“You’ll come visit,” she said.
“I’m sure I’d be
“But suppose something were to happen to you right here, because of me? You know it could. I couldn’t live with that.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, I swear. I’m going to live forever. We both are.”
“Oh, and how long have you had this planned?” Candy said.
“Since we got out of Wolfswinkel’s house. I thought then: this girl has miracles at her fingertips. Nothing’s beyond her. That’s what I believed then and I believe it even more strongly now.”
“Miracles? No. That wasn’t my doing. That was Boa, staying in practice for the day when she finally got out.”
“So if you’d have come knocking on Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s door without Boa—”
“We’d both be slaves right now.”
Malingo shook his head.
“You’re wrong. I remember very clearly looking in your eyes that first time Wolfswinkel summoned me.”
“You were hanging upside down from a roof beam.”
“That’s right. And I looked in your eyes—I remember this so, so clearly—and you know what I saw?”
“What?”
“Exactly the same person I’m looking at right now. Candy Quackenbush, of Chickentown, Minnesota. Come to save my life—”
“But—”
Malingo raised a finger.
“I’m not done yet,” he said. “You’d come to save my life from the hell Wolfswinkel had turned it into. Maybe you didn’t realize that was what you’d come to do, but it was. Now you can make lists of people who got hurt because you crossed over from the Hereafter, but I can make just as many lists of people who are still alive, or whose lives are better, because of you. Think of all the people who lived in fear of Christopher Carrion. You took that fear away.”
“Did I? Or did I just leave room for something even worse to take his place?”
“You talking about Mater Motley?”
“For now. But there’s probably somebody out there even worse, whose name we don’t even know yet.”
“You’re right. The Abarat’s got its share of bad. Just like the Hereafter, right?”
“Right.”
“But you didn’t put them here. Can you really blame yourself for every twisted, poisoned soul in the Abarat?”
“No. That’d be stupid.”
“And you’re not stupid,” Malingo said. “You’re anything but. Even if you were to leave right now the Abarat would never be the same. There’d always be this brief, golden time we’d remember. The Age of Candy.”
That broke Candy’s dark mood, at least for a moment.
“The Age of Candy!” she laughed. “That’s the silliest thing you’ve ever said.”
“I thought it had quite a poetical ring to it,” Malingo replied. “But if you think it’s silly then there’s only one way to stop us all from making idiots of ourselves.”
“Which is—”
“You can’t leave. Simple as that.”
Candy’s laughter died away and she thought about things for a long while. Finally she said, “I tell you what. I’ll stay until this whole business with Boa is cleared up. How’s that?”
“It’s better than you leaving us right now. And of course there’s a possibility that the mystery of Princess Boa will never be completely solved. In which case you’ll just have to stay with us forever.” He grinned. “What a terrible thing that would be.”
There was a moment of silence between them, and then Candy’s eyes drifted back over the edge of the boat. The lone squid she’d seen before had found a companion.
“Oh no!” she said, with sudden urgency. “Finnegan!”
“What about him?”
“Boa’s going to go to him the moment she gets away from Jibarish. And he’ll be so happy he’ll believe whatever story she tells him.”
“Perhaps some of it’ll be true.”
“Like what?”
“Well . . . maybe she still loves him.”
“Her?
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I know what she is inside. I went and spied on her, in her dreams. And there’s only room for one person in Boa’s heart.”
“And that’s Boa?”
Candy nodded.
“Do you think she’d hurt him?”
“I think she’s capable of anything.”
“Then we should find him.”
“Agreed,” Candy said.
“I suppose I row now,” Malingo said unenthusiastically.
“We’ll each do some,” Candy said.
“So . . . we’ll head for Qualm Hah, yes? That’s where the John Brothers said they’d be. We’ll find them with the help of a little magic, and then catch another ferry to the Nonce.”
“Right now I think I’ve had enough playing with magic.”
“Understood,” Malingo said. “We’ll just find them the old-
fashioned way. And we can talk about whether you’re going or staying later . . .”
“I’m not going to change my mind, Malingo.”
He gave her a sly, sideways smile.
“Later,” he reiterated.
Chapter 23
Cold Life
ON THE WESTERN EDGE of the Isle of the Black Egg, where the Pius Mountains formed a grim wall between the Izabella and the island’s interior, was a stretch of coastline known as the Shore of the Departed. It had earned the name from a grim, grotesque phenomenon. Owing to some peculiarity in the way the submerged coastline was configured, whatever litter the waters of the Izabella had gathered as they moved along this part of the island was here shunned and pitched up onto the shore by a current too languid to carry it any farther.
Thus, borne up and deposited on the Shore of the Departed, were the remains of humble fishing skiffs and massive ironclad war vessels, foundered upon the reefs of the Outer Islands, many of which remained uncharted. Sometimes there was little more than a few planks painted red, or a crow’s nest, perhaps a sail; but on occasion entire vessels, which had survived the assault of the belligerent surf, had borne up onto the shore, breaking open their hulls as wave upon wave threw them against the massive black boulders—the magma children of Mount Galigali—which formed the steep, brutal beach.
Today, however, there was nothing of any great size to see. Just a bicycle wheel, a tangle of old fishing nets in which several rotted carcasses were caught up, plus a great deal of trash that had been in the water so long it wasn’t really recognizable. There was one other thing, however, that the sluggish tide had delivered to the shore this day, something that lolled back and forth for a long while in the shallows as the teasing waters carried it up a
