Days of Magic, Nights of War Read online

  “And what would that be?” Carrion said.

  “Sacbrood,” Vol replied, his voice ripe with awe.

  Carrion nodded.

  “Oh, Gods . . .” Vol murmured, advancing a few steps toward the door to get a better view of the multitudes within. “Did you put them in here?”

  “I sowed the seeds, yes,” Carrion replied. “Countless years ago. I knew we would come to be in need of them in time. I have a great purpose to put them to.”

  “What purpose is that?”

  Carrion smiled into the soup of his nightmares. “Something mighty,” he replied. “Believe me. Something mighty.”

  “Oh, I can imagine,” Vol said. “Mighty, yes . . .”

  As he spoke, a limb perhaps eight feet long, and divided into a number of thorny segments, appeared from the shadows.

  Leeman loosed a cry of alarm and backed away from the door. But Carrion was too quick for him. He caught hold of Vol’s arm, stopping him in his stride.

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

  In his panic Vol’s three voices trod on one another’s tails. “They’re moving—oving—ving.”

  “So?” said Carrion. “We’re the masters here, Vol, not them. And if they forget, then we have to remind them. We have to control them.”

  Vol looked at Carrion as though the Lord of Midnight was crazy. “Control them?” he said. “There are tens of thousands of them.”

  “I will need a million for the work I want them to do,” Carrion said. He pulled Vol closer to him, holding him so tight Vol had to fight for breath. “And believe me, there are millions. These creatures are not just in the Pyramids. They’ve dug down into the earth beneath the Pyramids and made hives for themselves. Hives the size of cities. Every one of them lined with cells, and each one of those cells filled with eggs, all ready to be born at a single command.”

  “From you?”

  “From us, Vol. From us. You need me and my power to protect you from being slaughtered when the Last Day comes, and I need your mouths to communicate with the sacbrood. That seems fair, doesn’t it?”

  “Y—y—yes.”

  “Good. Then we understand each other. Now you listen, Vol: I’m going to let you go. But don’t try running off. If you do I won’t take kindly to it. You understand?”

  “I—I—I understand.”

  “Good. So . . . let’s see what our allies look like up close, shall we?” he said. He let Leeman Vol go. Vol didn’t attempt to make a run for it, even though his soles itched to do so.

  “Shield your eyes, Leeman,” Carrion instructed him. “This is going to be very bright.”

  He reached into the folds of his robes and took out perhaps a dozen of the luminous tops. They flew in all directions, spinning and blazing brightly. Some rose up into the heights of the Pyramid, others dropped away through holes that had been opened in the floor of the Pyramid, still others flew off left and right, illuminating other chambers and antechambers. Of the Kings and Queens who had been laid to rest here in the Pyramids with such panoply, there was nothing left. The sar-cophagi that had housed their revered remains had gone, as had the holy books and scrolls that contained the prayers that were written to soothe them to paradise; nothing was left. The slaves, horses and sacred birds slaughtered so that their spirits might escort the royal souls on the Eternal Highway had also gone. The sacbrood’s appetite had devoured everything: gold, flesh, bone. The great devouring tribe had taken it all. Chewed it up, digested it.

  “Look!” Carrion said as he surveyed the occupants of the Pyramid.

  “I see,” Vol said. “Believe me, I see.”

  Even Vol, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world of insects, was not prepared for the horror of these creatures’ forms; nor for the limitless variety of those forms. Some of the sacbrood were the size of maggots and surrounded by great puddles of stinking life, their bodies hissing as they writhed against one another. Some seemed to have a hundred limbs and scuttled in hordes over the ceilings, occasionally turning on one of their number and sacrificing it to their appetite. Some were flat as sheets of paper and slid over the ground on a film of slime.

  But these were the least. There were sacbrood here the size of obese wrestlers, others as huge as elephants. And in the shadows behind these enormities there were greater enormities still, things that could not be comprehended by a single glance of the eye, because their vastness defied even the most ambitious gaze. None seemed afraid of the lights burning in their midst, even after being so long in darkness. Rather they sought out the brightness with a kind of hunger, so that it seemed as though the entire contents of the Pyramid was moving toward the door, revealing their terrible anatomies with more and more clarity. Limbs snapping like scissors, teeth chattering like maddened monkeys, claws rubbing together like the tools of a knife sharpener. There was nothing in their shapes that suggested kindness or compassion: they were evildoers, pure and simple.

  “This is greater than I imagined,” Carrion said with a perverse pride. “What terrors they are.”

  As he spoke, a creature the size of ten men emerged from the great mass. Numberless parasitic forms, like lice, crawled over its restless body.

  “Do they want to kill us?” Vol wondered aloud. The insects on his head had taken refuge in his collar. He looked strangely vulnerable without their darting company.

  “It will tell us, I daresay, when it has a mind to,” Carrion said, watching the great creature with a mingling of respect and caution.

  Finally it spoke. The language it used, however, was not one that Carrion knew. He listened carefully, and then turned to Leeman Vol for assistance; Vol, whom the Brood-beast seemed to recognize as one who would comprehend it. Indeed he did. He began to translate, a little cautiously at first.

  “They . . . it . . . welcomes you. Then it tells you: We are growing impatient.”

  “Does it indeed?” Carrion said. “Then tell it from me: soon, very soon.”

  Vol replied to the Brood-beast, which went on immediately to speak again, its voice thick and undulating.

  “It says that it’s heard there are trespassers among the islands.”

  “There are one or two,” Carrion said. Vol’s three mouths provided a translation of this. “But nobody will get between us and our Great Plan.”

  Again the Brood-beast spoke. Again, Vol translated.

  “It says: Do you swear?”

  “Yes,” said Carrion, plainly a little irritated that his honesty was being called into question by this monster. “I swear.” He looked defiantly at the creature. “What we have planned will come to pass,” he said. “No question of it.”

  At that moment the Brood-beast revealed that it knew more about the craft of communication than it had been displaying, because the creature now spoke again, but in a recognizable fashion. It spoke slowly, as though piecing the words together like the fragments of a jigsaw; but there was no doubting what it said.

  “You . . . will . . . not . . . cheat . . . us, Car-ri-on,” it said.

  “Cheat you? Of course not!”

  “Many . . . years . . . in . . . darkness . . . we . . . have . . . waited.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Hungry!”

  “Yes.”

  “HUNGRY! HUNGRY!”

  The chorus was taken up from every corner of the Pyramid, and from the tunnels and hives many thousands of feet below, and even from the other Pyramids of the six where sacbrood had also bred over the years, and awaited their moment.

  “I understand,” Carrion said, raising his voice above the din. “You’re tired of waiting. And you’re hungry. Believe me, I do understand.”

  His words failed to placate them, however. They moved toward the door from all directions, the horrid details of their shapes more apparent by the moment. Carrion was no stranger to the monstrous—the pits and forests and vermin fields of Gorgossium boasted countless forms of the ghastly and the misbegotten—but there was nothing, even there, that
was quite as foul as this loathsome clan, with their fat, wet clusters of eyes and their endless rows of limbs clawing at the rot-thickened air.

  “Lord, we should take care,” Vol murmured to Carrion. “They’re getting closer.”

  Vol was right. The sacbrood were getting far too close for comfort.

  Those overhead were moving the fastest, skittering over one another’s bodies in their unholy haste and shedding living fragments of their bodies as they did so, which twitched on the ground where they’d fallen.

  “They do seem very hungry,” Mendelson observed.

  “What do you suppose we should do about that, Mr. Shape?” Carrion wondered.

  Shape shrugged. “Feed them!” he said.

  Carrion reached out suddenly and caught hold of Shape by the nape of his neck. “If you’re so concerned about their well-being, Mr. Shape, maybe you should sacrifice your own sorry flesh to their appetite, huh? What do you say?”

  “No!” said Shape, trying to wriggle free.

  “You say no?”

  “Yes, Lord, please, Lord. I’d be more use to you alive, I swear.”

  “In truth, Shape, I can’t imagine any state in which you’d be of use to me.”

  So saying, Carrion shoved Shape away. The man stumbled on his stump and fell to his knees in the shadow of the Brood-beast that had been talking to Carrion. For a fleeting moment the thing looked down at him with something close to pity on its misshapen face. Shape turned from it, and getting up, he fled across the littered ground, not caring that he was going deeper into the Pyramid, only determined to avoid both Carrion and the creature. As he hobbled away, he heard a sound above him. He froze on the spot, and in that instant a barbed, ragged form—wet and sinewy, and attached by a knotty length of matter to the ceiling—dropped on top of him. Shape cried out as it eclipsed him; then the living cord by which the thing was attached to the roof hauled on its freight, and the creature was taken back into the shadows, with Shape in its grip. He called out to his master one last time, his voice muted by the beast in whose maw he was caught. There was a final series of pitiful little kicks. Then both cries and kicks stopped, and Shape’s life ceased.

  “They’re feeling murderous,” Leeman Vol said to Carrion. “I think we should go.”

  “Maybe we should.”

  “Do you have anything else you need to speak with them about?”

  “I’ve said and seen all I need to,” Carrion replied. “Besides, there will be other times.” He went back to the door, calling to Vol as he did so. “Come away.”

  Even now Vol watched the creatures with the fascination of a true obsessive, his head twitching left and right, up and down, in his eagerness to see every last detail.

  “Away, Vol, away!” Carrion urged him.

  Finally Vol made a dash for the door, but even now he paused to glance back.

  “Go!” Carrion yelled to him, pulling the door shut. “Quickly, before they get out!”

  Several of the brood, who were within a few yards of the threshold, made a last desperate attempt to reach the door and block it before it closed, but Carrion was too quick. The Pyramid door closed in the same bizarre fashion that it had opened, and he quickly turned the Key in the lock, sealing the sacbrood in their prison hive. They shook the stones of the Pyramid’s walls in their frustration and loosed such a din of rage that the stone steps on which Carrion and Leeman Vol stood vibrated beneath their feet. Still, it was done. Carrion reverentially removed the Key from the lock and slipped it into the deepest recesses of his robes.

  “You’re shaking,” he said to Vol, with a little smile.

  “I—I—I—never saw such things before,” Vol conceded.

  “Nobody has,” the Lord of Midnight replied. “Which is why when I choose my moment and set them free, there will be chaos and terror in every corner of the Abarat.”

  “It’ll be like the end of the world,” Leeman said, retreating down the steps to the funeral barge.

  “No,” Carrion said as he followed Leeman down. “There you’re wrong. It will be the beginning.”

  Chapter 14

  Lament (The Munkee’s Tale)

  CANDY DIDN’T WASTE TIME shivering on the shore. It had been clear even from a distance where on the island she might find some place of relative comfort: in the mist-shrouded forest that lay a quarter mile along the beach. A light, warm breeze was coming out of the trees, its balm both welcoming and reassuring. Occasionally one of its gusts seemed to carry a fragment of music: just a few notes, no more, played (perhaps) on an oboe. A gentle, lilting music that made her smile.

  “I wish Malingo was with me,” she said to herself as she trudged along the beach.

  At least she wasn’t alone. All she had to do was follow the sound of the music and she’d surely find the music maker, sooner or later. The more of the melody she heard, the more bittersweet it seemed to be. It was the kind of song her grandfather (her mom’s dad, Grandpa O’Donnell) used to sing when she was little. Laments, he called them.

  “What’s a lament?” she had asked him one day.

  “A song about the sad things in the world,” he’d told her, his voice tinged with a little of his Irish roots. “Lovers parted, and ships lost at sea, and the world full of loneliness from one end to the other.”

  “Why’d you want to sing about sad things?” Candy had asked him.

  “Because any fool can be happy,” he’d said to her. “It takes a man with real heart”—he’d made a fist and laid it against his chest—“to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”

  “I still don’t understand. . . .”

  Grandpappy O’Donnell had cupped her face in his big, scarred hands. He’d worked on the railroad most of his life, and every scar had a story. “No, of course you don’t,” he said with an indulgent smile. “And why should you? A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you . . . there’s no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It’s not a bad feeling, child. That’s what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D’you see?”

  She hadn’t seen. Not really. The idea that sadness could somehow make you feel good was a hard idea to fathom.

  But now she was beginning to understand. Abarat was changing her. In the brief time she’d been traveling among the Hours, she’d seen and felt things she would never have experienced in Chickentown, not if she’d lived there a thousand years. The way the stars seemed to move when a traveler passed over the boundary between one Hour and the next, and whole constellations fell slowly out of the sky; or when the moon, falling brightly on the sea, called up slow processions of fish from the purple-blue deeps of the Izabella, all showing their sad silver eyes to the sky before they turned and disappeared into the darkness again.

  Sometimes just a face she passed by, or a glance someone would give her—even the shadow of a passing bird—would carry a kind of melancholy. Grandpappy O’Donnell would have liked it here, she thought.

  She was close to the edge of the misty trees now, and just a little way ahead of her a pathway began, made of mosaic stones that depicted a pattern of interwoven spirals, winding into the forest. It was a strange coincidence that her feet should have brought her precisely to the spot where this path began, but then her time in the Abarat had been filled with such coincidences; she wasn’t surprised any longer. And so she simply followed the pathway.

  The people who had laid the mosaic had decided to have some fun with the design. Dancing in and out of the spirals were the likenesses of animals—frogs, snakes, a family of creatures that looked like green raccoons—which seemed ready to scamper or slide away as soon as a foot fell too close to them.

  She was so busy studying this witty handiwork that she didn’t realize how far she’d come. The next time she looked up, the beach had gone from sight behind her, and she was entirely surrounded by the immense trees,
their canopy alive with all manner of Night birds.

  And still she heard the lament, somewhere off in the distance, rising and falling.

  Beneath her feet the spiral designs of the pathway were getting stranger by the step, the species of creatures that had been woven into the design becoming ever more fantastical, as though to alert her to the fact that her journey was about to change. And now ahead of her she saw the threshold of that change: a massive doorway flanked by elegant pillars stood between the trees.

  Though the hinges were still in place, and the remains of a hefty iron lock lay on the ground, the door itself had been eaten away by some rot or other. Candy stepped inside. The absent door had guarded a building of exceptional beauty. On every side she saw that the walls were decorated with exquisite frescoes, depicting happy, magical scenes: landscapes in which people danced so lightly they seemed to defy gravity and rise into the sky; or where creatures possessed of an unearthly beauty appeared from the cavorting waters of silver rivers.

  Meanwhile the lament continued to play, its melody as bittersweet as ever. She followed the music through the grandiose rooms, every footfall now echoing off the painted stones. The palace had not been left untouched by the forest that surrounded it. The trees, possessed of a feverish fluidity that gave them greater strength than ordinary trees, had pushed through the walls and the ceiling, the mesh of fruit-laden branches so like the intricately carved and painted panels that it was impossible to see where dead wood ended and living began, where paint gave way to leaf and fruit or vice versa. It almost seemed as if the makers of this place, the carvers and the painters, must have known that the forest would invade at last and had designed the palace so that it would swoon without protest into the arms of nature.

  She could almost bring to mind the people who had worked here. It seemed easy to picture their furrowed faces as they labored at their masterpiece; though of course it was impossible that she could really know who they were. How could she remember something she hadn’t witnessed? And yet the images persisted, growing stronger the deeper she traveled into the palace. She saw in her mind’s eye men and women working by the light of floating orbs like little moons, the smell of newly cut timbers and paint freshly mixed sharpening the air.