The Shattering (Guardians of Ga'hoole) (14 page)

N
yra looked at the shattered fragments of eggshell at her feet. She nudged them gently with her talon.

“Your Pureness, we must move on. There is a rolling bed of embers moving toward us. And the tree”—Uglamore looked up at the tree from which the egg had dropped—“It’s about to fall. There will be more eggs in the future, Your Pureness, rest assured.”

“I am assured but I shall not rest. And I vow to kill Eglantine if it is the last thing I ever do.” Her once-white face was almost black now with soot. She flapped her wings once, twice, and rose in the air. “Kill! Kill! Kill Eglantine, the betrayer, murderer of the Sacred Orb!”

When she had composed herself, Nyra turned to Uglamore. “Where have they all gone? There was an entire division. How can they just vanish?” They were flying west toward the distant lands known as Beyond the Beyond where the Pure Ones had secured a stronghold.

“Uh…” Uglamore hesitated. He had known this mo
ment would come, and he had a response prepared. But he was nervous. “Well, Your Pureness, they know how to fly in fires, these owls of Ga’Hoole. There is nothing like them. They can hide behind flame curtains and find passageways through them that we cannot.”

“Hmmm,” Nyra replied.

He cast a nervous glance at her. Maybe she believed him. It sounded reasonable. There was no way that he would ever tell her the truth: that it had all been a ruse, that they had been tricked, that seventy-five owls had been outwitted and outmaneuvered by a mere twenty-four owls—and none with battle claws! It gave Uglamore pause.
Was it possible
, he thought,
that the Great Ga’Hoole Tree could produce a better soldier than the Pure Ones
?

Kludd and Nyra and Stryker, the second in overall command, had trained them to fight magnificently. They were better armed than any other group of owls. Their discipline was the best. They were the best! Already they had conquered more territory than any other owl army, save perhaps those of the Northern Kingdoms. There was no discipline in the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. Every owl knew that. Those owls were free to do anything—anything at all! Then it suddenly struck Uglamore—a free society of owls might, in fact, produce a very fine soldier despite the lack of discipline. Discipline counted, but it had not won
this battle. Wits had.
When was the last time I used my wits? When was the last time anyone ever listened to me? When was the last time I really had any kind of an idea about anything?

Nyra banked across the headwind that was making a direct course to Beyond the Beyond hard to hold. Uglamore followed, as did the rest of the platoon.

“So, Octavia,” Ezylryb settled onto his favorite parlor perch in his hollow and plucked a dried caterpillar from a small dish, his favorite snack food. “Our young Guardians, the Chaw of Chaws, have become quite proficient in torch fighting. Simply amazing what they can do with a blazing branch. I mean, we have always had a flame squadron. But it was a rather minor unit, and they only used burning branches defensively, never offensively as these young owls did. They have essentially invented a new weapon.”

“Yes, sir, that they did,” said the plump, elderly nest-maid snake, as she dusted off the piles of books. “Very inventive those young owls.”

“Yes, I suppose they are the fruits of an open free-thinking society.”

“Nothing wrong with that, sir,” Octavia replied.

“No, nothing at all.”

Octavia, however, could tell that something was wrong by the tone in Ezylryb’s voice.

“But don’t you think it’s rather ironic that years ago I hung up my battle claws, hid them away in that back chamber of the hollow? And now something even more destructive, more deadly than battle claws has been invented, not to mention the flecks. Glaux, those flecks are dangerous.”

“Yes, sir, that they are.” Octavia knew that Ezylryb was, as he was sometimes inclined to do, approaching by a very circuitous route the heart of what was troubling him. And after all these years of serving her master, she knew what part she had to play. “Tell me, sir, did you pick up a fire branch in this most recent skirmish?”

The old Whiskered Screech fixed her in his squinted gaze. Octavia could feel the penetrating stare.
I swear he sees more with that old squinty eye than any owl with two good ones.

“Now, what do you think, Octavia?”

Octavia laughed. “I know you, sir. I don’t think you touched one burning branch. You were telling them how to peg-out, jabbering away in Krakish, and so on.”

“And so on,” Ezylryb churred good-naturedly. “But it gives one pause,” he continued.

“Pause about what, sir?” Octavia was now straightening out the papers on his desk.

“Does it not strike you as odd that fire was always used for constructive things—cooking, making light for candles to read by, and not as offensive weapons?”

“Battle claws!” Octavia interrupted. “What about them? You don’t cook with battle claws, sir. And to make them you need fire.”

“Just so, my dear. You’ve got me there. But the owls’ excitement about fighting with torches unnerves me somewhat. Boron and Barran are now instituting new training classes for the flame squadron.” Ezylryb did not sound particularly happy about this.

“Well, we have to get with the times, don’t we, sir?”

“What if we don’t like the times?” he said petulantly.

Octavia stopped dusting, coiled up, swung her head toward him, and fixed him with her sightless eyes.

How does she do it?
Ezylryb thought.
She sees straight through me with no eyes at all!

“Sir, don’t go into a gollymope on me, getting the dismals and all that nonsense,” Octavia spoke brusquely to her master.

“Yes, yes, of course not. I must get to the parliament chamber. We are convening tonight.”

“Tonight? It’s a celebration, sir.”

“For some.” He paused. “Not for Dewlap.”

“Oh, dear. Still out of sorts, is she?”

“Out of sorts is putting it nicely. She’s a Glaux-forsaken mess!”

Meanwhile in another part of the Great Ga’Hoole
Tree, there was an owl on the brink of a major gollymope. Otulissa bent over a plan she had made, a landing diagram for an attack on the Pure Ones.
And now the divisions actually exist. And there really will be a platoon of Frost Beaks from the Northern Kingdoms!
She sighed. It was hopeless. If only someone would listen to her—Ezylryb, Boron, Barran—even Bubo. The sounds of the celebration welcoming back Eglantine and Primrose drifted into her hollow.

Madame Plonk flew by on an unsteady course. She had obviously had too much of the milkberry brew that the adults often drank at celebrations.

“Am I the only one with an ounce of sense around here?” Otulissa said out loud to no one in particular.

“Hardly!”

Otulissa’s head spun around. She gasped as she saw Ezylryb poking his beak into her hollow. “I want you, Eglantine, and the band—no one else—down in the parliament chamber in a quarter of an hour.”

Otulissa blinked in utter bewilderment.
What in the world?

“And, Otulissa, try to be discreet when you fetch them. Don’t go beaking off in your usual voluble style!”

“Well…well…no, of course not, sir.” But she could have sworn she saw his squinted eye wink.

T
he Boreal Owl who stood guard at the entrance to the parliamentary chambers nodded for them to go in. The young owls had been here only twice before, and each and every one of them now felt a tad shameful about all the times they had eavesdropped on the parliament. The members of parliament were arranged in their usual positions on a slender white birch tree branch that had been bent into a semicircle. There was, of course, one vacant spot on this perch: the space that Dewlap had once occupied. But then all the young owls gasped as they simultaneously realized that the pile of dirty gray feathers in the corner of the chamber was attached to a bird, and that bird was the owl Dewlap. What in Glaux’s name had happened to her? She had once been a rich, lustrous brown color, shot through with steaks of white. But all of her brown feathers had turned gray and her amber eyes had turned the color of mud. Her head jerked in palsied
movements, and she seemed to be muttering something unintelligible.

Boron spoke first. His voice was gentle. He realized what a shock this was for the young owls, and he fervently hoped that this notion of the old Whiskered Screech’s was right. The band and Otulissa and Eglantine were bold. There was no doubt about that. But were they really mature enough for this? “Young’uns, she is not shattered. This has nothing to do with flecks,” the Snowy monarch said softly.

“What, then?” Twilight asked in a barely audible voice.

“Her gizzard has grown still,” Boron continued. “And her heart is broken.”

“Broken?” asked Gylfie. The young owls had never heard of such a thing as a broken heart.

“This is difficult to explain,” Boron said, looking at each of them and at the same time wondering how he would do it. “We owls experience most of our strongest emotions, as you all know, in our gizzards, but there are a few reserved for the heart. When an owl has been unfaithful, has betrayed a cause or a friend or, like Dewlap, the entire tree as she did by leaking information to the enemy during the siege, it has also betrayed its own heart. When such an owl realizes what it has done, its gizzard often be
comes still and its heart tries to work harder to make up for the difference. But an owl’s heart cannot do what an owl’s gizzard is supposed to do, and it breaks. Not literally, but it breaks in a way that even though it still pumps blood, its spirit is broken.”

“What happens to such an owl?” Soren asked in a scared voice.

“Well, it becomes rather like its heart and gizzard. It grows still. It continues to eat and breathe, but it is helpless. It is as if the owl’s soul, its scroomsaw, has left its body, yet it is not dead. The owl is not a scroom. It is what we call the living dead.” The young owls were very quiet. They could not even imagine such a thing, but when they looked at Dewlap, they could believe it.

“So what do you do?” Otulissa asked in a quiet voice.

“Well, my dear, that is where you come in.” And the way Boron said “you,” it seemed that he meant Otulissa in particular. “We have a mission for you.”

“Me?” Otulissa asked.

“You, Otulissa, with the help of your friends here.”

“What is it?” she asked. Soren could see that Otulissa was trembling.

“Be gentle,” Boron replied. Now all of the young owls blinked in confusion. Perhaps the most confused was Twilight.
Be gentle? That’s a mission? You gotta be kidding!

“We, the parliament of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, are charging you six owls”—and this time Boron was sure to also look at Eglantine—“with the mission of delivering Dewlap to the Retreat of the Glauxian Sisters, in the Northern Kingdoms, on the Island of Elsemere, in the Everwinter Sea.”

Otulissa was stunned beyond belief. How could this be? She had dreamed forever of going to the Northern Kingdoms to find fighting owls, to see the magnificent snowy landscapes and cliffs of ice. But to be sent there as an attendant to a feeble old owl, whom she hated and blamed for the death of her beloved Strix Struma—it was too much! Simply too much. She staggered slightly on the perch, but Twilight extended a steadying wing. For the first time in her life, Otulissa was speechless. Indeed, this was a situation beyond words.

Just then, there was a rap on the parliament door. The Boreal Owl stuck his head in. “Permission to enter, your honors? The new slipgizzle from the eastern Barrens has arrived with an urgent message.”

“Permission granted.”

A rather disreputable-looking Great Horned, missing one ear tuft, flew into the chamber.

“Your honors, I bring you ill tidings.”

“Go on.” Boron nodded.

“The Pure Ones took the canyons last eve. St. Aggie’s has fallen.”

It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the chamber. The words blurred in Soren’s ears. There was something said about Kludd and the 32
^nd
regiment. Skench was wounded or killed? It was a hodgepodge of disjointed noises.

The young owls had been quickly dismissed. They thought they had been dismissed for good in view of the crisis, but just as they were filing out of the chamber, Ezylryb had called out to the Boreal Owl to have the young ones wait in the antechamber.

So they waited, but few words were exchanged for the first several minutes.

“St. Aggie’s fallen? What does it mean?” Soren spoke in almost a daze. In fact, they all seemed dazed, except for Digger.

“It means,” the Burrowing Owl said in a hushed voice tight with fear, “the Pure Ones have control of the largest supply of flecks on earth.”

“I still don’t understand why I have to fly escort to that pathetic old owl,” Otulissa whimpered.

Digger whirled around. “Get a grip, Otulissa! You’re worrying about flying Dewlap to the Northern Kingdoms.
Meanwhile, the Pure Ones have control of all the flecks, and we now know what flecks can do! What does it mean, Soren asked. I’ll tell you what it means. It means more shatterings. It means that the Pure Ones can gain control of our brains, our minds. It means we might never be able to think again. It means it would be better to die than become a mindless tool for the most destructive owls on earth. That’s what it means, Otulissa.”

The other four owls were astounded. Digger, usually subdued, philosophical, and armed with endless patience, had suddenly become enraged. While the other owls had wilfed at the news that the Pure Ones had triumphed over St. Aggie’s, and appeared exceedingly slender with their feathers lying close to their bodies, Digger had puffed up and seemed almost twice his normal size as he spat out his rage at Otulissa.

The Boreal Owl now came into the antechamber. “Young’uns, the parliament would like to see you again. Follow me, please.”

Once more, the six owls filed into the parliament chamber and took their places facing the curved birch branch where the members perched. They all noticed that Dewlap had been removed from the chamber. This time Barran began to speak.