Abarat: The First Book of Hours

priests, to lay down the foundations of a New World and rebuild it in his image.

“Lord?”

The voice that had disturbed his thoughts was not that of Houlihan, as he’d expected. It was one of his grandmother’s many stitchlings, creatures sewn together from skin and leather and fabric, then filled with a living mud. This particular stitchling was called Knotchek, and he was a wretched piece of work in every way.

“What is it?” Carrion said to him.

“Your grandmother, Mater Motley, summons you, my lord. She needs to talk with you about the visitation you have had from Commexo City.”

“She misses nothing, does she?” Carrion remarked.

“Little, m’lord,” Knotchek agreed.

“Well, I cannot come now,” Carrion told the stitchling. “I have too much urgent business.”

“She told me… um…”

Knotchek was getting nervous. Plainly this was not a message he wished to deliver.

“Go on,” Carrion said.

“She says… she forbids any further presence on Gorgossium of visitors from Commexo.”

“She forbids?’ Carrion said. There was a menacing undertow to his voice. The nightmares in the water around his head grew agitated. “She forbids me. That harridan? That seamstress?”

He caught Knotchek with one backward sweep of his gloved hand, so powerful it threw the stitchling ten yards.

“Go back to her!” Carrion shouted. “And you tell her if she ever forbids me ANYTHING EVER AGAIN I will loose a pack of nightmares among her little tribe of stitchlings and drive them to tear down the Thirteenth Tower, till there is nothing left but a heap of rubble! DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?”

As he spoke, he moved toward Knotchek as though to strike him again. The stitchling drew itself up into a little ball of terror and waited to be brutalized.

But the blow never fell. Houlihan had emerged from the gallery, smiling.

“She’s found!” he exclaimed.

Carrion waved Knotchek away. “Go. Tell her,” he said.

Knotchek fled into the crimson mist and was gone.

“A problem, sir?” Houlihan said.

“Only my grandmother. She has too many fancy ideas about herself. One of these days she’s going to go too far. So… you say you’ve found her? Show me.”

Houlihan led Carrion back inside. The same image was now playing on all sixteen screens of Voorzangler’s device. The white-suited cyclops had a smug smile on his face.

“She was in the Yebba Dim Day, in a house down on Krux Street, which is in the Fishermen’s Ghetto. I must say, my lord, I can’t see why you would have any interest in her. She doesn’t look like much.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Carrion said.

He approached the screens. The images before him were crystal clear. There was the girl, staring straight at the eyes of the spy, which moved to keep her centered and focused whenever she turned or backed away.

Carrion turned to Mendelson Shape. “Are you absolutely sure that this is the girl who was with Mischief?”

Shape nodded.

“No doubt?”

“No, Lord. None.”

Carrion returned his gaze to the screens. “So…” he said quietly, staring at the girl. “Who are you?” He continued to stare at the image for several seconds, as though his eyes were attempting to interrogate the screen. Then he glanced around at Voorzangler.

“When did this happen?”

“Three hours ago. Maybe four.”

“So she’s probably still in the Yebba Dim Day. What do you think, Otto?”

“There have been some troubles there,” Voorzangler said, before Houlihan had a chance to respond. “The dock collapsed. So there have been no boats getting out these last couple of hours.”

“So she is still there,” Houlihan said.

“What’s the big deal?” Voorzangler said. “She’s just—”

Carrion suddenly raised his finger to silence the doctor and stared with renewed intensity at the image on the screens. The stranger from the Hereafter had become angry, and her face—recorded by the very thing that was irritating her—had changed.

The girlishness had gone out of it. A young woman had been ignited by the fury she felt.

The change had Carrion entranced.

“Now what is this?” he said, so, so softly. He narrowed his eyes, taking off his glove and putting his naked hand on one of the screens as if wishing he could reach into it and seize hold of the girl herself.

“Do I know you?” he said, his voice even more mellifluous. “I do, don’t I?”

The screen suddenly went blank. Carrion let out a little sob of pain, as though he’d been woken from a trance.

“It ends there,” Voorzangler said.

Carrion didn’t speak for a long while.

He simply continued to stare at the blank screen with an expression of profound bemusement on his face. Voorzangler opened his mouth to speak again, but Houlihan hushed him with a sharp look.

Finally, after fully two minutes, Carrion said: “Shape?”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Go to Vesper’s Rock and wait for me there.”

“Am I to go after the girl?”

“Oh yes. You are to go after her. But not by glyph. I’m going to give you something a little more in keeping with the significance of your mission.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just go,” Carrion said, still staring at the blank screen.

Shape hurried away.

“There is something in that face, Otto, that makes me think my enemies are wilier than I suspected. They play with dreams now.”

“Dreams?” asked the Criss-Cross Man.

“Yes, Otto. I have dreamed that face. That innocent face. But who…?” He glanced up and met Voorzangler’s strange stare. “Oh, are you still here?” he said to the doctor. “You may go. Thank Mr. Pixler for his kindness, will you?”

“The Universal Eye,” Voorzangler said. “I have to return to Commexo City with it.”

“No,” said Carrion, very plainly. “I’ll keep it here for now.”

“No, no, no, you, you, you don’t understand,” Voorzangler said, panic making his words skip. “The, the science of, of—”

“—is of no interest to me, Voorzangler. So don’t fret yourself. I won’t be stealing back any of your precious Verities. It’s her I’m interested in. And until I have the real thing in front of me, I will keep your Universal Eye.”

“It’s, it’s just not, just not—”

The doctor didn’t get to finish his reply. Carrion was on him in a heartbeat, his hands at the man’s throat. Voorzangler tried to drag Carrion’s huge grasp away from his windpipe, but his own thin little fingers weren’t equal to the job.

Carrion lifted him off the floor; his feet were dangling in the air.

“You were saying, Doctor?” Carrion said.