Abarat: Absolute Midnight (33 page)

Chapter 60
Abarataraba

O
N THE FAR SIDE
of the camp, close to the fence that bounded the northern end of the compound, John Slop, whose head was positioned close to the top of Mischief’s left antler, and therefore had the best vantage point of all the brothers, said: “Something’s happening over on the rock.”

“I said we shouldn’t have wandered so far,” John Fillet remarked. “Eddie? Did you hear what Slop said? Wait! Where’s Eddie?”

“It’s spreading . . .” John Slop murmured.

“
What’s
spreading?” Mischief said.

“Eddie!”
Fillet yelled.

“Please,” Serpent said, “there’s no need to make such a song and dance about it. Eddie’s perfectly capable of—”

“Is anybody paying attention to these storm clouds?” John Sallow said.

“I’ve been watching them.”

“
That’s
the problem. That cloud.”

“Sallow, it’s on the far side of Galigali.”

“Has anybody seen Eddie?”

“No.”

“I’m warning you,” said Sallow. “That’s not a normal storm. It’s spreading.
Look!
Even in the last couple minutes—”

“It’s getting bigger,” said John Slop.

“
What’s
getting bigger?” said John Fillet.

“Candy’s sitting on the rock, and she’s giving . . . I don’t know what she’s got . . . it’s bright. And it’s being passed on. It looks like she’s got a flame and she’s just passing it on. And it’s . . .”

“Spreading?”

“Yeah.”

“We should just go back over there and see what it is for ourselves,” said Mischief.

“Now you’re just being sensible, John. Don’t do that. You’ll take all the fun out of things,” said John Drowze mockingly.

“We can’t go anywhere until we find Eddie,” Fillet said.

“I see Eddie!” John Sallow said. “He’s over there doing a scene from
Mythfit Unbound.
”

“How do you know it’s
Mythfit
?”

“He’s standing in a bucket.”

“Ohhh,” said all the brothers in unison.

The Abarataraba had begun its work. Even though there were almost two thousand people between the rock where Candy was sitting and the spot where the John Brothers were arguing, Candy could hear their circular exchanges quite clearly. She could hear too, Eddie’s recitation of the speech from
Mythfit Unbound
:

“And the world’ll go on without me,

This is certain sure.

Should you choose to doubt me,

I’ll leave and close the door.”

If she’d simply heard clearly that collection of voices, given the distance between them, and the number of people who were filling that distance, it would have been remarkable. But there was more. A great deal more. She could hear with the same extraordinary clarity the voices of all the people who were talking in the space between them. Not only was she able to hear them all talking as though she were standing a step away from them, but she was also able to make sense of every single voice, her mind a crowd of attentive Candys, giving to every speaker a slice of her mind’s pie, for them and them alone.

There was, in addition to her many listening selves, one Candy who heard it all, and heard the pattern in the words, and gently, as the wind might carve a cloud with subtle gusts, moved each where she needed them to go, without their knowing she was present.

She wasn’t alone in this endeavor. She had given Malingo, who had created a glyph with her before, the charge of guiding Gazza and Betty and the Johns while she kept Zephario Carrion to work with her. He would either prove to be their greatest ally or a complete liability. But Candy was spreading a vision, which Carrion had seen quite clearly before Candy had departed from the rock. They would all have to work together to conjure a glyph so massive it would carry them out of this place of death before Mater Motley’s vessel appeared. There wasn’t time for doubt or weakness. Like all structures, their escape glyph would only be as strong as its weakest creator. Somehow Candy had to galvanize these sad, broken people, show them that there was a life after Midnight.

She was giving them all a piece of the Abarataraba as a touchstone, a way to hold onto the vision she had just shared with them.

But even when they had a piece of the Abarataraba’s power to lend them strength, it was difficult not to succumb to despair. Everywhere Candy went she heard the same suspicion being offered up as to why the camp had been built in this particular spot. It wasn’t that the Empress was trying to hide her atrocities behind Mount Galigali. It was something far grimmer. No more than three-quarters of a mile from where the camp was situated, lay the Edge of the World. The waters of the Sea of Izabella simply ended and plunged over the edge of the Abarat and into Oblivion. It was into those foaming waters, and then over the edge and into the Void, that all of Mater Motley’s enemies, once slain, would go, to be carried away by the waters into the silent Abyss below.

It was here the maps of the Abarat ended. There was nothing documented beyond that point. No other worlds had ever been seen in that bleak firmament. Nor suns, nor moons.

Even Candy couldn’t quite shake off the power of that image; the knowledge that if she failed to make this glyph a reality then her body would be carried away with the bodies of everyone who’d been executed, and all that she had seen or dreamed of would go down and down into that pitiless void and be lost forever.

It
had
to work. That was the thought she needed to hold onto.

And she had reason to hope; tentative tremors of affirmation in the air, as the first of the people who had been touched by her vision of escape, and given a tiny but significant boost in their strength by the fragment of the Abarataraba they had been given, rose like signals above the heads of those who’d willed them to appear. She let a line of thought go out to the signal closest to her, from which it gained another spurt of strength and more on to the next closest, and the one after that, the vision gaining clarity as each connected with each. The path of her first thought was set now, and it had no further need of her, fueled as it was by the thoughts of all those it had already met on its way.

She turned around and sent a second thought on its way, out into the vessel that her vision and passion were inspiring; a vehicle built from the intersection of two magics. One was ancient and external. It was rooted in the essence of things: was a thing red or blue or gold? Was it earth or sky or water? Was it alive or dead or hanging in the balance, waiting to be judged? This was the primal power of the Abarataraba. The second magic was rooted in the limitless particulars of living beings, each carrying their hopes and doubts and rage to the furnace where the vessel of their salvation might be made manifest.

Here was the mystery of creation, played out on a field of dirt and desperation. Candy could see it, this mystery. It was happening all around her. Out of the common earth of living beings, fragile and afraid, came the extraordinary forms of a glyph beyond the conceiving of any single mind. She heard the voices of her fellow prisoners, daring to hope aloud; one voice whispering a second; two voices whispering a third, fourth and fifth:
I dreamed this. . . .

We’re not dead yet.

And we’re

NOT

GOING

TO

DIE.

“The answer to
how
is to
do
,” Candy said. “That’s all there ever is. We’re not scattered pieces. We’re all one hope, one will, one dream.”

The Abarataraba was alight in her own body now, throwing off hundreds of blazing notes, each trailing lines of light, sketching the glyph against the sky. It was a crude rendering, but it showed the congregation gathered below the scale of their endeavor. And rough though the sketch was, there was something potent in its chaos. It was a vessel, this glyph, designed to hold every kind of thing that the desire for freedom called forth: whether color, form, mark or meaning. However disparate the visions were—the glyph would somehow turn their energies to its purpose.

Some visions were painted in color that had the clarity of myth: their blues were as vivid as the skies over paradise, their reds redder than any blood-rose love had ever bruised into bloom. Others were nameless, eruptions of color behind color: iridescences and luminosities, stains and corruptions, in which the glyph found the phantoms of forms that bespoke their conjurers’ dreams. A two-headed ax bound by ropes of smoke, another roped by rivers. A temple of carved divinities, each painted another unknown color, their heads crowned with the garlands of mercurial blossom and barbed cloud.

Candy felt a wind blow through the colors that she held, scattering them like the embers of an ancient fire, and she was astonished to feel a portion of her soul go with them, conforming not only into the shape of wind and flame but into a third shape, which was that of their antiquity.

Like all sacred works, it was both momentary and eternal. The intertwining of thoughts rising from the prisoners like branches from dreaming trees; the spinning prayers casting entreaties out to any thing in any heaven that might come to their rescue; the tiny fires that took a piece of Candy’s soul for fuel as they went to find the Lighter of all fires, the Begetter of all winds, the Lover of all souls, and carry Its holy song back to lift the brimming vessel up upon Its music.

She was a constellation now, pieces of her soul speeding in search of Deity, while the sigils of her flesh, bone and mind were gathered up by the glyph’s authority, and elegantly placed in the vast design where all the ley lines of its structure converged. She knew what she’d been called to do. For all its vast intelligences, the vessel had need of a pilot; and she had been called to duty.

“Lady?”

She was not alone: Malingo was rising to the left of her, Gazza to her right. And beyond them, and behind her, and in front, all the other authors of this vast device rose into its midst, their entrance instructing further reinventions, as though their very presences caused the system to convulse with bliss, turning every thought and breath and bead of sweat into an exaltation.

One part of Candy—impatient, doubtful,
human
—wanted the glyph to get underway, to carry them all off before their executioners arrived. But another part of her—a quieter, calmer part that was perfectly content to die if death was the price of enlightenment—took too much pleasure in the splendors visible from her place at the vessel’s heart to let fear of what might come steal what she was witnessing.

“All are boarded,” Gazza said.

And, as if on cue, the first blind burn of lightning came, turning Galigali into a black pyramid against a heaven of flawless white.

“Oh, Lordy Lou,” Malingo murmured. “We’re too late.
The Hag is here!
”

Part Seven
Oblivion’s Call

The Place is Where.

The Question How.

The Hours are When.

If Never, Now.

—Found written on the wall
of an abandoned asylum on
Gorgossium.

Chapter 61
Missing

“G
RANDMOTHER?”

Mater Motley had put her hand, palm out, against the battle- deck window. Though her head was bowed, Carrion could see her anguished features reflected in the smoke-smeared glass.

“What . . . have they
got
?” she said.

“I don’t understand,” Carrion told her.

She, very slowly, looked round at him. There was naked disgust on her face, either at her own lack of foresight or at her grandson’s stupidity, perhaps both.

“Do you not feel the barbs raking your skin?”

Carrion considered the question, looking down at his hands as he did so, as though to silently interrogate them.

“No,” he said. “I feel nothing.”

Then his eyes went up to his glass collar. Inside, he saw his remaining nightmares were behaving strangely. Depending on circumstances, they behaved in one of two ways. When feeling peaceable, they slowly swam around, warily studying the world outside their dreamer’s collar. When they were aroused, however, either by rage or a desire to protect their maker, they would lash and thrash like electric whips, causing the fluid they all breathed to become milky and laced. But now they were doing something they’d never done before. They were perfectly still, the entire length of their bodies pressed against the glass, so as to be as close to their window as possible.

“Whatever it is you’re feeling, my children are feeling too.”

“Your
children
?” Mater Motley said, her expression of disgust souring with contempt.

“Yes, dearest Grandmama. I know you much prefer to burn your children and their children, but I take pleasure in the company of mine.”

“You’d do well to remember that you were the one I kept from the flame, do you not?”

“It’s never far from my thoughts,” Carrion replied. “Truly. I know I owe you my life.” The Empress’s expression sweetened at this. “As I do my scars.” And quickly soured again. “As I do my purpose. My very reason for living.”

“And what is your purpose?”

“To serve you, lady,” Carrion said.

He met her gaze, his eyes the color of the midsummer sea—a gleaming, glittering blue that concealed unfathomable depths: black, blacker, blackest.

All but one of his children that had retreated to the inside of his collar had detached themselves, and were now looking at her. Did they understand the meaning of the conversation between the old woman and their master? Did they understand her contempt and his subtle mockery? It seemed they did. When he ceased to study her, they too looked away, returning their gaze as did he, to the new form out the window.

The vessel hawked up another limb of lightning, and spat it down upon the bleak flank of Mount Galigali. The force of the strike threw up a cloud of vaporized rock in the midst of which fell a hail of lava boulders, which would have beaten holes in a vessel less well designed than the Stormwalker. A number of them struck the battle-deck window, but for all her sensitivity to the nuances in the air, the assault of shattered stones didn’t perturb the Empress in the least. She simply stared unthinking out at the billows of pulverized rock pressing against the battle-deck window.

“Call in the Commanders,”
she instructed Carrion.
“Quickly now!”

This time, Candy knew, there would be a kind of thunder to follow the lightning. It wouldn’t be the rolling growl of burning air, but the boom of guns.

Mater Motley wasn’t going to let her prisoners go without a fight.

“Candy? Candy!”

It was easy enough to identify the speaker: it was Zephario. But it was a lot more difficult to work out precisely where he was located. She had lost contact with him as the construction of the glyph had escalated, and she’d almost forgotten, in the heat of the moment, the deal that she’d made with him. He had given her the means to make this escape possible, in exchange for her attempting to connect him with his lost child. He had kept his side of the bargain, and now it was her turn. It had to happen
immediately
. There’d be no other time.

“Gazza,” she said. “I’m going to have to leave you in charge of getting this glyph and everyone inside it away from Mater Motley. Do whatever you have to do.”

“Where are you going?”

“To keep my promise.”

“Are you crazy?” Gazza said.

“A promise is a promise.”

“Even when you make it to a
Carrion
?”

“He can hear you, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Gazza said. “He’s going to get you killed. And I—” He growled, his brow in knots. “Why can’t I—can’t I?”

“We have to go,” Candy said.

“I have stuff to say.”

“Then say it.”

“I love you,” Zephario said.

“Oh?” said Candy. “Well, that’s sudden.”

“I’m speaking for the young fellow here.”

“Oh,” Candy said matter-of-factly. Then, comprehending, “
Oh.
You do?” she said to Gazza.

“Yes,” Zephario replied again. “He loves you with every last bone in his body,” Zephario replied.

Gazza smiled confidently. “There’s more,” he said.

“There’s no time for more,” Zephario said.

The look of confidence had gone from Gazza’s face. His eyes looked at Candy, ashamed of the young man who stared out from behind them, unable to say the words.

“Zephario and I need to go,” Candy said.

Gazza simply nodded.

“I’ll be safe up there.” They looked at each other. “I wish it was different,” she said, staring at his sadness with her own. “You know what I mean—”

“Yes.”

And his knowing was enough for her. Maybe there’d be another time, when things were different. But for now . . .

“I’ll see you soon, then. . . .” Candy said, and with perfect timing the glyph released her, extending its own structure twenty feet or so, allowing her to drop down below, without injury, onto the shattered ground of Mount Galigali.

The Empress had begun to give her instructions. Time was of the essence, she let it be known. Time, and that the job be done flawlessly.

“In a few moments,” she told her Commanders, “the Stormwalker will emerge from the cloud of volcanic dust that the lightning limb has caused to temporarily blind the vessel. At which point,” she went on, “I will have a comprehensive view of the site of execution. We should expect some minor attempts to resist. These people have foolishly tried to live by their own laws, refusing to obey the judgments laid down by their superiors. Obviously no Empire can sanction the presence of such individuals in its midst. They will—”

“Leave before their executioners arrive?” Carrion suggested.

“Do you find this funny?”

“No, Grandmother, I believe what you say is absolutely correct, and these iconoclasts should be executed. But—”

“But
nothing.
A knife for every heart, remember?”

“Of course.”

“Well?”

“You have the knives, I realize. But regrettably the hearts have already departed.”

“Impossible.”

The vessel was emerging from the smoke now, and what Carrion could see was visible to a growing number of soldiers. The camp was empty. The prisoners had gone.

“Where are they?” she said, quietly at first. Then more loudly: “They were here! Six thousand, six hundred and ninety-one prisoners! The gates are still closed. THEY WERE HERE!”

“Two of them
are
still here,” one of the commanders—a small, gray-skinned stitchling called Chondross—pointed out.

“The compound is empty.”

“They’re not in the compound any longer, my lady,” Chondross told her. “They’re down there on Galigali.” The stitchling pointed out of the window down at the boulder-strewn slope. “Do you see them?”

“It’s Candy Quackenbush,” Carrion said.

“Of course it would be her,” the Empress said. “She was bound to be in this chaos somewhere.”

“Who’s with her?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whoever he was, he shouldn’t have gotten so close to her. It will be the death of him. I need a gunner!” she demanded.

No sooner had she uttered the words, than one stitchling called out: “Empress. I have the gunner ready at the bows. She has acquired your target.”

“Gunner?” the Empress yelled.

The gunner’s image appeared.

“Here, my Empress,” she said.

“Targets,” Christopher said.

“Ah, there you are,” the Empress said. “Two stupid animals standing in our way. Thank you, Christopher.”

“My pleasure, Empress. And my duty. Shall I have them killed?”

The image of Candy Quackenbush and her traveling companion came up on the Window. The latter had been extensively scarred—his face little more than a rigid mask of disfigured tissue; out of which he gazed blindly. Despite his maiming there was something in the man’s bearing that caused Mater Motley to hold back for a few moments.

“I have the target in my sights, Empress. Shall I fire?”

“Wait . . .”

She brought the Window closer to her so as to better study the mask of scar tissue for some clue as to the face it had been, before its destruction by—

“Fire,” she murmured.

It was a simple, stupid mistake. Gunner Gh’niemattah had been trained to respond to an order without hesitation. The syllable her Empress uttered was barely audible, but she responded to the sound of that one syllable by simply pulling the trigger.

It was impossible not to be astonished by the speed with which the girl from the Hereafter and the blind man beside her were erased by bursts of brilliance as each rocket found its target.