Abarat: Absolute Midnight

fragments of a song she’d heard first in Babilonium came to her head. A meaningless little nonsense, which she sang quietly to herself as she watched the army coming:

“I got a cold in my nose,

But it comes and it goes.

I got a cold in my brain,

Which nearly makes me insane.

I got a cold in my toe,

That I can’t get to go,

I got cold,

Cold,

Cold . . .”

And while the monsters came, she stood there, watching, knowing that she had no hope of stopping them. She looked back at the crowd that had emerged from the glyph, and saw that Malingo and Gazza had started to walk toward her. Gazza beckoned to her. She glanced one more time at the approaching enemy. They were still five minutes away, perhaps. But no more than that.

She turned and started to run toward Malingo and Gazza. Gazza was close enough to call to her now.

“Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

He opened his arms as he approached her, and hugged her tight. She gave as good as she got, which only made him hug her more. Malingo put his own arms around them both, which nobody objected to.

“What do we do now?” Malingo said.

“We have to defend ourselves,” Candy said. “We’ve no other choice.”

“I’m all for a good fight,” Gazza said, “but we don’t have a hope against those things. Look at them! They’re burning and they still keep coming. No legs, so they crawl.”

Candy looked back toward the volcano. The approach of the stitchlings was indeed terrifying. Though a few of the most traumatically wounded creatures had finally perished on the slope, the greater number continued their shambling descent.

“The Abarataraba’s all used up,” Candy said. “There’s still some magic in me, but there’ll be no more glyphs, I’m afraid.”

“What about getting off the island by water?”

“There’s no chance of that,” Malingo said. “Izabella just pours away over the Edge of the World. If we got into the water, we’d go with it.”

“There’s going to be a lot of killing,” Candy said grimly. “We have to make a stand here.”

“We were all brought here to die anyway,” Malingo reminded her. “At least this way we have a chance.”

There was another eruption from the heart of Galigali: this one so violent it blew the front half of the Stormwalker apart. It did not draw Mater Motley’s gaze off the condemned, however. She simply kept walking down over the smoking slope.

“I wonder what happened to Christopher?” Candy wondered aloud.

“He’s there,” Malingo said.

“I don’t see him.”

“I did, I swear. He was a little way back from all the rest, but he was there.”

Candy looked up at the approaching army with fresh interest.

“You’re sure?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

“Huh,” Candy said. “Three generations of Carrions.” She looked at Gazza and Malingo. “I guess we’ll go meet them together.”

Chapter 71

An Execution

CARRION HAD THROWN UP a low-resolution Distraction Shield to keep the stitchlings he was moving among from noticing him, but it scarcely mattered. They had their attentions entirely fixed upon those they were about to execute. So after a while he simply let the wielding lapse, knowing that they neither saw him nor would have cared if they had. It was only when Carrion realized that the girl from Chickentown had started to walk back toward his grandmother’s army—the expression on her face completely defying interpretation—that he repowered the shield and once again slipped out of sight.

In his invisible state he had a little time to get his thoughts in some kind of order. He no longer knew where his loyalties lay, or even whether there were any advantages to having loyalties. He had obeyed his grandmother’s instructions for many years, doing servile work much of the time, and what had that got him? Death and a bitter resurrection on a stony beach. And love? Ha, love! That had been even more cruel than loyalty. True, it hadn’t killed him. It might have been kinder if it had. Instead it had left him looking like a fool, having been tricked out of every piece of magic he’d ever learned and then left without so much as a kiss by way of compensation. He’d grieved. Oh, Lordy Lou, how he’d grieved. But more, he’d raged, the anger blazing about his heart, so that he’d had to stoop to murder in order to extinguish it.

But even that hadn’t been the end of the anguish. Fifteen years or so later, the girl from Chickentown had come into his life, their paths crossing by accident, or so he’d thought. She’d been washed into the arms of Mama Izabella, carrying—again by chance; again, so he’d thought—only to find that Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, Minnesota, carried inside her the soul of the Princess whose manipulations and infidelities had left him stripped of power and love. Now Boa’s soul no longer occupied the girl, but it seemed not to matter. She still acted as though she could stand up against his grandmother! But she was wrong. This wasn’t the same Hag of Gorgossium any longer; the vicious old woman she’d faced on the Wormwood. The Empress was a different order of power. Why didn’t the girl understand that? Why didn’t she see with her own eyes the scale of his grandmother’s ally, the Nephauree? Didn’t she comprehend how incendiary a place this had become? Not because there was a volcano spitting air and earth around them, but because three generations of the Carrion dynasty were assembled for the first time since the fire that had wiped the future of that dynasty away, and returned all the power to the oldest surviving member of that family, in whose shadow he, the youngest, had been doomed to live?

Right now this was the most volatile place in the Abarat. And however much Candy might have learned about magic from Boa, she was still, at root, an ordinary creature of the Hereafter, strong of will, no question, perhaps even extraordinary in some regard. But she was still merely human, the shadowy places at the back of her mind still haunted by the beasts that had stalked the apes from which her kind had risen up. She would never be free of that fear, Carrion thought. And that would always leave her weak when facing Midnight.

And yet still she stood there, defying his grandmother, defying her own fear. Perhaps, just perhaps, she was something new. The next kind of woman, this girl.

Such a pity, if that was so, that she was going to die.

k

The two armies met. The Empress looked at Candy without any visible emotion.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I came because I saw Zephario in pain,” Candy said. “He’s your son. Doesn’t that make you a little merciful?”

“No, girl. I cleansed myself of mercy before I went to meet the Nephauree. I knew they would smell it upon me.”

“So you feel nothing for him?” Candy said.

She had no conscious notion of why she was even asking questions, but there was a reason, of that she was dimly certain. This was family business, and like all families the Carrions had their secrets. Whenever the members of her own family had got together, it had always ended with curses and fistfights. Perhaps there was some secret here that might yet change the way this fatal game ended.

“Oh, I do feel something for him,” Mater Motley admitted. “Something like maternal