“You’re afraid of ghosts now?” she said, her contempt diseasing the air between them.
“Not fear. Respect.”
“For what? For Maas?” She glanced toward the place where Deetha Maas had last been standing, but he’d moved.
Maas had disappeared.
With every syllable Boa spoke her utterances grew in power, so that by the time she’d reached the fifth word the sound was causing the smaller bones on the slopes to shake themselves loose and tumble down the inclines like mobs of bones assembling in every part of the ossuary. The bones didn’t just slide down the slopes. They skipped, they tumbled, they leaped and somersaulted. Nor did their motion cease when they reached the bottom of the slope.
Instead, they cavorted among the shards and the bone dust, conferring upon the agitation they had carried down the slopes. As the clouds of dust rose into the darkness, they started to create unmistakable shapes, made from the dust’s memory of the beasts it had once been. The dragons were returning! No matter how large they had looked or how complex their forms and colors had been, it was all encoded in every mote of dust. Each beast in every grain remembered; they were waiting in every particle of dust in their entirety. Their majestic shapes sprang up from death throughout the caverns—the iridescence of their scales, the gilded beauty of their eyes, and the purples and reds and greens of their massive wings.
“He can’t kill what’s already dead, Princess,” Finnegan said.
“This is dragon magic. I don’t like it
“I’m here,” the priest said, though now it was harder to be sure the direction from which his voice was coming.
“Show yourself,
“You don’t mean that.”
“If you’re too weak to do what has to be done—”
She raised her left hand, in which she was holding a brilliant blade.
“Maas!” she called out. “Where are you?”
She stopped in mid-syllable, and her eyes lost their hold on Finnegan. Her mouth couldn’t hold the words she had yet to say, nor could her hand hold the knife. It fell from her fingers and as it did so Finnegan caught a smeared glimpse of Deetha Maas, standing behind and a little to the right of the Princess. He had his hand at the back of her neck, touching some vital place, injecting his magical Order of Silence into her.
“Please! Don’t—” Finnegan said.
“Don’t what? Gut her the way she was about to gut me? She fully intended to do it, you know. You were too weak. She wanted it done fast, didn’t she? ‘He’s dangerous.’ That’s what she said about me. Doesn’t that make you wonder?
“Just let her go, Maas. I won’t hurt you—”
“Don’t you want to know her secrets, Finnegan?”
“Not from you I don’t. Just let her go.”
“You’re going to have to see for yourself, then.”
“See what?”
“Her little hideaway on Huffaker.”
“Huffaker? She doesn’t even like—”
“You can both go, courtesy of the powers of this place.” The ghost dragons continued to roil around, their images rising up on all sides. “I think the dead must want to forgive you. They look at you with pity, Finnegan, for what you have to suffer. I know you think the suffering is over now that she’s come back but you’re wrong. It’s just begun.”
“Let her go, Maas.”
Finnegan felt the air throb around him, and the forms of the ghosts became remote.
Then the cavern was gone, and he was standing out in the darkness of another island, another Hour. In that darkness there was only one source of light: it was coming from the crack of a door, a little way from where Finnegan stood.
Again, the air throbbed. And his Princess was suddenly beside him.
“The knife,” she said, looking down. “It was in my hand!”
“Boa. We’re on Huffaker. He said you used to come here.” He glanced back at her, but there was too much darkness for him to see her. “Is that true?”
Boa looked and realized Finnegan was right. She sighed.
“Yes, love. It’s true. And I suppose you had to see sooner or later, didn’t you? Come. Let me show you my secrets.”
They walked together through the darkness to the threshold of the door, where the light fell. There was no sound around them. Nothing moved. Nothing sang. It was just the two of them as they approached the door.
“Touch nothing,” she said, and led the way inside.
Chapter 42
The Fiends
IN THE MAP-MOSAICKED ROOM at the top of the Needle Tower, Mater Motley surveyed her creation, and was satisfied. The Midnight Empire she had planned for, labored for, lived for, now owned the Abarat from horizon to horizon, with the exception of the Twenty-Fifth Hour; though it was only a matter of time, she was sure, until that most perverse of Hours fell to her. Everywhere Mater Motley sent her remote gaze, it was the same triumphantly desolate story. Where there had been calm there was now chaos and violence. Where there had been celebration there was panic and terror.
On several islands she observed desperate attempts being made to provide some light to cure this darkness. Many, much to her satisfaction, ended in disaster.
On Hobarookus, for instance, she witnessed the tribal wizard of the Amurruz attempt to propel himself, accompanied by a number of warriors, into the smothering darkness overhead with the apparent intention of hacking a hole through to the stars. But the sacbrood were formidably violent, despite the fact that they were imprisoned in a jigsaw of their own interlocked bodies and their solidified excretions. After a brief, noisy encounter, a rain of body parts fell upon the upturned faces of the Amurruz, marking the brutal end of that foolish act of bravery.
On the Isle of the Black Egg, the Chief of the Jalapemoto nation ordered the igniting of a pool of highly combustible kaizaph oil—which offered a comforting source of warmth and light for several hours, until the fuel in the shallow pool had been entirely consumed. Then the hungry flames followed the path of the oil into the seam that fed the pool, which divided and divided as it spread out across the plateau. Within half an hour cracks began to appear in the ground, followed quickly by sinkholes, gouting flame, which claimed the lives of thousands of Jalapemotian inhabitants.
And while these exquisite follies played out, the fiends came out of hiding. Mater Motley couldn’t possibly have witnessed all of their reappearances, but she saw plenty. Creatures of every kind—bestial, grotesque, crazed and infernal—they all came out of hiding. Some she knew by name from her grimoires: monstrous descendants of the Eight Evils who had first walked the Abaratian stage. The devourers of ruins called the Waikami; the phantom, Lord Hoath; the many-tongued beast, Morrowain; the death’s head creature know as the Depotic; the raging,
