“Moving parts of what?” Jytte asked.
“Of the timepieces as they stir in the wind. I call the parts the innards. As you know from preying on seal, or any animal, there are innards once we tear their bellies open.”
“Why do you want to know all this?” Stellan asked.
“I’m curious. Intellectual curiosity. I like to build things. And take them apart. Do you like to build things, cubs?” Although Stellan had asked the question, the old bear focused his attention on Jytte.
“My sister likes to build things. She’s an expert in building stuff from snow and ice. She understands how the pieces, the crystals, can lock together,” Stellan replied.
Ah! thought Uluk Uluk. The girl is indeed an ice gazer. Truly gifted! Yes, these were the cubs he’d been waiting for. Unlike the other poor, foolish cubs who were forced to become Tick Tocks, these two might be able to cause real damage before they succumbed to their grisly fate.
“Would you like to play a game? Not many cubs are good at it, but I know you two will excel.”
“We don’t have time,” Stellan began. “We need to—”
Jytte cut him off. “Yes! We love games. Stellan just knows that I’ll beat him. I beat him at everything.”
Uluk Uluk chuckled. “This game requires you to work together, as a team. Come with me.” He led them back over to his worktable. “I’m going to give you a very sturdy timepiece, and you’re going to take it apart. Break it, in fact.”
Jytte shot him a questioning look. “How is that a game?”
“Perhaps ‘challenge’ is a better word. Do you think you’re up to it?”
Jytte narrowed her eyes as she surveyed the timepiece. “I think so.”
“Now let me ask you one very important thing. Do you know what makes a timepiece break?” Both cubs shook their heads. “Friction,” said Uluk Uluk.
“What’s friction?” Stellan asked.
“Resistance, struggle, opposition.”
“A fight?” Jytte asked.
“Not exactly. To work properly, timepieces must have absolutely no friction. No resistance for all the innards—the small parts—to move. One could damage the timepiece if resistance were introduced. Say, grit, or small crystals of granite. The energy would not be transferred correctly. And eventually the clock would stop.” He sighed. “Yes, it would stop completely.”
Uluk Uluk placed a timepiece on a slab in front of them facedown. With a flick of a claw tip he popped off the back. The cubs’ eyes widened as they peered into a cluster of springs and small discs with interlocking teeth. Sparkling jewels were nested in the center of each disc. There was a chorus of little clicks. Jytte tipped her head and listened. The sound reminded her of the infinitesimally small clicks she heard during the crackling moons, when the tiniest splits formed in the hardest ice.
Uluk Uluk clapped his paws together. “Ready? I’m going to time you to see how long you take to stop this timepiece … okay … go!”
Stellan fixed his eyes on the disc with the teeth, the source of sounds. He felt a shiver run down his spine as a strange image formed in his head—the disc eating something. But eating what? Time? In his mind’s eye, he saw those teeth dripping with blood.
A slender forked piece swung to and fro interlocking with each tooth. Jam that and the terrible toothed disc would stop.
Jytte was clearly thinking the same thing. Before Stellan could move, she picked up a grain of grit from the table and dropped it just between the forked piece and the disc. Instantly the clicks were silenced. The movement stopped. Stellan let out a long sigh of relief as the gruesome images in his head faded. The clock was jammed.
“We did it!” Jytte exclaimed.
“Well done, cubs,” Uluk Uluk said. He was clearly pleased, but there was a note of something else in his voice, something that made Stellan uneasy. “Now you know what to do if you ever need to stop a timepiece.”
“Why would we ever need to do that?” Stellan asked, ignoring Jytte’s eye roll.
Uluk Uluk stared at Stellan. “You may find yourself facing challenges you never imagined, cub. All I can tell you is to trust those instincts of yours. They’ll serve you well.”
“All we care about right now is finding our father,” Stellan said stiffly.
“Of course, of course!” Uluk Uluk went and fetched something that hung in a corner of the cell. “Now, cubs, pay attention. This instrument is what I call a red band timepiece. In the time of the Others, it was called a compass watch. It can show you the direction you are traveling in relation to the sun. You know that during the Winter Ice Moons when the sun almost rises there is just a stain of red, a red shadow on the horizon. The same thing happens when it sets in the west.” The cubs nodded. “Well, with this timepiece, you move the hands to the exact position of that stain. It will help you keep directly north, if indeed you know where east and west is from the stain.
“Come, cubs, let’s go outside and try it. The red band should soon be showing in the east. And the east is where the sun rises. You shall want to bear just east of north. You’ll know when you are closing in on the hunting grounds as the ice becomes klarken.” He shot a glance at Jytte whose ears pricked up.
“Klarken?”
“Yes, hunters seek it. It’s almost transparent. It’s a solid precipitation, a reverse vaporization process that forms the ice far in the north when large drops of water freeze during a fog. Very good for hunters. They can almost see through the ice to the seals swimming below. It’s why they go there to those far northern reaches. Best hunting anywhere. And then of course you’ll start to see the formation of the Schrynn Gar clouds that come from the east. Start heading a bit more east when you see those clouds.”
“Why?” Jytte asked.
“It’s the true course to the hunting grounds.”
Uluk Uluk shoved aside the guilt forming in his gut. Yes, if they followed his directions, the Roguers would find them, but if the cubs were as clever as they seemed, they might be able to jam the clock before they were forced onto the wheel with the other Tick Tocks.
Stellan caught fragments of this thought, but there were too many words he did not know—Tick Tocks? And what was a wheel?
They left cell block six by climbing through an opening with no bars. Uluk Uluk moved stiffly as he hoisted his front leg over the ledge. The snow was knee deep on the cubs but ankle deep for Uluk Uluk. It had grown darker and the blackness seemed to shudder around them.
“Now, you see this third hand?” Uluk Uluk continued his demonstration. “This hand we’ll set in the direction you want to go. This other hand is for the red band that you set each morning and evening when the stain appears on the horizon.”
Jytte’s eyes glimmered with anticipation.
“North,” Jytte whispered as if the word was magical. “North to the hunting grounds.”
“Exactly! North to the best hunting grounds,” Uluk Uluk said. The lie slipped off his blue tongue so easily. He just needed to make sure the cubs ended exactly where he wanted them to go: Oddsvall, in the Ublunkyn region near the Ice Cap. “You’ll know you’re drawing close when you reach an island archipelago. The islands sit in the Oddsvall lead—a very wide lead that serves as a passageway for whales. You must watch carefully in this region for the blyndspryee.”
“What’s a blyndspryee?” Stellan asked.
“It is a sudden violent storm with a blinding wind that can arise within the blink of an eye. You must grasp each other, for if you get separated, you might never find each other again. Cubs perish in blyndspryees. It was said that the bones of one cub were once found across the Schrynn Gar gap.”
Stellan stepped forward, extending his paw to take the timepiece. “Thank you, sir. I think this will help us with our mission. Now we must be on our way.”
“I would advise that you stay through this night until the next. Good to be rested.”
“I think we really should be leaving.”
“On an empty stomach? I have som
e well-aged caribou.”
“Boo boo meat!” Jytte clapped her paws.
“We’re not hungry,” Stellan lied. Oh how he wished his sister would just shut up.
“C’mon, now. I smell the halibut on you, but boo boo, as you call it, Jytte, now there’s a meat that sticks to your ribs.”
“Yes, let’s stay, Stellan.”
Uluk Uluk didn’t wait for him to respond. “Follow me, cubs, and I’ll share my boo boo with you.”
“Hey, that rhymes!” Jytte said merrily. “Share my boo boo with you.”
Urskadamus! Stellan thought. This sister would be the death of him. But then again, this same sister had saved his life. He looked at Jytte. She was too thin. They needed the meat. Stellan knew they had to stay.
And so, as the deepening blackness of the night and the shadows of his own fears shuddered around Stellan, he followed silently.
It was a small cell. Hardly big enough to turn around in. It was made of a rough kind of ice that was not the least bit comfortable for sleeping, but Svenna supposed that was the point. And there were no portals through which to view the clock, or the sky. She didn’t miss the clock. But she missed the sky. There was one unexpected benefit—a gift, really, a blessing of sorts from Great Ursus. She had time now to think about her cubs. The endless numbers of the equations were beginning to release their claws from her mind. She would no longer gasp for memories like a dying creature for air.
Svenna raised a paw and scratched out some calculations—not about the clock. No, she was figuring out how long she had been in ice lock. Four days and thirteen hours. She could not glimpse the clock from ice lock, but she diligently kept track of the quarter-hour chimes and the louder ones that rang every hour.
She heard the heavy tread of the jailer come down the corridor and quickly began to erase her claw calculations from the ice floor. She bent over and licked off the last scratchings with her tongue. An odd taste suddenly filled her mouth.
Blood!
“Numerator Svenna,” the guard’s voice called out.
Quickly she sat up, placing her bottom squarely on the ice patch she had been licking.
“Ah, there you are.” The guard held a quill and piece of sealscap parchment in one paw, an abacus in the other. He set down the abacus. “Because of your good behavior these past four days, thirteen hours, fifty-two minutes, and”—he lifted a massive paw as he silently counted his claw tips—“and three seconds, you will be permitted to have quill and parchment to resume your calculations for the Oscillaria. Here is the log. And I shall bring a work clock for pendulum arc measurements.”
Svenna, with the taste of blood still in her mouth, stared at him. “Would tomorrow evening at this hour be sufficient?”
“You mean at eighteen hundred hours, twenty-four minutes, and thirty-five seconds?”
She blinked. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”
The guard slid the parchment and quill through the slot to her. He looked directly at her. “Yes, that is sufficient. But I’d advise you not to ask any more foolish questions.”
As soon as she was certain he was gone, she was on her paws and knees examining the red stain. She determined that it was not fresh blood but old blood. She took another lick. “Oh no!” she groaned, feeling a stab to her heart. Svenna knew beyond a doubt that this was the blood of a cub, possibly a still-nursing cub. She could almost taste the milky sweetness. What had happened to its mother? Was she not able to make a deal—a service swap so her cub could live free?
Svenna picked up the quill and looked at it. It was a mottled dusky gray with touches of brownish red and black, similar to the coloring but not the pattern of a barred owl. “Ah, must be a whiskered screech—like Lyze of Kiel. Wonder what that old sage of an owl, so long dead, would think of all this?” she murmured to herself. Then she worked on the calcs.
She heard twelve bells and decided to stop. She was suddenly very tired. As soon as she lay down, she fell into a deep slumber. She felt herself being pulled away. Far away from the horrid clock to another world, a world of infinite sky and swirling stars. A feather drifted by on the trailing edge of a breeze. Then ahead she saw the owl flying. It looked back. One eye was clenched in a perpetual squint. One foot missing a talon, a deep gouge in his beak. He was as scarred as an old fighting bear. It could be only one bird—Lyze of Kiel, or Ezylryb, as he had been called at the Great Tree of Ga’Hoole. Why had he flown into her dreams? But were these dreams? They seemed so real. The owl dissolved in a thickening fog.
She heard a soft chuffing sound, the kind cubs made when demanding to nurse. She opened her eyes wide. In the corner of her cell, a very tiny cub was hunched over, weeping.
Svenna walked toward it. “Why are you weeping, cub?” she asked gently, wondering how the cub got into her cell.
The cub shook its head and buried its chin deep in the fur of its tiny chest, as if ashamed of something.
“Now, what is it, dear? You can tell me. Are you hungry?” The cub shook its head. Not hungry. That was good, because the last of her milk had dried up.
“So can you tell me why you are crying, little one?”
“I … I have … no shadow!” the cub sobbed.
“No shadow? But of course not. There is no light in here. To have a shadow in a dark place, you need light.”
The cub shook his head. “No. That’s not why. I would not have a shadow on the brightest moonlit night.” He tucked his head deeper into his chest fur.
“Tell me, little one, why would you not have a shadow on the brightest moonlit night?”
“Because I’m not alive.” He paused. “I’m a gillygaskin.”
Svenna inhaled sharply. “A ghost?”
“A gillygaskin.” He raised his head. She gasped. His muzzle was stained in blood.
Then it dawned on Svenna. “You’re a Tick Tock!”
“I was until I died.”
Oh, Ursus, thought Svenna, let my cubs be far, far from here.
Stellan and Jytte had left Uluk Uluk the previous evening, just before the red band started to melt into the darkness of the night. They were now traveling through a sparse wood. Jytte looked down at the timepiece. “We are at four hours and thirty-five minutes and ten seconds from our starting point. So we are exactly on the track that Uluk Uluk set for us.”
“That’s what concerns me,” Stellan replied in a worried voice.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe he doesn’t want us to find our father or the hunting grounds, Jytte.”
“Why would you ever say that? Of course he does.”
There was no of course about it in Stellan’s mind. It seemed odd that this strange bear would take such an interest in them.
“You worry too much, Stellan. Uluk Uluk wants to help us! He must know how to get to the hunting grounds. He must have hunted there once.”
“Once! And that had to be a long time ago. You saw how skinny he was. You said it yourself. Things could have changed.”
“You’re always so suspicious, Stellan. You don’t trust anyone.”
“No, you’re wrong. I just don’t trust Uluk Uluk,” Stellan replied calmly.
Jytte clenched her teeth. She was fuming inside. But they had promised each other that night when Lago left that they would not fight again. Still, not fighting was harder sometimes than fighting. They walked on in icy silence.
They were looking for a river that Uluk Uluk promised would not be frozen but would have good fish to eat. The cubs were hungry. The caribou had not stuck to their ribs as Uluk Uluk had promised. But nothing could squelch Jytte’s excitement as they headed north to find their father. At least ten times since they had left Uluk Uluk, she had burst out gleefully, “We’re really on our way. On our way north!” And every time she said these words, Stellan thought, Something is wrong. We should not have trusted that bear.
They were in a short wood, which meant a forest with very small trees because they were so far above the tree line. The cubs had
often visited such forests in the summertime when the ice receded. But the short wood looked very different in the winter moons. Snow had transformed the landscape. The trees were so stubby that they disappeared under huge drifts of snow, and so did the streams and rivers. Stellan’s stomach growled loudly. Jytte sighed. She felt similar rumblings in her own stomach.
“You know it’s only going to get worse,” Stellan said.
“Why?”
“As we get bigger, our stomachs will get bigger. We’ll have to eat more, or else … ”
“Or else what?” Jytte asked irritably.
“Or else our pelts will hang off us like Uluk Uluk’s and puddle around our feet.”
“Thank you, Stellan, for reminding me how terrible we’ll look soon.”
“Don’t get cranky, Jytte.”
“Being hungry makes me cranky, and your being such a wet pelt makes me even crankier.”
“Well, Jytte, being hungry makes some bears dead. It’s called starving to death.”
Jytte felt her remaining patience with her brother begin to shred. If it wasn’t his hind paw and ruddering problems, it was something else. It was always something with him! He seemed to live to worry. “Urskadamus!”
“You swore, Jytte! What would Mum think?”
“Mum isn’t here to think. She left us. Remember? She left us to go off to look for that … that miserable place.”
“Miserable place? It’s the Den of Forever Frost. The place of noble and valiant bears. Heroes.” Tears began to leak from Stellan’s eyes.
“I don’t want a mum or a da that’s a hero. I just want a plain mum and da.” Jytte stomped her foot. They heard a crack. “Eeeyii!” she screamed. She pulled her foot up. It was drenched. “This is the river, Stellan. We’ve found the river!”
“That’s a river?” Stellan said, looking down. “Well … more of a creek than a river,” he muttered.
“So you’re saying this isn’t a river, Stellan? Look at this. I’m wet up to my knee. Do I have to drown in it to prove that this is the river Uluk Uluk was talking about? Oh, I forgot you wouldn’t even be able to save me. Not with your useless hind paws and ruddering!”