Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1

by Clive Barker

  Tempus, meanwhile, was no more than twenty strides away, racing over the stones.

  “Halt,” he yelled. “Both of you. Halt!”

  Candy ignored him. She climbed back into the glyph, her thoughts entirely focused on the next challenge: getting the craft into the air.

  “What are the words?” she said to Malingo.

  “Nio Kethica.”

  “Of course. That’s it.”

  Candy took a deep breath and closed her eyes, picturing the glyph rising into the air. Then she spoke the words: “Nio Kethica.”

  The response from the glyph was instantaneous. The vehicle’s engine made a strangled choking sound, and for a moment it seemed the craft was going to ascend. It rocked and shuddered, but unfortunately there was no upward movement. Candy looked up. Tempus was getting closer by the moment.

  “Nio Kethica!” she said again. “Come on, glyph! Nio Kethica!”

  There was more noise from the craft’s engine, but it wasn’t promising.

  “It’s a lost cause!” Malingo said, his eyes on the approaching Fugit Brother. “We should get away—”

  Before he could finish, Julius Fugit made another lunge from the hole beside the glyph. He failed to catch hold of Candy, but his hands seized the craft. The vehicle started to tip over. Candy let out a yell as she slid from her seat toward Julius’ grinning face.

  Malingo caught hold of her arm and pulled her back, scrambling to get them both out of the craft. As he did so, Candy tried one last cry of “Nio Kethica!” in the hope of awakening the glyph’s engine. But it didn’t work.

  “Come on!” Malingo yelled, hauling her over the side of the toppling machine. He was just in time. As Candy stumbled backward into Malingo’s arms the glyph fell over, trapping Julius Fugit beneath its weight.

  “Help me, brother!” Julius yelled.

  Tempus was two or three strides away. “I’m coming for you, brother!” he yelled, and threw himself on the craft, tearing at its decaying structure to reach his sibling.

  “Don’t make me wait, Brother Tempus!”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “I’m sure you are, brother. I’m sure you are.”

  “We’re in trouble…” Malingo murmured to Candy.

  He was right. It would take Tempus only a minute or two to free his brother, then the two of them would come in pursuit of their quarry with fresh zeal. And where were Candy and Malingo to go? The beach offered nothing by way of hiding places, and they couldn’t outrun the Fugit Brothers for very long.

  Candy shook her head in desperation.

  “It can’t end this way,” she said to herself.

  For all the grimness of their prospects, she couldn’t believe it was all going to end here. After the journeys she’d taken, and the visions she’d seen she couldn’t die on a deserted beach at the hands of a couple of crazy brothers. It wasn’t right! She knew in her heart that she had more journeying to do, more visions to see. Wasn’t that why the three women had allowed her that glimpse into the mysteries of her life before she was even born? They were preparing her for something, telling her to be ready to solve some major secrets.

  The Fugit Brothers weren’t going to put a stop to all that. She wasn’t going to let them.

  “It can’t end here,” she said aloud.

  “What can’t?” Malingo replied.

  “Our lives. Us.” Malingo looked startled by the fierceness in her voice, and in her eyes. “I won’t let it.”

  She’d no sooner spoken than a breath of wind came from off the sea, as though it were somehow answering her heartfelt plea. The gust cooled the sweat on Candy’s face.

  Despite everything, she managed a smile.

  “We’d better start running,” Malingo said. He pointed back toward the glyph.

  The Fugit Brothers were now clear of the glyph’s wreckage and were coming toward Candy and Malingo. Their features were on the move again, their grinning mouths racing around their faces like runners circling a track.

  “Our friends appear to have nowhere left to run, Brother Tempus.”

  “So it would seem, Brother Julius. So it would seem.”

  There was another gust of wind from the sea, and its coolness made Candy unglue her gaze from the approaching assassins and chance a look toward the water. The wind had thinned the colorless mist that hung over the waves. And through it came a patch of bright red.

  Red.

  “A boat!” Candy yelled.

  “What?”

  “Look! A boat!”

  The mist parted, and a simple little vessel, with a single mast and much mended sail, came into view. It had neither captain nor passengers.

  “Ha!” said Malingo. “Will you look at that?”

  They raced down to the water and strode into the mild surf. The wind was coming in stronger and still stronger gusts. It filled the patchwork sail until the ropes creaked under the strain.

  “Get in!” Candy said to Malingo. “Quickly! In!”

  “But the wind’s just blowing the boat back to shore!” Malingo said. “Back to them!”

  The Fugit Brothers had followed them down to the water’s edge. They too had read the direction of the wind, and had apparently decided they had no need to get their feet wet. All they had to do was wait. The boat would come to them.

  Candy glanced back at them as a large wave came in, wetting her all the way up to her neck. She let out a little yelp of shock, much to the amusement of the brothers.

  “Please,” she said to Malingo. “Just get in. Have a little faith.”

  “In what?”

  “In me.”

  Malingo stared at her for a moment, then shrugged and clambered in a rather ungainly fashion into the boat. Candy stole a moment to offer up a little prayer to the women of the Fantomaya. Surely it had been they who’d sent the boat. But what was the use of a boat without the right wind?

  “Help me,” she murmured.

  And as she spoke the sail of the boat snapped like a flag in the wind, and Candy looked up to see the women—all three of them—standing in the boat. It was a vision intended for her eyes only, it seemed. Neither the Fugit Brothers nor Malingo responded to the sight.

  Malingo offered his hand to Candy. She caught hold of it, and he hauled her onboard.

  She had no sooner set foot on the timbers of the little boat than Diamanda lifted her hands into the air. They were clenched tight, Candy saw. White-knuckled fists.

  “Travel safely,” the old lady said.

  Candy nodded. “I will.”

  “And don’t breathe a word of any of this,” said Joephi.

  “I won’t.”

  “What is this I will, I won’t stuff?” Malingo said. “Are you talking to me?”

  Luckily Candy didn’t have any need to tell a lie, because at that instant Diamanda unclenched her fists. As she did so the wind abruptly shifted, swinging around so fast that Candy could feel it move over her face: blowing against her left cheek one moment, and two seconds later blowing hard against her right.

  The boat shook from bow to stern. The ropes creaked. And the old patched sail filled with a fierce wind that now came from the landward side, a wind so strong that its gusts fattened the canvas to near-bursting point.

  Candy looked back over her shoulder at the Fugit Brothers, who were now wading into the frenzied surf in pursuit of the escapees. But the waves broke against them with no little force, slowing them down. Tempus lunged forward, attempting to catch hold of the boat before it was beyond his reach, but he was too late. The wind bore the little vessel away at such a speed he missed his grip and fell facedown in the water.

  Candy smiled up at the women. They did not linger more than another moment. Just-time enough to return Candy’s smile. Then they were gone, their delicate forms blown away by the very wind Diamanda had summoned.

  “That was a close call,” Malingo said. He was watching the diminishing figures of the Fugit Brothers, neck high in the surf. They were hoping
, presumably, that the wind would veer and carry their quarry back to them.

  But theirs was a lost cause. The gusts quickly drove the little vessel away from the island, and very soon the mist that always hung around the Twenty-Fifth Hour covered the sight of the rocky shore.

  Exhausted but happy, Candy turned her back on the island and faced the open sea. There would come a time when she would think very closely about all that had happened to her in the labyrinths of the Twenty-Fifth Hour. About what the women had said and shown her: the visions of tomorrow, the mysteries of yesterday. But she was too tired to think such weighty thoughts now.

  “Do you have any clue where we’re heading?” she asked Malingo.

  “I just found this old copy of Klepp’s Almenak in the bottom of the boat,” he said, proffering the sodden pamphlet for Candy to study if she wished. She shook her head. “I think there’s a sea chart in here somewhere,” Malingo went on. “The trouble is, half of the pages have rotted together.” He delicately worked to tease the pages apart, but it was a nearly impossible task.

  “I guess we’re just going to have to trust to the Izabella,” Candy said.

  “You make her sound like a friend of yours.”

  Candy trailed her hand in the cold water and splashed some up onto her face. Her eyes were heavy with fatigue.

  “Why not?” she said. “Maybe she is a friend of mine.”

  “Just as long as she treats us nicely,” Malingo said. “No twenty-foot waves.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Candy replied. “She knows we’ve been through some hard times.”

  “She does?”

  “Oh sure. She’ll carry us somewhere nice.” Candy lay her head on her arm and let her hand trail in the water. “Like I said: have faith, she’ll bring us where we need to go.”

  34. Different Destinies

  Once before, at the beginning of her adventures in the Abarat, Candy had been told to entrust herself to the care of Mama Izabella. On that occasion she’d needed some extra help to survive her journey. This time, however, safe aboard the nameless boat that had come to find her on the shore of the Twenty-Fifth, she let the sea carry her where it wished to; and all was well. There were some provisions on the boat, plain but nourishing. And while she and Malingo ate, the wind carried them away from the Time Out of Time, and off between the islands.

  As they traveled—having no idea of where the tide was taking them, nor any fear that it would do them harm—there were people across the archipelago who would have significant parts to play in Candy’s destination who were about their own business.

  At Midnight, for instance, Christopher Carrion was wandering the mist-shrouded island of Gorgossium, plotting, endlessly plotting.

  He was like a ghost haunting his own house. People were afraid of encountering him, because lately the nightmares that moved in the fluids were more active than ever, lending him an even more terrible appearance. Nor was there any way to predict where he might next appear. Sometimes he was seen in the Gallows Forest, feeding scraps of rotted meat to the vultures that assembled in stinking flocks there. Sometimes he was seen down in the mines, sitting in one of the exhausted seams. Sometimes he was spotted in one of the smaller towers, where Mater Motley’s seamstresses worked on creating an army of stitchlings.

  Those who did have the bad luck to encounter him in one place or another were always closely interrogated by those who did not. Everybody wanted to know what the likely mood of their lord might be. Did he look angry, perhaps? Not really, came the reply. Did he look distracted, as though his thoughts were elsewhere? No, not distracted either.

  Finally, some brave soul asked the question that everybody wanted an answer to, but all were too afraid to voice. Did he look demented?

  Ah now, came the reply, yes perhaps that was it; perhaps he did act a little crazily. The way he talked to himself as he wandered among the gallows, or sat in the tunnels, speaking softly as though he imagined that he was talking to someone very dear to him. A friend, perhaps? Yes; that was it. He spoke as though he was sharing secrets with a friend. And sometimes, as he talked, he would reach into the seething fluids that he breathed and he would fish out a nightmare, and proffer it, as if to his invisible guest. The gift of a nightmare.

  Was all this evidence of insanity? In any man other than Christopher Carrion the answer would surely have been yes. But Carrion was a law unto himself. Who could judge the depths of his thoughts, or of his pain?

  He kept no councils; partook of nobody’s advice. If he was planning a war, then it was not with the assistance of his generals. If he was planning murder, then he did not look to the advice of assassins.

  The only clue to the subject of his present meditations was a name he was several times heard to mutter; a name that did not yet mean anything much to those who heard it, but very soon would.

  The name he spoke was Candy. He said into himself not once but many times, as though repetition would somehow summon up the owner and bring her near to him.

  But she did not come. For all his power, Christopher Carrion was alone at Midnight, having nothing for company but the vultures at his heels, and the nightmares at his lips, and the echoes of that name he spoke, over and over again.

  “Candy.”

  “Candy.”

  “Candy.”

  His behavior did not go unnoticed, or unreported. There were creatures in the shadows all around the island, watching what Carrion did, and bringing reports of it to the top of the Thirteenth Tower, where the Lord of Midnight’s grandmother, Mater Motley, sat in her high-backed rocking chair, sewing stitchlings.

  It was her perpetual labor; she never stopped. She didn’t even sleep. She was too old to sleep, she’d once said. She had no dreams left to dream. So she sewed and rocked and listened to the stories of her grandson’s lonely vigils.

  Sometimes, when the skins of the stitchlings had piled up around her, and she was filled with a strange dementia of her own, Mater Motley also talked to herself. Unlike her grandson, she did not call out for company. She spoke in an ancient language known as High Abaratic, which was incomprehensible to all those who listened to the old woman. But the listeners didn’t need to comprehend her words to understand what Mater Motley was debating with herself. One look at the army of stitchlings she was assembling provided the answer to that question.

  War was her subject; war was her obsession. She was sewing the skins of soldiers together, and planning their deployment as she labored. Over the years the old woman and her seamstresses had created tens of thousands of warriors. Most of them, having only mud for muscle, needed neither to eat nor breathe. She had them assembled in great labyrinths beneath the island, where they waited in the darkness for the call to arms.

  And while they waited in the bowels of Gorgossium, Mater Motley waited too. Waited, sewed and chatted to herself in the language of the Ancients about the great coming time when Christopher Carrion would declare war upon the islands of light, and her army—her vast, soulless army of mud and thread and patches—would march to war in the name of Midnight.

  As for the architect of Commexo City, Rojo Pixler, he had labors and ambitions and meditations of his own.

  At the heart of his silver city, hidden away from the busy citizens that filled the streets of that metropolis, there was a great circular corridor. A hundred feet in height, it was lined from floor to ceiling—on both of its walls—with screens. This was the place to which Pixler’s tens of thousands of spies, the voyeuristic children of Voorzangler’s Universal Eye, sent their reports.

  It had become a place that Rojo Pixler frequented more and more often, circling the corridor for hours on end, inspecting the numberless screens. In truth, he was not really interested in the information that came from Tazmagor or Babilonium or the Yebba Dim Day. It was those reports that came up from the depths of the Izabella that had lately caught Pixler’s attention.

  Hour upon Hour he would traverse the Ring on his flying disc—his hands locked behind his b
ack, his feet set wide apart studying the screens for news from the deepest trenches of the Izabella. And why? Because there was life down there. His fishy spies, wandering deeper than they usually went, had sighted vast claw marks on the walls of the crevices, indisputable evidence that there was some order of creature in the depths of the Izabella that demanded his study.

  When he had consulted the grimoires he’d had stolen, searching their heavy pages for some clue as to the nature of these beasts, he had found more than he expected.

  In the seventh volume of Lumeric’s Six, he’d discovered an apocalyptic text that described all too well the occupants of the abysses of the Izabella. They were a race of creatures called the Requiax—beasts of sublime wickedness that lived, according to Dado Lumeric “in the profounde entrailes of the Mother Sea.”

  They would not always remain there, Lumeric prophesized. There would come a time when these creatures would rise out of the depths.

  “…they have long hungered,” Lumeric wrote, “for that time when darkness fell upon these many islandes of ours, erasing the lighte of sunne, moone and starres. In that terrible Midnighte, when all lighte hath passed away, they will come like a great pestilence; and commit such crimes against life as will change the order of thinges forever.

  “This I, Dado Lumeric, tell to be a thruthfulle prophesie, and count myself gladde to my soul’s core that I will not be upon the living stage to witness these sightes,for it will be beyond the wittes of men to endure. The great cities will go to duste, and the great men and women also, and all be carried away by the winde…”

  Pixler took Lumeric’s words to heart, especially the part about the crumbling cities. To see Commexo City wiped away? Erased as though it had never even existed? It was unthinkable.

  He had to be ready for this “terrible Midnighte,” when the Requiax rose into view. Plans had to be laid; defenses strengthened. If the Requiax appeared, as Lumeric predicted, he and his dream city would be ready to defy the prophecy, and stand against the darkness.