“Almost.”
“Well, hurry. I don’t have all night.” Carrion allowed himself a smile. “Though one of these days,” he murmured to himself, “I will.”
“Will,
“Have all night.”
Ignacio nodded, not understanding, and continued to beat the bones. A cloud of human dust rose into his face. He sneezed, and spat out a wad of phlegm and dust. Then he hammered on for a minute or more just to be sure the job was properly done. Carrion was a perfectionist, and he wanted to please the Nightmare Man, which was Ignacio’s secret name for the Lord of Midnight.
Eventually, he stood up, hammer in hand, and surveyed his handiwork.
“I always think they look better this way,” he said.
“Everybody looks better that way,” Carrion said, pressing Ignacio aside. “Go and alert Shape. He’s down at the beach eating.”
“Should we come straight back up?” Ignacio said.
He knew very well that some piece of secret conjuration was about to take place and was eager to witness it.
“No,” said Carrion. “You’ll know when the work’s done. Now get out of here.”
Ignacio retreated, leaving the Lord of Midnight to crouch down and put his finger into the pounded bones, like a child about to make mud pies. The Nightmare Man paused for a moment, breathing in two lungfuls of the fluid that seethed around his head before he began the labors before him. Then, fortified by the horrible visions that filled his every fiber, he began to draw in the dust the outline of the thing he intended to raise from it.
Ignacio found Mendelson Shape, whom he knew a little from various labors they’d performed together for Carrion, sitting on the starlit beach beside a small cairn of pebbles. He was adding his own choice of stones to the pile.
“Done eating?” Ignacio said.
“I killed something, then I wasn’t hungry,” Mendelson said, glancing over at the immense overturned crab, its leg span fully six feet, which lay a little way down the beach. Mendelson had torn out its underbelly and begun to eat the cold meat of the thing, but hadn’t got very far.
“May I?” said Ignacio.
“Help yourself.”
“Pity to let it go to waste.”
He went to the crab and proceeded to plunge his hands into its gray-green entrails, claiming two healthy fistfuls of its bitter guts, his favorite portion of the animal, in part because it was the most despised. He was one of the rare—perhaps blessed—stitchlings who ate. Most of his kind had no means of digestion and elimination. Ignacio was a happy exception. Two thirds of his body were still functioning as ordinary human anatomy. He was plagued by constipation, and consequently, piles, but it was a small price to pay for the pleasure of eating the meat of a crab that still had a couple of nervous twitches in it.
He glanced back up the beach at Mendelson.
“What are you here to do?” he asked.
“I’m here to ride whatever he’s raising back there,” Mendelson said gloomily. “And then I’m to fetch some girl for him.”
“Is he thinking of getting married then?”
“Not to this one,” Mendelson said sourly.
“You know her?”
“We’ve had our encounters. She comes from the Hereafter.”
“Really?”
Ignacio seized the crab by one of its spiny legs and hauled the carcass up over the stones to where Mendelson squatted.
“You went to the Hereafter?” he said.
Shape shrugged. “Yeah,” he said.
“And? What was it like?”
“What do you mean, what was it like? Oh. You mean: is it heaven?”
He looked up at Ignacio, his beady eyes bright with contempt, even in the murk. “Is that what you think?”
“No,” Ignacio said defensively. “Not necessarily.”
“Angels guiding the souls of the dead to the immortal cities of light? The way the old preachers used to tell it?”
“I don’t believe in all that nonsense,” Ignacio said, concealing his true hopes on the matter, which had indeed been optimistic. He’d liked the idea that somewhere beyond the Sea of Izabella lay a world where a stitchling such as himself might be healed, his hurts melted away, his mismatchings erased. But much as he wanted to believe in what the preachers pronounced, he trusted Shape.
“So, this girl…”he went on, cracking the crab’s huge claws and trying to sound indifferent to the news he’d just heard.
“Candy Quackenbush?”
“That’s her name?”
“That’s her name.”
“She followed you here, and now you have to kill her?”
“I don’t know if he wants her killed.”
“But if he does?”
“Then I kill her.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet, Ignacio. Why do you ask all these stupid questions?”
“Because one day I want to be doing what you’re doing.”
“If you think it’s some great honor, it’s not.”
“It’s better than digging up mummified bodies. You get to travel to the Hereafter.”
“It’s nothing special,” Shape said. “Now help me up.” He put out his arm so that Ignacio could haul him up onto his foot and stump.
“I’m getting old, Ignacio. Old and tired.”
“You need an assistant,” Ignacio said eagerly. “I could assist you. I could!”
Shape glanced at Ignacio, shaking his head. “I work alone,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I only like the company of one person.”
“Who?”
“Me, you fool.
“Oh…”
Shape looked back to the boulders where Carrion was working. He had noticed something that Ignacio, in the midst of his envious chatter, had failed to catch.
“The birds,” he said.
The qwat birds, which had been silent in their crannies since Carrion’s arrival on the island, had risen into the air above the Rock without uttering a sound, and were now hovering in a vast black cloud, wingtip to wingtip, overhead.
“That’s something rare,” Ignacio said, the wreckage of his stitched and overstitched face registering something close to wonder.
He had no sooner set eyes on the flock than from the place among the boulders where Carrion was working there came a flicker of dark blue-purple light, followed by another, this time orange-red, followed by a third, the hue of bone. The colors rose into the air above the rocks, driving the cloud of qwats still higher, and there colors broke into fragments, darts and slivers of light interlacing, performing an elaborate dance.
At this moment, the creator appeared from between the rocks, his hands raised in front of him as though
