Abarat: Absolute Midnight

noise of their innumerable beating wings was like no sound those hearing it had ever heard before, nor would again. They were out. Out and up, covering the sky. And it wasn’t only the bodies and wings of the brood that were blocking the light. They exuded a thick juice called broodgrume from their abdomens, which dried to a dense, hard, shell-like substance within a few moments of being exposed to the air. They had been programmed generation upon generation that, once they were up above land and water, they were to completely empty their sacs of this broodgrume. The consequence? That they all would become helpless prisoners of their own secretion; countless millions of their insectile brains too simple to understand that the instruction to void themselves of the grume would be the first and only act they would perform in the world outside their hives.

There had been times when Mater Motley had trouble believing that such a massive number of living things, however simplistic their thinking, would do as they had been programmed to do so blindly. At such times she went to a secret and sacred place that she had never named aloud. Its name was Zael Maz’yre, and from it all dark blessings flowed. She had bathed in those blessings for many years, and in due course she would pay the price, gladly. But for now, there was pleasure to be had hearing creatures of every kind raising their voices in panic as the erasing darkness spread across the sky, wiping out star after star, blinding moons and blotting out suns. Even the constellations had gone. Every last star had been like candles in a hurricane.

People offered prayers to the divinities of every Hour, but outweighing the prayers offered to gods and saints a hundred to one were those prayers offered up to the most ubiquitous force for happiness in the Abarat—the Grinning Boy himself—the Commexo Kid. He was the savior to whom countless terrified souls called out as the shadow-shroud moved on, its layers of living brood and their excreted grume two or even three layers thick in some places. Jibarish was plunged into utter darkness. So too was Ninnyhammer, and the Rock of Some Distinction called Alice Point; and the Nonce, and the Isle of the Black Egg, and Huffaker, and Orlando’s Cap, and Hobarookus . . .

Cries of terror and panic still rose up out of the islands that were newly overtaken by darkness. But out of those that had first fallen under the influence of the shadow-shroud the fear was punctuated with a new and very particular sound: that of accusation. Who had done this, and why? Why? Somebody needed to own up to this crime and do so quickly or there would be consequences. On island after island, in Hour after Hour, people started to seek out anyone that was in some way odd, and found, in mere distinctions, evidence of guilt. The signs were usually very small—a harelip, a slow eye, a tic, a stammer—but all that mattered was that the voices of accusation were able to rouse a mob into believing that these innocents were in some way responsible for this terror.

Mater Motley watched all of this with gluttonous satisfaction. She had reports from Nightseers, seamstresses whose eyes were powerful enough to pierce the darkness even at its densest. On Gnomon she was shown a crowd of three hundred or more, having lit fires to illuminate an ancient place of judgment, start the business of dealing with those that their collective madness had decided were responsible for the death of light.

The leader of the mob was a little man with some Skizmut blood in him somewhere. His name was Dyer Mere, and he had elected himself as the leader of the court among the trees. He demanded that the three prisoners the mob had selected—two sisters, Juup and Namena Chantamik, and a sometime tax inspector called Theopolis Kalapao—confess their guilt. The mob was convinced that it was they who had brought this calamity upon the islands. The two sisters were sobbing and quite beyond saying anything coherent, so it fell to Theopolis to reason with the crowd.

They all knew him, he reminded them. Had he not always been honorable in his dealings? Had he not possessed a sense of what was fair and right? He had no knowledge of the monstrous powers that had been used to blind the heavens. He was a victim of this catastrophe, just as they were. Unfortunately for him, Theopolis the tax inspector stammered, and the more he realized he wasn’t winning the argument against his accusers, the worse his stammer became, until his words of self-defense, reasonable though they were, could not even be understood.

The crowd didn’t listen. The deaths of Theopolis and the sisters were swift.

“Now the culprits are dead,” Dyer Mere declared. “Their spell will be undone very soon. Unless, of course, there are more conspirators we have not yet rooted out.”

By now the darkness had reached the eastern limits of the Abarat, as it had to the north and south. It was as though the Abarat was a vast coffin and the sacbrood its lid. And still, when Mater Motley turned her gaze toward the pyramids, she saw the brood emerging from their hives like a black snake, their numbers apparently undiminished, rising to extinguish every last light in the skies, their programming so powerful, and their hunger so vast, that they cared not at all that those of their species who’d emerged an hour earlier were now trapped in a vault of bodies and solidified grume. All that mattered to each was the task they’d been programmed to perform. To any other subject—such as the suffering of their own kind (which they would soon share)—they were as blind as the Abaratians on the islands below.

Within forty minutes, the number of innocents accused of causing the darkness to descend, and summarily hanged for their wickedness, had risen from three to eighty-five. Among that number was Dyer Mere himself, who had overseen the executions of his own wife and son-in-law before the finger of suspicion had turned on him. Now he was dead. Strung up from the same branch from which his first victim, the stammering tax inspector, Theopolis Kalapao, had been hanged.

The same insanity had possessed mobs of frightened souls on every island. The spectacle of their panic turning to judgment and slaughter was not something Mater Motley had considered when she’d been calculating the way that the events of this Midnight would play out. But what came next she had foreseen: the arrival of the Ziaveign. The eight families of monsters and their vile hybrids who had been hiding all across the island, harboring their hatred, waiting for a long-promised darkness to spread across the Abarat, now came out of hiding.

The Old Mother had made it her business over the years to reach as many of them as possible herself, finding them in their grim sanctuaries, hidden from the light and its servants. So she knew many of the demonic creatures that now rose up to sew havoc among the tribes who had hunted them when their sacred suns and moons had been high and mighty. Now the skies were black, and the light-givers gone. In the dark the hunters were about to become the hunted.

There were creatures in this rising multitude that were as ancient as the elements. The Crawfeit, for instance, whose bodies were bone cages filled with flocks of burning birds; their heads black iron pots brimming with a vile stew of venom, angel’s grief, and human meat; their limbs lengths of burned muscles held together with hair and hooks, and arrayed with dagger fingers. They were not demons. The Abarat had no known hell. The Crawfeit, like the other seven Ziaveign from which root all forms of night-beast, each corrupted in its own particular way, sprang from the presence of cruelty, pain, and loneliness among the Hours.

The Old Mother caught sight of all the Fiends she’d hoped to discover as she scanned the islands. On Scoriae she found the Abarat’s first executioner, Quothman Shant, at his bloody work. On Soma Plume, she saw Lailahlo, the Queen of Murderous Song, leading a chorus of tiny Pulcinellas. The Binder, Tarva Zan, who wrapped the hearts of her victims in fire, was walking the silent boardwalk of Babilonium. Gan Nug was still standing at the highest point of The Great Head calling forth more horrors. At his feet, gazing up at him in adulation, were nine of his Preyers, or priests. Clowdeus Geefee she found on a boat, alone, the Izabella stained bloodred all around, while Shote, the Plaguer, she discovered seeding diseases in the fields of the Nonce, and on Huffaker, caught sight of Ogo Fro, who was entropy and fatigue incarnate, among a crowd of the wanderers lost in the dark.

It was a triumph for darkness. All eight of the Great Fiends had risen up and shown their faces. And if they were here, then their children would surely be here too. And their children. And theirs. None of them as powerful as their legendary forebears to be sure, but they still possessed the genius to terrify. The Old Mother was happy—at least as happy as she knew how to be. She had thrown a party in the name of darkness, and all the guests she’d most wanted to attend had done so.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour, however, had been entirely unaffected by the invasion of the sacbrood. It not only protected itself at sea level, effortlessly repelling the darkness that attempted to touch the shore, but it also defended the air above with a sheath that reached up into the stratosphere, and instantly cremated those sacbrood who, in their thoughtless conviction, treated the air above the Twenty-Fifth Hour like any other. It was not. The rules of physics were inverted over that timeless place.

Air that should have been lightless was instead pale yellow, while the stars, whether they were fixed or