Abarat: Absolute Midnight (39 page)

Chapter 73
Souls

O
H, SO SLOWLY
, C
ARRION
raised his head. His purified gaze was fixed on Mater Motley.

“I see you now so clearly, Grandmother,” he said.

“The clarity of your eyesight is of no importance to me,” the Empress said.

“My brothers and sisters—”

“Are dead.”

“—should be in paradise.”

“Well, they’re not. Nor will they ever be. They’re part of the power that raised you so high.”

“Let them go.”

“No.”

“I can make you do it.”

“You could try,” the Empress said. “But it would be your last act.”

“So be it,” he said.

As he spoke he came at her, throwing some wielding ahead of him as he did so. It exploded in her face like a ball of spiked darkness. He didn’t give her so much as an instant to recover, but grabbed at her throat, apparently intent on throttling the life out of her. He carried her before him, stumbling back among her stitchlings.

Candy had seen the two of them meet head-to-head like this once before, on the deck of the
Wormwood
. She had no interest in watching the struggle play out again. Her concern was for poor Zephario. He was still pierced by the Nephauree, but he clung to life. She went to him. The temperature of the air dropped several degrees as she got closer to the Enemy of All Living Things: an unnatural chill that drove ice needles into her ligaments and marrow, making every step she took more difficult than the one before. But she would not be dissuaded.

Sensing her pain, Zephario raised his head. When he spoke his thoughts, it was a whisper of a whisper, the last exhausted murmur of a man using every sliver of strength to hold on to life.

The Abarataraba is still in you,
he murmured.

I don’t feel it,
Candy replied

It’s there. You would never have gotten so close without it. Not much of it, but—

What does it mean?

What does what mean?

Abarataraba.

. . . roughly translated, it means . . . Pieces of Life.

Then take them back. The Pieces of Life. Finish this. Set them free.

There’s a door in your head that Diamanda made when she put Boa’s soul into you. It’s not wood and hinges. It’s just a way into your being.

I know this door.

Then open it. Quickly.

I did it already.

Lordy Lou, so you did.

Will this hurt?

It won’t be my soul coming into you that will pain you,
Zephario said,
it will be my coming forth from you again.

Why?

Because I will enter you through a single door, which you opened. But if I am to free all the souls, I must exit through many.

You mean doors that haven’t been made yet.

I’m sure there’s a better way, but we don’t have the time—

Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything . . .

Here I come.

Instantly Candy felt the nerves in her head twitch. And Zephario’s life force came into her. It was strangely comforting, an odd sense of familiarity. Not the same as Boa being there, of course, but close enough. She felt Zephario’s anger turning her strength to its purpose, empowering her to face the monster.

The Hag had not even noticed her short exchange with Zephario. She’d been too busy fighting with her grandson. Unlike their battle on the deck of the
Wormwood
, in which the two of them had been equally matched, the balance had now plainly shifted in favor of the Hag. She had the wielding powers of the Nephauree at her disposal, and Carrion had nothing in his arsenal that was a match for them. Candy turned just in time to see Carrion drop down upon the ground, which was a chaotic mass of smoking fissures. The nightmares in his collar were writhing insanely, bleeding darkness into the fluid around his head. Whatever she had done to him, he had no fight left. The blow she landed would be the end of him.

“Empress?” Candy said. “I’m still here.”

Motley turned as she spoke. “Don’t worry, girl. My son’s dead, and my grandson’s almost gone. You’re next.”

Candy felt Zephario’s power moving through her as the Hag’s contemptuous gaze settled on her. The power divided as it did so: two becoming four, four becoming eight, eight becoming sixteen. He’d warned Candy it would hurt, and he’d not lied. The pieces of his divided soul coursed through her body in defiance of all anatomical constraints, burning their way like tiny fires through marrow and muscle, nerve and vein. Their passage was rapid, but before they could escape her, the Hag saw something in Candy that made her suspicious.

“What have you done?” she said.

She didn’t wait for an answer. She raised her hand, around which the air was already becoming denser as she summoned up a murdering spell. She would have let it fly a moment later had Carrion not caught hold of her arm. He lacked the strength to hold on to her for more than a few seconds, but that was all the time Zephario’s fragmented soul required to disperse itself throughout Candy’s body.

The instant he was spread, he burst free. The sting of his soul’s departure was almost more than Candy’s consciousness could endure. But she held on, despite the pain, and her anguish was rewarded with an extraordinary vision: the flight of soul-shards.

Seeing the motes speeding toward her, the Hag panicked. She wrestled her hand from Carrion’s grip and directed her murderous spell at the pieces of Zephario’s soul. But Zephario had outmaneuvered her. By dividing himself as he had into so many parts, he presented not one place to strike, but many. And while Mater Motley was still attempting to free herself, Zephario’s soul-pieces found what they’d traveled so far to find: his family.

As each of his children woke to the presence of their father, the filthy little doll in which its soul had been sewn up burst open as though a small explosion had been ignited in each. One by one, the dolls hanging in grim rows across the front of the Empress’s gown blew apart, as the son or daughter inside woke up to the proximity of Zephario.

Candy could not know, of course, what that moment felt like: soul liberating soul liberating soul. But she saw how it looked clearly enough, and it was no gentle business. Small though the dolls were they burst with astonishing violence, their coils of ragged cloth like entrails bursting from poorly sewn anatomies, as something both more abstracted and more real was set free.

If there was any way to distinguish one child from another, or the children from their mother, Candy couldn’t see it. They were simply points of brightness that burst from their squalid prisons, weaving around one another in front of the Hag as if to taunt her with their long-awaited freedom, then forming a cloud of ecstatic light that rose as its numbers swelled, the motion of the motes so fast that the trails they left upon the air seemed to form something that was almost a solid form: a ragged globe of threaded light, glorious in celebration of their reunion.

The effect upon Mater Motley was catastrophic. Each time one of the dolls came apart, her body convulsed, the scale of the motion mounting, so that she was quickly reduced to the status of a doll herself, helpless in the grip of forces she could not control.

It was not for want of trying. Twice she had attempted to summon up wieldings to drive Zephario back, but the violence with which she was being thrown around robbed her of the breath to finish them. Once only did she manage to utter four words, her eyes upon Candy as she spoke them:

“I WILL FIND YOU,” she said.

It was an uninspired response to the exquisite complexities of all that had come before, but Candy knew the viciousness of the woman cursing her too well to take the words lightly. Yes, the Empress of the Abarat had been cast down from her place of power. And yes, the souls she had most prized had been set free, the remnants of their prisons hanging off her dress, gutted. Yes, she was weak at that moment, and could perhaps have been destroyed.

But none standing or lying or kneeling there knew how it might be done. Minutes before she had been the very image of Imperial power, descending the flank of Mount Galigali with an army of burning assassins following upon her heels. Now she was in tatters. But she was still too dangerous a creature, and too unpredictable, for anyone to attempt to put her out of her misery.

In truth it was this most inward of wounds that saved Candy’s life, for after Zephario’s soul-passage through her body, Candy’s strength was utterly depleted. Had the Hag simply picked up a stone, she could have effortlessly beaten Candy’s brains out there and then and destroyed her nemesis in a heartbeat.

But the Empress couldn’t bear the idea of being seen in this broken, humiliated state, even though she’d won. The only memory of her she wanted anyone to take away from this battle was of her triumphant descent down the slope of Mount Galigali.

So, in a manner of restraint and decorum befitting a true Empress, she turned her back on the girl from Chickentown and very quickly made magical arrangements for her exit. She cast her eyes toward the bright place overhead where the comet of Carrions had briefly sundered the air and departed, leaving only a glimpse of that paradise to which they had gone, visible behind the door through which they’d passed.

The Empress was, of course, no longer wracked by the convulsions that the dolls had caused. All that unpleasantness was over. She could form words of summoning, sufficient unto the task of calling forth from the lava crust beneath her feet seven petals, enclosing her in a sheath of mottled gray and black, like a toxic flower that had yet to blossom. Only as it was about to close up, completely concealing Mater Motley from sight, did she utter one final instruction to the Other in her midst, in a language eons older even Old Abaratian: the ancient mind-words of the Nephauree. Candy didn’t need to know the language to understand what the creature had been told. The sounds of the words conjured pictures, which appeared with appalling clarity in her mind’s eye. She saw the ground crack. She saw rushing water. She saw the Void.

Then the petal shroud closed around Mater Motley, and sealed her up completely. And having done so, folded itself upon itself, and was gone. The moment the Empress was out of sight, every eye in the Abarat witnessed the appearance of what Midnight’s hand had cancelled: the light. The sacbrood fell from the sky, withered, and turned to ash.

It was a momentary triumph, for the Old Hag had left the Nephauree in her stead, asking of it one last favor: make sure that those many thousands who had witnessed her presence here did not live to tell of what they had witnessed.

Chapter 74
The Hammer of the Nephauree

“C
ANDY . . .”

Gazza was there, standing a little distance away from her, as though he wasn’t entirely certain that whatever he’d just witnessed happening was finally over, now that she was out of the fugue state that had put such a strange expression onto her face.

“It’s all right,” she said, looking up at him. She let him study her a while, to reassure himself that he did indeed have his Candy back with him. “
I’m
all right.”

“That thing . . .”

“The Nephauree?”

She glanced back over her shoulder. There were little bursts of brightness in the clots in the cloud of the Nephauree, as though its vast gaseous intelligence was speaking to itself, turning over possibilities.

“She instructed it to leave no witnesses,” Candy said.

“So now it’s going to kill everybody?”

“I would think so. If you were Empress of the Abarat would you want anyone—even a stitchling—to be able to report what they’d just seen? Poor Malingo. He’s already gone. I’m afraid we’re going to be following him very soon.”

“You’re not giving up?” Gazza said. He sounded appalled. “You, Candy Quackenbush? You can’t give up. What about the people whose lives you saved? The people here, thousands of them.”

“They . . . saved themselves.”

“Well, perhaps. But you showed them how to go on . . . and why.”

He looked away from her and attempted to clear his own eyes of tears with a quick wiping of his cheek.

“Please, Gazz . . .” she said.

“None of this was an accident, Candy; you meeting me, us coming here. I know you think you just brought more bad things here than good. And maybe Malingo
would
still be alive. But maybe he’d still be waiting for somebody to find him, and show him how to escape the wizard forever. You told me once, do you remember, not to think always of how something can happen. Only know they do.”

“I’ve got nothing left in me, Gazza. I couldn’t conjure a peanut, never mind a glyph.”

“We can still find a way out of here.”

“I don’t see how. We’re trapped.”

Behind them was the Void; in front of them the liquid fire of Mount Galigali, and to either side of the island the spumy waters of the Izabella, pouring off over the Edge of the World into Oblivion. Candy was right. There was no way out.

Meanwhile, the Nephauree was responding to Mater Motley’s last instruction; its virtually passive state became suddenly activated by the prospect of slaughter. The eruptions of light within each of the clotted areas threw out filaments of light, like lines drawn between constellations in the roiling darkness of the Nephauree’s internal universe.

As each line found its destination and moved on to the next, its brightness intensified, as though some vast mathematical equation was being solved in this geometry; a theorem concerned, paradoxically, with the ordered escalation of chaos. The speed with which the calculations took place continued to increase; it was only a matter of time before it reached critical mass.

“We’re not just going to stand here and look at it, are we?” Gazza said.

“No.”

“So we’re
going
?” Gazza said very quickly and softly.

“Yes.”

“Turn and run?”

“Better not to run, I think. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

“Got it,” Gazza said.

But the stitchlings, having been betrayed by their Empress once again, despite her promises of high remuneration, were beginning to understand that the Nephauree intended to massacre them as well, and took flight.

The Nephauree knew not where to begin its work of destruction. Finding a small window, together Candy and Gazza began to retreat, step after slow step over the baking earth. They had taken nine steps when the connection of black constellations ceased. The roiling motion in the interior went on, but now the darkness was being drawn toward a single place in the configuration. If the thing had an eye, then perhaps this was it.

“It’s watching us,” Candy said.

“Yeah, I get that feeling too.”

“Maybe we should . . .”

“Stop moving?” Gazza suggested.

“Yep.”

They stopped. It didn’t seem to help much. The eye continued to draw in strands of darkness from all around it. The point was very soon going to be reached where it could get no darker, nor any denser. Then surely, its killing power would fly.

The darkness flickered. Candy glanced at Gazza, and as she did so one of the stitchlings to the right of the creature lost its nerve, and turned to run. The Nephauree turned too. Not its entire body, just that little part within which the dark-amassing eye was set. A brief glance, sending a blur of shadows forth, and the stitchling—which had been one of the bigger brutes—was gone, as though the darkness had simply devoured it. Candy and Gazza turned and ran. And it hurt. Oh, how it hurt! Though the channeling of Zephario’s soul had been traumatic, and Candy’s body ached just about everywhere, it was, strange to say, a
good
hurt, a pain that made her aware of how alive she was, and how good it felt to be alive.

That was something worth running for, wasn’t it? To have more life, yes, more time to see the miracles of the Hours, and to help heal its wounds, more time to keep the company of the young man who was running as hard as she was beside her. All this raced through her mind as her body, filled with fury and gratitude, carried her over the broken ground—all this, and one other thing: the mystery of the Twenty-Fifth Hour, the Time Out of Time. There was a mystery being guarded there about which she knew nothing, except that it existed, and that she would never know the Abarat until she had solved it.

So much still to do: to explore, to solve, to
feel.
She couldn’t die yet!

But it was hard ground to race over, and they would have stumbled several times if each had not had the other to keep them from falling. They had a third companion, though Candy had not yet glimpsed it yet. One of the Abaratian seagulls had apparently decided to keep them company as they ran. Candy could hear its huge wings flapping somewhere overhead, and once she thought she saw it for a moment but it was such a brief glimpse—and what she saw was so large and preposterous—that she assumed her hallucinating senses were playing tricks. There was no doubt that the bird
was
keeping up with them, however. The more distance they were able to put between themselves and the Nephauree, the louder its wingbeats became. Finally, Candy slowed long enough to glance back. It was hard to judge how far they’d come.

The landscape had changed, even in the short time they’d been running. The wind had shifted, and the smoke from the volcano was drifting north, toward the Edge of the World. It obscured almost completely the remains of the Stormwalker, along with most of Mount Galigali’s northern flank. It only thinned out as it came close to the Nephauree. Or was it that the smoke had been consumed
by
the creature? That made sense. There was a jaundiced taint to the Nephauree now, as though it had somehow inhaled all the sulfurous filth in the cloud, and plucked up by its own devices shards of white-hot stone that hung like nascent stars in the Nephauree’s universe.

She took all this in—the smoke, the stolen yellow tainting the Nephauree, the bright white stars—in one brief glance. Then, realizing what she had
not
seen, looked again.

The stitchlings had gone. The burning ones, the ones that had just a flicker of fire here and there, and even those that had emerged from the wreckage whole: all of them, gone. The Nephauree had destroyed them all. Now the Nephauree had nothing left to delay it. Candy and Gazza were its only targets. And after them it came.

Candy didn’t look back a third time. She didn’t need to. She could feel the motion of the alien as it closed in on them; a profound disturbance in the ground over which she and Gazza were running.

There were people coming to meet them from the crowd of survivors at the far end of the island. And leading that crowd was John Mischief, arms outstretched. The gesture was optimistic, but the expression on his face was not. Even at this distance Candy could see that Mischief’s eyes were looking past Candy and Gazza. He was looking at the Nephauree. And he could see something terrible beyond words was about to happen.

“Bad news,” the bird said. “It’s attacking.”

Candy’s heart jumped, hearing the voice of the creature.

“Malingo?”

She slowed her run looking for the bird and, failing to find it, stopped entirely. Suddenly, down it swooped to hover in front of her. It was indeed Malingo. Or rather his head, the wound of his neck closed up and the leathery outgrowths on either side of his head flapping to keep him in the air.

“You’re alive!” Despite their desperate situation she couldn’t help but laugh: “Ha! Look at you!”

“This is how geshrats are born,” he said. “Heads with wing-ears. Our bodies are replaceable. I’ll just grow a new one when this is all over.”

“You never told me.”

“You never asked.”

“Well, that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” said John Moot.

“I disagree,” said John Serpent.

“Of course you do!” said John Mischief.

“Hey! I’m glad Malingo’s alive too,” Gazza said, “but we still have a problem.”

The Nephauree was no longer pursuing them. It had halted, twenty yards or so from Candy, Gazza and Malingo. Though Candy had seen countless images of power in her journeys through the Abarat, she’d never witnessed anything quite the equal of this. It was immense: a looming mass of contradictions. Despite its gaseous-liquid form there were places where the clotted darkness had a steely sheen to it, and others where it seemed the fine lines she’d seen drawn on its darkness had been etched there on countless previous occasions, an intricate matrix of line upon line upon line, darker even than the darkness into which they’d been scratched.

“Oh dear,” said John Fillet.

“What’s it doing?”

“Nothing good,” Candy said.

There was an insistent downward motion to the darkness now, the force of its substance pressing upon the solidified lava. It cracked open: jagged ruptures in the ground, which rapidly spread toward Candy and Gazza. There was nothing mysterious about either the motion of the fissures or of the light blazing out of them. The fissures were under the control of the Nephauree and they opened onto the molten magma that ran beneath the island.

Their way back to Mischief and the rest of the survivors was now denied. The widest of the fissures—seven feet wide and getting wider—had clearly been created to cut them off from their friends. They were being herded toward the northwestern corner of the island, where the waters of the Sea of Izabella became a roaring-white frenzy as they plunged helplessly on past the coast of Scoriae and over the Edge of the World. There was no real shore. The black lava rock simply sloped a little steeper before it met the panicking waters as they went to meet Oblivion.

The Nephauree was a stranger to itself, its mind a shadow on the wall of a chamber where the worst atrocities one living thing could visit upon another were commonplace. All it knew was the processes of fear, and how to multiply them. In the case of the young witch and her friends, it simply drove them back toward the waters until they were trapped between two unpleasant deaths: to be plunged into the white waters of the Izabella and drowned, or to drop into one of the fissures and be cooked alive.

At least, this had been its master plan. But the fracturing of the ground wasn’t proceeding as speedily as it had planned. There were more urgent claims upon its time right now than watching the little witch perish. It had come here to witness the elevation of the woman Mater Motley, into whose hands its species’ priests had put great power, for reasons more to do with their own Grand Designs than in service of her Imperial ambition. But she had underestimated the enemy, despite the elegance of her plotting.

The battle had been messier than the Nephauree had anticipated, but it had been won in the end. Even so, the priests who had dispatched the Nephauree here would not be pleased with the way things had gone. The sooner they had this news, the sooner they could make whatever strategic changes they judged appropriate. So the Nephauree could not afford to linger any longer. It needed this business with the girl and the fisherman over with, once and for all.

It needed to break the ground more effectively. And for that, it already had a plan. It willed its body to exude two horns of matter, into which it rerouted the darkness that had been dropped into its bowels. Now that same weighty darkness climbed up into the “horns” it had formed, turning them into vast hammers.

And down they came: two hammerheads of darkness that slammed into the wounded ground! Instantly, a fresh network of fissures appeared from the place where its hammerheads had landed. They zigzagged toward Candy and Gazza, separating them from the Johns, and causing every crack that had already gaped between the Nephauree and its victims to become even wider, creating a network of new fissures that drove the witch and her friends back and back and back, until they were at the top of the narrow shore that led down to the water’s edge.

The Nephauree lifted its hammerheaded horns again, reaching up even higher than it had previously, and brought them down like a judge slamming down his gavel to pass the final sentence. The shock wave it sent made the ground to gape everywhere, causing the tiny parcel of shore where the witch and her friends stood to be separated from the rest of the ground.

“We’re in trouble,” was all Candy could say.

Then the waters tugged at their little portion of ground with so much strength that it could no longer resist the demand. It parted from the rest of the shore with a violent shudder that threw Candy and Gazza to their knees.

Then the current caught it, and it was borne inexorably toward that place where the Sea of Izabella was lost to Oblivion.