funds built up through his titanically successful household products, Pixler has created his own dream city. By bringing together the genius of wizards and the skills of more conventional architects (all touched by their own genius) Pixler has not only transformed Pyon, but may eventually (and to the mind of this writer, regrettably) transform the entire archipelago. Nobody is safe from the Panacea, or from its relentlessly happy salesman, the Commexo Kid.
“Pixler’s flying machines are now venturing far from the skies over Pyon, while his burrowings beneath the seabed, where he intends to build a second city, three times the size of Commexo City, have dug through layers of rock which is filled (so I’m told by friends who are experts in their fields) with never-to-be-duplicated evidence of our earliest beginnings.
“But it is probably fair to say that a man like Rojo Pixler has no interest in the past. He looks only toward tomorrow. A life lived in perpetual expectation may be a fine thing for a time, but it’s a young man’s game. Mister Pixler has apparently yet to be touched by the shadow of his mortality. When that happens, I venture, he may be more respectful of all that lies quietly in the earth, as he will one day be its fellow.
“I apologize for such dark ruminations, but they come to me naturally when i contemplate the gaud of Commexo city. Nor is there much comfort to be discovered in the so-called Outer Islands_of which Pyon was once a member. Now there are only four in that group: The Isle of the Black Egg, Speckle Frew, Efreet and Autland. They are unquestionably the least pretty, the least charming, the least seductive of the archipelago. But that is not to say that they don’t possess a considerable degree of drama.
“At Four O’clock, on The Isle of the Black Egg, for instance, lie the Pius Mountains, a range of needle-sharp crags that are the tallest natural phenomenon in the islands. (In fact the top of Odom’s Spire, at the Twenty-Fifth Hour, is closer to Heaven. But there is nothing natural about the Spire, I would submit. It is surely the work of some less than divine architect.) The Pius Mountains, despite their inaccessibility, are not unpopulated. In the early days of the Abarat, during the Celestial Wars, guerrilla forces hid there and used their aerie as a base for devastating attacks on the fleets of the empress Deviavex. The descendants of those, rebels still have communities in Pius Heights (as they call the mountains), and there live a life of blameless and uncommon purity
“As to the black Egg, which gave the island its name, I can say only this: I have discovered to date two hundred and seventeen explanations for the name, each contradicting the next. As I cannot distinguish the value of any one explanation over any other, and it seems arbitrary to simply pick one for retelling here, I’d prefer to simply state that nobody knows how the island got its name and leave it at that.
“‘Moving on west, along the line of the Outer Islands, we come to Five O’clock, and Speckle Frew. It is geographically an uneventful island; the earth sandy and covered with fine, sharp-edged grass, the wind always howling. Though the terrain is scarcely varied, the island is home to a wide variety of species, most of them dangerous. The Naught, the Scab-Faced Snouter, the Rife all have their habitats in the undulating grasslands of Speckle Frew. Anil when ground is contested, or eggs are trampled or stolen, the ensuing battles can be brutal and bloody. In short, Speckle Frew is less an island than it is a bestiary, and it is not to be trespassed lightly.
“The next of the Outer Islands is Efreet. Unlike its neighbor, Speckle Frew, which has always been a wild spot, Efreet was once an island of great sophistication. The city of Koy, considered to have been the most cultured city in the Abarat, was built on the lower steppes of the island, which lies to the northeast. Opinions vary as to how long Koy stood, and why it fell, but what remains of the city—rows of pillars, archways, frescoes—testify to a site of elegance and learning. In recent times the ruins have become the haunt of lost and unhappy souls, and it seems impossible, visiting its mournful shores, that there was once a bright world here. Efreet’s Hour, I should add, is Six in the Morning.
“At Seven lies Autland, which is joined to Efreet by the Gilholly Bridge. There is a palace on Autland, built for Queen Muzzel McCray, to a design that appeared to her in a dream, or so local legend dictates. The Queen’s husband was a creature called Nimbus, Lord of the tarrie-cats. He still lives in McCray’s Palace, inside the dream—so to speak—of the woman he loved.
“Just a few islands remain to be described. At Eight O’clock, as the day brightens, stands Obadiah, an island of extraordinary flora. Here a visitor will find strange and sometimes aggressive plants growing in virtually inexhaustible profusion. Some have called Obadiah the Elegiac’s Garden, and suggested it may have been a kind of laboratory in which the mythic Creators of Abarat, A’zo and Cha, experimented with life-forms. Some even claim to have seen the one-eyed A’zo wandering the plant thronged slopes of Obadiah, his presence causing the flowers to open long dormant eyes and reach toward him as if to catch his gaze and share some secret of the earth.
“At Nine in the- Morning we arrive at the island of Qualm Hah. It is a puzzling place to explore, because it has two distinct faces. At the western edge of the island stands the busy seaport of Tazmagor, where the food is good, the people happy and the air filled with the din of extemporized songs. (Tazmagorians hold festivals regularly, in which competitors create epic songs on the spot, from subjects chosen by the crowd. Its reigning champion is one Sally Sullywart, who at the last festival beguiled the audience with a nine-minute song on the subject of fish gutting.)
“Outside the bounds of Tazmagor, toward the eastern end of the island, the land is empty. Nobody builds there; not so much as a shack. This is peculiar, given how crowded Tazmagor has become of late. But nobody I spoke to would tell me why.
“Onward, then, to Spake, which is an island I always take the greatest pleasure in visiting. It is a splendid, green place, with many cypress trees on its lower slopes. On its heights, above the trees, stands a simple stage, which has been used for performances of every kind circuses, slapsticks and High Tragedy since the beginning of known time.
“It may seem curious to a visitor that a drama would he performed in the open, at Ten in the Morning. But in fact the actors who first performed here, Norta Geese and Arlo Godkin, chose well. By a strange miracle of the island’s location, Geese and Godkin’s Theater is every three days shrouded in a mist that blows from the southeast, and surrounds the hill in a dark blanket. Tiny flames_like the sloughings of stars—litter this dark fog, and magically illuminate the dramas that are performed on the heights of the hill.
“Onward, then, to Nully, at Eleven. Topographically speaking, the island merits little study, but it is the location of one of the Abarat’s most extraordinary buildings: the Repository of Remembrance. From the outside the Repository is a large but commonplace building. Inside, however, it is anything but commonplace. Its rooms (which number over a hundred) are filled to capacity with objects that were once loved by the mighty. The toys of emperors, the rag dolls of queens; the stuffed crocodile which the great warrior Duke Lutherid of Skant was devoted to in his old age; the seventeen thousand porcelain mice Prince Drudru played with as a child. Room after room, cabinet after cabinet, shelf after shelf: the Repository is filled with bric-a-brac loved to distraction by people whose devotion at times suggests a touch of madness.
“I have described some twenty-four Hours and twenty-four islands, plus, of course, the occasional Rock. Only the Twenty-Fifth Island remains to be described, though I know already that its mysteries will outwit my pen in a heartbeat. I will therefore keep my description simple.
“The Twenty-Fifth Hour lies at the center of the archipelago. It is called, among other things, Whence and Lud and the House of the Fantomaya. But it is most frequently referred to as Odom’s Spire. When it comes to the history and purpose of the island’s spire_or to an evocation of its undeniably sentient mists, or the strange music the Sea of Izabella makes when she breaks upon its shores, utterly unlike any other sound her waters make, breaking on sand or stone all this is beyond me. No doubt the claims of the Righteous Bandy (a criminal who ended up on the shores of the Twenty-Fifth by chance, and who escaped a poet) are correct. ‘Every mystery of the Abarat,’ he said, ‘has its solution here; every enchantment its source, every prayer its destination.”
