Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1 Read online

  She put the cut to her mouth immediately, tasting the tang of her own blood, and perhaps something of the creature’s metallic innards, from whence the spike had come.

  Meanwhile, the insect had dropped off the poker and was finally retreating. It was wounded, she saw; two of its legs were set awry and were being dragged behind it.

  Even so, as it retreated, it underwent an extraordinary transformation.

  Without missing a steady step of its speedy stride, its back opened up, two doors sliding out of sight. Its wings were then raised and folded and slid with perfect accuracy into the opening and its back closed up again. At the same time a host of other smaller changes were taking place in its anatomy. A telescopic tail appeared, almost doubling the insect’s length when it reached its full measure, and a second rack of legs appeared along its abdomen. When its reconfiguration was complete it no longer resembled a locust or a dragonfly, but a huge centipede. Even its color seemed to have changed subtly, its bright greens bled of their intensity, so that now it was a sickly, mottled yellow.

  It no longer tried to record Candy or her surroundings. All it wanted now was to be away as fast as possible, so as to avoid another attempt on its artificial life. Candy made no further attempt to stop it from escaping. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  The creature was now about two feet from freedom. And then, in walked Izarith. She failed to notice the thing scuttling beneath her feet. Good mother that she was, her eyes went first to her frightened daughter.

  “Watch out!” Candy yelled.

  Too late. Izarith had trodden on the tail of the creature, which cracked like the shell of a lobster.

  Izarith looked down. The food she’d brought in with her fell from her hands. An expression of the most intense disgust came to her face.

  She raised her foot to stomp on it again.

  “Get it, Muma!” Maiza said, silent tears running down her cheeks.

  “Be careful,” Candy warned her, still trying to stop the blood flowing from her hand. “It fights back.”

  Izarith didn’t seem to care; her house had been invaded and her child had been terrorized. She was furious. She stamped on it twice, bringing her heel down hard. The creature was fast, however. It tried to rush away between Izarith’s legs. But she took a step back to stop it, and realizing the way was barred, the creature turned, its bug eyes scanning the wall to the right of the door. Picking up the poker that Candy had dropped, Izarith pursued the creature to the corner of the room.

  But again the insect showed a remarkable turn of speed. It ran toward the wall, and leaped, driving its feet into the plaster. Then it made a zigzag ascent, evading each and every blow Izarith attempted to deliver. In a matter of seconds, it was out of her reach and heading across the ceiling to a place where the plaster had fallen away, exposing a sizeable hole. It disappeared through it and was gone.

  “Hush,” Izarith said to Nazre, who’d begun to cry out loud.

  The child stopped crying almost instantly. Candy listened. She could still hear the creature’s feet as it scuttled away. Eventually they grew so soft, Candy wasn’t sure whether she was still hearing them, or imagining it.

  Then they were finally gone.

  Candy looked down at her hand. It was still bleeding. Not a lot, but enough to make Candy feel faintly sick. It was not just the blood that sickened her; Candy had a strong stomach. It was much more to do with the memory of the creature’s scrutiny; the horrid intelligence in its stare.

  “Do you know where that thing came from?” she asked Izarith.

  Izarith picked up what looked like the remains of a child’s shirt and tossed it over to Candy. “Here,” she said, “it’ll stop the blood.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “No,” Izarith replied, not looking at Candy. “There are things like that all over. But never before in my home.”

  “But it wasn’t real, Izarith. It was a machine of some kind.”

  Izarith shrugged, as though the matter of its being real or not was completely irrelevant.

  Candy tore the old garment she’d been given into two strips and bound it around her hand. It slowly stopped throbbing. As she tied off the knot, Izarith—who’d been silently working to calm and then feed her children—said, “I think you should go.”

  She still wasn’t looking at Candy. Plainly the fact that she was ushering the girl who’d been so generous to her out of her house was an embarrassment. But her primary concern was her children’s safety.

  “Will others like that thing come to replace it?”

  “I don’t know,” Izarith said, finally glancing up at Candy. The blood had gone from her face. Though she’d dealt with the insect efficiently enough, she was obviously deeply afraid. There were tears in her eyes, but she was fighting them bravely. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just think it’s better if you go.”

  Candy nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I understand. I hope things go well for you and your family.”

  “Thank you,” Izarith said. “I hope things go well for you, too. But be careful. This is a dangerous time.”

  “So I begin to see,” Candy said.

  Izarith nodded, then she returned to the business of feeding her children, leaving Candy to make her own way out.

  16. The Universal Eye

  Carrion had no love of things Commexian. On the island of Pyon, where it was always Three O’clock in the Morning, Rojo Pixler had built Commexo City, his so-called city of Light and Laughter. It had been, many years before, the site of the Carrion Night Mansion. The Lord of Midnight had happy memories of the times preceding the fire that destroyed the Mansion; Hours when Pyon had been a place of play. He’d needed no magic then. He’d been the prince, his father’s favorite. That was all he had needed in order to make the world glorious and Pyon a playground.

  But after the fire he had never gone back. And when the man he’d thought was a harmless dreamer by the name of Rojo Pixler had offered to buy the land on which the ruins of the Night Mansion still stood, he’d readily sold it.

  Only later did he discover that Pixler’s representatives had been surreptitiously buying up other plots of land around Pyon, until he had enough ground to start the construction of his dream city; a place where night was to be permanently banished by a constant blaze of artificial light. What a mockery, that on the very site where the Carrion family had lived in a palace of shadow and enigma, was now a garish city whose every surface blazed. The dazzle and gaud of it could be seen at midnight, if you stood in certain spots along Marrowbone’s Shore on the northwest where the wind off the Izabella thinned the red fogs.

  Carrion had promised himself that he would personally extinguish those lights when his Night of Nights came. And Rojo Pixler would get a nightmare or two to replace his bright and wretched dream. Something plucked from Carrion’s own cortex. Something that would leave the man a gibbering wreck, driven so far into madness he would be unable even to remember the name of his own damnable city.

  But that was for the future. Until that happy Night came, it made sense to put the inventions that Pixler funded to use. Pixler was no fool. He had found a way to marry the ancient magical principles that had been practiced on the islands since the beginning of time with new machineries invented by the scientists he kept in gleaming laboratories in the towers of Commexo City.

  Where had Pixler found those first magical principles? In books he had paid professional thieves to steal from Carrion’s own library, among other places. Carrion had let it be known that he was aware of the theft and even of the price Pixler had paid the thief, a fellow by the name of John Mischief, for his illicit services.

  Word had later reached him that Pixler—who was at heart a superstitious man—had become very agitated when he heard that his commissioned thefts were no secret. Fearing reprisal, he had casually offered the use of his “Sublime Verities,” as he called his marriage of science and magic, to Carrion, should he ever have need of them.

  Well, that time
had come.

  Immediately following his interrogation of Shape, Carrion had sent one of his trusted lieutenants, Otto Houlihan, the Criss-Cross Man, to Commexo City. He was sent with a very specific demand. He knew for a fact that, like any man of power—especially one who had risen suddenly, like Pixler—the King of Commexo City was not only superstitious, but paranoid. He feared for his life and for his city. And with reason. No doubt there were people on every island who hated Commexo City and all that it represented.

  Being a practical man—a man who believed in finding solutions, not simply stewing in his fear—Pixler had instructed his magical scientists to use their Sublime Verities in the creation of spies that would take the shape of living things and would be dispersed through the islands to watch for and report any sign of rebellion against him.

  Only a month before, the Criss-Cross Man had brought a dozen of these automaton spies to the Twelfth Tower for the Lord of Midnight’s amusement. They were like exquisite toys to Carrion’s eye; he had amused himself by having Houlihan blindfold them, then watched them batter themselves to pieces against the walls of his scrying room. Some of the finest he had turned over to his own scientists for closer analysis. One, an artificial meckle bird, he had caged and kept for himself, because it needed no nourishment, and it sang so fetchingly, even when blinded.

  Now he had a new reason for Rojo Pixler’s spying operations. He wanted to know if the girl who’d apparently been Mischief’s accomplice had survived the waters of the Izabella, and if so, where she’d gone.

  So he sent Houlihan to Commexo City; a short while later the man returned, not with information, but with one of Pixler’s chief scientists, a certain Dr. Voorzangler.

  The doctor appeared before Carrion dressed in a fine white linen suit, with white shoes and white tie; he wore one of the more peculiar ocular devices Carrion had ever seen. It had the effect of taking the image of his eyes and superimposing them, one over the other, in the middle of his face. Voorzangler’s eyes were not a perfect match. One of them was a little bigger than the other, and one seemed to be a little slower in its motion than its companion, so the cyclopic eye the device created was seldom whole. One image was always trailing half an eye behind the other.

  Whatever the reason for his wearing it, the thing didn’t seem to impair Voorzangler’s vision. He was studying the paintings on the walls of the gallery when Carrion came in.

  His voice, when he spoke, was high-pitched and weaselly.

  “I hear,” he said, “that you are searching for somebody. Is that right? Somebody who has conspired against you? And you need Mr. Pixler’s assistance?” Before Carrion could reply, the doctor continued, his voice, after a few sentences, already annoying Carrion. “Mr. Pixler instructed me to tell you that he is more than happy to help a friend and neighbor. Could you perhaps supply me with a brief description of the miscreant?”

  “No,” said Carrion. “But I have somebody who can.” He turned to Houlihan. “Where’s Shape?”

  “I brought him up from the kitchens as you instructed, sir. He’s waiting in the next room.”

  “Fetch him.”

  While Houlihan went off down the length of the gallery to fetch Shape, Carrion turned his full attention on Voorzangler.

  “So what have you brought to impress me with?” he said.

  Voorzangler began to blink his one and a half eyes vigorously. “It was Mr. Pixler’s desire that you be given access to our most secret spying device,” he said. “The Universal Eye.”

  “I’m honored,” Carrion replied. “May I ask why, if it is so secret, Mr. Pixler so honors me?”

  “He looks to the future, Lord Carrion. He sees a time when—if I may be so bold—you and he may be more than distant neighbors.”

  “Ah,” said Carrion. “Good. Then let me see what proof of his intentions he has sent.”

  “Here,” Voorzangler said, bringing Carrion’s attention to a dark gray box, about three feet square, which was standing a little way down the gallery. He took a small control unit out from his white jacket and touched it with his thumb.

  The response from the box was instantaneous. It rose into the air on a quintet of delicate legs on which it had been squatting. Then, without any further instruction from Voorzangler, it began to open up like a geometric flower, so that it now presented sixteen screens, four facing each wall of the room. An instant later, they all flickered into life, the images bright.

  Carrion smiled.

  “Well, well,” he said.

  He started to move around the other side of the device, but as he did so it accommodated him by flipping around, so as to present him with four more screens. Some of the images were static, but more were moving, their motion sometimes chaotic, as the camera—wherever it was situated—went in pursuit of a particular suspect.

  By now Houlihan had brought Shape in. He was still wearing the same shabby coat, except that it was now decorated with the remains of his meal in the kitchens. He looked embarrassed when Carrion called him to hobble forward and view the multiplicity of screens.

  “I’m hoping we’re going to find our little Candy somewhere here,” Carrion said to him. He turned to Voorzangler. “What kind of creatures do this spying for you?” he asked.

  “You saw some of them yourself, sir, a month ago.” His cyclopic gaze became sly. “I believe you still keep the meckle bird in your private rooms.”

  The meaning of this remark was not lost on Carrion. Voorzangler was subtly telling him that even he, the Lord of Midnight, was spied upon.

  Carrion filed the information away for another time, and simply pretended not to understand what he’d been told.

  “How many reports do you have in this device?” he asked.

  “Nineteen thousand, four hundred and twelve,” Voorzangler replied. “That’s just from the last two days. Of course if you want to go back further—”

  “No, no,” said Carrion. “Two days is fine. Shape?”

  “Yes, Lord?”

  “Doctor Voorzangler is going to show you a lot of pictures. If the girl is among them, I want to know. Otto? Come and find me when you’re ready.”

  Carrion left them to it and went out into the midnight, his thoughts straying from Voorzangler’s Sublime Verities to subjects more massive and remote.

  It was the stars glimmering through the fog that were the present subject of his meditations.

  He knew from his books that each one of those distant lights was a sun unto itself. And though their meager illumination did not disturb him, there were other creatures in the Abarat for which those little stars (not to mention the brightness of the noonday sun or the light of the pallid moons that hung over the islands) were a curse.

  They were called the Requiax, these creatures, and their home was in the deepest trenches of the Sea of Izabella.

  Their age and their capacity for evil were both beyond calculation. Such indeed was the scale of their wickedness and the extent of their age, that many learned men and women who’d made it their business to study the innumerable life-forms of the Abarat did not even believe they existed. Wickedness of such proportions was a mythic invention, they said. The Requiax could not be real.

  But Carrion had it from atrustworthy source that the Requiax lived. And having that certain knowledge he had wondered many times how things would be for his enemies across the archipelago if the light of the sun, moon and stars were somehow to be blotted out for a little while.

  In that time would the Requiax not rise up from their unfathomable trenches, forsaking the temples where they were still paid homage by the blind monsters of the deep, and turn their vast, depraved faces toward the lightless sky? Rise up and come where they had not ventured since the time when great clouds of ash had covered the sun and moon and stars?

  What harm would they do, if they walked the islands again?

  What cities would they bring down, what peoples would they erase?

  It was beyond even Carrion’s power to fully conce
ive of the devastation they would unleash.

  But he knew one thing: he wanted to be there to witness it. And he wanted to be ready, when the Hour of Darkness passed, and the Requiax returned to their temples and their trenches. Ready with his masons and his priests, to lay down the foundations of a New World and rebuild it in his image.

  “Lord?”

  The voice that had disturbed his thoughts was not that of Houlihan, as he’d expected. It was one of his grandmother’s many stitchlings, creatures sewn together from skin and leather and fabric, then filled with a living mud. This particular stitchling was called Knotchek, and he was a wretched piece of work in every way.

  “What is it?” Carrion said to him.

  “Your grandmother, Mater Motley, summons you, my lord. She needs to talk with you about the visitation you have had from Commexo City.”

  “She misses nothing, does she?” Carrion remarked.

  “Little, m’lord,” Knotchek agreed.

  “Well, I cannot come now,” Carrion told the stitchling. “I have too much urgent business.”

  “She told me… um…”

  Knotchek was getting nervous. Plainly this was not a message he wished to deliver.

  “Go on,” Carrion said.

  “She says… she forbids any further presence on Gorgossium of visitors from Commexo.”

  “She forbids?’ Carrion said. There was a menacing undertow to his voice. The nightmares in the water around his head grew agitated. “She forbids me. That harridan? That seamstress?”

  He caught Knotchek with one backward sweep of his gloved hand, so powerful it threw the stitchling ten yards.

  “Go back to her!” Carrion shouted. “And you tell her if she ever forbids me ANYTHING EVER AGAIN I will loose a pack of nightmares among her little tribe of stitchlings and drive them to tear down the Thirteenth Tower, till there is nothing left but a heap of rubble! DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?”