of invisible patches around them, sewn together by their own hands. It was only woven fabric, like any other, but such lattices have strength in their pattern out of all proportion to the mild stuff from which they are woven. The doors smashed against the quilt and broke.
The seamstresses entered the chamber and saw what the exchange between their Empress and the Pixler- Requiax had come to. The combatants were still high above the ragged hole in the floor through which the waters of the Izabella continued to surge up, their ambition unquelled. The Empress was elevated by a pillar of seething darkness, while the frail form of Rojo Pixler was borne up by the fronds of the Requiax’s continuously regenerating anatomy, which drew up with it countless lengths of woven water. Each carried, within its length, a cord of the Requiax’s matter, through which the desires of its mind were communicated. The mind had one desire above all others: to see the monstrous woman standing in darkness before it dead. She was the enemy—not the greatest of them, to be sure. Other evil, vaster than her by orders of magnitude, was using her to gain a stronghold here in Time. That would not happen! She had to be brought down. The glittering cords of the Pixler-Requiax went about their labors, wrapping themselves around the pedestal of shadows on which she stood, and then rising through the soul-laden folds of her garment, forming a net of knotted sea around her.
She couldn’t get the rest of the words out. The water ropes had climbed her torso, and there was a noose of water around her neck. It tightened.
“No!” she said, and raised the hand she’d used to seize hold of Voorzangler, its fingers sharp and dark. Only this time it was onto her own flesh that she turned her piercing fingertips, sliding them down between her throat and the noose. She pulled the water rope off her gullet, far enough at least that she could get two words out.
“Free . . . . . . me . . . . . .”
The seamstresses were already raising their hands and speaking in old Abaratian the Eight Names of the Creatrix, which would summon to them the means to liberate their Empress.
“Giathakat.”
“Juth and Junntak.”
“Kiezazaflit.”
“Enothu and Eyjo.”
“Yeagothonine.”
“Yuut.”
“Yuut.”
“Yuut.”
Even before all eight had been spoken motes of fire ignited in their hands, forming vicious instruments, far more effective at cutting than any knife. They exchanged no words. They knew their business. They came at the column of darkness on which their lady stood and cut at the silver-green waters of Pixler and the Requiax. The tools that had been the gift of the Creatrix were as efficient as they were strange. They lacerated the waters, like assassins in a world of throats. Back and forth! Up and down! The cords of water, severed, fell back into the churning flood that had produced them.
Pixler-Requiax roared his disapproval.
“You should have stayed out of this battle, women,” he roared. “It’s going to be the death of you.”
The water was still pouring up out of the ground, weaving replacement ropes as it did so. They rose up suddenly—only two of them, but many times thicker than the cords that had climbed the column. They weren’t interested in disarming the women. It was the seamstresses themselves these two ropes of water were eager to claim.
The ropes did not linger to choose which women to take; they simply took, snatching two of the seamstresses from their cutting and summarily drowning them. The remaining seamstresses were too busy at their cutting to even notice that two of their number had gone. But the Empress did.
“Sisters! Take care!” she called to them. The meaning of her words was lost in the confusion. The ropes, having drowned two already, rose up to snatch another two.
Pixler was not a man without compassion. His spirit, in the Requiax’s cold embrace, saw that the seamstresses were indeed only women. They had let go of the instruments they had been cutting with. They wanted only to live.
Pixler could hardly blame the creature for what it had never known, or needed to know. He was the one who’d baited it with his lights and noise of his heart, drowning in the deep. He was the one who’d caused the Requiax to rise up and meet the sky. So it had no mercy to offer up? Such was its state.
“
This time, Pixler and the Requiax spoke with one united voice.
“
Part Six
There is No Tomorrow
—Anon.
Chapter 53
Forgiveness
CANDY WOKE, AS SHE had woken so many times in the months of her travels in the Abarat, not quite sure of where she was at first, or how she’d come to be here, but figuring it out slowly, from the sights and sounds around her.
She was in the prison ship. She was down here in the bowels of the vessel with a large number, certainly upward of a thousand, of other arrestees. There wasn’t very much light to offer her any details of who these others might be, but what light there was came from two ineffective lanterns that hung high above the mass of huddled prisoners, and swung violently with the pitching of the ship. They were plunging through some very turbulent waters, which caused the ship to creak and roll, and which was in turn causing no little pain to those suffering around her.
She could hear their minds, restless with fear and pain, letting their questions flow unanswered from their bruised heads.
She wanted to quiet their terrors.
“It’ll be all right . . .” she murmured.
