Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 40

  Princess? Candy thought. Is that you?

  Yes, it’s me, the thought replied. We have to get out of here, sister, while we’re still able to do it.

  Can Carrion hear our thoughts?

  No. But he’ll guess soon enough. He’s not stupid. We have to get out. This time there won’t be any women of the Fantomaya to save our necks.

  Does he still mean us harm? Candy thought.

  Of course, came the reply, of course.

  “What are you thinking?” he said to her.

  “Nothing important. Just talking to myself.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” she said with more certainty than she felt.

  She deliberately kept her gaze averted from his, afraid that he would read something there.

  “Princess?” he said. “Forget the girl. It’s me you need speak with.”

  They had to have a plan, Candy thought while Carrion talked on. If they were going to get out of here alive, then they needed to be ready, if a moment presented itself, to seize it.

  But it was hard to hold on to her thoughts in the oppressive bubble at the top of the house. The air seemed to be getting staler with every breath she took. Her head throbbed so hard she thought she would pass out. It was so hot up here; the air under such pressure—

  Wait! There was something useful in that thought, if she could just make sense of it again. What had she just imagined? A bubble of stale air locked up at the top of the house; air that kept them breathing and also kept the water of the Izabella from invading the rest of the house.

  Yes! That was it! The air was keeping the water out. The windows were all closed, and so the Sea couldn’t get in. But if one of the windows were to break—

  “What are you thinking about?” Carrion said.

  “Me?” Candy said.

  “Yes, you. Look at me. Let me see what’s in your eyes.”

  Candy tried to laugh it off.

  “It’s just strange, that’s all,” she said, still keeping her eyes from meeting his. “To see you . . . uh . . . lying there like that . . . on my mom’s bed.”

  “I said: look at me.”

  There was more strength in his voice now. It wasn’t a request, it was a demand.

  Be careful, Boa warned. He’s not as weak as he’s pretending to be. We’re only going to get one opportunity to do what we’re thinking. He means to die with us.

  “Why don’t you look at me?” Carrion said.

  She couldn’t put off the moment any longer. Taking comfort from the presence of the Princess, she looked down at Carrion, and he returned the look: gaze meeting gaze meeting gaze.

  “There you are,” Carrion said softly, and Candy knew by the tender tone in his voice that it wasn’t her he was talking to at that moment; it was Boa. She took immediate advantage of his distracted state, very gently slipping her hand out of the Dark Prince’s grip. Then, still holding Carrion’s gaze (or more correctly, letting the Princess hold it), she took a slow step backward from the bed.

  His eyes flickered, like fire flecks in milk.

  She held her breath, praying that he wouldn’t wake from his trance of devotion but would keep staring at his Princess, keep adoring her.

  She began to take a second step. But as she did so, there was a sound from the roof above, and he made a small puzzled noise in his throat, as though he suddenly understood that he was being abandoned.

  Oh so softly, he said:

  “. . . no . . .”

  Then he sat up in bed. The sheet fell away from his wounded body, and a foul smell came to Candy’s nostrils. The stench she’d sometimes smelled behind the chicken factory, of dead and rotting meat.

  She turned her back on him at that moment and ran toward the window, trying to keep her mind focused on what she’d been planning—

  Behind her, Carrion spoke again. Not so softly this time. Nor to her.

  “Princess,” he said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Candy squeezed her eyes closed until they stung, determined to ignore both the question and the questioner. But the Princess had a history here that she did not. She couldn’t be quite so indifferent to this man. He had killed her, after all; or at least masterminded her death. That was a hard claim to casually shrug off.

  “Come back here,” the Lord of Midnight said. “And let’s get this whole tired business over, once and for all. I’ve waited, Princess. And so have you. Even the girl from the Hereafter has waited, though she didn’t really know what for. But it is very simple. We were waiting to put an end to this sad little game of hide-and-seek.”

  “I’m sorry . . .” Candy heard herself saying, though the words were not being shaped by her; they were coming from the other girl in her head, the Princess. Was it a trick the Princess Boa was playing on Carrion right now, distracting him with this apology while they’d plotted against him? Or was there something here Candy didn’t understand? Something that the Princess had done to Carrion for which she was genuinely apologetic?

  “Sorry isn’t good enough, angel,” the Lord of Midnight said. “You owe me more than that. You know you do.”

  Candy heard her mother’s bed creak as the Lord of Midnight lifted himself up off it, which in his broken state must have taken an immense effort of will. She forced herself not to look around at him, even when she heard his dragging tread as he approached her. She just stared at the window, and at the fish on the other side, darting through clouds of silver bubbles.

  He was right behind her now. She could feel his breath on her neck, even colder than the touch of his fingers. It was the ice of the Midnight Hour that was in him: the cold of Gorgossium’s Hour, the Hour of madness and despair and sorrow everlasting. All of it was in his touch. She felt his fingertips graze her shoulder.

  “Never fear, angel . . .” he said with a terrible tenderness. “I’ve got you now. And for always.”

  No, Candy thought: No—

  He wouldn’t take them. She wouldn’t allow it. Not after the struggle she’d had to free herself from him; and understand who she was. She wouldn’t let him put his hand on them and take them away to death.

  The Princess seemed to hear her resistance. Candy felt Boa’s presence, closer than close. In her, beside her: holding her hand, holding her heart. It gave her comfort.

  More than that. It gave her power.

  Together . . . she thought.

  Together, the Princess replied.

  “Angel?” Carrion said. The Princess didn’t reply. Instead they drew a single breath, the Two in One, and unleashed a cry on the back of that breath, their voices one tremendous word-sound.

  “Jassassakya—thüm!”

  The force of the Word flew against the window. For a moment the glass simply rattled, its strength sustained by the force of the water on the other side. Then it cracked.

  A second before it broke, Candy felt her legs go out from under her as the Princess dropped her down to the carpet. A heartbeat later the window shattered inward, and a rush of inky water flecked with silver fish poured into her mother’s bedroom. Candy caught a glimpse of Carrion in the instant before the flood claimed him. She saw his white eyes widen and his mouth grow slack. Then the wall of water caught them all, and the image of the Lord of Midnight was erased as though a dark hand had been passed across it.

  Chapter 58

  The Return of the Sea

  ON THE ROOF OF number 34, the survivors heard the sound of the breaking window and felt the house shake as the water rushed into it. But none had the least idea of what had gone on below; nor saw the three people—Candy, Carrion and Letheo—who were carried away by the force of the tide. They were too busy praying, or sobbing, or watching the skies in the hope of seeing some sign of rescue. Even if any of the survivors had glimpsed somebody in the flood, it’s doubtful they would have recognized any faces in the rush of water. Not with so much else from the Quackenbush residence being carried along in the same tumult: the armchair which Bill had made his th
rone and the television in front of which he sat despairing of his life; the family photo albums and all the love letters Bill had written to Melissa while he was courting her; the kitchen table where they’d all sat as a family and eaten in unhappy silence. All of it washed away.

  The same thing was happening throughout Chickentown: as the Sea of Izabella retreated, her waters carried the town’s garbage away with her, scouring the streets of the weary town. Of course in the process they destroyed much that was of genuine value, and which could never be replaced. The town hall and all its records were washed away; the parks and cemeteries were turned to mud; whole streets were leveled, hundreds of vehicles carried away. Even the biggest structures in Chickentown, the coops that had housed the egg-laying treasures of the town, were brought to their knees by the fury of the waters.

  But in spite of how terrible all this destruction was, there was remarkably little loss of life. Not only had a lot of people retreated to safe places before the inundation, but the waters themselves seemed to have treated with a supernatural courtesy those whom circumstance had put into their care. Stories would abound of how people were saved from the flood by the flood: how the waves seemed to conspire to bear them up rather than overwhelm, to lull them like infants in cradles of water, to be their protectors.

  It was all so strange, people would say when they talked of this day in times to come: the Day of the Chickentown Wave. All so very, very strange. Tragic too, of course, and sometimes even terrifying, but mostly strange.

  Needless to say, the retreat of the waters was scarcely the end of the matter. While Chickentown went about the business of accounting its losses and burying its dead, the authorities attempted to solve the question of where the waters had come from in the first place. The more preposterous suggestions—another dimension or world that could not be seen by the human eye—were immediately dismissed. Luckily, there were other, more plausible answers close at hand. Four days after the deluge, a group of geologists came from the University of Minneapolis with a clear edict from the head of their department that they find a rational explanation for what had happened in Chickentown. It didn’t take them long. Forty-eight hours later they were able to report to the press that they had discovered the presence of subterranean tunnels that had undoubtedly provided the conduits for the flood that had inundated the town. There was, they surmised, a very large body of water deep underground, which, owing to some fracturing of the walls that contained it, had been suddenly and disastrously unleashed. The water lay too deep for anyone to reach it and offer photographic proof of its existence, but it was still the version of events that most people accepted. It had the stamp of science upon it, after all, and that lent it legitimacy. Of course there had been significant pieces of evidence suggesting an entirely different explanation: pictures of the lighthouse and the jetty taken by the Courier’s photographer, and several garbage bags full of dried fish and other detritus picked up in their vicinity. But the police records had been washed away. So, of course, had the lighthouse, the jetty and all that had been left at the high-water mark; erased by the coming and going of the Izabella.

  Those same erasing waters had borne Candy away from Chickentown with great speed, their tumult quieting once the divide between the Hereafter and the Abarat was reached.

  I’m going back—

  Candy thought as the sky started to darken overhead and the unfamiliar constellations that hung in the heavens above the islands began to show themselves.

  I tried to leave, but here I am, on my way back.

  The thought made her smile. And the smile was still on her face when sleep overtook her. . . .

  News of what had happened in the Hereafter had preceded her to the islands. Some of it was unsubstantiated rumor, some pure invention, but fact or fiction, it was the matter of the hour. There’d been a great wave, everybody agreed. It had traveled deep into the other world, breaching the divide between the Abarat and the Hereafter. There had been great damage caused, and many deaths. Possibly a great sea battle. Possibly (though this was widely dismissed as unlikely) the destruction of the great warship the Wormwood. Even less believable (though there were many who prayed it was the truth) were the reported demises of the matriarch of the Carrion clan, Mater Motley, and her lethal grandson.

  Finally some solid facts emerged from this seedbed of possibilities. The first fact was the arrival of the Lud Limbo at the Yebba Dim Day, where the weary travelers—led, to everyone’s astonishment, by a man the Abarat had long thought dead, Finnegan Hob—presented themselves to authorities and requested an emergency meeting of the Great Council of the Islands. There was much to tell; much that the leaders of the Hours and their people needed to know. The council was quickly convened, and half a day later, in the three-domed Chamber of Decrees, on Soma Plume, representatives from all the Hours assembled to hear the tales that Finnegan, Tom, Geneva, the John brothers and Malingo (even Deaux-Deaux skipped in for the proceedings) had to tell.

  “And what news is there of Candy Quackenbush?” the leader of the council asked when the testimonies had all been offered up. “She seems to be at the center of all this. Is she still alive? And if so, where or when?”

  Only the Izabella knew the answer to that. With the tenderness of a loving mother, the waters carried the sleeping Candy through the channel between the Outer Islands of Autland and Efreet, protecting her from the bitter winds that howled around the latter island by calling up a current from thermal vents concealed in the coral shelves north of Qualm Hah. Occasionally Candy’s eyes would flicker open, and she would catch a glimpse of some sight that reminded her that she was back in the Abarat. Once a huge red ship sailed past her with what was surely an entire town built on its decks: houses and churches and winding streets. On another occasion, she sleepily opened her eyes to see that she was traveling past a rock on which there stood a church with twin steeples made of the skull of an immense dragon. She smiled to herself in her dreamy state. There was so much more to see, she thought. So much more to learn. So much more to be.

  Finally it was the sound of birds that woke her properly. She opened her eyes to see that the tide had brought her close to the shore of a tiny island, with an even tinier island set just a few yards from it. She didn’t need to make any effort to reach the island; the current carried her straight toward it. These were no shallows; it rose straight up out of the water. But she had no difficulty hoisting herself onto the grass, which grew lushly under a large spreading tree, in the branches of which the birds Candy had heard hopped and sang, feeding on the fruit that hung abundantly among the foliage. Candy was too hungry not to try the fruit herself. She was glad she did. Not only was the meat of the fruit rich and filling, there was a pit at its heart that was filled with sweet water. Both hunger and thirst assuaged, she lay on the lush grass beneath the tree, thinking she would make some plans for the future. But her fatigue was by no means over. Again, a lovely drowsiness crept over her, and again she slept.

  Over in Gorgossium, on the other hand, nobody slept. The Hour of Midnight had seen more horrors than most, but it was now in the throes of a new round of terrors. Though Mater Motley had returned to the island wounded, she quickly recovered from her injuries, and proceeded to put Midnight under a new rule of law: her law. The first of her draconian measures was to order the arrest and execution without trial of anyone she or her seamstresses suspected of being sympathetic to Carrion. He was dead, she announced, and any who had been loyal to him would now follow him to oblivion. No sooner had the guillotining begun than several battalions of stitchlings began the demolition of all towers but the Thirteenth, where Mater Motley had long resided, destroying in the process every piece of furniture on which Christopher Carrion had sat or slept; every book from which he’d read, every scrap of paper on which he’d written, every keepsake, every statue; in short, everything upon which he might once have laid his eyes or taken pleasure in.

  The official reason given for this cleansing was that his grandm
other was grief stricken by the loss and that she wanted to be rid of every object that put her in mind of him. But this persuaded few. They knew the truth. A new Night had begun, which would in time prove darker even than any that preceded it, and in its midst was the Hag Mater Motley, who nursed in her broken soul cruelties that even her grandson would have refused to countenance.

  And alone in her tower, Mater Motley sewed and sewed, like a woman possessed, and while she sewed, she thought of how fine the orchard had looked the Night it had burned, and how proud she was of her fire. . . .

  Again Candy woke.

  This time it wasn’t the birds that stirred her, it was the crash of waves. She sat up. The sky that was visible through the branches was bright with stars now, and the moon, full and amber, was rising over another island, from the shores of which came the sounds that had awoken her. But how was that possible? The island hadn’t been in view when she’d sat eating the fruit under the tree. Nor had it been Night.

  There was only one plausible explanation. The little island on which she had found refuge had moved. Indeed, it was still moving, with its tiny attendant island in the lead, gliding through the waves toward the shore where the silvery surf boomed.

  “Weird,” she said, wandering down to the edge of her little dominion and looking out at the peaks of the approaching island. It was Huffaker, she guessed. Yes, Huffaker. She could see the enormous cave where she and Malingo had been washed out into the starlight, several adventures ago. But how had the island gotten here? Her question was answered as soon as her traveler islands reached shallower water. The tiny island ahead of her lifted itself up out of the surf, and the bushy green head of an animal with vast, kindly eyes turned back toward her and smiled.

  She had no words. What do you say to a smiling island? All she could do was smile back. Then the beast returned its gaze to its destination and began to raise its immense body—on the back of which grew the sweet-fruit tree under which she’d slept so soundly—out of the waves and climb the shore.