Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 37

  “WHY?” he demanded, his hand going up to his chest. “WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE TO YOU?” His fingers worked at his chest, the expression on his face getting more and more agonized. “I’M AN INNOCENT MAN!” he yelled. “DO YOU HEAR ME? AN INNOCENT—”

  He stopped there. The words. The breath. His heart. All of them stopped, right there and then.

  His hand dropped away from his chest; he swayed for a long moment, then he fell sideways and hit the floor.

  Very quietly Letheo said: “Well, will you look at that?”

  A little trail of spit ran oh so slowly from the corner of Wolfswinkel’s mouth, and then, like everything else, stopped.

  Candy was astonished. This wasn’t the way that she’d imagined a wizard (even a wizard as absurd as Wolfswinkel) dying: having a heart attack and keeling over.

  But then the Abarat and its occupants had always been full of surprises; right to the bitter end.

  Chapter 53

  The Warship Unmade

  STANDING ON THE ROOF of 34 Followell Street, Melissa kept turning and turning, and turning, looking for what? A sign that there was some purpose to this chaos and fear? Or better still, a glimmer of some miracle: the possibility that all these terrors would be swept away in a moment, and the hurts they had done be healed. But nowhere could she see any hint of salvation for Chickentown. The invading waters swept on past the roof where she stood, carrying an endless parade of flotsam and jetsam. Sometimes the sights she saw were so horrible that it was all she could do to keep herself from blotting them out, from crouching down beside the chimney and covering her face until the invading waters had cleansed the streets, carrying away their cargo of the dead, the living and the never-having-lived; only opening her eyes again when the house no longer shook as the current plowed against it.

  But she couldn’t avert her eyes. Not as long as she knew that Candy was still very possibly in the great dark hulk of the Wormwood. After all, she was responsible for what had happened to her daughter, wasn’t she? If she’d had her wits about her that rainy night on the empty highway, when the three women had come from the Abarat smelling of souls and seawater, she would have locked the truck doors and windows against their magic, rather than curse her daughter with the terrible responsibility of another life.

  But her wits had failed her that long-ago night. She’d been glassy-eyed with pain and fatigue; and when the old woman had opened her little box of miracles, and a wave of warm bright air had come to comfort her, Melissa had let it caress her, let it soothe her, and in so doing she had begun the brutal game of cause and effect which had in time brought the relentless waters of the Izabella down on the roofs and streets and innocent heads of Chickentown.

  She took a moment to seek out the faces of her other children, including that most vulnerable of her infants, her husband, who had been pulled from the rowboat after Candy’s disappearance and deposited on the roof. How were they enduring all of this? Shakily, it appeared. No matter. The boys were young and strong. And Bill? He’d find a way to tell heroic lies about himself tomorrow, if such a day ever dawned.

  As she looked at her men, she heard a voice at her side.

  “We should talk, Mother Quackenbush.”

  Melissa looked up, knowing even before she found the empty air that there would be nobody there to speak these words.

  “Where are you?” she whispered, so as not to draw unwanted attention to herself.

  “Here,” the sorrowful woman replied. Diamanda was there to accompany her reply. She was like pale smoke in the afternoon light.

  “Remember me?” she said.

  Melissa nodded. “Of course.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the old woman said. “And whatever you do, don’t regret the choice you made that night. It was for the best.”

  Melissa looked around at the chaos on all sides: the detritus of Chickentown’s life left floating in the unforgiving waters of the Izabella.

  “How can all this be for the best?” she murmured.

  “It isn’t always easy to see the greater purpose of things when you’re trapped inside a single life.”

  “Who isn’t?” Melissa said.

  The old lady gave Melissa a strange smile, both sad and sweet.

  “You’d be surprised,” she said.

  “So surprise me.”

  Bill interrupted the conversation there. He was staring at Melissa as though he thought she was crazy.

  “Who the hell are you talking to?” he said, his lip curled with the old contempt.

  Melissa was momentarily stuck for an answer, but the old lady whispered one in Melissa’s ear.

  “Myself,” she said. Melissa smiled and furnished Bill with the same answer.

  He shook his head. “Crazy cow,” he muttered.

  Melissa ignored him. She had better things to be doing than trading insults with a man whose opinion she’d long ago given up caring about.

  Instead she sought out the misty form of Diamanda. “Where were we?” she murmured.

  Diamanda smiled. “Surprise me, you said.”

  “Oh yes, so I did.”

  “Well, I must tell you very quickly, though you may find what I’m about to tell you hard to believe, I swear on the Skein of Being that it’s true—”

  “I’m ready,” Melissa said.

  “Good. Then listen. The night we met. The night in the rain, on the highway. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “I had something with me. Besides my sisters.”

  “Yes. You had a box. It was filled with light.”

  “It wasn’t light, Melissa.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was a soul,” Diamanda replied. “It was the soul of a dead Princess.”

  On the deck of the Wormwood, Christopher Carrion had watched the battle between the forces of Finnegan Hob and the stitchlings become steadily more destructive. The fabric of the ancient warship had taken a brutal hammering from the conflict. Decking and railings had been torn up, sails slashed and rigging brought down. A fire had been started at the stern of the vessel and rather than be burned alive by the flames, the two carved beasts that protected that end of the ship had wrenched themselves off their painted plinths and lumbered away down the length of the vessel, inspiring the figureheads at the bow to similar revolution.

  The spectacle of destruction—any kind of destruction—had always given Carrion pleasure, from his earliest rememberings. The unmaking of the Wormwood was no exception. But now he had watched for long enough. It was time for him to find the girl from the Hereafter and finish her off. He was surprised that Wolfswinkel had not reappeared, but then perhaps he was taking rather too much time terrorizing the girl and would now need to be stopped.

  Tearing his eyes from the pleasurable scene, he headed down into the hold. As he did so, a small figure darted across his path. He reached out and caught hold of the figure by the scruff of the neck. It was Letheo, looking thoroughly bestial.

  “Thuaz,” he managed to say (though his mouth was so misshapen that it could barely make the word). Then: “Please . . . Lord. It hurts me, being like this. I need . . . the green thuaz.”

  After luxuriating in the spectacle of the Wormwood’s unmaking, Carrion was feeling uncommonly generous. He let go of Letheo, who fell to the ground at his feet.

  Again Letheo begged. “Prince . . . please . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” Carrion said, reaching into his robes and taking out the small bottle. “Why not?”

  He tossed the vial from hand to hand a few times, enjoying the obsessive way that Letheo followed it with his eyes. Finally he let the boy snatch it out of the air. With trembling fingers, Letheo uncorked the bottle and took a swig of its contents. Then he swallowed the stuff, making a face at the bitter taste. He folded forward, his teeth chattering wildly. Carrion stood back and watched with a curious dispassion as the antidote took its agonizing effect.

  “I wondered where I’d find you,” sai
d a voice from the shadows.

  Carrion looked up from the sight of Letheo’s twitchings and chatterings, and there was the girl from the Hereafter: his haunter, his nemesis.

  “Well, well,” Carrion said. “Did you give Mr. Wolfswinkel the slip?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Wolfswinkel’s dead,” Candy said.

  “How?”

  “I’m not a doctor. But at a guess, his rage got the better of him. His heart just gave up.”

  “You’re joking?”

  “What would be funny about that?”

  “Lord in Heaven. What is happening to the world?”

  “Good question,” Candy replied. She stared at Carrion for a long while as the Wormwood creaked beneath them and the fire consumed the sails above. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “No,” Carrion said. “You first. I insist. This was your plan from the beginning, wasn’t it? You came into the Abarat to undo the very order of things. Lord, what a destroyer you are.”

  “I didn’t plan anything,” Candy replied. “But maybe the ghost in me might have done.” She scrutinized Carrion and watched for some clue as to whether he understood its significance. But he looked genuinely puzzled, so she went on.

  “I’m not Candy Quackenbush,” she said. “At least . . . I’m not just Candy Quackenbush.”

  Still the puzzlement.

  “The soul of somebody you once knew is inside me,” she said.

  Slowly it seemed to dawn on him what she was saying. His nearly fleshless face grew slack in its haunted pool.

  “Boa?” he said, so quietly he was barely audible above the noise of destruction. “My Princess? My beloved Princess?”

  “Yes.”

  Now it was Carrion who did the scrutinizing, watching Candy with a feverish stare.

  “No. That’s not possible,” he said eventually. “I would have known.”

  “Not if she didn’t know herself,” said a third voice.

  And there was Mater Motley, coming down the stairs to join them in her gown of the damned. Though Candy was scarcely happy to see the woman, the Hag’s presence here was perfectly right and proper. Here they were, the four of them together for the first time. On one side, the Lord of Midnight and his grandmother. And on the other, the girl from the Hereafter with her Princess, joined in a single body: the Two in One.

  “Is this all true?” Carrion said to his grandmother. “Does she have Boa’s soul inside her?”

  Mater Motley’s stare was reptilian. There was no trace of human feeling in it.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s true.”

  “And all this time you knew?” Carrion said. “You knew that the woman I loved was just a touch away, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “How would it have helped?” Mater Motley said. “You think this girl would have loved you for what you did? You murdered Boa, child. And why? Because she didn’t love you. As if love matters in the grand scheme of things.”

  “She loved me. She couldn’t say it, she couldn’t show it, but she loved me.”

  “Listen to yourself,” the old woman said. “You sound like a lovesick adolescent! The time you spent besotted with her was time you could have spent planning and plotting. But no. You had to dote. You had to break your heart over some speck of beauty when anyone with eyes in their head could have seen that SHE DID NOT LOVE YOU!”

  It was too much. Carrion couldn’t bear to hear any more. He let out a cry of rage and frustration, the cry, perhaps, of a man whose heart had been truly broken. It resounded through the walls of the ship, scaring tens of thousands of tiny blue-backed roaches from their holes in the timbers. His nightmares were also agitated; they circled around, their bodies throwing off arcs of lightning against his collar.

  Candy was tempted to make her escape while Carrion and his grandmother were distracted, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn her back on this confrontation. Not when its subject was at least in some measure herself. Her life—past and future—was intimately bound up with the debate these two were engaged in.

  The nightmares in Carrion’s collar were continuing to get bigger, their forms becoming more and more grotesque. Carrion seemed not to notice what was happening to them. He was completely consumed by the feelings that had seized hold of him. With the greatest of difficulty, Candy took her eyes off Carrion for a moment and looked back at Mater Motley. The old woman was watching her grandson’s agonies with undisguised satisfaction, as though this were a moment she had waited for, and she was determined to savor it.

  There was a sharp cracking sound. The nightmares inside Carrion’s collar—too big to be contained any longer—were fracturing the glass. The dark fluid in which they’d swum ran hissing down over the Prince of Midnight’s robes. A flicker of concern came onto Carrion’s face as he realized that his beloved nightmares were about to break out. Then he seemed to change his mind. For an instant something resembling a smile flitted across his lipless mouth.

  Then the fracture in the collar gaped, and the fluids gushed out, hitting the boards at his feet with a wet slap. For the first time Candy saw Carrion’s nightmares in all their lurid glory: they hung around his neck with their pallid, twitching lengths knotted and intertwined. But they didn’t hang there for very long. No sooner had the collar emptied of fluid than they began to swell again, seeming almost to turn themselves inside out in their eagerness to be greater than themselves, skin following skin following skin, mottled one moment, scarlet the next; white speckled with yellow the next—

  They had eyes, she saw. Clusters of long eyes, like the petals of shiny black flowers, and around the eyes there were trails of eggs, which were even now beginning their own horrific life cycle. They shook themselves free of the parent creature and went into freefall, but had only dropped a foot or so before they sent out a little hook which caught somewhere in the fabric of the robes. There the next generation rapidly swelled up and fattened, so that the Prince of Midnight became a kind of grotesque nursery, alive with all manner of mewling, spittling things; some made in an instant into the very image of venom and sudden death, others still sickly in their infant state.

  Carrion had got beyond his furies now. He had begun to laugh—for no reason that Candy could properly comprehend—and the laughter quickly rose both in force and volume, so that it had a kind of insanity about it.

  “Calm down, Christopher,” Mater Motley said. “You’re getting hysterical.”

  “And with good reason,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  He began to advance on the old woman. “All along you’ve known . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About her,” Christopher replied, and though he hadn’t looked around at Candy since she’d begun her subtle retreat, he pointed toward her with unnerving accuracy. “Her,” he said again. “All along you knew that she was in her, and you didn’t tell me.”

  From the corner of her eye, Candy saw Letheo crawl away on his belly, as though he sensed something apocalyptic was about to happen and didn’t want to witness it, but Candy didn’t move. Now all Carrion’s attention was fixed again on his grandmother. The laughter, like the fury, had passed away. But they had left their echoes in him. His voice shook and his eyes flickered back and forth dangerously.

  Candy could see by the look on Mater Motley’s face that even she, whose bloodline ran in this man’s veins, was a little afraid of him at this moment. She watched him very carefully, as though ready to act in her own self-defense in a heartbeat.

  Meanwhile, as though there weren’t jeopardy enough in the meeting of these two obscene powers, there came a din from above: the cries of attackers and wounded, the crash of falling timbers, the swelling din of conflagration. The fire was obviously spreading fast. Smoke was steadily thickening the air in the corridor where Candy, Carrion and Mater Motley stood; it couldn’t be long before the air would become unbreathable.

  Such concerns were very far from Carrion’s thoughts right now, ho
wever. He was advancing on his grandmother, his voice filled with a cold fury.

  “Do you have any idea of how much I have suffered?” he demanded. “Do you? The hours I have lain in an agony of despair because I longed for nothing more than to beg for her forgiveness? But how could I? I thought she was gone. I had paid a fortune to have the life choked out of her. What use were my regrets? I didn’t know where her eternal soul had taken refuge.” His voice rose in force and volume. “BUT YOU DID! ALL THIS TIME, GRANDMOTHER—YOU! DID!”

  Suddenly, fueled by the agony and rage in Carrion’s heart and unable to hold themselves back an instant longer, the nightmares leaped from Carrion’s body and threw themselves toward Mater Motley.

  The old woman was prepared for the attack. She raised her hands in front of her face, and for one extraordinary instant Candy seemed to see the eyes burn through Mater Motley’s hands from the other side. Perhaps it was not an illusion but a piece of terrifying magic, because two hands made of light, ten times the size of the old incantatrix’s hands, leaped forth to meet Christopher Carrion’s nightmares. There was a massive release of energies as the two powers met: a force that momentarily threw itself around looking for someplace to escape and, finding a frailty in the ceiling, erupted in that direction, flying up with such power that it carried half the roof of the passageway with it.

  Candy was helpless. Even if she’d had time to grab hold of something before the eruption caught her up in its blast, there was nothing to seize hold of, for everything was being uprooted.

  The force of the energies caught her. Helpless to resist, all she could do was let it carry her up out of the passageway and deposit her in the midst of the fiery battlefield above.

  Chapter 54

  The Living and the Dead

  FOR A FEW SECONDS she lay on the deck in a daze, her consciousness almost knocked out of her by the blast. Sickened and dizzy, she sat up. There were eruptions of whiteness at the edge of her vision. She drew a few deep breaths, determined not to let her consciousness escape her. This would not be a safe place to lie in a dead faint, she knew. Not with the ship creaking and groaning around her as it prepared to die.