Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“Hush!” she said sharply.

“What?”

“We have visitors.”

The monotone in which she spoke was a voice Carrion had learned to despise—no, to dread. It was worse than anger, that voice. Anger had a beginning and an end. Even if it went on for weeks it would run out of fuel eventually. But the nullity from which this voice arose was his grandmother’s permanent state of being. It was her speaking from the grave into which she had been born, as she was fond of saying; the hole of dirt, worms and despair, which was the lot of all living things.

This was the harsh, unforgiving law that Carrion had been raised on. And every time he saw that look on his grandmother’s face, and heard the almost metallic harshness in her voice, the brutal lessons of his childhood came back to him as though her needle had only pierced his lips yesterday.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“Are you going or not?”

Christopher had drifted further into memory than he’d realized. He’d missed a piece of the conversation, it appeared. He knew from childhood it wasn’t wise to lie.

“I was distracted. Memories. Nothing important. You have all my attention now.”

“Good. Because we have a problem and you’ll have to fix it. I need to stay here in case they make a move.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Don’t you feel it?”

“No.”

“Look.”

She pointed to the ground, and threw down one of the wieldings he especially loathed. This was one of the Nephauree’s specialties, Carrion suspected: a violation of spatial geometry and physics alike. Though he had not moved a step, he now felt the ground shift beneath him. When his eyes dropped to the bare marble he was no longer standing on solid ground. But everything had shifted. The place where Carrion was standing now dropped away steeply, as it did on the opposite side, where his grandmother was standing on a steep slope, staring down into the depths of the ship. The floors and walls between the battle floor and the hold had been erased, essentially, by the power of the Nephauree’s magic.

There was chaos down there. Pigs were running around, squealing wildly. And in the midst of the pigs were two stitchlings. One of them was grievously wounded, a machete buried in its face. Mud continued to leap up out of the wound, its matter creating a gathering on the chest of the second stitchling, who lay sprawled on the ground.

The Empress took a steep step down the chaotic wall of the pit.

“You!” she said.

It was neither Shaveos or Lummuk who replied to her. It was the third entity down there: the one squatting on Shaveos’s chest, that looked up and spoke. Its face was still a work in progress, invisible fingers pushing the mud of its features around two holes for eyes—a slash of a mouth. But for all its crudity, it knew how to make words.

“What do you want?” it said, its voice a raw rasp.

“I want some respect from you, to start with! Do you know who you are addressing?”

“What makes you think I’d care?” the mud replied.

“Carrion?” the Hag said. “Go down and fetch me that skinless piece of filth. Carrion?”

Only now did she look up at the place where she’d last seen her son. He was no longer standing there.

“Carrion?”

“Carrion!”

“CARRION!”

Chapter 65

Lullaby

CANDY DIDN’T SEE ZEPHARIO ahead of her at any time during her pursuit, but her instincts told her she was on the right track. They also told her that she needed to pick up her pace otherwise she was going to lose him, even though he was the blind one and she the sighted. Luckily the old man had left a trail of air tinged with magic: drifts of color like chalk dust the color of his robes, falling away through the murky air. They weren’t, she thought, accidental. They only appeared at places where she might very well have made a wrong decision: turned right instead of left, or chosen the wrong one of several doors.

But even with the assistance he was giving to her, the space between them was getting bigger. And she certainly would have lost him eventually if help hadn’t come to her from a most unexpected source.

Mater Motley.

It was the Hag herself whom Candy heard call out:

“Carrion? Carrion! CARRION!”

Candy halted for a moment, and waited for the voice of the Hag to echo off the walls all around her. When they finally died away she heard the sounds of footsteps. It was Zephario she thought she heard, his running slowed by fatigue, but still moving fast. He was nearby too, just above her.

She risked everything, and called to him: “Wait for me, Zephario,” she said. “I’m coming. Just let me catch up with you.”

She had found the flight of stairs he had climbed—the pastel dust that he’d left behind him was still in the air, fading as it fell—and she went after him, climbing the stairs two or three at a time. Half way up she met a cloud of spice-and-honey smoke rolling down the stairs to meet her as she ascended. By now, she reasoned, the Hag was fully alerted to Candy’s presence. Stitchling troops were being sent to arrest her; and given her ignorance of the vessel’s layout, and the stitchlings’ familiarity with it, she had little hope of evading them.

She was almost at the top of the stairs. The atmosphere up here was very different from the atmosphere below. The lights in the hold had been the Commexo Company’s version of utilitarian supermarket lighting. It simply made things blandly visible. But the light that was illuminating the air at the top of the stairs was something else entirely: a blue-gold haze that dropped in lazy loops from a kind of ziggurat of candles in the center of a room so large that even thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of candles burning could not illuminate the walls of the room. It was some sort of altar. A place of worship for some thing Candy had no knowledge of. It was really only then that Candy understood how truly vast the craft that they had entered actually was; and the inconceivably immense orders of power that were being generated to keep it in the air.

“Zephario?” she said, her voice apparently never reaching the walls of the space, because no echo came back to her. “Zephario, where are you?”

“I’m here,” he said, and her eyes, following the sound of his voice, found him standing no more than thirty yards from her, standing so still in the flickering light of the temple that her gaze had slid past him several times without noticing him. “But you don’t need to stay with me any longer, Candy. You got me here. You did what you said you’d do.”

“I said I’d get you to him,” she said.

“To who?” Christopher Carrion asked.

For the second time she followed the sound of a Carrion’s voice in this place. And for a second time, found the one she was searching for just a short distance away. Candy couldn’t help but notice his startling transformation. He looked nothing like the festering alley urchin she’d encountered in Tazmagor.

“You shouldn’t be here, Candy. This is a sacred place. At least the Hag thinks so.”

“Sacred to whom?” Zephario asked him.

“The ones who give her the power she’s got. Who helped her build this Stormwalker,” Carrion replied. “Those Who Walk Behind the Stars.”

“The Nephauree?” Zephario said very softly.

“Yes . . .” Carrion said, his voice carrying a fresh measure of respect for this knowledgeable stranger. “Do you