Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 32

  Carrion had no wish to go among this stinking multitude, even in some sort of guise that would prevent them from petitioning him. So he found a place a little way above the harbor, where he could sit and wait for the arrival of the Wormwood.

  He didn’t have to wait long. After just a few moments the surface of the sea—which had been placid up until now—became agitated, and fish began to appear in the waves: not the schools of melk and wretchen fish which would normally have populated these waters, but creatures that usually lived in deep sea trenches, called up from the darkness by some urgent summons. They were barbaric-looking creatures, some of them armored and spiny, while others made sounds as they broke the surface, speaking in fishy tongues as they cavorted in the surf.

  And then out of the darkness came the sound of the ship that had summoned these scaly multitudes: of ropes and boards creaking, and then—as the vessel came closer to land—the voice of the first mate as he called the water depths (six fathoms! five fathoms!) and the sound of the crew singing a hauling song as they labored to bring the Wormwood into the harbor. Finally the titanic form of the Wormwood itself appeared from the darkness. The vessel was so terrifying a sight to some of those who’d assembled to witness its arrival that they fled in confusion, offering up panicked prayers of protection against its appearance. They had reason for their terror: it was in every way a hellish vessel. Smoke rose in columns of black and red from ports along its flanks and from its central tower. At the bow sat not one but two demonic figureheads, one looking heavenward, one into the depths of the Izabella. At the stern sat their brothers in grotesquerie, looking out to port and starboard. The smoke swirled around them, lending them a terrible liveliness, as though at any moment they might unroot themselves from the structure of the ship and swim off to make some terrible mischief.

  The Wormwood had not one but two means of propulsion. In the dark depths of its hold were slave giants: creatures from the mountains of the Isle of the Black Egg, who would live out the rest of their long lives chained to their oars of the Wormwood. But the greater power that pressed the Wormwood forward was the wind; and the sails that captured it were vast and purple: the final proof, if any more were needed, that this was a vessel that traded in cruelty and despair.

  It anchored no more than a quarter mile from the shore. By the time Carrion, followed by a limping Letheo, had made his way down to the water’s edge, a minor spell had created a pathway of solid water that allowed them to walk casually to the ship, in the hull of which a door opened to receive them. As they were about to enter, Letheo snatched hold of his master’s cloak.

  “She’s here,” he said. “Your grandmother.”

  Carrion’s pace automatically slowed. He scanned the imposing bulk of the vessel, searching for some sign of Mater Motley.

  He’d no sooner spoken than a figure did emerge from the darkness of the ship, accompanied by two members of the crew. It wasn’t Carrion’s grandmother, however. It was a wizard Carrion knew of by reputation: one Kaspar Wolfswinkel. A ridiculous little man, he was dressed in a suit of bright yellow, which could not have contradicted Carrion’s mood more profoundly. The wizard was all smiles, however: “Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!” He beamed.

  “Wolfswinkel?”

  “You remembered me,” Wolfswinkel gushed. “How kind! How very kind! I had no reason to imagine you might know who I was, but still I hoped—”

  “What are you doing on the Wormwood?”

  “Your grandmother invited me to come aboard,” Wolfswinkel said.

  “So she is here.”

  “Oh yes, she’s here,” Wolfswinkel went on. “And she insists you attend on her at your earliest convenience.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Carrion said sharply.

  They were by now in the dark bowels of the ship. From someplace nearby, one of the giants was weeping in his chains, the sound reverberating in the boards of the ship. It made Carrion smile.

  “May I show you to your quarters, my Lord?” Wolfswinkel offered.

  “I’ll find my own way,” Carrion replied abruptly. “Take Letheo and get him something to eat.”

  “I was instructed to attend upon you, my Lord, not on this boy.”

  “And I’m ordering you to make my servant comfortable, wizard. Feed him and get him some fresh clothes. Those are my orders.”

  “As you wish,” Wolfswinkel said, doing his best to put a polite face on his ill temper. “But if you should need anything, Prince, please call for me. I am at your beck and call.”

  He proceeded to bow, deeply and flamboyantly. But Carrion had already gone off to explore the ship. He had very seldom had occasion to travel in the Wormwood, and he had forgotten what a masterpiece it was. The shipwright had been a man called Dyther Selt; and he had given his life, literally, for the creation of the Wormwood, the tasking of conceiving, designing and building the great warship so overwhelming that it had fatally exhausted him. His death was not the end of his presence on the Wormwood, however. Sometimes, Carrion had heard, sailors claimed they saw Selt’s ghost on the deck close to where he had fallen, staring up at the wind-fattened sails.

  “Welcome aboard,” said a voice from the shadows. The nightmares in which his head swam grew suddenly agitated.

  “Grandmother . . .” Carrion said.

  The old woman stepped into view.

  “Alone?” Carrion asked.

  “No, no. I brought my sewing circle with me, so not a moment would be lost: we’ll continue to make an army of stitchlings while we hunt the girl.”

  “I could have happily done it without you.”

  “Happily? You? When was the last time you did anything happily?”

  Carrion raised an eyebrow. “Did you come here to contradict everything I say, or is there some other reason?”

  “Oh, there’s another reason.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “Ah.”

  “You’re too used to doing things your own way. Well, of course you are. You’re a man. You think you’re near as dammit perfect.”

  “What’s your point?” Carrion said, his lip curling.

  “We can’t afford to let this girl live.”

  “It wasn’t my intention—”

  “Don’t embarrass yourself with a lie,” Mater Motley said. “You don’t know what you would have done if she’d truly been at your mercy.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “That you might have let her slip, for sentiment’s sake.”

  “I’m not stupid!” Carrion snapped. “And I’m certainly not sentimental. So you go home, Grandmother. Let me do my work. You do yours.”

  “I think not. I’m going to stay. Sew. Watch.”

  “Then I’m disembarking,” Carrion said. “If you won’t trust me, then you can go to hell!” He turned his back on the old woman, furious.

  Mater Motley suddenly reached forward and snatched hold of Carrion’s robes. “Don’t you dare speak in that tone to me!” she raged. “I’ve always protected you! And now all you do is show me disrespect! I won’t have it, Carrion! Do you hear me?”

  “And I will not be watched like an erring child, Grand-mother. Do you hear me?” As he spoke he slowly raised his hand and disengaged the old woman’s fingers from the haunted fabric of his robes. “I’ve seen enough of what the girl can do to want her out of our way, believe me.”

  “Then why did you let her slip in Efreet?”

  “I was . . . distracted,” Carrion said irritably. “It won’t happen again. I’ve made up my mind to kill Candy Quackenbush and she will die if I have to chase her beyond the end of the sea. She will die. What do you want as proof? Her head? I’ll bring you her head if that’s what you want.”

  “No, thank you,” Mater Motley said as though the very thought of such a gift nauseated her beyond words. Then: “Just the eyes.”

  “They are unalike. You know that? Different colors.”

  “Of course. They s
peak of her nature.”

  “If I bring you her eyes, you’ll leave me in peace?”

  “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll retire into the hold with my women and we’ll sew. I’ll leave you in the hands of Admiral Bloat and the wizard Wolfswinkel. If you should need me, I’ll be close by. If not, I’ll be invisible to you. How’s that? Good enough?”

  Carrion contemplated the compromise for a moment, then nodded. “By the way,” he said. “Why did you free that damnable wizard?”

  “He knows the girl. She got into his house and liberated his slave. I thought he might be useful. He’s certainly devoted to her downfall. Use him as you wish. Promise him power if it helps. Then I’ll put him out of his misery when the girl is dead.”

  “Do we know where she is?”

  “She’s on board a ship called the Lud Limbo, last seen leaving the Nonce.”

  “In whose company?”

  “The usual suspects. The geshrat slave she freed from Wolfswinkel, Malingo. The revolutionary Geneva Peachtree, who was involved in several acts of aggression against the institutions of the Grand Council of the Islands. A comrade of hers called Two-Toed Tom and another called Captain McBean. Oh, and a young girl who would have made a fine member of my sisterhood had she not sided with these fools. The Peachtree woman found her. Her name’s Tria. Then of course there’s Mischief and his brothers.”

  “And Hob. You’re forgetting Hob.”

  “No, I wasn’t forgetting. I would never make that error. He’s the one to watch, if it gets personal. He’d die for the girl. He doesn’t know why, of course—”

  “Well, we’ll put that to the test,” Carrion said, allowing himself a little smile. “Maybe he won’t feel so brave when I have him in my nightmares.”

  “Maybe,” said Mater Motley. “But I’d prefer not to fathom his devotion. Better just slaughter them all and be done with it.”

  “Finally, Grandmother,” Carrion said. “We agree on something.”

  The winds were good and the currents favorable; the warship, for all its size, quickly picked up speed as it wove between the islands. Admiral Bloat, who was an unpleasant-looking man in a constant dull fury about that fact, predicted that they would catch up with the escapees in a matter of an hour or so. “We’ll simply ram them, if you like,” Bloat said to Carrion. “That’ll sink them quick enough. Then when they’re going under, we’ll pour a dozen buckets of goat’s blood into the water. That always starts a feeding frenzy. They’ll be eaten alive in two minutes.”

  “You speak from experience?”

  “You don’t become an admiral in the Gorgossian Navy by being a great lover of peace and justice, Lord,” Bloat replied.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Shall we have the goats slaughtered?”

  “Yes. Why not?” Carrion said, faintly revolted by the Admiral’s flushed enthusiasm for the coming cruelties. “Let’s get this over and done with.”

  “The world will be a better place, Lord, with these felons dead.”

  “Will it indeed?” Carrion said, turning away from Bloat and losing his thoughts in distance. “Will it indeed?”

  Chapter 47

  Something in the Wind

  CHICKENTOWN WAS IN A strange mood that day. It had woken after a night of disturbed dreams: people up at two in the morning, three in the morning, sitting in their kitchens taking comfort from a bowl of ice cream or in their dens watching some old movie, but in fact not really tasting the ice cream, nor seeing the movie, because their thoughts were in other places entirely.

  Rumors had been spreading through town, whispers and warnings that Chickentown was in the most terrible danger. Nobody, except the stone deaf, had been untouched by this talk. Schoolchildren had passed the rumors back and forth as they played; dog walkers had chatted lightly about it when they stopped to let their charges say hello to one another’s bottoms; patients sitting in dentists’ waiting rooms had turned the conversation to something worse than the subject of the drill, just for comfort’s sake.

  In the aisles of supermarkets, on the corners of streets, in the chicken factory, where there had been a record-breaking slaughter the previous day, even in the less friendly parts of town, where folks lingered suspiciously in doorways and there wasn’t a lot of casual chat, people talked today; talked in ways they had perhaps never talked in their lives, nor ever would again. Talked of things they’d dreamed in recent nights, things that overshadowed every hope of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Things that made them think that perhaps they should put off whatever they were going to do with the rest of the day—however pressing it had once seemed to be—and leave town for a little while.

  And the more the whispers were repeated, the more plausible they began to sound. Folks began to make plans. It was time to stop worrying about what the neighbors might say (let them seek their own salvation) and simply pack a small suitcase, gather up the family and pets and carry them off to some safe place.

  To Higher Ground.

  So the exodus from Chickentown began. And the more people packed up and left, the more their neighbors took courage and did the same. Very soon Main Street was clogged for almost a mile, and a lot of folks, seeing that there was difficulty making progress up the street, had abandoned their cars and were proceeding on foot. Everybody was heading in more or less the same direction. There was, after all, only one piece of higher ground in the vicinity of the town, and that was the ridge that lay to the east of Chickentown, commonly called the Rise. It was probably no more than two hundred and fifty feet higher than street level, but obviously people’s suspicious selves were telling them that this was a significant distance, because there were plenty of Chickentowners making the climb.

  A few, it should be said, had been there for quite some time: about two dozen had made a little camp on the top of the Rise, setting up a ring of tents with a bonfire in its midst. It was a simple arrangement, but it seemed to serve its purpose; it became a focus for everyone who was thinking of doing the same thing. Come up the hill, the circle of tents and the smoky fire seemed to say: come up the Rise onto Higher Ground.

  And as the day went on, more and more people came, forsaking their offices and their stores, their customers, their bosses and their homes.

  “It’s working,” said Henry Murkitt as he and Diamanda wove through the town, assessing the effect of their campaign of whispers. The seeds of doubt that they had meticulously sown had come to fruition.

  “What’s going on in the Abarat?” Henry asked the incantatrix.

  “Oh, do shush,” Diamanda said irritably. “I almost had a glimpse of Candy then, but it slipped away. She’s on a ship, I can see that much.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, no. She’s got people with her. But none of them look too happy—”

  Henry sighed. “I have a very bad feeling about all of this.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Diamanda remarked. “We’re at the very . . . edge of things, Henry. Nothing’s certain after this.” She caught hold of his hand. “Except love.”

  “Are you afraid?” he said.

  “For us? No. But for these people—these poor, confused people who don’t believe that their lives have the least meaning—yes, I’m afraid for them.”

  “Afraid they’re going to die?”

  “Worse than that. Afraid the end will come and they’ll be in terror, because they won’t believe they have a heaven to go to.”

  “Maybe they’re right,” Henry said bluntly. “I mean, this is a cruel world. And I doubt the Abarat’s much better. What is there to believe in, when you come down to it?”

  Diamanda slipped her hand out of Murkitt’s hand and turned to face him.

  “Henry Murkitt,” she said. “Listen to yourself, you damn fool! Anybody can shrug and say life is just some accident of mud and lightning. But Henry, it isn’t. And I mean to show you, in the time we have together—whether it’s an hour or a day or whatever it is—I mean to show you that you just h
ave to open your heart and look—you hear me, look!—and you’ll see every minute a hundred reasons to believe.”

  “Oh, will you?” Henry said, irritated by Diamanda’s tone. “And where will I find these hundred reasons?”

  “Everywhere!” Diamanda said. “Don’t you see we’re born into a pattern so huge and so beautiful and so full of meaning we can only hope to understand a tiny part of it in the seventy or eighty years we live with breath in our bodies? But one day, it will all come clear. And on that day I’d like to be standing right beside you and saying—”

  They spoke the rest together:

  “I told you so!”

  And then they laughed, so loudly that for a moment those living souls who were within earshot of them looked around, puzzled, as though they had heard the laughter plainly enough but could neither see its source nor imagine what anybody would think was funny on this day of fear and whispers and unanswered prayers.

  There had been no talk of leaving town at the Quackenbush house. Not since the argument over the meat loaf about the family relocating to Colorado. Today, in fact, the house was unusually quiet. The television was on, but muted; Bill was sitting in front of it staring with a vague expression of bemusement at the basketball. Melissa was in the bathroom obsessively cleaning it, a ritual she always performed when something was troubling her. She felt strange; removed from everything, as though she hadn’t completely woken up from the dream conversation she’d had with Candy. She’d heard none of the whispers about Higher Ground that were all over town: she was too busy listening for her daughter’s voice, and getting the bathroom clean. The boys were at Howie Gage’s house, two blocks away, playing war games. Bill had let them go several hours ago. But now, without warning, Melissa appeared at the door and announced that she was going to go and pick them up.

  “Why, for God’s sake?” Bill said.