Guardians of Ga'Hoole 06 - The Burning

confounded owls come? When would they launch their invasion? He had fortified the rimrock surrounding St. Aggie’s as best he could with fleck emplacements. He had guards placed on the highest point of every promontory. Any foreign owl would be spotted immediately. He had promoted his two top lieutenants, Uglamore and Stryker, to the positions of division commanders and they had set up garrisons at the two main approaches to St. Aggie’s: the boulder of the Great Horns, where two peaks rose into the sky like the tufts of a gigantic Great Horned Owl, and then at the point of entry called the Beak of Glaux. Patrols flew night and day guarding both areas. No crow dared approach during the day with these fiercely clawed owls commanding the skies. A hireclaw owl from Beyond the Beyond had turned out to be an excellent blacksmith. And he would make fire claws! Fire claws were special battle claws with small coals inserted in the tips. These claws were the most dangerous of all weapons, for they allowed an owl to fight at close range while simultaneously ripping and burning an opponent. They were considered “dirty weapons.” Many blacksmiths refused to make them because they not only did damage to the enemy but over time they disfigured an owl’s own talons.
    The Pure Ones had been practicing fighting with ignited branches, as well as using the fire claws. Kludd was ready. He was ready for war. Ready for the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, and most of all he was ready for Soren, his brother. He snapped his metal beak shut, blinked his eyes behind the metal mask, and imagined his claws tearing into his brother’s flesh. He could see the blood splattering the night. He could hear the breath leaking from his brother’s windpipe, the gasping, ragged breaths of a dying owl, of Soren.
    On a high battlement of the Beak of Glaux, Uglamore crimped his talons over a narrow lip of rock and scannedthe sky. When will they come? When? Logic dictated that the invasion would come on a moonless night, or a night thick with cloud cover. Cloud cover was rare here, just as trees were rare. They had solved that by importing kindling for fighting with fire from Ambala and the Shadow Forest, but one cannot control the moon or command the clouds. A breeze riffled his feathers, and a shiver went though his gizzard. There was no telling with these owls, the Guardians of Ga’Hoole. Logic did not dictate to them. Nothing dictated to them, as a matter of fact. And this was eternally confounding to Uglamore. The owls of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree were completely free, free to do anything. They knew no discipline, at least not the discipline of the Pure Ones, or of St. Aggie’s. They seemed to fly in loose ragtag groups, compared to the tightly drilled formations of the Pure Ones.
    And yet the Guardians had won the last battle in The Beaks even though they had been completely outnumbered. What a ruse they had pulled when they had led the Pure Ones to think that they had entire divisions at the ready, divisions from the Northern Kingdoms, when in actuality they had had none! How did a bunch of undisciplined owls come up with such an idea? The Pure Ones had come so very close to beating them, and yet it was the Pure Ones who had been forced into an ignominious retreat. The Guardians’ victory had nothing to do with skill or discipline, but everything to do with wits. They had won it on wits alone.
    Uglamore had not stopped thinking about this ever since. All the battle strategies of the Pure Ones were planned by either the High Tyto or his mate, Her Pureness, Nyra. There was a central chain of command with them at the top, and which went down through the Barn Owl lieutenants. Beneath the Barn Owl lieutenants were the Grass and the Masked Owls, and finally down through the ranks to the very lowest rung on the ladder of pureness, the Sooty Owls. They were all Barn Owls of some sort, and they all had the word Tyto in their formal names. But some Tytos were considered more pure than others. And this, too, gave Uglamore pause. The Guardians of Ga’Hoole were just a big hodgepodge of every kind of owl in the owl universe. It was said they even had a Brown Fish Owl among them who was in charge of a unit in the Flame Squadron, and there was a Burrowing Owl who ranked quite high as well.
    So what did it all mean? Uglamore wasn’t quite sure. But he was beginning to question things in a way he had never before questioned, and it was almost frightening to him.