Abarat: Absolute Midnight

by Clive Barker

  It was a triumph for darkness. All eight of the Great Fiends had risen up and shown their faces. And if they were here, then their children would surely be here too. And their children. And theirs. None of them as powerful as their legendary forebears to be sure, but they still possessed the genius to terrify. The Old Mother was happy—at least as happy as she knew how to be. She had thrown a party in the name of darkness, and all the guests she’d most wanted to attend had done so.

  The Twenty-Fifth Hour, however, had been entirely unaffected by the invasion of the sacbrood. It not only protected itself at sea level, effortlessly repelling the darkness that attempted to touch the shore, but it also defended the air above with a sheath that reached up into the stratosphere, and instantly cremated those sacbrood who, in their thoughtless conviction, treated the air above the Twenty-Fifth Hour like any other. It was not. The rules of physics were inverted over that timeless place.

  Air that should have been lightless was instead pale yellow, while the stars, whether they were fixed or falling, blazed black against its brightness. The Twenty-Fifth had no intention of allowing the brood to invade its sacred air. Though the forces encircled the island, throwing wave after wave of forces against it, the power that the Hour emanated was too unpredictable to be overwhelmed. Finally, the brood seemed to comprehend that this was not a battle they could win, and left off the attack to move on to new conquests: some breaking north to the Outer Islands, others around the island to follow an easterly course.

  The fact that the Twenty-Fifth had not succumbed irritated Mater Motley.

  “You hear me make this oath, Maratien,” she said when word reached her that the brood’s attempts to get onto the island had failed. “Before very long, you will follow me as I walk up from the water’s edge into the heart of the Twenty-Fifth. And I will stand there as its owner, and I will sink it if I so choose.”

  “And it will be the same with Commexo City?” Maratien said.

  Mater Motley made a snort of contempt as she strode toward the mosaic of the island of Pyon, and set her foot upon the spot where Rojo Pixler had built Commexo City.

  “The stars no longer shine over Pyon,” she said, “but the city still burns as brightly as ever.”

  “Is Pixler there?”

  “Why would he not be?”

  “He went down into the Izabella.”

  “So he did. An odd coincidence. Something vast happens in the heavens, and Pixler is down in the deep . . .”

  “I heard a rumor,” Maratien said.

  “Go on.”

  “That he came back, but he’s not himself.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He supposedly went in search of a Requiax. Those don’t really exist, do they?”

  “Everything exists at some depth, Maratien.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes. Everything,” the Hag replied. “Perhaps he’s come back suffering from deliriums of the deep.” She took one of the needles from her dress; needles forged in cold fires that Zael Maz’yre itself had called up. She gave the needle to Maratien. “Take this down to General Axietta. You know which of the women she is?”

  “She’s the bald one with the birthmark?”

  “That’s her.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Maratien said.

  “Well you take the needle down to her as proof that these orders came from me.”

  Maratien took the needle.

  “What orders, m’lady?” the girl said.

  “She’s to take four warships, with six legions of stitchlings in each vessel. Head straight for Pyon. There’ll be plenty of distraction to keep Mr. Genius Pixler from expecting an attack from the sea. When she gets into the city she’s to take it—destroy it if she’s in the mood. I don’t care. But there are two things I need her to do without fail.”

  “Yes, m’lady?”

  “Kill every light that burns in that damn city. And make it her personal business to bring me back the heads of Rojo Pixler and the boy.”

  “The boy . . . ?”

  “The Commexo Kid.”

  “Is he a living thing?”

  “We won’t know until we have his head in our hands, will we?” Mater Motley said. “Now go. I want Commexo City dark in two hours.”

  Chapter 37

  Love and War

  MATER MOTLEY WASN’T THE only one who had a comprehensive view of the sacbrood’s advance over the Abarat. At the heart of the Commexo Company’s headquarters, in the Circular Room, reports came in from the innumerable mechanical spies, perfect copies of species from the tiny tiger tic to the enormous Rashamass (which resembled a cross between a whale and a millipede). They weren’t programmed to seek out events of any great moment. But there were so many of Pixler’s spies out in the world that at any given Hour one of them would be certain to catch witness of a scene of tragedy or celebration, were it to occur.

  But in all the years the cyclopic Dr. Voorzangler, whose genius with Abaratian technologies was responsible for making Rojo Pixler’s visionary dreams into practical realities, had traveled the immense circle on one of the gravity-negating discs that carried him wherever he willed them to take him, he had never witnessed anything as momentous as the events unfolding on the screens now. He had watched as the pyramids at Xuxux had been unsealed, silently awed—though he would never have admitted it—by the sheer power of the hidden engines that had opened the pyramids up. But their opening had only been the first part of the spectacle. What followed had been more incredible still: the outpouring of a life-form Voorzangler was not familiar with, that had been hidden away in the tombs, and now rose like six black rivers flowing heavenward, where they converged to become a sea of darkness that spread over the sky and above the pyramids, blotting out the constellations above Xuxux then moved outwards: east toward Babilonium, south toward Gnomon, west toward Jibarish, and north toward the island of Pyon, at which Hour, of course, Commexo City stood.

  Voorzangler surveyed the sight for a few minutes, trying to get a grasp on what he was seeing, then he summoned his assistant, Kattaz to his side.

  “What’s Mr. Pixler’s status?” he wanted to know.

  “I was just with him,” Kattaz replied. “He says he feels fine after ‘the problem.’ That’s what he calls it, sir. The little problem with the bathyscaphe.”

  Voorzangler shook his head. “Really, the man is fearless. We nearly lost him . . .” He stared at the spreading darkness again. “I’m going to start making a report on this . . . this phenomenon. I’d like Mr. Pixler to see it for himself when he’s feeling well enough. Would you inform him that we have a very immediate problem? This . . . darkness is going to cover the city within the next ten minutes.”

  “What is it?” Kattaz asked him.

  “According to my records this is a species, I believe they are sacbrood. They predate Time, and therefore these islands. But what we know of them from fossil records suggest that they were significantly smaller than these creatures we see now.”

  “Genetically altered then?”

  “That’s my assumption.”

  “By science? Magic?”

  “Possibly both. Look at them!”

  He directed Kattaz’s attention to the screen behind her. One of the creatures reporting this cataclysm, a balloon fox, had risen dangerously close to the sacbrood, risking its existence in order to report every detail of what it was witnessing. The sacbrood were a study in diversity: no two of them were alike. Their heads were complex arrangements of black, insentient eyes, which were sometimes assembled in glistening bunches like ripe fruit. Some had immense barbed jaws, some complex arrangements of mandibles. Some had heads that almost resembled that of the common Hereafter housefly, which had quickly established itself in the Abarat having come between worlds in the early years of trading.

  “Oh by the Kid! Look at this, Doctor Voorzangler! This one . . . the eggs it’s carrying! That’s disgusting. Lordy Lou, look at all those little maggoty . . . oh, that’s horrible.
”

  “Do you really think so?” Voorzangler said, looking at the image with a detached curiosity. “It’s just more life, isn’t it? We can’t be judgmental. At least I can’t.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Doctor. You’re probably quite right. It’s just another species.”

  She was about to say more to him when the door to Rojo Pixler’s private chamber opened and the great architect appeared.

  “What’s going on, Voorzangler?”

  “I was just about to alert you, sir.”

  “No need. You’re being watched too, remember?”

  “I wasn’t aware—”

  “That some of the screens you’re looking at are looking at you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, they are.”

  He closed the door to his suite behind him and then, moving very slowly, his limbs exhausted, he stepped up onto one of the discs and, taking up his familiar posture, hands cupped left in right behind his back, he allowed the disc to carry him the long way around the room, examining the screens as he went.

  Such was the immensity of the chamber, and vastness of the numbers of screens, that it took him several minutes to come around again to the place where Voorzangler and Kattaz were standing. When he finally did so, and Voorzangler got an opportunity to look at his mentor very closely, he was troubled. Pixler appeared very much the worse for wear following his descent into the depths of the Izabella. His skin was white, and beaded with sweat. His hair was pasted to his scalp with the moisture.

  “I wish you’d let me examine you, sir. Just a brief checkup?”

  “I’ve told you, Voorzangler, I’m perfectly fine. Never better.”

  “But weren’t you in the bathyscaphe when the Requiax took hold of it?”

  “Oh yes. Oh, I’ve been closer to death than I ever care to be again. But the Requiax is an ancient entity, Voorzangler. It has no interest in whether a man lives or dies.”

  “You’re not a man, sir. You’re Rojo Pixler. You’re the father of the Commexo Kid.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am. And I am not going to die. Now, or ever.”

  “Or ever, sir?”

  “You heard me, Voorzangler. Or ever. The future is mine to own. It’s bright, Voorzangler, and full of possibilities. I can’t afford to die.”

  “I want to believe you, sir—”

  “But—?”

  “But these sacbrood, sir . . .”

  “Is that what they are?” Pixler said matter-of-factly. “Fascinating.”

  “Our records report—”

  “Forget the records. They’re not worth a damn.”

  “But sir, you wrote them.”

  “No, not me, Voorzangler. I was another man entirely when I wrote those. That man is gone.”

  “Gone, sir?”

  “Yes, Voorzangler, gone. As in departed. Exited the building. Dead.”

  “You look a little sick, sir,” Voorzangler said, speaking slowly, as though to an idiot. “But . . . you’re not dead. Trust me.”

  “Oh no. Thank you very much for the invitation. But I don’t think I will. Trust you, I mean. I have better advisors now.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s their understanding that our neighbors on Gorgossium, specifically that she-cur, Motley—” As he spoke of her, his features were overtaken by a rising wave of infiltrations, his muscles twitching violently, plainly not under Pixler’s command. “She’s apparently intending to cut off all natural light to the islands.”

  “How do you know this?” Voorzangler said.

  “I’m looking at the screens, Doctor. This mass swarming of sacbrood is blotting out the skies. There will be a severe, even catastrophic, drop in temperature. Blizzard conditions on islands that have never seen a flake of snow. Crops will perish in the fields. Livestock will freeze to death. There will be massive loss of life in rural areas—”

  “People can build fires,” Kattaz said.

  Pixler looked at the woman with naked disdain. “Go away,” he said. “You offend me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t need reasons. Just go.”

  “Mr. Pixler, please.”

  “Oh don’t whine, Voorzangler. I know what goes on between you two. I’ve watched you fawn over her. Love makes you look ridiculous, don’t you see?” He glanced back at Kattaz. “Are you still here? I said go away.”

  Kattaz looked to Voorzangler for help, but his face was utterly blank, all sign of real emotion concealed. She didn’t wait for him to come to her defense. Obviously he wasn’t going to do so.

  “I’m sorry I offend you . . . sir,” she said in a monotone, and departed.

  “So Mater Motley has herself an army,” Pixler went on, as though nothing had happened.

  “She does?” Voorzangler said. His gaze was on the screens filled with sacbrood now.

  “Stop looking at the damn insects. They’re just a part of what she’s up to. Look at this.”

  He pointed to a cluster of screens showing both recorded footage of the stitchling legions, marching in shockingly precise lockstep as they assembled to board the warship, and live feeds showing those same warships carving their way through the dark waters of the Izabella; the only light supplied by the lamps, like blazing eyes, in the bows of the ships, and a host of smaller, airborne lights that cast a cold, blue-white luminesence as they flew around and above and behind the vessels.

  “You mean the goons on the ships?” Voorzangler said. “They’re just stitchlings. Rags and mud! They have no brain-power. Yes, she can train them to march, but I doubt they’ll do much else!”

  “I think perhaps she let you see the clowns so that you wouldn’t ever think of them as soldiers. The Old Mother’s quite brilliant in her way, you know,” Pixler said.

  “The Old Mother? Is that what they call her? Huh. She’s a crazy hangover from the days of the Empire. I doubt she even knows what year this is.”

  “She may indeed be touched by madness, Voorzangler. On the other hand, that may be simply a performance, to have you believing she is harmless in her lunatic condition.”

  “Sane or insane,” the doctor said, “she is not the real power. That was Carrion right from the beginning.”

  “Never underestimate a woman. After all, Old Mother has persuaded some very powerful allies to come over to her side. Powers I do not even care to name. They do not see the world as we do, in opposites. Night and Day. Black and White.”

  “Good and Evil?”

  “They would find that particular idea utterly absurd.”

  “So these . . . beings . . . are her allies?”

  “So she believes.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “I believe she is useful to them at present. So they indulge her dreams of founding an Imperial dynasty—”

  “Isn’t she a little old to be having children?”

  “You don’t have to give birth to children in the world of mysteries where that woman walks.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t. Not remotely.”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Good!” Pixler said brightly, laying a clammy, cold hand—a dead man’s hand was all Voorzangler could think—on the doctor’s shoulder.

  “You can still admit to ignorance. There’s hope for you yet, Voorzangler. Smile, Doctor!”

  “I can’t. I mean I will if you want me to . . .”

  He tried to fake a smile, but it was a wretched sight.

  “Forget it,” Pixler said.

  Voorzangler let the smile die a quick death, and went on talking: “Is the City in any danger?”

  “Well, ask yourself: what do our sources tell us about her plans?”

  “That she wants the Abarat in total darkness.”

  “But . . . Commexo City is still lighting up the sky.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So maybe we should placate her? Offer to dim them, maybe fifty percent? Just until she sends her warships home?”

  “That won’t fool he
r. We have to stand our ground or she will destroy this city and all that it’s about to become.”

  “Which is what . . . ?”

  “It’s a conversation for a night without warships, Voorzangler. Go down to the dormitories. Speak to that milk-and-cookies woman.”

  “Mrs. Love.”

  Pixler looked appalled.

  “Who in the name of all that’s addictive called her that?”

  “. . . um . . .”

  “I take it from your gormless expression that I did.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’ll fix it when this Last Great War is over and we’ve won the peace.”

  “You sound very confident, sir.”

  “Do I have any reason not to?”

  “Wars are unpredictable, sir. We didn’t know Mater Motley had an army of stitchlings until a few minutes ago. And . . . there’s the matter of her allies.”

  “The Higher Powers,” Pixler said.

  “We have no idea who they are, is that right?”

  “Put it this way. If I had some knowledge of them I’d tell you. Not the knowledge. Only that I knew it.”

  “You don’t trust me any longer, do you?”

  “Oh, Lordy Lou, Voorzangler. I never trusted you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you think too much and you feel too little. And that can bring Empires down.”

  Voorzangler studied the ground between his oversized feet for a long moment. “If I may remark, sir . . .”

  “Remark away.”

  “I feel something for Kattaz. Something very real. At least I believe it’s real. And it may seem foolish in a one-eyed, obsessive-compulsive scientist of advancing years to hold out hope for some return on my investment of devotion, but if it’s foolish, then so be it. I stand by my feelings, however much a fool I may be.”

  “Huh.”

  Now it was the architect who looked away, staring at the screens without seeing them. When he looked back at Voorzangler, there had been a subtle shift in his features. Though he was still Rojo Pixler, something else—the same force, perhaps, that had infested his face with twitches—was present in him. It leaked a tiny amount of black fluid through his pores into each bead of sweat, so that they decorated his blood-drained features like immaculate black jewels.