rows across the front of the Empress’s gown blew apart, as the son or daughter inside woke up to the proximity of Zephario.
Candy could not know, of course, what that moment felt like: soul liberating soul liberating soul. But she saw how it looked clearly enough, and it was no gentle business. Small though the dolls were they burst with astonishing violence, their coils of ragged cloth like entrails bursting from poorly sewn anatomies, as something both more abstracted and more real was set free.
If there was any way to distinguish one child from another, or the children from their mother, Candy couldn’t see it. They were simply points of brightness that burst from their squalid prisons, weaving around one another in front of the Hag as if to taunt her with their long-awaited freedom, then forming a cloud of ecstatic light that rose as its numbers swelled, the motion of the motes so fast that the trails they left upon the air seemed to form something that was almost a solid form: a ragged globe of threaded light, glorious in celebration of their reunion.
The effect upon Mater Motley was catastrophic. Each time one of the dolls came apart, her body convulsed, the scale of the motion mounting, so that she was quickly reduced to the status of a doll herself, helpless in the grip of forces she could not control.
It was not for want of trying. Twice she had attempted to summon up wieldings to drive Zephario back, but the violence with which she was being thrown around robbed her of the breath to finish them. Once only did she manage to utter four words, her eyes upon Candy as she spoke them:
“I WILL FIND YOU,” she said.
It was an uninspired response to the exquisite complexities of all that had come before, but Candy knew the viciousness of the woman cursing her too well to take the words lightly. Yes, the Empress of the Abarat had been cast down from her place of power. And yes, the souls she had most prized had been set free, the remnants of their prisons hanging off her dress, gutted. Yes, she was weak at that moment, and could perhaps have been destroyed.
But none standing or lying or kneeling there knew how it might be done. Minutes before she had been the very image of Imperial power, descending the flank of Mount Galigali with an army of burning assassins following upon her heels. Now she was in tatters. But she was still too dangerous a creature, and too unpredictable, for anyone to attempt to put her out of her misery.
In truth it was this most inward of wounds that saved Candy’s life, for after Zephario’s soul-passage through her body, Candy’s strength was utterly depleted. Had the Hag simply picked up a stone, she could have effortlessly beaten Candy’s brains out there and then and destroyed her nemesis in a heartbeat.
But the Empress couldn’t bear the idea of being seen in this broken, humiliated state, even though she’d won. The only memory of her she wanted anyone to take away from this battle was of her triumphant descent down the slope of Mount Galigali.
So, in a manner of restraint and decorum befitting a true Empress, she turned her back on the girl from Chickentown and very quickly made magical arrangements for her exit. She cast her eyes toward the bright place overhead where the comet of Carrions had briefly sundered the air and departed, leaving only a glimpse of that paradise to which they had gone, visible behind the door through which they’d passed.
The Empress was, of course, no longer wracked by the convulsions that the dolls had caused. All that unpleasantness was over. She could form words of summoning, sufficient unto the task of calling forth from the lava crust beneath her feet seven petals, enclosing her in a sheath of mottled gray and black, like a toxic flower that had yet to blossom. Only as it was about to close up, completely concealing Mater Motley from sight, did she utter one final instruction to the Other in her midst, in a language eons older even Old Abaratian: the ancient mind-words of the Nephauree. Candy didn’t need to know the language to understand what the creature had been told. The sounds of the words conjured pictures, which appeared with appalling clarity in her mind’s eye. She saw the ground crack. She saw rushing water. She saw the Void.
Then the petal shroud closed around Mater Motley, and sealed her up completely. And having done so, folded itself upon itself, and was gone. The moment the Empress was out of sight, every eye in the Abarat witnessed the appearance of what Midnight’s hand had cancelled: the light. The sacbrood fell from the sky, withered, and turned to ash.
It was a momentary triumph, for the Old Hag had left the Nephauree in her stead, asking of it one last favor: make sure that those many thousands who had witnessed her presence here did not live to tell of what they had witnessed.
Chapter 74
The Hammer of the Nephauree
“CANDY . . .”
Gazza was there, standing a little distance away from her, as though he wasn’t entirely certain that whatever he’d just witnessed happening was finally over, now that she was out of the fugue state that had put such a strange expression onto her face.
“It’s all right,” she said, looking up at him. She let him study her a while, to reassure himself that he did indeed have his Candy back with him. “
“That thing . . .”
“The Nephauree?”
She glanced back over her shoulder. There were little bursts of brightness in the clots in the cloud of the Nephauree, as though its vast gaseous intelligence was speaking to itself, turning over possibilities.
“She instructed it to leave no witnesses,” Candy said.
“So now it’s going to kill everybody?”
“I would think so. If you were Empress of the Abarat would you want anyone—even a stitchling—to be able to report what they’d just seen? Poor Malingo. He’s already gone. I’m afraid we’re going to be following him very soon.”
“You’re not giving up?” Gazza said. He sounded appalled. “You, Candy Quackenbush? You can’t give up. What about the people whose lives you saved? The people here, thousands of them.”
“They . . . saved themselves.”
“Well, perhaps. But you showed them how to go on . . . and why.”
He looked away from her and attempted to clear his own eyes of tears with a quick wiping of his cheek.
“Please, Gazz . . .” she said.
“None of this was an accident, Candy; you meeting me, us coming here. I know you think you just brought more bad things here than good. And maybe Malingo
“I’ve got nothing left in me, Gazza. I couldn’t conjure a peanut, never mind a glyph.”
“We can still find a way out of here.”
“I don’t see how. We’re trapped.”
Behind them was the Void; in front of them the liquid fire of Mount Galigali, and to either side of the island the spumy waters of the Izabella, pouring off over the Edge of the World into Oblivion. Candy was right. There was no way out.
Meanwhile, the Nephauree was responding to Mater Motley’s last instruction; its virtually passive state became suddenly activated by the prospect of slaughter. The eruptions of light within each of the clotted areas threw out filaments of light, like lines drawn between constellations in the roiling darkness of the Nephauree’s internal universe.
As each line found its destination and moved on to the next, its brightness intensified, as though some vast mathematical equation was being solved in this geometry; a theorem concerned, paradoxically, with the ordered escalation of chaos. The speed with which the calculations took place continued to increase; it was only a matter of time before it reached critical mass.
“We’re not just going to stand here and look at it, are we?” Gazza said.
“No.”
