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

up.
    “Exactly, Popo.” Dumpy paused. “Dangerous like swords. Like daggers! They could even be weapons.”
    “Weapons!” they exclaimed. They all knew somewhat dimly about weapons. Some of them had seen owls fly through the Ice Narrows with their battle claws gleaming.
    “Yes,” Dumpy went on, “and the big thing I was trying to tell you about—the big thing that is coming is bad owls. The Guardians of the great tree are going to fight the bad owls and they need all the help they can get. We are going to help them.”
    “But Dumpy, aren’t we just too darned dumb?” the Chubster said.
    “No!” Dumpy exploded. “There will be no more D word!”
    “D word?” they all said, for not one of them had any notion of letters, their sounds, or what they might signify.
    “No more saying the word ‘dumb,’” Dumpy explained. “You are going to become fighting puffins. Fighting the good fight for the noble owls of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. We can do it. But you must believe that you can think. To fish is to be a puffin. To build an ice hollow is to be a puffin, but to think is also to be a puffin.”
    And thus it was that the Dump Brigade began, not just named for its leader Dumpy the Fifteenth, but for three out of four of the puffins, as well, who made up that first brigade and who were also named Dumpy. And their first exercise was target practice with frozen fish. They soon found that the tiny slim capelin were easier to launch and more precise in their trajectory than the rather cumbersome bluescales. Yes, “trajectory.” The puffins did start to speak in such terms as trajectory, velocity, and the speed of the airflow around frozen capelins, bluescales, and herring hurled at distant targets.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Summit Meeting
    W e think that their target date for this…this vile hatching is the night of the lunar eclipse,” said Otulissa. With Cleve at her side, she was perched on the Ice Dagger, which jutted out from the depths of the Everwinter Sea. She and Cleve were telling Coryn what they’d learned in the Ice Narrows.
    Coryn felt his gizzard quake. Owls had been talking forever about the peculiarities of young chicks who hatched on the night of a lunar eclipse. He himself had been born on such a night, as had his mother, and as had Hoole. In the back of his mind, a vague notion had been stirring. It was becoming clearer as Otulissa and Cleve related to him their discovery of the remnants of a strange egg in the Ice Narrows, and the horrible massacre at the Gray Rocks, and finally the alarming encounter with blue owls in the canyon of the Ice Talons. In an all-out war the Guardians might succeed in destroying the eggs and preventing the reentry ofnachtmagen into the world. But the problem of the ember would remain and the ember itself, with its strange unfathomable powers, seemed to attract its own kind of poison from the world and the creatures in it.
    Even though he was deep in thought, Coryn followed what Otulissa was saying. “We have until the eclipse. We don’t know exactly where the eggs are but we have a pretty good idea. Cleve and I feel that if Nyra and the Striga could be lured away even, temporarily, we could destroy the eggs. We are sure more blue owls are being brought in to guard them but they are not there yet. I spoke to you about how we had encountered some kraals and they were an invaluable source of information on this. Cleve has learned much in his practice with Tengshu. I think he and I could handle whoever might be sent in to sit the eggs.”
    Coryn felt a stirring deep in his gizzard. It was almost as if he could feel glints deep within it and then there dawned a sudden brightness in his head, an illumination in his brain. “Well, of course!”
    “Of course what?”
    “The way to get them away—‘lure’ them as you say—is with the ember.”
    “But aren’t we trying to get the ember to the Middle Kingdom? Hide the ember? Not put it outthere as bait!” Otulissa was astonished by Coryn’s line of thinking.
    “Otulissa.” Coryn looked at her steadily then swung his head toward Cleve. “The ember is the only way! Believe me. It is our only chance for getting at those eggs. Besides, I am far from certain that Gup Theosang will give permission to hide the ember in his kingdom. While we wait for word, it will serve as bait.”
    “He’s right, Otulissa,” Cleve said.
    “But how do we do it?”
    “We will start with rumors of the ember.”
    “Rumors of