Guardians of Ga'Hoole 15 - The War of the Ember

they could have easily infiltrated the palace while I…I…” She hesitated. “Tolled him to glaumora.”
    “And instead, you sent him to hagsmire!” Twilight boomed. “I like it! I like it a lot! A most artistic balance. Like a good story. All set to rights in the end.”
    Gylfie gave the Great Gray a withering look.
    “Well,” Coryn said, “his part of the story has ended but we must try to set the rest to rights. Which brings me to the second issue. It appears that Nyra herselfis…is…” For the first time, Coryn faltered, then regained his confidence. “Is becoming more haggish. How this is happening, what peculiar physiological changes are occurring…” He swiveled his head toward Otulissa as if seeking some clue, some thread of an explanation.
    “It’s very strange,” Otulissa said. “We have all read about hagsfiends in the past. The Book of Kreeth is mostly a speculative work on how one might create monstrous haggish offspring through various experiments. But what Dumpy describes suggests a morphological reversion to a more primitive form. We know from the battle in the canyonlands that in certain phases of the moon, given the right conditions and the ingestion of contaminated water, wolves, corrupt ones such as those of the MacHeath clan, could become vyrwolves, while other wolves were completely immune to such changes. Perhaps we have a similar situation here.”
    Soren swiveled his head toward Otulissa. “These thoughts of yours are interesting, Otulissa, but we must plan. Now is not the time for speculation.”
    “You are right, Soren.” Otulissa nodded in agreement.
    “I think,” Soren said, swiveling his head toward his nephew, Coryn, “we need a plan to secure the ember. We can hope that the Boreal Owl Bess killed was theonly one who knew about it. If this is the case we must assume that he planned to steal it for his own purposes.”
    “What purposes?” asked Digger.
    “Well, perhaps he wanted to ransom it or sell it to the highest bidder. Perhaps he was planning to approach Nyra.”
    “In any case,” Otulissa said, “the ember must be removed as soon as possible from the Palace of Mists. We have to assume that the palace is now vulnerable. It is just too risky to suppose that the Boreal was working alone.”
    Bess sighed. “I am so glad you said that, Otulissa. The owl had battle claws. I killed him with the stone points. But I shudder to think what might have happened if that owl had brought fire into the palace.” A silence fell upon the group. The Palace of Mists possessed a treasury of books, maps, documents, and artifacts that had in the last few years advanced the culture and technologies of owls in ways they could never have imagined.
    “But if we send someone to retrieve the ember,” Bubo said, “that owl could be followed.”
    “That’s true,” Soren said slowly. He blinked his eyes shut for several seconds. Gylfie, Soren’s oldest friend, looked at him. After years of diving into forest fires his beak had lost its tawny glow and was permanentlysmudged. But he still had that dark sparkle in his eyes, and his face feathers had retained their luster. The two owls knew each other so well that words were not always necessary. Right now, Gylfie sensed what Soren was thinking. “Gylfie,” Soren turned to the Elf Owl. “Do your remember back at St. Aggie’s when we discovered that Hortense was actually an infiltrator, and how she told us she had arrived there?”
    “Of course!” Gylfie’s yellow eyes blazed. She knew exactly where Soren was heading with this. “HALO!” she exclaimed.

CHAPTER NINE
Tactics
    H ALO?” Gwyndor asked.
    “High Altitude Low Opening situation,” Otulissa replied. “Of course!”
    “What?” Bubo asked.
    “Huh?” Dumpy said. “What’s altitude?”
    Coryn shot Otulissa a warning glance as she sighed and muttered something about Dumpy’s limited vocabulary. Gylfie began to explain. “It’s a stealth strategy for getting into an area without being noticed. You wait for a night with thick cloud cover, and then you drop into the cloud bank from a high altitude and then down into the target zone.”
    “You see what I’m getting at?” Soren addressed everyone, but his eyes were fastened on Gylfie. “We’ve got a front coming in tonight. As a matter of fact, it’s going to be miserable. Drenching rains, thick oily clouds, sooty as a forest fire—with sleet and all sorts of mess.If we dropped three owls into the