Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“The Abarat, Dad. You can say it.”

“I won’t soil my tongue!”

He wasn’t quiet any longer. His fury echoed off the plain whitewashed walls.

“Listen to yourself, Dad!” Candy said.

“Don’t call me—” He stopped himself, as his rant came to meet him from the far wall of the church. He stopped, and once again dropped his voice. “Clever little witch, aren’t you? You still know how to anger me. But I’m not falling for it.” He took a deep breath. “If you defy me one more time I will make your mother suffer. Do you understand me? Look at me, girl, when I’m talking to you. I want you to know who I really am.”

“The enemy,” Candy said.

Her father smiled.

“Finally we agree on something,” he said. He turned his back on her and called out to his followers. “Is the machinery all warmed up and ready to go?”

“I did it all exactly like you told me to, sir,” one of them said.

“Good. Very good.”

Chapter 27

Interrogation

AROUND THE TIME GAMBAT was leaving Malingo and Candy on the upper deck of The Sloppy (now the happy owner of two autographs from the hand of the most famous geshrat alive) a convoy of five vessels was about to depart from the harbor at Vrokonkeff, on Gorgossium. The largest of these five, the Kreyzu, was flying a smoke flag in the billows of which the stylized image of a needle and thread had been worked, marking it as the bearer of the presumptive Empress of the Hours, Lady Midnight herself, Mater Motley. The four ships that accompanied the Kreyzu were armed from waterline to crow’s nest with cannons and stitchlings, all in service of protecting the Lady Midnight.

Her departure had been delayed, of course. She had returned to her tower with the girl, Maratien, to find that Taint Nerrow, the seamstress she’d left to clean the mosaic map of the Abarat that was laid into the floor of her chamber, had been thrown out of one of the chamber windows and lay dead at the bottom. Mater Motley had liked the Seamstress Nerrow; the woman had been loyal and zealous. It didn’t please her that circumstances obliged her to now interrogate the dead woman, which would cause the deceased profound anguish. Mater Motley was certain that, had she been able to offer her opinion, Taint Nerrow herself would have volunteered her suffering in return for the name of her murderer.

Events many years in the designing were about to come to fruition: events that would transform the islands and all that lived upon them forever. She—who would be the mistress of that transformed world—could not afford to let a force as powerful as Taint Nerrow’s murderer go uncaught. She needed to know who the trespasser had been, and quickly. She bent down and turned Taint’s corpse over. Her face had a crack down the middle. But there was little blood. Ordering the rest of the women to retreat a few steps, Motley threw up a Dome of Diligences around herself, the body, and Nerrow’s spirit, which was hovering over the corpse, attached by a decaying cord of ectoplasm.

“Calm yourself, woman,” Motley said. “I don’t need more than a minute or two of your time.”

“I don’t want—”

“You have no choice.”

“—to go back—”

“You have no choice.”

“—into the flesh.”

“You have no choice. Hear me, witch?”

Taint’s spirit, a smudge of a panicked shadow, repeatedly flew against the inside of the Dome of Diligences like a fly trapped in a jar.

The Empress quickly became weary of Nerrow’s panicked cavorting.

“Enough,” she said.

She reached out and caught hold of her seamstress’s spirit. The shadow flailed, desperate to be free. Several of Nerrow’s sisters watched on in silent horror.

“Neysentab,” said the Old Mother, and with these three syllables she unmade the Dome. “If any of you find necromancy hard to witness, then I suggest you avert your eyes.”

Several did exactly that, one or two of the sisters even walking away from the body of Taint Nerrow entirely so as not to even hear what was happening. Meanwhile, Mater Motley went down on her knees beside Taint Nerrow’s corpse, telling one of the remaining sisters, “Fathoon? Open her mouth wide and hold her head.”

Kunja Fathoon, who was a big-boned woman with huge hands, did as she was instructed.

Mater Motley swiftly placed the spirit between Nerrow’s lips and ordered Fathoon to close the dead woman’s mouth and keep it closed whatever happened. Kunja Fathoon pinched the dead woman’s mouth to stop the spirit from exiting that way. She kept it pinched closed for as long as a minute. Nothing happened. And nothing. And still nothing. Then, suddenly, the woman’s leg twitched. Its motion was followed by an eruption of thrashings and kickings.

“Calm, Taint Nerrow. Calm,” Mater Motley said. “I know this must be horrible for you coming back into your broken body, but I only need a few questions answered.” She glanced up at Fathoon. “Are you ready?” Fathoon nodded. “Don’t weaken.”

“I won’t.”

“No,” Mater Motley said, her certainty confirmed by something in Fathoon’s eyes. “No, you won’t. Then let’s be done with this, shall we?”

“At your instruction, my lady.”

“Now.”

Fathoon uncovered Nerrow’s mouth.

“Cease this, Taint Nerrow! RIGHT NOW!”

The woman’s cries became less pitiful. Her contortions dwindled.

“That’s better,” the Old Mother said. “Now, answer me quickly and truthfully. Then I can let you go, and you can go to your death.”

Taint drew a second phlegmatic breath and then spoke, her voice unequivocally that of a dead woman: flat, thin, joyless.

“What did I do to deserve this?”

“The fault wasn’t yours, Nerrow. I simply want to know who murdered you.” Mater Motley leaned forward a little to catch the answer when it came. “Who was it, sister?”

“It was the Princess Boa.”

“Impossible!”

“I swear.”

“She’s been dead sixteen years, sister.”

“I know. Yet it was she.”

“And you have no doubt?”

“None. It was she. It was Boa. It was! It was!” Her reanimated body was beginning to defy her control. Her face was riddled with tiny tics and seizures. They seemed to give her pain, even though her nerves had only a ghost of life left in them.

Mater Motley studied the corpse at her feet without replying. Nerrow’s despairing eyes stared up at the woman who held her spirit hostage. “I’ve told you all I know. Let me go to death. It will be kinder than life was.”

“Well then . . .” the Old Mother said. “Let go, Fathoon. Peace in the Void, woman. Be gone.”

She had barely finished her sentence before the seamstress’s spirit had fled its confinement and was rising