The War of the Ember (3 page)

D
eep 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 molted 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.

The sun fell in a bright column from almost directly overhead, illuminating one of the busts of ancient explorers that lined the map hollow. The one they called Magellan. He wore a funny round hat and had a beard longer than any Whiskered Screech could hope for. Now a shadow fell across that beard, a short shadow due to the sun’s angle, but recognizable nonetheless. Bess noted the slight dip in the crown of the head, the
soft swoop of the brow tufts. It was a Boreal. And not just any Boreal, but the very one who had supposedly been poisoned and lay dying in the bell tower. Worse, it was wearing battle claws! Bess felt her gizzard tremble and then lock. She had been completely duped. And there was only one reason why an owl, a strange owl, would find his way to this place and attempt such a deception. The ember!

B
ess was a scholar. She had never fought. Never worn battle claws, never held a weapon, never even wielded a burning branch—perish the thought! There must be no flames in the Palace of Mists with its treasure trove of books and maps. But now she knew that Bess the scholar would have to change. Was she up to it? Did she have a choice? She had no doubt that the intruder was after the ember. How many places in the palace had the Boreal Owl searched so far? If he went through the passageway and was persistent enough, he would find the spiraling tunnel to the stone chamber, the one the Others had called the “crypt.” It was a burial vault that contained coffins and the relics of great scholars. It was in one of these coffins that Bess had placed the cask that held the Ember of Hoole.

The Ember of Hoole presented baffling and often dangerous choices to those entrusted with its keeping. Forged in the fires of the Sacred Ring of volcanoes in a
time before time, retrieved more than a thousand years ago by Hoole, it was this peculiar and powerful ember that anointed the true kings of Ga’Hoole. There would be other monarchs, good ones, but to be an embered monarch was very special. There had only been two in the entire thousand-year history of the tree: Hoole and Coryn.

With the ember came many blessings. But it seemed that with every blessing there came a curse. For the ember contained in its fiery gizzard a power for both good and bad—for bad especially in the talons of a weak or evil owl. One had to be exceedingly careful in its presence. Hoole, an owl of exceptional mettle, withstood these influences. However, it had been so long since owls had lived under the rule of an embered king that they were not always prepared for the dangers it posed.

Now wedged between two lethal-looking stone arrowheads, Bess thought of the tribulations that had accompanied the ember since Coryn had retrieved it. Many of the owls of the great tree had fallen under the ember’s thrall and had begun to worship it; then sometime later the Striga, the strange blue owl from the Middle Kingdom, came to exert a malignant influence
over Coryn and to seek even greater power by seizing the ember.
Thank Glaux,
Bess thought,
he had failed.

Would Bess fail to protect the ember now? Would she fail to act? The minutes lengthened; the shadows, too, as the sun passed its zenith. The silhouette of the Boreal Owl began to slide over the cabinet. Would he turn toward the passageway that led to the crypt? Should she wait? She did not complete the thought but seized two sharp stone points, one in each talon, burst from the cabinet, and flew at the Boreal Owl.

She flew directly for the owl’s gizzard and would have landed a fatal blow except for the glancing swipe of one of the intruder’s battle-clawed talons which sent her reeling. Blood spun through the air. At first, Bess was not sure where it came from, but then realized the blood was not her own. She saw it stream from the underside of the intruder’s wing, a spot called the wingpit. Had she struck the gizzard or the heart it would have meant his instant death. The owl staggered in his flight, and Bess was relieved to see his wounded wing droop. Confusion swam in the owl’s eyes. But Bess’s relief did not last for long. The furious owl hurtled wildly toward her with startling speed despite his wound. The arrowhead fell to the floor with a clink. The
intruder attempted to seize it, but missed and, in one swift, graceful movement, Bess shoved it out of his way with a sweep of her wing tip, and then quickly retrieved it for herself. The two owls now began circling each other. Bess knew nothing about the strategies of talon-to-talon combat, or of fighting defensively. Her gizzard pulsed wildly. She was definitely out of her element. And she could tell that this Boreal Owl was a seasoned combat soldier.

“Where is it?” the owl demanded.

“Where is what?” she parried.

“The Ember of Hoole.”

“I know nothing of any ember.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that!”

Still they circled. It was as if Bess’s brain was operating on two levels. On one, she was trying to fight, on the other, she was trying to parry with words, upset this owl’s equilibrium as she had done with the jab to the wingpit, but mentally, gizzardly.

“I never expected a Boreal Owl to abuse the tolling ritual. What you did was a profanity.” Did she detect a slight flinching of plumage, as if the owl was about to wilf? “Forget glaumora,” she added. “You’ll rot in hagsmire.”

“Never!” the owl spat vehemently. “We shall control hagsmire and all its fiends.”

Now it was Bess who flinched. What was this owl talking about? The Boreal Owl saw his opening in the fraction of time Bess had let her mind wander. The owl rushed in and struck her to the stone floor. The wind was knocked from her and she heard the clink once more of a stone point as it fell to the floor. She still held one in her talon. She saw a flash as the Boreal Owl flew for the spiraling stairs.
The crypt!
She banished all thoughts from her brain and in that utterly mindless moment, Bess of the Chimes, Bess the Knower, became a warrior. She would not think. She would not feel. She would only kill. She blasted through the air like a missile. Down, down, down into the crypt, she spiraled on the tail of the other Boreal. They zigzagged through the maze of stone. Bess heard the clank of the battle claws as the owl skimmed a corner. This owl was not a precision flier.
I am better at this,
Bess thought. He couldn’t even pick up the arrowhead when he had knocked it from her talons.
A clear shot, that’s all I need. One clear shot.
Bess began to drive the owl out from the narrow alleys between the stone coffins. There was a bay at the back of the crypt. If she could get him to fly there, he would
be trapped. She must make him think the ember was in that bay. That was it! She stopped her flight and reversed her direction suddenly, and began to carve a turn toward the bay. The owl took the bait. He thought she was flying back to defend the ember.

And now an odd thing transpired. Bess felt as if she were actually becoming two owls. There was Bess the warrior, the strategist who swiveled her head back and tried to muster a fearsome look in her eyes, and then there was Bess the observer. The Bess she knew. Bess now pretended to dart from her course, but gave her opponent ample berth to block the move.
It’s working! It’s working!
They were almost in the bay. There were a few niches in the walls where candles had once burned to light the crypt. She flew directly toward one, then did an inside-out loop and hovered against the niche with her wings spread wide as if she were protecting something—something precious.

“Let me at it or I’ll tear you to pieces,” the intruder screeched.

Bess said nothing. She continued to hover against the stone wall. Now she did not have to feign fear. She
was
frightened. Her gizzard twitched in spasms of pure terror. But she must hold steady and draw him closer. She heard the click of the battle claws as he extended them.
The serrated edges gleamed and then blurred as the Boreal charged. Bess bunched her shoulder and raised her talon, and the air glinted as bits of mica embedded in the arrowhead flashed like shooting stars.

And then it was over.

Bess blinked. Beneath her, the Boreal Owl had fallen. From its breast, an arrowhead protruded. And now the owl was truly gasping its last breath on earth. Bess bent over the dying owl.

“I suppose now you expect me to toll you to glaumora.”

The amber eyes growing tarnished as life seeped from him suddenly brightened with a horrifying glint. “I am in hag’s cradle now. Hagsmire is my glaumora. You will see. Just wait…just…” But the words evaporated as the owl met death.

“Death profane,” Bess whispered. She was no longer Bess the warrior. She had stepped back inside her own body and only now realized that she was shaking uncontrollably.