Abarat

nightmares that moved in the fluids were more active than ever, lending him an even more terrible appearance. Nor was there any way to predict where he might next appear. Sometimes he was seen in the Gallows Forest, feeding scraps of rotted meat to the vultures that assembled in stinking flocks there. Sometimes he was seen down in the mines, sitting in one of the exhausted seams. Sometimes he was spotted in one of the smaller towers, where Mater Motley's seamstresses worked on creating an army of stitchlings.

Those who did have the bad luck to encounter him in one place or another were always closely interrogated by those who did not. Everybody wanted to know what the likely mood of their lord might be. Did he look angry, perhaps? Not really, came the reply. Did he look distracted, as though his thoughts were elsewhere? No, not distracted either.

Finally, some brave soul asked the question that everybody wanted an answer to, but all were too afraid to voice. Did he look demented ?

Ah now, came the reply, yes perhaps that was it; perhaps he did act a little crazily. The way he talked to himself as he wandered among the gallows, or sat in the tunnels, speaking softly as though he imagined that he was talking to someone very dear to him. A friend, perhaps? Yes; that was it. He spoke as though he was sharing secrets with a friend. And sometimes, as he talked, he would reach into the seething fluids that he breathed and he would fish out a nightmare, and proffer it, as if to his invisible guest. The gift of a nightmare.

Was all this evidence of insanity? In any man other than Christopher Carrion the answer would surely have been yes . But Carrion was a law unto himself. Who could judge the depths of his thoughts, or of his pain?

He kept no councils; partook of nobody's advice. If he was planning a war, then it was not with the assistance of his generals. If he was planning murder, then he did not look to the advice of assassins.

The only clue to the subject of his present meditations was a name he was several times heard to mutter; a name that did not yet mean anything much to those who heard it, but very soon would.

The name he spoke was Candy . He said into himself not once but many times, as though repetition would somehow summon up the owner and bring her near to him.

But she did not come. For all his power, Christopher Carrion was alone at Midnight, having nothing for company but the vultures at his heels, and the nightmares at his lips, and the echoes of that name he spoke, over and over again.

'Candy.'

'Candy.'

'Candy.'

His behavior did not go unnoticed, or unreported. There were creatures in the shadows all around the island, watching what Carrion did, and bringing reports of it to the top of the Thirteenth Tower, where the Lord of Midnight's grandmother, Mater Motley, sat in her high-backed rocking chair, sewing stitchlings.

It was her perpetual labor; she never stopped. She didn't even sleep. She was too old to sleep, she'd once said. She had no dreams left to dream. So she sewed and rocked and listened to the stories of her grandson's lonely vigils.

Sometimes, when the skins of the stitchlings had piled up around her, and she was filled with a strange dementia of her own, Mater Motley also talked to herself. Unlike her grandson, she did not call out for company. She spoke in an ancient language known as High Abaratic, which was incomprehensible to all those who listened to the old woman. But the listeners didn't need to comprehend her words to understand what Mater Motley was debating with herself. One look at the army of stitchlings she was assembling provided the answer to that question.

War was her subject; war was her obsession. She was sewing the skins of soldiers together, and planning their deployment as she labored. Over the years the old woman and her seamstresses had created tens of thousands of warriors. Most of them, having only mud for muscle, needed neither to eat nor breathe. She had them assembled in great labyrinths beneath the island, where they waited in the darkness for the call to arms.

And while they waited in the bowels of Gorgossium, Mater Motley waited too. Waited, sewed and chatted to herself in the language of the Ancients about the great coming time when Christopher Carrion would declare war upon the islands of light, and her army—her vast, soulless army of mud and thread and patches—would march to war in the name of Midnight.

As for the architect of Commexo City, Rojo Pixler, he had labors and ambitions and meditations of his own.

At the heart of his silver city, hidden away from the busy citizens that filled the streets of that metropolis, there was a great circular corridor. A hundred feet in height, it was lined from floor to ceiling—on both of its walls —with screens. This was the place to which Pixler's tens of thousands of spies, the voyeuristic children of Voorzangler's Universal Eye, sent their reports.

It had become a place that Rojo Pixler frequented more and more often, circling the corridor for hours on end, inspecting the numberless screens. In truth, he was not really interested in the information that came from Tazmagor or Babilonium or the Yebba Dim Day. It was those reports that came up from the depths of the Izabella that had lately caught Pixler's attention.

Hour upon Hour he would traverse the Ring on his flying disc—his hands locked behind his back, his feet set wide apart studying the screens for news from the deepest trenches of the Izabella. And why? Because there was life down there. His fishy spies, wandering deeper than they usually went, had sighted vast claw marks on the walls of the crevices, indisputable evidence that there was some order of creature in the depths of the Izabella that demanded his study.

When he had consulted the grimoires he'd had stolen, searching their heavy pages for some clue as to the nature of these beasts, he had found more than he expected.

In the seventh volume of Lumeric's Six , he'd discovered an apocalyptic text that described all too well the occupants of the abysses of the Izabella. They were a race of creatures called the Requiax — beasts of sublime wickedness that lived, according to Dado Lumeric 'in the profounde entrailes of the Mother Sea .'

They would not always remain there, Lumeric prophesized. There would come a time when these creatures would rise out of the depths.

'… they have long hungered ,' Lumeric wrote, 'for that time when darkness fell upon these many islandes of ours, erasing the lighte of sunne, moone and starres. In that terrible Midnighte, when all lighte hath passed away, they will come like a great pestilence; and commit such crimes against life as will change the order of thinges forever .

'This I, Dado Lumeric, tell to be a thruthfulle prophesie, and count myself gladde to my soul's core that I will not be upon the living stage to witness these sightes,for it will be beyond the wittes of men to endure. The great cities will go to duste, and the great men and women also, and all be carried away by the winde…'

Pixler took Lumeric's words to heart, especially the part about the crumbling cities. To see Commexo City wiped away? Erased as though it had never even existed? It was unthinkable.

He had to be ready for this 'terrible Midnighte ,' when the Requiax rose into view. Plans had to be laid; defenses strengthened. If the Requiax appeared, as Lumeric predicted, he and his dream city would be ready to defy the prophecy, and stand against the darkness.

Meanwhile, the architect of Commexo City rode the Ring, around and around, studying the screens, watching for some sign of movement in the uncharted depths of Mama Izabella…

It was snowing in Chickentown. Or so it seemed.

Candy stood in the backyard of 34 Followell Street while fat flecks of white swirled around her and