“Oh, Lordy Lou, are we ever,” Candy said.
“Then
Candy jumped into the boat. Its boards creaked.
“If ye’ve cracked her boards and you drown, don’t blame me.” Ruthus grinned.
“We won’t drown,” Malingo said following Candy. “This girl has work to do. Great work!”
Candy smiled. (It was true. What, or how, or when—she had no idea. But it was true.)
Ruthus was racing to the wheelhouse yelling to Malingo as he did so: “Cut the rope, geshrat. Be quick!”
The dock was reverberating as the mob, its numbers increasing, followed Green Beard’s lead.
“I see you, girl!” he yelled, “and I know what you are!”
“Rope’s severed, Ruthus!”
“Hold on, then! And pray!”
“Your crimes against the Abarat must be punished—”
The last word was repeated by every hate-filled throat in the crowd.
The third time, the threat was drowned out by the raucous roar of Ruthus’s little boat, as its engine came to life.
A cloud of yellow exhaust fumes erupted from the stern of the boat, its density blotting all sight of the mob, just as its din had blotted all sound.
Ruthus’s work was not over. They had got away from the dock, but they were not yet out of the harbor. And there were more opportunistic fishermen bringing in cargos of garbage all the time. If Ruthus’s boat had been any larger, it would have been caught in the confusion. But it was a tiny thing, and nimble-like, especially with Ruthus at the wheel. By the time the smoke trail had cleared, the boat was out of the harbor and into the Straits of Dusk.
Chapter 4
The Kid
CANDY’S ESCAPE FROM THE mob in the Yebba Dim Day had not gone unnoticed. The greatest concentration of eyes spying her jeopardy were at Three O’Clock in the Morning. At the heart of that extraordinary city was a vast round mansion, and at the heart of the mansion, a circular viewing chamber, where the innumerable mechanical spies that were scattered around the Abarat—perfect imitations of flora and fauna so cunningly crafted as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, but for the fact that each carried a miniscule camera—reported what they saw. There were literally thousands of screens in the Circular Room covering the inner and outer walls, and Rojo Pixler would have been there, watching the world he had brought into being—its little tragedies, it little farces, its little spectacles of love and death on full display—but today he was not riding around the room on his levitation disc, surveying the archipelago. The team of island-watchers was currently led by his trusted colleague, Dr. Voorzangler, wearing his beloved spectacles which offered the illusion that his two eyes were one. It was he who was noting any significant comings and goings, one of which was that of Candy Quackenbush. Voorzangler ordered his second, third, and fourth in command to be sure that each reminded the other to remind Voorzangler to report the movements of the girl from the Hereafter to the great architect when he finally returned.
Though the phrase “when he returns” usually carried little significance, today it did. Today the great architect was surveying the site of his next great creation: an undersea city in the deepest trenches of the Sea of Izabella. Why? Voorzangler had asked Pixler more than once to which the answer had always been the same: to put a name to the hitherto nameless, and embrace the wonders that surely existed in the lightless deeps. And when innocent endeavors had been achieved and those creatures had been catalogued, then he would be able to undertake the true objective of this endeavor (one which he had only shared with Voorzangler): to lay in the hidden habitat of these unknown life-forms the foundation of a deep-water city so ambitious in scale and design that the blazing immensity of Commexo City would be as a rough sketch might be to the finished masterwork.
Even now, as Voorzangler watched Candy Quackenbush leave the Yebba Dim Day, Pixler was visible on an adjacent screen climbing into his bathyscaphe, giving the camera a confident wave as he did so. Inside he had only artificial intelligences beside him, but their cold company was all he needed.
His face appeared now in the fish-eye lens that relayed his presence at the master controls of the bathyscaphe. His voice, when he spoke, had a metallic tone.
“Don’t look so worried, Voorzangler,” Pixler said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Of course, sir,” the doctor replied. “But I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t a little concerned.”
“Boasting now?” Pixler said.
“About what, sir?”
“About your humanity. There aren’t very many employees of the company who could say such a thing.” Pixler ran his hands over the bathyscaphe’s controls, turning on all the vessel’s functions. “Smile, Voorzangler,” he said. “We’re making history, you and I.”
“I just wish we were making it on another day,” Voorzangler replied.
“Why?”
“Just . . . bad dreams, sir. Every rational man is allowed a few irrational dreams, wouldn’t you say?”
“What did you dream?” Pixler wanted to know. The bathyscaphe’s door slammed closed and sealed with a hiss. An artificial voice announced that the winches were all fully functional.
“It was nothing of consequence.”
“Then tell me what you dreamed, Voorzangler.”
Voorzangler’s single eye dodged left and right, looking for a way to avoid meeting the great architect’s inquiring gaze. But Pixler had always been able to stare him down.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. I dreamed that everything went perfectly well with the descent except —”
“Except?”
“Once you got into the very deepest place . . .”
“Yes?”
“There was a city there already.”
“Ah. And its occupants?”
“They’d gone, thousands of years before. Great scaly fins they’d had. And beauty in their faces. There were mosaics on the walls. Such bright, ambitious eyes.”
“And what happened to them?”
Voorzangler shook his head. “They left no clue. Unless their perfect city
“What kind of clue is perfection?”
“Well, you would know, sir.”
Pixler was not so easily persuaded. “Why did you have to have that stupid dream? You may have cursed my entire enterprise.”
“We’re scientists, sir. We don’t believe in curses.”
“Don’t tell me what I believe in. Find me the Kid.”
“He’s being searched for.”
“And not found?”
“Not so far.”
“Don’t bother. I just thought he’d want to see me off.”
The automatic doors of the bathyscaphe were closing. A flicker of anxiety crossed the great architect’s face. But he would not be commanded by it. The three massive winches—one of them supplying power to the bathyscaphe, the second delivering clean air, the third, and largest, bearing the weight of the immense vessel— were paying out steadily now. Voorzangler looked at the readings on the screens that surrounded the cabin. Hundreds of tiny cameras, like shoals of one-eyed fish, circled the descent column down which the bathyscaphe
