Abarat

by Clive Barker

  “Be careful,” she heard Zephario say.

  She glanced up at him, but her gaze never focused on his face. It slipped over his shoulder, through the crowd of prisoners and up over the fence, slipping through the coils of barbed wire on top of the boundary fence, and out, across the wasteland that lay between the camp and the slopes of Mount Galigali. It ascended in a heartbeat, up the steep slope. Her eyes had no interest in studying the barren heights, however. There was something above the volcano that had claimed their attention.

  There was a storm up there, vast and implacable, moving in with the obscene certainty of a blood-hungry army. There was thunder in it, but it wasn’t a natural thunder, rising up to crack the sky then falling away again, muttering its complaint as it retreated. No, this was the churning thunder of an endgame machine; a funeral march played for those about to die. It neither cracked nor complained; it simply grew louder as its source approached.

  “Oh, Lordy Lou,” Candy said very softly.

  “What can you see?”

  “The biggest storm clouds I’ve ever seen. It’s ridiculous how big they are. And that thunder.”

  “That’s not thunder,” Gazza said as he climbed down the boulder, the rest of the group following closely behind.

  “Who are they?” Zephario quickly demanded.

  “They’re fine,” Candy said. “They’re my friends.”

  “Nobody’s fine. Not around this much power.”

  “Well, it’s too late.”

  Gazza was staring at the Abarataraba.

  “It’s so beautiful,” he said.

  “See?” Zephario told Candy. “What did I tell you? Give me the piece back.”

  “Let me look at it,” Gazza demanded.

  “No,” Candy said. “We have to hurry. You see that storm? Motley’s in there somewhere. Her and the stitchlings she’s bringing to execute us.”

  “Mother . . .” Zehpario whispered.

  With those two syllables, Zephario gained everyone’s silent attention. It was Malingo who broke it.

  “Are we supposed to trust him?” Malingo said. His nostrils were widening ever so slightly, as he suspiciously inhaled the scent of Carrion the Elder. “I’ve had bad experiences with Carrions.”

  “My mother has a lot to answer for,” Zephario said. “And it will be up to you to make sure she doesn’t get to keep her Empire. She’s murdered a lot of innocent people to get it.”

  “We can talk about the future once we have it in our hands,” Candy said.

  “And how do we do that?” Malingo said.

  “A glyph,” Candy said with certainty.

  “A glyph? How are we going to keep all these people from asking stupid questions and getting in our way?”

  “Why would they get in our way?”

  “Because they’ve never made a glyph before and we don’t have time to explain.”

  “Just because it’s never been done before doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We just have to spread the word. Very quickly.”

  Candy looked back at Zephario, who must have sensed her gaze on him because he said: “Go on. You’re doing just fine.”

  “Mr. Carrion gave me a piece of magic. And we’re going to use it to spread the gospel of the glyph. It’s either that or waiting for the executioners to arrive.”

  “Well, that’s an easy choice,” Gazza said. “Let’s spread the gospel.”

  Chapter 60

  Abarataraba

  ON 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 Gal
igali. 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

  “GRANDMOTHER?”

  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!”

  k

  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.