Abarat: Absolute Midnight a-3

by Clive Barker

  “I knows yous,” Shaveos said. “Chickumtomb girl! Candy Quackenbush!”

  It said her name with remarkable clarity. But the words had barely escaped his lips when Candy felt a wave of force, like a narrow wind, rush past her. The air ignited all around her, just for a second, then the ring of light and power passed her by, closing like an iris as it did so. It struck both stitchlings in their chests. They loosed a shock of rage and pain. Shaveos’s claw went limp, freeing Candy’s hair from its grip.

  She instantly turned to look for Zephario.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  He was reaching into the interior of his jacket, mumbling to himself as he did so.

  “Can I help?” she said, reaching toward him.

  Though her fingers didn’t touch him, she sensed how close they were, and retreated from him with guilty haste.

  “That power surge,” she said. “It was you.”

  Behind her, Shaveos bellowed:

  “Candy Quackenbush. She ams here!”

  “Oh, great,” Candy groaned.

  “Cargo Hold Nine! Cargo Hold Nine!” shouted Lummuk.

  “I’ll killser!” said Shaveos.

  And so saying, he stood, picking up his machete as he did so, and ran for Candy, swinging his machete in the air.

  She saw the machete coming, and tried to throw herself out of its path through the door into the next hold. But the thresholds of the doors between the holds were abnormally high, and she stumbled. She might well have cracked her shinbones had she not reached out and caught hold of the door frame. Shaveos swung at her again, and this time she might have perished had he not lost hold of his dinner. At that moment, a pig a charged into him, knocking him over, and taking Candy with him in the process.

  Candy was shoved aside by the stitchling’s bulk. She lost her grip of the door frame and fell back among the pigs. There were several seconds when all Candy could see was a blur of wet snouts and curly pink tails, then she sat up, in time to see Lummuk stagger away from Shaveos, whose machete was buried deep in Lummuk’s head: so deep that the blade was entirely hidden for several inches of its length before its painted end could even be seen.

  Shaveos reached out and caught hold of the machete’s handle as his companion toppled backward. This had two consequences. One, it stopped Lummuk from falling backward; indeed it pulled him back into an upright position, where he teetered for several seconds, while Shaveos twisted the machete this way and that, attempting to free it.

  Candy was watching Shaveos’s face when he finally worked the blade loose. She saw his expression shift from frustration to pleasure—there! The blade was coming free!—only to decay seconds later into puzzlement, more than puzzlement. Fear. And Candy knew why.

  It was only common sense.

  She saw Shaveos try to push his machete back into the hole he’d just unstopped, like a man with a fat cork trying to fit it back into the narrow opening of a bottle from which a djinni was escaping. It was a lost cause. Still he pushed, and as he did so the mud from Lummuk’s head leaped at him. So fast. So horribly fast! Tentacles, black as the stitchling’s eyes had been, but shot through with smears of vivid color that had surely never been in gray-brown muck mined on Gorgossium. Shaveos knew he was in trouble. He let go of the machete and instead used his free hand to stem the flow of mud.

  “Lummuk! Shaveos ams sorry! Accident! Oopsies! Lummuk! She ams to blame! The—” He drew breath and yelled: “CANDY QUACKENBUSH!”

  The mud that had once been Lummuk didn’t care about his explanations. It continued to crawl up Shaveos’s arm, leaping over his fingers, and then—just as Shaveos drew breath to yell Candy’s name one more time, Lummuk oozed into his open mouth.

  Candy shook herself out of her trance of curiosity and turned to Zephario.

  “We should get—” she started to say.

  But the blind man had already gone.

  Chapter 64

  No Plan B

  “WHY HAVEN’T WE FALLEN out of the sky?” Gazza said.

  “Maybe because we haven’t stopped moving?” Malingo suggested, though there was precious little conviction in his reply. “How far have we come?”

  Gazza looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re a lot farther from Scoriae than I thought we were.”

  Malingo got to his feet and turned around to look back through the glyph’s semitranslucent walls. It was a beguiling, rapturous spectacle, with layer upon layer of figures, their colors shimmering toward the stern of the glyph. There were people in all directions, some assembled in groups, many solitary. But he resisted the temptation to study them too closely. He needed to focus his attention on the northern coastline of Scoriae.

  Gazza had been right. They were indeed a lot farther from Scoriae than he thought they’d be. If he squinted, he could just see the area of flat ground where the internment compound had been located, and beyond it, Mount Galigali, which was no longer the inert rock it had been for as long as any of these people could remember. A gaping hole had been torn open in its flank, and liquid magma blazed from the wound, hawking up phlegm-fire to spit at the sky.

  “Galigali’s gonna go bang,” Malingo said.

  “Hasn’t it already?”

  “I think it’s got more destruction in it than the few fireworks we’ve seen so far.”

  “Really? Funny, I feel like Galigali right now. I’m going to go bang. But a good bang. No . . . a great bang,” Gazza said.

  “Oh? What’s brought this on?”

  “Not what, Malingo, who.”

  “Oh, her. What was it that got ya? Her eyes, right? Blue, brown. Blue, brown.”

  “But each time, a different blue.”

  “A different brown.”

  “Lordy Lou,” Gaz said.

  Malingo’s smile withdrew, only lingering in his eyes.

  “I didn’t realize. I’m sorry,” Gaz said.

  “What’s to be sorry for?” Malingo asked.

  “You don’t look very happy now. I didn’t realize—”

  “We geshrats seem to always want more than fate has given us.”

  “That’s not just a geshrat problem.”

  “No?”

  “No. When you like something . . . even love something . . .”

  “Or even love, yes.”

  “Yes. Love. That’s the word.” His voice got louder with every syllable. “Why not use it?”

  “Perhaps more quietly?” Malingo said.

  “Why? She makes me happy. Crazy-happy. And I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but she’s . . . I don’t know . . . hypnotizing me with those eyes. Blue, brown. Blue, brown.”

  “You do sound crazy. Be careful,” Malingo warned him. “Everybody can hear what you’re saying.”

  “Fine by me,” Gazza said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” He raised his voice to be sure he could be heard by everyone in the glyph. “I love the girl who brought us together, Candy Quackenbush. None of us would still be alive if it weren’t for her,” he reminded them all, his voice coming back to him in mysterious echoes off the vaulted ceilings and the nine-sided chambers. “But we’re not safe yet. The Stormwalker that’s waiting for us back there is even bigger than our glyph, and it contains an army of stitchlings: one stitchling for every one of us. A knife for every heart. That’s what Mater Motley has planned for us. But we’re free and we’re going to stay free. The problem is there’s seven thousand knives they haven’t used yet.”

  There were murmurs of assent from all directions, high and low, port and starboard.

  “Does anybody disagree?” Gazza yelled.

  He let the silence play out for a few seconds, to give any dissenting voice a chance to be heard. But there were no objections raised. Candy was the heroine of the Hour.

  “All right,” he said, smiling. “So then it’s agreed. We have to go back. We’re—”

  “Wait.”

 
; The voice of a woman came from somewhere on the starboard side.

  “Before we turn around, there’s something everybody should know. The vessel the Empress has come after us in is a death-ship. It’s called a Stormwalker. I saw copies of the plans for its construction. It could blow us out of the skies in a heartbeat.”

  There were murmurs of suspicion:

  How did she see plans for a thing like that?

  Whose side was she really on?

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t on the side of what’s right,” the woman said. “I want Mater Motley brought to trial for murder. My brother, Kaltu Mothrass, was tortured to death by her and her seamstresses.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t have time—” Malingo started to say but the question had been asked and the woman was already answering it: “I’m Juna Mothrass. My brother and his wife, Geneva Peachtree—”

  “Wife?” Malingo said quietly to himself.

  He had spent many hours in Geneva’s presence since they had all banded together around Candy, but not once had he heard Geneva make any mention of a husband, which would have sounded odd under any circumstances, but was particularly strange when the husband you were talking about was one of the most famous revolutionaries of Abarat. Malingo needed to be certain that this woman was who she claimed to be.

  “So, Juna—” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “—do you know Geneva well?”

  “Very well.”

  “Well enough to tell me which book she knows by heart from beginning to end?”

  The fact that Malingo had presented Juna with such a demanding question had a murmur of anticipation to make the colored compartments of the vessel churn, color flowing with color, creating hues that only existed in the ethereal or metafictional dimensions.

  “Of course,” Juna Mothrass replied without hesitation. “The Testaments of Pottishak. She knows every word.”

  “Is that the right answer?” Gazza said.

  “Yup,” Malingo told him. “She knows Geneva. We should listen to her.”

  “I don’t know much,” Juna said. “All I can say with any certainty is that if we try to come at the vessel from either side, we’ll be blown out of the sky.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Gazza said. “Are we supposed to leave Candy on that island? Look at it! Look!”

  He had picked, quite by chance, a particularly opportune moment to direct everyone’s attention toward Scoriae, because two and half seconds later the top of Mount Galigali, which had been a shape so recognizable it had been used on Ž500 paterzem notes without need of identification for many years, blew off. A column of liquid stone poured heavenward, blackening a sky that was only just beginning to clear the dirt from the sockets of the stars when the flame turned into an oily-black smoke that blinded them again. Meanwhile, titanic shovelfuls of infernal cinders rolled smoking down the slope, pitched so far by the force of the eruption that some of them flowed down onto the beach, where they rolled into the water, throwing up clouds of steam.

  “I think there’s only one way to go,” Juna said.

  “And where’s that?” Gazza said.

  “We go straight at the Stormwalker.”

  “You mean fly straight at that thing?”

  “That’s suicide, surely,” said somebody else.

  “On the contrary. I think it’s our only chance because it’s the last thing she’ll expect. She thinks we’re frightened of her.”

  “We are,” said John Slop.

  “No,” said Gazza. “We’re not. And if we admit to fear, then we’re already lost.”

  “So what’s going to stop us colliding with her?”

  “Nothing. We will collide with it! And push it back, directly into the mouth of the volcano.”

  “Is the glyph strong enough to survive the impact?”

  “I don’t know,” Juna said. “We’re only as strong as our will to survive.”

  “All right,” said Gazza warily. “Let’s call that Plan A. Who has a Plan B?”

  There was a very long silence, which Malingo eventually broke.

  “Apparently there is no Plan B,” he said.

  “Well, that keeps it simple,” said Gazza. “We fly straight at the Stormwalker and take our chances.”

  “What will they do? What will they do?” The Empress paced back and forth in front of the window, watching the glyph. “They can’t stay out there forever.”

  “Maybe they’re not out there,” her grandson said.

  “What nonsense are you talking? I can see them with my own eyes.”

  “Who knows what’s really out there? We could be one great big mirror. We could be looking at a distorted version of ourselves.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous. I have access to every form of magic in the Abarat. And I have moved on to search other worlds for new sources of power.”

  “Are you still keeping all that a secret, Grandmother? Because it really isn’t much of one is it? Not any longer. I followed you as far as the Starrish Door—the one that leads to the Zael Maz’yre—years ago.”

  “No,” the Empress replied coldly. “You couldn’t have.”

  “Oh, don’t fret yourself. I got no further than the door. How could I? All those choices. doors with doors. And within every door, a destination. Of course I had no idea which one you’d taken, and of course I was deathly afraid of choosing the wrong one. Who knows where I would have been delivered? I was afraid I’d never find my way back. So I left, and went back to my work, and never—”

  “Hush!” she said sharply.

  “What?”

  “We have visitors.”

  The monotone in which she spoke was a voice Carrion had learned to despise—no, to dread. It was worse than anger, that voice. Anger had a beginning and an end. Even if it went on for weeks it would run out of fuel eventually. But the nullity from which this voice arose was his grandmother’s permanent state of being. It was her speaking from the grave into which she had been born, as she was fond of saying; the hole of dirt, worms and despair, which was the lot of all living things.

  This was the harsh, unforgiving law that Carrion had been raised on. And every time he saw that look on his grandmother’s face, and heard the almost metallic harshness in her voice, the brutal lessons of his childhood came back to him as though her needle had only pierced his lips yesterday.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “Are you going or not?”

  Christopher had drifted further into memory than he’d realized. He’d missed a piece of the conversation, it appeared. He knew from childhood it wasn’t wise to lie.

  “I was distracted. Memories. Nothing important. You have all my attention now.”

  “Good. Because we have a problem and you’ll have to fix it. I need to stay here in case they make a move.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Don’t you feel it?”

  “No.”

  “Look.”

  She pointed to the ground, and threw down one of the wieldings he especially loathed. This was one of the Nephauree’s specialties, Carrion suspected: a violation of spatial geometry and physics alike. Though he had not moved a step, he now felt the ground shift beneath him. When his eyes dropped to the bare marble he was no longer standing on solid ground. But everything had shifted. The place where Carrion was standing now dropped away steeply, as it did on the opposite side, where his grandmother was standing on a steep slope, staring down into the depths of the ship. The floors and walls between the battle floor and the hold had been erased, essentially, by the power of the Nephauree’s magic.

  There was chaos down there. Pigs were running around, squealing wildly. And in the midst of the pigs were two stitchlings. One of them was grievously wounded, a machete buried in its face. Mud continued to leap up out of the wound, its matter creating a gathering on the chest of the second stitchling, who lay sprawled on the ground.

 
The Empress took a steep step down the chaotic wall of the pit.

  “You!” she said.

  It was neither Shaveos or Lummuk who replied to her. It was the third entity down there: the one squatting on Shaveos’s chest, that looked up and spoke. Its face was still a work in progress, invisible fingers pushing the mud of its features around two holes for eyes—a slash of a mouth. But for all its crudity, it knew how to make words.

  “What do you want?” it said, its voice a raw rasp.

  “I want some respect from you, to start with! Do you know who you are addressing?”

  “What makes you think I’d care?” the mud replied.

  “Carrion?” the Hag said. “Go down and fetch me that skinless piece of filth. Carrion?”

  Only now did she look up at the place where she’d last seen her son. He was no longer standing there.

  “Carrion?”

  “Carrion!”

  “CARRION!”

  Chapter 65

  Lullaby

  CANDY DIDN’T SEE ZEPHARIO ahead of her at any time during her pursuit, but her instincts told her she was on the right track. They also told her that she needed to pick up her pace otherwise she was going to lose him, even though he was the blind one and she the sighted. Luckily the old man had left a trail of air tinged with magic: drifts of color like chalk dust the color of his robes, falling away through the murky air. They weren’t, she thought, accidental. They only appeared at places where she might very well have made a wrong decision: turned right instead of left, or chosen the wrong one of several doors.

  But even with the assistance he was giving to her, the space between them was getting bigger. And she certainly would have lost him eventually if help hadn’t come to her from a most unexpected source.

  Mater Motley.

  It was the Hag herself whom Candy heard call out:

  “Carrion? Carrion! CARRION!”

  Candy halted for a moment, and waited for the voice of the Hag to echo off the walls all around her. When they finally died away she heard the sounds of footsteps. It was Zephario she thought she heard, his running slowed by fatigue, but still moving fast. He was nearby too, just above her.