Abarat: Absolute Midnight

creature clinging to life.

Mespa suddenly looked up.

“Get back to your boat!” she screamed. “Run. Run!”

“What’s wrong?”

“The seamstresses! They’re here!”

She pushed Candy away from her.

“Go!” they shouted, and the two women of the Fantomaya raced away in the opposite direction.

Candy turned and looked toward The Piper. She could see Malingo, Eddie, and Gazza by the swaying lanterns hanging at the stern. Malingo was beckoning to her, and Gazza started to do the same. Candy looked back at the women, intending to say good-bye, but they had already gone. The only clue to their whereabouts was the sight of their pursuers: five women, their long hair streaming behind them, standing astride juggernauts of almost white-hot iron, easily three times as tall as their riders. Weaving between one another they chased their unseen quarry off over the Izabella. Candy watched a second or two then started to run toward the boat.

The same violent message was spreading out from the remains of The Great Head in all directions. It made the water beneath Candy’s feet shake as she ran, the worst tremors so powerful she was afraid the sea was going to open up beneath her. It was the continuing destruction of The Great Head that was causing the tremors, she knew, but she refused to look at the horrors there. She kept her eyes fixed on The Piper. Malingo was beckoning to her, as was Gazza. It was his voice that she heard from above the rubble.

“Come on! Don’t look back! Keep your eyes on me.” He reached toward her, as though he had the power to stretch out and gather her back into the same arms from which he’d released her. “Just run, Candy!”

There was another sound now, audible above Gazza’s voice and the noise of dying and destruction. She could hear the rising whine of the fever wheel, and the insane scream of the monster who was riding it.

She knew Gazza was right. She shouldn’t look back. But she made the error anyway.

It was a smear of a sight, but it was enough to know she was in very serious trouble. The fever wheel was no more than ten yards behind her, its proximity making every bone in her body vibrate. On the seamstress who rode the fiery wheel, was an obscenely distorted face, her mouth a gaping black shriek, her hair streaming behind her like white paint thrown against a starless sky.

“Run! Run!” Gazza said.

Candy threw everything she had into it: her strength, her anger, even her fear that this fast dash was a lost cause, that she’d never again feel around her the arms of those who loved her, or say to Gazza the words she’d knew she felt but didn’t yet know how to say.

How cruel and stupid was that? To finally lay her eyes on a face she knew from some other sweet dream of life, sweet dream of love, but never get to say: I know you, don’t I? I’ve always known you.

She. Would. Never. Tell. Him.

The wheel was going to kill her. A spray of scalding water caught her neck. It hurt. But nowhere near as much as the thought that she’d—

Never—

Ropes of unraveled fire arced past her and set the water ablaze where they fell, boiling it to columns of steam—

Never—

And now the seamstress’s shrieks were added to the sum of terrors closing on her. There were fragments of words she’d either heard or even used herself, all dissolved in the vile torrent of noise pouring out of the virago:

“Sheeeeaaanammaaashinigajjanda- jamdannamandasighaphipheeenuuuurrrephriidddeaajardadchalajicfloatakaiemamamee—”

The consonants and vowels so unendurable—like needles being driven into Candy’s head—that it was all she could do not to add her own sum of screams to the cacophony—

“Never!”

The word came from Gazza.

Candy stared at The Piper through her agony and saw that he had lifted Eddie up onto his shoulders.

“NEVER!” he said again.

Then Eddie threw the machete. Candy saw it catch the light as it left his hand, then it was gone into the shadows, and all she caught was the noise of its approach—a quickening breath that for some reason surfaced through all the other noise—until it briefly appeared again as it passed over her head.

She couldn’t help but see where it went, turning in time to see the expression on the seamstress’s face change as she understood what she had raced with such eagerness to meet. The machete cut through her neck, and her head was thrown up toward the lightless heavens on a surge of scarlet.

Candy didn’t linger to see it fall. Though the fever wheel had lost its rider it was still on the move.

She fixed her eyes upon The Piper—or more truthfully upon one of the faces among the many—and ran. There was a raw shriek from the wheel, and then a crash as it keeled over. Candy felt freezing water splashing against her back. She didn’t look to see if the wheel had in fact fallen over. She just ran and ran until she was there at the boat, gasping. She reached up and found that the arms that had let her go were the first to catch hold of her again, and wrap her up tighter than anybody had ever held her before.

Chapter 40

Bones and Laughter

FINNEGAN HAD BEEN ON the Nonce for a day, searching for a place that he had endeavored to find ever since the death of his Princess. He had finally discovered it, beneath the mountains of that Hour: the place where, according to the myth of the dragon families, their dying members went to pass the last portion of their lives. There they had perished, leaving their bodies to decay among the numberless bones of the worms who had come here to die over the centuries.

Now he was standing in that most secret of secret places, a cavern that had been fashioned over the millennia by the genius of water and stone into the likeness of a cathedral so big the city of Commexo could have comfortably fitted within it three or four times over. It was illuminated by the phosphorescence given off by a fungus that flourished on the bare architecture of the dead. They had spread to every corner of the caverns, laying a gray pallor on the air, which only served to add to the immensity of the space. But the

scale of this vast cathedral was barely large enough to contain the immense numbers of dragon’s bones that had collected here over the centuries, some laid here by mourners, carrying the corpses of dragon kings or common soldiers; some laid down by those who had owned them, and had made their final journey dressed in meat and scales, so as to lose them at least among the remnants of those who had gone before.

In places they were heaped like stained snowdrifts against the hundred-foot walls, in others simply littering the floor, broken by the passage of the centuries into splinters, the splinters into crumbs, and the crumbs to dust.

“That’s a fine sight,” Finnegan murmured to himself.

“Is that all it’s about, Hob?” said a voice of age and pain. Its vibrations, breaking the bleak silence, brought tiny changes among the bones. Dust ran hissing from eye sockets of dragons dead in their mothers’ wombs.

“Deetha Maas?” Finnegan said. He already had his sword and dagger drawn. “Show yourself.”

“I’m right here,” the ancient voice told him. “Look.”

Indeed, something directly in front of him did move. It was so uncannily slow that it was several seconds before he could make sense of the form. When he did so he recognized instantly that he was