Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 10

  “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, bow-legged, 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 maid-servants, 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.”

  Chapter 15

  The Pursuer

  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.

  Candy had known Nadine just a little; she had worked as a checko
ut girl at the supermarket where her mother, Melissa Quackenbush, had shopped. She’d always seemed the kind of person Candy could never imagine herself being: always smiling, always helpful.

  Her death had affected Candy deeply. For reasons she couldn’t really understand, she’d felt profoundly sad. Sadder even than what she’d felt when Grandpappy O’Donnell had passed away.

  She’d dreamed about being at the wedding many times after that, in a huge church filled with the kind of flowers you’d only ever see in a dream. Sometimes she’d been a guest at the wedding (though in reality nobody from the Quackenbush family had been close enough to any of the bride’s or bridegroom’s families to be invited). Sometimes she’d been the bride. She hadn’t told anybody the dreams. She’d felt a little foolish about having them; after all, she really had no right to them. It wasn’t her tragedy. Why then had it moved her so deeply?

  She sat in the chamber with the portraits of Prince Quiffin and the young Princess Boa and turned the puzzle over, looking for some way in to it. She felt a connection here in the Twilight Palace: the sadness of Nadine Morales and that of Princess Boa joined by a bridge of her own feelings, her own thoughts. But why? What was the purpose of that bridge?

  And while she was asking herself these questions, it was probably worth also asking why fate had dropped her here in the palace in the first place. As Methis had carried her toward the Hour of Seven and the mist-shrouded trees had come into view, she’d had the distinct impression that there was something here that was significant; though at the time she hadn’t known what. Now she did. These empty, lament-filled rooms were what had drawn her. Those, and the story she had just heard.

  Now, having heard it, she wanted to leave. The munkee’s story had brought back the thoughts of Nadine Morales, and she wanted to put those out of her head. But there was still a large part of the palace she hadn’t seen. She couldn’t leave here (possibly to never come back) without investigating further. So, as the invisible Bilarki continued to play his laments (a different melody now, but no less sad than those that had preceded it), she ventured deeper and deeper into the palace. The light diminished as she went, and the darker it got the easier it was to imagine how these rooms might have been when the palace had still been in its glory. What an amazing place it must have been! The walls bright with color, the air full of laughter and the smell of good food. If only she’d been here to see it. In a way, she thought, she’d come to the Abarat too late; its days of fine palaces and great Kings and Queens were over. The Abarat had become a chaotic place, overshadowed by murder and bad magic, by sadness and freak shows and the ever-present laughter of the Commexo Kid.

  The sheer weight of Bilarki’s music was beginning to take its toll. The farther she went, the more tired she became. Her limbs began to feel heavy. Soon she wanted to lie down and sleep for a while. And why not? She was as safe here as any other place. Safer, probably. She found herself a chaise lounge that looked reasonably comfortable and sat down on it. Up in the branches of the trees Bilarki moved like a ghost, trailing his laments as he walked through the trees.

  Her lids were like lead; they soon closed. In a few seconds her head was filled with voices, rising up out of the walls around her. Somebody seemed to call her, as if from the past.

  “Come here, dear one!” he said.

  “The stars are so bright tonight,” a young woman’s voice replied. “I wonder what they say?”

  “Don’t ask! Never ask.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you might not like the answer.”

  She heard somebody laughing at this and turned her dream sight around, looking for whoever it was who was so amused, and she found a man with a large gray beard standing at the opposite end of the room. Even if he hadn’t been wearing a crown, Candy would instantly have recognized him as the King. He looked directly at her in the dream, and there was such love in his eyes, such deep, unspoilable love, that it made Candy want to cry with pleasure. She could never remember her father looking at her in such a way.

  “What’s this, child?” Claus said. “Please, no tears.”

  Candy put her hand up to her face. Her cheeks were wet. The King approached her, opening his arms as he approached.

  “There’s nothing in the world to be sad about, darling.”

  “I was only thinking of how different things will be when I’m married” came the reply. It was her voice she heard speaking, but it was subtly changed. It had a richness in it that wasn’t in Candy’s voice, a kind of lilting music. She made a note to herself to remember this when she woke from this dream.

  “He loves you,” King Claus said to her. “He loves you, my darling, with all his heart. If he did not, I would not allow him to marry you and take you away from me.”

  Claus smiled and gently stroked her face. She half expected his fingers to be cold—reaching as he was from the past—but no, they were warm and soft. He spoke again, now almost whispering.

  “Finnegan is a child of both Night and Day,” he said. “There has never been a man like him in the history of the islands. At least none that we know of. It is a gift of the Gods that you two should find each other and fall in love. Together you will heal a breach that has divided these islands for generations.” In Claus’ eyes she could see how this prospect delighted him. “You’ll have the most beautiful children the Abarat has ever seen, and this palace will be the perfect place for them to live, because it stands at the spot where the Dark Hours meet the Light.

  “Smile,” he said again, oh so softly.

  She put her hand up and covered his, interweaving their fingers.

  Before she could make the smile he wanted to see, she heard somebody shouting, far off.

  “What is that?” she said.

  King Claus was still looking at her with that sweetly loving expression, as though he hadn’t heard her ask the question. The shouting became louder, but no more coherent. Whoever it was who was doing the yelling, he was in a state of panic.

  She looked around, but there was no sign of an intruder. The room she was in was bright and happy, like the people in it.

  Then she realized: the panicker wasn’t here with her in this dream. He was outside, in the waking world!

  “I have to go,” she said to Claus. It was strange to be talking this way to somebody in a dream, but he’d been so kind to her that she didn’t want to offend him.

  “Where are you going?” King Claus said. “You belong here. Always. Always.”

  “I have to wake up!” she said.

  He looked at her with a puzzled expression on his face. “Wake up?” he said. “But you’re not dreaming—”

  “Yes, I am. I am! Listen to that shouting!”

  “I can’t hear anything,” King Claus said gently. “Is this a joke?”

  “No—” she said, stepping away from him. “I have to go.”

  His fingers were still interwoven with hers; he didn’t want to let her go. Nor, in a way, did she want to lose contact with him. She could have happily bathed in the King’s voice and words for another hour.

  Still, she had to go. The panicked voice was close. And now she recognized it.

  “Filth!” she said.

  “The munkee?” Claus replied.

  “Yes. Yes, the munkee!” Candy replied. “He’s in trouble. I have to go to him!” She pulled her hand from the King’s hand, and as they broke contact she felt herself rising up out of the waking dream. “I’m sorry,” she said to the King as his face grew dimmer before her. “I’m sure I’ll—”

  She didn’t have a chance to finish the sentence. At that moment she woke, and the dream disappeared in a heartbeat.

  Filth was at her side, his eyes crazier than ever.

  “We gotta problem!” he hollered. “We gotta big problem!”

  “What is it?” said Candy, rubbing her eyes.

  “I went down to the beach to get some fresh air, and this boat came in with four stitchlings rowing. You know what stitchlings are?�
��

  “Oh yes. I’m afraid I do.”

  “These weren’t your normal stitchlings, though. These were bigger, stronger. And they had these helmets—”

  “Mires. They’re called mires,” Candy said grimly. “I assume they weren’t alone?”

  “No.”

  “There was a man with criss-cross tattoos on his cheeks leading them?”

  “Yes, there was.”

  “His name’s Otto Houlihan, sometimes called the Criss-Cross Man.”

  “I’ve heard of him. He’s—”

  “A hunter. He works for the man who killed your Princess—”

  “Christopher Carrion.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And now Houlihan’s coming after you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess Carrion thinks I’m trouble.”

  Filth tilted his head, a look of bemusement on his face. “Why would he think that?”

  “Long story.”

  “The short version.”

  “Well . . . I came from the Hereafter. By accident. I think . . .”

  “Go on,” said Filth.

  “There are some people in Gorgossium who think I’m here to spoil their plans.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So you’re not—”

  “Not what?”

  “Here to spoil their plans?”

  “No. I don’t even know what their plans are.”

  “So they’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Yes. But I just happen to be up in this tree, and it doesn’t seem to matter to them that I’m innocent.”

  “They’ll take you anyway.”

  “Probably.”

  “Huh.” Filth considered all this for a moment. “Fas-cinating,” he remarked. Then: “Gotta go.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yes. Well, I’m—”

  “—a busy munkee!”

  “A coward.”

  Candy laughed, despite the grimness of her situation.