Abarat: Absolute Midnight Read online

  But it was from the third and smallest of the three harbors at Vrokonkeff, that the Old Mother was presently preparing to make her departure.

  The voyage she was about to take was not of enormous length; she was merely crossing to the pyramids at Xuxux. The voyage may not have been of great consequence, but it was one of great significance, and she had prepared for it by fasting for nine days, and during that time, not uttering a single word. Even now, as she dismounted from the mummified hand that had long been her preferred mode of travel, and approached the simple vessel that would carry her to the pyramids, she did not speak. Nor, out of deference to their doyen, did the seamstresses who accompanied her.

  She was half way up the gangplank when there rose a commotion farther down the quayside.

  “Lady! Lady!”

  It was a girl called Maratien, who for some years had attended upon the Old Mother in the tower, who came racing along the dock to speak with her mistress. Several seamstresses broke ranks to stop the girl from reaching Mater Motley for fear that Maratien’s intentions might be violent.

  But the Old Mother had no fear of the girl.

  “Let her go,” she instructed. “She may approach. What is it, Maratien? What’s distressing you, child?”

  “There’s somebody in your tower.”

  “Yes, of course. I left—”

  “Not any of your seamstress sisters.”

  “Who then?”

  “I didn’t recognize her.”

  “You were sufficiently concerned to race down and warn me?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “You do know how important this voyage is?”

  “I know. Of course. And forgive me for having delayed you in your great work. I meant no disrespect. Please—”

  “Ssh, ssh, ssh,” Mater Motley said with an almost loving indulgence in her voice. “You did well.”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “I said you did well, Maratien. And so you did. There will be another tide. I will return to the tower with you.”

  “What if I’m wrong?”

  “Then you will have made an error and you’ll learn from it, won’t you?”

  “Yes, lady.”

  “Now let’s see who has come to visit me.”

  Chapter 22

  Turning Away

  ONCE THE SMALL ROWING boat had delivered Candy and Malingo out of the maze of caves beneath Jibarish, and into the open waters of the Izabella, it had lost all power of self-will.

  “Do you have any idea of what direction the Nonce is in?” Malingo said, gazing about confusedly in all directions.

  Candy considered this for a long moment. A chill wind came across the waters. She shuddered.

  “I can’t focus. I’m all alone in here,” she said.

  Her hand went to her face. Behind it, tears came. And once they came, could not be quelled. Malingo just sat, an oar in each hand, watching her. Though his head was dropped, he kept his eyes on her.

  “I would have thought you’d be happy to be rid of her,” he said.

  “I am,” Candy replied. “At least I was on the island. And she’s a vile piece of work. But still, in here . . .” She tapped the middle of her forehead with her finger. “In here there’s just me and a lot of space. Too much space.”

  “Everybody’s in the same situation.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Lonely?”

  “Sometimes very.”

  “I didn’t realize how strange it would feel, with her gone. You’re right. I’m just feeling what everybody else feels.”

  She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands, but she’d only just done so when her sorrow overwhelmed her again and more tears came. It was as though she, Candy, was weeping for the first time, without another presence in her thoughts to help her shrug off her grief. She didn’t try to stem the flow now. She just let the tears come, talking through them.

  “I thought there was enough of the real me just spread out to fill my head. That’s how it felt at first.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it’s like I’m sitting by a little fire in the middle of . . . in the middle . . .” The tears almost silenced her, but she pushed on through them. “. . . the middle of a huge gray nothing.”

  “Is it solid? The gray, I mean.”

  “Does it matter?” she said, looking out over the dark waters.

  A single squid, its body no longer than her foot from the tips of its tentacles to the top of its head, propelled itself past the boat, its body decorated with waves of color.

  “Maybe it’s just a gray mist,” Malingo said. “Maybe it’s not empty. Maybe it’s full of things that you just haven’t seen yet.”

  Candy glanced up at Malingo, who was studying her so intensely, his face so full of love she could feel its presence, a living thing, coming in to drive off her solitude. Whether he intended it or not, that’s how she felt.

  “I hate girls who cry at every little thing,” she said to him, wiping her tears away for a second time, “so no more blubbering from me.”

  “It’s not as if you didn’t have a reason,” Malingo replied.

  “There’s always reasons, aren’t there? I’m sure all kinds of things will go wrong before I get home.”

  “Back home to the Hereafter? Why go back there? You said you hated it.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Candy replied without much conviction. Then, looking back at the sea, she said, “I love being here, Malingo. Nothing would make me happier than to stay forever.”

  “Then stay.”

  “I can’t. The price is too high.”

  “What price?”

  “People’s lives. Not just Covenantis. But Mrs. Munn . . . she was almost killed too. And there’ve been plenty of others. Some of them perhaps you’d say deserved it. Kaspar Wolfswinkel. The Criss-Cross Man. A lot of stitchlings on the Wormwood, and Mater Motley’s seamstresses. All of them would still be alive if I’d stayed in Chickentown. What just happened with Laguna and her boys is the last straw.”

  “And what about the other ones whose lives you’ve changed? The people who love you? What about me? What will I do when you’re gone, Candy? I thought we were going to be friends forever.”

  Candy sighed.

  “You’ll come visit,” she said.

  “I’m sure I’d be very welcome in Chickentown,” Malingo said. “They’d probably put me in a zoo.”

  “But suppose something were to happen to you right here, because of me? You know it could. I couldn’t live with that.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, I swear. I’m going to live forever. We both are.”

  “Oh, and how long have you had this planned?” Candy said.

  “Since we got out of Wolfswinkel’s house. I thought then: this girl has miracles at her fingertips. Nothing’s beyond her. That’s what I believed then and I believe it even more strongly now.”

  “Miracles? No. That wasn’t my doing. That was Boa, staying in practice for the day when she finally got out.”

  “So if you’d have come knocking on Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s door without Boa—”

  “We’d both be slaves right now.”

  Malingo shook his head.

  “You’re wrong. I remember very clearly looking in your eyes that first time Wolfswinkel summoned me.”

  “You were hanging upside down from a roof beam.”

  “That’s right. And I looked in your eyes—I remember this so, so clearly—and you know what I saw?”

  “What?”

  “Exactly the same person I’m looking at right now. Candy Quackenbush, of Chickentown, Minnesota. Come to save my life—”

  “But—”

  Malingo raised a finger.

  “I’m not done yet,” he said. “You’d come to save my life from the hell Wolfswinkel had turned it into. Maybe you didn’t realize that was what you’d come to do, but it was. Now you can make lists of people who got hurt b
ecause you crossed over from the Hereafter, but I can make just as many lists of people who are still alive, or whose lives are better, because of you. Think of all the people who lived in fear of Christopher Carrion. You took that fear away.”

  “Did I? Or did I just leave room for something even worse to take his place?”

  “You talking about Mater Motley?”

  “For now. But there’s probably somebody out there even worse, whose name we don’t even know yet.”

  “You’re right. The Abarat’s got its share of bad. Just like the Hereafter, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But you didn’t put them here. Can you really blame yourself for every twisted, poisoned soul in the Abarat?”

  “No. That’d be stupid.”

  “And you’re not stupid,” Malingo said. “You’re anything but. Even if you were to leave right now the Abarat would never be the same. There’d always be this brief, golden time we’d remember. The Age of Candy.”

  That broke Candy’s dark mood, at least for a moment.

  “The Age of Candy!” she laughed. “That’s the silliest thing you’ve ever said.”

  “I thought it had quite a poetical ring to it,” Malingo replied. “But if you think it’s silly then there’s only one way to stop us all from making idiots of ourselves.”

  “Which is—”

  “You can’t leave. Simple as that.”

  Candy’s laughter died away and she thought about things for a long while. Finally she said, “I tell you what. I’ll stay until this whole business with Boa is cleared up. How’s that?”

  “It’s better than you leaving us right now. And of course there’s a possibility that the mystery of Princess Boa will never be completely solved. In which case you’ll just have to stay with us forever.” He grinned. “What a terrible thing that would be.”

  There was a moment of silence between them, and then Candy’s eyes drifted back over the edge of the boat. The lone squid she’d seen before had found a companion.

  “Oh no!” she said, with sudden urgency. “Finnegan!”

  “What about him?”

  “Boa’s going to go to him the moment she gets away from Jibarish. And he’ll be so happy he’ll believe whatever story she tells him.”

  “Perhaps some of it’ll be true.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well . . . maybe she still loves him.”

  “Her? Love? No.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know what she is inside. I went and spied on her, in her dreams. And there’s only room for one person in Boa’s heart.”

  “And that’s Boa?”

  Candy nodded.

  “Do you think she’d hurt him?”

  “I think she’s capable of anything.”

  “Then we should find him.”

  “Agreed,” Candy said.

  “I suppose I row now,” Malingo said unenthusiastically.

  “We’ll each do some,” Candy said.

  “So . . . we’ll head for Qualm Hah, yes? That’s where the John Brothers said they’d be. We’ll find them with the help of a little magic, and then catch another ferry to the Nonce.”

  “Right now I think I’ve had enough playing with magic.”

  “Understood,” Malingo said. “We’ll just find them the old-

  fashioned way. And we can talk about whether you’re going or staying later . . .”

  “I’m not going to change my mind, Malingo.”

  He gave her a sly, sideways smile.

  “Later,” he reiterated.

  Chapter 23

  Cold Life

  ON THE WESTERN EDGE of the Isle of the Black Egg, where the Pius Mountains formed a grim wall between the Izabella and the island’s interior, was a stretch of coastline known as the Shore of the Departed. It had earned the name from a grim, grotesque phenomenon. Owing to some peculiarity in the way the submerged coastline was configured, whatever litter the waters of the Izabella had gathered as they moved along this part of the island was here shunned and pitched up onto the shore by a current too languid to carry it any farther.

  Thus, borne up and deposited on the Shore of the Departed, were the remains of humble fishing skiffs and massive ironclad war vessels, foundered upon the reefs of the Outer Islands, many of which remained uncharted. Sometimes there was little more than a few planks painted red, or a crow’s nest, perhaps a sail; but on occasion entire vessels, which had survived the assault of the belligerent surf, had borne up onto the shore, breaking open their hulls as wave upon wave threw them against the massive black boulders—the magma children of Mount Galigali—which formed the steep, brutal beach.

  Today, however, there was nothing of any great size to see. Just a bicycle wheel, a tangle of old fishing nets in which several rotted carcasses were caught up, plus a great deal of trash that had been in the water so long it wasn’t really recognizable. There was one other thing, however, that the sluggish tide had delivered to the shore this day, something that lolled back and forth for a long while in the shallows as the teasing waters carried it up a little way and then claimed it again, only to roll it still farther with the next wave, until the sickly surf lost the strength to torment its plaything any further, and withdrew, leaving the ragged sack it had thrown up onto the black stones to remain where it was.

  There, amid the fly-swarmed seaweed and the broken bottles and pieces of sea-worn wood (along with the occasional reminder that the Izabella had not returned empty-handed from the Hereafter: a very drowned chicken; a street sign bitten in half by one of the Izabella’s more aggressive occupants; a wooden crate containing several boxes of expensive whiskey; even—of all things—a laughing plaster pig, standing three feet tall and dressed in a chef’s regalia, while carrying a silver platter on which the pig was apparently quoted as saying: “Eat more pork!”) lay the body the waters had cast up on the Shore of the Departed.

  It was the remains of a person, though the extensive damage that had been done to the body both from hungry fishes below and hungry birds above, did not at first make it easy to distinguish its gender.

  But the signs were there, had there been anybody on that abandoned stretch of coast to see. It had the large hands of a male, and there was still an Adam’s apple in its much decomposed throat; its hips were narrow, and its shoulders broad. There were even a few signs of how this man might have looked in life. For some reason much of his face had been left untouched by the birds that had pecked at him as he floated, and it was still possible—if someone had cared to study his features closely—that at some time in his life somebody had sewn up his mouth.

  The body had not gone unnoticed. Already some of the smaller scavengers that lived along the beach were appearing from under the stones they used as doors to their hideaways and cautiously venturing out to investigate the newcomer. The crabs that had been foraging in the rotting seaweed were now scuttling over the rocks toward this new meal. Most of them were small, their blue-gray shells barely as broad as the length of a thumb, but no sooner had they appeared than the bigger crabs, some of them twenty, thirty times larger than the foragers, appeared, pushing aside stones which then rolled or skipped down the shore and into the scummy water.

  None of this sudden activity was missed by the bittamu birds that lazily circled the shore, huge scavengers that resembled the offspring of albatross and pterodactyl. They loosed full-throated shrieks of appetite and, making the subtlest of modifications in the angle of their wings, began a steady spiraling descent. But while they were still descending, a new claimant for the meat the Izabella had washed up came into view.

  It had perhaps once been a crab, perhaps a crab of common dimensions. But it was much changed now, by something or someone who had corrupted it into this monstrous form with careless magic. It was albino, its shell marked with a symmetrical design of maddening complexity. It had no less than seventeen shiny black eyes, sitting atop twitching stalks, while its mouthparts worked in ceaseless
finicky motion, as its massive claws rhythmically delivered the morsels it constantly picked up into the machine of its maw with a delicacy that their scale belied.

  Scuttling sideways, like all of its clan, it approached the body. Several smaller birds, sharp-beaked mekaks who seldom took flight, preferring to dine, breed and die on the shore, were already dancing over the corpse in their delight at having so many treats to pick from. And in their squawking enthusiasm they failed to notice the approach of the albino. The creature, for all its size, was quick. It came at the frenzied mekaks at a rush, catching one in each of its scissor claws, and snapping each bird in half before they even had time to struggle.

  The others, shrieking in panic, attempted to depart, flapping their ill-oiled wings in an attempt to get beyond the range of the crab’s claws. But no. Snap! And a third bird fell down headless. Snap! Snap! Snap! And a fourth dropped, quartered, to the stones.

  Now the albino had the feast to himself. Even the bittamu birds delayed their descent, and circled above the beach unwilling to take on the beast below, however tempting the meal.

  The crab assessed the body with its pincers and eyes, seeking out the best place to begin. It elected the hand of the corpse, taking hold of the wrist in its left pincer and lifting it up in order to snip off its fingers. But as it did so a long thread of life, its length spilling a sickly light, slid from the entrails of the body, where it had been nesting.

  It let out a high-pitched squeal as it appeared; the strongest sound that shore had heard in many an age. It climbed up the corpse’s arm so fast that the crab had no time to prepare for its attack. The creature coiled around the claw, which still held the dead man’s hand. Livid bursts of brightness, more intense by far than the light its body spilled, now burst from it. They caught the shell of the crab’s claw in a web of lightning, which instantly tightened. The claw cracked wide open, shards of shell and pieces of its meat flying in all directions.

  The crab did not have a mouth with which to voice its pain. It simply scrambled wildly to be away from its mutilator, its pincer legs sliding on the rot-slickened stones. But it wasn’t given a chance to escape. A second lightning thread had appeared from the coils of the corpse’s gut, and gathering itself into a coil had launched itself at the monster striking its eyestalks then dropping to the stones in front of the immense beast.