Abarat: Absolute Midnight Read online

  There was a wind blowing up here on the higher elevations. It made the antiquated trees creak, and their branches shake down a dry rain of leaves and withered fruit. Candy didn’t let anything distract her from her guide. She followed it as closely as the passage through the choked undergrowth would allow, until it led her to a place where the trees’ lowest branches had woven their twigs with the bushes below, forming a wall of knitted wood. Candy stood before it a moment, while the eye cast its light upon the interwoven twigs. A few seconds went by and then a shimmer of motion passed through the wall, and where the eye had shone its light the wall unwove itself, opening a narrow door. The trees and shrubs were still parting when the voice that had spoken to Jollo said, “Either come in or be gone, girl. But don’t just stand there.”

  “Thank you,” Candy said, and stepped between the writhing branches.

  She had come to the top of the island. The wind here moved in sighing circles, the freight of leaves it bore rising and falling as it was swept around her. It wasn’t just leaves in the circling gusts, however. There were animals too, creatures of every size and shape moving around her, their flanks pale as the moon sometimes, sometimes red as a setting sun, their eyes blazing green and gold, and all leaving trails of motion on the shadowy air.

  She couldn’t be sure whether she was witnessing a joyous race or a life-and-death pursuit. Whichever it was, it suddenly turned in her direction, and she dropped to the ground, hugging her head with her hands as she felt the rush of life passing over her. It was loud now. Not only the rush of wind but the thunder of hooves and paws, and the screeches, roars, and howls of perhaps a thousand species, perhaps twice that.

  “Do you not yet know the difference between a dreamed thing and a living one?” Laguna Munn said, her voice closer to Candy than the sound of the animals’ passage.

  “Dreamed . . . ?” Candy said.

  “Yes, girl,” Laguna replied. “Dreamed. Imagined. Conjured. Invented.”

  Candy dared a cautious glance up. Whatever the incantatrix was saying, the hooves and the claws that were still racing over the top of Candy’s head looked real and extremely dangerous.

  “It’s an illusion,” Laguna Munn said. “Stand up. Go on. If you don’t trust me, how can anything I try to do for you have a hope of working?”

  Candy saw the sense in this. She raised her head a little more. The violence of the living torrent galloped over the dome that protected her thoughts. It hurt. Not just her skull, creaking beneath the assault of the hooves, but the bones of her face, and the delicate tissues it protected.

  If she didn’t endure this assault she’d not find anyone else to tell her what Laguna Munn could.

  She stood up.

  Lordy Lou, the pain of it! Even though it was an illusion it was still strong enough to make blood trickle from her nose. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, but a fresh flow immediately followed. And still the animals thundered on, the violence of their passage buffeting her as they pressed on.

  “I know you’re there, Laguna Munn,” she said. “You can’t hide forever. Come on. Show yourself.”

  Still the creatures came, their passage through her as powerful as ever. The blood running from her nose was in her mouth. She tasted it, copper and salt. How much longer could her body survive this relentless onslaught? Surely the incantatrix wouldn’t let her die because she failed?

  “I’m not going to die,” she told herself.

  Again, she tried to force her vision through the conjuration. Again the conjuration forced its reality upon her.

  You’ll never do it without me, Boa said.

  “Help me, then.”

  Why should I?

  A wave of anger rose up in Candy. She was sick of Boa; sick of every egocentric woman with more power than compassion that she’d encountered, starting with Miss Schwartz, and finishing up with Mater Motley. She’d had enough of them—all of them.

  And finally, her eyes started to prick the illusion that was battering her, giving her a glimpse of the mysterious Laguna Munn. She was what Candy’s mother, Melissa, would have called a “big-boned woman,” by which she’d meant fat.

  “I . . . see . . . you,” Candy said.

  “Good,” Laguna Munn replied. “Then we can proceed.”

  Laguna raised her hand, and made a fist of it. The tidal flow of living things ceased instantly, leaving Candy with aching bones, a buzzing head, and a bloody nose. Laguna spoke, her voice soft.

  “I didn’t expect to meet you, though I was curious, I must say. I thought the Fantomaya had your affections.”

  “The Fantomaya is the reason I’m here,” Candy said.

  “Ah, so somebody’s been telling you stories.”

  “It’s not just a story!” Candy snapped.

  The anger was still in her, bubbling up.

  “Calm yourself,” Laguna Munn said. She seemed to rise from her chair and move toward Candy without taking a single step. “What did I see in your head, girl?”

  “Something more than me,” Candy said. “Another person.”

  Laguna’s eyes, already huge, grew larger still, and brighter. “Do you know the name of this other in your head?”

  “Yes. Her name’s Princess Boa. Her soul was taken from her body by the women of the Fantomaya—”

  “Stupid, stupid . . .” Laguna Munn muttered to herself.

  “Me?” Candy said.

  “No, not you,” Laguna replied. “Them. Playing with things that they had no business with.”

  “Well, they did it. And now I want to undo it.”

  “Why not go to them?”

  “Because they don’t know I know. If they’d wanted us to separate even­tually, they would have told me she was there, wouldn’t they?”

  “I suppose that’s reasonable, yes.”

  “Besides, one of them has already been killed because I came over to the Abarat—”

  “So if any other witch was going to die you’d prefer it to be me.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “It’s how it sounded.”

  “What is it about this place? Everybody playing stupid games! It makes me sick.” She wiped her bloodied nose again. “If you’re not going to help me, then I’ll just do it myself.”

  Laguna Munn didn’t attempt to conceal her astonishment or the seam of admiration that ran beside it.

  “Lordy Lou. You would, wouldn’t you?”

  “If I have to. I can’t find out who I really am until she’s out of my head.”

  “And what happens to her?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a lot of things I don’t know. That’s why I came to you.”

  “Tell me honestly, does the Princess want to have a life free of you?”

  “Yes,” Candy said with confidence. Laguna stared at her with intimidating intensity. “The problem is that I don’t really know where I stop and she begins. I must have been born with her already in my head. And we’ve always lived together, her and me.”

  “I should warn you, if she truly doesn’t want to leave, then you’ll have a fight on your hands. A fight like that could be fatal.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  “Do you understand what I’m—”

  “Yes. It could kill me.”

  “Yes. And I’m assuming that you’ve also considered the fact that there may be parts of you that aren’t you at all?”

  “That are her? Yes. I’ve thought of that too. And I’d lose them. But if they were never mine in the first place—never me—then I’m not really losing anything, am I?”

  Laguna Munn’s gilded gaze softened.

  “What a crazy conversation there must be going on inside your head right now,” she said. “And I’m not talking about the one between you and your stowaway. It’s a pity you and I have met so late in life,” she said with what seemed to be genuine regret.

  “I’ve only just turned sixteen,” Candy said.

  “I know. And that’s young, I realize
. But there are roads to revelation that should have been laid when you were just a baby, and laying them is going to be harder now. You came here in search of freedom and revelation, and I’m afraid all I can give you is warnings and confusion.”

  “So you can’t separate me from Boa?”

  “That? I can do that. I can’t make any predictions concerning the consequences of the separation. But I can promise you that you will never be the same again.”

  Part Two

  You, Or Not I

  As thorn and flower upon a single branch sit,

  So hate beside my love for her will fit.

  Two pieces of one thing, that make a whole.

  As you and I, my love, a single soul.

  —Christopher Carrion

  Chapter 9

  A New Tyranny

  IT WOULD HAVE COME as no surprise to the occupants of Gorgossium that the sounds of demolition were audible from the waters surrounding the island. Its inhabitants could barely hear themselves think.

  The Midnight Island was undergoing great changes, all designed to deepen the darkness that held Gorgossium in thrall. It was not the darkness of a starless sky. It was something far more profound. This darkness was in the very substance of the island. In its dirt, in its rock and fog.

  Over the years many had attempted to find the words to evoke the horrors of Gorgossium. All had failed. The abominations which that island had brought to birth, and nurtured, and sent out often across the islands to do bloody and cruel work defied even the most articulate of souls.

  Even Samuel Klepp, who in the most recent edition of Klepp’s Almenak, the standard guide to the islands, had written about Midnight in as brief and offhand a fashion as possible.

  There is a great deal more, he had written, which I will not sully the pages of the Almenak by relating, horrors that haunt the Night-Noon Hour that will only go on to trouble our minds the more if their horrid visions are dwelt upon. Gorgossium is like unto a fetid carcass, rotting in its own consumption. Better we do upon these pages what we would do were we to encounter such a thing upon a road. We would avert our eyes from its foulness and go in search of sweeter sights. Then so should I.

  There was worse to come, much worse. Whatever the fear-flooded mind might have imagined when it thought of Midnight—the unholy rituals performed there in the name of Chaos and Cruelty, the blank-eyed brutalities that took the sanity or the lives of any innocent who ventured there; the stink out of its gaping graves, and the dead who had climbed from them, raised for mischief’s sake, and left to wander where they would—all this was just the first line in a great book of terror that the two powers who had once ruled Gorgossium, Christopher Carrion and his grandmother, Mater Motley, had begun to write.

  But things had changed. In an attempt to track down and finally slaughter Candy Quackenbush (who had caused her endless problems) Mater Motley had stirred up the Sea of Izabella and used their maelstrom to carry her warship, the Wormwood, into the Hereafter. Things had not gone well. The magic she had unleashed in that other world, contained perhaps by laws of matter that had no relevance in the Abarat, had lost its mind. The warship had been torn apart in the water—pieces of the Izabella and countless numbers of her stitchling warriors torn up the same way. Her grandson, Christopher Carrion, had drowned there too. Mater Motley had returned to Gorgossium alone.

  Her first edict as the sole power now ruling Midnight was to summon up six thousand stitchlings—monsters filled with the living mud that was only mined on Gorgossium—to begin the labor of demolishing the thirteen towers of the Iniquisit. In their place, she would let it be known, there would be just a single three-spired tower built, far taller than even the tallest of the thirteen. From there she would rule, not only as the Sovereign of Gorgossium, but in time as the Empress of the Abarat.

  She was a dangerous potentate.

  Even among her hundreds of seamstresses—some of whom had known her for the better part of a century—there were few who trusted her affections. As long as she had need of their services (and at present she did) they were safe from harm, for without seamstresses there were no new stitchlings, and without stitchlings, no new legions to swell her army. But if that situation were to ever change, the women knew, they would be as disposable to the Old Mother as any stitchling.

  Her weapon of choice when summarily executing one of her mud-men was her snake-wood rod, a simple but immensely powerful wand made of snake-wood that had been burned, buried, and raised up again on three consecutive midnights. It shot black lightning, destroying its target in an instant.

  On several occasions, while surveying the work of demolition, she would catch sight of one of the stitchlings failing to labor as hard as the rest, and would summarily execute the brutish thing where it stood. The lesson: life and death were Mater Motley’s gift to give or take as she saw fit, and only a fool or a suicide walked where she walked without caution.

  With such a powerful overseer, work on the demolition and removal of rubble proceeded at great speed, and in a matter of days the plateau where the many towers of the Iniquisit had stood there now stood a monumental structure. A single tower, designed by an architect of genius, incantatrix Jalafeo Mas, who used her knowledge of magic to defy the laws of physics and raise up a tower taller than the sum of the thirteen that had once stood there.

  It was here, in the red-walled room at the top of the tower, that Mater Motley assembled the most trusted of her seamstresses: nine of them.

  “The years of labor and faith are over,” Mater Motley said. “Midnight approaches.”

  One of the nine, Zinda Goam, a seamstress half a thousand years old who had arranged to have her familiars raise her from the grave after her death so that she might continue to serve Mater said, “Are we not at Midnight now?”

  “Yes, this is a time called Midnight. But now it’s Absolute. There is a greater Midnight than any in the making. A Midnight that will blind every sun, moon, and star in the heavens.”

  Another of the women, whose emaciated body was draped with veils of fine cobwebs, could not silence her incredulity.

  “I have never understood the Grand Design,” said Aea G’pheet. “It doesn’t seem possible. So many Hours. So many heavens.”

  “Do you doubt me, Aea G’pheet?”

  The seamstress, though her skin was pale, became paler still. She hurriedly said, “Never, m’lady. Never. I was just astonished is all—overwhelmed, really—and misspoke.”

  “Then be careful in the future lest you find yourself without one.”

  Aea G’pheet lowered her head, the cobwebs shimmering as they shook.

  “Am . . . am I . . . forgiven?”

  “Are you dead?”

  No, m’lady,” Aea said. “I’m still alive.”

  “Then you must have been forgiven,” the Old Mother said without humor. “Now, back to the business of Midnight. There are, as we know, many forms of life that have taken refuge from the light. Even the light of the stars. These creatures will be freed when my Midnight dawns. And they will make such mischief . . .” She paused, smiling at the thought of the fiends unleashed.

  “And the people?” said another of the nine.

  “Anyone who stands against us will be executed. And it will fall to us to spill their blood when the time comes, without hesitation. And if there is any woman here who is unwilling to fight this war upon those terms let her leave now. No harm will come to her. She has my oath on that. But if you choose to stay, then you will have agreed to do the work before us without fear or compromise.

  “The labor of Midnight will be bloody, to be sure, but trust me, when I am Empress of the Abarat, I will raise you so high all thought of what you did to be so elevated will seem like nothing. We are not natural women, henceforth. Perhaps never were. We have no love of love, or of children, or of making bread. We are not made to tend fires and rock cradles. We are the unforgiving something upon which despairing men will break their fragile heads. There is no making peace with
them, no husbanding them. They must be beneath our heels or dead and buried beneath the earth upon which we walk.”

  There was a ripple of pleasure around the chamber at this remark. Only one of the younger seamstresses murmured something inaudible.

  “You have a question,” Mater Motley said, singling her out.

  “It was nothing, lady.”

  “I said speak, damn you! I won’t have doubters! SPEAK!”

  The seamstresses who had been surrounding the young woman now retreated from her.

  “I was only wondering about the Twenty-Fifth Hour?” the young woman replied. “Will it also be overtaken by Midnight? Because if not—”

  “Our enemies could find sanctuary there? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the question to which, in truth, I have no answer,” Mater Motley said lightly. “Not yet, at least. You are Mah Tuu Chamagamia, yes?”

  “Yes, lady.”

  “Well, as long as you are so curious about the state of the Twenty-Fifth, I will put two legions of stitchlings at your disposal.”

  “To . . . do what, m’lady?”

  “To take the Hour.”

  “Take it?”

  “Yes. To invade it. In my name.”

  “But, lady, I have no skill in military matters. I could not.”

  “Could not? You dare say COULD NOT to me?”

  She stretched out her left arm, the fingers of her hand outstretched. The killing rod she used against the stitchlings flew from its place against the wall into her hand. She grasped it in a white-knuckled grip and in one sweeping motion pointed it at Mah Tuu Chamagamia.

  The young woman opened her mouth to offer some further word of defense, but she had no time to utter it. Black lightning spat from the rod in her direction, and struck her in the middle of her body.