them overboard, one at a time by the limbs, like sacks of grain. Each of their faces was full of fear and defeat. At the front of the ship, leaning out like some half dead bowsprit, was King Glendar.
Glendar turned, and looked at Mikahl with eyes as cold and black as jet, and smiled a grin of needle sharp teeth. It wasn’t a smile of victory or menace. It was a smile full of contempt; contempt for the living, for the ship was floundering aimlessly at sea now. There was no crew in sight, only King Glendar, and a few Westland soldiers tossing corpses out into the vast, cobalt expanse, while drifting to their own certain deaths.
Mikahl turned from the window, and hurried to the door of the little room, but it wouldn’t open for him. He tried and tried to turn the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. Terror shot through him like wildfire.
“There has to be a way!” Loudin’s voice spoke from the chair where his mother had been sitting.
Mikahl’s fear ebbed away, and he smiled at his big, tattoo-covered friend.
“Aye Loudin, but what is it?”
“There is only one way!” King Balton’s hoarse voice croaked from the bed.
He was buried under a pile of blankets, and the skin of his face was greenish pale, and slick with sweat. The poison was still eating his life away, and he was gasping for breath.
“Think…Then act…Think…Then act…Think…Then act…” the raspy mantra echoed on and on.
Suddenly, Grrr rose with his hackles standing on end, and a deep rumbling growl in his throat. Mikahl turned to the window. Peeking in, with a gleeful smile on his sickly, white face was the wizard Pael. His cackling laugh echoed through the room, and it all collapsed into a sudden blackness that overtook Mikahl.
Alone again, back in his coma, the only sound Mikahl could hear in that dark empty place, was the sound of his own broken body trying desperately to draw breath. “Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth… Creeek… Krooth…”
After he stepped inside, Hyden Hawk closed the door to Pratchert’s Tower behind him. Talon flapped up from his shoulder with a start, and he jumped a little himself.
There was no room or hallway there. He found himself in a forest. Sort of a forest, anyway. Leading out ahead of him was a tunnel-like corridor formed of greenery. What little space overhead, that wasn’t closed in by branches and leaves, was filled with tangles of colorful, flowering vines, and clumps of hanging moss. The moss seemed to glow a radiant yellowish color, which lit the underside of the canopy like a lantern might. The thick trunks of the trees, that lined the archway in nearly perfect rows, were wrapped in spirals of ivy and creepers. Between, and behind the trunks, an unforgiving wall of thorn-bearing shrubs filled every conceivable space. Beyond that, there appeared to be nothing but blackness.
Talon flew up to the peak of the arch and tried and tried to get through where there should have been sky, but the effort was futile. There would be no bird’s eye view of the layout of this place, Hyden decided.
After further investigation, Hyden found that the walls of this passage were just as impenetrable as the roof was. Seeing that there was nothing else to do, but find where the forest tunnel led, Hyden set off down the leaf- strewn, grass covered floor with Talon winging along beside him.
Clumps of wildflowers sprouted up here and there, some with tiny white petals, some with big drooping orange and red blooms. Around the base of a rather large tree, a cluster of purple and gray mushrooms sprouted up, like a little city of toadstool buildings. A bright, yellow butterfly fluttered by on its way to an even brighter, cerulean colored flower, which bloomed from the thorny shrub beyond the trees. Hyden half expected a group of fairy folk to troop out, and dance a jig for him.
Before long, he came to a junction. The tunnel he was in ended, and he could either go left or right. A few dozen yards down the right hand tunnel, a man sat, huddled with his head between his knees, and his back against the trunk of one of the trees that lined the way.
Cautiously, Hyden walk toward the man, while Talon flew further down the right hand passage to explore it. Hyden called out, but there was no response. When he moved closer, Hyden got a strange feeling in his gut. He nudged the man’s shoulder with his boot, and wasn’t too surprised when the skeleton fell over, with a rattling thrump of dusty bones.
Through Talon’s eyes, he saw that the right and left hand tunnels were identical mirror images of each other. Each went on straight for a ways, than ended in a T-junction, just like the first tunnel had. He decided that he would turn right at each intersection he came to, that way he could find his way back to the skeleton, by making left hand turns on his way back. To his great surprise though, when he turned his second right, the skeleton was there ahead of him, laid over exactly as his boot had left it.
Hyden pondered this for a while, and then sent Talon back to the first junction. When the bird flew left at the corner, there he was, coming right back at Hyden, again from the right hand corner of the other end of the passage. This was unexpected, and confusing. Hyden decided to go left then. There was no surprise when he made his second left hand turn, and saw the toppled skeleton laying there ahead of him. Talon came flapping down, landed on his shoulder, let out a frustrated squawk, and then started preening himself, while Hyden pondered their dilemma further.
While he was standing there, with his chin in his hand, he heard a chirping giggle from the trees nearby. Again, he heard the sound. He looked around and spotted a couple of tree squirrels peeking over a root at the edge of the thorny wall. A few other squirrels scampered along the limbs as they went about their business, but they didn’t seem to notice him. The two squirrels by the tree trunk though, were watching him intently, and giggling.
“You think it’s funny, then?” Hyden asked lightheartedly. He didn’t expect a response, and was shocked when he heard the squirrels plainly speaking to each other. Sure, he had communicated with animals, but it wasn’t a very verbal sort of communication. This was something altogether different. The squirrels were articulate.
“Can he hear us?” one squirrel asked the other.
“He can, I think!” the other replied.
“That’s far better than most that come here.”
“Is there a way beyond this, this…” Hyden indicated the tree-formed passage, but didn’t know what to call it. “…beyond this, this loop?”
“My, my, my, this one might just do,” a squirrel passing by on a limb overhead said to the others.
“He didn’t ask for a way out!” one of the squirrels by the root nodded reverently. “He asked for a way forward. That’s a start.”
“He asked for a way beyond, is what he did,” the squirrel beside him corrected. “A wise word ‘beyond.’ A wise question to ask, not a foolish one.”
“I’m here!” Hyden snapped. “You talk about me as if I’m not, or as if I couldn’t hear you. You’re awfully rude squirrels. You should know that I have friends that love to eat squirrels.” The last was said lightly, but the possible threat caught the little creatures’ full attention.
“Your friends may eat careless squirrels,” one of them replied, indignantly. “But we’re not careless.”
“Not careless at all,” the other added.
“Careless or not, it’s rude to talk about someone as if they weren’t there,” Hyden scolded. “Now that you’re talking to me, instead of about me, would you please answer my question?”
“No,” one of the squirrels answered simply. “You already know the answer to the question that you asked.”
“Use your head, and ask the proper question,” the other one told him. “We will only answer one.”
Hyden made a face at the squirrels, because he knew they were correct. Of course, there was a way out of the loop. The right question became obvious then, but Hyden thought it through before asking it.
“What is the way to get beyond this place?”
“Follow your heart!” a squirrel giggled from the trees.
“Follow your familiar!” another added.
The two squirrels, by the root, started bounding away, into the thorny wall. Just before they were out of earshot, one of them turned, and said, “Try going both ways, at the same time, and looking through all of your eyes at once.”
It took several attempts, and as much concentration as it did for him to climb the nesting cliff of the hawklings, for him to be able to see through Talon’s eyes with his own eyes open, but he finally managed it. It was
