Abarat

But then she'd effectively be in Pixler's control, wouldn't she? In his city, as his guest. Or his prisoner.

'I can see you're having second thoughts,' Pixler said, reading the confusion on Candy's face. 'You're thinking about a comfortable place to lay your head, no doubt.'

Candy tried to block out his seductions by concentrating on something else. She turned her attention to the moth.

Off between the trees, Doggett's team was close to bringing down the creature's body. There was much shouting and a flurry of orders, then—sooner than any of the workmen had anticipated—the moth's corpse came crashing down out of the trees. As it struck the ground, it erupted in a brilliant shower of light and color.

But there was something else in the substance of the creature that was also set free as it flew apart. Candy saw four or five skeletal faces rise up out of the blazing remains of the moth and weave their way skyward.

The spectacle didn't just draw her attention. It drew that of Pixler and Birch too. Candy seized her moment. She cautiously retreated a step, then another, then another. Birch and Pixler hadn't noticed: the disintegration of the moth was like a fireworks display; it claimed all their attention.

After five backward steps Candy turned and ran.

It didn't take her long to get to the other side of the copse, and there she paused to take a backward glance. She could see Birch and Pixler, silhouetted against the brightness of the moth. By now they had both realized that she'd gone. They were looking around, obviously trying to locate her. But apparently they'd been staring into the blaze of the disintegrating moth for too long, and it was still blinding them. Or perhaps the darkness simply concealed her. Whatever the reason, when they looked in her direction—as now and then they did—they failed to see her.

Pixler yelled something at Birch, who immediately went back to the balloon's gondola.

He's gone for more men , Candy thought. I'd better get out of here .

She turned her back on the men and the moth and surveyed the starlit terrain in front of her. Ninnyhammer was an island of gentle hills; on top of one of those hills, perhaps two miles from where she was standing, was a building with a large dome upon it. There was light in its windows, so if it was a house, then somebody was at home, and if it was a religious building of some kind (which the dome made her think perhaps it was), then it was open for worship. Or sanctuary, which was what she needed right now.

She didn't look back now at Rojo Pixler, or the moth with its colors and its weaving ghosts. She simply started down the gentle slope that led away from the trees. Very soon, the copse was out of sight, and the men's voices had been carried away by the wind.

She was alone for the first time since she'd arrived in the Abarat. There were no hunters, no Sea- Skippers; no Izarith, no Samuel Klepp, no John Mischief and his brothers.

Just her, Miss Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, under a heaven filled with alien stars.

From somewhere deep inside her a great—and unforeseen— surge of joy appeared.

Out of sheer pleasure she started to sing as she went. It wasn't a song from the Hereafter that came to her lips. It was the absurd little ditty she'd heard the Sea-Skippers sing.

'O woe is me!
O woe is me!
I used to have a hamster tree.
But it was eaten by a newt
And now I have no cuddly fruit.
O woe is me!
O woe is me!
I used to have a hamster tree!'

For some uncanny reason she remembered it perfectly, as though she'd known it all her life, which was of course impossible. Yet here it was, coming to her lips as easily as some rhyme she'd been taught at kindergarten.

Oh, well , she thought as she gave the song full throat, there's another mystery .

And content that somewhere on the journey ahead she would find the answer to that mystery—along with something to eat—she went on her way, singing of newts and hamster trees.

24. DIGGER AND DRAGONS

John mischief hadn't been making an idle boast when he spoke of himself—or more correctly, of themselves , the brothers—as master criminals. During their long felonious career, they had stolen from all manner of places, coming away with all kinds of hauls. Only once had they been arrested, and slipped custody while being transported back to the Yebba Dim Day by throwing themselves overboard.

There were too many thefts for the brothers to remember every one, but there were some that they still liked to revisit in those idle moments of happy self-congratulation. Their burglary of the chateau of Malleus Nyce on Huffell's Hill, for instance, had been extremely profitable. They'd come away with every costume Nyce had ever worn to the Cacodemonic Carnivals on Soma Plume: sixty-one outfits, all set with precious jewels and sewn with Thread of Sirius. Just a year or so later, they had broken into the prison on Scoriae and stolen all the tattoos off the body of the gangster Monkai-Monkai, leaving him as naked as the day he was born.

Then there had been their picking of the locks on the door of the Repository of Remembrance, that contained one hundred and thirty-one rooms of treasures that had once belonged to the great and the good of the Abarat, going back to the time when the islands were twenty-four Tribal Territories.

Nothing in the Repository had been of any real value. There had been no jewels, no precious metals. But the rooms had contained objects of infinitely more value than wealth. Here, collected and cataloged on the Repository's shelves was a hoard of the heart: the nursery toys of kings, the playthings of princes, the mud pies that potentates had dreamed would one day be palaces. The potential purchasers of all these objects of lovely inconsequence were the people across the archipelago who still idolized their one-time owners; and the brothers had anticipated making so many millions of zem they would never have to steal another fork.

But it was not to be. Monkai-Monkai had broken out of prison two days later and had come after the brothers and the only way Mischief and his siblings had escaped with their lives was by handing over their booty from the Repository to him.

But the treasure the brothers had been most proud of stealing, because stealing it had proved so difficult, was a painting known as The Beautiful Moment .

It had hung in what was known as the Stone House, the possession of the sometime lord of the Islands of Day, King Claus. Since the death of his daughter, Claus had become an obsessive eater, and weighed over a thousand pounds. He ate and slept in a vast clockwork car, and had chased the thieves in it when he'd awoken to find his painting being stolen.

That had been a close call. But the brothers had been proud of the job. And indeed so enamored of what they'd stolen that they had almost considered keeping it.