Abarat 2: Days of Magic, Nights of War

Abarat 2: Days of Magic, Nights of War Clive Barker A dazzling fantasy adventure for all ages, the second part of a quartet appearing at two yearly intervals, richly illustrated by the author. Film rights sold to Disney for $8 million on the paintings alone.The Abarat; a magical otherworld composed on an archipelago of twenty-five islands – one for each hour of the day, plus an island out of time.Candy Quackenbush, escaping her dull, dull life from the most boring place in our world, Chickentown, USA, finds that in the Abarat she has another existence entirely, one which links her to marvels and mysteries–and even to murder…In this, the second volume in Clive Barker's extraordinary fantasy for both adults and children, Candy's adventures in the amazing world of the Abarat are getting more strange by the Hour. Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight, has sent his henchmen to capture her. Why? she wonders. What would Carrion want with a girl from Minnesota? And why is Candy beginning to feel that the world of the Abarat is familiar to her? Why can she speak words of magic she doesn't even remember learning?There is a mystery here. And Carrion, along with his fiendish grandmother, Mater Motley, suspects that whatever Candy is, she could spoil his plans to take control of the Abarat.Now Candy's companions must race against time to save her from the clutches of Carrion, and she must solve the mystery of her past before the forces of Night and Day clash and Absolute Midnight descends upon the islands.A final war is about to begin. And Candy is going to need to make some choices that will change her life forever… Abarat 2 Days of Magic, Nights of War Clive Barker For my mother,Joan I dreamed I spoke in another’s language, I dreamed I lived in another’s skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger’s kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator’s name. I dreamed—and this dream was the finest— That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you. C.B. Table of Contents Cover Page (#u620df851-f7a4-51f4-a213-472f7aebfe69) Title Page (#ubde5f20a-c640-5e14-91e2-9bc092a2bff1) Dedication (#ua67bbd83-65e8-5952-b78a-3d12cdeda1d0) Epigraph (#u0c50751e-b2c2-5c38-9b30-039e84f90306) PROLOGUE HUNGER (#u6d4d2c1c-96ba-58e8-b5be-081658b2ab05) PART ONE FREAKS, FOOLS AND FUGITIVES (#ua259b459-4678-53e8-89d1-36124c73c483) 1 PORTRAIT OF GIRL AND GESHRAT (#ub997d7e9-523f-52de-b4cd-32232d1a7049) 2 WHAT THERE IS TO SEE (#u908eb8d5-0286-580c-aefd-109ebba1e078) 3 ON THE PARROTO PARROTO (#ub2b565b4-8235-5350-9f8a-efdbb5e39877) 4 THE SCAVENGERS (#ucdcefaf2-c2cb-5f6e-9815-8c1f0ee77947) 5 THE SPEAKING OF A WORD (#u91c79472-a621-517b-ab98-8e50c9839149) 6 TWO CONVERSATIONS (#u0bf549a2-2cbd-57cd-a307-729b12b3d903) 7 SOMETHING OF BABILONIUM (#u7002c97b-8933-5405-8810-f47e7f843577) 8 A LIFE IN THE THEATRE (#u351938ad-3bb5-51f5-8d6d-7577fe003241) 9 AGAIN, THE CRISS-CROSS MAN (#uf3d431ec-791b-5a92-aaea-0b7e19a95c90) 10 “THE FREAKS ARE OUT! THE FREAKS ARE OUT!” (#u571c43b5-cddc-50e2-97b6-811bd0f385b6) PART TWO THINGS NEGLECTED, THINGS FORGOTTEN (#u72bd3318-772e-5657-8c37-6a53d58a81a0) 11 TRAVELING NORTH (#ue4e76f93-376c-5f54-98f9-f66a15243cbe) 12 DARKNESS AND ANTICIPATION (#u5818b2d6-b0ef-53b0-9935-46c4ee2ffc45) 13 THE SACBROOD (#ubae3be49-4b4f-5dce-b0ee-9663d1edf3e8) 14 LAMENT (THE MUNKEE’S TALE) (#u12f31d37-2b77-5a84-94c6-8bd6b6557907) 15 THE PURSUER (#u299545db-7dd4-5b17-9265-485ec7ea8d2c) 16 THE WUNDERKAMMEN (#litres_trial_promo) 17 THE STAR-STRIKER (#litres_trial_promo) 18 DEPARTURE (#litres_trial_promo) 19 LIFE AND DEATH IN CHICKENTOWN (#litres_trial_promo) 20 MALINGO ALONE (#litres_trial_promo) 21 NIGHT CONVERSATIONS (#litres_trial_promo) 22 A DEATH SENTENCE (#litres_trial_promo) 23 DREAMER TO DREAMER (#litres_trial_promo) 24 HUSBAND AND WIFE (#litres_trial_promo) 25 FATES (#litres_trial_promo) 26 KASPAR IS VISITED (#litres_trial_promo) 27 ABDUCTION (#litres_trial_promo) 28 A SUMMONING (#litres_trial_promo) PART THREE A TIME OF MONSTERS (#litres_trial_promo) 29 THE CAPTAIN CONVERSES (#litres_trial_promo) 30 THE BEASTS OF EFREET (#litres_trial_promo) 31 NEWS IN NONCE (#litres_trial_promo) 32 EVENTS AT THE THRESHOLD (#litres_trial_promo) 33 A VISIT TO MARAPOZSA STREET (#litres_trial_promo) 34 SECRETS AND MEAT LOAF (#litres_trial_promo) 35 TWO IN NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo) 36 THE BRIDEGROOM UNEARTHED (#litres_trial_promo) 37 THE OWNER OF THE DEAD MAN’S HOUSE (#litres_trial_promo) 38 MIDNIGHT’S HEART (#litres_trial_promo) 39 DRAGON BONES (#litres_trial_promo) 40 A TALE OF ENDLESS PARTINGS (#litres_trial_promo) 41 AN AMBITIOUS CONJURATION (#litres_trial_promo) 42 THE HIGH MAZE (#litres_trial_promo) 43 THE DARK DENIED (#litres_trial_promo) 44 THE PRINCE AND THE BEAST-BOY (#litres_trial_promo) 45 A DECISION (#litres_trial_promo) PART FOUR THE SEA COMES TO CHICKENTOWN (#litres_trial_promo) 46 DEPARTURES (#litres_trial_promo) 47 SOMETHING IN THE WIND (#litres_trial_promo) 48 STIRRING THE WATERS (#litres_trial_promo) 49 INTO THE HEREAFTER (#litres_trial_promo) 50 FATHER AND DAUGHTER (#litres_trial_promo) 51 INTO THE WORMWOOD (#litres_trial_promo) 52 THE SECRET OF SECRETS (#litres_trial_promo) 53 THE WARSHIP UNMADE (#litres_trial_promo) 54 THE LIVING AND THE DEAD (#litres_trial_promo) 55 THE BEGINNING OF THE END (#litres_trial_promo) 56 DOWN AND DOWN (#litres_trial_promo) 57 “NEVER FEAR…” (#litres_trial_promo) 58 THE RETURN OF THE SEA (#litres_trial_promo) About The Author (#litres_trial_promo) ALSO BY CLIVE BARKER (#litres_trial_promo) PRAISE FOR CLIVE BARKER AND Abarat (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PROLOGUE HUNGER (#ulink_d1857a12-5247-5794-ba1d-0f0466d3d81d) Here is a list of fearful things: The jaws of sharks, a vulture’s wings, The rabid bite of the dogs of war, The voice of one who went before. But most of all the mirror’s gaze, Which counts us out our numbered days. —Righteous Bandy, the nomad Poet of Abarat OTTO HOULIHAN SAT IN the dark room and listened to the two creatures who had brought him here—a three-eyed thing by the name of Lazaru and its sidekick, Baby Pink-Eye—playing Knock the Devil Down in the corner. After their twenty-second game his nervousness and irritation began to get the better of him. “How much longer am I going to have to wait?” he asked them. Baby Pink-Eye, who had large reptilian claws and the face of a demented infant, puffed on a blue cigar and blew a cloud of acrid smoke in Houlihan’s direction. “They call you the Criss-Cross Man, don’t they?” he said. Houlihan nodded, giving Pink-Eye his coldest gaze, the kind of gaze that usually made men weak with fear. The creature was unimpressed. “Think you’re scary, do you?” he said. “Ha! This is Gorgossium, Criss-Cross Man. This is the island of the Midnight Hour. Every dark, unthinkable thing that has ever happened at the dead of night has happened right here. So don’t try scaring me. You’re wasting your time.” “I just asked—” “Yes, yes, we heard you,” said Lazaru, the eye in the middle of her forehead rolling back and forth in a very unsettling fashion. “You’ll have to be patient. The Lord of Midnight will see you when he’s ready to see you.” “Got some urgent news for him, have you?” said Baby Pink-Eye. “That’s between him and me.” “I warn you, he doesn’t like bad news,” said Lazaru. “He gets in a fury, doesn’t he, Pink-Eye?” “Crazy is what he gets! Tears people apart with his bare hands.” They glanced conspiratorially at each other. Houlihan said nothing. They were just trying to frighten him, and it wouldn’t work. He got up and went to the narrow window, looking out onto the tumorous landscape of the Midnight Island, phosphorescent with corruption. This much of what Baby Pink-Eye had said was true: Gorgossium was a place of terrors. He could see the glistening forms of countless monsters as they moved through the littered landscape; he could smell spicy-sweet incense rising from the mausoleums in the mist-shrouded cemetery; he could hear the shrill din of drills from the mines where the mud that filled Midnight’s armies of stitchlings was produced. Though he wasn’t going to let Lazaru or Pink-Eye see his unease, he would be glad when he’d made his report and he could leave for less terrifying places. There was some murmuring behind him, and a moment later Lazaru announced: “The Prince of Midnight is ready to see you.” Houlihan turned from the window to see that the door on the far side of the chamber was open and Baby Pink-Eye was gesturing for him to step through it. “Hurry, hurry,” the infant said. Houlihan went to the door and stood on the threshold. Out of the darkness of the room came the voice of Christopher Carrion, deep and joyless. “Enter, enter. You’re just in time to watch the feeding.” Houlihan followed the sound of Carrion’s voice. There was a flickering in the darkness, which grew more intense by degrees, and as it brightened he saw the Lord of Midnight standing perhaps ten yards from him. He was dressed in gray robes and was wearing gloves that looked as though they were made of fine chain mail. “Not many people get to see this, Criss-Cross Man. My nightmares are hungry, so I’m going to feed them.” Houlihan shuddered. “Watch, man! Don’t stare at the floor.” Reluctantly, the Criss-Cross Man raised his eyes. The nightmares Carrion had spoken of were swimming in a blue fluid, which all but filled a high transparent collar around Carrion’s head. Two pipes emerged from the base of the Lord of Midnight’s skull, and it was through these that the nightmares had emerged, swimming directly out of Carrion’s skull. They were barely more than long threads of light; but there was something about their restless motion, the way they roved the collar, sometimes touching Carrion’s face, more often pressing against the glass, that spoke of their hunger. Carrion reached up into the collar. One of the nightmares made a quick motion, like a striking snake, and delivered itself into its creator’s hand. Carrion lifted it out of the fluid and studied it with a curious tenderness. “It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Carrion said. Houlihan didn’t comment. He just wanted Carrion to keep the thing away from him. “But when these things are coiled in my brain they show me such delicious horrors.” The nightmare writhed around in Carrion’s hand, letting out a thin, high-pitched squeal. “So every now and then I reward them with a nice fat meal of fear. They love fear. And it’s hard for me to feel much of it these days. I’ve seen too many horrors in my time. So I provide them with someone who will feel fear.” So saying, he let the nightmare go. It slithered out of his grip, hitting the stone floor. It knew exactly where it was going. It wove across the ground, flickering with excitement, the light out of its thin form illuminating its victim: a large, bearded man squatted against the wall. “Mercy, my Lord…” he sobbed. “I’m just a Todo miner.” “Oh, now be quiet,” Carrion said as though he were speaking to a troublesome child. “Look, you have a visitor.” He turned and pointed to the ground where the nightmare slithered. Then, without waiting to see what happened next, he turned and approached Houlihan. “So, now,” he said. “Tell me about the girl.” Thoroughly unnerved by the fact that the nightmare was loose and might at any moment turn on him, Houlihan fumbled for words: “Oh yes…yes…the girl. She escaped me in Ninnyhammer. Along with a geshrat called Malingo. Now they’re traveling together. And I got close to them again on Soma Plume. But she slipped away among some pilgrim monks.” “So she’s escaped you twice? I expect better.” “She has power in her,” Houlihan said by way of self-justification. “Does she indeed?” Carrion said. As he spoke he carefully lifted a second nightmare out of his collar. It spat and hissed. Directing it toward the man in the corner, he let the creature go from his hands, and it wove away to be with its companion. “She must at all costs be apprehended, Otto,” Carrion went on. “Do you understand me? At all costs. I want to meet her. More than that. I want to understand her.” “How will you do that, Lord?” “By finding out what’s ticking away in that human head of hers. By reading her dreams, for one thing. Which reminds me…Lazaru!” While he waited for his servant to appear at the door, Carrion brought out yet another nightmare from his collar and loosed it. Houlihan watched as it went to join the others. They had come very close to the man, but had not yet struck. They seemed to be waiting for a word from their master. The miner was still begging. Indeed he had not ceased begging throughout the entire conversation between Carrion and Houlihan. “Please, Lord,” he kept saying. “What have I done to deserve this?” Carrion finally replied to him. “You’ve done nothing,” he said. “I just picked you out of the crowd today because you were bullying one of your brother miners.” He glanced back at his victim. “There’s always fear in men who are cruel to other men.” Then he looked away again, while the nightmares waited, their tails lashing in anticipation. “Where’s Lazaru?” Carrion said. “Here.” “Find me the dreaming device. You know the one.” “Of course.” “Clean it up. I’m going to need it when the Criss-Cross Man has done his work.” His gaze shifted toward Houlihan. “As for you,” he said. “Get the chase over with.” “Yes, Lord.” “Capture Candy Quackenbush and bring her to me. Alive.” “I won’t fail you.” “You’d better not. If you do, Houlihan, then the next man sitting in that corner will be you.” He whispered some words in Old Abaratian. “Thakram noosa rah. Haaas!” This was the instruction the nightmares had been waiting for. In a heartbeat they attacked. The man struggled to keep them from climbing up his body, but it was a lost cause. Once they reached his neck they proceeded to wrap their flickering lengths around his head, as though to mummify him. They partially muffled his cries a little, but he could still be heard, his appeals for mercy from Carrion deteriorating into shrieks and screams. As his terror mounted the nightmares grew fatter, giving off brighter and brighter flashes of sickly luminescence as they were nourished. The man continued to kick and struggle for a while, but soon his shrieks declined into sobs and finally even the sobs ceased. So, at last, did his struggle. “Oh, that’s a disappointment,” Carrion said, kicking the man’s foot to confirm that fear had indeed killed him. “I thought he’d last longer than that.” He spoke again in the old language, and—nourished, now, and slothful—the nightmares unknotted themselves from around their victim’s head and began to return to Carrion. Houlihan couldn’t help but retreat a step or two in case the nightmares mistook him for another source of food. “Go on, then,” Carrion said to him. “You’ve got work to do. Find me Candy Quackenbush!” “It’s as good as done,” Houlihan replied, and without looking back, even a glance, he hurried away from the chamber of terrors and down the stairs of the Twelfth Tower. PART ONE FREAKS, FOOLS AND FUGITIVES (#ulink_b7deec71-f19b-5399-889d-eaa743bb1863) Nothing After a battle lasting many ages,The Devil won,And he said to God(who had been his Maker): “Lord, We are about to witness the unmaking of Creation By my hand. I would not wish you to think me cruel, So I beg you, take three things From this world before I destroy it. Three things, and then the rest will be wiped away.” God thought for a little time.And at last He said: “No, there is nothing.” The Devil was surprised. “Not even you, Lord?” he said.And God said: “No. Not even me.” —From Memories of the World’s End Author unknown (Christopher Carrion’s favorite poem) 1 PORTRAIT OF GIRL AND GESHRAT (#ulink_4b13a7d7-c922-51cb-a870-8296e851ef81) LET’S GET OUR PHOTOGRAPH taken,” Candy said to Malingo. They were walking down a street in Tazmagor, where—this being on the island of Qualm Hah—it was Nine O’clock in the Morning. The Tazmagorian market was in full swing, and in the middle of all this buying and selling a photographer called Guumat had set up a makeshift studio. He’d hung a crudely painted backcloth from a couple of poles and set his camera, a massive device mounted on a polished wood tripod, in front of it. His assistant, a youth who shared his father’s coxcomb hair and lightly striped blue-and-black skin, was parading a board on which examples of Guumat the Elder’s photos were pinned. “You like to be pictured by the great Guumat?” the youth said to Malingo. “He make you look real good.” Malingo grinned. “How much?” “Two paterzem,” said the father, gently pressing his offspring aside so as to close the sale. “For both of us?” Candy said. “One picture, same price. Two paterzem.” “We can afford that,” Candy said to Malingo. “Maybe you like costumes. Hats?” Guumat asked them, glancing at them up and down. “No extra cost.” “He’s politely telling us we look like vagabonds,” Malingo said. “Well, we are vagabonds,” Candy replied. Hearing this, Guumat looked suspicious. “You can pay?” he said. “Yes, of course,” said Candy, and dug in the pocket of her brightly patterned trousers, held up with a belt of woven biffel-reeds, and pulled out some coins, sorting through them to give Guumat the paterzem. “Good! Good!” he said. “Jamjam! Get the young lady a mirror. How old are you?” “Almost sixteen, why?” “You wear something much more ladylike, huh? We got nice things. Like I say, no extra charge.” “I’m fine. Thank you. I want to remember this the way it really was.” She smiled at Malingo. “Two wanderers in Tazmagor, tired but happy.” “That’s what you want, that’s what I give you,” Guumat said. Jamjam handed her a little mirror and Candy consulted her reflection. She was a mess, no doubt about it. She’d cut her hair very short a couple of weeks before so she could hide from Houlihan among some monks on Soma Plume, but the haircut had been very hurried, and it was growing out at all angles. “You look fine,” Malingo said. “So do you. Here, see for yourself.” She handed him the mirror. Her friends back in Chickentown would have thought Malingo’s face—with his deep orange hide and the fans of leathery skin to either side of his head—fit only for Halloween. But in the time they’d been traveling together through the islands, Candy had come to love the soul inside that skin: tenderhearted and brave. Guumat arranged them in front of his camera. “You need to stand very, very still,” he instructed them. “If you move, you’ll be blurred in the picture. So, now let me get the camera ready. Give me a minute or two.” “What made you want a photograph?” Malingo said from the corner of his mouth. “Just to have. So I won’t forget anything.” “As if,” said Malingo. “Please,” said Guumat. “Be very still. I have to focus.” Candy and Malingo were silent for a moment. “What are you thinking about?” Malingo murmured. “Being on Yzil, at Noon.” “Oh yes. That’s something we’re sure to remember.” “Especially seeing her…” “The Princess Breath.” Now, without Guumat requesting it, they both fell silent for a long moment, remembering their brief encounter with the Goddess on the Noon-Day island of Yzil. Candy had seen her first: a pale, beautiful woman in red and orange standing in a patch of warm light, breathing out a living creature, a purplish squid. This, it was said, was the means by which most of the species in the Abarat had been brought into Creation. They had been breathed out by the Creatrix, who had then let the soft wind that constantly blew through the trees and vines of Yzil claim the newborn from her arms and carry them off to the sea. “That was the most amazing—” “I’m ready!” Guumat announced from beneath the black cloth he’d ducked under. “On the count of three we take the picture. One! Two! Three! Hold it! Don’t move! Don’t move! Seven seconds.” He lifted his head out from under the cloth and consulted his stopwatch. “Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. That’s it!” Guumat slipped a plate into his camera to stop the exposure. “Picture taken! Now we have to wait a few minutes while I prepare a print for you.” “No problem,” Candy said. “Are you going down to the ferry?” Jamjam asked her. “Yes,” said Candy. “You look like you’ve been on the move.” “Oh, we have,” said Malingo. “We’ve seen a lot in the last few weeks, traveling around.” “I’m jealous. I’ve never left Qualm Hah. I’d love to go adventuring.” A minute later Jamjam’s father appeared with the photograph, which was still wet. “I can sell you a very nice frame, very cheap.” “No, thanks,” said Candy. “It’s fine like this.” She and Malingo looked at the photograph. The colors weren’t quite true, but Guumat caught them looking like a pair of happy tourists, with their brightly colored, rumpled clothes, so they were quite happy. Photograph in hand, they headed down the steep hill to the harbor and the ferry. “You know, I’ve been thinking…” Candy said as they made their way through the crowd. “Uh-oh.” “Seeing the Princess Breath made me want to learn more. About magic.” “No, Candy.” “Come on, Malingo! Teach me. You know all about conjurations—” “A little. Just a little.” “It’s more than a little. You told me once that you spent every hour that Wolfswinkel was asleep studying his grimoires and his treatises.” The subject of the wizard Wolfswinkel wasn’t often raised between them: the memories were so painful for Malingo. He’d been sold into slavery as a child (by his own father), and his life as Wolfswinkel’s possession had been an endless round of beatings and humiliations. It had only been Candy’s arrival at the wizard’s house that had given him the opportunity to finally escape his enslavement. “Magic can be dangerous,” Malingo said. “There are laws and rules. Suppose I teach you the wrong things and we start to unknit the fabric of time and space? Don’t laugh! It’s possible. I read in one of Wolfswinkel’s books that magic was the beginning of the world. It could be the end too.” Candy looked irritated. “Don’t be cross,” Malingo said. “I just don’t have the right to teach you things that I don’t really understand myself.” Candy walked for a while in silence. “Okay,” she said finally. Malingo cast Candy a sideways glance. “Are we still friends?” he said. She looked up at him and smiled. “Of course,” she said. “Always.” 2 WHAT THERE IS TO SEE (#ulink_18f42e74-d717-5f14-ad46-7ebbcbe5110c) AFTER THAT CONVERSATION THEY never mentioned the subject of magic again. They just went on with their island hopping, using the time-honored guide to the islands, Klepp’s Almenak, as their chief source of information. Every now and again they’d get a feeling that the Criss-Cross Man was closing in on them, and they’d cut short their exploring and move on. About ten days after they’d left Tazmagor, their travels brought them to the island of Orlando’s Cap. It was little more than a bare rock with an asylum for the insane built on its highest point. The asylum had been vacated many years before, but its interior bore the unmistakable signs of the madness of its occupants. The white walls were covered with strange scrawlings that here and there became a recognizable image—a lizard, a bird—only to dwindle into scrawlings again. “What happened to all the people who used to be in here?” Candy wondered. Malingo didn’t know. But they quickly agreed that this wasn’t a spot where they wanted to linger. The asylum had strange, sad echoes. So they went back to the tiny harbor to wait for another boat. There was an old man sitting on the dock, coiling a length of frayed rope. He had the strangest look on his face, his eyes all knotted up, as though he were blind. This wasn’t the case, however. As soon as Candy and Malingo arrived, he began to stare at them. “You shouldn’t have come back here,” he growled. “Me?” Malingo said. “No, not you. Her. Her!” He pointed at Candy. “They’ll lock you away.” “Who will?” “They will, soon as they know what you are,” the man said, getting to his feet. “You keep your distance,” Malingo warned. “I’m not going to touch her,” the man replied. “I’m not that brave. But I see. Oh, I see. I know what you are, girl, and I know what you’ll do.” He shook his head. “Don’t you worry, I won’t touch you. No sir. I wouldn’t do a damn-fool thing like that.” And so saying he edged around them, being sure to keep his distance, and ran off down the creaking dock, disappearing among the rocks. “Well, I guess that’s what happens when you let the crazy folks out,” Malingo said with forced brightness. “What was he seeing?” “He was crazy, lady.” “No, he really seemed to be seeing something. The way he was staring at me.” Malingo shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. He had his copy of the Almenak open and used it to nimbly change the subject. “You know I’ve always wanted to see Hap’s Vault,” he said. “Really?” said Candy, still staring at the rocks where the man had fled. “Isn’t it just a cave?” “Well, this is what Klepp says—” Malingo read aloud from the Almenak. “‘Huffaker’—Hap’s Vault’s on Huffaker, which is at Nine O’clock in the Evening—‘Huffaker is an impressive island, topographically speaking. Its rock formations—especially those below ground—are both vast and elaborately beautiful, resembling natural cathedrals and temples.’ Interesting, huh? You want to go?” Candy was still distracted. Her yes was barely audible. “But listen to this,” Malingo went on, doing his best to draw her thoughts away from the old man’s talk. “‘The greatest of these is Hap’s Vault’…blah, blah, blah…‘discovered by Lydia Hap’…blah, blah, blah…‘It is Miss Hap who was the first to suggest the Chamber of the Skein.’ ” “What’s the Skein?” Candy said, becoming a little more interested now. “I quote: ‘It is the thread that joins all things—living and dead, sentient and unthinking—to all other things—’” Now Candy was interested. She came to stand beside Malingo, looking at the Almenak over his shoulder. He went on reading aloud. “‘According to the persuasive Miss Hap, the thread originates in the Vault at Huffaker, appearing momentarily as a kind of flickering light before winding its way invisibly through the Abarat…connecting us, one to another.’” He closed the Almenak. “Don’t you think we should see this?” “Why not?” The island of Huffaker stood just one Hour from the Yebba Dim Day, the first island Candy had ever visited when she’d come to the Abarat. But whereas the great carved head of the Yebba Dim Day still had a few streaks of late light in the sky above it, Huffaker was smothered in darkness, a thick mass of clouds obscuring the stars. Candy and Malingo stayed in a threadbare hotel close to the harbor, where they ate and laid their plans for the journey, and after a few hours of sleep they set out on the dark but well sign-posted road that led to the Vault. They’d had the foresight to pack food and drink, which they needed. The journey was considerably longer than they’d been led to expect by the owner of the hotel, who’d given them some directions. Occasionally they’d hear the sound of an animal pursuing and bringing down another in the murk, but otherwise the journey was uneventful. When they finally reached the caves themselves, they found that a few of the steep passageways had flaming torches mounted in brackets along the cold walls to illuminate the route. Surprisingly, given how extraordinary the phenomenon sounded, there were no other visitors here to witness it. They were alone as they followed the steeply inclined passageway that led them into the Vault. But they needed no guide to tell them when they had reached their destination. “Oh Lordy Lou…” said Malingo. “Look at this place.” His voice echoed back and forth across the vast cavern they had come into. From its ceiling—which was so far beyond the reach of the torches’ light as to be in total darkness—there hung dozens of stalactites. They were immense, each easily the size of an inverted church spire. They were the roosts of Abaratian bats, a detail Klepp had failed to mention in his Almenak. The creatures were much larger than any bat Candy had seen in the Abarat, and they boasted a constellation of seven bright eyes. As for the depths of the cavern, they were as inky black as the ceiling. “It’s so much bigger than I expected it to be,” Candy said. “But where’s the Skein?” “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll see it if we stand in the middle of the bridge.” Malingo gave her an uneasy look. The bridge that hung over the unfathomable darkness of the Vault didn’t look very secure. Its timbers were cracked and antiquated, its ropes frayed and thin. “Well, we’ve come this far,” Candy said. “We may as well see what there is to see.” She set a tentative foot on the bridge. It didn’t give way, so she ventured farther. Malingo followed. The bridge groaned and swayed, its boards (which were laid several inches apart) creaking with every step they took. “Listen…” Candy whispered as they reached the middle of the bridge. Above them they could hear the chittering of a chatty bat. And from far, far below the rushing of water. “There’s a river down there,” Candy said. “The Almenak doesn’t—” Before Malingo could finish his sentence, a third voice came out of the darkness and echoed around the Vault. “As I live and breathe, will you look at that? Candy Quackenbush!” The shout stirred up a few bats. They swooped from their roosts down into the dark air, and in doing so they disturbed hundreds of their siblings, so that in a matter of a few seconds countless bats were on the move; a churning cloud pierced by shifting constellations. “Was that—?” “Houlihan?” Candy said. “I’m afraid it was.” She’d no sooner spoken than there was a footfall at the far end of the bridge, and the Criss-Cross Man stepped into the torchlight. “Finally,” he said. “I have you where you cannot run.” Candy glanced back along the bridge. One of Houlihan’s stitchling companions had appeared from the shadows and was striding toward them. It was a big, ill-shapen thing, with the teeth of a death’s head, and as soon as it set foot on the bridge the frail structure began to sway from side to side. The stitchling clearly liked the sensation, because it proceeded to throw its weight back and forth, making the motion more and more violent. Candy grabbed hold of the railings, and Malingo did the same, but the frayed ropes offered little comfort. They were trapped. Houlihan was now advancing from his end of the bridge. He had taken the flaming torch from the wall and held it ahead of him as he advanced. His face, with its criss-crossed tattoos, was gleaming with sweat and triumph. Overhead, the cloud of bats continued to swell, as events on the bridge disturbed more and more of them. A few of the largest, intending perhaps to drive out these trespassers, swooped down on Candy and Malingo, letting out shrill shrieks. Candy did her best to ignore them: she was much more concerned with the Criss-Cross Man, who was now no more than seven or eight feet away. “You’re coming with me, girl,” he said to her. “Carrion wants to see you in Gorgossium.” He suddenly tossed the torch over the railing, and with both hands free he raced at Candy. She had nowhere left to run. “What now?” he said. She shrugged. Desperate, she looked around at Malingo. “We may as well see—” “What is there to see?” he replied. She smiled, the tiniest smile, and then, without even glancing up at their pursuers again, they both threw themselves headfirst over the rope railing. As they plunged into the darkness, Malingo let out a wild whoop of exhilaration, or perhaps fear, perhaps both. Seconds passed, and still they fell and fell and fell. And now everything was dark around them and the shrieking of the bats was gone, erased by the noise of the river below. Candy had time to think: If we hit the water at this speed we’ll break our necks, and then suddenly Malingo had hold of her hand, and using some trick of acrobatics he’d learned hanging upside down from Wolfswinkel’s ceiling, he managed to flip them both over, so that they were now falling feet first. Two, three, four seconds later, they hit the water. It wasn’t cold. At least not icy. Their speed carried them deep, however, and the impact separated them. For Candy there was a panicky moment when she thought she’d used up all her breath. Then—God bless him!—Malingo had hold of her hand again, and gasping for air, they broke surface together. “No bones broken?” Candy gasped. “No. I’m fine. You?” “No,” she said, scarcely believing it. “I thought he had us.” “So did I. So did he.” Candy laughed. They looked up, and for a moment she thought she glimpsed the dark ragged line of the bridge high above. Then the river’s current carried them away, and whatever she’d seen was eclipsed by the roof of the cavern through which these waters ran. They had no choice but to go wherever it was going. Darkness was all around them, so the only clues they had to the size of caverns through which the river traveled was the way the water grew more tempestuous when the channel narrowed, and how its rushing din mellowed when the way widened again. Once, for just a few tantalizing seconds, they caught a glimpse of what looked like a bright thread—like the Skein of Lydia Hap’s account—running through the air or the rock above them. “Did you see that?” Malingo said. “Yes,” said Candy, smiling in the darkness. “I saw it.” “Well, at least we saw what we came to see.” It was impossible to judge the passage of time in such a formless place, but some while after their glimpsing of the Skein they caught sight of another light, a long way ahead: a luminescence which steadily grew brighter as the river carried them toward it. “That’s starlight,” Candy said. “You think so?” She was right; it was. After a few more minutes, the river finally brought them out of Huffaker’s caverns and into that quiet time just after nightfall. A fine net of cloud had been cast over the sky, and the stars caught in it were turning the Izabella silver. Their journey by water wasn’t over, however. The river current quickly carried them too far from the dark cliffs of Huffaker to attempt to swim back to it and bore them out into the straits between Nine and Ten O’clock. Now the Izabella took charge, her waters holding them up without their needing to exert themselves with swimming. They were carried effortlessly out past Ninnyhammer (where the lights burned bright in the cracked dome of Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s house) and south, into the light, to the bright, tropical waters that surrounded the island of the Nonce. The sleepy smell of an endless afternoon came off the island, which stood at Three O’clock, and the breeze carried dancing seeds from the lush slopes of that Hour. But the Nonce was not to be their destination. The Izabella’s currents carried them on past the Afternoon to the vicinity of the island of Gnomon. Before they could be delivered to the shores of that island, however, Malingo caught sight of their salvation. “I see a sail!” he said, and started yelling to whoever might be up on deck. “Over here! Here!” “They see us!” Candy said. “They see us!” 3 ON THE PARROTO PARROTO (#ulink_f040b3ea-e029-579f-9cdc-c97ce5432736) THE LITTLE VESSEL MALINGO’S sharp eyes had spotted wasn’t moving, so they were able to let the gentle current carry them toward it. It was a humble fishing boat no more than fifteen feet in length and in a very dilapidated condition. Its crew members were hard at work hauling up onto the deck a net full to bursting with tens of thousands of small mottled turquoise-and-orange fish, called smatterlings. Hungry seabirds, raucous and aggressive, wheeled around the boat or bobbed on the water close by, waiting to snatch up those smatterlings that the fishermen failed to get out of the net, onto the deck and into the hold of their boat quickly enough. By the time Candy and Malingo were within hailing distance of the little vessel, most of the hard labor was over, and the happy crew members (there were only four on the boat) were singing a song of the sea as they folded the nets. “Fishes, feed me!Fishes fine!Swim in the netsAnd catch the line!Feed my children!Fill my dishes!That’s why I love you,Little fishes!” When they were done with the song, Malingo called to them from out of the water. “Excuse me!” he yelled. “There are still two more fishes down here!” “I see you!” said a young man among the crew. “Throw them a line,” said the wiry bearded man in the wheelhouse, who was apparently the Captain. It didn’t take very long for Candy and Malingo to be brought up over the side of the boat and onto the stinking deck. “Welcome aboard the Parroto Parroto,” said the Captain. “Somebody get ’em some blankets, will you?” Though the sun was still reasonably warm in this region between Four O’clock in the Afternoon and Five, their time in the water had chilled both Candy and Malingo to the bone, and they were glad of the blankets and the deep bowls of spicy fish soup that they were given a few minutes later. “I’m Perbo Skebble,” said the Captain. “The old man is Mizzel, the cabin girl is Galatea, and the young fellow there is my son Charry. We’re from Efreet, and we’re heading back there with our hold full.” “Good fishin’,” Charry said. He had a broad, happy face, which fell naturally into an expression of easy contentment. “There’ll be consequences,” Mizzel said, his own features as naturally joyless as Charry’s were naturally happy. “Why do you always have to be so grim?” Galatea said, staring contemptuously at Mizzel. Her hair was shaved so close to her scalp, it was little more than a shadow. Her muscular arms were decorated with elaborate tattoos. “Didn’t we just save two souls from drowning? We’re all on the Creatrix’ side on this boat. Nothing bad’s going to happen to us.” Mizzel just sneered at her, rudely snatching the empty soup bowls from Candy and Malingo. “We’ve still got to get past Gorgossium,” he said as he headed down into the galley with the bowls. He cast a sly, faintly threatening glance back at Candy as he departed, as though to see whether he’d succeeded in sowing the seeds of fear in her. “What did he mean by that?” Malingo said. “Nothing,” said Skebble. “Oh, let’s tell the truth here,” said Galatea. “We’re not going to lie to these people. That would be shameful.” “Then you tell ’em,” Skebble said. “Charry, come, lad. I want to be sure the catch is properly stowed.” “What’s the problem?” Candy said to Galatea, when the father and son had gone about their work. “You have to understand that there’s no ice on this boat, so we’ve got to get the catch back to Efreet before the fish go rotten on us. Which means…let me show you.” She led them to the wheelhouse, where there was an old and much-weathered map pinned up on the wall. She pointed a well-bitten fingernail at a place between the islands of Soma Plume and Gnomon. “We’re about here,” she said. “And we’ve got to get…up to here.” Their destination lay past the Twenty-Fifth Hour, way to the north of the archipelago. “If we had more time, we’d take the long way back, hugging the coast of Gnomon and then passing the Nonce and heading north between Ninnyhammer and Jibarish, and rounding the Twenty-Fifth till we get back to our village.” The Twenty-Fifth, Candy thought: she’d been there briefly with the women of the Fantomaya. She’d seen all kinds of visions, including one that she’d dreamed of many times since: a woman walking on a sky full of birds, while fish swam in the watery heavens around her head. “There’s no chance you could drop us off at the Twenty-Fifth, is there?” Candy said. But even as she spoke she remembered the dark side of life on the Twenty-Fifth. She’d been pursued there by a pair of monsters called the Fugit Brothers, whose features moved around their faces on clicking legs. “You know what?” she said. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea after all.” “Well, we can’t do it anyway,” Galatea told her. “It’ll take too long. The fish’ll rot.” “So which way are we going?” Malingo said. Candy had guessed already, from looking at the map. “We’re going between the Pyramids of Xuxux and Gorgossium.” Galatea grinned. Every other tooth in her mouth was missing. “You should be a-fishing, you should,” she said. “Yep, that’s where we’re going. Mizzel thinks it’s a bad plan. He says there’s all manner of things that live on the island of Midnight. Monsterosities, he says. Horridy things that will come flapping over and attack the ship.” “Why would they do that?” Candy asked. “Because they want to eat the fish. Or else they want to eat us. Maybe both. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it ain’t good news. Anyhow, we can’t be squibbies about this—” “Squibbies?” said Candy. “Cowards,” Malingo said. “We gotta sail past Midnight whether we like it or not,” Galatea went on. “Either that or we lose the fish, and a lot of people will go hungry.” “Not a good choice,” said Skebble as he climbed out of the hold. “But like the girl says, we got no choice. And…’fraid you got no choice but to come with us. Either that or we dumps you in the water again.” “I think we’d rather stay on board,” Candy said, giving Malingo an anxious look. They headed north, out of the bright afternoon waters of the straits between Four and Five into the dark seas that surrounded Midnight. It wasn’t a subtle change. One minute the Sea of Izabella was glittering with golden sunlight and they were warm; the next, waves of darkness covered the sun and a bitter cold swept in to surround them. Off to their port side they could see the immense island of Gorgossium. Even from a considerable distance they could pick out the windows of the thirteen towers of the fortress of Iniquisit and the lights that burned around the Todo mines. “You want a closer look?” said Mizzel to Candy. He passed her his battered old telescope, and she studied the island through it. There seemed to be immense heads carved from some of the stony outcrops of the island. Something that looked like a wolf’s head, something that looked vaguely human. But far more chilling were the vast insects she saw crawling around the island: like fleas or lice grown to the size of trucks. They made her shudder, even at such a safe distance. “Not a pretty place, is it?” Skebble said. “No, not really,” said Candy. “Plenty of folks like it though,” the Captain went on. “If you’ve got a darkness in your heart, that be the place you go, huh? That be the place you feel at home.” “Home…” Candy murmured. Malingo was standing beside her and heard her speak the word. “Homesick?” he said. “No. No. Well…sometimes. A little. Just about my mom, really. But no, that wasn’t what I was thinking.” She nodded toward Gorgossium. “It’s just strange to think of somebody calling that dismal place their home.” “Each to their Hour, as the poet wrote,” Malingo said. “Which is your Hour?” Candy asked him. “Where do you belong?” “I don’t know,” Malingo said sadly. “I lost my family a long time ago—or at least they lost me—and I don’t expect to see them again in this life.” “We could try and find them for you.” “One day, maybe.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “When we don’t have so many teeth nipping at our heels.” There was a sudden explosion of laughter from the wheelhouse, which brought the conversation to an end. Candy wandered over to see what was going on. There was a small television (which had red curtains to either side of the screen, like a little theater) placed on the floor. Mizzel, Charry and Galatea were watching it, much entertained by the antics of a cartoon boy. “It’s the Commexo Kid!” Charry said. “He’s so wild!” Candy had seen the Kid’s image many times now. It was hard to go very far in the Abarat without meeting his perpetually smiling face on a billboard or a wall. His antics and his catchphrases were used to sell everything from cradles to coffins, and all that anybody would want in between. Candy watched the flickering blue screen for a little while, thinking back to her encounter with the man who had created the character: Rojo Pixler. She’d met him on Ninnyhammer, briefly, and in the many weeks since she’d half expected to see him again at some turn in the road. He was part of her future, she knew, though she didn’t know how or why. On screen the Kid was playing tricks, as usual, much to the amusement of his little audience. It was simple, knockabout stuff. Paint was spattered; food was thrown. And through it all jogged the relentlessly cheerful figure of the Commexo Kid, dispensing smiles, pies and “just a li’l bit o’ love” (as he would round off every show saying) to the world. “Hey, Miss Misery,” said Mizzel, glancing around at Candy. “You don’t laugh!” “I just don’t think it’s very funny, that’s all.” “He’s the best!” Charry said. “Lordy Lou, the things he says!” “Happy! Happy! Happy!” said Galatea, perfectly copying the Kid’s squeaky voice. “That’s what I is! Happy! Happy! Hap—” She was interrupted by a panicked shout from Malingo. “We’ve got trouble!” he yelled. “And it’s coming from Gorgossium!” 4 THE SCAVENGERS (#ulink_89afbd79-2820-586a-917e-bbe067088726) CANDY WAS THE FIRST out of the wheelhouse and back on deck. Malingo had Mizzel’s telescope to his eye and was studying the threatening skies in the direction of Gorgossium. There were four dark-winged creatures flying toward the fishing boat. They were visible because their innards glowed through their translucent flesh, as though lit by some bitter fire. They gibbered as they approached, the chatter of mad, hungry things. “What are they?” Candy said. “They’re zethekaratchia,” Mizzel informed her. “Zethek for short. The ever-hungry ones. They can never eat enough. That’s why we can see their bones.” “Not good news,” Candy guessed. “Not good news.” “They’ll take the fish!” Skebble said, appearing from the bowels of the ship. He’d apparently been attending to the engine, because he was covered with oil stains and carried a large hammer and an even more sizeable wrench. “Lock down the holds!” he yelled to his little crew. “Quickly, or we’ll lose all the fish!” He pointed a stubby finger at Malingo and Candy. “That means you as well!” “If they can’t get to the fish, won’t they come after us?” Malingo said. “We have to save the fish,” Skebble insisted. He caught hold of Malingo’s arm and pressed him toward the brimming holds. “Don’t argue!” he said. “I don’t want to lose the catch! And they’re getting closer!” Candy followed his gaze skyward. The zethek were less than ten yards from the boat now, swooping down over the twilight sea to begin their scavenging. Candy didn’t like the idea of trying to protect herself against them unarmed, so she grabbed hold of the wrench in Skebble’s left hand. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take that!” she said, surprising even herself. “Take it!” he said, and went to help the rest of the crew with the labor of closing the holds. Candy headed for the ladder on the side of the wheelhouse. She put the wrench between her teeth (not a pleasant experience: it tasted of fish oil and Skebble’s sweat) and clambered up the ladder, turning to face the zethek once she reached the top. The sight of her standing on the wheelhouse, the wrench in her hand like a club, had put a little doubt in them. They were no longer swooping down on the Parroto Parroto but hovering ten or twelve feet above it. “Come on down!” Candy yelled to them. “I dare you!” “Are you crazy?” Charry hollered. “Get down!” Malingo called to her. “Candy, get—” Too late! The closest zethek took Candy’s bait and swooped down, its long, bone-bright fingers reaching to snatch at her head. “Good boy!” she said. “Look what I’ve got for you.” She swung the wrench in a wide arc. The tool was heavy, and in truth she had very little control over it, so it was more by accident than intention that she actually struck the creature. That said, it was quite a blow. The zethek dropped out of the sky as if shot, striking the boards of the wheelhouse so hard they cracked. For a second he lay still. “You killed him!” said Galatea. “Ha-ha! Good for you!” “I…don’t think he’s dead…” Candy said. What Galatea couldn’t hear, Candy could. The zethek was growling. Very slowly he raised his gargoylish head. Dark blood ran from his nose. “You…hurt…me…” “Well, come over here,” Candy said, beckoning to the beast across the fractured boards of the roof. “I’ll do it again.” “The girl’s suicidal,” Mizzel remarked. “Your friend is right,” the zethek said. “You are suicidal.” Having spoken, the zethekaratchia opened his mouth and kept opening it, wider and wider, until it was literally large enough to bite off the top of Candy’s head. In fact, that seemed to be his intention, because he lunged forward, leaping across the hole in the roof and throwing Candy down on her back. Then he jumped on top of her. The wrench flew out of her hand; she had no time to pick it up. The zethek was upon her, his mouth vast— She closed her eyes as a cloud of the beast’s breath broke against her face. She had seconds to live. And then suddenly Skebble was there, hammer in hand. “Leave the girl alone,” he hollered, and brought the hammer down on the zethek’s skull, delivering it such a calamitous blow that he simply fell backward into the wheelhouse through the hole in the roof, dead. “That was brave, girl,” he said, hauling Candy to her feet. She patted the top of her head just to be sure it was still there. It was. “One down,” said Candy. “Three to—” “Help, somebody!” Mizzel yelled. “Help!” Candy turned around to find that another of these wretched things had caught hold of Mizzel and was pinning him to the deck, preparing to make a meal of him. “No, you don’t!” she yelled, and ran for the ladder. Only when she was halfway down did she remember that she’d left the wrench on the roof. It was too late to go back for it. The deck, when she reached it, was slick with fish oil and water, and instead of running she found herself sliding over it, completely out of control. She hollered for someone to stop her, but there was no one close enough. Straight ahead was the hold, its door already opened by one of the beasts. Her only hope of stopping herself was to reach out and grab the zethek that was assaulting Mizzel. But she’d have to be quick, before the opportunity slid by. She put out her hand and made a grab for the beast. The zethek saw her coming and turned to ward her off, but he wasn’t fast enough: she caught hold of his hair. He squawked like an enraged macaw and struggled to free himself, but Candy held on. Unfortunately, her momentum was too great to bring her to a halt. Quite the reverse. Instead, the creature came along with her, reaching up to try and untangle her fingers from his ratty locks even as they both slid toward the gaping hold. Over the edge they went and down among the fish. Luckily it wasn’t a long fall; the hold was almost filled with smatterlings. But it wasn’t a pleasant landing, a thousand fish sliding beneath them, cold and wet and very dead. Candy still had her grip on the zethek’s hair, so that when the creature stood up—which he did instantly—she was hauled to her feet too. The creature wasn’t used to being held by anybody, especially some scrap of a girl. He writhed and raged, snapping at her with his over-sized mouth one moment, the next attempting to shrug her loose by shaking his body so violently that his bones clattered. Finally, apparently despairing of escape, the zethek called to his surviving comrades: “Kud! Nattum! Here! In the hold! Now!” A few seconds after the call had gone out, Kud and Nattum appeared over the edge of the hold. “Methis!” Nattum said, grinning. “You have a girl for me!” So saying, he opened his mouth and inhaled so powerfully that Candy had to fight to keep herself from being pulled straight into the maw. Kud wasn’t interested in such tricks. He shoved Nattum aside. “I take her!” he said. “I’m hungry.” Nattum shoved back. “So am I!” he growled. While she was being fought over, Candy took the opportunity to yell for help. “Somebody! Malingo? Charry?” “Too late,” said Kud, and leaning over the edge of the hold he caught hold of her and pulled her up. He was so quick and violent that Candy lost her grip on Methis. Her feet slid over the slimy fish for a moment; then she was in the air, being hauled toward Kud’s mouth, which now also opened like a toothed tunnel. The next moment everything went dark. Her head—much to her horror—was in the mouth of the beast. 5 THE SPEAKING OF A WORD (#ulink_0decce38-98a9-550c-849f-40df0329c322) THOUGH HER ENTIRE SKULL was suddenly enclosed by the zethek’s mouth, Candy was still able to hear one thing from the outside world. Just one stupid thing. It was the squeaking voice of the Commexo Kid, singing his eternally optimistic little song. “Happy! Happy! Happy!” it squealed. She offered up a little prayer in that dark moment, to ask any God or Goddess, of Abarat or the Hereafter, who would listen. It was a very simple prayer. It simply said: Please don’t let that ridiculous Kid be the last thing I hear before I die— And, thank the divinities, her prayer was answered. There was a dull thud directly above her, and she felt the tension of Kud’s jaws relax. She instantly pulled her head out of his mouth. This time the slickness of the fish beneath her was to her advantage. She slid across the carpet of smatterlings in time to see Kud collapse among the fish. She took her eyes off him and looked up at her savior. It was Malingo. He was standing there with Skebble’s hammer in his hand. He smiled at Candy. But his moment of triumph was short. In the next instant Kud rose up roaring from his slimy bed of fish and pulled the legs out from under Malingo, who fell down on his back. “Ah-ha!” Kud yelled, laying eyes on the hammer that slipped out of Malingo’s hand when he fell. Kud snatched it up and got to his feet. The brightness in his bones had become a furious blaze in the last few minutes. In the sockets of his skull, two dots of scarlet rage flickered as he turned his stare toward Candy. He looked like something from a ghost-train ride. Wielding the hammer, he raced at Candy. “Run!” Malingo yelled. But she had nowhere to run to. There was a zethek to the left of her and one to the right, and behind her a solid wall. A skeletal smile spread over Kud’s face. “Any last words?” he said as he lifted the hammer above his head. “Come on,” he growled. “You must have something in your head.” Curiously, she did have something in her head: a word she could not even remember hearing until this moment— Kud seemed to see the confusion in her eyes. “Speak!” he said, striking the wall to the left of her head with the hammer. The reverberations echoed all around the hold. The dead smatterlings convulsed, as though they’d been given a spasm of life. “Talk to me!” Kud said, striking the wall to the right of Candy’s head. Showers of sparks erupted from the spot, and the fish jumped a second time. Candy put her hand up to her throat. There was a word there. She could feel it, like something she’d eaten but not quite swallowed. It wanted to be spoken. That she was certain about. It wanted to be spoken. And who was she to deny it its ambitions? She let the syllables rise up, unbidden. And spoke them. “Jassassakya-th?m!” she said. From the corner of her eye she saw Malingo sit bolt upright on the bed of fish. “Oh Lordy Lou…” he said, his voice hushed with awe. “How do you know that word?” “I don’t,” Candy said. But the air knew it. The walls knew it. No sooner were the syllables out of her lips than everything began to vibrate in response to the sound of whatever Candy had said. And with each vibration the air and the walls repeated the syllables in their own strange fashion. Jassassakya-th?m! Jassassakya-th?m! Jassassakya-th?m! “What…have…you…done…girl?” Kud said. Candy didn’t know. Malingo, on the other hand, did. “She’s uttered a Word of Power,” he said. “I have?” Candy replied. “I mean, I have. That’s what I’ve done.” “Magic?” Kud said. He began to retreat from her now, the hammer sliding out of his fingers. “I knew there was something about you from the beginning. You’re a witch-girl! That’s what you are! A witchgirl!” As the zethek’s panic grew, so did the reverberations. With each repetition they gathered strength. Jassassakya-th?m! Jassassakya-th?m! Jassassakya-th?m! “I think you should get out of here now,” Malingo yelled to Candy as the din climbed. “What?” “I said: Get out! Out!” As he spoke he stumbled toward her through the fish, which were also vibrating in rhythm with the words. The zetheks paid no attention to him, nor to Candy. They were suffering from the effects of the word. They had their hands clamped over their ears, as though they were afraid it was deafening them, which perhaps it was. “This is not a safe place to be,” Malingo said when he got to Candy’s side. She nodded. She was beginning to feel the distressing influence of the vibrations herself. Galatea was there to lift her up onto the deck. Then both girls turned to help Malingo, reaching down to catch hold of his long arms. Candy counted: “One, two, three—” And they hauled together, lifting him up with surprising ease. The scene in the hold had become surreal. The Word was making the catch vibrate so violently that at first glance the fish seemed to be alive again. As for the zethek, they were like three flies caught in a jar, propelled back and forth across the hold, slamming against the sides. They seemed to have forgotten all about the possibility of escape. The word had made them crazy, or stupid, or both. Skebble was standing on the opposite side of the hold. He pointed to Candy and yelled at her: “Make it stop! Or you’re going to shake my boat apart!” He was right about the boat. The vibrations in the hold had spread throughout the vessel. The boards were shaking so violently nails were being spat into the air, the already cracked wheelhouse was rocking to and fro, the rigging was vibrating like the strings of a huge guitar; even the mast was swaying. Candy looked over at Malingo. “See?” she said. “If you’d taught me some magic I’d know how to turn this off.” “Well, wait,” Malingo said. “Where did you learn that word?” “I didn’t learn it.” “You must have heard it somewhere.” “No. I swear. It just appeared in my throat. I don’t know where it came from.” “If you two have quite finished chatting?” Skebble hollered over the din. “My boat—” “Yes!” Candy shouted back. “I know, I know!” “Inhale it!” Malingo said. “What?” “The Word! Inhale the Word!” “Inhale it?” “Do as he says!” Galatea yelled. “Before the boat sinks!” Everything was now shaking to the rhythm of the Word. There wasn’t a board or a rope or a hook from bow to stern that wasn’t in motion. In the hold the three zetheks were still being pitched around, sobbing for mercy. Candy closed her eyes. Strangely enough, she could see the word that she’d uttered in her mind’s eye. There it was, clear as crystal. Jass…assa…kya…th?m… She emptied her lungs through her nostrils. Then, still keeping her eyes tightly shut, she drew a deep breath. The word in her mind’s eye shook. Then it cracked, and it seemed to fly apart. Was it just her imagination, or could she feel it coming back into her throat? She swallowed hard, and the word was gone. The reaction was instantaneous. The vibrations died away. The boards dropped back into place, peppered by nails. The mast stopped lurching to and fro. The fish stopped their grotesque cavorting. The zetheks quickly realized that the attack had ceased. They unstopped their ears and shook their heads, as though to put their thoughts back in order. “Go, brothers!” Nattum said. “Before the witch-girl tries some new trick!” He didn’t wait to see that his siblings were doing as he suggested. He started to beat his wings furiously and climbed into the air, weaving a zigzag course skyward. Methis was about to follow; then he turned to Kud. “Let’s ruin their catch!” Skebble let out a howl of complaint. “No!” he yelled. “Don’t—” His cry was ignored. The two creatures squatted down among the fish, and the vilest smell Candy had ever smelled in her life rose up from the hold. “Are they—?” Malingo nodded grimly. “The catch! The catch!” Skebble was howling. “Oh, Lord, no! No!” Methis and Kud thought all this was hugely amusing. Having done their worst, they beat their wings and lifted off. “Damn you! Damn you!” Skebble yelled as they flew past. “That was enough fish to feed the village for half a season,” Galatea said mournfully. “And they poisoned it?” Malingo said. “What do you think? Smell that stink. Who could ever eat something that smelled like that?” Kud had by now escaped into the darkness, following Nattum back to Gorgossium. But Methis was so busy laughing at what they’d just done that he accidentally clipped the top of the mast with his wing. For a moment he struggled to recover himself but lost his momentum and fell back toward the Parroto Parroto, hitting the edge of the wheelhouse roof and bouncing off onto the deck, where he lay unconscious. There was a moment of surprised silence from everybody on deck. The whole sequence of events—from Candy’s speaking of the Word to Methis’ crash—had taken at most a couple of minutes. It was old Mizzel who broke the hush. “Charry?” he said. “Yes?” “Get a rope. And you, Galatea, help him. Tie up this burden of filth.” “What for?” “Just do it!” Mizzel said. “And be quick about it, before the damn thing wakes up!” 6 TWO CONVERSATIONS (#ulink_48784fc3-b266-5139-a24e-3c066a0683f4) “SO,” SAID MIZZEL, ONCE the stunned zethek was firmly secured. “You want to know my plan?” They were all sitting at the bow of the boat, as far from the stink of the hold as they could get. Candy was still in a mild state of shock: what she’d just witnessed herself doing (speaking a word she didn’t even know she knew) needed to be thought about very carefully. But now was not the time to do the thinking. Mizzel had a plan, and he wanted to share it. “We’re going to have to dump out all the smatterlings. Every last fish.” “A lot of people are going to go hungry,” Galatea said. “Not necessarily,” Mizzel replied. He had a sly expression on his scarred and weatherworn face. “To the west of us lies the island of Six O’clock…” “Babilonium,” Candy said. “Precisely. Babilonium. The Carnival Island. Masques and parades and fairs and bug wrestling and music and dancing and freaks.” “Freaks?” said Galatea. “What kind of freaks?” “Every kind. Things that are too small, things that are too large, things with three heads, things with no head at all. If you want to see freaks and monsters, then Babilonium’s the place to find them.” While the old man was speaking, Skebble had gotten up and gone to the door to study the bound zethek. “Have you seen these freak shows on Babilonium?” he said to Mizzel. “Certainly. I worked in Babilonium in my youth. Made a lot of money too.” “Doing what?” said Galatea. Mizzel looked a little uncomfortable. “I don’t want to go into details,” he said. “Let me just say it involved…um, bodily gases…and flame.” Nobody said anything for a moment or two. Then Charry piped up. “You farted fire?” he said. Everybody subdued their amusement with a great effort of will. All except for Skebble, who let out a whoop of laughter. “You did!” he said. “You did, didn’t you?” “It was a living,” Mizzel said, staring fiercely at Charry, his ears bright red. “Now can I please get on with my story?” “Go on,” said Skebble. “Get to the point.” “Well, it seems to me if we could sail this damn boat to Babilonium, we would sure as certain find somebody to buy that zethek and put him in one of them freak shows.” “Would we make much money from a deal like that?” “We’ll make sure we do. And when we’ve done the deal we’ll sail to Tazmagor, get the hold scrubbed out and buy a new supply of fish.” “What do you think?” Candy said to Skebble. He glanced out at the bound creature, scratching at his tatty beard. “No harm in trying,” he replied. “Babilonium, huh?” Candy said. “What, you have a problem with this?” Skebble said testily. It had been a grim and eventful couple of hours. He was obviously weary, his energies exhausted. “If you don’t want to come with us—” “No, no, we’ll come,” said Candy. “I’ve never been to Babilonium.” “The playground of the Abarat!” Malingo said. “Fun for all the family!” “Well, then…what are we waiting for?” said Galatea. “We can dump the smatterlings as we go!” By chance Otto Houlihan was on Gorgossium at that time, waiting for an audience with the Lord of Midnight. It was not an appetizing prospect. He was going to have to report that though he came very close to capturing the girl in Hap’s Vault he had failed, and that she and her geshrat companion had most likely thrown themselves to their deaths. The news would not make Carrion happy, he knew. This made Houlihan nervous. He remembered all too well the feeding of the nightmares he’d witnessed in the Twelfth Tower. He didn’t want to die the same way as the wretched miner had died. In an attempt to put these troubling thoughts from his mind, he slipped away to a little inn called The Fool in Chains where he could drink some Hobarookian vodka. Perhaps it was time—he thought as he drank—to cease his life as a hunter and find a less risky means of making money. As a bug-wrestling promoter, perhaps; or a knife juggler. Anything, as long as he never had to come back to Gorgossium and wait… His clammy meditations were interrupted by the sound of laughter from outside. He staggered out to see what all the fuss was about. Several customers, many in states of inebriation as bad or worse than his own, were standing in a rough circle, pointing to something on the ground in their midst. The Criss-Cross Man went to see. There in the dirt was one of the uglier occupants of Gorgossium: a large zethek. He had apparently collided with a tree and had fallen to earth, under which he was now standing, looking very confused, picking leaves out of his hair and spitting out dirt. The drunkards just kept laughing at him. “Go on, laugh at me!” the creature said. “Kud seen a thing you be way afraid of. A terrible thing I seen.” “Oh yeah?” said one of the drunks. “And what was that?” Kud spat out one last mouthful of dirt. “A witch-girl,” he said. “Does bad magic on me. Almost kills me with her Word.” Houlihan elbowed his way through the crowd and grabbed hold of the zethek’s wing so that he wouldn’t try to escape. Then he peered into his broken, confounded face. “You said you fought with this girl?” he said. “Yes.” “Was she alone?” “No. She was with a geshrat.” “You’re sure?” “You saying I don’t know what a geshrat looks like? I’ve been drinking their blood since I was a baby.” “Never mind about the geshrat. Talk to me about the girl.” “Don’t shake me! I will not be shaken. I’m—” “Kud the zethek. Yes, I heard. And I’m Otto Houlihan, the Criss-Cross Man.” The moment Houlihan offered up his name, the crowd that had been pressing around Kud suddenly melted away. “I’ve heard of you,” Kud said. “You’re dangerous.” “Not to my friends,” Otto replied. “You want to be my friend, Kud?” The zethek took but a moment to think on this. “Of course,” the creature said, bowing his head respectfully. “Good,” said the Criss-Cross Man. “Then back to the girl. Did you catch her name?” “The geshrat called her—” He frowned. “What was it? Mandy? Dandy?” “Candy?” “Candy! Yes! He called her Candy!” “And on what island did you last see this girl?” “No island,” Kud replied. “I saw her on a boat, out there—” He pointed behind him, toward the lightless waters of the Izabella. “You go after her?” “Why?” Kud looked nervous. “Magic in her,” he said. “Monstrous. She’s monstrous.” Houlihan didn’t remark on the oddity of a creature like Kud calling Candy a monster. He simply said: “Where do I find her?” “Follow your nose. We spoiled their catch by befouling their hold.” “Very sophisticated,” Houlihan said, and turned his back on the befuddled beast to consider his options. If he stayed on Gorgossium he would eventually be admitted into Carrion’s presence and be obliged to explain how once again the girl had outmaneuvered him. The alternative was to leave Midnight and hope he would be able to find Candy and get some answers from her before Carrion summoned him back and demanded answers. Yes! That was better. A lot better. “Are you finished with me?” the zethek growled. Houlihan glanced back at the wretched thing. “Yes, yes. Go,” he said. “I’ve got work to do, following your stink.” 7 SOMETHING OF BABILONIUM (#ulink_be263b7c-c7af-5c4f-939d-2b55dd4ca0ab) THE SHORT VOYAGE TO the Carnival Island quickly took the Parroto Parroto out of the darkness that surrounded Gorgossium. A golden glow on the horizon marked their destination, and the closer they came to it the more boats appeared in the waters around the little fishing boat, all making their way west. Even the most unremarkable of vessels was decorated with flags and lights and streamers, and all were filled with happy people on their way to celebrate on the island ahead. Candy sat in the bow of the Parroto Parroto, watching the other vessels and listening to the singing and the shouts that echoed across the water. “I don’t see Babilonium yet,” she said to Malingo. “All I see is mist.” “But do you see the lights in that mist?” Malingo said. “That’s Babilonium for sure!” He grinned like an excited kid. “I can’t wait! I read about the Carnival Island in Wolfswinkel’s books. Everything you ever wanted to see or do, it’s there! In the old days, people used to come over from the Hereafter just to spend time in Babilonium. They’d go back with their heads so stuffed with the things they saw, they had to make up new words to describe it.” “Like what?” “Oh. Let me see. Phantasmagoric. Cathartic. Pandemonical.” “I never heard of pandemonical.” “I made that one up.” Malingo smirked. “But there were hundreds of words, all inspired by Babilonium.” As he spoke, the mist began to thin out and the island it had been concealing came into view: a glittering, chaotic conglomeration of tents and banners, roller coasters and sideshows. “Oh. My. Lordy. Lou,” Malingo said softly. “Will you look at that?” Even Charry and Galatea, who were working on building a makeshift cage of timbers and rope to contain the captured zethek, stopped work to admire the spectacle. And the closer the Parroto Parroto came to the island, the more extraordinary the sight seemed to be. Despite the fact that the Hour was still early and the sky was still light (showing just a few stars), the lanterns and lamps and myriad little fires on the island burned so brightly that they still made the island shimmer with their light. And by that light the crowds could be seen, busy about the happy labor of pleasure. Candy could hear their contented buzz, even over a considerable expanse of water, and it made her heart quicken with anticipation. What were these people seeing that made them so giddy with bliss? They chatted, they whooped, they sang, they laughed; more than anything they laughed, as though they’d only just learned how. “This is all real, isn’t it?” Candy said to Malingo. “I mean, it isn’t a mirage or something?” “Your guess is as good as mine, lady,” Malingo said. “I mean, I’ve always assumed it was perfectly real, but I’ve been wrong before. Oh…speaking of that…of being wrong, if you’re still interested in learning whatever magic I got out of Wolfswinkel’s books, I’d be happy to teach you.” “What made you change your mind?” “What do you think? The Word of Power you uttered.” “Oh, you mean Jass—” Malingo put his finger to Candy’s lips. “No, lady. Don’t.” Candy smiled. “Oh yes. That might spoil the moment.” “You see, what did I tell you in Tazmagor? There are laws to magic.” “And you can teach me those laws? At least some of them. Stop me from making a bad mistake.” “I suppose I could try,” Malingo conceded. “Though it seems to me you may know more than you think you know.” “But how? I’m just—” “—an ordinary girl from the Hereafter. Yes, so you keep saying.” “You don’t believe me?” “Lady, I don’t know any other ordinary girls from the Hereafter besides you, but I’d be willing to bet none of them could take on three zetheks and come out the winner!” Candy thought of the girls in her class. Deborah Hackbarth, Ruth Ferris. Malingo was right. It was very hard to imagine any one of them standing in her shoes right now. “All right,” she said. “Supposing I am different, somehow? What made me that way?” “That, lady, is a very good question,” Malingo replied. After much maneuvering through the flotillas of boats and ferries and people on water bicycles that thronged the harbor, Skebble brought the Parroto Parroto in to dock at Babilonium. Though the catch had been dumped in the straits several miles back, the stink of the zetheks had permeated their clothes, so their first task before they ventured onto the crowded walkways was to purchase some sweeter-smelling outfits. It wasn’t difficult. Over the years a number of enterprising clothes merchants had set up their stalls close to the dock, realizing that many of the visitors would want to shuck off their workday clothes as soon as they arrived on Babilonium and buy something a little more appropriate to the air of the Carnival. There were perhaps fifty or sixty establishments in this chaotic little bazaar, their owners all singing out the virtues of their wares at the tops of their voices. Shoemakers, boot makers, cane makers, breeches makers, petticoat makers, bodice makers, suit makers, hatmakers. Needless to say, there were a lot of very garish and outlandish outfits for sale—singing boots, aquarium hats, moonbeam underwear—but only Charry (who did buy the singing boots) gave in to the merchants’ relentless salesmanship. The rest all chose comfortable clothes that they could wear without embarrassment when they eventually moved on from Babilonium. The Carnival Island was all Candy and Malingo had hoped it would be, and more. It attracted people from right across the archipelago, so there were all kinds of shapes and faces, garments, languages and customs. The visitors from the Outer Islands, for instance—from Autland and Speckle Frew—were dressed simply and practically, their sense of Carnival limited to a new waistcoat or a little fiddle playing as they walked. Celebrants from the Night Islands, on the other hand—from Huffaker and Jibbarish and Idjit—were dressed like escapees from a magician’s dream, their masks and costumes so fantastic that it was hard to know where the audience ended and the entertainment began. Then there were the travelers from Commexo City, who favored a certain cool modernity in their outfits. Many wore small collars that projected moving images up around their faces—masks of color and light. More often than not it was the Commexo Kid whose adventures were playing on the screens of these faces. Finally, of course, there were those creatures—and there were many—who, like Malingo, needed neither paint nor light to make them part of this prodigious Carnival. Creatures born with snouts, tails, scales and horns, their forms and their voices and their behavior a fantastical show unto itself. And what had all these Carnival-goers come to see? Whatever, in truth, their eager hearts and spirits desired. Mycassian Bug Wrestling in one tent, subtle-body dancing in another; a seven-ring circus, complete with a troupe of albino dinosaurs, in a third. There was a beast called a fingoos, who put its snout right through your head to read your mind. Next door to that, a thousand-strong choir of mungualameeza birds were singing excerpts from Fofum’s Bumble Bees. Everywhere you looked there were entertainments. The Electric Baby, who had a head full of colored lights, was on display here, as was a poet called Thebidus, who recited epic poems with candles perched on his pate, and a thing called a frayd, which was billed as a beast that had to be seen to be believed: not one but many creatures, each devouring the other to make a “living testament to the horrors of appetite!” Of course, if you didn’t wish to go into the tents, there was plenty to do in the open air. There was a dinosaur on display—“lately captured by Rojo Pixler in the wilds of the Outer Islands”—and a hoofed beast the size of a bull delicately walking a high wire, and of course the inevitable roller coasters, each claiming to be more heart-stopping than the competition. The air was filled with the mingled smells of a thousand things: pies, caramel, sawdust, gasoline, sweat, dog’s breath, sweet smoke, sour smoke, fruit nearly rotten, fruit beyond rotten, ale, feathers, fire. And if happiness had a smell, that too was in the air of Babilonium. In fact, it was the fragrance that hovered behind all the other fragrances. Nor did the island ever seem to exhaust its surprises. There was always something new around the next corner, in the next tent, in the next arena. Of course, any place that boasted such brightness and wonderment had its share of shadows too. At one point the group made a turn off the main thoroughfare and found themselves in a place where the music wasn’t quite as upbeat and the lights not quite so bright. There was a more sinister, serpentine magic at play here. There were colors in the air, which made half-visible shapes before dissolving again; and music coming from somewhere that sounded as though it was being sung by a choir of irate babies. People peeped out from behind curtains of booths to the right and left, or flew over them, their shapes changing as they somersaulted against the sky. But they’d come to the right place, no doubt of that. Right up ahead was a large canvas sign that read FREAK SHOW, and under it a brightly colored row of banners on which a variety of outlandish creatures had been crudely painted. A creature with a fringe of arms and tentacles around its huge head; a boy with a body of a reptile; a beast that was a bizarre compendium of pieces thrown together carelessly. Seeing all of this, Methis the zethek quickly realized what was being planned on his behalf. He began to fling himself around his cage, cursing obscenely. The crudely made cage looked as though it might break beneath his assault but proved stronger than the creature’s fury. “Should we feel a little sorry for him?” Candy asked. “After what he did?” said Galatea. “I don’t think so. He would have murdered you in cold blood if he’d had the chance.” “I suppose you’re right.” “And destroying the fish like that,” said Malingo. “Pure malice.” The zethek knew he was being talked about and fell silent, his gaze going from one person to the next, hatred in every glance. “If looks could kill,” Candy murmured. “We should leave you to make the sale,” Malingo said to Skebble when they were within a few yards of the freak show. “You should have a little coin for yourselves,” Mizzel said. “We could never have caught the creature if not for you. Especially Candy. My Lord! Such courage!” “We don’t need any money,” Candy said. “Malingo’s right. We should leave you to sell the creature.” They paused a few yards shy of the entrance to the freak show to make their farewells. They hadn’t known one another very long, but they’d fought for their lives side by side, so there was an intensity in their parting that would not have been there if they’d simply gone out sailing together. “Come to the isle of Efreet one Night,” Skebble said. “We never see the sun up there, of course, but you’re always welcome.” “Of course, we got some fierce beasts live up there,” Mizzel said. “But they stay to the south side of the island mostly. Our village is on the north side. It’s called Pigea.” “We’ll remember,” Candy said. “No, you won’t,” said Galatea with half a smile. “We’ll just be some fisherfolk you met on your adventuring. You won’t even remember our names.” “Oh, she remembers,” Malingo said, glancing at Candy. “More and more, she remembers.” It was a curious thing to say, of course, so everyone just ignored the remark, smiled and parted. The last time Candy looked back, the quartet was dragging Methis’ cage through the curtains into the freak show. “You think they’ll sell him?” Candy said. “I’m sure they will,” Malingo replied. “It’s ugly, that thing. And people pay money to see ugly things, don’t they?” “I guess they do. What did you mean when you talked about my remembering?” Malingo looked at his feet and chewed on his tongue for a little time. Finally he said: “I don’t know exactly. But you’re remembering something, aren’t you?” Candy nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I just don’t know what.” 8 A LIFE IN THE THEATRE (#ulink_cdf4d145-c289-5cf9-9275-d63974b11c6f) IT WAS THE FIRST time on their journey together that Candy and Malingo had realized that they had different tastes. Up until now they’d traveled in step with each other, more or less. But faced with the apparently limitless diversions and entertainments of Babilonium, they found they weren’t quite so well matched. When Malingo wanted to see the green werewolf star juggler, Candy was itching to go on the Prophet of Doom ride. When Candy had been Doomed six times, and wanted to sit quietly and gather her breath, Malingo was ready to go take a ride on the Spirit Train to Hell. So they decided to separate, to follow their own fancies. Occasionally, despite the incredible density of the crowd, they would find each other, as friends will. They’d take a minute or two to exchange a few excited words about what they’d seen or done, and then they’d part again, to find some new recreation. On the third time this happened, however, Malingo reappeared with the leathery flaps he had on his face standing proud with excitement. He was wearing a cockeyed grin. “Lady! Lady!” he said. “You have to come and look at this!” “What is it?” “I can’t really describe it. You just have to come!” His excitement was infectious. Candy put off going to watch the Huffaker Snail Tabernacle Choir and followed through the throng to a tent. It was not one of the huge circus-sized tents, but it was large enough to hold several hundred people. Inside there were about thirty rows of wooden benches, most of them filled by an audience that was roaringly entertained by the play that was being performed onstage. “Sit! Sit!” Malingo urged her. “You have to see this!” Candy sat down on the end of a crowded bench. There was no room for Malingo anywhere nearby, so he remained standing. The setting of the play was a single large room stuffed to over-capacity with books, antique ornaments and fanciful furniture, the arms and legs of which were carved with the scowling heads and tremendous talons of Abaratian monsters. All of this was pure theatrical illusion, of course; most of the room was painted on canvas, and the details of the furniture were painted too. As a result, none of it was very solid. The whole set shook whenever a cast member slammed a door or opened a window. And there was plenty of that. The play was a wild farce, which the actors performed with abandon, yelling and throwing themselves around like clowns in a circus ring. The audience was laughing so hard that many of the jokes had to be repeated for the benefit of those who didn’t hear them the first time. Glancing along the row in which she was sitting, Candy saw people with tears of laughter pouring down their faces. “What’s so funny?” Candy said to Malingo. “You’ll see,” he replied. She went on watching. There was a shrill exchange going on between a young woman in a bright orange wig and a bizarre individual called Jingo (that much she heard), who was running around the room like a crazy man, hiding under the table one moment and hanging from the swaying scenery the next. To judge by the audience’s response this was about the funniest thing they’d ever seen. But Candy was still lost as to what it was all about. Until— —a man in a bright yellow suit came onstage, demanding rum. Candy’s jaw fell open. She looked up at Malingo with an expression of disbelief on her face. He smiled from ear to ear and nodded, as if to say: Yes, that’s right. It’s what you think it is. “Why are you keeping me here, Jaspar Codswoddle?” the young woman demanded. “Because it suits me, Qwandy Tootinfruit!” Candy suddenly laughed so loudly that everybody else around her stopped laughing for a moment. A few puzzled faces were turned in her direction. “Qwandy Tootinfruit…” she whispered. “It’s a very funny name…” Meanwhile, onstage: “You’re my prisoner,” Codswoddle was saying to Qwandy. “And you’re going to stay here as long as it suits me.” At this, the girl ran to the door; but the Codswoddle character threw an elaborate gesture in her direction, and there was a flash and a puff of yellow smoke, and a large grotesque face appeared carved on the door, snarling like a rabid beast. Jingo hid under the table, blabbering. The audience went wild with appreciation at the stage trickery. Malingo took a moment to lean over and whisper to Candy. “We’re famous,” he said. “It’s our story, only sillified.” “Sillified?” she said. It was a new word, but it nicely described the version of the truth that was being played out on the stage. This was a sillification of the truth. What had been a frightening experience for both Candy and Malingo was enacted here as an excuse for pratfalls, word games, face pullings and pie fights. The audience, of course, didn’t care. What did it matter to them whether this was true or not? A story was a story. All they wanted was to be entertained. Candy beckoned to Malingo, who squatted down on his haunches beside her. “Who do you suppose told the playwright about what happened to us?” she whispered to him. “It wasn’t you. It wasn’t me.” “Oh, there’s plenty of spirits on Ninnyhammer who could have been listening.” By now the play was heading for its big conclusion , and events onstage were getting more and more spectacular. Tootinfruit had stolen a volume of Codswoddle’s magic, and a battle of wild conjurations ensued, with the stage set becoming a fourth actor in the play. Furniture came to life and stalked around the stage; Codswoddle’s yellow-suited ancestors stepped out of a painting on the wall and tap-danced. And finally Qwandy used a spell to open up a hole in the floor, and the malevolent Codswoddle and all his train of monstrous tricks were snatched away into what Candy assumed was the Abaratian version of hell. Finally, to everybody’s delight, the walls of the house folded up and were dragged away down the same infernal hole, leaving Qwandy and Jingo standing against a backcloth of sparkling stars, free at last. It was all strangely satisfying, even for Candy, who knew that this version was very far from the truth. When the crowd rose to give the bowing actors a standing ovation, she found herself rising to join in the applause. Then the painted red curtain came down, and the crowd began to disperse, talking excitedly and repeating favorite lines to one another. “Did you enjoy it?” Malingo asked Candy. “In a weird way, yes. It’s nice to hear that laughter. It—” She stopped for a moment. “What’s wrong?” said Malingo. “I thought I heard somebody calling out my name.” “Here? No, I—” “There! Somebody is calling my name.” She looked over the crowd, puzzled. “Maybe one of the actors,” Malingo said. Looking back toward the stage. “Perhaps you were recognized?” “No. It wasn’t one of the actors,” Candy replied. “Who then?” “Him.” She pointed across the rows of benches toward a solitary figure who was standing close to the flap of the tent. The man was instantly recognizable, even though they were just catching glimpses of him through the departing crowd. The colorless skin, the deep-set eyes, the designs on his cheeks. There was no mistaking him. It was Otto Houlihan, the Criss-Cross Man. 9 AGAIN, THE CRISS-CROSS MAN (#ulink_97607ae3-9921-5fbc-97e7-9a8445358932) “HOW DID YOU FIND us?” Candy asked. Otto Houlihan smiled that joyless smile of his. “I followed the trail of stinking smatterlings,” he said. “It wasn’t hard to figure out where you’d gone. You’re not all that clever, whatever you might think.” “But how—” “—did I know you were making a getaway on a little fishing boat?” “Kud told him,” Malingo said. “Good guess, geshrat,” Otto replied. He didn’t look at Malingo. He concentrated his chilly gaze on Candy. “My, but you’ve become so much more famous since last we met.” He glanced toward the stage. “Apparently your life is now the stuff of bad comedy. Imagine that.” “Why don’t you give up the chase?” Candy replied. “We’re never going to let you take us. You know that.” “If I had my way,” Houlihan replied, raising his hands as he started to approach her, “you would be buried right here. But Carrion wants you alive. And so alive I must take you.” If any of the departing audience had heard this, they decided to ignore it. Now everyone had departed. The Criss-Cross Man didn’t bother to look around at the empty auditorium. He had all his attention focused on Candy. “Run…” Malingo murmured to her. Candy shook her head and stood her ground. She wasn’t going to let Houlihan think that she was afraid. She refused to give him the satisfaction. “Please, lady,” Malingo said. “Don’t let him—” “Ah!” said a ripe, rounded voice from the direction of the stage. “Fans!” With a little growl of frustration, Houlihan dropped his hands, still a stride or two away from Candy. The man who had just played Jaspar Codswoddle had appeared from backstage. He was nowhere near as fat or as tall as the character he had just portrayed. The illusion had been created with a false stomach, a false bottom and leg extensions, some of which he was still wearing. In fact he was a diminutive man, and beneath his makeup—most of which he’d wiped off—he was bright green. The robes he’d thrown on offstage were more theatrical than anything he’d worn during the play. Behind him came his entourage of two: a highly muscled woman in a florid dress and what looked like a five-foot ape in a coat and carpet slippers. “Who wants an autograph then?” the little green actor said. “I’m Legitimate Eddie, in case you didn’t recognize me. I know, I know, it was an uncanny transformation! Oh, and this young lady behind me is Betty Thunder.” The woman curtsied inelegantly. “Perhaps you’d like an autograph from Betty? Or from my playwright, Clyde?” The ape also bowed deeply. Candy glanced around at Houlihan. He had retreated a step or two. Obviously he didn’t like the idea of doing anything violent in front of these three witnesses. Especially when one of them—Betty Thunder—looked as though she could break his nose with one punch. “I’d love an autograph,” Candy said. “You were wonderful.” “You thought so?” Legitimate Eddie replied. “Wonderful?” “Really.” “You’re too kind,” he protested with a sly smile of satisfaction. “One does one’s best.” He quickly produced a pen from behind the rolls of his stomach fat. “You have something for me to sign?” he said. Candy pulled up the sleeve of her jacket. “Here!” she said, proffering her bare forearm. “Are you sure?” “I won’t ever wash it off!” Candy said. She caught Malingo’s eye as she spoke, and with a couple of darting looks to left and right, instructed him to look for a quick exit. “What shall I write?” Eddie wanted to know. “Let me see,” Candy said. “How about: To the real Qwandy Tootinfruit.” “That’s what you want? Well, all right. To the real…” He had barely written two words when the significance of what he’d been asked to write struck him. He very slowly raised his head to look at Candy. “It can’t be,” he breathed softly. Candy smiled. “It is,” she said. From the corner of her eye, she could see Houlihan was now approaching again. He seemed to have realized something was wrong. At lightning speed, Candy snatched the pen out of the actor’s hand and then swung around behind him, putting her shoulder against his back and shoving him toward the Criss-Cross Man. The padding made him unstable. He stumbled forward and fell against Houlihan, who also lost his balance. Both men fell to the ground, with Legitimate Eddie on top. Houlihan roared and raged—“Get off me, you fool! Let me up!”—but by the time he had got himself out from under Eddie, Malingo had already led Candy to a gap in the wall of the tent. “You’re not going to escape me, Quackenbush!” Houlihan yelled as Candy slipped away. “Which way?” Malingo said when they got outside. “Where are the most people?” He pointed off to their left. “Then let’s go!” she said. As they made their way toward the crowd, she heard Houlihan’s voice behind her and glanced over her shoulder to see him appearing from the tent, a look of insane fury on his face. “You’re mine, girl!” he yelled. “I’ve got you this time.” Though there were only about six strides between the pursuer and pursued, it was enough to give Candy and Malingo a head start. They plunged into the throng and were quickly hidden by the parade of people and animals. “We should split up!” Candy said to Malingo as they took refuge behind a line of booths. “Why?” said Malingo. “He’ll never find us in this chaos!” “Don’t be so sure,” Candy said. “He has ways—” As she spoke, Houlihan’s voice rose above the clamor of the celebrants. “I’m going to find you, Quackenbush!” “We have to confuse him, Malingo,” Candy insisted. “You go that way. I’ll go this.” “Where will we meet again?” “At the freak show. I’ll meet you there in half an hour. Keep to the crowds, Malingo. It’ll be safer.” “We’ll never be safe as long as that man’s on our heels,” Malingo said. “He won’t be on our heels forever, I promise.” “I hope you’re right. Vadu ha, lady.” “Vadu ha,” Candy said, returning the wishes in Old Abaratian. With that they parted. For Candy the next few minutes were a blur. She pressed through the crowds, trying all the while to get the sound of Houlihan’s voice out of her head, but hearing him every step of the way, repeating the same dreadful syllable. “Mine! Mine! Mine!” Hundreds, perhaps thousands of faces moved before her as she proceeded, like faces in some strange dream. Faces masked with cloth or papier-m?ch? or painted wood; smiling sometimes, astonished sometimes; sometimes filled with a strange unease. There were a few faces she recognized among the masks. The Commexo Kid appeared in a hundred different versions; so did the faces of Rojo Pixler and even Kaspar Wolfswinkel. There were others to which she could put no name that nevertheless drew her attention. A young man danced past her wearing a black mask streaming with bright red dreadlocks. Another man had a face that had erupted into bright green foliage, in which flowers like daisies bloomed; yet another was tattooed from head to foot with golden anatomy but wore on his chest a cleverly painted hole, which seemed to show her his mechanical heart. And every now and then among these bright, strange creatures there would be a naysayer: a serpent in this Eden, preaching the Coming Apocalypse. One of them, dressed in a ratty robe that exposed his sticklike legs, even had a fake halo attached to his head and pointed at the people as they passed, saying they would all perish for their crimes, at the End of Time. But his bitter words could not destroy the magic of this place, even now. Everywhere she looked there was beauty. A swarm of miniature blue monkeys the size of hummingbirds fluttered up in her face and clambered into the sky, up invisible ropes disappearing in a cloud of violet smoke. A dozen balloons floated past her, pursued by a quiverful of needles, which caught up with their quarry and pierced them, liberating a lilting chorus of voices. A fish of elephantine proportions, with bulging eyes that looked like twin moons, floated past, trailing a scent of old smoke. In this confusion of wonders Candy had long ago lost all sense of direction, of course. So it came as a total surprise when she turned the corner and found herself in the very backwater that they’d first come down with the zethek in his cage. Straight ahead of her lay the freak show, its brightly colored banners depicting the cast of monsters to be found inside. She glanced back down the alleyway, just in time to see Houlihan come into view. Hoping to avoid his eye, she shrank back into the shadows, and for a moment she thought she was going to be lucky. But then, just as he was about to disappear into the crowd again, he seemed to sniff her, and with a chilling certainty he turned his head in her direction and peered down the darkened alleyway. There was no more shadow for Candy to shrink into. She could only hold her breath and wait. Narrowing his eyes as though trying to pierce the shadows, the Criss-Cross Man began to push his way through the crowd toward the alleyway. The smallest of smiles had appeared on his face. He knew where she was. Candy had no choice. Clearly he’d seen her. She had to retreat. And there was only one place to go: into the freak show. She broke out of the shadows and started to run. She didn’t bother to look over her shoulder. She could hear how close Houlihan was now: the sound of his feet sticking and unsticking on the garbage-strewn ground, the raw rasp of his breath. She parted the canvas curtains and flung herself through them into the backstage area of the freak show. The smell that met her was almost overpowering: the mingled stench of rotting hay and some sickly sweet perfume that had perhaps been splashed around to cover up the other smells. There were three large cages close by, the largest containing a thing that looked like a pony-sized slug. It let out a pitiful mewling at the sight of Candy, and it pushed its eyes between the bars of its cage on fleshy horns. They scrutinized Candy for a long moment. Then the thing spoke, its voice soft and well-educated. “Please let me out of here,” it said. The creature had no sooner uttered these words than they were echoed from the other two cages (one of which contained what looked like a four-hundred-pound porcupine-woman; the other, one of the creatures Candy had seen advertised on the billboards outside the show: a hybrid boy, with scaly flesh and a pointed tail). The same cry, or a rough variation of the same, escaped them both: “Let us out!” It was now rising from other directions too. Some of the voices were high-pitched squeals, some low rumbling, some just scrawls of sound. And then, just as she thought the cacophony could not get any louder, she heard Houlihan out in the alleyway, whistling for her like a man who’d lost his pooch in the crowd. Quietly cursing him, she backed away. Any minute, she guessed, the Criss-Cross Man was going to step into view. The sooner she was out of here the better… Meanwhile there was a roll of drums from the show itself, followed by an announcement delivered by a woman’s voice, which managed to be both coarse and pompous. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Scattamun’s Emporium of the Malformed. You are guests in the largest collection of freaks, grotesques, inverts, miscreations, mutants, monsters, tetragogs and fiends in the Abarat; plus, of course, the one and only Eye in a Box! Be prepared to be appalled at the horrors Creation has made in the name of Life; at the Horrors that Evolution in all its Cruelty has brought forth! They were made for our amusement! Feel free to mock them! Spit at them! Poke them a little if you dare! And be grateful you are not in their shoes!” “Please—” the giant slug mewled. “Let me out.” After hearing Mrs. Scattamun’s horrendous speech, Candy had no doubt of what she should do. She pulled open the bolts on the creature’s cage. The slug leaned its weight against the door, which swung open with an ill-oiled creak. Meanwhile Candy moved on to liberate the porcupine-woman, followed by the hybrid boy. None of them lingered. The very moment the bolts were drawn they were out, hollering and howling with joy at their liberation. The freaks nearby heard this joyous din, of course, and started to raise a chorus of their own. Soon the whole wooden platform upon which the freak show stood was shaking with their demands of freedom. Candy might have gone to find them and set them free, but at that moment the curtains were pulled apart, and Otto Houlihan came through, gloating. “There you are!” he said, advancing on Candy. “I knew you couldn’t escape me forever.” Before he could catch hold of her, the porcupine-woman intervened, stumbling between them in her ambition to be free. In so doing she blocked the Criss-Cross Man’s path for a few vital seconds, preventing him from getting hold of Candy. She pulled aside a second rotting canvas and stepped into a much more brightly lit area. Here there were twenty cages and tableaux arranged for the viewing pleasure of the paying customers, of which there were several dozen. Everybody seemed to be having a fine time watching the Scattamuns’ poor captives as they shook their cages. The louder the freaks sobbed and complained, the more they laughed. Candy was revolted by the whole spectacle and felt a spasm of guilt at the sight of Methis, who had been quickly elevated to the status of The Most Terrifying Freak in Captivity. He didn’t look particularly terrifying. He sat at the back of his cage with his head in his hands, his eyes downcast. A little boy with cotton candy all around his mouth was kicking the bars of Methis’ cage, trying to get a response from him. When he failed, he started to spit at the zethek. “Did this one pay, Mrs. Scattamun?” said a tall bony man, pointing down at Candy. Mrs. Scattamun swept on over, her gray dress raising a little cloud of dust. She had spiky painted eyelashes and cherubic lips. Her nose and cheeks bore the unmistakable bloom of a very heavy drinker. “No, I didn’t sell a ticket to this one, Mr. Scattamun.” “Did you not, Mrs. Scattamun?” “I did not.” The pair of them wore hats, which were morbid variations on the aquarium hats that were apparently such a rage in Babilonium. Instead of housing living fish, however, the Scattamuns’ hats were filled with dead, withered creatures. “Did you come here to look at the freaks?” Mrs. Scattamun said. “Yes…” Candy said. “But you didn’t pay to look.” “I came in here by mistake,” Candy said. Mrs. Scattamun put out her empty palm. “Mistake or no mistake, everybody pays. That’ll be six zem.” She leaned forward and the withered thing on her head bobbed in its formaldehyde. Before Candy could reply, there was a fresh eruption of noise from the back room, and Houlihan started shouting again. “Out of my way!” he yelled. “All of you! Out of my way before I slit your throats.” Hearing this outburst, the audience began to beat a hasty retreat, which did not please Mrs. Scattamun. “Mr. Scattamun,” she said. “Kindly discover what’s going on back there. And stop it! Well? Don’t just look at me!” She gave her husband a very unloving shove. “Go!” Reluctantly Mr. Scattamun crossed to the curtain and stepped through. Two seconds later he was thrown backward through the curtain at great speed. He was followed by the man who’d pushed him: Otto Houlihan. Mrs. Scattamun let out a shrill shriek. “Get up and get that yellow monster out of here!” she demanded. “You heard me, Mr. Scattamun.” Obediently Mr. Scattamun got to his feet, but Houlihan kicked him in the chest and down he went again, knocking over several small cages as he did so. “Where’s the girl?” Houlihan demanded. Candy had taken refuge behind a cage that contained a beast three times her size, which seemed to have completely rubber limbs. It bawled like a baby. Candy told it to hush, but it responded by bawling even more loudly. Its din drew Mrs. Scattamun’s attention to Candy. “The girl’s back there!” she said to Houlihan. “I can see her from here! She’s hiding behind the fetteree!” “I see her,” Otto said. “Don’t hurt my children!” Mrs. Scattamun said. “They’re our bread and butter, they are.” Houlihan drew a long-bladed knife out of his belt and headed toward the cage containing the bawling fetteree. Candy ducked down as low as possible and crawled behind the cages, keeping her head down so as to make as small a target as possible. Suddenly there was a growl in the shadows, and she looked up to find herself face-to-face with a creature she knew. “Methis!” The zethek was wearing the most pitiful of expressions, and Candy couldn’t help but feel another spasm of guilt. The creature was no doubt feeling claustrophobic, locked up in a little cage. After all, he had wings. Wait: wings! Methis had wings! “Listen to me,” she said to the zethek. Before she could get any further, somebody grabbed hold of Candy’s collar and hauled her to her feet. “You leave our freaks alone, girl!” Mrs. Scattamun snarled. She stank of old liquor and cheap perfume. “Hey, you!” she yelled to the Criss-Cross Man. “I’ve got your girl! You want to come and take her away?” 10 “THE FREAKS ARE OUT! THE FREAKS ARE OUT!” (#ulink_d253670f-3015-5cf8-99cd-5a7cff20aa42) CANDY HAD TO THINK quickly. Houlihan was no more than ten strides away. He wouldn’t let her slip through his lethal fingers this time. She glanced at Methis, who was looking up at her with a forlorn expression. The zethek was still dangerous, she knew. Still hungry. Could she possibly make an ally out of him? After all, they both wanted the same thing right now, didn’t they? To be out of this place. He out of reach of the Scattamuns, she out of reach of Houlihan. Could they perhaps do together what they could not do apart? It was worth a try. Wrenching herself free from Mrs. Scattamun, she reached around the side of the cage and hauled the heavy iron bolt open. Methis didn’t seem to understand what she’d done, because he didn’t move, but the horrendous Mrs. Scattamun understood perfectly well. “You wretched girl!” she seethed, catching hold of Candy again and shaking her violently. In so doing she knocked Candy against the cage, and the unbolted door swung open. Methis looked lazily over his shoulder. “Move!” Candy said to him. Mrs. Scattamun was still shaking her and calling for her husband while she did so. “Mr. Scattamun! Fetch your whip! Quickly, Mr. Scattamun! The new freak is escaping!” “Hold the girl!” Houlihan yelled to Mrs. Scattamun. “Hold her!” But Candy had had quite enough of being shaken, thank you. She gave the Scattamun woman a good elbow in the ribs. She expelled a sour breath and let go of Candy. Then she stumbled backward. The Criss-Cross Man was directly in her path. The woman fell against him—much to his irritation—blocking his route to his intended victim. Candy quickly reached through the bars and gave Methis a nudge, telling him again to move. This time he seemed to understand. He pushed the cage door open and quickly slipped out. Before he could get out of reach, Candy threw herself forward and caught hold of one of his front limbs, pulling herself toward him. As she did so, she glanced back to see an irritated Houlihan knocking off Mrs. Scattamun’s hat as he scrambled to his feet. The hat smashed as it hit the ground. The stink of formaldehyde sharpened the air. Mrs. Scattamun let out a keening sound. “My chitterbee!” she shrieked. “Neville, this man’s broken my chitterbee!” Her husband was in no mood for consolations. He had picked up his freak-taming whip and now raised it, preparing to strike out at Candy. Methis spread his wings with a swooping sound. Then he ran down the passageway between the cages, flapping his wings, with Candy still hanging on to him. “Fly!” she yelled to the zethek. “Or he’ll have you back in the cage! Go on, Methis! FLY!” Then she pulled herself onto Methis’ back and held on for dear life. Candy heard Scattamun’s whip crack. His aim was good. She felt a sting of pain around her wrist and glanced down to see that the whip was wrapped around her wrist and hand three or four times. It hurt like crazy, but more than that, it made her mad. How dare this man take a whip to her? She glanced back over her shoulder. “You…you…freak!” she yelled at him. She caught hold of the whip in her hand, and by sheer luck at the same moment Methis’ wing beats carried them both up into the air. The whip was jerked out of Scattamun’s grip. “Oh, you stupid, stupid man!” Mrs. Scattamun shouted, and caught hold of the trailing handle of the whip, while Candy unwrapped the other end from her wrist. As Candy and Methis rose into the air, Mrs. Scattamun stumbled after them between the cages, unwilling to let the whip go. After a few steps one of the freaks casually put his foot out and tripped her up. She fell heavily, and Candy let the whip drop on top of the sprawled figure. She was still shrieking at her husband, her curses getting more elaborate by the syllable. Since there was no roof on the Scattamun’s empire of malformations, Candy and Methis were able to rise freely in a widening spiral until they were maybe fifty feet above the island. The scene below was becoming more chaotic by the moment. The three escapees from the backstage area had by now come into the freak show and were going among the cages, opening them up with their teeth and fingers, even their agile tails. It was very satisfying for Candy to watch the escalating pandemonium as the members of Scattamun’s bestiary threw open their cages and escaped, repeatedly knocking their sometime captors over in their haste to be at liberty. From her elevated position Candy was able to see how news of the escape was spreading through the crowd out on the boardwalk. Children were gathered into the arms of fretful parents as the shout went up: “The freaks are out! The freaks are out!” As they continued to ascend, Candy heard a strange noise coming out of Methis and thought for a moment that he was sick. But the noise he was making, strange as it may have sounded, was simply laughter. Malingo, meanwhile, had taken refuge behind Larval Lil’s Beer and Sweet Potato stand, where he had kept out of sight for a while, until he was certain that there was no danger of being apprehended by the Criss-Cross Man. He had persuaded one of the cooks to bring him a mug of red ale and a slice of pilgrim’s pie, and he was sitting among the garbage cans happily washing the pie down with ale when he heard somebody nearby talking excitedly about a girl he’d just seen, flying overhead in the grip of some monster or other. That’s my Candy, he thought, and finishing off the last of the pilgrim’s pie, he scanned the glowing clouds. It didn’t take more than a minute or two for him to locate his lady. She was hanging on to the back of the zethek as they flew north. He was very happy, of course, to see that she hadn’t fallen victim to Houlihan (whose whereabouts he’d long since given up on), but watching his friend get smaller and smaller as Methis bore her away toward twilight made him fearful. He hadn’t been alone in this world since he’d escaped from Wolfswinkel’s house. He’d always had Candy at his side. Now he would have to go and look for her on his own. It was not a happy prospect. He watched the girl and her winged mount steadily eroded by the gentle gloom of dusk. And then she was gone, and there were just a few stars, glittering fitfully in the sky low over Scoriae. “Take care, lady,” he said to her softly. “Don’t worry. Wherever you are…I’ll find you.” PART TWO THINGS NEGLECTED, THINGS FORGOTTEN (#ulink_a098cdd1-aed0-5d53-b21a-7c49ebd1730a) The Hour! The Hour! Upon the Hour! The Munkee spits and thickets cower, And what has become of the Old Man’s power But tears and trepidation? The Hour! The Hour! Upon the Hour! Mother’s mad and the milk’s gone sour, But yesterday I found a flower That sang Annunciation. And when the Hours become Day, And all the Days have passed away, Will we not see—yes, you and me— How sweet and bright the light will be That comes of our Creation? —Song of the Totemix 11 TRAVELING NORTH (#ulink_2e950a06-2b5f-5bff-8524-419ff95d3701) THE BRIGHTNESS OF BABILONIUM’S Infinite Carnival didn’t light up every corner of the island, Candy soon discovered. The zethek carried her up a gentle slope, on the other side of which the garish lights of the pomps, parades, carousels and psychedelias gave sudden way to the hazy blue of early evening. The din from the crowds and from the roller coasters and from the barkers at the sideshows grew more remote. Soon only the occasional gust of wind brought a hint of that din to Candy’s ears, and after a little while, not even that. All she heard now was the creaking of the zethek’s wings and the occasional charmless rasp of the creature’s labored breathing. Beneath them, the landscape was little more than a wilderness of reddish dirt dotted with a few solitary trees, all spindly and undernourished, which threw their long shadows eastward. Now and again she saw a farmhouse, with a couple of cultivated fields beside it, and cattle settling down after their evening milking. Though of course it was always dusk here, wasn’t it? The evening stars were always rising in the east; the flowers opening to meet the moon. It would be a very pleasant Hour to live in, with the day almost ending but the night not yet begun. It had been different, she thought, in the Carnival. There the lights had lent the sky a false brightness, and the din had driven out the aching hush that was all around her now. Perhaps that was why Six O’clock had been chosen as a place to put the razzmatology of the Carnival: it was a kind of defense against the darkening Hour, a way of delaying the darkness with laughter and games. But it couldn’t be put off forever. The farther north they traveled, the longer the shadows became, and the red of the earth darkened to purple and to black as the light steadily faded from the sky. Candy did her best to be an undemanding passenger. She didn’t move too much, and she kept her mouth shut. Her greatest fear was that the zethek would realize that he was in no danger of being recaptured and would swing around and head back to Gorgossium. But so far the beast seemed content to fly on northward. Even when they cleared the coast of Babilonium and began to cross the straits between Six and Seven, he did not show any sign of wanting to turn. But he did swoop down toward the water and skim it, looking, Candy guessed, for fish to scoop up out of the water. Candy hoped he didn’t actually catch sight of anything, because if he plunged his head into the water she would almost certainly be thrown off his back. Luckily the gathering darkness and the wind ruffling the surface of the water made fish spotting difficult, and they flew on over the murky straits without incident. The island of Scoriae was visible ahead, with the magnificent, ominous cone of Mount Galigali at its heart. She knew very little about this Hour, beyond the few facts she’d read in Klepp’s Almenak. It had mentioned, she remembered, that there had once been three beautiful cities on the island—Gosh, Mycassius and Divinium—and that an eruption of Mount Galigali had destroyed all three cities, leaving no survivors, or so she thought she remembered. She had no idea how long it was since the eruption had occurred, but she could see that the larval paths had marked the island like wide black scars, and no seed had sprouted on them nor house been built since the liquid rock had cooled. There was only one place, at the westbound edge of the island, where the gloom and sterility were relieved somewhat. There, a bank of pale, pliant mist had gathered, as though nestling the spot, and rising from this gently moving cloud was a forest of tall trees. They had to be a particularly Abaratian species, Candy reasoned; no trees in the Hereafter (at least none she’d ever been taught about in school) thrived in a place where there was only the last blush of sunlight in the sky. Perhaps these were trees that fed not on sunlight but on the light of the moon and stars. Fatigue, and perhaps hunger, were now taking a serious toll on Methis’ flying skills. He was rocking from side to side as he flew, sometimes so severely that one or the other of his wing tips would graze the tops of the waves. His feet plowed the water too, on occasion, throwing up a cold spray. Candy decided this was the time to break her silence and offer a few words of encouragement. “We’re going to make it!” she said to him. “We’ve just got to get to the shore. It’s no more than a quarter of a mile.” Methis didn’t reply. He just flew on, his flight becoming more erratic with every wing beat. Candy could hear the waves splashing on the shore now, and her view of the mist-shrouded trees was better and better. It looked like a place she might lay down her head and sleep for a while. She had lost track of how long it was since she’d enjoyed a good long sleep. But first they had to reach the shore, and now with every yard they covered that seemed to be a more and yet more remote possibility. Methis was laboring hard; his breath was raw and painful. “We can do it!” Candy said to him. “I swear…we can.” This time the exhausted creature responded to her. “What’s with this we? I don’t see you flapping your wings.” “I would if I had wings to flap.” “But you don’t, do you? You’re just a burden.” As he spoke, there was a surge of surf in front of them and a massive creature—not a mantizac, but something that looked more like a rabid walrus—lunged out of the water. Its snaggle-toothed maw snapped just inches from Methis’ snout, then the monster fell back into the sea, throwing up a great wall of icy water. There was a panicky moment or two when Methis was flying blind through the spray, and all Candy could do was cling to him and hope for the best. Then she felt a strong wind against her face and shook the water from her eyes to see that Methis was climbing steeply to avoid a second attack. She slid down over his wet back and would surely have lost her grip and fallen had he not quickly leveled off again. “Damn gilleyants!” he yelled. “It’s still below us!” Candy warned. The gilleyant was breaching again, this time roaring as it threw its immense bulk out of the water. Then it came back down again with another great splash. “Well, it’s not getting us,” Methis said. The encounter had put some fresh life into the zethek. He flew on toward the island, keeping his new elevation, at least until they were so close to the shore that the water was no more than three or four feet deep. Only then did he swoop down again, making an inelegant landing in the soft amber sand. They lay there on the beach for a while, gasping with relief and exhaustion. It didn’t take very long for Candy’s teeth to begin to chatter. The gilleyant’s cavorting had soaked her to the skin, and now the wind was chilling her. She got to her feet, wrapping her arms around herself. “I have to find a fire or I’m going to catch pneumonia.” Methis also got up, his expression as miserable as ever. “We won’t see each other again after this, I daresay,” he said. “So I suppose I should wish you luck.” “Oh, well, that’s nice—” “But I’m not going to. It seems to me you’re just a troublemaker, and the more luck you have the more trouble you’ll make.” “Who for?” “For innocent beasts like me,” Methis growled. “Innocent!” Candy said. “You came to steal fish, remember?” “Oh, stop the self-righteous talk! So I was going to steal a few fish. Big deal! For that I get beaten around by you and your magic, put in a cage and sold to a freak show, and then made to carry you on my back! Well, you know what? You can freeze to death right here for all I care.” He flapped his wings hard, deliberately aiming the icy draft in Candy’s direction. She shuddered. “Enjoy yourself,” he said with a sneering smile. “If you’re lucky, maybe Galigali will explode. That’ll keep you warm.” Candy was too cold to waste words on a reply. She just watched while the zethek flapped his wings violently to reach takeoff velocity and then ascended gracelessly into the air. He took a moment to fix the direction of Gorgossium, then he headed off across the water, staying close to the waves as he went, in the hope, presumably, of spotting an unlucky fish. In less than a minute, he had disappeared from sight. 12 DARKNESS AND ANTICIPATION (#ulink_495eb99c-b465-5d9b-ae06-8e9e4747aa06) AT JUST ABOUT THE same time that Methis was heading back toward the Midnight Isle, a small vessel—the kind that no zethek would attack, hungry though they always were—was departing from Shadow Harbor, on the eastern flank of Gorgossium. The vessel was a funeral barge, beautifully appointed from bow to stern with black sails and blackbird plumage surrounding the place where the deceased would normally be laid. This was a funeral barge without a body, however. In addition to the eight oarsmen who labored to propel the vessel through the icy waters at a very nonfunereal pace, there was a small contingent of stitchling soldiers, who sat around the edges of the vessel, prepared to ward off any attacker. They were the best of troops, every one of them ready to give up his life for his master. And who was that master? The Lord of Midnight, of course. He stood dressed in voluminous robes of thrice-burned silk (the blackest, most portentous; the silk of all melancholias) and studied the lightless waters of the Izabella as the barge sped on. Besides the soldiers and the oarsmen, he had two other companions on this vessel, but neither of them spoke. They knew better than to interrupt Christopher Carrion while he was in the midst of his meditations. At last he seemed to put his thoughts aside, and turned to the two men he had brought with him. “You may be wondering where we are heading today,” he said. The men exchanged glances but said nothing. “Speak. One or the other.” It was Mendelson Shape (whose ancestors had been in the employ of the Carrion dynasty for generations) who chanced a reply. “I have wondered, Lord,” he said, eyes downcast. “And have you by now guessed?” “I think perhaps we’re on our way to Commexo City. I heard a rumor that Rojo Pixler is planning a descent into the deepest parts of the Izabella to see what lives down there.” “I heard the same rumor,” Carrion said, still studying the dark waters. “He spies down into the depths and has made contact with the beasts that live in the trenches.” “The Requiax,” Shape said. “Yes. How do you know of them?” “My father claimed he saw the body of one of their sort, Lord, washed up on the beach near Fulgore’s Cove. Huge it was, even though it had been mostly eaten and rotted away. Still…its eye or the hole where the eye had been…was so big that my father could have stood inside it and not touched the top.” “Then our Mr. Pixler is going to have to be careful down there,” Carrion said, still not taking his eyes off the black waters. “Or he’s going to leave the Commexo Kid an orphan.” He chuckled to himself at the thought. “So that’s not where we’re going?” Shape said. “No. That’s not where we’re going,” Carrion replied, turning his attention to the other passenger who was with him on the funeral barge. His name was Leeman Vol, a man whose reputation went before him, just as Carrion’s did. And for much the same reason: to see him was to be haunted by him. Nothing about Vol was pleasant or pretty. He did not like the company of his fellow bipeds much, preferring to enjoy the fellowship of insects. This in itself had gained him a measure of infamy around the islands, not least because he bore on his face more than a few mementos of that intimacy. He had lost his nose to a spider many years before, the creature having injected his proboscis with a toxin so powerful that it had mortified the skin and cartilage in a few agonizing minutes, leaving Vol with two slimy holes in the middle of his face. He had fashioned a leather nose for himself, which effectively masked the mutilation but still made him the target of taunts and whispers. Not that the nose was the sole reason that people talked about him. There were other facts about Vol’s appearance and personal habits that made him noteworthy. He had been born, for instance, with not one but three mouths, all lined with bright yellow teeth that he had meticulously sharpened to pinprick points. When he spoke, the mingling and interwoven sounds of these three mouths was uncanny. Grown men had been known to block their ears and leave the room sobbing because the sound put them so much in mind of their childhood nightmares. Nor was this second grotesquerie all the vileness that Vol could boast. He had claimed from his childhood that he knew the secret language of insects and that his three mouths allowed him to speak it. In his passion for their company, he had made his body into a living hotel for members of the species. They seethed over his anatomy without check or censure: under his shirt, in his trousers and over his scalp. They were everywhere. Miggis lice and furgito flies, threck roaches and knuckle worms. Sometimes they bit him, in the midst of their territorial wars, and often they burrowed into his skin to lay their eggs; but such were the small inconveniences that went with being a home for such creatures. “Well, Vol?” Carrion said, watching a line of yellow-white miggis lice migrate across the other’s face. “Where are we headed? Any ideas?” “The Pyramids at Xuxux, perhaps?” Vol said, his three mouths working in perfect unison to shape the words. Carrion smiled behind the circling nightmares in his collar. “Good, Vol. Exactly so. The Pyramids at Xuxux.” He returned his gaze to Mendelson Shape. “You see now why you were invited to join me?” Poor Mendelson didn’t reply. Fear had apparently seized hold of his tongue and nailed it to the roof of his mouth. “After all,” Carrion went on, “we wouldn’t be here, preparing to get into the Pyramids, if you hadn’t crossed over into the Hereafter to get the Key.” He slid his gloved hand into the folds of his robe and slowly brought into view the Key that Shape had pursued, along with its thieves, John Mischief and his brothers, across the forbidden divide between the dimension of the Abarat and that of the Human World. It had not been an easy chase. In fact, Shape had ended up returning to the Abarat on the heels of the girl to whom Mischief had given the Key: Candy Quackenbush. It had not been he, in the end, who’d got the Key back. It had been the wizard Kaspar Wolfswinkel, into whose hands Candy had later fallen. But Mendelson could see by the appreciative smile on his Lord and Master’s face that Carrion knew his servant had done the cause of Darkness no little service in his pursuit. Now Carrion had the Key back. And the Pyramids of Xuxux were to be unlocked. “Well…will you look at that?” said Vol. The six Pyramids were appearing from the murk of the Night Hour, the largest of them so tall that clouds formed around its summit. The Hour here was actually One O’clock in the morning, and the sky was completely lightless. The Sea of Izabella was not, however. As the funeral barge approached the steps of the Great Pyramid, its presence (or more correctly, the presence of its most powerful passenger) summoned to the hull a vast number of tiny creatures, specks of crude and unthinking life, that were somehow drawn to be near a great force such as Carrion. They each flickered with their own tiny bud of luminosity, and perhaps it was this fact—that they had been made as carriers of light, while Carrion was a Prince of Darkness, light’s smotherer—that made them so attentive to him. Whatever the reason for this uncanny assembly, they came to see the barge in such numbers that they threw a garish radiance up out of the water. And as though this weren’t strange enough, there now came a din out of the Pyramids, such as might have been made by an orchestra of demons, warming up for some monstrous overture. “Is that noise really coming from the Pyramids?” Shape said. Carrion nodded. “But they’re tombs,” Shape said. “The royal families were laid to rest there.” “And so were their slaves and their eunuchs and their horses and their cats and their sacred serpents and their basilisk.” “And they’re dead,” said Shape. “The serpents and the eunuchs and the…whatever. They’re all dead.” “All dead and mummified,” Carrion replied. “So…what’s making all that noise?” “It’s a good question,” said Carrion. “And given that you will be seeing for yourself in a few minutes, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. Think of the dead as flowers.” “Flowers?” “Yes. What you hear is the noise of insects, drawn to those flowers.” “Insects? Surely not so loud a noise, Lord, would come out of insects?” Shape made a stumbling laugh, as though he thought this was a joke. “Anyway,” he went on, “what would inspire them to make such a sound?” “Explain to him, Vol.” Vol grinned and grinned and grinned. “They make that noise because they smell us,” he said. “Especially you, Shape.” “Why me?” “They sense that you’re close to death. They lick their lips in anticipation.” Shape grew contemptuous now. “Insects don’t have lips,” he said. “I doubt…” said Vol, approaching Shape, “…that you’ve ever looked closely enough.” Vol’s three yellow smiles were too much for Shape. He pushed the man away with such force that many of the insects living on his skull fell off and pattered into the water. Vol let out a sob of quite genuine distress and spun around, leaning over the edge of the barge and reaching down into the water close to the steps, scooping his infestation up. “Oh, don’t drown, little ones! Where are you? Please, please, please, please don’t drown.” He loosed a low moan, which began in his bowels and climbed up through his wretched body until it escaped his throat as a howl of rage and sorrow. “They’re gone!” he yelled. He swung around on the murderer. “You did this!” “So?” said Shape. “What if I did? They were lice and worms.” “They were my children!” Vol howled. “My children.” Carrion raised his hands. “Silence, gentlemen. You may continue your debate when we have finished our business here. Do you hear me, Vol? Stop sulking! There’ll be other lice, just as adorable.” Leaving the two men staring at each other in sullen silence, Carrion went to stand in the bow of the barge. During the argument the unmelodious din from inside the Pyramids had ceased. The “bees”—or whatever else had been making the noise—had hushed in order to listen to the exchange between Vol and Shape. Now both the occupants of the Pyramids and their visitors were silent, each listening for some telltale noise, each knowing it was only a matter of time before they laid eyes upon one another. The barge came alongside the flight of stone steps that led up to the door of the Great Pyramid. The vessel nudged the stone, and without waiting for the stitchlings to secure the barge, Carrion stepped off the deck and began his ascent of the stairs, leaving Mendelson Shape and Leeman Vol to hurry after him. 13 THE SACBROOD (#ulink_875dfc45-81ae-5971-abfe-4ce59af43c2b) IT HAD TAKEN A great deal of organization—and more than a little bribery—to arrange Carrion’s visit to the great Pyramids of the Xuxux. They were, after all, sacred places: the tombs of Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses; and in their humbler chambers, the servants and animals belonging to the mighty. The royal dead had ceased to be laid there several generations ago, because all six Pyramids had been filled with the deceased and their belongings. But the Pyramids had continued to be carefully guarded by soldiers working for the Church of Xuxux. They circled the Pyramids on a fleet of vessels elaborately decorated with religious insignia, and they were armed with weapons of fearsome firepower. Furthermore, they had the complete freedom to use their weaponry in defense of the Pyramids and the royal remains that were contained therein. But Carrion had arranged to have the patrol interrupted for a time so that his funeral barge could slip in, unnoticed, to the steps of the Great Pyramid. As he approached his destination, however, his thoughts were not upon the difficulties of arranging this journey, nor on what lay inside the Pyramid to which he had spent so much trouble getting the Key. They were upon the girl whose presence in the Abarat had come about because she had accidentally interrupted the thief of the Key and his pursuer. In other words, on Candy Quackenbush. Candy Quackenbush! Even the name was ludicrous, he told himself. Why did he obsess about her the way he did? She was here because of a fluke of circumstance, nothing more. Why then could he not get her wretched name out of his head? She was a girl from some forsaken little town in the Hereafter, nothing more. Why then did she haunt his thoughts the way she did? And why—when thoughts of her did arise—were there other images following on after her? Images that troubled him deeply; that sickened and shamed him. Images of a bright Afternoon on the Nonce, and bells ringing in jubilation, and every flower, as if by some unspoken understanding of the Hour’s flora, becoming white for a marriage ceremony… “Sickening,” he said to himself as he ascended the Pyramid steps. “She’s nothing. Nothing.” Shape overheard his master’s mutterings. “Lord?” he said. “Are you well?” Carrion glanced back at his servant. “I have bad dreams, Shape,” Carrion told him. “That’s all. Bad dreams.” “But why, my Lord?” Shape said. “You’re the most powerful man in the Abarat. What is there in this world that could possibly be troubling to you? As you yourself said: She’s nothing.” “How do you know what I was talking about?” “I just assumed it was the girl. Was I wrong?” “No…” Carrion growled. “You weren’t wrong.” “Mater Motley could surely deal with her for you,” Shape went on, “if you don’t care to. Perhaps you could share your fears with her?” “I have no desire to share anything with that woman.” “But surely, Lord, she’s your grandmother. She loves you.” Carrion was becoming irritated now. “My grandmother loves nothing and nobody except herself,” he said. “Maybe if I told her—” “Told her?” “About your dreams. She would prepare something to help you sleep.” At this, Carrion let out a raw noise of rage and caught Shape by the windpipe, drawing him so close that his face was pressed against the sweaty surface of Carrion’s collar. The nightmares seething in the fluid on the other side came to peer at him, tapping their bright snouts against the glass. “I warn you, Shape,” he said. “If you ever say anything to my grandmother about my bad dreams…your life will become one.” Mendelson scrambled to be free of his master’s hold, his good leg pushing Carrion away from him, while his peg leg shook rhythmically in the air. “I—I—I am loyal to you, Lord,” Shape sobbed. “I swear, liege, by all that’s dark.” As quickly as Carrion had picked Shape up, he let the terrified man go. Shape dropped from his hands like a sack filled with stones and lay splayed on the step, his terror giving off an unmistakable smell. “I wouldn’t have killed you,” Carrion remarked lightly. “Thank…thank you…Prince,” Shape said, still watching his Lord from the corner of his eye as though at any moment the coup de gr?ce might still fall and his unhappy life be summarily ended. “Come on now,” Carrion said with a brittle brightness in his voice. “Let me show you how much trust I have in you. Get up! Get up!” Shape got to his feet. “I’m going to give you the Key to the Pyramids,” Carrion said. “So that you can have the honor of opening the door for me.” “The door?” “The door.” “Me?” “You.” Shape still looked queasy about all this. After all, who knew what lay on the other side of that door? But he could scarcely refuse an invitation from his Prince. Especially when the Key was there in front of him, shimmering and seductive. “Take it,” Carrion said. Shape glanced over Carrion’s shoulder at Leeman Vol, who was staring at the Key. He wanted it badly, Shape could see. If he’d dared, he would have snatched it out of Carrion’s hand, run to the door and opened it up, just to say that he’d been the first to see what lay inside. “Good luck,” Vol said sourly. Shape made an attempt at a smile—which failed—and then went to the door, drew a deep breath, and slid the Key into the lock. “Now?” he said to Carrion. “The Key is in your hand,” Carrion replied. “Choose your own moment.” Shape took a second deep breath and turned the Key, or at least made an attempt to do so. But it would not move. He leaned against the door, grunting as he attempted to force the Key to turn. “No! No! No!” Carrion ordered him. “You’ll bruise the Key, imbecile. Step away from the door! Now!” Mendelson obeyed instantly. “Now calm yourself,” Carrion instructed him. “Let the Key do the work.” Shape nodded and limped back to the door. Again he put his hand on the Key, and this time—though he was barely pressing upon it—the Key turned in the lock all on its own. Astonished, and not a little terrified, Shape retreated from the door, his work done. The Key was not only turning in the lock, it was slipping deeper into the door as it did so, as if to deny anyone a change of heart. In response to the turning of the Key, an entire area of the door around the lock—perhaps a foot square—began to grind and move. This was no ordinary mechanism: as its effect spread, waves of energy came off the Pyramid like heat from a boiling pot. The door was opening, and its shape echoed that of the building itself: an immense triangle. A stench came out from the darkness on the other side. It wasn’t the smell of the long dead or the spices in which they had been preserved. Nor was it the smell of antiquity; the dull dry fragrance of a time that had been and would not come again. It was the stink of something very much alive. But whatever the life-form that was sweating out this odor, drooling it, weeping it, it was nothing any of the three had ever encountered. Even Carrion, who had a weary familiarity with the world in all its corruptions, had never smelled anything quite like this before. He stared into the darkness beyond the door with an odd little smile on his face. Mendelson, on the other hand, had decided that he’d had enough. “I’ll wait in the barge,” he said hurriedly. “No, you don’t,” said Carrion, grabbing hold of his collar. “I want them to meet you.” “Them?” said Leeman Vol. “Are…are there many of them?” “That’s one of the things we’re here to find out,” the Lord of Midnight replied. “You can count, can’t you, Shape?” “Yes.” “Then go in there, and bring out a number!” Carrion said, and pressing Shape in the direction of the door, he gave his servant a shove. “Wait!” Shape protested, his voice shrill with fear. “I don’t want to go alone!” But it was too late. He was already over the threshold. There was an immediate response from the interior; the din of an infinite number of carapaced things roused from invertebrate dreams, rubbing their hard, spiny legs together, unfurling their stalked eyes… “What have you got in there?” Vol wanted to know. “Hobarookian scorpions? A huge nest of needle flies?” “He’ll find out!” Carrion said, nodding in Shape’s direction. “A light, Lord!” Shape begged. “Please. At least a light so I can find my way.” After a moment’s hesitation, Carrion seemed to soften, and smiling at Shape, he reached into his robes, as if he intended to produce a lamp of some sort. But what came out appeared to be a small top, which he set on the back of his left hand. There it began to spin, and in spinning threw off waves of flickering light, which grew in brightness. “Catch!” Carrion said, and flipped the top in Shape’s direction. Shape made an ungainly attempt to catch hold of it, but the thing outwitted him, spinning off between his fingers and hitting the ground. Then it spun off into the Pyramid, its luminescence growing. Shape looked away from the top and up into the space that its ambitious light was filling. He let out a little sob of terror. “Wait,” Leeman Vol said. “There can only be one insect that gives off a stench such as this.” “And what would that be?” Carrion said. “Sacbrood,” Vol replied, his voice ripe with awe. Carrion nodded. “Oh, Gods…” Vol murmured, advancing a few steps toward the door to get a better view of the multitudes within. “Did you put them in here?” “I sowed the seeds, yes,” Carrion replied. “Countless years ago. I knew we would come to be in need of them in time. I have a great purpose to put them to.” “What purpose is that?” Carrion smiled into the soup of his nightmares. “Something mighty,” he replied. “Believe me. Something mighty.” “Oh, I can imagine,” Vol said. “Mighty, yes…” As he spoke, a limb perhaps eight feet long, and divided into a number of thorny segments, appeared from the shadows. Leeman loosed a cry of alarm and backed away from the door. But Carrion was too quick for him. He caught hold of Vol’s arm, stopping him in his stride. “Where do you think you’re going?” he said. In his panic Vol’s three voices trod on one another’s tails. “They’re moving—oving—ving.” “So?” said Carrion. “We’re the masters here, Vol, not them. And if they forget, then we have to remind them. We have to control them.” Vol looked at Carrion as though the Lord of Midnight was crazy. “Control them?” he said. “There are tens of thousands of them.” “I will need a million for the work I want them to do,” Carrion said. He pulled Vol closer to him, holding him so tight Vol had to fight for breath. “And believe me, there are millions. These creatures are not just in the Pyramids. They’ve dug down into the earth beneath the Pyramids and made hives for themselves. Hives the size of cities. Every one of them lined with cells, and each one of those cells filled with eggs, all ready to be born at a single command.” “From you?” “From us, Vol. From us. You need me and my power to protect you from being slaughtered when the Last Day comes, and I need your mouths to communicate with the sacbrood. That seems fair, doesn’t it?” “Y—y—yes.” “Good. Then we understand each other. Now you listen, Vol: I’m going to let you go. But don’t try running off. If you do I won’t take kindly to it. You understand?” “I—I—I understand.” “Good. So…let’s see what our allies look like up close, shall we?” he said. He let Leeman Vol go. Vol didn’t attempt to make a run for it, even though his soles itched to do so. “Shield your eyes, Leeman,” Carrion instructed him. “This is going to be very bright.” He reached into the folds of his robes and took out perhaps a dozen of the luminous tops. They flew in all directions, spinning and blazing brightly. Some rose up into the heights of the Pyramid, others dropped away through holes that had been opened in the floor of the Pyramid, still others flew off left and right, illuminating other chambers and antechambers. Of the Kings and Queens who had been laid to rest here in the Pyramids with such panoply, there was nothing left. The sarcophagi that had housed their revered remains had gone, as had the holy books and scrolls that contained the prayers that were written to soothe them to paradise; nothing was left. The slaves, horses and sacred birds slaughtered so that their spirits might escort the royal souls on the Eternal Highway had also gone. The sacbrood’s appetite had devoured everything: gold, flesh, bone. The great devouring tribe had taken it all. Chewed it up, digested it. “Look!” Carrion said as he surveyed the occupants of the Pyramid. “I see,” Vol said. “Believe me, I see.” Even Vol, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world of insects, was not prepared for the horror of these creatures’ forms; nor for the limitless variety of those forms. Some of the sacbrood were the size of maggots and surrounded by great puddles of stinking life, their bodies hissing as they writhed against one another. Some seemed to have a hundred limbs and scuttled in hordes over the ceilings, occasionally turning on one of their number and sacrificing it to their appetite. Some were flat as sheets of paper and slid over the ground on a film of slime. But these were the least. There were sacbrood here the size of obese wrestlers, others as huge as elephants. And in the shadows behind these enormities there were greater enormities still, things that could not be comprehended by a single glance of the eye, because their vastness defied even the most ambitious gaze. None seemed afraid of the lights burning in their midst, even after being so long in darkness. Rather they sought out the brightness with a kind of hunger, so that it seemed as though the entire contents of the Pyramid was moving toward the door, revealing their terrible anatomies with more and more clarity. Limbs snapping like scissors, teeth chattering like maddened monkeys, claws rubbing together like the tools of a knife sharpener. There was nothing in their shapes that suggested kindness or compassion: they were evildoers, pure and simple. “This is greater than I imagined,” Carrion said with a perverse pride. “What terrors they are.” As he spoke, a creature the size of ten men emerged from the great mass. Numberless parasitic forms, like lice, crawled over its restless body. “Do they want to kill us?” Vol wondered aloud. The insects on his head had taken refuge in his collar. He looked strangely vulnerable without their darting company. “It will tell us, I daresay, when it has a mind to,” Carrion said, watching the great creature with a mingling of respect and caution. Finally it spoke. The language it used, however, was not one that Carrion knew. He listened carefully, and then turned to Leeman Vol for assistance; Vol, whom the Brood-beast seemed to recognize as one who would comprehend it. Indeed he did. He began to translate, a little cautiously at first. “They…it…welcomes you. Then it tells you: We are growing impatient.” “Does it indeed?” Carrion said. “Then tell it from me: soon, very soon.” Vol replied to the Brood-beast, which went on immediately to speak again, its voice thick and undulating. “It says that it’s heard there are trespassers among the islands.” “There are one or two,” Carrion said. Vol’s three mouths provided a translation of this. “But nobody will get between us and our Great Plan.” Again the Brood-beast spoke. Again, Vol translated. “It says: Do you swear?” “Yes,” said Carrion, plainly a little irritated that his honesty was being called into question by this monster. “I swear.” He looked defiantly at the creature. “What we have planned will come to pass,” he said. “No question of it.” At that moment the Brood-beast revealed that it knew more about the craft of communication than it had been displaying, because the creature now spoke again, but in a recognizable fashion. It spoke slowly, as though piecing the words together like the fragments of a jigsaw; but there was no doubting what it said. “You…will…not…cheat…us, Car-ri-on,” it said. “Cheat you? Of course not!” “Many…years…in…dark-ness…we…have…waited.” “Yes, I—” “Hungry!” “Yes.” “HUNGRY! HUNGRY!” The chorus was taken up from every corner of the Pyramid, and from the tunnels and hives many thousands of feet below, and even from the other Pyramids of the six where sacbrood had also bred over the years, and awaited their moment. “I understand,” Carrion said, raising his voice above the din. “You’re tired of waiting. And you’re hungry. Believe me, I do understand.” His words failed to placate them, however. They moved toward the door from all directions, the horrid details of their shapes more apparent by the moment. Carrion was no stranger to the monstrous—the pits and forests and vermin fields of Gorgossium boasted countless forms of the ghastly and the misbegotten—but there was nothing, even there, that was quite as foul as this loathsome clan, with their fat, wet clusters of eyes and their endless rows of limbs clawing at the rot-thickened air. “Lord, we should take care,” Vol murmured to Carrion. “They’re getting closer.” Vol was right. The sacbrood were getting far too close for comfort. Those overhead were moving the fastest, skittering over one another’s bodies in their unholy haste and shedding living fragments of their bodies as they did so, which twitched on the ground where they’d fallen. “They do seem very hungry,” Mendelson observed. “What do you suppose we should do about that, Mr. Shape?” Carrion wondered. Shape shrugged. “Feed them!” he said. Carrion reached out suddenly and caught hold of Shape by the nape of his neck. “If you’re so concerned about their well-being, Mr. Shape, maybe you should sacrifice your own sorry flesh to their appetite, huh? What do you say?” “No!” said Shape, trying to wriggle free. “You say no?” “Yes, Lord, please, Lord. I’d be more use to you alive, I swear.” “In truth, Shape, I can’t imagine any state in which you’d be of use to me.” So saying, Carrion shoved Shape away. The man stumbled on his stump and fell to his knees in the shadow of the Brood-beast that had been talking to Carrion. For a fleeting moment the thing looked down at him with something close to pity on its misshapen face. Shape turned from it, and getting up, he fled across the littered ground, not caring that he was going deeper into the Pyramid, only determined to avoid both Carrion and the creature. As he hobbled away, he heard a sound above him. He froze on the spot, and in that instant a barbed, ragged form—wet and sinewy, and attached by a knotty length of matter to the ceiling—dropped on top of him. Shape cried out as it eclipsed him; then the living cord by which the thing was attached to the roof hauled on its freight, and the creature was taken back into the shadows, with Shape in its grip. He called out to his master one last time, his voice muted by the beast in whose maw he was caught. There was a final series of pitiful little kicks. Then both cries and kicks stopped, and Shape’s life ceased. “They’re feeling murderous,” Leeman Vol said to Carrion. “I think we should go.” “Maybe we should.” “Do you have anything else you need to speak with them about?” “I’ve said and seen all I need to,” Carrion replied. “Besides, there will be other times.” He went back to the door, calling to Vol as he did so. “Come away.” Even now Vol watched the creatures with the fascination of a true obsessive, his head twitching left and right, up and down, in his eagerness to see every last detail. “Away, Vol, away!” Carrion urged him. Finally Vol made a dash for the door, but even now he paused to glance back. “Go!” Carrion yelled to him, pulling the door shut. “Quickly, before they get out!” Several of the brood, who were within a few yards of the threshold, made a last desperate attempt to reach the door and block it before it closed, but Carrion was too quick. The Pyramid door closed in the same bizarre fashion that it had opened, and he quickly turned the Key in the lock, sealing the sacbrood in their prison hive. They shook the stones of the Pyramid’s walls in their frustration and loosed such a din of rage that the stone steps on which Carrion and Leeman Vol stood vibrated beneath their feet. Still, it was done. Carrion reverentially removed the Key from the lock and slipped it into the deepest recesses of his robes. “You’re shaking,” he said to Vol, with a little smile. “I—I—I—never saw such things before,” Vol conceded. “Nobody has,” the Lord of Midnight replied. “Which is why when I choose my moment and set them free, there will be chaos and terror in every corner of the Abarat.” “It’ll be like the end of the world,” Leeman said, retreating down the steps to the funeral barge. “No,” Carrion said as he followed Leeman down. “There you’re wrong. It will be the beginning.” 14 LAMENT (THE MUNKEE’S TALE) (#ulink_5e30de09-9932-520f-b193-f61693c6a87d) CANDY DIDN’T WASTE TIME shivering on the shore. It had been clear even from a distance where on the island she might find some place of relative comfort: in the mist-shrouded forest that lay a quarter mile along the beach. A light, warm breeze was coming out of the trees, its balm both welcoming and reassuring. Occasionally one of its gusts seemed to carry a fragment of music: just a few notes, no more, played (perhaps) on an oboe. A gentle, lilting music that made her smile. “I wish Malingo was with me,” she said to herself as she trudged along the beach. At least she wasn’t alone. All she had to do was follow the sound of the music and she’d surely find the music maker, sooner or later. The more of the melody she heard, the more bittersweet it seemed to be. It was the kind of song her grandfather (her mom’s dad, Grandpa O’Donnell) used to sing when she was little. Laments, he called them. “What’s a lament?” she had asked him one day. “A song about the sad things in the world,” he’d told her, his voice tinged with a little of his Irish roots. “Lovers parted, and ships lost at sea, and the world full of loneliness from one end to the other.” “Why’d you want to sing about sad things?” Candy had asked him. “Because any fool can be happy,” he’d said to her. “It takes a man with real heart”—he’d made a fist and laid it against his chest—“to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.” “I still don’t understand…” Grandpappy O’Donnell had cupped her face in his big, scarred hands. He’d worked on the railroad most of his life, and every scar had a story. “No, of course you don’t,” he said with an indulgent smile. “And why should you? A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you…there’s no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It’s not a bad feeling, child. That’s what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D’you see?” She hadn’t seen. Not really. The idea that sadness could somehow make you feel good was a hard idea to fathom. But now she was beginning to understand. Abarat was changing her. In the brief time she’d been traveling among the Hours, she’d seen and felt things she would never have experienced in Chickentown, not if she’d lived there a thousand years. The way the stars seemed to move when a traveler passed over the boundary between one Hour and the next, and whole constellations fell slowly out of the sky; or when the moon, falling brightly on the sea, called up slow processions of fish from the purple-blue deeps of the Izabella, all showing their sad silver eyes to the sky before they turned and disappeared into the darkness again. Sometimes just a face she passed by, or a glance someone would give her—even the shadow of a passing bird—would carry a kind of melancholy. Grandpappy O’Donnell would have liked it here, she thought. She was close to the edge of the misty trees now, and just a little way ahead of her a pathway began, made of mosaic stones that depicted a pattern of interwoven spirals, winding into the forest. It was a strange coincidence that her feet should have brought her precisely to the spot where this path began, but then her time in the Abarat had been filled with such coincidences; she wasn’t surprised any longer. And so she simply followed the pathway. The people who had laid the mosaic had decided to have some fun with the design. Dancing in and out of the spirals were the likenesses of animals—frogs, snakes, a family of creatures that looked like green raccoons—which seemed ready to scamper or slide away as soon as a foot fell too close to them. She was so busy studying this witty handiwork that she didn’t realize how far she’d come. The next time she looked up, the beach had gone from sight behind her, and she was entirely surrounded by the immense trees, their canopy alive with all manner of Night birds. And still she heard the lament, somewhere off in the distance, rising and falling. Beneath her feet the spiral designs of the pathway were getting stranger by the step, the species of creatures that had been woven into the design becoming ever more fantastical, as though to alert her to the fact that her journey was about to change. And now ahead of her she saw the threshold of that change: a massive doorway flanked by elegant pillars stood between the trees. Though the hinges were still in place, and the remains of a hefty iron lock lay on the ground, the door itself had been eaten away by some rot or other. Candy stepped inside. The absent door had guarded a building of exceptional beauty. On every side she saw that the walls were decorated with exquisite frescoes, depicting happy, magical scenes: landscapes in which people danced so lightly they seemed to defy gravity and rise into the sky; or where creatures possessed of an unearthly beauty appeared from the cavorting waters of silver rivers. Meanwhile the lament continued to play, its melody as bittersweet as ever. She followed the music through the grandiose rooms, every footfall now echoing off the painted stones. The palace had not been left untouched by the forest that surrounded it. The trees, possessed of a feverish fluidity that gave them greater strength than ordinary trees, had pushed through the walls and the ceiling, the mesh of fruit-laden branches so like the intricately carved and painted panels that it was impossible to see where dead wood ended and living began, where paint gave way to leaf and fruit or vice versa. It almost seemed as if the makers of this place, the carvers and the painters, must have known that the forest would invade at last and had designed the palace so that it would swoon without protest into the arms of nature. She could almost bring to mind the people who had worked here. It seemed easy to picture their furrowed faces as they labored at their masterpiece; though of course it was impossible that she could really know who they were. How could she remember something she hadn’t witnessed? And yet the images persisted, growing stronger the deeper she traveled into the palace. She saw in her mind’s eye men and women working by the light of floating orbs like little moons, the smell of newly cut timbers and paint freshly mixed sharpening the air. “Impossible,” she told herself aloud, just to be clear about this once and for all. After a while she realized somebody was keeping pace with her, nimbly moving from shadow to shadow. Now and again she’d catch a tiny glimpse of her pursuer—a flash of its eyes, a blur of what looked like striped fur. Eventually curiosity overcame her. She called out: “Who are you?” Surprisingly, she got an immediate guttural reply. “The name’s Filth.” “Filth?” “Yeah. Filth the munkee.” Before she could respond, the creature appeared from between the trees and came to stand, bowlegged, in front of her. He was indeed a monkey, as he had claimed, but he had a decidedly human cast to his crooked face. His eyes were slightly crossed, and his wide, preposterous mouth housed an outrageous assortment of teeth, which he showed whenever he smiled, which was often. He was dressed in what looked to be the remnants of an old circus costume: baggy striped pants held up by a rotting belt, an embroidered waistcoat in red, yellow and blue, and a T-shirt on which was written I’M FILTH. The entire ensemble was caked with mud and pieces of rotted food. The smell he gave off was considerably less than fragrant. “How did you find your way in here?” he asked Candy. “I—I followed the music.” “Who are you, anyhow?” “Candy Quackenbush.” “Daft name.” “No dafter than Filth.” The ape-man raised a grimy finger and without any preamble put it in his nose, pressing it into his nostril and hooking it around so that the top came out of the other hole. Candy did her best not to look appalled in case it encouraged him. “Well, then we’re both daft, aren’t we?” he said, wiggling his finger. Candy was no longer able to disguise her revulsion. “Do I disgust you?” he asked her cheerfully. “A little,” she admitted. The munkee tittered. “The King used to be most amused when I did that.” “The King?” “King Claus of Day. This was his Twilight Palace, this place. These are the borderlands of his domain, of course. By the time you get halfway up Galigali, it’s Night.” Candy looked around at the remnants of the fine building with new respect. “So this was a palace.” “It still is,” Filth said. “’Cept it don’t have Kings or Queens in it no more.” “What happened to them?” “Weren’t you taught no history at school?” “Not Abaratian history, no.” “What other kind of history is there?” Filth said, giving Candy a strange look from the corner of his eye. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Actually, the palace was really built for Claus’ daughter, Princess Boa. And when she died, her father told everybody—his courtiers, his cooks, his maidservants, his fool—me—to just go our various ways and find happiness any way we could.” “But you didn’t go?” “Oh, I went for a while. I tried being a nun, but I didn’t like the hats.” Candy laughed at this, but Filth’s expression remained perfectly serious, which somehow made the joke even funnier. “So you came back?” Candy said. “Where else was I going to go? What’s a fool to do without a King? I was nothing. Nobody. At least here I had the memory of being happy. She’d made us happy, you see. She could do that.” “She being—?” “Princess Boa, of course.” Princess Boa. It was a name Candy had heard spoken several times, but always in whispers. “Claus had two children,” Filth said, “Prince Quiffin and Princess Boa. They were both fine, beautiful creatures—that’s Quiffin over there.” He pointed to a portrait of a fine-featured young man, with his dark hair and beard coiffed into delicate curls. “And the girl gathering the arva blossoms, over there? That’s my sweet Princess when she was eleven. She was something special, even then. Another order of being, she was. There was this light in her…in her eyes. No. In her soul. It just shone out of her eyes. And it didn’t matter how grumpy or down in the mouth you were feeling, you only had to be with her for a minute or two and everything was good again.” He fell silent for a few seconds, then very quietly repeated himself: “Everything…was…good.” “Was it a sickness that killed her?” “No. She was murdered.” “Murdered? How horrible.” “On the day of her wedding. Right there in the church, standing beside the man she was going to marry, Finnegan Hob.” Tears were brimming in the munkee’s eyes. “I was there. I saw it all. And I never want to see anything so terrible again as long as I live. It was as if all the light went out of the world in one moment.” “Who murdered her?” Candy asked. Filth’s face was completely motionless, except his eyes, which flickered back and forth like panicked prisoners in the cells of his skull. “They said a dragon did it. Well, a dragon did do it; at least the killing part. And Finnegan killed the thing right outside the church, so that was an end to that. But the real villain…” His eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again he was looking directly at Candy. “The Lord of Gorgossium,” he said, very quietly. “That’s who made it happen. Christopher Carrion.” “Why wasn’t he arrested?” The munkee made a bitter laugh. “Because he’s the Prince of Midnight. Untouchable by the laws of Day. And nobody on the Nightside would bring him to law; how could they? Not when he was the last Carrion! It makes me crazy to think about it! He has her blood on his hands, her light on his hands. And he goes free, to cause more mischief. There’s no justice in this world!” “You know this for certain?” Candy said. “That he’s guilty of her murder?” After a moment’s musing, Filth said: “Put it this way: if he was standing here right now, and I had the means to do away with him…I would.” The munkee snapped his fingers. “Like that! There are some things you don’t need evidence for. You just know. In your heart. I don’t know why he did it. I don’t really care. I only know he did.” Now he fell silent, and in the lush breeze the lament returned. “Sad music,” Candy said. “Well, this isn’t a place of dancing. Not anymore. Will you excuse me for a while? I don’t feel in the mood to go on talking.” “Oh yes, of course. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” “The number of times I’ve told myself: do your best to be happy. You can’t change the past. She’s gone forever. And that’s all there is to it. But I suppose there’s a little corner of my heart that refuses to believe that.” He gave Candy one last, mournful glance, and then he headed off into the blue shadows. As he went he said: “The musician’s called Bilarki, by the way. He doesn’t talk anymore, so don’t try and get a conversation out of him; you’ll be wasting your time.” 15 THE PURSUER (#ulink_5d956fe1-1b64-59c6-8da7-16cebf717271) TWO SUMMERS BEFORE, THERE had been a tragedy in Chickentown that could have matched the tale of Princess Boa for sadness. A young man called Johnny Morales had come into town for his sister Nadine’s wedding, and the night before had been killed in an automobile accident. The young man’s passenger, who was the bridegroom-to-be, had also been killed. They’d been drinking heavily at the groom-to-be’s bachelor party, and laughing together (according to a survivor of the wreck) when Morales had lost control of his car and run off the highway into a tree. The double tragedy had been too much for Nadine. Having lost her brother and her beloved in one terrible moment, she gave up on life. Two and a half months later she checked into a rundown motel on the outskirts of town and took enough of her mother’s sleeping pills to make sure she never woke up again. The pain, the sadness, the meaninglessness of her life without her brother and her almost-husband had overwhelmed her. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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