The Battle of the Werepenguins Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Text copyright © 2021 by Allan Woodrow

  Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Scott Brown

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  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Woodrow, Allan, author. | Brown, Scott (Illustrator)

  Title: The battle of the werepenguins / Allan Woodrow ; illustrated by Scott Brown.

  Description: New York : Viking, 2021. | Series: Werepenguin | Audience: Ages 8–12. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: After receiving a clue from Omneseus the Seer, twelve-year-old werepenguin Bolt and his friends Blackburn and Annika set off to defeat “the Stranger” and free the world’s penguins from his reign.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021021649 (print) | LCCN 2021021650 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593114261 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593114285 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Penguins—Fiction. | Shapeshifting—Fiction. | Good and evil—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Humorous stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.W86047 Bat 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.W86047 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021649

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021650

  Book design by Kate Renner & Lucia Baez, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  To the not-so-gentle reader,

  for while books are often written for “the gentle reader,” I encourage you to read ferociously. —A.W.

  For Michael McDougall,

  thank you for always rooting for me, Captain. —S.B.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: The Docks

  PART ONE

  Pingvingrad

  1 Omneseus

  2 Happyish Together

  3 Mind a Penguin’s Mind

  4 TheFriendship Code

  5 The Power Inside

  6 Mists of Hate

  7 The Island

  8 Falling for You

  9 One in a Hole

  10 The Underground

  11 The Story of Zemya

  12 Refusals and Repercussions

  13 A Break in the Action

  14 The Hero Code

  15 The Test of the Mole

  16 The Voice in Bolt’s Head

  17 Mission Implausible

  18 Dinnertime. Or Is It Breakfast?

  19 PEWD

  20 The Dentist’s Story

  21 A Fine Kettle of Fish

  22 The Whale Teeth

  23 Hi-Yo Silver

  24 But Who Will Rescue the Rescuers?

  25 Crumbling Plans

  26 One Last Fish to Fry

  27 So, Now What?

  28 Another Break in the Action

  29 The Stranger, Part 1

  30 The Stranger, Part 2

  PART TWO

  The Tundra

  31 If You Can’t Beet ’Em

  32 Three’s Company

  33 Curses

  34 The Journey

  35 The Honesty Code

  36 A Song of Ice and Ice1

  37 The Lair of the Stranger

  38 Born from Hate

  39 Rule!

  40 Mind Games

  41 It’s Break-in-the-Action Time

  42 The Annika Code

  43 Whiteout

  44 The Almost Toothless

  45 The Battle of the Werepenguins

  46 Inside Man

  47 The Return of the Baron

  48 Born from Love

  49 The Forest Bandits

  Epilogue: Off the Docks

  “Penguins, penguins! They are everywhere

  and oh, they are magnificent.” —Amundsen

  Prologue: The Docks

  As the crew loaded large wooden crates and smaller iron cages onto the steamship, the misty salt water tickled my ears. Ear-tickling is very annoying, so I cursed the ocean spray. Rattling chains and hydraulic hums echoed across the pier, along with the grunting of apes, the whoops of flamingos, the roars of lions, and the shrieks of a dockworker who forgot to close the crate of roaring lions before loading it onto the ship.

  But, despite the menagerie of yips and yaps, the penguins were silent. I watched as their crate was lifted with ropes that were attached to a large crane, to be loaded onto the ship. Their crate had a window, and I could see the penguins lounging on their pillows, watching a show on the big-screen TV I had thoughtfully placed inside for their amusement. Penguins love soap operas.

  “Be careful!” shouted the penguin caretaker as the crate swung from the crane. The man—short, balding, and roundish with a long, thin nose—wore a long black overcoat with a white shirt underneath. It was the same outfit he had worn every time I had seen him, an outfit that made him look, if you squinted, eerily similar to the birds he cared for.

  “Relax, my friend.” I clapped the man on the back, and he jumped. He was jittery. Anxious. “Your penguins will be fine,” I said in my most soothing voice. “After all, penguins don’t get seasick. It’s the giraffes I worry about.” There are few things worse, or harder to clean up after, than a seasick giraffe. “We should be at the zoo within the week. There, the animals will find happiness. I hope.”

  “It was kind of you to offer them a new home,” said the man. He choked up; his gratefulness was genuine.

  “We had a deal,” I reminded him. “You tell me your tale, all of it, and I give the animals a new beginning.”

  “Although perhaps you wish I had never begun to tell you my story at all?”

  “Perhaps.” My evenings had been filled with nightmares since my first visit to this zoo. So, why was I here? Why return to hear the rest of a story that had turned my hair white, my face wrinkly, and my stomach perpetually queasy?

  Because perhaps after the story ended, my nightmares would cease and my stomach would un-quease itself. I could only pray they might.

  But, upon my return just the other day, I discovered the St. Aves Zoo had been torn down, a result of accidents and circumstances that involved an iceberg and a clumsy cow. I was the animal procurer for a new zoo, a great zoo, and so I struck my bargain: a home for the now homeless animals if the man told me the rest of his story.

  To be honest, the zoo already had plenty of giraffes an
d apes and dung beetles—and really, how many dung beetles does one zoo need?—but to hear the conclusion of this man’s tale, I would have accepted a thousand dung beetles. Fortunately, he only had twenty-eight of them.

  But our deal was not entirely one-sided. For my zoo would also now feature the St. Aves Zoo penguins—the most celebrated penguins in the world. I pinched my arm to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. “Ow!” I howled, wishing I hadn’t pinched so overzealously.

  I turned to my companion, who was still watching the penguin crate, which now lay quietly on the ship, snuggled between the opossum cage and possum cage, although I wasn’t sure which was which. The loading of the rest of the cages and crates would take hours. As we stood on deck I figured this was a good time to collect the rest of my payment. “Your story is not yet finished,” I reminded the penguin caretaker.

  “Are stories ever finished?” he asked. “For even as one story ends, another begins. The world continues to spin, lives continue to be lived, penguins continue to waddle.”

  “And storytellers continue to delay ending them.”

  The man smiled and sighed. “Very well. Where did I leave off?”

  “Bolt and his companions, the bandit Annika and the fearless pirate Blackburn, had set sail for the island of Omnescia. Bolt needed to speak to the great seer Omneseus in hopes of discovering how to defeat the Stranger, the most powerful werepenguin of them all.”

  The man nodded, his long, thin nose flapping against the bitter winds blowing across the deck. “Yes, they were happy then, sort of. Happyish. All was well, for the moment. But Bolt and his friends would soon discover their happiness was as fleeting as a feather in the wind. As the caretaker for penguins, I know how fleeting feathers in the wind can be.”

  Coincidentally a feather, perhaps from an ostrich, floated under my nose. My sneeze was so loud it woke a sleeping hippo nearby, and you never want to wake a sleeping hippo. The hippo grunted, thumped its feet, and overturned the snow cone machine in its cage. A shame. Hippos love snow cones, and I hadn’t brought another machine as a backup.

  The caretaker waited for the hippo grunts to quiet before continuing. “Our three heroes arrived the very next day. Bolt made the trek up the Omnescian mountains to speak to the great seer. That is where we will continue our story. That is, if you are certain you want to hear its conclusion.”

  “I am. I must.” I wrung my hands with excited nervousness. “For once you let the cat out of the bag, it can never go back in.”

  “I hope you’re mistaken by that,” said the man as a pride of escaped lions ran across the deck below us, chasing a dozen screaming dockworkers.

  PART ONE

  Pingvingrad

  1.

  Omneseus

  Humboldt Wattle—although everyone simply called him Bolt—sat on the frozen ground in a dimly lit cave high up in a mountain on the island of Omnescia. Despite the cold, he wore just a simple white T-shirt and a pair of ratty gray sweatpants. Strapped across his shoulders was a unicorn-and-rainbow backpack that held two more white T-shirts and two more pairs of ratty gray sweatpants. It also held some dead fish in case Bolt got hungry.

  A small campfire crackled. On the other side of the flames sat a bald man in a tunic and cheap plastic glasses. Black spirals were painted on the lenses, which made the man look strangely mysterious, or maybe mysteriously strange. This was the great seer, Omneseus.

  Closing his eyes, Bolt thought back to a week earlier, when he had sat in this exact same cave. Then, the seer had told Bolt how to defeat the Earl, the ruler of the city of Sphen and a werepenguin. Bolt had to scale a mountain to get an egg so he could defeat the Earl, who was then eaten by his newborn son. You sort of had to be there.

  Omneseus raised his arms, his powerful voice echoing through the bowels of the cave. “Welcome, Bolt. You are back, just like I foretold. For I see all!” He waved his fingers above his head as if casting a spell. “I see a band of bunnies about to eat dinner. I see a girl eagerly picking wax from her ears. I see a little silhouetto of a man!”

  Bolt nodded. The seer did see all, but a lot of what he saw tended to be somewhat random. “I’m here to—”

  The seer held up his finger to quiet Bolt. “Oh, I know why you are here. I can see it as plainly as I see the nose on your face! There!” He pointed four feet to Bolt’s left.

  “Um, my nose and I are over here,” said Bolt, waving.

  The seer blinked a few times. “Right. Sorry. I can barely see anything while wearing my strangely mysterious X-ray glasses. Or maybe they’re mysteriously strange.” He removed his glasses and blinked a few times. “Ah, better.” He cackled.

  “Can you please not cackle? It sounds evil and spooky, and there’s nothing particularly funny,” Bolt said. Fortune-tellers and seers cackled all the time, which was annoying and a little scary.

  Omneseus cackled one more time anyway. “I know why you are here. Yes! You are here for . . .” The man jumped up and held out his hand. “You are here for salmon-flavored corn chips!” He held up a bag of corn chips.

  “Actually, I’m here for a totally different reason. But, well, I guess I’m sort of hungry.” Bolt stood up and reached across the fire to grab a handful of fish-flavored snacks. They were delicious.

  “You are also here to learn how to find and defeat the Stranger, aren’t you? He is the mightiest of your kind. The father of all werepenguins in the world.”

  As the seer spoke, Bolt switched from chewing chips to chewing his lips with fright.

  “You shouldn’t bite your lips,” said the seer. “It’s a bad habit.”

  “Sorry,” said Bolt, picking his nose.

  “Tell me, Bolt. Are you up to the task of stopping the Stranger?”

  Every penguin in the world had a slim coating of evilness inside them, implanted by the Stranger. That coating made them cruel and vicious. But if Bolt could stop the Stranger, he would free the penguins from that hate. The world’s penguins would once again be happy, kind creatures. “I’m ready—at least I think I am.”

  “You think?” the seer demanded. “You must know! Do not doubt, or you will no doubt lose!” Bolt gulped. “The Stranger does not doubt. He lives in the South Pole under a great magical moon where he is invincible. And immortal. Unless.”

  “Unless what?” Bolt was glad to hear that there was an unless.

  “I will sing you a chant.” The seer sat back down and closed his eyes. He lifted his palms and began to softly hum.

  Bolt groaned. Seers gave advice coded inside cryptic, confusing songs just as often as they cackled. Bolt had figured out the meaning of other chants he had been given, but he would have much preferred simple printed directions.

  Still, he waited politely as the seer chanted, slowly and off-key:

  Discover your code—and embrace it you must.

  Turn away the bloodlust. It’s love you must trust.

  The hunger inside, it’s so strong and so real!

  Its threat you’ll repeal with the tooth of a seal.

  But you won’t win unless you take this advice—

  Born from love may entice, but a bite’s twice as nice.

  Bolt’s hair stood up in the shape of two horns, and he pulled them in frustration. “What does that mean?”

  The seer shrugged. “How should I know? I’m a seer, not a translator.”

  Frustrated, Bolt continued pulling his hair until he accidentally yanked three strands out. He knew the chant was important. The fate of the world could be hidden inside its confusing lyrics.

  “I might not know much of the chant’s meaning,” the seer continued, “but I can guess some of it. Have you heard of the Ilversay Oothtay Ealsay?”

  “The Silver Tooth Seal?” asked Bolt, who was quite good at pig latin. He recalled a line from the chant: Its threat you’ll repeal with the tooth of a seal.

 
“The beast lived high in the polar mountains long ago. It was twenty feet long and devoured penguins as if they were Pez candies from a dispenser. Speaking of which—” He pulled a small Pez dispenser from his tunic. The dispenser was the shape of a moose. “Want a candy?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Good call. I’ve had this dispenser in my pocket for decades.” The seer sniffed the dispenser, winced, and then tossed it into the fire. “Anyway, what made the Ealsay especially terrible was its tooth, a single tooth made of pure silver. And as you know, werepenguins hate silver.”

  “They do? I don’t hate silver.” Bolt didn’t have any feelings at all about silver or, for that matter, any metal.

  “Well, most do. Maybe it’s because silver clashes with their orange beaks. Anyway, the ancient scrolls say that this tooth, and this tooth alone, can slay even the mightiest werepenguin.”

  “How ancient are these scrolls?”

  “Even older than my Pez candies. According to the scrolls, if you stab the Stranger with the Ealsay’s silver tooth, his reign will end forever.”

  Bolt squirmed. He didn’t want to plunge a tooth into the Stranger, or anyone. All werepenguins were naturally evil, and Bolt constantly battled his own yearnings to rule and destroy things. As a result, he had vowed never to kill, no matter what. Killing might be just what it took to push him into the eternal darkness of werepenguin wickedness.

  But he’d worry about that after he got the tooth. “You said the creature lived long ago?”

  “Yes, but its silver tooth survives. It is guarded by a group of whale dentists. You know of PEWD?”

  “Pooed?”

  “No, P-E-W-D. The Pingvingrad Establishment of Whale Dentistry. They keep the tooth in their heavily guarded island fortress.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m not much of a kidder. The head of the institution is a werepenguin. Her name is Dr. Helga Walzanarz.”

  “Gesundheit.”

  Bolt bit his lips again; they were getting quite chapped. The world was depending on him, and now he had to face another werepenguin to get a tooth so he could fight another werepenguin? He groaned from the weight of it all.