Abarat: Absolute Midnight

by Clive Barker

k

  This time, Candy knew, there would be a kind of thunder to follow the lightning. It wouldn’t be the rolling growl of burning air, but the boom of guns.

  Mater Motley wasn’t going to let her prisoners go without a fight.

  “Candy? Candy!”

  It was easy enough to identify the speaker: it was Zephario. But it was a lot more difficult to work out precisely where he was located. She had lost contact with him as the construction of the glyph had escalated, and she’d almost forgotten, in the heat of the moment, the deal that she’d made with him. He had given her the means to make this escape possible, in exchange for her attempting to connect him with his lost child. He had kept his side of the bargain, and now it was her turn. It had to happen immediately. There’d be no other time.

  “Gazza,” she said. “I’m going to have to leave you in charge of getting this glyph and everyone inside it away from Mater Motley. Do whatever you have to do.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To keep my promise.”

  “Are you crazy?” Gazza said.

  “A promise is a promise.”

  “Even when you make it to a Carrion?”

  “He can hear you, you know.”

  “I don’t care,” Gazza said. “He’s going to get you killed. And I—” He growled, his brow in knots. “Why can’t I—can’t I?”

  “We have to go,” Candy said.

  “I have stuff to say.”

  “Then say it.”

  “I love you,” Zephario said.

  “Oh?” said Candy. “Well, that’s sudden.”

  “I’m speaking for the young fellow here.”

  “Oh,” Candy said matter-of-factly. Then, comprehending, “Oh. You do?” she said to Gazza.

  “Yes,” Zephario replied again. “He loves you with every last bone in his body,” Zephario replied.

  Gazza smiled confidently. “There’s more,” he said.

  “There’s no time for more,” Zephario said.

  The look of confidence had gone from Gazza’s face. His eyes looked at Candy, ashamed of the young man who stared out from behind them, unable to say the words.

  “Zephario and I need to go,” Candy said.

  Gazza simply nodded.

  “I’ll be safe up there.” They looked at each other. “I wish it was different,” she said, staring at his sadness with her own. “You know what I mean—”

  “Yes.”

  And his knowing was enough for her. Maybe there’d be another time, when things were different. But for now . . .

  “I’ll see you soon, then. . . .” Candy said, and with perfect timing the glyph released her, extending its own structure twenty feet or so, allowing her to drop down below, without injury, onto the shattered ground of Mount Galigali.

  The Empress had begun to give her instructions. Time was of the essence, she let it be known. Time, and that the job be done flawlessly.

  “In a few moments,” she told her Commanders, “the Stormwalker will emerge from the cloud of volcanic dust that the lightning limb has caused to temporarily blind the vessel. At which point,” she went on, “I will have a comprehensive view of the site of execution. We should expect some minor attempts to resist. These people have foolishly tried to live by their own laws, refusing to obey the judgments laid down by their superiors. Obviously no Empire can sanction the presence of such individuals in its midst. They will—”

  “Leave before their executioners arrive?” Carrion suggested.

  “Do you find this funny?”

  “No, Grandmother, I believe what you say is absolutely correct, and these iconoclasts should be executed. But—”

  “But nothing. A knife for every heart, remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well?”

  “You have the knives, I realize. But regrettably the hearts have already departed.”

  “Impossible.”

  The vessel was emerging from the smoke now, and what Carrion could see was visible to a growing number of soldiers. The camp was empty. The prisoners had gone.

  “Where are they?” she said, quietly at first. Then more loudly: “They were here! Six thousand, six hundred and ninety-one prisoners! The gates are still closed. THEY WERE HERE!”

  “Two of them are still here,” one of the commanders—a small, gray-skinned stitchling called Chondross—pointed out.

  “The compound is empty.”

  “They’re not in the compound any longer, my lady,” Chondross told her. “They’re down there on Galigali.” The stitchling pointed out of the window down at the boulder-strewn slope. “Do you see them?”

  “It’s Candy Quackenbush,” Carrion said.

  “Of course it would be her,” the Empress said. “She was bound to be in this chaos somewhere.”

  “Who’s with her?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whoever he was, he shouldn’t have gotten so close to her. It will be the death of him. I need a gunner!” she demanded.

  No sooner had she uttered the words, than one stitchling called out: “Empress. I have the gunner ready at the bows. She has acquired your target.”

  “Gunner?” the Empress yelled.

  The gunner’s image appeared.

  “Here, my Empress,” she said.

  “Targets,” Christopher said.

  “Ah, there you are,” the Empress said. “Two stupid animals standing in our way. Thank you, Christopher.”

  “My pleasure, Empress. And my duty. Shall I have them killed?”

  The image of Candy Quackenbush and her traveling companion came up on the Window. The latter had been extensively scarred—his face little more than a rigid mask of disfigured tissue; out of which he gazed blindly. Despite his maiming there was something in the man’s bearing that caused Mater Motley to hold back for a few moments.

  “I have the target in my sights, Empress. Shall I fire?”

  “Wait . . .”

  She brought the Window closer to her so as to better study the mask of scar tissue for some clue as to the face it had been, before its destruction by—

  “Fire,” she murmured.

  It was a simple, stupid mistake. Gunner Gh’niemattah had been trained to respond to an order without hesitation. The syllable her Empress uttered was barely audible, but she responded to the sound of that one syllable by simply pulling the trigger.

  It was impossible not to be astonished by the speed with which the girl from the Hereafter and the blind man beside her were erased by bursts of brilliance as each rocket found its target.

  Chapter 62

  The Volcano and the Void

  CANDY, SITTING ATOP THE higher slopes of Mount Galigali, stared up at the immense expanse of the Stormwalker’s underbelly as it slowly passed over her. The immense machine seemed almost close enough for her to reach up and touch. The guttural drone of the vessel’s massive engines made the scree on the slope dance a lunatic dance.

  “It’s time. Take me to my son,” were the words Mater Motley had watched Zephario say to her.

  He was right, Candy knew: this was the moment. The Prince of Midnight was inside the Stormwalker with his grandmother—and was there any place he was more likely to be on this night of nights, when old allegiances became clear, than with her? She had to get them both up into the great lightning machine before the Stormwalker destroyed them both.

  And then, up out of the unsifted memories in her head, a word sprang onto her tongue: a word in Old Abaratian. It had a flawless provenance. Candy had taken it from the sleeping mind of Princess Boa, back in the days when she’d used Boa as a living repository of magic. Boa had in turn learned the word from the same source she’d used for the wieldings and invocations, prayers and necromancing—her devoted Christopher Carrion. And who was Carrion’s source? Of that, Candy had not the slightest doubt. Carrion had learned the word from his grandmother, Mater Motley, who was riding high in the Stormwalker over their heads.

  Somehow that confirmed the rightness of the wo
rd she was about to utter. She had tracked it around in a circle, back to the Hag of Gorgossium.

  She didn’t even know what the word meant. But she knew this was the right moment to say it. It had four syllables:

  Yet—

  -ha—

  -si—

  -ha.

  “Are you ready?” she said to Zephario.

  “For what?” he said.

  “I can’t be sure, but I think there’s going to be a staircase, made of smoke, and we’re just going to climb it.”

  “Then I’m ready.”

  At that moment, though Candy didn’t know it, the Empress of the Abarat was studying them in the Window—no, not them: Zephario—trying to work out what it was about the burned face that puzzled her.

  “Yet—” Candy said.

  Words of magic had to be spoken very cautiously, Malingo had once told her he’d read in Wolfswinkel’s books. They had to be pronounced clearly so that the forces that were being summoned into activity knew exactly what they were being instructed to do.

  As Candy spoke the second syllable—“ha”—the Empress looked up from the Window, suddenly realizing what element had worked such a terrible transformation upon the face on the slope below.

  “Fire,” she’d said.

  Gunner Gh’niemattah had thought she’d heard her Empress’s instruction. She had not aimed for one figure or the other, but for the rock between them. The rocket would blow a hole in the rock between them, causing the ground they were standing on to fold in on itself, carrying both of them down to their deaths.

  “si—”

  Gunner Gh’niemattah pulled the trigger. The charge in the gunner’s launcher exploded.

  “ha—”

  The explosive charge slammed against the expulsion plate at the base of the rocket.

  The phenomenal power of the weapon, which had been mounted on the Stormwalker so recently that the gunner had never had an opportunity to test it, completely blindsided her. The whole launcher kicked so violently that the gunner was thrown back across the gunnery tower, her neck snapping at the same moment the rocket struck the flank of Mount Galigali.

  Such was the power of the rocket’s release that a ripple of its force passed through the entire Stormwalker. It juddered and rolled. As its motion settled, the Empress called forth five more windows to study the aftereffects of the rockets.

  “What do you see?” Christopher asked her.

  “A hole in the side of Galigali, and a lot of dust and dead rock.”

  “So they’re dead?”

  “Of course they’re dead. The ground opened up beneath both of them. And down they went into the fire.”

  “What fire?” Christopher said, looking toward the window. “There’s nothing left burning in Galigali, surely.”

  “I might have killed Candy Quackenbush, but I’ve resurrected Galigali.” Mater Motley turned and walked back to look at the volcano. “So many resurrections. First Boa, then you, now Galigali.”

  “I was never dead, lady,” he replied. “If I had been, I would have remained that way. Happily.”

  He didn’t look back at her. He just kept staring at the ever-multiplying streams of magma as they coursed down over the volcano’s flank.

  “Stop obsessing on the girl! Did she really mean something to you?”

  “Yes. She reminded me I’d been in love once. And that maybe I had deserved to be loved in return.” He stared past his grandmother at the wasteland visible through the battle-deck windows behind her. “She was quite a creature. Look! There! Her last miracle. She made them a glyph. That’s how they got away. She made a glyph big enough to carry all of the prisoners.”

  “Impossible,” the Empress told him.

  “I’m looking at it,” Christopher replied, pointing past her.

  The Empress turned, following the direction of his finger, out through the battle-deck window.

  Beyond the empty camp was a stretch of boulder-strewn wasteland, and beyond that, the Void. An empty darkness, into which was headed the immense glyph that Candy helped create.

  “They’ve gone over the Edge of the World,” one of the stitchling Commanders remarked.

  “Indeed they have,” the Empress replied.

  “That’s the end of them then,” a second Commander said. “There’s nothing to hold them up out there. They’ll fall forever.”

  “How did she do that?” Mater Motley said to herself.

  “Does it matter?” Carrion said. “She’s dead. She won’t be doing it again.”

  The Empress responded as though he hadn’t spoken.

  “The amount of power that takes. Where did she get it?” She talked very quietly, almost to herself.

  “They don’t seem to be falling,” Carrion said. “Are you sure that’s the Edge of the World?”

  A copy of the Almenak had already been brought out, and the map in it carefully studied. Christopher went over to the Commanders and snatched the copy away to scrutinize for himself.

  “Of course none of the information in these wretched Almenaks are reliable,” he said. To the north of Scoriae, the Sea of Izabella fell away into a featureless darkness, along the edge of which was written: This is the Edge of the World. Beyond the edge, etched in white letters against the blackness were four letters, widely sprawled:

  VOID

  “They will fall,” one of the Commanders said.

  “Forever and ever,” said Motley.

  “We should go to the very edge then,” Carrion said. He was smiling now, genuinely pleased at the prospect. “I want to see what this Void looks like.”

  “I already gave the order,” the Empress said. “We’ll be waiting for them if they attempt to turn around.”

  The Stormwalker had taken one lightning stride, and was about to take a second, moving the two-mile-long vehicle over the deserted camp toward the Edge of the Abarat with extraordinary speed.

  “I see no sign of her glyph falling,” Carrion said.

  “It will,” his grandmother said. “There’s nothing out there to hold it up. See for yourself.” She directed Christopher’s attention to the port side of the Stormwalker. There, beyond a stretch of solidified lava, the Izabella rushed on toward the edge of the world, where it fell away, throwing up churning clouds of spray.

  “Impressive,” Carrion said.

  “Yet her glyph still flies,” the Old Hag groaned. “How? Where does power like that come from?” She glanced at her grandson. “Did she ever talk to you about these powers?”

  “The girl? No. But I have a theory. . . .” he said coyly.

  “I’m listening.”

  “The blind man who was with her. I knew him. Not the face, of course. There’s nothing left there, but . . . the eyes. Something about the eyes . . .”

  “Don’t be coy. Talk!”

  “It’s ridiculous,” he said, “but . . . I remember them from a dream. I was just a boy, and they looked down at me. Then he whispered something to me . . .”

  “What did the man say?”

  Carrion’s gaze slid in his grandmother’s direction for a second or two. Then he looked away.

  “He looked down at me and he said, ‘I love you, Little One.’”

  Chapter 63

  Pigs

  “. . . YETHASIHA.”

  The stairway of fog had understood very well the urgency of Candy and Zephario’s situation. It had formed beneath their feet, and instantly closed up like an accordion, lifting them up into the belly of the Stormwalker through an open door that then closed very quickly, protecting its passengers from the explosion that peppered the hull on which they were sprawled with a number of projectiles that struck it like bullets.

  They were alive. The breath had been knocked out of them, and they were a lot closer to the Hag of Gorgossium than either of them would have wished, but they were alive.

  “That was quite a word,” Candy said. “I’ve never wielded something that moved so quickly—”

  She stopped, s
ilenced by the sound of two low-ranking stitchling soldiers engaged in a fierce exchange as they opened an iron door that brought them into this portion of the hold. Judging by their banter, the Old Hag’s seamstresses had devoted considerably little time to their mental capacities.

  “There’s Quagmites on this vessel. I swears.”

  “You and your Quagmites, Shaveos,” the other stitchling said as it sniffed the air. The sound of its voice changed suddenly. “Huh. You right. You right.”

  “See! You smells it too?” said Shaveos excitedly. “That’s a Uman Been. I told you I knows it, Lummuk!”

  “How’d you know what a Uman Been smells likes?” Lummuk wanted to know.

  “I were on the Wormwood, whens it went the Hereafter.”

  “You saw that Chickumtomb?”

  “I did. I saw all that drownsd.”

  “Were it horrible?”

  “Oya. It were Viley!” Shaveos said gravely. “I was trown out the ship. I ended up in . . . I forgets. I still got the paper!” Candy heard the sound of the stitchling rummaging for something. “Here. Hold my knife,” he said.

  This probably wasn’t a bad time to snatch a look at the enemy, Candy thought. She peered out from behind the tarpaulin-covered crates where she and Zephario had hidden and got a clearer look at stitchlings than she’d ever had before. There was an intelligence in their behavior, though not in their speech, that she hadn’t expected to see in the sacks of walking mud. And she noticed that the mud didn’t simply fill the sack, the way dirt might, rather it pushed out of little holes, as though it was constantly in the process of reinventing itself. There was something in the weave of the sack that then crawled all over the stitchlings’ forms, repairing any larger tears by crudely restitching the thread. They were, quite obviously, as she had been, Two In One: the thing occupied, and the occupying thing.

  These two stitchlings in particular were chaotic, asymmetrical beings. One had an arm that ended in something more like a lobster claw than fingers, while the other, thanks to some seamstress’s whim, had no less than four hands at the end of one arm, two pairs set palm to palm, and no hand at all on the other arm.

  Lobster Arm was apparently Shaveos, because it was he who now brought a tattered piece of folded paper out of the jacket of his mud-and-blood-splattered uniform. He pulled out a pair of spectacles with both lenses cracked, and peered at the map.