Abarat: The First Book of Hours

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 carpeted the brown dirt and the gray grass.

But there was something odd about this blizzard. For one thing, it seemed to be happening in the middle of a heat wave. Candy’s hair was pasted to her forehead with sweat, and her T-shirt glued to her back. For another thing, the snow was spiraling down out of a perfectly blue sky.

Strange, she thought.

She reached up and caught hold of one of the snowflakes. It was soft against her palm. She opened her hand. The flake had a drop of blood on it. Suspicious now, she examined the snowflake more closely. Despite the warmth of her hand, the flake wasn’t melting. Before she could examine it more closely however, a gust of wind came along and carried it away, leaving a fine trail of scarlet across the middle of her palm.

She reached out and snatched at another flake. Then at another, and another. They weren’t snowflakes, she now realized. They were feathers. Chicken feathers. The air was filled with a blizzard of chicken feathers.

She felt them brushing against her face, some of them leaving little trails of blood. Horrible. She tried to wipe them off with the heels of her hands, but the storm of feathers seemed to be getting worse.

“Candy?”

Her father had come out of the house. He had a beer bottle in his hand.

“What are you doing standing out here?” he demanded.

Candy thought for a moment, then shook her head. The truth was that she didn’t know what she was doing out here. Had she come to look at the snow? If so, she didn’t remember doing so.

“Get back inside,” her father said.

His neck was flushed, and his eyes were bloodshot. There was a mean expression in his stare that she knew to be careful of: he was close to losing his temper.

“You heard me,” he said. “Go back in the house.”

Candy hesitated. She didn’t want to contradict her father when he was drunk, but nor did she want to go inside. Not with him in his present mood.

“I just want to take a little walk,” she said softly.

“What are you talking about? You’re not taking no walk. Now get the hell inside.”

He reached out and caught hold of her, gripping her neck close to her shoulder so tightly she let out a yell.

As though in response to her cry there was an eruption of din in the yard around her: the clucking of countless chickens. The birds were everywhere, filling the yard in all directions. She felt a kind of revulsion at the sight of so many chickens. So many beaks, so many bright little eyes; so many heads cocked so that they could look up at her.

“How did they get here?” she said, gently reaching up to free herself from her father’s grip.

“They live here,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me!” her father said, shaking her. “God, you are so stupid. I said: they live here. Look.”

Candy turned her sickened gaze toward the house. He was right. There were chickens on the roof, carpeting it like beady-eyed snow; chickens at the windows, lining the sills; chickens squatting all over the kitchen. On the table; on the sink. She could see her mother standing in the middle of the kitchen with her head bowed, weeping. “This is crazy,” Candy murmured.

“What did you say?”

Her father shook her again, harder this time. She pulled herself free of him, stumbling backward as she did so. Somehow she lost her balance and fell down on the hard dirt, the bitter stench of chicken excrement filling her