I put my hand on his and shook my head slightly. “Let’s wait and see what they do.”
“What do you want from us?” I asked.
The birds landed a few feet away. One twisted its head and stared at me with one black eye. A black tongue tasted the air from the beak’s rictus as the bird moved closer.
I heard a rough, scratchy voice say, “Wantfrumus?”
“Do you understand me?”
The two birds bobbed their heads up and down, stopping occasionally to preen feathers.
“What are we doing here? Who are you?”
The birds hopped a little closer. One said, “Hughhn,” and I could have sworn the other said, “Muunann.”
I marveled incredulously, “You’re Hugin and Munin?”
The black heads bobbed up and down again. They hopped a little closer.
“Did you steal my bracelet?”
“And the amulet?” Kishan added.
Heads bobbed.
“Well, we want everything back. You can keep the honey cakes. You probably already ate them, anyway.”
The birds squawked hoarsely, snapped their beaks loudly, and flapped their wings at us. Ruffled feathers puffed up, making the birds look much bigger than they were.
I folded my arms across my chest.
“Not going to give them back, huh? We’ll see about that.”
The birds hesitantly danced closer, and one hopped onto my knee. Kishan was immediately concerned.
I touched his arm. “If they are Hugin and Munin, they whisper thoughts and memories into Odin’s ears. They may want to sit on our shoulders and speak to us.”
It appeared I was right, because the minute I tilted my head to one side, one of the birds flapped its wings and settled on my shoulder. It stuck its beak near my ear, and I waited to hear it speak. Instead, I felt a curious pulling sensation. The bird tugged gently on something in my ear, but I felt no pain.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Thoughtsrstuck.”
“What?”
“Thoughtsrstuck.”
I felt another gentle tug, a snap, and then Hugin hopped away with a filmy, web-like strand hanging from his beak.
I covered my ear with my hand. “What did you do? Did you steal part of my brain? Do I have brain damage?”
“Thoughtsrstuck!”
“What does that mean?”
The strand hanging from the beak slowly dissipated as the bird clacked its beak. I sat there, staring, mouth gaping wide in horror, and wondered what had been done to me. Did it steal a memory? I racked my brain trying to remember everything important. I searched for some gap, some emptiness. If the bird did steal a memory, I had no idea what it could be.
Kishan touched my hand. “Are you okay? How do you feel?”
“I feel fine. It’s just—” My words fell away as something shifted in my mind. Something was happening. Something was dragging across the surface of my mind like a squeegee over soapy glass. I could feel a layer of confusion, mental clutter, and dirt, for lack of a better word, peeling away like dead skin after a sunburn. It was as if random fears, worries, and dismal thoughts had been clogging the pores of my consciousness.
For a moment, I could see everything I needed to do with perfect clarity. I knew we were almost at our goal. I knew there would be fierce protectors guarding the Scarf. I knew what the Scarf was and I knew what it could do. In that moment, I knew how we’d use it to save Ren.
Munin hopped back and forth in front of Kishan, waiting for its turn.
“It’s okay, Kishan! Go ahead. Let it sit on your shoulder. It won’t hurt you. Trust me.”
He looked at me doubtfully, but he cocked his head to one side anyway. I watched with fascination as Munin flapped its wings and landed on Kishan’s shoulder. He kept its wings open, flapping them up and down lazily as it worked on Kishan’s ear.
I spoke to Hugin, “Is Munin doing the same thing to Kishan?”
The bird shook its head and shifted from foot to foot. It started preening its feathers.
“Well, what’s the difference? What will it do?”
“Waitforit.”
“Waitforit?”
The bird nodded.
Munin hopped down to the floor and held a wispy black strand in his mouth about the size of an earthworm. It opened its beak and swallowed it.
“Uh . . . that looked different. Kishan? What happened? Are you okay?”
He responded quietly, “I’m fine. He . . . he showed me.”
“Showed you what?”
“He showed me my memories. In full detail. I saw everything that happened. I saw Yesubai and me all over again. I saw my parents, Kadam, Ren . . . all of it. But with one major difference.”
I took his hand in mine. “What is it? What’s the difference?”
“That black thread you saw—it’s hard to explain, but it’s like the bird removed a dark pair of sunglasses from my eyes. I saw everything as it really was, as it really happened. It wasn’t just from my perception anymore. It was like I was an outside observer.”
“Is the memory different now?”
“It’s not different . . . it’s clearer. I could see that Yesubai was a sweet girl who cared for me, but she was encouraged to seek me out. She didn’t love me the same way I felt for her. She was afraid of her father. She obeyed him completely, but she was also desperate to leave him. In the end, it was her father who killed her. He threw her viciously—hard enough to cause her neck to break.
“How did I overlook her fear, her anxiety?” He rubbed his jaw. “She hid it well. He took advantage of my feelings for her. I should have seen what he was all along, but I was blind, infatuated. How could I not see this before?”
“Love makes you do crazy things sometimes.”
“What about you? What did you see?”
“I sort of got my brain Hoovered.”
“What does ‘Hoovered’ mean?”
“A Hoover is a vacuum. My thoughts are clear, like your memories are clear. In fact, I now know how to get the Scarf and what comes next. But first things first.”
I jumped up and lifted the nest tucked into the corner of the tree house. The two birds hopped up and down, squawking in irritation. They flew over to me and flapped their wings in my face.
“I’m sorry, but it’s your own fault, you know. You’re the ones who cleared my mind. Besides, these belong to us. We need them.”
I took the camera, my bracelet, and the amulet out of the nest. Kishan helped me attach the bracelet and the amulet chain and tucked the camera in the bag. The birds looked at me sulkily.
“Maybe we can give you something else instead as compensation for losing your prizes,” I said.
Kishan hunted up a fishhook, a Glowstick, and a compass and placed them in the nest. After I put the nest back, the birds flew up to inspect their new treasures.
“Thank you both! Come on, Kishan. Follow me.”
21
The Divine Weaver’s Scarf
After retrieving our treasures from the nest, I headed toward a simple rope that hung from the wood ceiling. When I pulled it, a rattling noise came from above the tree house and a panel opened. A ladder descended and struck the floor.
I explained to Kishan, “The next part will be the hardest. This ladder leads to the outside branches, which we have to climb until we hit the top where there’s a giant bird’s nest. The Scarf will be there, but so will the iron birds.”
“Iron birds?”
“Yes, and we’ll have to fight them to take the Scarf. Wait a second.” I rifled quickly through Mr. Kadam’s research and found what I was looking for. “Here. This is what we’re fighting.”
The picture of the mythological Stymphalian bird was frightening enough without the description he’d included.
Kishan read, “Terrible flesh-eating birds with iron beaks, bronze claws, and toxic droppings. They usually live in large colonies.”
“Swell, aren’t they?”
&n
bsp; “Keep close to me, Kells. We can’t be sure that you heal here.”
“For that matter, we can’t be sure you heal here, either,” I grinned, “but I’ll try not to leave you alone too long.”
“Funny. After you.”
We climbed the ladder and found ourselves in a cluster of branches set tightly enough together that they reminded me of a children’s jungle gym. It was easy enough to climb if I didn’t think about falling. Kishan insisted that I climb first so he could catch me if I slipped, which only happened once. My foot slipped on some wet wood, and Kishan caught it, shoe and all, in his palm and pushed me upward again.
After a good climb, we rested on a branch with our backs against the trunk, Kishan lower, me higher. He tossed me a canteen of sugar-free lemonade, which I accepted gratefully. As I drained it in long gulps, I noticed some damage on the limb I was seated on.
“Kishan, take a look at this.”
A thick, gummy, chartreuse paste was splattered on the end of my branch and had apparently eaten through half of it.
“I think we’re looking at the toxic droppings,” I remarked wryly.
Kishan wrinkled his nose. “And this is old, maybe as long as two weeks ago. The smell is nasty. It’s sharp and bitter.” He blinked and rubbed his eyes. “It’s burning my nostrils.”
“I guess we’ll have to watch out for toxic bombs, huh?”
Now that he had the smell of the birds, we could follow his nose to the nest. It took another hour of climbing, but we finally came upon a giant nest resting on a trio of tree limbs.
“Wow, that’s huge! Much larger than Big Bird’s.”
“Who’s Big Bird?”
“A giant yellow bird on kid’s television. You think any of the birds are close?”
“I don’t hear anything, but the smell is everywhere.”
“Huh, lucky I have a tiger nose nearby. I can’t really smell anything.”
“Count your blessings. I don’t think I’ll ever get this smell out of my mind.”
“It’s only fair you get to fight nasty-smelling birds. Remember, Ren got the Kappa and immortal monkeys.”
Kishan grunted and kept moving toward the giant nest. Old droppings bleached the surface of the tree branches, weakening them. If we stepped too close to one, the branch’s surface crumbled into white powder and sometimes broke off altogether.
We crept closer and depended on Kishan’s hearing for warning of approaching birds. The nest was the size of a large swimming pool and made of dead tree limbs the thickness of my arm all woven together like a giant Easter basket. We climbed over the top and dropped into the nest.
Five massive eggs rested in the middle. Each one would have filled a Jacuzzi. Bronze and gleaming, they reflected the sunlight into our eyes. Kishan lightly tapped on one, and we heard a hollow metallic echo.
I circled the egg and gasped. The eggs were resting on top of the most beautiful diaphanous material I’d ever seen. The Divine Weaver’s Scarf! The cloth looked alive. Colors shifted and swirled in geometric patterns on the Scarf’s surface. A kaleidoscope of pale blue shifted into hot pink and yellow, which twisted into soft green and gold, and then slid into blue-black raven billows. It was mesmerizing.
Kishan scanned the sky and assured me the coast was clear. Then he crouched down next to me to examine the Scarf.
“We’ll have to roll the eggs off one by one, Kells. They’re heavy.”
“Alright. Let’s start with this one.”
We gripped a gleaming egg and rolled it carefully to the side of the nest, and then went back for the second. We found a feather near the second egg. Normal bird feathers were lightweight, hollow, and flexible. This one was longer than my arm, heavy, and metallic. Kishan could barely move it, and the edge was as sharp as a circular saw.
“Uh, this isn’t good.”
Kishan agreed, “We’d better hurry.”
We were rolling the third egg when we heard a loud screech.
A far-off bird was making its way toward the nest. It didn’t sound happy. I shaded my eyes to get a better look. It seemed small at first, but my opinion of its size quickly changed as it sped closer. Mighty wings held the creature in the air as it rode the thermals.
Thump. The sun hit the metallic body of the giant bird and reflected the light, blinding me. Thump. It had now come much closer and seemed to have doubled in size. It screeched out a harsh wailing call. A quieter screech echoed an answer as another joined the first bird. Thump.
The tree moved up and down as something landed on a nearby branch. A bird screamed at us and started making its way toward the nest. As always, Kishan stepped in front of me. We moved backward quickly, keeping the trunk behind us.
Thump. Thump. Thump. A bird flew over us. It was more monster than bird. I got a good look at it as it swooped overhead. Its head was tilted, so it could fix its eye on us. I estimated the wingspan to be around forty feet, or about half the length of Mr. Kadam’s plane. I strung my bow, drew back an arrow, and shivered as its shrill, high-pitched shriek vibrated through my limbs. My hand shook, and I let the arrow go. I missed.
The body of the creature was like a giant eagle. Rows of dense, overlapping metal feathers covered the bird’s torso and grew larger along its long, broad wings. Its feathers were about the size of a surfboard. The wingtips were tapered and widely separated. The iron bird beat its wings and spread its tail feathers to help it brake and swoop into the sky again.
It moved like a raptor. Powerful, muscular legs with razor sharp talons stretched out to grab us on its second pass. Kishan pushed me face-down into the nest so that the bird missed us, but only by inches. Its head looked something like a gull with a stout, longish hooked beak but there was an extra hook resting on the upper mandible of its beak, sharp on both sides like a double-edged sword.
When one of the birds came closer, it nipped at us, and I heard a metallic shear as the sharp edges of its beak snapped together like a pair of giant scissors.
Another came too close so I zapped it with a lightning bolt. The energy hit the bird on its chest and bounced off, scorching the nest not a foot from where Kishan was standing.
“Watch it, Kells!”
This was not looking good. I shouted, “My lightning bolts just bounce off!”
“Let me try!” He threw the chakram. It hurled through the air in a wide arc past the bird.
“Kishan! How do you miss something that big?”
“Just watch!”
As the chakram completed its arc and spun back to Kishan, it hit the bird on the return trip and sliced through a metallic wing, making a terrible sound, something like a drill on sheet metal. The bird screamed and fell thousands of feet to the ground below, tearing off branches and tree limbs as it went. The tree shook wildly as it crashed.
Three more birds circled overhead and tried to grab us with knifelike talons or beaks. I nocked another arrow and aimed for the nearest one. The arrow struck the bird right in the chest, but all it did was make it angry.
Kishan ducked between some eggs as a bird tried to shish kabob him with a talon.
“Aim for the neck or the eyes, Kelsey!”
I shot off another arrow into the neck and a third into the eye. The bird flew off and then fell, spinning like an out of control airplane before crashing to the ground. Now they were really mad.
More birds arrived. They seemed intelligent and resourceful. One nipped at Kishan, backing him to the edge of the nest. While he was busy there, a second bird reached out and grabbed him with its talons.
“Kishan!”
I raised my hand and aimed for its eye. This time, the lightning bolt worked. The iron bird shrieked and let Kishan go, dropping him with a thud into the nest. I did the same thing to the other bird, and it took off, calling madly to its flock mates.
I raced over to Kishan. “Are you alright?”
His shirt was torn and bloody. The bird’s talons had raked across both sides of his chest, and he was bleeding freely.
The skin around the slices was blistered and angry red.
“It looks like their talons are coated with acid too,” I said sympathetically.
He sucked in a breath when I lightly touched his skin. “I’ll be fine.” He froze. “Listen. They are communicating with each other. They’re coming back. Get ready to fight.” Kishan stood to distract them while I took a position behind the remaining two eggs.
“All things considered, I’d rather have monkeys,” Kishan shouted.
I shivered. “Tell you what. We’ll rent King Kong and The Birds. Then you can decide.”
He yelled as he ran from a swooping bird, “Are you asking me on a date? Because if you are, it will definitely give me more incentive to come out of this alive.”
“Whatever works.”
“You’re on.”
He ran across the nest, jumped off the edge, flipped over in midair and landed on a tree limb that jutted out. He threw the chakram, and it soared into the sky. The sun glinted off the golden disc as it whirled around the tree and sliced through the dozen or so birds circling the top.
They split off in every direction and then regrouped. I could almost see them calculating their next maneuver. All at once, they dove for us. Shrieking, the flock attacked. I’d once seen a colony of seagulls display mobbing behavior. They all pecked and harassed a man with a sandwich at the beach until he ran away screaming. They were violent, determined, and aggressive, but these birds were worse!
The birds ripped limbs off the tree to reach us. More than half of them dove for Kishan, who agilely leapt from branch to branch until he was back with me behind the eggs. Frenzied flapping around the nest blew air in every direction. I felt as if I was caught in a whirlwind.
Kishan threw his chakram again and again, cutting off the leg of one bird and slicing the belly of a second before the weapon returned to his hand. I got rid of two with arrows through the eyes and blinded two more with lightning shots.
Kishan shouted, “Can you keep them off me for a minute, Kells?”
“I think so! Why?”
Tiger's Quest Page 32