Abarat: Absolute Midnight (36 page)

“You knew all along?”

“That she worked with them?” He looked up at his father out of the maze of pain he had discovered and Candy knew that the Christopher Carrion who was watching the world now would never have been able to make sense of his father’s fears until he had been made to remember the fire. Now he was reconnected to the horror of the burning of the Carrion Mansion, in all its terrible particulars. It wasn’t some ancient tale of a cruel thing done in a cruel time. It was living memory of the dying. The stench of burning hair and flesh and bone. The sound of screaming silenced as those who were crying out inhaled fire. It was a crime committed by the woman who taught him not to feel, that could never be forgotten or forgiven.

But what he knew, she knew. It had always been like that between them.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Christopher said.

“There’s nothing to apologize for, son.”

“You don’t understand. I just didn’t want the Hag to feel it. But your pain—my pain—was too strong. I let it slip away.
She
felt them!”

“What does that mean?” Candy asked.

“She knows he’s here now,” Christopher said. “She knows I’ve seen my father’s face. And she is
very
unhappy.”

Chapter 66
Love, Too Late

T
HERE HAD BEEN NO
dissenting voice from anywhere throughout the glyph. The plan was simple: tell the ship where it was to go, and return with all possible speed to Scoriae.

“How?” said John Mischief.

“Good one,” said John Slop. “How?”

“Easy,” said Gaz. “We
think.”

“We just have to think to make it obey?” Malingo said.

“I hope—”

Suddenly, the glyph responded to its creators’ instructions without a moment’s hesitation. It sped even deeper into the Void and then—when perhaps it sensed that it was so far from Scoriae that it was no longer visible, even to the keenest eye—it swung around.

“See?” Gazza said. “Here we go! I just hope wherever Candy is . . .”

“Do you think she knows we’re coming?” Malingo said.

“Yes,” Gazza said. “She knows.”

Events of great significance were happening out there, Candy knew. But what? She
had to see.

“Window. Window. Window,” Candy said. “Carrion? I need to get to a window.”

It took a moment for the request to pierce Zephario’s anguish. Again, Candy had to say: “A window.”

“What about a window?”

“I have to find one.”

Zephario didn’t waste time with more questions. He reached out, open palmed, and touched the wall.

“I’ll wait with Christopher until
she
comes. You go, Candy. There’s nothing more you can do.
Go on.
I’m ready for her. It’s going to be quite a reunion.”

Even so, Candy paused. She wanted to be there when the Hag finally came face-to-face with the two men she had almost destroyed, but who had each survived, against all expectation. Candy, however, wasn’t here to watch. She was here to do some good.

“Go!” Zephario said. “I’ll find you again, somewhere. If not in this life, then in another.”

She didn’t like leaving him, but she knew she had to. She’d done what she could; now there was other work to do. Exactly what that work was she didn’t know, but her instincts told her it would all become clearer if she could just look out at the island. Perhaps they weren’t even over Scoriae any longer, but had drifted off out into the Void.

She got to the top of the next flight, and found herself surrounded by doors, all identical: gray, metallic, unmarked. She had no idea where she was in the vessel; all she had to rely upon was her instinct. It had served her well before and if she was lucky it would do so again. She just had to focus—

It was no sooner said than done. A door opened in front of her and she was running down a corridor, calling as she ran:

“Come on, windows. Come
on
! I’m here. Where are you?”

The corridor divided. Again she chose. Again she ran.

“
Windows.
Come on.
Where are you?
”

There were noises coming from all around her: through the walls, up from the metal gratings under her feet, and down from the tiled ceiling: shouts, roars, squeals, screams.

And thundering behind it all, the roar of the engines that fired up the storm on the legs of which the Stormwalker trod. She could run forever in this place, she knew, and never find—

Wait! A window!
She sensed its presence like an open eye in the sealed brutal prism of this monstrous place. There was a door to her left. She opened it, moved through a passage to a second door, which again she opened. It brought her into a large chamber filled with what looked like suits of armor made for giants. She threaded her way between them, and came, finally, to the window. She was looking out into the Void.

Directly below her she could see the very edge of the Abarat: the limits of reality. Beyond that there was only Oblivion: a gray place that had neither depth nor detail, simply an unending nothingness.

“Must be a different window . . .” she murmured to herself. “Can’t be this. There’s nothing to see.”

She was about to turn when she realized her error. There
was
something out there in the nullity. And oh, Lordy Lou, it was coming at the Stormwalker at such speed, and so directly, that she had almost missed seeing it.

The glyph was coming out of the Void, set on a collision course with the Stormwalker. There would be no error in this. Her friends, no doubt assuming she was dead, were coming back to greet their executioners with a death blow of their own—

Mater Motley had seen her son through Carrion’s eyes, and had realized two things in the same moment: the first, that Zephario was now here in the sacred Temple of the Nephauree, and second, that the madness she had driven him into after the fire (some pitiful shreds of a mother’s love, incongruous though it was, had kept her from murdering him) had now been driven out of him. She knew without a moment’s thought whose handiwork this was: the witch from the Hereafter had touched him, damn her. It seemed every time Mater Motley encountered the girl she found another reason to despise her.

Well, no matter. It was all easily solved. Finally she would do what she should have done years ago: kill him. Nothing vicious. Just a quick execution to get him out of the way.The neatness of the solution pleased her. She was at the door, already thinking about how she was going to slaughter him, when she heard one of the stitchling Commanders say, “Empress?”

“Not now.”

“Empress.”

“I said
NOT NOW
!” her voice almost bestial this time.

She turned to reinforce her point, but her gaze never reached the Commander. Instead it went to the window, or rather the formless Oblivion beyond the window, and to the shape of a vast blade being flung out of that Oblivion.

At that moment, staring at the glyph as it hurtled toward her vessel, Mater Motley was given a helping of a kind of gruel she had not tasted since her childhood: helplessness.

“I hate you . . .” she said. “You and all the worlds.” But her hatred was not enough to stop the glyph. “They mean to strike us,” she said, her voice dead.

“Then it will break apart,” one of the Commanders said.

“You can’t break something that isn’t solid, you imbecile. It’s made of magic and hope. Damn her.
Damn her.
”

“
Malingo? Gazza! I love you! Don’t do this! Can you hear me? It’s Candy! PLEASE SAY YOU CAN HEAR ME! STOP RIGHT NOW OR YOU’LL KILL YOURSELVES!”

“She said she loved me.”

“Who did?”

“Who’d you think, geshrat?
Her!
Candy! I heard her say she loved me.”

“I’M IN THE STORMWALKER!”

“She said—”

“She was in the Stormwalker. Yes, I heard her this time,” Malingo said.

“She’s alive!” Gazza said. “She’s in the Stormwalker and she’s
alive
!”

“But that’s terrible! She’ll be killed.”

“No. Not my Candy,” Gazza said, with unshakable confidence in the wisdom of his beloved. “She’s clever. She’ll think of something.”

In the Temple of the Nephauree, where Candy had left the father and the son, the great roar of the Stormwalker’s engines ceased the moment the vessel touched the Void. The temple was the wellspring for every bit of magic that kept the Stormwalker aloft, and for a few seconds the conditions of space itself—cold, silent, dead—took possession of the temple. Denied the air to feed their bright flames, the candles were instantly extinguished, every last light pinched out at the same instant.

Though both the silence and the darkness were utter, the two Carrions knew that something had entered the temple: something that even they, who lived lives steeped in nightmares, had no desire to see or hear. One of the Nephauree had crossed from its hiding place behind the stars and was here, in this place.

A primal terror clutched at father and son. Instantly, the sound of the engines came roaring back. But in the few seconds of its absence, its volume had risen by orders of magnitude. It wasn’t the sound of the vessel’s engines themselves that were so loud: it was the sound of the vessel itself. The Stormwalker was reverberating.

“The ship’s shaking, Gazza!” Malingo said.

“I don’t feel anything,” said Gazza.

“Not the glyph. The Stormwalker. Look at it. It’s rocking around. What’s she making it do?”

“Lordy Lou . . .”
Gazza said. “I think we’re causing it. We’re pushing a piece of the Void in front of us—”

“How can an empty place have pieces?”

“Maybe it’s not empty at all. Like space isn’t really space. It’s full of stuff. Gas. Dust. Bits of—”

“Wait!” Malingo said. “Did you feel that? Now
we’re
shaking.”

“I think its trash from the Void,” Gazza said. “It’s breaking up against the ’Walker, and it’s flying right back at us!”

There was evidence that his theory was right. All but invisible energies were seething in the air ahead of the glyph. The garbage of Oblivion swept ahead of the glyph’s broom, breaking like a wave against the Stormwalker then thrown back at the glyph again.

“What happens now?” Malingo said.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Gazza replied. “There’s no turning back. That I
do
know. In ten seconds we’re going to hit. And then—”

“We’re all going to die,” Candy said, her tone quite matter-of-fact.

She hadn’t moved from the window. Where was there left to go? She was looking over the Edge of the World, with Oblivion ahead of her, and with nothing behind except a world of melting stone. She was better off where she was, staring at the glyph that she’d helped bring into being. It was a freedom machine. It would strike the Hag’s Stormwalker so hard it would fling the death-machine back the way it had come.

In the Temple of the Nephauree, in the company of the unseen Other, Zephario Carrion
held his son in his arms, quietly singing to him the “Lullaby of Luzaar Muru.”

“Coopanni panni,

Coopanni panni,

Luzaar Muru.

Copii juvasi

Athemun yezoo.

Coopanni panni

Coopanni panni

Luzaar—”

And then the two vessels struck.

Chapter 67
Yat Yut Yah

G
AZZA
’
S THEORY
—
THAT THE DETRITUS
of the Void, the trash of Oblivion, had somehow gathered up in front of the glyph as it speeded back toward Scoriae—was confirmed when the glyph hit the Stormwalker, pressing it closer to the gaping emptiness. The Empress’s vessel began to shudder, the motion minor at first but rapidly escalating, intensifying the assault of the detritus upon the Stormwalker. The ship’s dark armor cracked in places, and jagged pieces were torn away, their tumbling departure over the surface of the machine stripping away further pieces.

“
Candy?
Where are you? CANDY!” Gazza cried.

Gazza called out to her over and over, but now there was no answer. All he could do was watch the terrible spectacle of the machine in which she was trapped coming apart. It would not be destroyed quickly, he knew. The death-machine had been built, after all, to be a womb of storms. Not only to contain such birthing, but to channel their forces and to walk upon them. It would not succumb easily.

Even so, she was
inside
.

And she wasn’t answering him, even though he kept on calling.

“Candy? Candy? Candy?”

Standing at the window still, watching the collision, the Empress delayed going down to meet with the visitor she knew had entered the temple. The Nephauree were quickly offended; even now she should have been hurrying down to find out what this one wanted. But there was another piece of business more pressing still.

Candy Quackenbush.

The girl from Chickentown had been nothing at the beginning. Just a stupid adolescent who’d fallen off her world into the Izabella and been washed up on the shores of the Abarat. Insignificant, she’d thought; a nobody, who would somehow find her way to the Hereafter again, or would perish quickly in a world that she did not understand.

But she’d been mistaken. The girl was an enigma sealed up inside a conundrum with a tribe of puzzlements, nonsense and contradictions. And she had an uncanny knack for self-preservation, even when circumstances were not promising; even when Otto Houlihan, the Criss-Cross Man, one of the most successful assassins in the Abarat, had slipped and fallen before her.

There was no time for any more fumbled attempts. The girl simply had to die,
now
, in the chaos and confusion of this battle. Nobody would ever know how she’d died, or why. And as to who should do the job, she had no doubt about that. She would. Though she was an Empress now, and should have been above such squalid labor, she was the only person she trusted to do the job—the glyph, the state of her Stormwalker, even her guest in the temple—none of it mattered right now. All that mattered was to kill Candy Quackenbush. The girl was an abomination, a freak, and she would be dead within the hour. Only then, when she was looking down at the girl’s dead face—tasting her eyes and heart and liver—could she be certain that the First Empire of Midnight could begin.

The room where Candy had been standing, for reasons known only to those who had constructed the Stormwalker, was coming apart from both above and below, the metal panels of which the walls were constructed, buckling as though they were little more than pieces of tinfoil. Cracks spread across the window from left and right. Candy backed away from it, fearing it would shatter, and stumbled across the floor—which was collapsing in sections even as she crossed it—to the door. The door frame had cracked, however, and the door had been wedged closed. She wasted perhaps ten seconds trying to force it open before deciding that physical force wasn’t going to work. She was going to have to use the magical kind.

Many years before, her curious mind had plucked out of Boa’s private grimoire—for no other reason than that it was easy to remember—a wielding called the Cri Naz At. The spell was nine syllables, three of which were contained within its name.

Focusing her gaze upon the much-beaten door she recited them now.

“Cri Naz At

By Tu Hu

Yat

Yut

Yah.”

The syllables formed the image of a mallet in her head. Four syllables for its head, the other five forming its handle, which she held tight in her mind’s eye, her fingers wrapped around
Tu Hu
Yat Yut Yah.

The words slammed into the door, and a ragged crater four feet wide appeared in the metal. A shock of pain, all the sharper because it was completely unexpected, ran up through Candy’s hands and arms. This was something new completely: she was making a weapon with a spell, and literally wielding it. Now at least she understood what she was doing.

She gripped
Yat Yut Yah
even harder, and swung it with much greater force. This time, however, she was no innocent. She was entirely in the weapon—her thoughts, her news, her sinew, blood and bones. She was the bridge between the syllables and the force that it wielded. She was what turned words into action, into a force that would not be denied.

She slammed the syllables against the door

—
Cri Naz At By Tu Hu Yat Yut Yah
—

—and it flew apart!

Mater Motley heard the noise of the door breaking apart, but it would have meant nothing to her in the cacophony if it hadn’t been attached to a surge of power from the level below; a magical signature that she instantly recognized. The girl was right there, just a few walls away. She called out to her. If she knew that Quackenbush was close by, then surely the girl knew of her presence as well.

“
I’m coming for you,” the Old Mother said.

In the Temple of the Nephauree, Christopher Carrion, ravaged by fear, whispered a flame into being. It was little more than a flicker, but it was enough to offer him a view of the ziggurat of extinguished candles.

“What are you doing?”
Zephario murmured, his whispered voice carrying, despite the cacophony.

“I have to find the door.”

“You don’t want to see the Nephauree. Trust me.”

It was too late. The flame was already multiplying, leaping from wick to wick as it ascended the ziggurat, swelling to fill the temple with yellow-gold light.

From the corner of his eye—far off across the vastness of the temple—Christopher saw something no larger than a door that was opened just a crack onto a dark place. Then something that lived in that dark place threw the door open, and flowed through it, instantly swelling to become a vast incoherence, which possessed no sign of an anatomy whatsoever.

Gazing upon the Nephauree would certainly have been the death of him, but for the fact that at that very moment the blind man chose to act. He reached into his jacket, and seeing the iridescence that Zephario pulled out if it, the Nephauree unleashed a razor wire shriek that made blood pour from the blind man’s ears, nose and mouth.

It wanted what it saw in Zephario’s hand:
a last fragment of the Abarataraba
. And being the creature it was, it knew only one certain way to secure what it wanted. It would kill.

Sightless though he was, Zephario saw death.

Out of the Nephauree’s meaningless form came a horizontal flight of steel needles. The spears came within a hand’s length of Zephario’s skull, then they were casually deflected, blazing briefly in complaint, then flying out in all directions, dying as they fell. Even so, the Nephauree had not given up on the thought of capturing the errant shred of the Abarataraba. It unleashed another torrential shriek, which were orders of magnitude more distressing than the first. Zephario reeled away from its source though he knew he had no hope of outrunning it, nor indeed had any desire left in him to avoid his execution.

He had done all he could, made his farewells. He was ready for his trial by breath to be over, and in some place far from time and corporeality, have bright death finally begin.

With his back turned to his slaughterer he didn’t see the second descent of needle spears. And their piercing, when it came, was not as painful as the shriek of their maker had been. But the shriek was not silenced. It went on and on, his face streaming with fresh flows of blood from his eyes, like tears shed for the fact that he was not yet free. In his dying throes, he did the only thing he thought would make a difference: he sent the last fragments of his power to the girl, Candy Quackenbush.

“You’ve got nowhere left to go,” Mater Motley said.

Candy glanced back over her shoulder. The Empress of the Abarat was standing behind her, ten yards down the passageway. Everything was vibrating, much of it violently: the walls, the ceiling, the rivets in both. Only the Hag was still, uncannily still in fact, in perfect focus in a shaking world. Every detail of her dress was fixed, every doll hanging in there, each one of them a soul she had stolen, a prisoner: their suffering her constant pleasure.

“Yes is the answer,” Mater Motley told her.

“I didn’t ask a question,” Candy said.

“You were wondering whether I’m going to lock up your soul in one of my little dolls.” She smiled, showing her small gray teeth and mottled gums. “The answer is yes.”