Abarat: Absolute Midnight

A temple of carved divinities, each painted another unknown color, their heads crowned with the garlands of mercurial blossom and barbed cloud.

Candy felt a wind blow through the colors that she held, scattering them like the embers of an ancient fire, and she was astonished to feel a portion of her soul go with them, conforming not only into the shape of wind and flame but into a third shape, which was that of their antiquity.

Like all sacred works, it was both momentary and eternal. The intertwining of thoughts rising from the prisoners like branches from dreaming trees; the spinning prayers casting entreaties out to any thing in any heaven that might come to their rescue; the tiny fires that took a piece of Candy’s soul for fuel as they went to find the Lighter of all fires, the Begetter of all winds, the Lover of all souls, and carry Its holy song back to lift the brimming vessel up upon Its music.

She was a constellation now, pieces of her soul speeding in search of Deity, while the sigils of her flesh, bone and mind were gathered up by the glyph’s authority, and elegantly placed in the vast design where all the ley lines of its structure converged. She knew what she’d been called to do. For all its vast intelligences, the vessel had need of a pilot; and she had been called to duty.

“Lady?”

She was not alone: Malingo was rising to the left of her, Gazza to her right. And beyond them, and behind her, and in front, all the other authors of this vast device rose into its midst, their entrance instructing further reinventions, as though their very presences caused the system to convulse with bliss, turning every thought and breath and bead of sweat into an exaltation.

One part of Candy—impatient, doubtful, human—wanted the glyph to get underway, to carry them all off before their executioners arrived. But another part of her—a quieter, calmer part that was perfectly content to die if death was the price of enlightenment—took too much pleasure in the splendors visible from her place at the vessel’s heart to let fear of what might come steal what she was witnessing.

“All are boarded,” Gazza said.

And, as if on cue, the first blind burn of lightning came, turning Galigali into a black pyramid against a heaven of flawless white.

“Oh, Lordy Lou,” Malingo murmured. “We’re too late. The Hag is here!”

Part Seven

Oblivion’s Call

The Place is Where.

The Question How.

The Hours are When.

If Never, Now.

—Found written on the wall

of an abandoned asylum on

Gorgossium.

Chapter 61

Missing

“GRANDMOTHER?”

Mater Motley had put her hand, palm out, against the battle- deck window. Though her head was bowed, Carrion could see her anguished features reflected in the smoke-smeared glass.

“What . . . have they got?” she said.

“I don’t understand,” Carrion told her.

She, very slowly, looked round at him. There was naked disgust on her face, either at her own lack of foresight or at her grandson’s stupidity, perhaps both.

“Do you not feel the barbs raking your skin?”

Carrion considered the question, looking down at his hands as he did so, as though to silently interrogate them.

“No,” he said. “I feel nothing.”

Then his eyes went up to his glass collar. Inside, he saw his remaining nightmares were behaving strangely. Depending on circumstances, they behaved in one of two ways. When feeling peaceable, they slowly swam around, warily studying the world outside their dreamer’s collar. When they were aroused, however, either by rage or a desire to protect their maker, they would lash and thrash like electric whips, causing the fluid they all breathed to become milky and laced. But now they were doing something they’d never done before. They were perfectly still, the entire length of their bodies pressed against the glass, so as to be as close to their window as possible.

“Whatever it is you’re feeling, my children are feeling too.”

“Your children?” Mater Motley said, her expression of disgust souring with contempt.

“Yes, dearest Grandmama. I know you much prefer to burn your children and their children, but I take pleasure in the company of mine.”

“You’d do well to remember that you were the one I kept from the flame, do you not?”

“It’s never far from my thoughts,” Carrion replied. “Truly. I know I owe you my life.” The Empress’s expression sweetened at this. “As I do my scars.” And quickly soured again. “As I do my purpose. My very reason for living.”

“And what is your purpose?”

“To serve you, lady,” Carrion said.

He met her gaze, his eyes the color of the midsummer sea—a gleaming, glittering blue that concealed unfathomable depths: black, blacker, blackest.

All but one of his children that had retreated to the inside of his collar had detached themselves, and were now looking at her. Did they understand the meaning of the conversation between the old woman and their master? Did they understand her contempt and his subtle mockery? It seemed they did. When he ceased to study her, they too looked away, returning their gaze as did he, to the new form out the window.

The vessel hawked up another limb of lightning, and spat it down upon the bleak flank of Mount Galigali. The force of the strike threw up a cloud of vaporized rock in the midst of which fell a hail of lava boulders, which would have beaten holes in a vessel less well designed than the Stormwalker. A number of them struck the battle-deck window, but for all her sensitivity to the nuances in the air, the assault of shattered stones didn’t perturb the Empress in the least. She simply stared unthinking out at the billows of pulverized rock pressing against the battle- deck window.

“Call in the Commanders,” she instructed Carrion. “Quickly now!”

k

This time, Candy knew, there would be a kind of thunder to follow the lightning. It wouldn’t be the rolling growl of burning air, but the boom of guns.

Mater Motley wasn’t going to let her prisoners go without a fight.

“Candy? Candy!”

It was easy enough to identify the speaker: it was Zephario. But it was a lot more difficult to work out precisely where he was located. She had lost contact with him as the construction of the glyph had escalated, and she’d almost forgotten, in the heat of the moment, the deal that she’d made with him. He had given her the means to make this escape possible, in exchange for her attempting to connect him with his lost child. He had kept his side of the bargain, and now it was her turn. It had to happen immediately. There’d be no