Days of Magic, Nights of War Read online

  “Soon . . .” Letheo’s eyes remained averted. “Perhaps Mister Masper will have some in the house for me.”

  “I don’t see any lights out there. Is this house of his big?”

  “Huge.”

  “The boat must have delivered us to the wrong beach.”

  “Or maybe we’re early,” Letheo said, slowly getting to his feet.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe we’re early,” he said, as though the sense of this was obvious. “Maybe the house hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “It moves,” Candy said.

  “Yes. It moves. If we’re lucky we’ll see it coming in to land.”

  Lordy Lou, Candy thought to herself. It always seemed that just as she thought she was coming to the end of the Abarat’s amazements and nothing could astonish her, it had something more to unveil.

  “Listen,” Letheo said.

  “What are you hearing?”

  “We have visitors.”

  Candy listened. Letheo was right. There were animals nearby. She heard a long threatening growl. And there was a sharp smell in the wind suddenly, as though the beast was marking its territory.

  “We’re in trouble, yes?” Candy murmured.

  “We’re dead,” Letheo said.

  “They haven’t got us yet.”

  “It’s only a matter of time—”

  “Then we’d better move,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Letheo winced as he walked toward her.

  “Sorry it hurts,” she said. “But being eaten is going to hurt a lot more.”

  Chapter 28

  A Summoning

  THE THREE WOMEN OF the Fantomaya sat in three high-backed antique chairs on the south shore of the Twenty-Fifth Hour and watched a storm move out of the shadows of Gorgossium to stalk the straits between Midnight and the island of Ninnyhammer. Joephi, thanks to the incredible eyesight of the squid whose vision she was presently sharing (the animal clamped to her face like a pair of living spectacles), could see a great distance. All the details of the storm and its effects—the thunderhead spitting lightning as it moved west, the ships in the straits as they plowed through the mountainous seas—were clear to her. And she was reporting everything she saw to the other two.

  “What’s going on at the wizard’s house?” Mespa asked her.

  “I’ll take a look,” Joephi said, and focused her attention upon the heights of Ninnyhammer. News of Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s escape had reached them only a short time before. They had come out here to see what could be seen and to debate precisely what was going on.

  “I can see a lot of bodies laid out at the bottom of the hill,” Joephi said.

  “Tarrie-cats?” said Diamanda.

  “And some regular soldiers.”

  “Who would have done a thing like this?” Diamanda said.

  “Well, it won’t be difficult to puzzle it out,” Mespa remarked. “Wolfswinkel had very few friends. If any. It’s hard to imagine anyone risking their necks to liberate him.”

  “Well, somebody did,” Joephi observed. “And just because he was locked away doesn’t mean he wasn’t working in secret. Plotting. Assembling a gang of some sort. He was a clever man, as I remember. Ugly and charmless, of course, and a terrible drunkard. But clever.”

  “All right,” said Diamanda. “Let’s for the moment accept your theory. He was plotting with somebody. But who?”

  “Somebody who wanted the help of a wizard . . .”

  “Why assume they took him because they liked him?” Mespa said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “He murdered five good people. For the possession of their hats. Maybe somebody related to one of them decided his punishment wasn’t severe enough.”

  “What? And took him away to execute him?” Joephi said. “Absurd.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “That’s a ridiculous idea—”

  “Ladies, ladies—” Diamanda started to say. But she didn’t finish. Instead she rose unsteadily from her chair, her expression stricken.

  “Oh . . . no . . .” she murmured.

  Joephi gently eased the squid from her face. “What’s wrong, Diamanda?”

  “Candy.”

  “Candy?” said Mespa. “What about her? You think she has something to do with this Wolfswinkel business?”

  “No, no, it’s not that. I suddenly had a clear vision of her! What does the girl think she’s doing?”

  “Where is she?” Mespa said.

  “I don’t exactly know,” Diamanda replied, closing her eyes. “It’s dark, wherever it is; very dark.”

  “Well, that’s a start, I suppose,” said Joephi.

  “And there’s . . . feathers . . . no, no, not feathers . . . snow.”

  “Heavy or light?” said Joephi. “Can you tell? There were flurries on Speckle Frew within the last couple of hours.”

  Diamanda’s eyes scanned the scene she was seeing with her mind’s eye, her pupils flickering back and forth as they searched for clues. At last she said: “This is heavy. The snow’s deep.”

  “Is she high up?” Joephi wondered. “In the Pino Mountains, maybe? The Isle of the Black Egg?”

  “No, that’s not it either. There are trees. A lot of—”

  All three sisters spoke the name of Candy’s whereabouts together.

  “Efreet.”

  “What in heaven’s name is she doing there? The place is crawling with monsters.”

  “Well, that’s where she is,” Diamanda said flatly. “And the sooner we get her off the island and away from those beasts, the better.” She walked away from her sisters a couple of steps, quietly muttering a common conjuration to herself as she did so. The color of her robe became suddenly uncertain of itself. The black and purple in its threads gave way to blue and white and more blue. The hem fluttered as though it had been entrusted to a flock of small, invisible birds.

  “You’re going somewhere?” said Mespa.

  “To Efreet, of course,” Diamanda replied. “Whatever our Candy is doing there, she’s going to need help.”

  “Then we should all go,” said Joephi.

  “No, no, no. You two need to find out what’s happening on Ninnyhammer. Wolfswinkel should be severely reprimanded if he has some hand in this violence. So investigate this closely. Find out the facts.”

  “Are you sure you can deal with Efreet on your own? You know how you hate the cold.”

  “If that’s a polite way of asking me if I’m not too antiquated to be going off facing the Five Beasts of Efreet on my own, let me remind you what St. Catham of Dette says: ‘We will bring the Infernal Enemy to its knees with wisdom, not sticks.’”

  “Diamanda, dear. St. Catham was eaten alive from the toes up, over a period of nineteen days. I don’t think you should be quoting her.”

  “All right. Then I concede the folly of going. And if I meet a terrible death while I’m there, I promise one day I’ll come back to this very spot and you can take my ghost to task for it. Meanwhile, you go to Ninnyhammer and let me go to Efreet, so we can get this wretched problem solved.”

  Her sisters plainly weren’t convinced, but Diamanda wasn’t about to change her mind. “We need to move quickly and with the minimum of attention being drawn our way. I want as few people knowing about Candy’s presence as possible. She’s in a very delicate place right now. I’m sure her visit to the Twilight Palace must have been confusing, to say the least.”

  “She won’t be confused for very long,” said Joephi. “She’s not a stupid girl.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Sooner or later she’s going to put all the pieces of the puzzle of her young life together, and when she does we’re going to have a lot more to deal with than mixed emotions.”

  “You think so?” said Mespa. “If I were her, I’d love to find out that I—”

  “No, you wouldn’t!” Diamanda said. “You’d be furious! You’d feel lied to and cheated and used. And you’d want to know w
ho was responsible.”

  “Hmm,” said Mespa. “Maybe.”

  “So what do we do about it?”

  “What can we do? What’s done is done. Anyway, I’m not sure I’d change a thing, if I had the choice to do it all over again. Yes, we took risks. But they were for the right reasons. We have nothing to apologize for.”

  “Let’s just hope the girl agrees.”

  That remark silenced the three women for a time, and they stood staring out at the water for a few minutes while the gulls wheeled overhead, uttering their soul-stricken cries.

  Finally Diamanda said:

  “All right. I can’t linger here. I’ve got work to do.”

  She wrapped her now blue robes around her and muttered a word of activation. They suddenly billowed, filling with wind—

  “Just remember—” she said, imparting some last words of wisdom before the robes carried her away. “Work delicately. We’re dealing with people’s lives here.”

  “It seems to me,” Joephi remarked, “that we should have considered that a long time ago.”

  Diamanda had no opportunity to reply to this. The motion of her sky blue robes became more urgent, and she was carried away in a heartbeat, her flying form lost against the bewitching skies that surged like a mirror of the tide above the Twenty-Fifth Hour.

  PART THREE

  A TIME OF MONSTERS

  Sent out of Paradise Garden for their sins,

  the First Couple stole fruits from every tree they passed

  on their way to the gate, so as to spite their Creator.

  And outside the Garden, crouched against the Wall,

  they gorged upon the Fruits, eating one after the other,

  until their bodies sickened with the excess of it,

  and they puked them up.

  And the Seeds of the Fruits were spilled in the dirt,

  And from them came Monsters of the World,

  Who were born in filth,

  And never knew there was such a thing as Love.

  —From The Holy Book of Fiafeefo

  Chapter 29

  The Captain Converses

  DESPITE HIS INITIAL RELUCTANCE to take the helm of the good ship Lud Limbo, Malingo very quickly came to understand the advantages of such a position. A captain is a king on water, and though his elevation brought considerable responsibilities with it, it also provided significant comforts. Within ten minutes of the ship having left Babilonium, Captain Malingo was sitting in an extraordinarily plush chair in his exquisitely decorated cabin, being poured an absurdly foamy mug of Micklenut ale. At his new captain’s instruction, Deaux-Deaux was describing in detail the circumstances that had brought them together on this voyage.

  “It was the witches’ idea,” he said. “They have these prophetic spasms, you know, when they see a little bit of this and they glimpse a little bit of that. Of course they never see all of everything. That would be entirely too convenient. There always has to be some ambiguity. It’s never straightforward.”

  “But they gave you a prophecy of some kind?” Malingo said.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Which was—?”

  “Well . . . when we’d decoded it, we realized it meant that there was going to be one last war.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I know. We all could have predicted that. But we didn’t. They did.”

  “A war between us and Night, like the old times?”

  “Presumably.”

  “Any mention of who’d be leading the opposition?”

  “No. But can there be any doubt? The enemy is Chris-topher Carrion. He’s the one who has the most to gain if Night wins the day . . . so to speak.”

  “Did they give you any idea what he’s planning?” Malingo asked.

  “Just a little, but it’s—”

  “What?”

  “Let me finish. It’s so preposterous that I think it’s just a lie, a rumor that Carrion and his grandmother started.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “As a distraction from what they’re really planning.”

  “Huh. So what’s the rumor?”

  “Well, it’s simple enough,” said Deaux-Deaux. “It appears they have some plan for creating permanent Night.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. You heard right. Permanent Night on all the islands . . . for all time.”

  “How do they intend to achieve that?”

  “I don’t know. But the women of the Fantomaya seem to think it’s a reality. That’s why they want us to get everybody who’s on the side of Day together. That way, we can all face the enemy side by side.”

  “Hence this voyage.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So who are we going to find?”

  “Some very important people, according to the sisters. There was once a band of fighters under the leadership of Finnegan Hob.”

  “Hob? You mean the young man who was going to marry the Princess Boa?”

  “Yes. He didn’t marry her, of course, because his beloved princess was murdered—”

  “—on their wedding day.”

  “Right.”

  “Whatever happened to Finnegan?”

  “He began a Holy War against the whole race of dragons, swearing that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d exterminated every last one of them; no small oath, of course. There are a lot of dragons out there. And some of them—well, you know how they can go to ground. They can stay hidden for generations.”

  “So is he still searching?”

  “Nobody’s very sure. Apparently a bunch of his friends decided that, what with all this news of war in the air, they should go look for him. They hired a boat called the Belbelo, captained by a fellow called Hemmett McBean. They left from the Yebba Dim Day just about eight weeks ago.”

  “And?”

  “And they haven’t been heard of since.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What do the Fantomaya say?”

  “They don’t believe they’re dead.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’ve seen enough of the future to believe that Finnegan Hob will play a major part in it. So will several of the folks who went out to find him.”

  “Who were they?”

  “There was a warrior called Geneva Peachtree, from the Isle of the Black Egg. There was a friend of Finnegan’s called Two-Toed Tom and another fellow—a gambler—by the name of Kiss Curl Carlotti. Though according to the witches he does not feature in their dreams of tomorrow, so who knows what will befall him. Or already has.”

  “Who else?”

  “Let me see. There’s apparently a girl called Tria, a waif, possessed of some strange powers. It’s through her, I think, that the women of the Fantomaya made contact. And the others are a family I got to know just a little when he was swept in from the Hereafter with Candy—”

  “John Mischief and his brothers?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Candy told me all about them.”

  “The brothers live on the horns on his head, you know?” Deaux-Deaux said. “Besides Mischief, there’s John Moot, John Pluckitt, John Slop, John Sallow, John Drowze, John Fillet and John Serpent.”

  “So taken altogether this is quite a gang.”

  “Yep.”

  “And the women don’t know if they found Hob?”

  “No, at least not when I last spoke to them. They only know from Tria that the gang was headed toward the Nonce.”

  “The Nonce, eh? What’s it like there? I mean . . . Three in the Afternoon . . . it should be siesta time.”

  “Oh, I don’t think anyone on the Nonce gets much rest,” said Deaux-Deaux. “It’s a very unpredictable place, as far as I understand. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Things grow in a heartbeat and die in another. I don’t know if anybody has ever properly mapped the island, because it always seems to be changing.”

  “You seem very sure that we’re go
ing to get there,” said Malingo.

  Deaux-Deaux gave Malingo a big grin. “Of course we will,” he said. “We’ve got a wonderful Captain.”

  “You’re too kind,” Malingo said, and laughed.

  When the Sea-Skipper had left the cabin, Malingo stayed there for a while, turning over the strangeness of recent times. Who would ever have thought that he’d be a captain of a vessel sailing the Izabella, and in such exciting, frightening times. Even if he weren’t the Captain of the Lud Limbo for very long (and something told him he wouldn’t be making it a lifelong career), at least he would have a grand adventure. What a change there’d been in his life! And he owed it all, of course, to one person and one alone: Candy Quackenbush. If she hadn’t come to the domed house on the hill in Ninnyhammer—and more, if she hadn’t challenged Wolfswinkel—Malingo would still be under the magician’s thumb.

  Picturing her now, facing off against the monstrous magician, Malingo felt a surge of yearning for Candy’s company. There hadn’t been a moment in the days they’d spent together when he had wanted to be anywhere but right there beside her, listening to her expressions of wonder and outrage, making up silly jokes and sharing songs and slices of pilgrim’s pie. She had become in that short time his dearest friend, and now he missed her.

  He gazed out of the cabin at the wild, wide waters of the Izabella.

  “Wherever you are, my lady,” he said, “take care of yourself. We’re going to have some pretty amazing stories to tell each other when all this is over.”

  Chapter 30

  The Beasts of Efreet

  “IS THERE ANY WAY I can get you to move a little quicker?” Candy said to Letheo.

  He wiped a trail of blood from the corner of his eye. “Yeah,” he said. “Carry me.”

  “Very funny.”

  There was a roar from the snowy wastes behind them, its reverberations powerful enough to shake a dusting of snow off the branches above their heads.

  The sound made Letheo cast a fearful backward glance.

  “A Waztrill,” he said.

  “You can identify an animal by its roar?” she said, her teeth starting to chatter with the cold.

  “I’ve told you—”