The War of the Ember Read online

  What is the meaning of all I have seen and heard here? Dumpy tried to recall his second-to-last thought before the mind storm in his wee brain had begun.

  I must do something! And that scares me almost as much as what I have seen and heard. I must do something! But what?

  Then Dumpy the Fifteenth’s thoughts came swiftly. I must tell someone what I have heard and seen. Not Pop and Mummy. They’re too stupid. Grandpop and Grummy—even stupider! He thought of his older brother, the Chubster. No, never! Oh, Great Ice, what am I to do? Then it came to him. I must tell somebody smart. Should I go to the Great Ga’Hoole Tree? The owls! The Guardians! He’d seen them once or twice. And there were the four called the Band. Oh, and that very nice Spotted Owl from the north. What was his name?…Cluck, Clem—Cleve! Yes, Cleve. Cleve had passed through when Dumpy was just a chick. But he remembered. Indeed, he did! Dumpy’s foot had had a sea tick lodged in it, and Cleve had removed it. I must find Cleve and I must find the Band. But they’re so smart, and I’m so dumb! It would be so embarrassing, and it’s so far to travel. Maybe…maybe I can tell the polar bears. They are big and tough. And they’re much closer.

  Dumpy waddled to the back entrance of the cliff cave and perched on a ledge that overhung the Ice Narrows. He looked down into the churning waters. He could see his brother, the Chubster, as he was known, diving for fish for his own young family. The Chubster caught sight of him, opened his beak to shout a greeting, and the twenty-four fish that he had neatly lined up in his beak dropped back into the sea.

  “Ah, for the love of ice!” A squawk erupted from one of the ice nests that notched the cliffs. “Chub, you idiot. You lost our dinner!” It was the Chubster’s mate, Pulkie.

  “Just wanted to say hi to Dumpy. Hey, Dumpster, baby! How’s it icing?”

  “I got young’uns to feed,” Pulkie shouted, and blasted out of the nest. Folding her wings back against her plump sides, she hurled herself into the thrashing water below. Some baby pufflings peered over the edge of the ice nest.

  The Chubster, oblivious to his hungry pufflings, flew up to where Dumpy perched. “What ’cha doing?”

  “Uh…nothing.” Dumpy wasn’t sure if he should say anything to his brother about what he had just witnessed. He tried changing the subject. “Pulkie—she can really dive. Look at her.”

  “Yep, she’s a can-do sort of puffin. You got to get yourself a mate, Dumpy.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Ready? Mum always said you were the smartest. Too smart for your own good maybe.”

  Dumpy blinked. She might be right, he thought. “Uh…listen, I got to go.”

  “Go where?” asked the Chubster.

  “I’m not sure,” Dumpy said.

  “Imnotsure! A fabulous place!” the Chubster exclaimed. “Heard all about it. Great fishing.”

  “Uh, well, I better be off.” Dumpy spread his wings and lifted off the edge of the cliff. He heard the Chubster yelling at his pufflings. “Wave bye-bye to Uncle Dumpy. He’s going to Imnotsure.”

  Pulkie was back in the ice nest, sorting fish. She and the pufflings turned and looked wistfully at Dumpy as he dissolved into the fog bank over the Ice Narrows.

  Oh my, fog. Which way do I go? Dumpy thought. Finally, he carved a turn and headed north toward the end of summer gathering place for the bears. He knew where that was. Not far from the Ice Narrows. But what should he tell them? He tried to order the facts in his disorderly mind. First there was the strange blue owl. And the owl with the frightening face. But worse than what they looked like was what they said. Hagsfiends. What were hagsfiends? Another kind of bird? Definitely not a polar bear. The faint dark memory stirred again, like a shadow invading his being.

  Dumpy must have been flying faster than he thought, for soon he was looking down at the remnants of summer ice in the Everwinter Sea. He followed the floes up the Firth of Fangs. He hoped the polar bears were still there and had not begun their long swim north to the more remote firths and small channels where they hibernated for the winter. He spiraled down, and to his great delight saw several bears swimming about and some reclining on floes with their cubs. Many of the floes were bloody with freshly killed seals. The polar bears were fattening up for their long winter sleep.

  The firth was quite narrow at this point, and Dumpy saw one bear slip off an ice floe and swim toward the base of the cliffs where there appeared to be a cave. Dumpy hovered outside. It was hard to understand these bears, with their thick Krakish accent. Thankfully, many of them spoke a mixture of Hoolian and Krakish, and Dumpy was catching a few words here and there.

  “Gunda grunuch and see you in two years…Eeh, Sveep?” Then the most enormous head Dumpy had ever seen poked out of the cave and roared in a clear voice. “Svarr, you are about as romantic as a mess of seal guts. Love ’em and leave, huh?”

  “Well, mating season doesn’t last forever, and I’m getting sleepy. The katabats are blowing early,” replied a male bear who was treading water outside the cave.

  “You just want to skedaddle.”

  “Here, I’ll get you something to eat before I go.” The bear swooped an immense paw through the water and snatched up a large fish. “Bluescale—token of my affection.” He slapped it down on the rock ledge by the cave.

  “Great Ice!” Dumpy sputtered. The two bears looked up.

  “What do you want?” the bears roared.

  “That fish—that fish. Never saw one that color. Sky. I mean blue,” Dumpy said, alighting on the ice floe the male bear had just vacated. “I saw an owl that color. Blue…” Dumpy repeated the word softly, almost as if he were tasting it.

  “I’m out of here,” Svarr said. “Same time, same place, two years from now.” He yawned and began to swim off. “Hope you get some cubs. I’m sure they’ll be cute, just like their mum.”

  The female sighed. “As if he’ll ever bother to visit them.”

  “You mean he’ll never see his cubs?” said Dumpy.

  “Never.”

  “That’s very sad,” Dumpy said. “I mean, he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

  The bear blinked. “What is your name, puffin?”

  “Dumpy.”

  “Well, Dumpy, mine is Sveep, and I think that is very astute of you.”

  “What’s ‘astute’?”

  “Smart, keen.”

  Now it was Dumpy’s turn to blink. “No…no one has ever called me—or any a puffin—smart, keen, or…or astute.”

  “Well, I’m calling you that. Now tell me, what is this about a blue owl?”

  Dumpy hoped he could give a halfway intelligible recitation of what he had seen. He began slowly. “There is this cave in the Ice Narrows. Two owls came to it. One had these feathers that you call blue, and the other…the other…”

  When Dumpy had finished the story, Sveep was silent for several seconds, then finally she spoke. “This does not sound good. Not good at all. But it’s owl business.”

  “What should I do?”

  “You must seek out the owls,” she said. “The Guardians of Ga’Hoole.”

  Dumpy’s head drooped. For a bird that possessed one of the most comical faces, with its bright orange beak and odd facial markings, Dumpy at this moment looked positively tragic. “I can’t,” he whispered into his breast feathers.

  “What do you mean ‘you can’t’?” Sveep said. She was beginning to feel that seasonal sleepiness that afflicted polar bears at this time of year, when they sensed the first signs of winter, when seconds, then minutes clipped off each day’s light. Nonetheless, she fought the lethargy that beckoned her insistently. This was important. “I repeat, why can’t you seek the owls?” Her words were becoming thick.

  “The Guardians are all so smart. I am so stupid.”

  This was like of jolt of summer sun through her body. “Nonsense! You’re the smartest puffin I’ve ever met!” she said emphatically.

  “Do you mean that?” Dumpy asked.

  “I mean it. You have to
go.”

  “I’ll…I’ll think about it!”

  “Don’t think about it—do it!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Chimes in the Mist

  Deep in the Shadow Forest, the darkest of all the forests of the Southern Kingdoms, there was a place where the thickly wooded land dipped suddenly into a cleft in the earth. The depression was hardly noticeable from above because the trees were dense, and mist from a waterfall obscured the land itself. Within this cleft, there was a stone palace left from the time of the Others, and in the palace dwelled a Boreal Owl named Bess. Less than a dozen owls in all the kingdoms knew of this palace or the Boreal Owl. To these owls, the Boreal Owl was not just Bess, but Bess of the Chimes—or the Knower, one of the most learned owls in the six owl kingdoms. To the few owls who knew of this place, it seemed odd that it was called a palace. It was more like a vast library, with books, and maps, and charts, and ancient scientific instruments. Bess herself never left the Palace of Mists. She had arrived years before with the bones of her father, determined to mourn him in the time-honored tradition of Boreal Owls.

  On this particular night, she was just finishing her evening ritual. The bones of her father, Grimble, had long since crumbled to dust and blown away, but the place they had lain in the bell tower, beneath the bell, had become a hallowed place for Bess, and every evening at tween time she flew within the confines of the enormous hood of the clapperless bell and sang her song in the chimelike tones unique to Boreal Owls. The last verse always gave her hope that someday she would join her beloved father, Grimble, in glaumora, so she always sang it with a robust spirit.

  Glaux ring in this noble owl,

  Sound the clapper made of mist.

  Ting ting, I hear it now.

  How can a scroom resist

  This lovely tolling sound,

  Which calls you from on high?

  Fly on, dear Da, fly on.

  Owl angels wait and sigh.

  As she finished the last verse of the song, she sensed a presence near the tower. It would not be the Band. They knew better than to intrude during her prayers. She settled uneasily on the window ledge of the tower and swiveled her head around. She heard a gasp from a niche in the circular stone wall. A soft violet light suffused the tower, and she thought she saw a lump of feathers in the niche. They billowed, then settled, then billowed again in long intervals. A ragged breath escaped. “Great Glaux!” she whispered to herself and swooped down. She saw on the narrow floor of the niche a Boreal Owl in grave distress. He attempted to lift his head, but it flopped back down.

  Bess was stunned. This owl was a stranger. It had been years since a stranger had found its way to the Palace of Mists, let alone a sickly stranger. The intruder spoke.

  “I have come…to…die.” The words were delivered in breathy little puffs. “Die beneath the bell.”

  “But you are alone.” Bess said.

  “No matter…You shall sing me to glaumora, shall you not? I have been poisoned.”

  “But surely there are antidotes.”

  “No…The poison is in my gizzard. You shall sing me to glaumora,” the owl repeated, “shall you not?”

  Bess knew that she could not refuse. There were covenants, unwritten laws particular to each kind of owl. In general, these concerned acts of owl kindness that were to be performed selflessly. They were blessings not to be bestowed by Glaux but any ordinary owl. For a Boreal Owl to refuse to help one of its kind to die under a bell and sing them to glaumora was a profound violation of this unwritten code. So she helped the owl, dragging and pushing it as gently as possible, to the spot beneath the bell where her own father’s bones had once rested. “What is your name?” She asked. But the sick owl had sunk into a delirium and was speaking gibberish. So now for the second time that evening, Bess rose and flew in the deep shadows of the bell’s hood.

  I am the chimes in the night,

  The sound within the wind.

  I am the tolling of glaumora

  For the souls of long-lost kin.

  I shall sing you to the stars,

  Where your scroom shall finally rest

  ’neath the great bell of the sky

  In a tower of cloud crests.

  When she came to the last verse for this nameless owl, she felt none of her usual hope. It was hard to sing for an owl one did not know. But she sang on. He would be dead by morning, she was sure, but she would have done her duty. After finishing the ritual song she alighted near the Boreal’s still form. The unknown owl roused himself and spoke in a low voice, “Go. Let me die alone, in peace.”

  Bess spent the night as she spent most of her nights, deep in study of ancient texts of the Others. Tonight her study was more solemn, shadowed by the thought of the dying owl. She had just begun her translation work for the fourth volume of the fragmentum, which was composed of scraps pieced together from the remains of some of the Others’ great literary works. At the moment, she was working on some beautiful love sonnets attributed to the playwright known as Shakes. In between her scholarly labors, she took breaks to stretch her wings and fly the wonderful, swirling, misty gusts of the falls. As the night thinned, she went out to catch one of the plump water rats that scampered around the rocks at the falls’ base. Then, before she turned in, she went to the bell tower to see if the owl had passed on.

  He had not, but she was sure it would not be long. Bess could hear the owl’s ragged breath from where she perched. She kept her distance as she watched, for once the final song had been sung it was customary to leave the owl so that there was no shadow other than the bell’s cast upon it. The moon had long since slid into another world, but twixt time was nearing and the long shadows of morning would soon be upon the Palace of Mists.

  She headed for the nest in the map hollow of the Palace of Mists where she now slept. It was not as comfortable as her previous sleeping place had been, a splendid hollow in the headless statue of an Other. Well, not quite an Other. It was a creature she had discovered through her research that the Others called an “angel,” which was shaped like the Others—with the addition of huge wings. Whether or not angels truly ever existed, Bess could not determine. But the whole idea of the Others fashioning a likeness of themselves with wings struck Bess as rather poignant. She had found comfortable lodging in its right shoulder.

  These days, however, she slept in the maparium. Bess almost dared not think about the reason for this change, as the secret was so vital to the well-being of the owl world that she feared merely thinking upon it could somehow put everything in danger.

  In this chamber there were cabinets of ancient navigational instruments and strange artifacts. Its walls were honeycombed with deep, narrow cubbyholes. In those cubbyholes lay maps furled in metal tubes, a system which seemed to preserve them very well. The first time Bess tried sleeping in the maparium was during a spell of particularly awful weather. She had tried out more than a dozen sleeping places. First, the cubbyhole slots, which she hated; then she tried the case of a sextant, an instrument used by the Others for celestial navigation. But it was too shallow to get comfortable in. She had finally nested in a strange spherical map the Others had called a “globe.” It had a rather large hole in it in the middle of an ocean labeled Pacific.

  Upon entering the maparium, Bess, as she always did before settling into her new nesting place, perched for a moment in front of a collection in one of the largest cabinets. On the back wall of the cabinet, a map was mounted, and fixed to the map were a half dozen stone points, “arrowheads” the Others had called them. They seemed to be arranged on the map according to the regions the stones came from. The cabinet and its simple weapons suggested to Bess that the Others, now gone, had made a study of others preceding them. This thought inevitably brought on a gentle flurry of philosophical musings that usually lulled her to sleep. Bess felt her eyelids grow heavy.

  She made her way to the globe and squeezed through the hole in the Pacific Ocean. She settled in the pile of downy molt
ed feathers and rabbit’s ear moss with which she had made a reasonable lining. But sleep seemed to elude her. She bunched her feathers this way and that. Squashed back on her tail and stuck her legs straight out in front of her. Still sleep would not come. This was unusual for Bess. She wondered about the dying Boreal. How had he ever found his way to the Palace of Mists, sick as he was? It must have been purely by accident. Perhaps he had been flying over and was sucked into a downdraft. Too weak to fight, he just let himself go. That couldn’t be quite right, because he had explicitly said that he wanted to die under a bell. So he must have known that this bell tower existed. Bess felt an uncomfortable squishiness in her gizzard. She wondered if he had died yet. Was his scroom climbing that star-chinked path to glaumora?

  She finally fell into a fitful sleep. And as she slept, the tolling of the song she had sung echoed dimly somewhere in the back of her mind. It did not sound right. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why,” she whispered in her sleep. She heard a familiar call. Her gizzard seemed to respond even as she slept. The call wound through her dream and she felt a flood of joy. “Da!” In all the long years she had been singing her father to glaumora, Bess had never once dreamed of him. But now he was floating in front of her in the silver dream-light that suffused her sleep! “Wake, silly child!” he exclaimed. With a jolt, she woke up. “It was a dream,” she whispered to herself. But why in a dream should he call her to wake? Something’s wrong, she thought. She pressed her eye against the crack in the globe to see if there just might be a scroom out there. Nothing. Nonetheless, she slipped out of the globe for a better look around the maparium.

  And at that precise moment, Bess heard wing beats approaching. An acute sense of danger rattled her gizzard. It was too late to squeeze herself back into the globe. Desperately, she looked around for a hiding place. The door of the cabinet! She had left it open earlier and now flew directly toward it. Once inside, she wilfed and made herself as slender as the stone points, which were sharp. She would have to be careful.