka.

Kawaka did not move. The other archaeopteryxes, twenty or so, flanked their leader. “The stone,” he said, “is property of the archaeopteryx empire.”

Tranglarhad blinked. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“But—but it's rightfully mine!” shouted Tranglarhad. “I risked my ear tufts on the mountaintop to get it.”

Kawaka stowed the gemstone inside his uniform. “And I might return it to you—if you return the
Book of Heresy
first!”

Tranglarhad watched Kawaka's recruits. One was lazily eyeing the laboratory's tools and furnishings, gauging their value. Another was whetting a sword upon a stalagmite, whistling as if at home. The High Owl knew he should not have let Kawaka bring his troops in.
But if I give up the book now, I have nothing, nothing but an armed troop inside my own lair
, Tranglarhad thought. The owl stood firm. “No, you give me the gem first.”

“No, you the book.”

“You!”

Kawaka raised his cutlass in reply.

Every pair of eyes was now on him and Tranglarhad. The grasp of the owls on Dandelion and the academy students loosened.

Dandelion seized the chance. A desperate idea had formed in her mind. “The gemstone's magical! If you tell it to sing your heart, it will reveal its new owner.”

“Did you teach your students such nonsense?” Kawaka said derisively. “Sentimentality!” He cackled. “‘Sing my heart' all right …”

Before he finished his sentence, the gem inside his uniform rang with a deep note. He looked down, shocked.

“Sing
my
heart,” spat Tranglarhad. A different tune rose from the gem, discordant with the first, and louder. He waved his claws at his minions. They hooted the same, joined by the roars of the archaeopteryxes. The cacophony was so horrendous that Kawaka dropped his cutlass to cover his ears.

Taking his chance, Tranglarhad leaped at Kawaka and sliced Kawaka's uniform open with a flick of one blade.

Catching the loud gem that spilled out, the owl turned to the furnace, grimacing as the sound rose higher and higher, harsher and harsher, the notes of the owls clashing and grating against the tunes of the archaeopteryxes. As Tranglarhad fumbled to place the gem inside, Kawaka rushed behind him and kicked.

His foot had barely grazed the owl's tailfeathers when the gem touched the coals. As if to mirror the owls' shock and despair, the gem distilled from its jarring repertoire one loud, pure high note. The furnace vibrated, cracked, and exploded, spewing flames and the noise of true chaos. Shards of iron shot through the air. Tranglarhad was blown backward. The glass vials along the walls burst from the heat, releasing horrid odors. Thick black fumes rolled and filled the laboratory. The owls holding the young raptors captive broke away, dashing toward Tranglarhad, who was obscured in the smoke.

Kawaka choked. His skin burned from all the debris that had shot under his feathers, and for a moment he could barely stand. He rallied his soldiers to hunt for Tranglarhad as well. The archaeopteryxes and the owls began battling, but the owls were too scattered to sustain a strong front.

Confused and disoriented, none of them saw that the gemstone had burst out of the furnace along with the debris. An owl tripped over it, sending it rolling toward Dandelion.

Dandelion kept low and grabbed the Leasorn gem, then doubled back toward the corner where her sword was piled with her friends' weapons. She threw a gold acorn pin at an owl who tried to stop her, stunning him with a hit right between the eyes.

Despite his wounds, Cloud-wing was already beside her, snatching up his claymore.

“Where? Where to?” groaned Isobello. Their ears still rang from the loudness. They dashed back toward the way they'd come, hoping to reach the door with the sound of a waterfall behind it, but the archaeopteryxes had already blocked the exit. There was only one shabby door on the other side that was nearer to them than any enemy.

“This is your last chance to escape!” Cloud-wing called out raggedly to them.

Your?
Dandelion thought. Just then, Kawaka broke free from a bunch of owls.

“The Leasorn gem! Has it been shattered?” he demanded.

He saw Dandelion holding it and gestured to his archaeopteryxes. “Seize them.”

“Go. Go on without me,” Cloud-wing urged. “I can hardly see to fly—but I can cover you. I'll distract them!”

This time you're wrong, Cloud-wing
, Dandelion thought.

She yanked out her rope and crammed one end into Cloud-wing's claws.

“Just hold on,” she said before he could protest.

As Kawaka's recruits hurled themselves at the young birds, Dandelion and her friends flew through the door and plunged into the darkness, leaving the chaos and battle behind them.

Fear choked them; they felt the weight of Sword Mountain pressing down from above. Only the lavender glow from the Leasorn gem lighted their dark path. The rope strained in Dandelion's claws, and she held tight; with Cloud-wing at the other end, she would never let go. Echoes of their wing beats bounced off the stalactites that stabbed down like stone daggers. The caverns stretched before them, bigger than they had anticipated. It was like a castle unto itself—a Castle of Earth. They made so much noise, weaving through the tunnels, that the archaeopteryxes found their trail easily.

They fled down a narrow and dirty stretch of caves, smelling foul and dusty—nobird, not even the slovenly owls, had inhabited this section for a long time.

Suddenly, a dead end forced them to halt. Trapped. Nothing but stone all around.

They stalled, looking about desperately. “Up!” cried Dandelion. “There's a break in the ceiling!”

It resembled a smoke shaft. It was not in the direction they'd hoped for; it led farther, deeper into the heart of the mountain, but they flew toward it, grasping at any chance. Blitz and Blaze slashed at spiderwebs from its opening, and they rose frantically into the darkness, one after another.

The archaeopteryxes arrived at the dead end and froze, gazing up into the shaft, into territory where not even the bravest of owls had ever ventured.

“Fools!” Kawaka said. “That crack was made by an earthquake. They'll either have to turn back, or get stuck up there and die.”

“Do you want us to wait it out?” asked an archaeopteryx.

“No—we'll smoke them out with these torches and speed up the process,” ordered Kawaka. “Their bodies will drop back down here, or the gem—whichever falls first!”

Up in the shaft, Dandelion and her friends fluttered blindly, their wingtips slapping the walls. They were in the throat of the mountain, at its mercy. What was above them? Dandelion glanced up once and saw nothing but walls of stone that seemed to lean in and merge into a flat plane of darkness. They heard the screeches and the cries of the archaeopteryxes shouting up at them. But gradually they became more distant, and the orange glow of the torches below became no more than a pinprick of light. Then that, too, was gone as the shaft twisted, and there was darkness all around. The shaft narrowed with each passing second, and they were forced to fly closer together. The smoke from the archaeopteryxes's torches wound itself around their bodies, stinging their eyes and throats as they panted in the heat.

Tapping the edges of the tunnel with her talons, Dandelion unexpectedly felt a side shaft branching off in a horizontal direction. She illuminated the opening with the gemstone, and encouraging one another, the birds ventured down this new direction, crawling speedily.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Stop.”

“What?”

“Turn back. The tunnel's narrowed off,” she explained, finding that she could only fit her talons in the crack ahead of her.

They shuffled and stumbled back to the vertical shaft. It was not to be the first time. Again and again they encountered side shafts, but they always found that the tunnel tapered to a gap too narrow to squeeze through. Each time the disappointment burned still deeper. They'd rest in the nooks, not daring to speak, before turning back to the main shaft.

Our breathing sounds so loud
, Dandelion thought time after time. Their swallows, gulps, sniffs revealed just how frightened and vulnerable they actually were.

They dismissed these thoughts and continued to follow the main shaft in its unending upward spiral. Feathers bent and snapped in the tight space. Their wings would give way at some point soon and—then what? They had struggled all this way for nothing? Only to fall, little sad bundles of feathers, one hitting another, right down to despair and death in the waiting ring of archaeopteryxes?

Why are we still moving? Why do we keep flying up?
Dandelion thought.
Nobird's chasing us now.
And yet: They were trying to distance themselves from panic. They must keep moving, constantly moving, to stay ahead of its grasp.

Their strength was waning. Time and time again, one slipped and faltered, crashing onto the bird below, generating a moment of tight confusion. “Hurry! Hurry!” moaned the birds lower down the line.

“It's so dark,” Cloud-wing said, gritting his beak.

Dandelion held the gemstone toward him. “Some light,” she said. Its lavender glow showed the dark spot of blood growing at his throat.

The shaft cramped them in further till they could not stretch their wings. They arched their backs and extended their legs, bracing themselves in the narrow space. Their claws scrabbled to find purchase. Still they climbed upward, much slower now, the weapons strapped to their bodies scraping against rock.

Soreness throbbed in their shoulders and wings. Tension pounded their backs and legs. At last they could no longer move up without wobbling and risking a fall.

Finally they consented to rest and paused and listened to the silence, and here panic caught up with them. The very air they breathed seemed to get scarcer and scarcer. Their lungs labored, their beaks opened wide.

They vowed hurriedly to one another that they would catch anybird, should one of them slip. Then they waited—for what, they dared not think.

Holding the gem in her beak, Dandelion tore a strip of cloth from her hem and tried to staunch the bleeding on Cloud-wing's throat. She used another strip to bind the makeshift bandage into place but found the piece was too short to tie a knot. She took off her last acorn pin and used it to secure the bandage.

“Can you see better?” she said, moving the gem closer.

Cloud-wing was still holding the rope—the rope that he had used to teach her to fly, long ago.

“
I'll be here, at the other end of the rope, and I'll hold you up
....”

He pressed it back into Dandelion's grasp as he lifted his face toward her.

She saw something glistening slide down his cheek. “Yes, Dandelion,” he whispered.

“How long have we been underground, you think?” she said.

Cloud-wing considered. “Five hours? I can't tell.” He looked toward their other companions.

“More than that, surely,” said Blitz. “You think it's morning outside?”

“We'll never know, will we?” said Isobello.

They panted, drawing ragged breaths. The thought of slow suffocation sent a spear of dread into Dandelion's heart, and the purple glowing gemstone in her talons was the only comfort.

“Great Spirit. This place is like a coffin!” said Pandey.

Nobird had the heart to reply.