Abarat: Absolute Midnight

by Clive Barker

  “Why? What’s there?”

  “That’s where she’s got Finnegan. And I don’t think he’s as happy in her company as he expected to be. Not remotely.”

  “How are we going to get there?”

  “Not we, me.”

  “There is no me, Candy. There’s only we.”

  “Oh, Lordy Lou . . .” she murmured, her voice close to breaking. “What did you have to go and say that for?”

  “Because it’s true. You saved me from Wolfswinkel—”

  “And now you’re going to save me from the rest of the world?”

  “If need be.”

  “Do you want to tell the others then?” Candy said. “I know they’re all suspicious of me, and maybe they have good reason. You should tell them that what we saw out there was a part of a death-ship, a Stormwalker, Boa called it. Apparently it’s two miles long.”

  “What? No. That can’t be.”

  “Well we were just seeing a part of it, actually.”

  “And what is it?”

  “Boa called it a death-ship.”

  “Oh, lovely.”

  “I don’t know if anyone is interested in my opinion, but I suggest that the best thing everybody can do is just lay low. There are terrible things happening out there right now.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But it won’t last forever. We’ve got to remember that. The sacbrood are dead up there, or dying. And it’s only a matter of time before they start to decay, and a rain of brood bodies will start falling.”

  “Well, that’s something to look forward to,” Malingo said dryly. “And then the stars will start showing through again.”

  “Oh yes. That will be welcome. But it’s going to be a grim, filthy mess, Malingo. Light or no light.” She drew a deep breath. “I’m going to walk a little way along the beach. Make a glyph.”

  “I’ll talk to the rest of the folks.”

  “Tell them I don’t think Boa is going to cause any more problems, will you? She’s gone, and I really don’t think she’ll be back.”

  “Famous last words.”

  “Well, I can hope, can’t I?”

  “That you can,” Malingo replied. “That and not much else.”

  The pieces of the Stormwalker converged on Gorgossium like nine vast curses carved out of gleaming black destruction. They made the Izabella crazy as they converged on the island, churning her waters up until they were white and the shadowy air through which they passed was stirred up into an insanity of its own, its particles sticking against one another, causing trillions of tiny fires to ignite all around them.

  Atop the Needle Tower Mater Motley turned her clavicle, the black, polished surface of which was an unmistakable echo of the nine pieces which had now come to a halt all around the island’s perimeter. Like the air around the Needle, and the Needle itself, Maratien was shaking violently, out of sheer terror.

  “What are you thinking, girl?” the Old Mother asked her.

  “They’re so huge . . . how do they stay in the sky?”

  “It isn’t Abaratian magic that made them,” Mater Motley said. “Or that moves them. It is the technology of Those Who Walk Behind the Stars.” She glanced down at Maratien. “Next time I go to them, you will come with me.”

  “To the other side of the stars?” Maratien murmured as though she was testing the words to see if they contained the truth.

  “Watch now,” the Old Mother said, raising the black clavicle higher than her head.

  She uttered an instruction in a language that Maratien had never heard before. Something ignited in the marrow of the bone, and blazed from the hairline fissures, shards of flickering illumination that raced away in all directions. Time grew lazy, or so it seemed to Maratien. Her body lost its appetite for breath. The rhythm of her heart slowed to a funereal pace, from beneath the beat of which the noise of what might have been a thousand thousand thunders rose, one noise rolling into the next so that it became a single unbroken sound, its volume steadily climbing.

  It was the sound of the Stormwalker’s energies she was hearing, she knew. There were lights coming in the nine parts of the ship: rows of tiny windows in one place, a vast sigil in another, as alien to Maratien’s eye as the words she’d heard the Old Mother utter had been to her ears. There were other signs of how remote from anything familiar to her the device was. As the power of the engines climbed, and the lights within the parts multiplied and grew stronger, they shed their illumination in sections of the vast machines that had not been visible until now. What had looked like plain black surfaces from a distance now showed their true faces. They were etched with elaborate detail, black on black on black.

  She had no idea what she was looking at; whether this was an external manifestation of the Stormwalker’s engines, or a vast manifesto of destruction, Maratien had no way of knowing. But her instinct told her that the Old Mother’s claims to the origins of this massive creation were true. Maratien had been born into a family of sorcerers, and had been surrounded by books that chronicled the history of Abaratian magic from her infancy. But nowhere in the tens of thousands of pages, many illustrated or illuminated by artists of antiquity, had she ever seen anything that remotely resembled the monumental mysteries that were now assembled around Gorgossium. Though they had all halted without crossing the invisible boundary between sea and land, none of them were completely still, each in its own subtle fashion was preparing for the imminent convergence.

  They did not need to wait long for the signal. Once again the marrow in the black bone caught fire, and again sheets of incandescence erupted from it, each striking one of the waiting pieces. The thunder of their energies suddenly rose a hundredfold. Then they proceeded to close in upon one another. As they did so, Mater Motley turned the black clavicle skyward, and a tenth sheet of brilliance escaped the marrow. Maratien followed its ascent, passing the incandescence and reaching its destination a second or two before the signal.

  The Stormwalker didn’t have nine pieces, it had ten.

  The tenth lay against the top of the lightless sky, its very lean body resembling a spine along the length of which perhaps fifty pairs of multi-segmented legs were arranged, the limb on the left a perfect mirror of that on the right, the symmetric severity of their design touched now and then by tics and tremors. The bone’s signal didn’t cure the waiting spine of its agitations. In a matter of seconds, the tenth part went from being a vast stillness touched by flickers of lunacy to a mass of intricate shifts and unfolding that multiplied a hundredfold, then ten hundredfold.

  “It sees me . . .” Maratien said very softly.

  “Perhaps so,” Mater Motley replied. “If it does, then it sees something insignificant. A fleck of living clay clinging to its Maker. Don’t think—don’t ever think you can understand it. You can’t. You can’t ever comprehend it, because you don’t know the intelligences that made it.”

  The tenth part was now beginning its majestic descent from the top of the sky, and as it did the other parts picked up speed, still making adjustments in their positions so as to match more accurately the parts with which they were about to be knitted.

  There was another sound behind the roaring of their many unknowable engines. There was a rising whine of power, which became sharper and harder as the pieces converged, and arcs of scarlet lightning leaped between the parts, and down from the descending tenth, to connect with the nine below: a spitting, blazing net of energies drawing them together.

  Below them all, still raised high in Mater Motley’s hand, was the beacon bone. The Old Mother kept her eyes turned skyward watching the convergence. But the moment that Maratien covered her ears and closed her eyes she knew.

  “What are you doing, girl? I didn’t bring you up here to have you whimper like a beaten child.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “Too much? This?” She reached down, her fingers suddenly horrifically long, digging into the girl’s hair and scalp. “Open your eyes!” she shrieked. �
��Or I’ll have the lids off them, so you’ll never close them again.”

  “No, please, Mother, please! I’m just afraid!”

  “I said: OPEN YOUR EYES!”

  “Please, I can’t. Don’t make me.”

  Mater Motley glanced down at the girl, with her face buried in the souls sewn to her gown. “Is that where you want to be, Maratien? You want to be wrapped up forever in a place you’ll be safe?”

  Maratien didn’t open her eyes. She simply nodded and sobbed.

  Mater Motley looked down at her with utter contempt on her face.

  “You disappoint me, girl,” the Old Mother said. “You bore and weary and disappoint me. But if that’s what the child wants, who am I to deny her?”

  “Thank you,” Maratien said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “Oh don’t thank me too quickly, girl,” the Old Mother said. “Wait a hundred years.”

  The fingers in Maratien’s scalp dug farther still, plunging into her thoughts and memories, reaching down with her needle fingers in search of the part she would keep: the soul.

  Too late, Maratien understood the significance of the Old Mother’s words.

  “No, Mother, please! No, I didn’t mean. No, no, no—”

  Her words dissolved into a single shriek as Mater Motley’s fingers found her essence and closed around it. In desperation Maratien reached up and attempted to catch hold of the invading hand but before she could do so the will to act was taken from her in that same instance as her soul.

  Out of the girl’s head the Old Mother drew the girl’s last light, delivering it into one of the countless rag dolls that were sewn to her gown, still awaiting a soul.

  Mater Motley returned her gaze to the glories of the convergence that blazed above, allowing her hand to linger in Maratien’s head only long enough to raise the puppet corpse to its feet, then let it go. Gravity did the rest. The body toppled backward, and dropped off the point of the Needle Tower.

  Just as the ten parts of the Stormwalker touched and fused, Maratien’s body met the ground. There it broke open, its pungent scent alerting scavengers from every direction to come partake of the feast while it was still warm.

  Chapter 48

  Smiles

  “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” Gazza asked. He had appeared over the top of the sand dune behind which Candy was summoning up a glyph big enough for two.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she told him. “I’m not even supposed to be looking at you.”

  “Well, I am and you are.”

  “Yes, so I see.”

  “So where are you going? I know what you’re doing. I may be just a fisherman but I’m not stupid.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “You’re making a glyph. You’re flying away somewhere, leaving me—”

  “I’m not leaving you. I’m going to find Finnegan.”

  “Oh, good. So I can come?”

  “No. I didn’t say—”

  “You just said you weren’t leaving me.”

  “Where’s Malingo?”

  “All right, if you have to go, at least show me how to make a glyph for myself so I can follow you. I will. I can do anything if I want something badly enough.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  “And I want to be wherever you are.”

  “Gaz . . .”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “No. It’s not wrong. It’s just a bad time, that’s all.”

  “You showed Malingo. He told me. So show me!”

  “No!”

  He ran down the slope of the dune at a rush, his piebald features bright with fury in the light off the solidifying glyph.

  “You think I’m like all the rest, don’t you?”

  “I don’t want you to get bent out of shape, but we don’t have time for this, Gaz.”

  She turned her back on his stare.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  Candy stared hard at the ground, trying to remember where in the glyph summons she’d been. She was tired, and her fatigue was starting to affect her ability to get things done.

  “Not what?”

  “I’m not like all the others,” he said. He came around to the other side of the glyph so that she couldn’t continue to avoid engaging his stare. “I’m not waiting for the miraculous Candy Q to come up with all the answers—”

  “Well, that’s good because I haven’t got any! Sometimes I think I don’t have anything except . . . except . . . except . . . you’re not to blame.” Candy looked up at him through the skeletal form of the glyph, its lines solidifying in the air.

  “You look like you hate me right now,” he said.

  “No,” Candy said. “Not hate. Just . . . why now?”

  “Why now what?”

  “You know why.”

  “Do I?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “What you feel. What we feel.”

  “So I’m not just imagining it?”

  “Oh, Lordy Lou,” he said, throwing up his arms. She couldn’t tell who he was angry at. Or whether he was even angry. “No. You’re not imagining it.”

  “So do you . . . ?” she asked.

  “Well . . .” he said.

  “Because I do.”

  “Ha!”

  Such relief flooded his face. He grinned the grin of all grins.

  “You should see the grin on your face,” he said to her.

  “My face? What about on yours?”

  The glyph finished itself while they were standing there, exchanging their grins. She sensed its stillness. So did he.

  “Your magic’s done,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You want me to go find Malingo?”

  “In a minute.”

  “We don’t have much—”

  “Half a minute?”

  “No. A minute’s good.”

  Before they’d been mortal enemies, Candy and Deborah Hackbarth had been friends. And two summers before, when on the first day back at school after summer vacation they walked home together, exchanging tales of summer, Deborah had one big story to tell. His name was Wayne Something or other and she’d met him in Florida, where she’d gone to visit her grandmother. Wayne was the One, Deborah had said; she knew so because it felt right when she said it, which she had, over and over, during that long walk home, and Candy, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the conversation would falter for a moment, and her best friend would sew the seeds of their enmity with the oh-so-casual: “And what about your summer, Candy?”

  How times had changed! Perhaps the street had survived the flooding of Chickentown by the Sea of Izabella and even now there were two girls sharing secrets as they wandered home from school, but Candy would never know. Not because Mater Motley’s all-devouring darkness would devour her, though that was possible. But because she didn’t care. She didn’t want to go back there. She could live and die here, under these troubled heavens, perhaps even staring at the troubled face on the other side of the glyph.

  k

  Then came the first shot. A missile was fired out of the west by a weapon of such power that the projectile it launched toward the shore punched its way through Hour after Hour before striking its target. The trail of fire it left on the air was still decaying when a second projectile was fired, this one aimed much lower than the first, barely clearing the shore as it screeched overhead.

  When it landed, the force of the explosion was powerful enough to knock Candy to the ground. She got to her feet, gasping for breath, and raced up the dune. To her relief she saw that Malingo, along with the rest of the refugees, had sought shelter among the rocks.

  She cupped her hands around her mouth and called to him.

  “Malingo!”

  There was no answer from the landscape, which was illuminated afresh when a third volley came shrieking through, this one so low it clipped the hill that rose beyond the shore,
sending up a plume of debris.

  “I have to go, Malingo!” Candy screamed. “Be safe!”

  When she turned back to the glyph, Gazza was already inside.

  “We’re going together,” he said.

  She had neither the time, nor in truth the will, to argue with him. They needed to be gone. Now. As she leaped into the glyph, the small, sleek gunship that had fired upon them appeared from the sea-mist that had, until now, veiled the sandy shore upon which they stood.

  Behind it, Candy saw a vessel at least thirty times as big; its watchtowers and uniformed guards assuring its function. It was a prison ship, coming for them all. Candy willed the glyph into motion, but as it rose into the air, a fourth volley came suddenly from the west. It struck its target, and everything went dark.

  Chapter 49

  Of Those Who walk Behind the Stars

  THOUGH THE OLD MOTHER had not known when she would have need of the Stormwalker, nor precisely to what purpose it would need to be put to when that time came, she had laid meticulous plans for how things were to proceed. It was crewed by three hundred and fifty stitchlings, and another four thousand were in the belly of the ship: massive legions of warriors, ready and waiting to go. They weren’t simple mindless cannon fodder. Far from it. They had been created to make war with the utmost ferocity and intelligence; war so terrible that once made would never be allowed to happen again, because the memory of its horrors would be so grim.

  In addition, she had on board one member of that species who walked behind the stars. Its name was ninety-one syllables long, but it answered to Nephauree. The physical form it presented to her was an illusion: a thin wavering line of smoke-shadow, standing three times her height. Of its true form, she knew nothing. Once she’d made the error of demanding that she see it as it actually was, and the experience had almost made her ready to stab out her own eyes. The experience had been so traumatizing, she remembered nothing of what she’d seen, but she knew what lay just a few vibrations of vision beyond the smoke-shadow was a thing so vile, so repugnant, so utterly without beauty or virtue, that no mind could witness it and remain sane. It was an engine of venoms and despair.