Abarat: Absolute Midnight

time and brought it down with all his strength, severing the rope that kept them from making their escape.

He did so with not a moment to spare. The rest of their pursuers were a stride or two from boarding The Piper. One of the men attempted to leap aboard the boat even as the rope was severed. The Piper sped forward, and the leaper landed in the water.

They were away! The only problem was their extra passenger: the youth called Gazza. He was still in a fighting fury.

“You!” he said, pointing his mottled finger at Candy. “I know who you are! The girl from the Hereafter!”

“Candy Qua—”

“I don’t care to know your name. I demand that you order your thugs to turn this boat around.”

“We can’t,” Candy said. “If you want to get off, you’ll have to jump and swim.”

The youth called Gazza pulled a short-bladed knife out of a sheath hanging from his belt.

“I’m not swimming,” he said.

“Well, we’re not turning back.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gazza said, and shoved Candy aside. Then, knife in hand, he headed toward the wheelhouse.

Malingo yelled a warning to Mischief, but the roar of the engine surely kept the brothers from hearing it. Gazza opened the wheelhouse door, and would have been through it, his knife raised, had Candy not lunged at him throwing one arm around his neck and slamming her fist down on the hand that held the knife. He didn’t drop it. But she managed to pull him away from the door, at which moment, by sheer chance, the boat cleared the harbor and hit the heavy swell of the open sea. The boat was briefly lifted into the air as it crested the first big wave, throwing Candy, with her arm still around Gazza’s throat, back onto the deck. He fell with her. On top of her, in fact.

This time he did lose the knife. And by the time all the blushing and scrambling and cursing and struggling to stand up again was over, Malingo had picked the knife up and Eddie, looking a lot more serious, indeed dangerous, than the short, green, egotistical comedian Candy had first met, had his stolen machete pointed at Gazza’s navel.

“I will gut you, sir,” he said, betraying a trace of actorly flamboyance in that last syllable only, “if you make any further attempt to do harm. I mean it. I can and I will. You can let go of him now, Miss Quackenbush. Unless of course, you feel there’s a reason to hang on to him that I hadn’t fathomed.”

Candy stared briefly into Gazza’s eyes.

“No,” she said, averting her gaze and feeling embarrassed but not entirely sure what she had to be embarrassed about. “He’s . . . fine. He’s not going to be stupid about this once we explain—”

“Never mind the explanations. All I wanted you to do was turn the boat around,” Gazza said.

The purple patches on his face had turned a very pale blue, and his eyes, which had shards of gold in them, were no longer fierce.

“You can still jump in and swim back.”

“I can’t swim.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Eddie said impatiently. “We’ve got work to do.”

“If he goes in the water,” Malingo said, “he’ll drown. I can’t have that on my conscience.”

“I don’t give two hoots about your conscience. The whole world is being overtaken by darkness and the dynasties—”

“We heard it, Eddie,” Malingo said.

“I know their names! All eight of them: Tarva Zan, the Binder, and Lailahlo, who sings babies to their graves. And Crawfeit and Quothman Shant, and Shote, who leaves plagues wherever he walks—”

“Is he okay?” Gazza said, looking at Candy, the colors in his eyes reeling around.

“No,” she said.

“—there’s Clowdeus Geefee, who killed my little brother. And Ogo Fro, who killed my big brother. Sent him down into a despair he never rose up from. And last—but very far from least—there’s Gan Nug, who talks to the creatures that are in waters, deep down below us right now.”

Mischief and the brothers had emerged from the wheelhouse to hear Eddie offer up his list.

“What’s going on out here?” John Slop said.

Gazza stared at Mischief and his brothers, and for the first time in the considerable while Candy had known the Johns, she saw them do something that was curiously eerie. All of them shifted their gazes and looked at Gazza at the same speed and the same moment. And then, all at the same time, they said: “What are you lookin’ at, kid?”

It was too much for Gazza. He dropped to his knees, presenting the diminutive Eddie with an easier target.

“All right,” he said, “I won’t fight. I won’t cause any trouble. I believe you. Whatever you say, I believe you.”

Candy laughed.

“That’s good to hear. Eddie, put down the knife. We already know he’s trustworthy.”

“Me?” Gazza said. “Absolutely. Totally and utterly. I’m with you.”

He looked up at her, the pastel motes in his eyes settling into blue irises in pale yellow eyes. They looked straight up at Candy, meeting her gaze and quickening her heart.

Chapter 36

The Shadow-Shroud

DESPITE THE CURRENT DEFYING power of the Kreymattazamar, which returned Mater Motley and her entourage back to Midnight’s island faster than any other vessel in the Abarat, and despite the speed with which she was transported from the harbor to the circular room atop her Needle Tower, the shadow shroud of the sacbrood had already begun to spread in all directions from the pyramids.

Such was the passionate bloodlust of the brood to be out and doing their murderous duty, that when the path to the sky became blocked they set upon one another with unbounded brutality. Very quickly the areas surrounding the exits of the pyramids were littered with the remnants of the weak or unlucky, who had perished before reaching the stars they had been born to extinguish.

But such wastage had been factored into the calculations from the beginning. They did as they were programmed to do. They rose up and they spread across the sky. They went east to darken the skies over Babilonium, southeast to cover Gnomon’s wilderness, in the midst of which stood its Great Ziggurat; and northeast to Scoriae, where the darkness overhead seemed to encourage Mount Galigali to stir up the fire in its belly and spit streamers of liquid rock into the starless heavens. North it went to Pyon, where the lights of Commexo City burned so brightly that its apocalyptic effect was not felt. On other parts of the island, of course, places so far uncivilized by Pixler’s influence, the peasant community thought the blanking out of all the stars was just one more show of power by the great architect, and resigned themselves to finally giving up their independence and going to the bright streets of Commexo City where they would add to the sum of beggars there. The same northerly advance also encompassed Idjit, where that island’s incessant lightning storms became even more violent, stirred up by the blinding of the heavens. Finally the cloud spread west, southwest, and south, erasing the moon and stars from the skies over Jibarish, and Ninnyhammer, and extinguishing the late afternoon sun that bathed Gnomon where there had been many oracles, all of whom were quite capable of seeing this approaching catastrophe.

Notwithstanding the egotistical attitude that had silenced most of them, a few had been foolhardy enough to speak of what they’d seen. All had been dead within the hour. The rest, having quickly got the message that this was a future that would be fatal to talk about, kept what they knew to themselves, or left Gnomon entirely thinking they’d be safer talking about the approaching apocalypse on some other island. But wherever they went—some to the Yebba Dim Day, in the hope of talking to the Council, a few to Yzil or farther—it all failed to change their own futures. Those who spoke their fears aloud were murdered within the hour, leaving the others two options: to live in silent anticipation of the world’s end, or to take their own lives before it came.

So the secret of Absolute Midnight had remained secure. And when the sacbrood rose up in their millions, the