Abarat

22. IN GALLOWS FOREST

Nobody – not even christopher carrion himself—knew every last secret of the Midnight Island. The place was a labyrinth, with its columns of black rock and its fathomless lakes, its mines, its forests, its steeps and its plains. It was the hiding place of countless ancient mysteries. Indeed he'd heard it said that every fear that had ever chilled the human heart was here on Gorgossium. All assembled at that terrible Hour when the past slips away from us and we are left in dark, not knowing what will come next. If anything.

Tonight, Carrion was out walking among Gorgossium's horrible splendors, meditating on what he had seen through the eyes of the moth he'd conjured out of human dust on Vesper's Rock.

He'd witnessed the flight to the Yebba Dim Day, and of course he'd seen the girl standing there on the tower of The Great Head, studying the islands. He'd taken pleasure in the look of terror on her face as his creation, guided by Shape, had swooped down to catch hold of her and carry her off. The journey back to Midnight had begun. Things had been going very well.

Then had come the appearance of the balloons and the attack on the moth. Carrion had watched the approach of the vessels in a state of impotent fury, listened in horror as their bolts flew. He'd heard Mendelson ordering the moth to descend, presumably in the hope of outmaneuvering their pursuers. But it was a lost cause. One of the bolts had struck home, wounding the moth's telepathic powers. The images in Carrion's mind's eye had gone blank.

He didn't care about the fate of the moth—it had been raised from dust and light and would now to dust and light return. Nor did Mendelson Shape's survival matter to him. All that concerned him was the moth's freight: the girl it had abducted from the towers of the Yebba Dim Day.

Though he'd only caught a brief glimpse of her—and her face had been obscured by some device she was wearing over her eyes– he had felt an extraordinary rush of recognition at the sight of her. She was somebody special; somebody important. Perhaps even somebody for whom he could feel love.

But even as his heart had quickened at the sight of the girl, his head had cautioned him to be careful. He had not had pleasant experiences where love was concerned. It could break your heart, if you weren't careful. It could make you feel so lost, so confused, and so worthless that life didn't seem worth living. This wasn't something he knew from books; these were the bitter lessons of his life.

He decided to think further on this, so rather than return to the Twelfth Tower he went walking, taking his favorite path through Gallows Forest. As he proceeded, his thoughts inevitably turned from the girl that he'd seen on the towers of the Yebba Dim Day to that other special one, the one who had caused him so much grief: his Princess Boa.

Though it was many years since she had hurt him, he still wore on his heart the scars she had left there.

In his eyes she had been beautiful beyond words, a creature of infinite charm and sweetness of nature. She had also been the daughter of King Claus, who ruled at that time an alliance of the Islands of Day. As such, she had been a perfect match for the Lord of Midnight. So he'd told her, in his letters to her.

"What a time of healing there wouldbe," he'd written, "if you would consent to marry me. You who love the Daylight Hours, and I, who love the Night. Wouldn't we be perfect together? For centuries the islands have been at war, sometimes secret hostilities, sometimes open struggle; but always a conflict that ended in a terrible loss of life, and in a stalemate which advanced the cause of neither side.

"An end to all of that. An end to war, forever! If you would marry me, we would announce on our wedding day that all enmities between the Islands of Night and Day would henceforth cease; and that the old wounds would be healed away by the example of our love, and a new Age begin: an Age of Everlasting Love. The war-makers would be stripped of their weapons and made to turn their hands to some loving labor. On that day too I would intend to free all my many stitchlings, who have worked to defend Midnight from attack. This would be an act of faith on my part. In doing this, I would be announcing to the world that I would rather die unarmed, and in love, than ever pick up another sword.

"And I would name you, my darling, as my inspiration. You, my sweet Princess, would be the loving soul that the Abarat would thank for your power to quell the anger in the heart of Night."

There had been many such letters, and many to him from the Princess Boa, in which she'd told him how beautiful his sentiments were, and how much she wanted to believe that Carrion's Age of Love Everlasting was something that could indeed be brought about.

"My father, King Claus, and my brother Quiffin have both advised me to accept your noble entreaties" the Princess had written, "but my lord, I am far from certain that I can do as you all desire me to do. If 1 fail to feel in my heart the depth of love that a union of our souls surely demands, things would never go well between us. Please understand that I wish you no discourtesy in speaking this way. I only desire to speak truthfully so that there be no misunderstanding"

Her letter, full of doubt (there was no outright refusal, at least not at the beginning) had hurt him. For long nights after receiving it he could not bring himself to eat, or to speak to anyone.

Finally, he had penned a response, begging her to reconsider.

"If you are concerned about my appearance, lady" he had said, "please be reassured: my grandmother Mater Motley has promised to use her skills in the magical arts to erase the marks that a life of grief and loneliness have left upon me. Should you agree to a union between us—and though you say your soul is not touched by love for me, I yet dare hope I may earn that love —theny your Midnight Prince would be made new again, as any lover should be: new in your eyes, new in my own, and new, finally, in the eyes of the world ."

But all his reassurances could not persuade the Princess Boa to change her mind. She wrote back to him with great tenderness, but there was always uncertainty in what she wrote. She wasn't saying no , outright, because her father agreed with Carrion and saw a great opportunity for peace between Day and Night if his daughter and the Lord of Midnight were to marry. But for her to say yes, she would have to be rid of all the questions that haunted her.

She had dreams, she had written, that did not reassure her.

He had written back, asking her what dreams these were.

The Princess Boa had not been specific in her response. She'd only said that the dreams frightened her, and though she did not doubt Carrion's good and honorable intentions toward her, she could not put these visions out of her head.

As he walked through Gallows Forest, the vultures and the ravens kept pace with him, the ravens flying from tree to tree overhead, the vultures hopping at his feet, fighting between themselves for the place closest to his heels. He remembered how he had labored over the letters he had written back to her, determined to convince her that the dreams she was having were of no significance, and that she should take comfort in his undying devotion to her.

"I will protect you ," he had written, "from any power that threatens you. I will put myself between you and Death itself. Please, lady, be assured: there is no demon in air, earth or sea that can threaten you ."

Whenever he had sent a letter to her there had always been a trial by hope while he had waited for her reply. And then a terrible moment when that reply had finally arrived and his fingers had become thick and fumbling with unease as he struggled to open the envelope.

The answer never satisfied him.

He pressed her, over and over, to stop punishing him with indecision. And finally, after much importuning on his part, the Princess had given him a clear answer. It could not, indeed, have been clearer. She did not love him, could not love him, and would never love him.

He'd almost drowned in the wave of self-hatred that had broken over him when he read that final reply. He knew why she was telling him no, and it had nothing to do with her nightmares. It was something else; something far simpler.

She hated him.

That was the terrible truth of the matter. However tenderly phrased her refusal, he could read between the lines of her letter. She thought he was an ugly, scarred, nightmare-ridden grotesque, and she hated him with all her heart.

That was the beginning, the middle and the end of the matter.

His long, meditative amble through the trees had brought him into the heart of the forest now, where the great gallows of the past had been planted. Some still had rotted nooses tied to their beams, and a few of those nooses still supported the remains of executed men and women, mummified in their last, ghastly poses, mouths stretched grotesquely wide. Some had had their tongues plucked out by hungry ravens, and many of the birds in this vicinity had come to possess the voices of those whose tongues they ate. Now they chattered like men as they hopped around on the bloodred branches that had sprouted from the gallows.

"What a night to be hanged, eh?"

"I was hanged on a night like this. How my wife cried!"

"Mine didn't."

"Why not?"

"She was the reason I had a noose around my throat!"

"You killed her?"

"I surely did! She cooked the worst bread-puddinginTazmagor !"

The Lord of Midnight put the absurdly grim gossip out of his head and let his thoughts go back to the girl he had seen through the moth's eyes on the towers of the Yebba Dim Day. Though she had fallen out of the air when the moth was killed, she was still alive; of that Carrion was irrationally certain. And sooner or later he would find her and speak to her.

Did he dare believe that perhaps this girl had come from the Hereafter as fortune's way of compensating him for what he'd suffered at the hands of the Princess Boa? Perhaps that was why he thought he recognized the girl: because she was a gift to him from circumstance.

The thought lifted his dark mood somewhat. He walked on through the trees, toward the cliff edge, where he would have a view toward the islands of the west. Including, of course, the Yebba Dim Day.

His route took him past a place among the trees where two masked men who'd been warders in his prison and had developed a deep enmity for one another were fighting with clubs. The pair were brothers, Wendigo and Chilek, and Carrion had amused himself some days earlier by casually sewing a seed of discord between the two (a rumor, no more, whispered in each ear, suggesting that one brother was attempting to become the prison's warden behind the other's back). It was a test, really, to see how long it would take for jealousy to overcome the once powerful love that the two brothers had borne one another. Not long, was the answer. Here they were now, fighting to the death over something that wasn't even true.

Unseen, Carrion watched from the shadows as the fight reached its grim conclusion. One brother slipped in the mush of rotted gallows leaves beneath their feet and went down in the dirt. The other man didn't give his brother a chance to beg for mercy. He raised his club and delivered the coup de grace with a whoop of boyish glee.

The victor's moment of triumph didn't last very long. The whoop died away, and the surviving brother seemed to wake from his trance of envy and bloodlust. He shook his head and pulled off his mask. Then—letting both mask and club drop from his hands– he fell to his knees beside his sibling. Recognition of what he'd done flooded his face.

Carrion laughed, hugely amused. Hearing the laughter, Wendigo looked up from his brother's body and stared off into the shadows.

"Who's there?" he demanded of the darkness.

The sudden grief in his voice disturbed a flock of gallows ravens in the branches overhead. They too had been watching the fight, it seemed. Now they called to Wendigo as they swooped down around him.

"Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!"

He tried to wave them off, but they weren't about to be driven away.

Around and around they flew, some even daring to land on the man's head to hop there and laugh into his ears. He struck wildly at them, but they were up and away before he could catch hold of their black and spindly legs. Defeated, now alone with his crime, Wendigo sank down sobbing in the dead leaves.

Carrion left the ravens to their tormenting and Wendigo to his tears. His mood was improving by the moment.

As he walked, a wind came out of the west and passed through the forest, whistling between the rotted teeth of the hanged men and sighing out of their eye sockets. The nooses creaked as the corpses swung back and forth.

Carrion took off one of his gloves and put his bare hand up into the wind, his lips drawing back. They had been permanently scarred, those lips, by something that his grandmother had done to him many, many years before. Hearing him use the word love , Mater Motley had sewn his lips together, and left him that way, speechless and hungry, for the space of a day.

"Where are you, child of the Hereafter ?" Carrion wondered aloud.

The wind carried his words away.

"Come to me" he went on, as he walked through the swaying corpses toward the sea. "I won't hurt you, child. I swear, on the tomb of my beloved ."

And still the wind took his words. He let it. Perhaps his gift from the Hereafter would hear what he was telling her and do as he was asking.

"Come to me" he said again, dropping his words to a whisper, imagining them finding their way into the ear of the trespasser. As she slept, perhaps, or as she stared out at the sea, just as he was staring out at the sea.

"Do you hearme ?" he said. "I'm waiting for you. Come to me. Come to me. Come to me ."

23. THE MAN WHO MADE THE KID

The great moth, though it was certainly dead, did not fall from the sky like a stone. Its wings were so large that it spiraled down like a kite that had lost the wind. Candy held on to its thorax, praying aloud:

"Please, God, help me!"

But the words were snatched out of her mouth by the speed of their descent, which grew faster and faster.

She caught a glimpse of what lay below. It wasn't bare rock, but it wasn't a featherbed either: it was a stretch of what looked like moorland, with here and there a few scattered trees.

And then—as if things weren't bad enough—Mendelson Shape reached down around the body of the moth and began to shake her loose. Quite why he was doing this was beyond her; perhaps he was simply trying to lighten the load. Whatever his reasons, they were his undoing. In his attempt to throw Candy off, he lost his own grip on the animal and started to pitch forward over the moth's head. In desperation he snatched hold of the moth's antennae, but his body weight simply flipped the insect's whole cadaver over.

It was now Shape who started to pray aloud for help, though he did so in a language Candy didn't understand. His pleadings were no more efficacious than Candy's had been. She heard him clawing his way up over the moth, each breath a sob. But he was lost. His pleadings became more desperate than ever; then the wind gusted with particular force, and he was carried away. Candy glimpsed him as he swept past her. He plunged out of sight through the darkened air, leaving her lying face up on the belly of the insect as it too plummeted earthward. The spread of the moth's wings slowed its descent, which was about the only good news about Candy's situation. She held on tight, anticipating a massive blow when they hit the ground.

But she was lucky. The wind had carried the moth away from the rocks where Mendelson had fallen, and toward one of the copses. The insect's body landed in the canopy. Twigs and branches snapped, and the huge body threatened to continue its fall to earth, but the young trees had sufficient resilience to bear the moth's body up.

Leaves flew into the air and came spiraling down on top of Candy. She lay absolutely still, waiting for the last of the motion to subside. Then she gently rolled over onto her stomach and peered down through the creaking branches.

The ground was still twenty feet below her, perhaps more. She needed to proceed with extreme caution, she knew, if she was going to get down to terra firma without doing herself harm. As it turned out, it wasn't too much of a problem. The trees presented her with easy hand– and foot-holds. Though she still was shaky from the last few minutes of high drama, she managed to clamber down to earth without any further incident.

The first thing she did was to relieve Squiller of his duty by gently unknitting him from her head. The poor squid was trembling violently. She did her best to reassure him with soft words.

"It's okay," she told him. "We're perfectly safe now."

She would have to get him back to the water as soon as possible. Squiller had been serving her sight for an hour or more; she was surprised he was still alive.

Now that she was on the ground she took stock of the situation. What place was this? Or, more correctly, given that she was in the Abarat, what Hour?

It was dark here—darker than the Yebba Dim Day—but not yet deep night. Her guess was that this was Ten O'clock in the Evening, which she remembered from her lessons with Klepp was the island of Ninnyhammer.

There was a little chill in the air, and on the breeze, from some distance away, she could hear an orchestra playing some mournful music.

She ventured to the edge of the little stand of trees to see if she could discover the source of the music. She did so easily. As she peered out from the trees, two of the hunters set their balloons down gently, not fifty yards away from her, the floodlights on their gondolas illuminating the ground in every direction. Rather than step out into the light and make herself a potential target for the hunters she retreated into the cover of the trees again and watched while events unfolded.

First she heard the sound of the gondola doors being opened, and then—with a quiet hum—a set of steps emerged, so that these pampered hunters didn't have to jump the short distance from the doorway to the ground.

The three men who emerged were all wearing identical clothes: high-collared gray suits and highly polished gray boots. The leader—to judge by the way that the other two men fawned upon him—was not the oldest. He was a diminutive young man with a shock of orange hair that fell over his brow, and the perpetually narrowed eyes of one who was deeply suspicious of the world.

The other two—his bodyguards, perhaps—were almost twice his size, and they instantly proceeded to survey the territory into which their leader was wandering. Both carried guns.

Finally, bringing up the rear of this little group was a black man so tall he had to bend his head in order to get out through the gondola's door. He wore a pair of small silver glasses and he carried some kind of large electronic tablet, the screen of which gave off a pulsing glow that illuminated his face with light: sometimes white, sometimes turquoise, sometimes orange. He attended closely to everything the man with the orange hair said or did, and in response his long agile fingers moved restlessly back and forth over the tablet, missing no detail of whatever his boss said or did as he set it down.

The man with the suspicious eyes had already fixed his gaze upon the moth in the tree; and he approached the creature, talking as he went.

"Have you ever seen any life-form quite like this, Mr. Birch?" he said to the man in the silvered glasses. He didn't wait for a reply. "Doggett?" Mr. Suspicion said, now addressing the larger of the two bodyguards. "You'd better get some grappling hooks and ropes, so we can bring this thing down. I want it preserved for our collection."

"It's as good as done, Mr. Pixler," Doggett said, and left the little company to get the work underway.

Pixler ? Candy said to herself. Was it possible that this little man was in fact the master architect of Commexo City?

"What do you make of it, Birch?" Pixler asked his companion.

The man came to Pixler's side. He was fully two and a half feet taller than his boss, and despite the insipid, functional cut of the pale suits they were all wearing, he wore his with a curious elegance. "I've been going through Willsberger's Flora and Fauna of the Islands and—"

"There's no entry for a giant moth?" Pixler said, gently patting his quiff to be sure it hadn't lost its shape.

"No."

"I'm not surprised," Pixler said. "It's my opinion that this thing was made by magic. Look at the color flowing out of it, Birch. It was a conjuration that made this. And a powerful one." Pixler smiled. "It's going to take time to root out all the magic in these islands. We've got a lot of books to burn, a lot of spirits to break—"

Candy listened to the man speaking of book burnings and spirit breaking with a little smile of anticipation on his face, and it made her shudder. So this was the philosophy of Rojo Pixler, the great architect of Commexo City. It made grim listening.

"I don't want them going to their local shamans and witch doctors for their healing and their revelations. I want them coming to us. To me! If people want a taste of magic, let it be our magic. Sanitized. Systematized."

"Hallelujah," Birch said.

"You're not mocking me, are you?" Pixler snapped, reeling around on the man, his finger jabbed in the man's face.

Birch raised his hands in surrender, the tablet slipping from his hands. "Good Lord, no. Absolutely not, sir."

Pixler laughed out loud. "A joke, Birch. A joke!" he said.

"What?" said Birch, his expression empty.

"Where's your sense of humor?" Mr. Suspicion said.

"Oh. A joke."

"Come on, Birch, lighten up. I trust you."

Birch bent down and picked up the tablet he'd dropped. As he did so, he shot Pixler a glance that the boss-man didn't see, but Candy did. It spoke volumes. Under Birch's loyal manner lay a deep-seated contempt for his employer.

"Write this down for me, Birch," Pixler said. "I want to announce an amnesty on all books of magic. If they're turned over to us in Commexo City for burning in the next thirty days, I will personally guarantee that whoever hands the books over will be immune from prosecution."

"With respect," Birch said, "there are no laws, sir, forbidding the practice of magic outside Commexo City. And again, with respect, I think it would be very hard to get any of the Island Councils to agree to put such a law into effect."

"What if we told these two-bit councilors that they could never have any further dealings with Commexo unless they did create such a law?" Pixler said.

"That might work," Birch said. "But what about the big players? The Carrion family has a vast magical library, I hear. Probably the largest on the islands. How do we get them to give that up?"

"I'll find a way," Rojo said, his manner oozing confidence. "I always find a way, you know me."

"Wait," said Birch softly.

"What is it?"

"Would you mind, sir?" Birch said, handing his glowing tablet over to his boss.

"What's the problem, Birch?" Pixler said.

"None, sir," Birch said, taking a small step away from his employer, toward the copse, then another, then a third.

"Birch?"

At that moment Birch's steps became a long-legged dash into the undergrowth.

Too late, Candy realized that she was the target of his pursuit. She turned and started to run, but before she could get more than a yard, he had his hands on her.

"A spy ?" Pixler yelled.

"It's just a girl," Birch said, as he pulled Candy out of the shadows and into the blaze of light from the balloons. She complained loudly about his manhandling of her, but she had no choice in the matter. He was considerably stronger than she was, and he didn't seem to care that he was bruising her in the process of holding on to her.

"Are you our moth maker?" Pixler said. "Did you do that ?" He pointed to the dead moth, which was still in the trees, despite the attempts of Doggett and his team to bring it down.

"She's probably one of the local tribespeople," Birch said, still holding Candy tight. "Some of them are mute, I believe."

"Are you mute?" Pixler said.

"No," Candy replied.

"Ah. That's one theory that bites the dust," Pixler said.

"Then who are you?" said Birch.

"My name is Candy Quackenbush and for your information I was being abducted by that thing in the trees when you brave, clever gentlemen shot it out of the skies. You could have killed me!"

Pixler listened to this little outburst with a mildly amused expression on his face.

"I think you could probably let the young lady go now, Birch," Pixler said.

"She may be armed," Birch said, not releasing Candy.

"What have you got in your hand?" Doggett demanded.

"That's Squiller," Candy said, looking down. To her distress she realized that in the last few minutes—while she'd been listening to the book-burning nonsenses Rojo Pixler was spouting—the life had finally gone from her little squid. Most likely it had been out of its native element too long.

"Let me go !" she raged, digging at Birch with her elbows to get him to release her.

"You heard what the girl told you," Pixler said.

Birch let go of Candy, but stayed within six inches of her in case she attempted to make a move on his boss.

"Shall I take that from you?" Pixler said, his hands extended to receive Squiller's body.

"No, you can't," Candy said. "I'll bury him myself. I want to say a little prayer."

"For a squid ? My lord," said Birch, "you are a primitive lot on this island."

"Don't be so judgmental, Birch," said Pixler. His voice had become softer. "My sister Filomena used to bury all her pets in the back garden when we were young. We had quite a little cemetery back there. I used to dig the hole, and she'd write a little prayer. These little rituals are important. Where are you from, child?"

"A long way away," Candy said.

She suddenly felt a deep tremor of sadness go through her, and she wished with all her heart that she could snap her fingers and be returned to her own backyard in Followell Street, where she could lay Squiller to rest beside Monty the canary and several deceased goldfish: the companions of her childhood. She could feel tears not that far off, and the last thing she wanted to do was weep in front of a couple of total strangers. So she said:

"If you'll excuse me, I'm going to bury Squiller in the woods. It's been nice meeting you, Mr. Pixler. And you"—she looked at Birch—"not so nice."

"Well, that's plain-speaking," Pixler said.

"We speak plainly in Minnesota."

"Minnesota?" said Birch. "What island is that?"

"Minnesota isn't in the Abarat, Birch," Pixler said.

"You mean—?"

"Yes," said Pixler. "Minnesota is in the Hereafter."

Leaving them to their discussion, Candy wandered off into the woods, making sure she kept well away from the area where the men were now at work under Doggett's supervision, bringing the dead moth down from the branches.

She found a place where the dirt looked relatively easy to penetrate and she proceeded to dig with her hands. When she'd got down a foot or so, she lay Squiller's little body at the bottom of the hole and threw a fistful of earth over him. She'd only been to one funeral in her life—her grandmother's—but she remembered a smattering of words from the ceremony.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…" she murmured. Then she improvised: "Thank you for your company, Squiller. I'm sorry you're gone. I'm going to miss you." She began to push the remaining dirt over the squid's body as she spoke, covering it completely. "I hope wherever you've gone, it's a place you want to be." She sniffed hard, swallowing her salty tears. It wasn't just Squiller's impromptu funeral that had brought them on. It was thoughts of home, and of the great distance that lay between this place and the streets of Chickentown. "Now I'm alone," she said to herself.

"No, you're not."

She glanced over her shoulder. Rojo Pixler was standing close by.

"This is a private funeral," she said to him.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, sounding genuinely contrite. "I really didn't wish to intrude on your grief. It's just that back there you said something very interesting."

"I did?"

"When you told me that you came from Minnesota."

"Oh, that."

"Yes, that. Were you telling the truth?"

"Why?"

"Because I would be extremely thankful to you if you would lead me back there."

"To Minnesota?"

"Yes. To Minnesota."

Candy looked incredulous. "You wouldn't like it," she said.

"Oh but I think I would. I'm always looking for new markets for the Commexo Kid and his Panacea."

Candy didn't reply. She finished covering up Squiller and gently patted down the earth. Pixler had meanwhile squatted beside her.

"Here," he said. He had made a small cross of two pieces of twig, tied together with a length of grass.

Candy was a little taken aback by the simple gentility of the gesture, but then she thought, Well, he's trying to be civil , so she took the cross from Pixler and pushed it into the soft earth at the head of the grave.

"Thank you," she said.

"No problem. I want us to be friends. What's your name again?"

"Candy Quackenbush."

"Candy, I'm Rojo. I won't beat around the bush. The fact that you've come from the Hereafter is of the greatest possible importance to me."

"I don't see why," said Candy. "It's not as interesting there as it is here."

"Well, maybe not to you ," Rojo replied. "But you're used to it. To me it's… new territory to explore. A new frontier. I've done all I can here. I need somewhere new to—"

"Conquer?" Candy said, standing up and looking down at Pixler.

"No," he protested mildly. "Do I look like a conqueror? I'm a civilized man, Candy. I build cities—"

"And burn books," she said.

He looked pained to have been caught in a lie. Before he could come back with another response, she had more to say: "And shoot down defenseless creatures."

"I didn't see you being carried by the moth, I swear. If I had, I wouldn't have fired."

"There was a rider on the moth too."

"Really?"

"Yes. His name was Mendelson Shape. He fell to his death."

Rojo looked genuinely distressed. "That's a tragedy. I am completely culpable. In the heat of the hunt I did something I shouldn't have done. Did you know him? The rider, I mean? If he has family I'll make whatever reparations I can."

"I don't know if he had any family. He worked for someone called Christopher Carrion."

"Carrion? Really ?" Rojo glanced away from Candy toward the moth, which Doggett's men were seconds away from bringing down out of the trees. "So that was Carrion's handiwork, eh?" he said, his voice touched by awe. "Very impressive."

Candy followed his gaze toward the moth. Light and color were still pouring from it, dissipating on the air, illuminating the trees: blue and purple and yellow and red.

"So tell me—" Pixler said, "—what were you doing, taking a ride on Carrion's moth?"

"If you must know I wasn't taking a ride. Shape abducted me."

"Abducted?"

"Yes."

Rojo gave a little self-satisfied smile. "Well then," he said. "I saved you from some very serious trouble. You wouldn't have wanted to be Carrion's prisoner, believe me. He has the morals of the very Devil, that man. And if he ever found a way to get over to the Hereafter…"

"It's not that difficult," Candy said.

"To get there, perhaps. But to gain a foothold…" He passed his hand through his hair. "That's the challenge. Please listen to me. Candy. I truly believe we could be very useful to one another."

Candy was not convinced. "How?" she said.

"Think it through. I'm in need of somebody with a good working knowledge of the Hereafter, and you need somebody here to protect you from Carrion."

"I don't need protection."

"Oh, my dear, you don't have the first clue what this man will do to you if he takes it into his head to be cruel. He is a law unto himself, believe me."

"Even so, I don't care to tell you about the Hereafter," Candy said, backing away from him.

"Oh, now don't be difficult," Pixler said. "I realize we met under difficult circumstances. But I'm genuinely sorry about the moth. It was just an accident. It could have happened to anyone."

"Anyone who was out hunting," Candy said.

"I realize not everybody approves of it. But it relaxes me. And I have a huge collection of stuffed animals in Commexo City. Nineteen thousand specimens, from fleas to Kiefalent whales. I'd really like you to see it."

"Some other time, maybe," Candy said.

Pixler shrugged. "Believe me or not," he said, his tone hardening, "I don't really care. In the end, you're going to come begging to me, when Carrion's on your tail. Begging for me to hide you from him."

"Yes, well maybe…" Candy said. "But right now I'd prefer to take my chances."

"Please," Pixler said, making one last desperate attempt to convince her, "let me bring you back to Commexo City. It's not safe on half these islands. The inhabitants are savages. Totally uncivilized."

"I am not going back to Commexo City with you. That's final," Candy said.

In truth there was a little part of Candy that wanted to accept Pixler's invitation. He was polite enough, after all; he seemed more like an ordinary human being than many of the creatures she'd met on her travels, which right now she found reassuring. She was feeling very much alone, and very tired. She'd lost count of the time that had passed since she and Mischief had plunged into the Sea of Izabella (though she'd reset her watch when Mischief had told her to, it had stopped); now she felt the way travelers in the Hereafter felt when they'd traveled around the world and their body clocks had become confused. Her thoughts were sluggish and her limbs ached. The thought of going with Pixler to some civilized place where the showers were probably hot and the beds were surely soft was not without its attractions.

But then she'd effectively be in Pixler's control, wouldn't she? In his city, as his guest. Or his prisoner.

"I can see you're having second thoughts," Pixler said, reading the confusion on Candy's face. "You're thinking about a comfortable place to lay your head, no doubt."

Candy tried to block out his seductions by concentrating on something else. She turned her attention to the moth.

Off between the trees, Doggett's team was close to bringing down the creature's body. There was much shouting and a flurry of orders, then—sooner than any of the workmen had anticipated—the moth's corpse came crashing down out of the trees. As it struck the ground, it erupted in a brilliant shower of light and color.

But there was something else in the substance of the creature that was also set free as it flew apart. Candy saw four or five skeletal faces rise up out of the blazing remains of the moth and weave their way skyward.

The spectacle didn't just draw her attention. It drew that of Pixler and Birch too. Candy seized her moment. She cautiously retreated a step, then another, then another. Birch and Pixler hadn't noticed: the disintegration of the moth was like a fireworks display; it claimed all their attention.

After five backward steps Candy turned and ran.

It didn't take her long to get to the other side of the copse, and there she paused to take a backward glance. She could see Birch and Pixler, silhouetted against the brightness of the moth. By now they had both realized that she'd gone. They were looking around, obviously trying to locate her. But apparently they'd been staring into the blaze of the disintegrating moth for too long, and it was still blinding them. Or perhaps the darkness simply concealed her. Whatever the reason, when they looked in her direction—as now and then they did—they failed to see her.

Pixler yelled something at Birch, who immediately went back to the balloon's gondola.

He's gone for more men , Candy thought. I'd better get out of here .

She turned her back on the men and the moth and surveyed the starlit terrain in front of her. Ninnyhammer was an island of gentle hills; on top of one of those hills, perhaps two miles from where she was standing, was a building with a large dome upon it. There was light in its windows, so if it was a house, then somebody was at home, and if it was a religious building of some kind (which the dome made her think perhaps it was), then it was open for worship. Or sanctuary, which was what she needed right now.

She didn't look back now at Rojo Pixler, or the moth with its colors and its weaving ghosts. She simply started down the gentle slope that led away from the trees. Very soon, the copse was out of sight, and the men's voices had been carried away by the wind.

She was alone for the first time since she'd arrived in the Abarat. There were no hunters, no Sea-Skippers; no Izarith, no Samuel Klepp, no John Mischief and his brothers.

Just her, Miss Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, under a heaven filled with alien stars.

From somewhere deep inside her a great—and unforeseen– surge of joy appeared.

Out of sheer pleasure she started to sing as she went. It wasn't a song from the Hereafter that came to her lips. It was the absurd little ditty she'd heard the Sea-Skippers sing.

For some uncanny reason she remembered it perfectly, as though she'd known it all her life, which was of course impossible. Yet here it was, coming to her lips as easily as some rhyme she'd been taught at kindergarten.

Oh, well , she thought as she gave the song full throat, there's another mystery .

And content that somewhere on the journey ahead she would find the answer to that mystery—along with something to eat—she went on her way, singing of newts and hamster trees.

24. DIGGER AND DRAGONS

John mischief hadn't been making an idle boast when he spoke of himself—or more correctly, of themselves , the brothers—as master criminals. During their long felonious career, they had stolen from all manner of places, coming away with all kinds of hauls. Only once had they been arrested, and slipped custody while being transported back to the Yebba Dim Day by throwing themselves overboard.

There were too many thefts for the brothers to remember every one, but there were some that they still liked to revisit in those idle moments of happy self-congratulation. Their burglary of the chateau of Malleus Nyce on Huffell's Hill, for instance, had been extremely profitable. They'd come away with every costume Nyce had ever worn to the Cacodemonic Carnivals on Soma Plume: sixty-one outfits, all set with precious jewels and sewn with Thread of Sirius. Just a year or so later, they had broken into the prison on Scoriae and stolen all the tattoos off the body of the gangster Monkai-Monkai, leaving him as naked as the day he was born.

Then there had been their picking of the locks on the door of the Repository of Remembrance, that contained one hundred and thirty-one rooms of treasures that had once belonged to the great and the good of the Abarat, going back to the time when the islands were twenty-four Tribal Territories.

Nothing in the Repository had been of any real value. There had been no jewels, no precious metals. But the rooms had contained objects of infinitely more value than wealth. Here, collected and cataloged on the Repository's shelves was a hoard of the heart: the nursery toys of kings, the playthings of princes, the mud pies that potentates had dreamed would one day be palaces. The potential purchasers of all these objects of lovely inconsequence were the people across the archipelago who still idolized their one-time owners; and the brothers had anticipated making so many millions of zem they would never have to steal another fork.

But it was not to be. Monkai-Monkai had broken out of prison two days later and had come after the brothers and the only way Mischief and his siblings had escaped with their lives was by handing over their booty from the Repository to him.

But the treasure the brothers had been most proud of stealing, because stealing it had proved so difficult, was a painting known as The Beautiful Moment .

It had hung in what was known as the Stone House, the possession of the sometime lord of the Islands of Day, King Claus. Since the death of his daughter, Claus had become an obsessive eater, and weighed over a thousand pounds. He ate and slept in a vast clockwork car, and had chased the thieves in it when he'd awoken to find his painting being stolen.

That had been a close call. But the brothers had been proud of the job. And indeed so enamored of what they'd stolen that they had almost considered keeping it.

The Beautiful Moment was a lovely thing. Or more correctly, three things; for the artist, a man called Thaddeus George, had painted a triptych that, when laid side by side, portrayed the entire archipelago, immortalized in oils at a time when everyone had had high hopes for the future. King Claus had commissioned the work from Thaddeus six weeks before his daughter's wedding, taking him up in an air balloon so that he might see the Abarat spread out "at this beautiful moment."

The world Thaddeus had painted was very different from the Abarat of today. The islands had been very different sixteen years ago. There had been no Commexo City on Pyon. Babilonium had been a modest little collection of tents and fun-fair entertainments (a Ferris wheel, a hall of mirrors, a geek in a cage). The air traffic above the islands had been little more than a few million birds, and the odd balloon, and the sea traffic had consisted chiefly of sailing ships.

In the interest of his art, Thaddeus had also taken some liberties with the size and complexity of the islands. He had left out most of the towns and villages, and the smaller outcroppings, which did not count as Hours, like Vesper's Rock, had also been omitted.

But even in this much simplified form, Thaddeus's last known work had been his most ambitious achievement: to look at it was to feel as though you were a bird, hovering over the islands, borne aloft by a balmy wind.

The Johns had made a small fortune from that theft. They had sold the picture to Rojo Pixler. He had paid many thousands of zem, which Mischief assumed he had borrowed, for at the time Pixler had still been a traveling salesman, selling gaudily painted windup toys for children.

The fact that Pixler had probably used The Beautiful Moment as a way to plan his slow but apparently irrevocable takeover of the islands was not lost on the brothers. In the years since Pixler had bought the painting, Pixler's judgment (and his luck) had been flawless. He was now undoubtedly the most powerful nonmagical creature on the Abarat. Besides Commexo City, which was so vast it was practically a world unto itself, the sometime salesman also owned a controlling share of Babilonium, and was now planning the construction of a pleasure dome, as he described it, at Five O'clock in the Evening. There was even talk of his buying the Great Zigurrat at Soma Plume and deconsecrating it, then turning it into a second city the size of Commexo.

Despite the fact that his public face was the ever-smiling Commexo Kid, Pixler was by no means a sweetheart. Indeed, he had made it known when he purchased the painting that if John Mischief or any of his brothers ever whispered to anyone that the transaction had taken place he would arrange for the whisperer and his brothers to be silenced.

That was the real Rojo Pixler speaking.

So, Mischief and his brothers had kept their mouths shut, and the fact that the painting had gone missing didn't even make it into the news sheets. Still, there were plenty of other crimes for which the Johns were responsible which continued to be the talk of coffeehouse and mothercake stalls alike, years after they had taken place. It was widely thought that when Mischief and his brothers were finally tracked down and brought to trial, the punishment would be death.

All of which goes to explain why Mischief, exhausted by his travels though he was, and badly wanting to stay close to Candy so as to retrieve the Key she still carried, did not dare remain near the Yebba Dim Day.

Rather than enter The Great Head in pursuit of Candy and risk being recognized inside, he waited instead in the water close to the jetty until all the dramas there were over, and then dragged himself back onto the quay (or what was left of it) in the hope of finding a boat that would carry him away to a less busy island. Somewhere the brothers could relax for a few days and plan their next move.

He was in luck. He was sitting feeding flakes of buttered coa fish to Slop when he heard a woman clap her hands to get the attention of all who were on the dock and announce that: "We need someone who can dig!"

With one voice, his brothers all said: "He can dig !"

And not for the first time, Mischief found himself volunteered.

Five minutes later a two-masted sailing ship called Belbelo left the Yebba Dim Day and headed into the currents of the Straits of Dusk.

The man in charge of the vessel was one Captain Hemmett McBean, a bear of a man who had sea salt in his blood. There were four other occupants of the Belbelo , besides the eight brothers. First there was the person who'd called for a digger, a black woman-warrior by the name of Geneva Peachtree, who was obviously in charge of this mission, whatever its purpose. Besides her and the captain, there were two other diggers: one a creature who hailed from the Island of Spake, called Two-Toed Tom; the other a large, brutish fellow, bald but for three black curls, called "Kiss Curl" Carlotti. He had been a gambler of some notoriety, but had lost his tongue and his middle toes in a bet many years before and had sworn off gambling thereafter. The last member of this unlikely band—but by no means the least important—was a waif-like girl, no more than thirteen, with long, white-blond hair and dark, eloquent eyes. Her name was Tria, and she sat at the bow of the Belbelo most of the time, staring out over the waters of the Izabella.

Those waters soon became very much more turbulent, as McBean's little vessel left the Straits and headed out into the open sea. There were thunderheads moving down from the heights of Hap's Vault, and Hemmett had already warned his passengers that the storm was going to be ferocious. The clouds were now moving over the sea, spitting lightning down at the seething water.

The girl, Tria, seemed completely unperturbed by the way the Belbelo rode the increasingly violent waves. She simply gazed out toward the darkened islands ahead, and now and again whispered something to Geneva. The girl's instructions were in turn passed to McBean, who was piloting the vessel in whatever direction Tria's instincts indicated.

As they traveled, Two-Toed Tom, who boasted a fine array of spiral tattoos, sat on the starboard side of the boat, with a yellowed and much-folded map in his hands, studying its contents with a large magnifying glass. Geneva Peachtree stood in the center of the boat, occasionally giving orders, but most of the time scanning the horizon. Now and again she would go over to consult the map with Two-Toed Tom.

The Johns were far too curious not to wander across and ask what was so interesting about the document they were studying. As soon as they approached, Two-Toed Tom hurriedly began to fold the map up. Then Geneva said:

"It's all right, Tom, I know the brothers."

"You do?" said John Pluckitt.

"By reputation only," Geneva Peachtree replied with a smile so lovely that the Johns all fell a little in love at the same moment.

"Then if you know us," said John Moot, "you probably don't trust us."

"No. Quite the reverse," Geneva said to Moot. "The only people I really trust are those who have nothing to lose."

"Ah," said John Pluckitt. "Then that's us."

"Nowhere left to run," said Fillet, rather wearily.

"Here's my promise to you, brothers," Geneva said. "If things go well on this expedition, I will give you a home where I promise you the law will never touch you. A place where you can start a new life."

"Where's that?"

"On the Isle of the Black Egg," Geneva replied. "It may not look like the most inviting of places. Four in the Morning is a dark time. The moon's gone down and the sun's nowhere near showing its face. But there's more to my island than darkness and death."

"Really?"

"Believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light, hidden at the heart of things."

She looked away as she spoke, and John Mischief knew that she wasn't just describing the mysteries of her island. She was talking about the here and now: this voyage and its purpose.

This seemed as good a time as any to ask exactly what that purpose was.

"What have you got planned for us?" John Fillet asked. "Why do we need a digger, for one thing?"

"Tell them, Tom," Geneva said.

Two-Toed Tom looked a little reluctant.

"Go on," Geneva urged.

"I don't want to frighten them off," Tom said.

"I don't think John Mischief is the nervous kind somehow," Geneva replied. "Nor are his brothers."

"If you say so."

"I say so," Geneva replied. Her words, however gently delivered, were indisputably an order. And having given it, she left Tom and the Johns to talk, and went to consult with Tria again.

The Johns watched her go.

"It happens quickly, huh?" Two-Toed Tom said.

"What?"

"Falling in love with Geneva. One look, really. That's all it takes."

The Johns all looked back at Tom. Sallow, Drowze and Pluckitt were blushing.

"Don't worry, she has the same effect upon everybody. Even me. Do you have a lady?"

"No," said Mischief. "You?"

"I have a strange household," Two-Toed Tom said. "Do you want to see?"

"Please," said Mischief.

Two-Toed Tom took out a much-thumbed photograph of five individuals. One was Tom himself, with a two-headed Idjitian Jenga curled up at his feet. Beside Tom stood a big, scarlet-skinned man with long braided hair, who had a miniature blossom pig in his arms.

"I see what you mean," Mischief said. "A strange household indeed. Do you miss them?"

"Of course; all of them. We've been together a long time. But this mission is important to me. They understand that I had to come." He very carefully put the picture away. "And they know I might not come back."

"What did he say?" John Pluckitt asked.

"I heard what he said," John Drowze replied. The whole horn on which Drowze grew leaned forward as he addressed Tom. "Let me get this straight," John Drowze said. "Are you saying we could get killed?"

"Oh, hush , all of you," John Mischief said, embarrassed by his brothers' show of cowardice. "We signed on for this trip and we're going to see it through to the bitter end."

"It would be nice to know exactly what all this was about, however," Sallow said, with his usual aplomb. "You know, just so that we can be prepared."

"Of course," said Tom, his earlier reserve now set aside. "Where do I begin? Well, let me start with Finnegan. Do any of you remember a man called Finnegan Hob?"

"Of course," said John Slop. "He was the poor fellow—"

"—who was going to marry the Princess Boa," said John Moot.

"But didn't get the chance—" said John Swallow.

"—because the Princess," said John Mischief, "was taken by a dragon at the altar."

"You have it right," said Tom. "Finnegan was a fine man. Indeed I believe he would have been a great man if he'd married the Princess and had a chance to come to power. Together they would have healed a lot of old wounds around the islands. Feuds that go back to the war between Night and Day."

"He wasn't of royal blood, was he?" said John Serpent.

"Well, that's the interesting thing about Finnegan," Tom went on. "His father was a Prince of Day. His name was Maffick Hob. His mother was of lowly birth, but had some extraordinary powers of her own. And she was a child of the Night. Her name was Mariah Capella, and she lived on Speckle Frew—"

"Interesting mix," Mischief observed. "Finnegan was quite a hybrid."

"That's an understatement," saidTom. "It was a forbidden union, this marriage between Maffick and Mariah. A Prince of Day and a witch from the Nightside; it was unheard of. So Finnegan was a rare man, in every way. I had the great honor of knowing him for a few months during his courtship with the Princess Boa. I was in charge of her stables, and I would arrange for them to go out riding together. It was a secret courtship, at first, of course. But it didn't stay secret for very long."

"Why not?"

"Because the love she felt for him poured out of her. Love that deep couldn't be hidden, not from people who knew her well, like her father. He soon saw through our little arrangements."

"And what did King Claus say when he found out?" John Moot asked.

"At first he was in a rage about it. How could the Princess contemplate falling in love with a man of such questionable birth? 'Half this and half that ,' I remember him saying. But that all changed very quickly."

"Why?"

"Because he met Finnegan." Tom made a small, sad smile. "You couldn't know Finnegan for more than two minutes and not see how good a man he was. How gentle. How compassionate. So certain in his opinions and so profound in his feelings…" He sighed heavily. These memories were obviously bittersweet. "So anyway, King Claus sanctioned the union and a wedding was announced. It was to be held on the Nonce, in the Old Palace of Bowers. Believe me, there was never a woman as happy as the Princess in those months leading up to the ceremony. Her love for Finnegan illuminated everything she said and did." Tears welled in Tom's eyes and, brimming, ran down his cheeks. "I have one consolation," he said, his voice raw with sorrow. "That she was the happiest soul in creation, until the last moment of her life."

"So you were there in the Palace when it happened?" Sallow said.

"Oh yes," said Tom. "I'm afraid I was. I was standing perhaps ten yards away from her when the dragon's tongue took her." He fell silent, as a picture of this horror entered his mind's eye. "It dragged her out through the Palace door before we even knew what was happening. Finnegan was the first to go after her. But he was too late. She was dead by the time he got outside. Ten, twelve seconds maybe, from standing at the altar with Finnegan at her side, to lying out in the dirt, gone from us. Even now as I think of it, after all those years, it scarcely seems believable."

A great roll of thunder shook the boards of the boat, and the first drops of icy rain started to splatter against their faces, mingling with the tears on Tom's face.

"What's all this got to do with this little fishing trip we're on?" John Mischief said.

"I'll tell you. For nine years after he lost his Princess, Finnegan went looking for the family of the dragon that had killed her. He needed answers, you see. He knew the murder of his beloved hadn't been the actions of a rogue worm—"

"Worm?" said John Serpent.

"Yes, sir: worm ," Tom replied, with deep contempt. "Dragon is too noble a term for these things ."

"Wait," said Mischief. "I don't think I'm quite following this. Are you saying that Finnegan was going after these dragons—these worms—to interrogate them?"

"Worms have tongues," Tom said. "And many of them are very eloquent. A few are poets."

"Really?" said John Sallow. "I never knew that."

"Any of it any good?" said John Moot.

"Ordure, muck, excreta," Tom replied.

"Just wondering," said Moot.

"So, Finnegan assembled a band of folks who were ready to help him find these worms," said Tom. "There were eleven of us back then. Twelve, including Finnegan. McBean, Kiss Curl, Geneva and myself are all that I know for sure are left of the band."

"Lordy," said Slop.

"Dragon hunting isn't a job for the people who are interested in living long lives."

"I assume Finnegan had already killed the dragon that murdered his beloved?"

"Oh yes. Finnegan killed it right outside the Palace. Climbed into its mouth and struck a sword blow to its brain. It was a famous worm too. Perhaps you heard of it? Gravainia Pavonine."

"That's impressive," said Mischief.

"They're entirely ridiculous creatures when you have them cornered," Two-Toed Tom said. "All that din and self-importance, and they have not a breath of love or honor in them."

"But intelligent?" said Pluckitt.

"Oh, certainly. Marvelously intelligent, some of them. But intelligence without love is an empty thing, I think."

"Well said," John Sallow remarked.

"Believe me, I've been nose to nose with several worms in my time, and they are a vicious, vain and cruel species. Even the crowned heads."

"You met royalty?"

"Oh yes. Gravainia Pavonine was fourth in line to the Scaly Throne. Only his brothers, Nemapsychus and Giamantis, and his sister, Pijirantia Pavonine, were before him. And all still alive, I'm afraid to say."

"What about Finnegan?" said John Moot. "You were telling us about him and you got lost with all this wormy talk."

"Ah yes. Finnegan. That's where she comes in," Tom said. He pointed to the small girl still sitting in the bow of the Belbelo , braving the waves. Geneva had put a coat around Tria's frail shoulders, but she seemed not to notice the downpour. "Our little friend Tria has an uncanny ability to find people; often people who've been missing a long time."

"And when did you all last see Finnegan?" Mischief asked.

"About six years ago," Tom replied. "He went off on his own."

"Why?"

"Because his quest for the family of Gravainia Pavonine had taken such a terrible toll of lives. He didn't want anybody else to die on his account, so he slipped away while we were on Efreet, leaving a note saying we should all get on and live our lives. Forget about him, he said. As if we could ever do that."

He glanced up at Geneva, who at that moment happened to be looking in his direction. She clearly knew by the expression on his face what tale he was telling, and with a little nod of her head encouraged him to finish it.

So Tom went on.

"We all tried to obey his instructions, for his sake as much as for our own. We went our separate ways and tried to live our lives. But Finnegan was never very far from our thoughts. How could he be? We had shared his quest and his company for years. We all knew he was out there somewhere among the islands alone." Tom shook his head. "We hated to think of that. We listened for news of him, and sometimes we'd hear something—he'd been seen here, he'd been seen there—but never anything certain. And then, about seven weeks ago, Geneva met Tria. And apparently the child knew immediately that there was somebody Geneva wished to find."

"So she knows Finnegan's alive?"

"So she says."

"For certain?"

"For certain. But she has a sense that wherever he is, he's buried ."

"Ah-ha!" said Mischief. "So that's why you needed a digger!"

"You won't be alone, believe me," said Geneva, breaking into the conversation. "We'll all be digging beside you."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Mischief.

Geneva turned to Tom. "Will you try and persuade Tria to go below for a while? Maybe she'll listen to you. At least until this storm is—"

She was interrupted by the sound of something grating along the underside of the Belbelo . The vessel shook.

"Have we hit something?" John Serpent said in alarm.

"I knew we shouldn't have come on this trip!" John Pluckitt muttered. "Crazy…"

Mischief ignored his brothers and peered over the side of the boat, to see if they had struck a rock. But no; what they had struck—or rather, what had struck them—was moving through the thrashing waters. And it was no small object.

Tom looked up at Mischief, an expression of profound concern on his face.

"I think we found our first dragon," he said.

25. MISCHIEF UNDONE

A dragon it was; a worm of the seagoing variety. It rose up twenty feet above the seething waters, the back of its head spread like the hood of a cobra, and lined with foot-long spikes. Its very appearance rocked the Belbelo so violently that it nearly capsized.

"A'zo and Cha !" Mischief said. "Look at that thing!"

"Get the child !" Geneva yelled.

Two-Toed Tom immediately raced up the length of the rocking vessel to claim Tria from the bow. Even the sudden arrival of the great serpent had not disturbed her from her meditations on Finnegan's whereabouts. But she put up no protest when Tom took her from her vulnerable position and brought her into the little cabin.

The dragon, meanwhile, was speaking.

"These waters are mine," it said, its voice deep and smooth; its tone quite equitable. "I demand a toll from anyone who sails through them" Its head swooped low as it scanned those upon the deck of the Belbelo. "Today, I will be generous. In return for your trespass here, I will only take … let me see, what will I take?" It sniffed, its head skimming the creaking boards of the boat. "I shall take a girl-child ," it said. "Where is she? Don't hide her away ."

The dragon's head drew closer to the cabin door.

"Bring her out !" the dragon demanded. "Come on! Let me have her and I will guarantee you safe passage ."

He turned to Carlotti.

"What is your destination, sir?" the worm said, all politeness.

Carlotti shook his head.

"Don't deny me now" the dragon went on, its terrible teeth perilously close to poor Carlotti's head, as though in an instant it would behead him.

"You'll get no answers from him," said Geneva, glancing around to locate her sword. "He has no tongue."

"Ah ," said the dragon, turning to Geneva. "Then you tell me, woman. Where are you headed? To the Nonce is it ?"

"Maybe."

"I can work up a current with my tail that will get you there in half the time."

"I'm sure you can," said Geneva, pulling her sword out from the heap of garments where it lay.

"Just give me the girl-child ," the dragon said, breathing so hard on the cabin doors they shook.

"Not a chance," said Geneva, poking the side of the dragon's throat with her sword, drawing its attention away from the cabin.

The beast threw its cadaverous gaze back toward her.

"Now don't incense me, woman ," the worm said. "Just let me have my toll ."

"You heard me, worm," Geneva replied. "Not a chance."

"Damn thee, woman ," the dragon said. "Take this !"

It made a foul retching sound and suddenly regurgitated the contents of its five stomachs in a noisome torrent that struck Geneva with such force it threw her across the deck. Her sword went out of her hand and spun across the boards.

Geneva pulled herself to her feet, her boots sliding in the slime of the dragon's stomach juices. Twice she slipped, but on the third attempt, she succeeded in standing upright. She had picked a new weapon—one of the bigger bones the worm had spewed up. Racing back across the deck she beat the bone back and forth against the snout of the dragon, and when the bone shattered, she picked up another, continuing to strike at the thing until that bone, like its predecessor, was smashed to smithereens.

"How long is this little game going to go on for ?" the dragon said, putting on a show of weariness. "I'm getting irritated ."

Mischief and the brothers were standing watching all of this, not knowing whether to hide or fling themselves over the side.

"I'm not going near that thing," John Serpent warned.

"You of all people, Serpent ," said John Pluckitt, "should be happy in its company."

The exchange had drawn Geneva's attention.

"Mischief!" she yelled. "Distract it!"

"Do what?"

"You heard me: distract it!"

"How?"

"Use your imagination!"

So saying, Geneva went down on her knees in the stinking filth that had been expelled from the worm and searched for her missing sword.

"The grappling hook!" said John Moot. "Mischief! Listen to me! Get the grappling hook."

"Where is it?"

"Behind us!" said John Drowze.

"I don't see it!"

"On the cabin wall, Mischief!" John Moot yelled. "Are you blind?"

There was indeed a hook hanging in place against the wall of the cabin. Unfortunately, it was directly beneath the dragon, which had reared up to better assess the dispersal of its enemies.

"Don't worry," Drowze said. "It's not interested in us! We're beneath its notice."

"Famous last words," said John Serpent.

But Drowze was right. For the moment at least the dragon was uninterested in the John brothers. It was watching Geneva on her hands and knees, smiling with satisfaction at the sight of her humiliation.

Mischief ducked beneath the snaking neck of the beast and snatched the grappling hook out of its cradle. It was about six feet long, and it had an iron hook at its end, but it didn't feel like the most potent of weapons.

"It's going to break!" Mischief said.

"You've no choice!" John Drowze yelled to Mischief.

"I know," Mischief said. Then he hollered up at the great worm. "Hey you !"

The dragon glanced down at the brothers for a moment with a supercilious look, then it casually knocked them aside with its snout, as though they were a piece of bad meat that had somehow found its way onto its plate. With Mischief floored, it slid its huge spiked head past him to get to the cabin door. "Girl-child!" it said. "You can come out now."

It pushed at the door, which flew open, its hinges wrenched from the frame.

Giddily, Mischief got to his feet. He heard Tom yelling to the beast to stay out. The creature drew a breath and expelled it. As it did so, all the windows in the cabin blew outwards, and a wave of smoky heat erupted from the interior. Coughing and blinded by tears, Two-Toed Tom and Tria stumbled out of the cabin, driven from their refuge by the heat.

Then the dragon opened its mouth, sliding its scaly chin over the ship's creaking boards to scoop up the child.

Before it could do so, Kiss Curl Carlotti came at it with a short sword and stabbed the tender flesh around its nostril.

Dark blood sprang from the wound and hissed as it hit the Belbelo's boards. The dragon's lip curled with anger and it opened its mouth horrendously wide, dislocating its bottom jaw so that its mouth gaped like a tunnel.

"Watch out, Carlotti!" Mischief yelled, scrambling over the wet deck to draw the dragon's attack away from the child.

He went straight for its eye, driving the grappling hook at the narrowed orb. The hook caught under the dragon's eyelid, more by chance than design.

"Pull !" John Serpent yelled.

Mischief did exactly that. The delicate membrane of the dragon's eyelid tore and a second spray of blood came from the beast. Some of it spattered on Mischief's bare arms. It stung ferociously.

The dragon shook its head, forcing Mischief to let go of his weapon. It reared up, letting out a bellow of narcissistic fury.

"My face !" it cried, its din making the vessel reverberate from end to end. "My perfect face! My beautiful face ."

It shook its head, loosing the hook from its lid. More blood spouted from the wound, filling the dragon's eye.

"I think you did it!" John Moot said.

"I wouldn't be too sure," said Mischief, backing away over the blood-slickened boards.

Half-blinded, the dragon lowered its head to the deck again, opening its tunnel mouth and sliding its lower jaw over the boards to scoop Mischief up.

Weaponless now, all the brothers could do was retreat before the creature's vast maw, yelling for help as they did so.

"Geneva! Somebody! Please God, it's going to eat us alive!"

"I'm coming !" Geneva called back to him.

She was still digging through the vomitus, searching for her sword. Her endeavor was not helped by the violent rocking of the boat, which was escalating as the dragon's motion turned the waters around the Belbelo to a seething frenzy.

The dragon's maw was a foot or two from the brothers now.

Having nowhere else to run, Mischief fled into the smoky cabin.

"Meat !" the dragon yelled, determined to devour its mutilators. "You are all meat !"

The spikes on the dragon's hood prevented it from getting through the door, but the maddened beast wasn't going to let a little detail like that stop it. It shook its head back and forth with such violence that the doorframe cracked and broke. Then it pushed its head in through the opening it had made and into the cabin.

The brothers were trapped.

"Kick it !" yelled Fillet.

"Punch it !" yelled Drowze.

With no hope of escape to left or right of the monster, and only the prospect of its hot-breathed throat ahead, Mischief went into a flailing frenzy, punching its snout, its lips, even its gums. But it availed him nothing. The worm thrust its head into the cabin and closed its teeth around the brothers' body. It did so with a curious gentility. No doubt it could have bitten Mischief in half if it had desired to do so, but it apparently wanted to torment him with a slow devouring, to which end it dragged the screaming brothers out through the smashed door.

On deck, everybody was yelling now, with the exception of Tria. Threats, demands, prayers: all were being offered up to keep Mischief from being eaten alive.

The dragon was unmoved. Slowly—almost majestically—it lifted its head, the brothers' body hanging out of either side of its mouth, and began to sink back down into the frantic waters of the Izabella.

In one last act of desperation, Tom ran to the edge of the boat, reached out, and seized hold of Mischief's hand.

Somehow the worm managed to speak, even though it had a choice piece of meat between its teeth.

"Two for the price of one ," it growled.

"Geneva !" Tom yelled. "For A'zo's sake, help us !"

"I'm here !" Geneva yelled back to him.

She had finally located her sword. Not waiting to wipe the slime off it, she raced over the pitching deck to strike the enemy afresh.

Tom had caught hold of the rail of the Belbelo with one hand, but his grip on the slick rail was tenuous; and every time the dragon pulled to loosen Tom's hold, its teeth sank more deeply into John Mischief's body.

He and his brothers were not bearing all this in silence. They were letting it be known that this was an agony; eight voices, all howling or sobbing or shouting, demanding that something be done to free them before it was too late.

Geneva yelled out to the dragon now, as she came to the side of the boat.

"Put them down, worm !" she demanded. "Or I take jour life. Down, I said !"

The dragon looked at Geneva's sword from the corner of its blood-blackened eye. Then—seeing that if it held on to its quarry for another moment, Geneva would slash its throat—it did three things in quick succession. It let go of John Mischief, who lost his grip on Tom and fell into the water; it lifted one of its taloned forefeet and brought it down on the side of the boat, crashing through the deck and all the boards beneath to a spot well below the waterline. And finally it picked upTwo-Toed Tom and threw him as far as it could from the Belbelo .

As the creature turned back, Geneva's sword slashed across the dragon's upper chest. The worm unleashed an agonized din; the pitch of its vibrations such that all the nails in the deck shot up out of the boards, leaving only the pitch that the shipwrights had used to seal the vessel holding the boards together.

Then it dived after Geneva with terrifying speed, its pursuit driving her back across the boat, her weight enough to crack the pitch and separate the boards.

In that instant the Belbelo —which had endured much, and mightily—became a doomed vessel.

"Hemmett !" Geneva yelled. The Captain had been at the wheel throughout the dragon's attack, attempting to keep his vessel from capsizing in the tumult the worm had created. "Get Tria off the boat !"

"But my ship—"

"There's no help for it, Captain! Save the child !"

As she spoke, the dragon's jaws snapped closed, three inches from Geneva's face. Its stinging, rancid blood, along with a wave of heat from its pierced lung, erupted from the wound she'd made in its chest, spattering her arms and neck, but she refused to let the pain drive her back. She held her ground, even though the wounded dragon snapped again and again, almost taking off her face. Luckily, with only one eye its spatial judgment was spoiled so that it repeatedly missed its target. But the sound when the teeth met was terrifyingly solid: like the din of an iron door slamming closed over and over.

Geneva took a deep breath and lifted her sword. She knew she would not have a second chance at the blow she was about to deliver. She would have to drive down , behind the solid breastbone, in order to pierce its heart. It would either find its way into the dragon's vitals and kill the damned thing, or she would miss and the worm would swallow her.

Making a silent prayer to the ninety-one goddesses of her homeland, she raised her sword.

The creature was preparing to snap at her again. She could hear the muscles of its jaws creaking like an immense spring as they opened.

Trusting to the goddesses and her instinct to guide her, she ducked down beneath the dragon's jaw and put the tip of her sword against its scaly throat. She met resistance immediately, as though she was pressing against bone. Cursing, she tried another place.

The dragon opened its mouth, expelling the stench of its stomachs.

This was it! She had to strike. It was now or never.

She pushed; and yes, the sword broke the armor of hard, gray-green scales and pierced its flesh.

She threw all her body weight against the sword. It was enough. The blade slid down behind the creature's breastbone.

She felt the worm's serpentine body shudder as the blade ran down into the cavity of its breast and pierced its vast heart. Its mouth, already gaping, opened a little wider still. And from deep, deep within the vile convolutions of the thing there came a noise like the growling of a thousand rabid dogs.

"Die ," she said to it, just loud enough that it would hear.

Then she twisted her blade in its heart. The rabid din got louder, and the stench from its stomachs became foul beyond measure: the smell of death released from the entrails of the beast.

Slowly, the dragon's good eye slid to the left, so as to fix on Geneva one last time. It curled back its upper lip, baring its formidable array of teeth. But this was all an empty show. Its din was dying away. There was no real fury left in its wounded body.

The dragon trembled down to its stinking core. Then, putting both its front legs on the side of the sinking vessel, it pushed off.

Geneva let her sword slip out of her hands rather than risk being pulled into the sea as the dragon made its departure. She stumbled back onto the disintegrating deck, which was now six inches deep in water, scarcely believing that she'd bested the beast.

"Are you alive?" McBean yelled to her.

"Just," she said.

While Geneva had been fighting with the dragon, McBean had broken out the little red lifeboat and had launched it over the opposite side of the Belbelo . Now he was hurriedly depositing Tria—for whom the dragon had forfeited its life—in the boat.

Kiss Curl Carlotti was meanwhile attempting to salvage as much as he could from the sinking vessel. The precious map which Tom and Geneva had been consulting went into the Captain's hands for safekeeping. The rest—some food, some kegs of water, a few more weapons—were quickly stored at the bottom of the lifeboat.

Geneva drew a deep breath, thanked the goddesses for her survival, and started across the sinking vessel to the lifeboat. She scanned the waters as she did so, hoping against hope that the Izabella would give up the pair that she had claimed. The dragon had not yet sunk beneath the waves, she saw. Though weakened by blood loss—indeed barely able to lift its head above the waters—it continued to stay in the vicinity of the Belbelo , as though it hoped it might still claim its wounder. The Izabella was dark with its blood, and there was a yellowish steam rising off the waves, as if the mixture of salt water and the dragon's fluids were causing some kind of alchemical reaction.

"Do you see any sign of Tom or Mischief?" the Captain asked Geneva.

"No," she said grimly. "Nothing."

"Here…" said a frail voice from the railing.

Geneva looked over the side of the ship. There, barely keeping their heads above the churning waters, were John Mischief and his siblings. Some of the brothers looked to have slipped into unconsciousness. Two had their eyes rolled back in their sockets, as if they were dead.

"Oh, Lord," said McBean. "Let's get them in the lifeboat."

Together, Carlotti and Geneva hauled the limp body of Mischief and his brothers out of the water and into the lifeboat. Then McBean pushed the little vessel off from the sinking ship then proceeded to row away from the Belbelo , so that they would not be caught in the vortex when the vessel went under.

Tria went quietly to the bow of the little boat and took up her usual position.

"Emergency supplies?" Geneva said, gently easing Mischief's torn shirt out of his pants. The puncture wounds the dragon's teeth had left in his stomach and sides were ragged and deep. Blood was still oozing from them.

Carlotti went to the stern of the lifeboat and brought out the emergency first aid kit. He opened it up and started to select some bandages and gauze, while Geneva kept her hands pressed on the worst of the wounds, to prevent any further blood loss.

They were now a safe distance from the Belbelo , and McBean stopped rowing and put up the oars.

"I can take care of Mischief now," the Captain said to Geneva. "You look for Tom."

He pointed to his telescope, which was lying on the floor of the lifeboat.

"Go on," McBean said. Then, with a terrible sadness in his voice, "I may have lost the Belbelo , but I'm still Captain of this boat. Find Tom; please God, find him."

Geneva let McBean take over care of Mischief, and she started to scan the waters in the general vicinity of the spot where Tom had been thrown by the worm.

Some distance from the little lifeboat the broken body of the Belbelo moaned eerily, as the waters of the Izabella rushed into her hold. The Captain didn't look up from tending to Mischief. This was not a sight he wished to witness. The noise of the vessel's demise grew louder. Its timbers burst; its mast cracked and fell into the water, throwing up a great wall of water. Then, just before the sea finally closed over her, the Belbelo stopped sinking for a long moment, and in the sudden eerie hush her bell could be heard tolling.

Six times it rang, and then the tolling ceased and the rushing of the water began one final time, louder than ever. There was one last, terrible crack from out of the depths, and Captain McBean's noble little vessel went down to join the tens of thousands of ships the Sea of Izabella had claimed over the centuries.

Not once through all of this did the Captain raise his eyes from his patients.

When the noise of the Belbelo's sinking finally quieted, he said:

"Any sign of Tom?"

"Not so far," Geneva replied, still searching the water.

"And the worm?" the Captain said.

"Gone," Geneva replied. "Slipped out of sight when we weren't looking. How are the brothers?"

"Some, I think, are doing better than others," the Captain said grimly. "I've stopped the blood from flowing, but none of them are conscious." He dropped his voice, as though Mischief and his brothers might hear some of what he was saying. "It doesn't look good," he said.

At that moment, Tria piped up, her voice as pale as her skin.

"The Nonce," she said.

Geneva looked up from the melancholy sight of Mischief and his brothers to see that the girl was pointing off to the port side.

A quarter of a mile from them, the waters of the Izabella grew considerably calmer. The storm clouds thinned out, and shafts of sunlight breached them. They illuminated a golden shore, and beyond that shore, a rising landscape of tropical lushness.

Geneva had not been back to the Nonce since the tragic hour of Finnegan's wedding to the Princess Boa; and though she'd surmised, along with Tom, that this was indeed where Tria was leading them, her flesh tingled at the prospect of returning there.

"If there's any hope for Mischief and his brothers," Geneva said, "it's on the Nonce."

"What happens if one of them dies and the rest are still alive?" McBean said.

"We'll deal with that problem when we get to it," Geneva replied. Then more quietly, "Let's just hope we don't have to."

Suddenly there was a rapping on the side of the boat—for all the world like somebody knocking on a door, desiring entrance—and Geneva turned around to see a very welcome sight. Two-Toed Tom was hauling himself up over the side of the lifeboat. She went to help him. He clambered into the boat and collapsed, gasping, on the boards.

"I… was… afraid… you'd sail off and give me up for dead."

"We would have never done that," said Geneva.

"What about our digger?" Tom replied, looking over at Mischief.

"He's very badly wounded. We're heading to the Nonce, Tom. Let's hope we can get some help for him there."

"It's amazing he's even alive," Tom said admiringly. "He was in the dragon's mouth."

"That he was," said the Captain. "If the brothers live, they're going to have quite a tale to tell."

The current was on their side; it carried them swiftly toward the island of the Nonce. The condition of the wounded Mischief and his brothers did not deteriorate significantly as they went, and as the bright shore beckoned, and the smell of blossoms sweetened the air, Geneva's spirits began to rise just a little.

They were within perhaps six hundred yards of the beach when something nudged the little boat from below. Geneva went to the side of the vessel. She could see the reef below; the water was no more than fifteen feet deep. It was a beautiful spectacle: colored fish of every shape and size moving in shoals or happy solitude among the coral canyons.

And then, as she watched, panic seemed to seize them all. As a single animal they twitched and swam into hiding; gone in two heartbeats.

Geneva murmured the beginning of a prayer: "Goddesses, hear me in my hour of desperation—"

That was as far as she got. At that moment, a midnight-black stain spread through the water beneath the boat.

Geneva took a cautious step back from the edge of the lifeboat.

"Get the child, Captain," she said, very quietly.

"Problem?" he murmured.

"Dйjа vu," she said.

"I thought for certain it was—"

"Dead ?" said the worm, as it rose out of the darkened waters. It was a truly grotesque sight. Geneva's sword was still lodged in its throat, and the creature's blood ran copiously from the wound, over the once pristine scales of its neck and upper body. Violent shudders passed through its body as though it was about to have a fit of titanic proportions.

"Do you have a gun, Captain?" Geneva murmured.

"Back in the Belbelo . . ."

"Something," she said. "Anything. Kiss Curl?"

Carlotti moved down the little boat to look for something that they could use to defend themselves. His motion attracted the gaze of the worm, and without hesitation the creature swooped down. Kiss Curl didn't have a chance. The dragon came up behind him, unhooked his jaw, and took Carlotti into its mouth whole.

"No !" Geneva yelled, flinging herself toward Kiss Curl to catch hold of him before he was swallowed. But the dragon threw back its head, like a bird taking a fish, and Carlotti slid out of sight into one of its bellies, as silent in death as he had been in life.

"Bastard thing!" Geneva said, tears of fury running down her cheeks.

The dragon made a terrible sound in its throat: a low joyless laughter. "Who will be next?" it said, scanning the survivors.

"McBean?" Geneva whispered.

"Yes?"

"Does the lifeboat have a flare gun?"

"I believe it does."

"Can you get it?"

"Surely."

"Very slowly, Captain. Take. Your. Time."

The Captain did as Geneva had instructed. With great caution he lifted the center seat of the lifeboat, where there was a compartment containing emergency rations, and—yes!—a flare gun.

The worm meanwhile twitched and reeled. It was obviously getting closer to collapse with every passing moment. But that didn't make it any less dangerous, Geneva knew. She had once seen a dragon take the lives of six people when it had all their swords driven into its head.

"Here," the Captain said, oh-so-softly, and put the flare gun into Geneva's hand.

It was a cumbersome thing, but Geneva knew she didn't need to have perfect aim: her target was large.

Had the worm seen what they were doing? It opened its mouth and loosed a ragged noise, but the sound was more of anguish than of rage; the death tremors in its serpentine body were increasing with every beat of its heart.

Geneva brought the gun into view. The worm's good eye flickered. There was a moment's stillness, then the worm said:

"Damn you, woman."

And Geneva fired the flare.

It left a smoky red trail, bright even in the light of the approaching day.

Though her aim didn't need to be good, it was. The flare flew straight down the dragon's throat, and for a moment the creature became the very image of its mythological self: the fire-breathing beast of the Testaments of Pottishak that Geneva had learned by heart at school.

"And yea, the Great Dragon Cascatheka Rendithius came upon the land like a plague, and fire came from its throat and blackened the living earth —"

She had scared herself many times as a child conjuring that image in her mind's eye. But seeing it now—made flesh, made smoke—it was not so terrible. It was just a worm after all: petty and sly and cruel.

Then the gunpowder exploded, and two columns of blinding white fire blew out the monster's eyes. The dragon screamed; a shriek that rose out of the inferno of its bellies and out of its throat and its pierced heart.

It lasted a little time, then it died away.

The dragon's body swayed, its eyes reduced to blackened holes, and without further sound the beast collapsed upon itself as though its spine had turned to jelly. It didn't fall to the left or right. It sank upon itself down into the bloodstained waters, descending so gracefully that it was gone from sight with scarcely a bubble.

"Thank you and good night," the Captain remarked bitterly.

"Worms ," Geneva said, matching his bitterness. "I hate them with all my heart. And now they've taken Kiss Curl from us. I swear… I swear 1 will not be content until every dragon is wiped off these islands. And out of the waters too. Every last one." She looked sideways at Tom and the Captain. "Agreed?"

"Agreed," they both said.

They all stood in silence then, meditating for a time on their lost comrade.

And while they did so, the tide carried them gently to the beach, so that by the time their silent prayers were over, and they raised their heads, the hull of the lifeboat was gently nudging the soft white sand of the Nonce.

"We're here," said Tria.

"Finnegan is somewhere on this island?" Geneva said.

"Yes," the child replied.

Tom shook his head in disbelief.

"Back where it all started," he said. "Who would have thought?"

They said no more, but worked in thoughtful silence for the next little while, carrying the body of John Mischief and his brothers from the boat and up the sand to the cool shadows of the blossom-filled trees that lined the shore.

26. THE HOUSE OF LIES

Candy walked across rolling hills, the route before her illuminated only by stars. As she went, she kept her eye on the strange domed house that was built on top of the hill. She was more tired and hungry with every step she took, and was desperately hoping she'd find a simple welcome there at the house; a place where she could finally lay her head down and sleep. Her limbs felt like lead, and her eyelids kept fluttering closed, so that it felt that she was actually sleepwalking.

She contemplated lying down right where she stood, making a nest for herself in the grass and napping until the worst of her exhaustion passed. But she rapidly argued herself out of that plan.

She had no idea of what kind of animals lived on Ninnyhammer. For all she knew it could be an island of venomous toads, vampiric weasels and rabid snakes. Given the variety of strange fauna she'd encountered during her travels, anything was possible. So on she went, though her pace was slowing, step by exhausted step.

When she was about a mile from the house, she came upon a pillar topped with a little platform on which a well-fed fire was blazing. There were perhaps a dozen other such pillars, all topped with fires, which apparently marked the perimeter of the homeowner's property.

They certainly marked something , because once she had walked past the pillar, there was a subtle change in atmosphere. Though the pillar fires weren't particularly large, they cast a light with a strength out of all proportion to their size, multiplying Candy's shadow and making the solid ground appear to cavort beneath her feet.

She also sensed the presence of living creatures in her imminent vicinity, though for some reason she couldn't catch sight of them. Perhaps they were too quick for her weary eyes; or hidden in the long grass, or simply, given that this was the Abarat, invisible . But sometimes she felt them brushing her shins, or nudging the back of her legs.

After a while their teasing presence began to annoy her.

"Who are you?" she demanded finally. "Show yourselves, will you? There's nothing I hate more than games of hide-and-seek."

Her demand had an immediate effect. Two animals, twice as large as domestic cats but definitely of the feline family, emerged from behind a scattering of rocks close by. They had fur the color of brick and flame, with black stripes and vast, luminous eyes.

"You look hungry," she said to them. "But it's no good looking at me. I don't have anything to give you."

By way of reply the scrawniest of the two cats let out a spine-tingling yowl, and within thirty seconds, half a dozen of its brethren had emerged from hiding. They all studied Candy with the same wide-eyed intensity as had the first couple.

Candy was just a little unnerved. Were they now sizing her up for devouring? If not, then why had they been following so closely on her heels, as though they were sniffing her raw flesh?

She halted a second time, turned back to them and said: "Will you just stop staring at me? Don't you know it's rude ?" If they understood, they didn't respond to the instruction. They just kept following her, staring, staring, as she strode along the narrow track that zigzagged up the slope toward the domed house.

In fact, the closer she got to the house the more agitated the cats' behavior became. Rather than being content to follow on her heels they ran ahead, weaving back and forth in front of her, as though they intended to trip her up. As they wove, they all let out the same caterwauling sound. It sounded like a chorus of damned souls, and it made Candy's stomach churn to hear it.

At last she could bear it no longer. She nimbly leaped over the backs of the animals in her path and made a desperate dash for the house. The cat-beasts came after her, their cacophony mounting in volume and disharmony the closer she got to the threshold.

She could feel their hot breath on the backs of her legs as she ran, and she feared that at any moment the fastest of them would leap and dig its claws into her legs, immobilizing her. She managed to stay ahead of them, but the chase took its toll. By the time she reached the house, she was gasping for breath, her lungs and throat burning.

She banged on the door, and shouted as best her fiery throat would allow, "Is there anybody at home ?"

There was no reply.

She banged again, yelling with fresh gusto. By now, the cats had caught up with her, but for some reason instead of attacking her they simply walked to and fro, two or three yards from the threshold, yowling.

"Will somebody please help me?" Candy said, hammering on the door yet again.

This time she heard the sound of somebody moving behind the door.

"Hurry ," she implored.

After a few seconds the door was opened by an acidic-looking man in a bright yellow suit. He was short, but his height was increased by the fact that he wore not one unshapely hat on his head but several, all perched on top of one another. He also carried a hat in either hand, which he promptly added to the unruly pile. He then picked up a long staff that was propped just inside the front door and with a curt: "Stand aside, girl!" he charged past Candy and went after the cats with his staff.

"Get out of my sight, you repugnant specks of rabidity!" he hollered. "You, girl:get inside !"

The animals scattered until they were out of the range of his staff. But once that was accomplished they began their to-ing and fro-ing afresh, accompanied by that same anxious yowling.

"Thank you," Candy said to her rescuer. "I was certain they were planning to attack me."

"Oh, they were," the man replied unsmiling. "I've no doubt of that. They were sent by the Devil himself to torment me, those damn tarrie-cats."

"Tarrie-cats, you call them?"

"Yes. Tarrie-cats. They have their own city on the other side of the island. It's called High Sladder. Why the hell they just can't stay there is beyond me. Did any of them get their claws in you?"

"No, they didn't touch me. I was just frightened because they were chasing me. And then there was that noise they were making…"

"Vile, isn't it?" the man said grimly, waving Candy aside so that he could bolt the door, top, middle and bottom. "Believe me when I tell you there's reason to be afraid of those creatures. Every single one of them has taken an innocent life."

"No?"

"It's God's honest truth! Children have been smothered by fur balls. Babies have been bled dry by tarrie-cat fleas the size of my thumb. You're lucky you had the energy to outrun them. If you'd slipped and fallen, they would have been on you in a heartbeat. I saw you from my big window"—he pointed up the stairs to what was presumably the dome of the house—"and I sent down a little incantation for you, to speed your heels. I hope it helped."

"Well, it must have worked, because here I am."

"Here you are indeed. And I'm happy to see you." He set the stick down and turned to clasp Candy's hand. "I'm Kaspar Wolfswinkel: philosopher, thaumaturgist and connoisseur of fine rums. And you are—?"

"Candy Quackenbush."

"Quackenbush. Quack. En. Bush. That's not an Abaratian name."

"No… no, it's not. I'm a visitor, I suppose you'd say."

Kaspar's deeply lined and gnomic face was a perfect portrait of fascination.

"Indeed?" he remarked casually. "A visitor? From…" His finger noodled about in the air. "The other place, perhaps."

"The Hereafter? Yes."

"Well, well," Wolfswinkel said. "That's quite a journey you've taken. All the way from there to…"

"Here?" Candy prompted.

"Yes. Quite so. There to here. That's aways." He smiled, though the expression sat uncomfortably on a face made for scowls and gloom. "You know, you really don't know how wonderful it is to have you in the house with me."

"Are you all alone?"

"Well, more or less," Kaspar said, leading Candy into his living room. It made Samuel Klepp's pressroom look tidy by contrast. Books, pamphlets and papers lay on every surface but one, the comfortable green leather chair into which Wolfswinkel now lowered himself, leaving Candy to stand. "Most of my family and friends are deceased," he went on. "Victims of the war waged upon us by those wretched kitties ." He sighed. "It was paradise here on Ninnyhammer till the tarrie-cats built that shanty town they call a city. I mean, I'm an older man. Semiretired. This was going to be the perfect Hour for me to spend my twilight years. I planned to sit and sip my rum and ruminate on my life. Things done, things left undone. You know the way it is. I regret nothing, of course."

"Oh," said Candy. "Well I suppose that's good." She was a little lost for words on the subject of regret so she moved on to a subject she did know something about. "It must be lonely," she said.

"Yes," Kaspar said. "It gets lonely, to be sure. But what's worse than the loneliness are the memories."

"Of what?"

"Of how Ninnyhammer used to be, before the tarrie-cats came. They turned this perfect island into a nightmare. They really did. Every now and again I get a supply of fuel for the fires—"

"The fires on the poles?"

"Yes, they at least allow me to see the enemy. But I live in fear of the time when I run out of fuel and—"

"—the fires will go out."

"Exactly. When that happens… well… I fear that'll be the end of me and Kaspar Wolfswinkel will be a memory too."

"Surely there must be some way to catch the cats," Candy said. "Back home in Chickentown—"

"I'm sorry? Chickentown? What exactly is a Chickentown?"

"It's the town where I live. Or where I used to live."

"What a perfectly ridiculous name for a place," Wolfswinkel commented.

His tone brought out a little defensiveness in Candy. "It's no weirder than Ninnyhammer ," she remarked.

Wolfswinkel's eyes grew narrow and sly. "Well, of course this island isn't my real home ," he said.

"No? So why do you stay here?"

"It's a very long story. Maybe I'll tell you later. Why don't you sit down? You look tired."

Candy glanced around the room for a place where she might take up his invitation. Wolfswinkel, seeing that all the chairs were occupied, muttered something under his breath and threw a simple gesture toward one of the smaller chairs. The pile of books perched upon it flew off the seat like a small flock of startled birds.

"Now sit," he said.

"May I take off my shoes?"

"Be my guest. Allow me to get you something to eat. Make yourself at home."

"My feet are killing me."

"I knew somebody who had feet like that. They'd walk all over him. Archie Kashanian was his name. He used to wake up with footprints all over his chest, all over his face. It was the death of him, finally."

Candy wasn't sure whether Kaspar was making a joke or not. So rather than insult him by laughing she kept a straight face, though the idea of somebody being stomped to death by his own feet seemed utterly nonsensical.

Once again Candy changed the subject.

"Back in the Hereafter," she said, "we have people who catch stray animals and find new homes for them. Or if they can't do that, then they have them put down."

"Homes ?" Wolfswinkel said, his tone incredulous. "Who would give a home to any one of those monsters ! The Infernal Regions is the only home the tarries deserve. Anyway, they can't be caught. They're too quick. They have to be tricked. Poison! That's the way. You see that plate of fish on the table by the door? It contains enough scathrassic acid to kill a whole pack of them. If only I could just get them to eat it. But they're suspicious of me." He paused, then he snapped his fingers. "Wait a minute," he said. "Maybe you'd have more luck! Yes. I believe you would."

"Me?" said Candy.

"Yes, you ! If they saw you putting out the food—you, whom they don't really know—they'd be fooled into taking it." He looked smugly satisfied with his little plan. "You just need to be very casual—" He started to get up from his armchair.

"Wait!" Candy said. "I don't want to disappoint you, Mr. Wolfswinkel, especially as you've been so kind and all, but I'm not going to poison cats for you."

"If they were just cats I'd understand your moral dilemma, Miss Quackenbush. But they're not. They're hellspawn. Trust me on this. Hellspawn . After all the harm they've done—not just to me, but to poor, innocent people right across Ninnyhammer—scathrassic acid is kinder than they deserve, believe me. If there were any justice in heaven, they'd be struck down by lightning, every last one of them!"

Before Candy could reply to this outburst from her host, there was a sound from an adjacent room.

"What was that?" she said.

"Oh, it was just the wind," Wolfswinkel replied hurriedly. "Take no notice."

"It didn't sound like the wind," Candy said, getting up out of her chair. "It sounded like a voice. Like somebody crying."

"Oh! Crying! Well, yes. Of course there's crying! I didn't want to depress you when you first arrived, but there are several mourners here in the house with me."

"Mourners?"

"One of my friends—a dear, dear friend—was killed by the tarrie-cats just yesterday, and we're having a wake on his behalf. You know, gathering to toast his memory and tell tales of what a fine fellow he was."

"Really?" Candy said. Something about this explanation didn't quite ring true. "If there's a wake going on," she said, "then why are you wearing a bright yellow suit?"

Wolfswinkel glanced down at his jaundiced ensemble, then feigned a look of surprise. "This is yellow !" he said. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Oh, dear," he said pitifully. "Poor Kaspar. The blindness is getting worse."

"You're saying you didn't realize that was a yellow suit?" said Candy, more and more certain that her suspicions were correct, and that this strange little man was for some reason deceiving her.

"Yes," Kaspar said, putting his hand to his brow, as though the drama was too much for him. But Candy wasn't convinced by his hammy theatrics. Her real interest now was to discover who had made the grieving sound she'd heard.

She got up from her chair and went to the adjoining door, through which the sound of sobbing had come.

"Where are all these mourners then?" she said, as she went. Kaspar moved to stop her, but he wasn't quick enough. Candy stepped through the door into the next room.

Just as she'd suspected, there was neither a casket here, nor a corpse, nor so much as a single mourner. There was simply a dark, cluttered room, one of its walls dominated by a huge portrait of Kaspar sitting on an animal that looked like a cross between a giant armadillo and a camel.

"There's no wake going on in this house!" Candy snapped. "You were lying to me. I can't bear liars!"

Kaspar had followed her through the door. "So what if I was?" he replied, nonchalantly. "It's my house. I can lie in my house if I want to. I can run around in the nude yelling hallelujahs if I so desire."

"Didn't anybody ever tell you it was rude to lie?"

"Maybe I can't help it," Kaspar said. "Maybe I've got an incurable disease that makes me lie. Poor Kaspar."

"Oh," Candy said. "And do you have such a disease?"

"Maybe I do. Maybe I don't."

"Oh, stop it," Candy snapped, her temper stretched to breaking point. "Can't you simply tell me the truth?"

"Well… yes, I suppose I could. But where would the fun be in that?"

"You know what?" Candy said. "This is a ridiculous conversation. And you are a ridiculous little man."

She turned on her heel and started to walk back toward the door she'd just walked through.

"I wouldn't go out there if I were you. The tarrie-cats are still out there."

"So what?" said Candy. "I'd prefer to take my chances with them than stay in here another—"

Before she could finish, Kaspar stepped into the doorway, blocking her path.

"What are you doing?" Candy said. "Get out of my way."

He didn't reply to this. He simply raised his arm, put his stubby-fingered hand over Candy's face, and shoved.

Candy stumbled backward, her foot catching on a rucked-up rug. Down she went, on her tailbone. It hurt, and she yelped.

"I think you should stop being so judgmental, little missy," Wolfswinkel said, every little trace of kindliness abruptly gone from his face. He stood over her and looked her dead in the eye. "Believe me, I've done worse than lying in my life. A whole lot worse."

"I believe you have," Candy said softly.

She started to scramble to her feet. Wolfswinkel neatly kicked the legs from under her, and down she went for a second time. She was beginning to get a little scared of Wolfswinkel now. He might look like a clown, with his stupid hats and his yellow suit, but then she'd always been a little afraid of clowns.

"I want to leave now," she told him.

"Do you indeed? Well, I'm afraid you're not going to. You're going to stay here with me."

"You can't keep me here. I'm not—"

"—a child? You are to me. To me you are an infant. A baby with no one to protect you. I'd lay a bet that nobody even knows you're here."

Candy didn't reply, but her silence was all the confirmation Wolfswinkel required.

"I didn't lie about one thing," Kaspar said.

"What was that?"

"I did whisper an incantation when I saw you. I prayed you'd make the mistake of ignoring the tarrie-cats who were trying to warn you about coming up here. Lo and behold, my supplications were answered! Into my hands you came, like a stupid little fish."

"One minute I'm a baby, the next minute I'm a fish," Candy snapped. "Make up your mind!"

She was feeling more afraid of Wolfswinkel by the moment, but she wasn't going to show it.

"My error," Kaspar said. "You're not a baby, and you're not a fish. You're a hostage."

"A what ?"

"You heard me: a hostage. I'll bet there are people out there who would pay a few thousand zem to have you in their hands."

"Well, you can forget that," Candy said. "I don't have any friends in the Abarat."

"Now who's lying?" Wolfswinkel said, bending down to poke Candy. "Of course you've got friends. A pretty girl like you? You've probably got half a dozen boys pining away for you."

Candy laughed out loud at the preposterousness of this.

"Then you have family."

"Not here I don't," Candy said, thinking, while she spoke, of how quickly she could squirm out from between Wolfswinkel's legs and get to the door. "My parents are—"

"—in Chickentown."

"Yes."

"Hmm," said Wolfswinkel. "Well give me time. I'll find somebody here who wants you. Somebody who'll pay a price. Malingo? Where are you? Malingo ! Present yourself before me right now , or I'll have your hide for boot leather."

"I'm here," said a voice from above, and there—hanging upside down from a roof beam—was a creature that resembled a Halloween mask come to life. His skin was a mottled orange, the pupils in his dark-rimmed eyes dark slits. There were four knobbly horns on his head, and two large fans of leathery skin spread from either side of his head, where ordinary folks would have had ears. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt and an even dirtier pair of pants.

He would have made a fearful sight if he hadn't worn such a pitiful expression on his face. Seeing him, Candy thought back to the weeping she'd heard when she'd first come into the house. This Malingo was surely the source of that unhappiness.

"Come down here and catch hold of this wretched child for me," Wolfswinkel told him. "Now !"

"I'm coming, I'm coming."

Malingo began to clamber down out of the rafters.

But before he could reach ground level, Candy was away. She gave Kaspar a two-handed shove in the belly and then she raced back to the door between the rooms, darting through to the front room. Malingo was on the ground now. She could hear the slap of his bare feet as he raced over the tiled floor in pursuit of her. He was fast. She was barely halfway across the room when he caught hold of her. "

"Don't struggle," he said softly. "It'll be worse for the both of us if you fight him, believe me."

Hearing the delicacy in Malingo's voice, Candy looked up and met his gaze. There was a sweetness in his eyes she had not expected to find there, the Halloween horror of his face concealing something far gentler.

"Bring her back here," Wolfswinkel yelled. "And be quick about it."

Malingo duly pulled Candy away from the front door and into the second room, where Kaspar was standing in front of a long mirror, rearranging the ridiculous tower of hats on his head.

"I suggest you take Malingo's advice," Wolfswinkel said. "You really don't want to be on my bad side."

Candy ignored him, struggling to free herself from Malingo's grip. But it was a lost cause. The creature was considerably stronger than she was. And to add to his physical strength, he gave off a dizzying smell, a bittersweet mixture of cloves and cinnamon and rotted limes.

"Now listen, my dear," Wolfswinkel said, "you have to calm down. You're only going to exhaust yourself, struggling like that. I'm not going to do any harm to you as long as you behave."

He turned away from the mirror and walked across to the other side of the room, where a large square of tile on the floor had been painted an eye-pricking blue. At each corner of the square was a short, fat candle.

"Candles, illume," Kaspar said, and with a little sound like a snatched breath each of the candles ignited itself.

"Brighter!" he instructed them, and the flames grew longer, the illumination they threw up making every other lamp in the room inconsequential.

"Now," said Kaspar, turning his attention back to Candy. "Let's see what secrets you're keeping from me, shall we? Malingo, you know what to do."

Malingo pushed Candy toward the blue square. "Don't worry," he whispered. "It doesn't hurt."

"I heard that," Wolfswinkel said. "I don't know why you're trying to curry favor with this girl. She can't be of any use to you."

"I'm just—"

"Shut up!" Kaspar snapped. "Put her in the light! Go on!"

Malingo gave Candy a second little shove and she stumbled forward into the square. As she did so, she felt her body pass through an invisible barrier. Within the square, she felt a peculiar pressure on her, as though the air inside the design was heavier than the air outside, and it was pressing against her body from every side. It was not by any means a pleasurable sensation. The pressure made it harder for her to draw breath, and her head ached furiously.

Not only that, but being in the painted box sealed her off from the outside world. Now—though she could see Wolfswinkel giving orders to Malingo—she could not hear his voice. Clearly there was now some kind of invisible wall around her. She tested the thesis by extending her hand. It was like pushing her fingers into cold fat. The thickened air congealed against her skin, and the sensation was so disgusting that Candy withdrew her hand before she even reached the limits of her persistence.

Wolfswinkel, meanwhile, was waving his staff around as though he were writing letters in the air.

The candles flickered; the cell convulsed around Candy.

And then, much to her horror, she felt something pulling at her. Not at her hand or arm, but at some place in the center of her head. It didn't make her headache any worse, but she still felt somehow invaded by the sensation. It was as though Wolfswinkel was reaching inside her to pull something out. She saw strange smears of images appearing in the air at the end of Wolfswinkel's staff, and as they settled and focused she realized that these images were recognizable to her. Ten, twenty, thirty pictures appeared, all plucked out of her memories. There was 34 Followell Street, where she'd stood so often, dreaming of the far away. There was her bedroom, and her mother's face, and the schoolyard, and Widow White's house, with its front lawn covered in colored pinwheels.

Apparently none of these images was of the slightest interest to Wolfswinkel, because he erased them with an irritated wave of his staff.

He gathered his strength for a second summoning, and a new wave of images emerged from Candy's head, these more recent. First there was the lighthouse, and the ramshackle jetty of Hark's Harbor. Then there was Mischief and Shape and the turbulent waters of the Sea of Izabella; then the Sea-Skippers, and the Yebba Dim Day.

In the midst of all these familiar sights, however, was one Candy didn't recognize. It was a shape made of blue-green light that looked like a short length of braided ribbon which had been put in the deep freeze. There were tiny crystals glinting on it, and from one end spilled a trail of brightness that broke into tiny pinpoints of intense luminescence before they melted on the air.

At the sight of it Wolfswinkel paused, the color rising in his already ruddied cheeks. There was a look of shock on his face, of disbelief.

"Will you look at that?" he mouthed.

An ugly, avaricious smile had begun to creep onto his face. He left his staff to stand by itself, and he spat onto his palms, rubbing them together before wiping them on his trouser legs. With his hand thus prepared, he reached forward to take hold of the strange object that he'd conjured from out of Candy's mind. Though it wasn't solid (how could it be, when it was made of pure thought?) it nevertheless seemed to gain a measure of solidity as his hands closed around it.

Candy felt a terrible wrenching pain in her skull as Wolfswinkel's fingers took possession of the object. There were flashes of white at the corners of her eyes, which rapidly spread, so that in a matter of moments they washed out her sight completely.

Her legs grew suddenly weak beneath her. She toppled forward against the invisible wall of her square blue cell, and then collapsed to the tiled floor.

The last thing she remembered was the sound of Malingo's voice, breaking through from the other side.

He didn't speak her name. He simply let out a cry of distress. It echoed in Candy's throbbing head for a moment. Then it faded away, and she was lost to blissful unconsciousness.

27. WORDS WITH THE CRISS-CROSS MAN

Candy woke with the worst headache she'd ever experienced in her life, but at least she was no longer in the cell in which KasparWolfswinkel had imprisoned her. She was lying sprawled on a decadently overstuffed velvet chaise lounge, tossed there along with a load of old books. She sat up, her hand going up to her throbbing brow. She felt mildly feverish, and her eyes burned behind her lids when she blinked.

Wolfswinkel was talking in the next room, sounding half crazy with excitement.

"Yes… yes… I know what I have, believe me! This is the Pyramid Key, right here in my hand. Somebody had put it in her thoughts, but I've got it now."

Candy got to her feet, fighting her giddiness, and went to the door between the rooms. As she approached it, however, something dropped into view in front of her. It was Malingo. He was hanging upside down from the rafters, with one long, orange and partially bent finger pressed to his lips. Candy pointed through the door, indicating that she wanted to see Wolfswinkel, but he waved her away. Candy did as instructed. Bizarre though Malingo was, there was something about his gaze that not only endeared him to her, but also made her instinctively trust him.

He climbed over the ceiling and, still inverted, clambered down the wall, using minuscule cracks in the plaster as toe– and fingerholds. Then he flipped over and dropped lightly to the ground three or four yards from Candy, his expression and his posture tentative, as though he was nervous in case all he earned for his troubles was a blow.

"It's all right," Candy whispered. "I'm not going to hit you. You don't have to be frightened of me."

Malingo sidled up to her.

"You have to get out of here," he whispered. "My master's a very cruel man."

"What are you two talking about?" Wolfswinkel yelled from the other room. "Show yourself, child! Now !"

Candy knew it would be wiser to obey this petty despot rather than argue with him. So she went to the door and stepped into view.

Wolfswinkel was sitting in his leather armchair with the receiver of an antiquated telephone in his hand.

"I'm talking to somebody who has some considerable interest in you," he said.

"Oh, really?" she replied with a little shrug.

"It seems you're quite the celebrity, Candy Quackenbush. At least that's what I'm hearing." He returned his attention to the person at the other end of the line. "Yes, I've got her here right now. She's standing right in front of me, as plain as day. Oh, she's about five-three, five-four.

"So, what am I to do with her, Otto? What's she worth on the open market?" Clearly the man he was talking to became agitated at this remark, because Wolfswinkel's next words were: "Calm down, Otto. That was a joke. I know Carrion wants her. But be reasonable. If he wants both the Key and the girl, then I'm going to be expecting something substantial by way of recompense. That's only right and proper, isn't it? Ninnyhammer? No, I don't want Ninnyhammer. When all this is over I never want to see this wretched little rock ever again. No. I want to be Lord of Babilonium! Or Commexo City! Anywhere but here. I'm sick of living in a place where everybody's half asleep!"

Again, the person at the other end of the line had something to say in response. Wolfswinkel listened, drumming his stubby fingers—like the fingers of a chicken slaughterer, fat with blood—on the threadbare arm of his chair.

"Have you quite finished, Houlihan?" he said finally. "You seem to forget that I'm the one with the cards at this table. I've got something Carrion wants badly . No, no, not the girl. The Key! I've got the Key! I don't know how she got hold of it, but I'd stake my hats on the fact that it's the real thing. I know what power feels like. And this is it."

He raised his right hand, which held the aforementioned key, and casually studied the object. He wore a smug smile as he listened to the reply from the fellow he was speaking to.

Finally, he said, "Candy? Get over here, will you? I'm speaking to a friend of mine called Otto Houlihan. He's a… deal maker and he wants to speak with you." Woifswinkel beckoned to her, his gesture impatient. "Hurry up, girl! And be polite. He just wants to know you're the real thing." Candy kept her distance. "Come on" Woifswinkel muttered, his face reddening with fury.

"Go," Malingo murmured behind her. "He loses his temper in a heartbeat."

Very reluctantly, Candy went over to Woifswinkel.

"Here she is, Otto," Woifswinkel said. He handed Candy the receiver. "Like I said, you be nice. Otto Houlihan's a very old friend of mine. We were at school together."

Candy took the receiver from Woifswinkel and put it to her ear.

"Hello… ?" she said.

"Am I speaking to Candy Quackenbush?"

The voice at the other end was silky smooth. She imagined she was talking to someone closely related to a snake, which—given the variety of people she'd met so far—was not beyond the bounds of possibility.

"Yes, I'm Candy Quackenbush."

"Well, you're a very lucky young lady."

"Am I?" Candy said. She didn't feel very lucky at the moment. "Why's that?"

"Well, carrying that Key around could have been the death of you.

"Really?" she said. She didn't believe a word of it.

"Agree with him," Wolfswinkel mouthed.

"I didn't realize I even had a key," Candy said. She remembered how passionately Mischief had impressed on her the need to deny that she had it.

"You tell me the truth now," Houlihan was saying. "It'll be better for you if you tell the truth than be found out later."

"I am telling the truth."

"I won't warn you again," Otto Houlihan said, his voice losing its silkiness. "Where did you steal it from?"

"I didn't steal it," Candy said. "I told you: I didn't know I had it."

"Wolfswinkel tells me he found it in your thoughts. Are you telling me he's a liar?"

"No," Candy said. "If that's what he says, then I guess he must have found it there."

"But you don't know how it got there?"

"No. I don't." The line went quiet for a moment. "Can I go now?" Candy said. "I really don't have anything else to tell you."

"Oh, I think you've got plenty more to tell me," Houlihan said, his voice now entirely bereft of its silken quality. There was now a subtle element of threat in his words. "But we'll have plenty of time to talk when I come to fetch you. Put Kaspar back on. I'll be seeing you very soon."

"He wants to talk to you again," Candy said, passing the receiver over to Wolfswinkel.

"Are you finished with her?" Wolfswinkel said to Houlihan.

The answer was apparently yes , because Wolfswinkel now waved Candy away. She retreated into the next room, relieved that the interrogation was over.

Perhaps she might get out, she thought, while Wolfswinkel was occupied by his telephone call. She went over to the window and tried the handle, but it was locked. Outside, rain was falling. It pattered against the little panes of glass.

"There's no way out. At least not that way."

She looked around. Malingo was hanging upside down from the rafters. She wandered over to him.

"Can I trust you?" she said. It was a silly question, of course; if she couldn't, he wouldn't confess to it. But still he nodded, as if he knew what was coming next.

"You have to help me," she whispered to him. "I need to get out of here."

A pitiful expression crossed Malingo's inverted face.

"It's impossible," he said. "You think I haven't tried over the years? But Kaspar always catches me. And when he catches me, he beats me with his stick. You don't want to have that happen."

"I'll risk the beating," Candy said. "This fellow Otto Houlihan is coming to get me. And I really don't want to be here when he arrives."

Malingo looked even more distressed. Rocking back and forth from the rafters he sang a little rhyme:

"Well that's not very useful," Candy said. "I need help and you hang upside down, singing songs like a crazy man."

"I'm not crazy," Malingo protested. "I'm just tired of being beaten all the time. When I sing my songs it makes me feel better."

He started swinging again, his arms wrapped around his body, a perfect picture of despair.

"Listen to me," Candy said, putting her hand on his shoulder to slow his swinging. "We both want the same thing. You want to get out of here and so do I."

"What are you two yabbering about in there?" Wolfswinkel yelled from the next room.

"Nothing," Malingo said plaintively.

"Nothing? Nobody yabbers about nothing, unless they're witless spit-for-brains fools. Is that what you are, Malingo?"

"Y… y… yes, sir."

"Well, say it out loud so we can hear you! What are you?"

"I've… forgotten, sir."

"A spit-for-brain fool. Say it! Go on! Say: I'm a spit-for-brain fool, sir."

"You're a spit-for-brain fool, sir."

Wolfswinkel slammed down the telephone.

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

"I mean: I'm a fool, sir. I! Me ! I'm the spit-in-his-eye fool, sir."

"You know what I'm doing, Malingo?"

"No, sir."

"I'm picking up my stick. And you know what that means… don't you?"

Candy watched as two tears formed in Malingo's eyes and ran down over his forehead, then dropped to the carpet.

"Come here, Malingo."

"Leave him alone!" Candy protested. "You're frightening him."

"Keep your mouth shut, or you'll be next! Malingo? Come here, you little rat-spasm !"

Candy went to the door. "Please. It was me who was doing the talking, not him."

Wolfswinkel shook his head.

"Why are you standing up for him?" he said. "Oh, I know. You're trying to get him to help you, aren't you?" He smiled, showing his mostly rotted teeth. "Well let me explain something to you. Malingo's a geshrat. And geshrats are cowards, even the best of them. And Malingo makes most of his breed look like heroes. Come here, Malingo. Right now !"

Candy heard a soft thump as Malingo dropped from the rafters.

A few seconds later he appeared at the door.

"Please sir, no sir," he said, the words becoming one pitiful appeal.

"Isaid here ! NOW! If I have to wait one more second —"

Malingo didn't attempt to seek clemency any longer. He started to walk toward Wolfswinkel, casting a forlorn glance at Candy as he went, as though being beaten in front of her made the prospect even worse.

"On your knees," Wolf swinkel said. "NOW! Come to me on your knees. Bare back!"

Malingo went to his knees and shuffled over to the wizard.

"Please—" Candy began.

"You want to make it worse for him?" Wolfswinkel said, coldly.

"No," said Candy. "Of course not."

"Then shut up . And watch. You could very well be next. I have absolutely no compunction about beating a member of the fair sex, believe me."

I bet you haven't , Candy thought. At that moment she couldn't imagine despising anyone with the heat of the hatred she felt for Wolfswinkel. But she didn't dare speak her mind. Not with Malingo at the bully's feet, about to be beaten for the crime of speaking.

"Fetch me a glass of rum, girl," Wolfswinkel said. "And smile, girl, smile !"

Candy made a pitiful attempt to look cheery.

"Now, get me my libation! It's on the dresser in the living room. Go !"

Candy turned her back and returned to the room where she'd conversed with Malingo.

There was a large, elaborately carved dresser set against the far wall. On it sat a crystal decanter of liquor and a small glass.

She took the stopper from the decanter. As she did so, she glanced up at the row of five paintings lined up on the wall above the dresser. They were all portraits: two women and three men. Underneath the portraits were the names of those portrayed:

Jengle Small, Doctor Inchball, Hetch Heckler, Biddy Stuckmeyer and Deborah Jib. There was nothing about the group that suggested they were related or in any way connected, except perhaps for one detail. They were all wearing hats. The same style of hats—no, the same hats, the very same —that were now piled somewhat absurdly upon Kaspar Wolfswinkel's head.

As she took notice of this oddity, she heard the sound of Wolfswinkel's stick whistling through the air and landing on Malingo's back. She winced. A second stroke came quickly after the first, then a third, and a fourth and fifth. Between the blows she heard the soft sound of Malingo's sobs. She understood those heart-wracking tears; she'd shed them herself, when her father was done with her. Tears of relief that it was all finished, for now. And tears of fear that it would happen again when she least expected it. Her father hadn't used a stick to strike her, but he'd had his own ways to cause pain.

Trembling with anger and frustration, she poured the glass of rum—silently wishing the wizard would choke on the stuff—put the stopper back in the decanter and started to carry the liquor back to Wolfswinkel. The blows kept falling as she walked in, but as she entered they stopped.

Malingo was curled up in a little ball of pain and tears at Wolfswinkel's feet like a punished animal. The magician was out of breath. There was a catarrhal rattle in his chest.

"The rum! The rum!" he said, beckoning to Candy.

He took the glass from Candy's fingers.

"Out of my sight!" he shouted.

Malingo scuttled away on all fours, up the wall, through the top of the door, and back—Candy assumed—to his favorite hanging place. Back to his rocking and his song about Houlihan and the holy-man.

Wolfswinkel downed the rum in one gulp.

"More! More!" he said, proffering the empty glass. "Where's the decanter, girl?"

"I didn't bring it."

"Didn't bring it, you maggoty clod? Well, get it !"

Candy ducked just in time.

He swung his staff in her direction. It missed her nose by precious inches.

She backed away from the sweating Wolfswinkel before he could aim a second blow at her, and she retreated out of his range.

Then—cursing the little man under her breath, using a few choice adjectives she had picked up from her dad—she headed into the next room for the rum decanter.

28. A SLAVE'S SOUL

She had guessed correctly about malingo.

He was indeed rocking from the rafters, his tears running down his brow and soaking the carpet beneath him.

"We've got to get out of here ," Candy mouthed.

He shook his head, his expression one of bottomless despair.

Candy picked up the rum decanter and returned to the front room. As she arrived at the door, the telephone rang. Wolfswinkel picked up the receiver, thrusting the empty glass at Candy to have it refilled.

He had put down his staff, she saw. It lay across the arms of his chair.

What if she threw the decanter at Wolfswinkel, and while he was busy trying to catch it, picked up his staff and made a break for the front door? No; that was no good. Even if she made it out there—and who knew what traps Wolfswinkel had laid around the house to prevent escapees?—she'd be leaving Malingo behind.

She couldn't do that. Though they had had no more than two minutes' worth of conversation, she felt responsible for him. They had to get out together.

She poured the wizard some more rum. Wolfswinkel wasn't even noticing what she was doing. Whatever he was being told on the telephone had him absurdly excited.

"He wants to talk to me?" he said. "Really?"

He downed the glass of rum and thrust it toward Candy to be refilled. She obliged happily. She knew from experience what alcohol did to sharp minds. It dulled them, stupefied them. A drunk magician, she reasoned, was a sluggish magician, which was exactly what she wanted right now.

Wolfswinkel emptied the third glass of rum with the same speed as he had the first two. And demanded a fourth. Before he could get it to his lips, however, his whole demeanor changed, and a look of strange reverence came over his face.

"My Lord Midnight," he said. "This is indeed an honor, sir."

Lord Midnight ? Candy thought. He's speaking to Christopher Carrion, the Dark Prince himself. And what was the subject under discussion? Apparently she was.

"Yes, my lord, she's here," Wolfswinkel said. "She's here right beside me." There was a pause. "Well, if I may be so bold, sir, she doesn't seem to me in any way an extraordinary creature. She's… just a girl, you know. Like most girls: something and nothing." There was another pause while Wolfswinkel listened. "Oh, yes sir, I spoke to Otto Houlihan. He's on his way to collect the Key." Another pause. "And the girl, too? Oh yes, of course. She's yours."

He drank the rum and again thrust the glass out to have it refilled. But the decanter was empty. Irritated, Wolfswinkel gestured that Candy should go find some more. She got the impression– judging by the slight trembling in his hands, and the twitches under his eye and at his mouth—that though he was honored to be speaking with the Lord of Midnight, he was also intimidated to his cowardly core.

Candy went next door in search of the liquor. She didn't have to look far. There was a bottle in the dresser. As she wrestled to unscrew it, her eyes went up to the portraits again.

"Who are these people?" she murmured to Malingo.

It took the beaten geshrat a moment to come out of the trance of unhappiness he was in. But when he did, he whispered:

"They were all friends of his. Members of the Noncian Magic Circle. But then he swore allegiance to King Rot —"

"Who?"

"Carrion."

"Oh. King Rot. I get it. What did he do, once he'd sworn allegiance?"

"He murdered them."

"What? He murdered his own friends?"

"Rum !" Wolfswinkel roared.

"Why?"

"RUM!"

Wolfswinkel was at the door now, with his empty glass. His face was flushed red with liquor and excitement, like a shiny tomato balanced on top of an overripe banana.

"That ," he said, with an expansive gesture, "was Lord Midnight himself. My liberation, you see, is imminent. All thanks to you." He smiled lopsidedly at Candy, displaying his ill-kept teeth. "It was quite a moment, missy, when you came knocking at my door. You changed my life. Fancy that, huh? Who'd have thought a little ferret's dung-hole like you would be the cause of Uncle Kaspar's Liberation?"

He walked over and pinched Candy's cheek, as if she were a little child and he the indulgent relative.

"Give me another glass of rum, girl," he said. "Keep me happy till Otto arrives, and maybe I won't beat you black and blue."

Candy took the top off the bottle and poured another brimming glassful. As Wolfswinkel put the glass to his lips, Candy took her life in her hands and deliberately let the bottle slip from between her fingers. It smashed on the floor between them, releasing a pungent stench of rum.

"You idiotic —"

Candy didn't give Wolfswinkel time to finish his next insult. Instead, she pressed her hands against his chest and pushed. The rum had made Wolfswinkel unsteady on his feet. He staggered to regain his balance, and while he did so she slipped through the door into the next room.

There, still lying across the armchair where he'd left it, was his staff.

Without giving herself time to question or doubt the wisdom of what she was about to do, Candy picked it up.

The thing vibrated in her grip, as though it resented being handled by a stranger. But she refused to let the staff intimidate her. She held onto it and waited for the inevitable reappearance of its owner.

Somehow, he knew what she'd done, because he yelled: "Put that down!" even before he appeared at the door.

The staff's vibrations became still more violent at the sound of its master's voice. But Candy refused to release it.

Wolfswinkel was at the door now, pointing at her.

"I said put that down ," Wolfswinkel said, his voice slurred with alcohol. "Put it down, or I'll—"

"Or what ?" Candy said, wielding the stick like a baseball bat. "What will you do? Huh? You can't kill me because then you won't have anything to hand over to your lord and master."

Wolfswinkel wiped away the sweat that had popped up all over his forehead and was threatening to run into his eyes.

"Malingo!" he yelled. "Get in here! RIGHT NOW !"

Malingo dutifully crawled in, upside down, around the top of the door.

"Seize that wretch!" Wolfswinkel demanded. "And give me my staff!"

Malingo hesitated, his despairing eyes on Candy. I said—

"I heard what you said," Malingo replied.

Wolfswinkel took a moment to consider what his slave had just said, or rather the tone of it. There was something new in Malingo's voice. Something Wolfswinkel didn't like at all. It called for a new order of threat.

"Do as I say, geshrat. Or so help me I'll break every bone in your body."

"With what ?" Candy reminded him. "I've got your little magic stick."

"But you don't know how to use it, missy," Wolfswinkel replied, and before Candy could evade him he caught hold of the end of the staff.

Even drunk on rum, he had a supernatural power in his grip. He twisted the stick to the left, then to the right, then to the left again, attempting to wrest it from Candy's grip. But the more violently he twisted, the harder she held on.

"If you don't let go—" he hollered at her, his unpretty face made uglier still by his rage.

"Hot air. That's all you are," Candy said. "Hot air in a banana-skin suit."

Wolfswinkel's lip curled with fury, and he hauled his staff toward him. There was a short scuffle, and in the heat of the moment they both lost their grip on the staff.

It fell to the floor between them and rolled off across the boards.

Both Candy and Wolfswinkel made a lunge to reclaim it, but before either could reach it Malingo dropped from the ceiling and neatly snatched it up.

A smug smile appeared on Kaspar Wolfswinkel's face.

"Good boy," he said to Malingo. "You are a very, very good boy. I will think of some way to reward you for this." He wiped his sweaty brow with the arm of his yellow jacket. Then he put out his fat hand. "Now give it back to Uncle Kaspar," he said.

The beaten Malingo looked at his master like a creature mesmerized by a poisonous snake. But he didn't move to return the staff.

"Didn't you hear me?" Wolfswinkel demanded. "GIVE ME MY STAFF . I'm going to beat this wretched girl till she's yelping. Won't that be fun?"

There was a long, long moment in which nothing happened. Then, slowly—very, very slowly—Malingo shook his head .

"Candy…" he said quietly, not for a moment taking his eyes off the man who had once been his master. "You'd better go. Quickly, before Houlihan gets here."

"I'm not leaving without you."

At this, Malingo shot her a glance, filled with a mixture of fear and exhilaration.

"Oh, how sweet this is," Wolfswinkel remarkedl "how touching." Then, putting on a smile, he beckoned to Malingo. "'Come on now, boy. Joke's over. You've had your moment. Let's stop all this playacting. You know you don't have the guts to leave me."

His tone was all milk and honey, and it was frighteningly credible.

"You belong to me, Malingo," he went on. "Remember? I bought you in an honest transaction. I have the papers. You can't walk away. I mean, goodness gracious, where would the world be if every slave just upped and walked away when they got the inclination?"

The smile went from his face. Wolfswinkel had exhausted his supply of sweetness.

"Now," he said, "for the last time: give me back my staff and I promise you, I promise you , I will not hurt you."

Malingo didn't move. He didn't even blink.

"Oh now, wait a moment," Wolfswinkel went on. "I know what you're thinking. You can smell freedom, can't you? And it's rather tempting. But think, geshrat. You don't know how to live out there in the world."

"Take no notice of him," Candy said.

"You've got a slave's soul, geshrat. And you'll never change that."

"There's nothing to be afraid of out there," Candy said. Then revising her opinion in the interest of honesty, she said: "Well, nothing worse than this. Than him . And I'll be with you—"

"Oh no, you won't," Wolfswinkel said, snatching hold of Candy's wrist.

His grip was like fire. She cried out in pain and struggled so hard to be free of him that his hats, all carefully perched upon one another, slid sideways from his sweat-slickened head.

A look of panic crossed his face, and he let go of Candy so as to catch the falling hats and push them back into place. She stepped out of his range, her hand numb with pain. As she rubbed it back to life, the paintings of the five murdered magicians came into her mind's eye. And with them, a simple thought:

His hats. Part of his power is in those idiotic hats.

She had only a moment to register this notion. Then Wolfswinkel was closing on Malingo, his hands reaching out to reclaim his staff.

"Give it to me," he said to Malingo. "Come on. You know it's mine."

There were flecks of yellow-white spittle on his lips. He looked as though he was about ready to explode with fury.

Malingo raised the staff.

"Good boy," Wolfswinkel said, a slight smile returning to his sweaty face.

Malingo looked his master straight in the eyes. Then he lifted his leg, and taking the staff in a two-handed grip, he brought it down across his knee.

Wolfswinkel let out a howl as the staff broke in half. Splinters flew in all directions, and the crack of the breaking staff echoed off the walls.

Malingo lifted the pieces of the staff and showed them to Wolfswinkel.

"You'll never beat me with this again," he said.

Then he threw the two halves down on the floor, on the very spot where he'd been bruised and humiliated just a few minutes before.

Wolfswinkel looked down at them, his body shaking.

"Well, now…" he muttered. "Aren't you a brave little rebel?"

Now it was he who lifted his hands, locking his fingers together above his head.

Then, muttering something that was incomprehensible to Candy's ears, but still sounded profoundly threatening, he unknotted his hands and began to slowly, slowly ease them apart. There was a form made of seething darkness between his palms, which grew as he parted his hands. It resembled a fat, five-foot-long maggot armed with tentacles, each one of which ended in a cruel red hook. It had two heads, one at either end of its body, their faces resembling Kaspar. Their teeth were as sharp as a shark's teeth.

"Lovely," Wolfswinkel said, looking up at this foul thing that he'd conjured. "You like my little eeriac?"

Then, without waiting for a reply, he dropped his hands in front of him and released the creature.

The eeriac, though solid, seemed to be able to defy gravity, for it instantly rose high above the heads of those in the room, twisting and turning like a rope that had an ambition to knot itself.

It made an inverted curve of its body and turned both its grotesque faces down to look at its creator.

Wolfswinkel nodded to the thing. "Are you ready?" he said. It opened its mouths and let out a hiss from the depths of its throats. "Good," said Wolfswinkel. He pointed at Malingo and uttered these words:

"Kill my slave."

The eeriac didn't hesitate. It threw itself down from the heights of the room and flew toward Malingo.

Luckily, Malingo was quick. He was used to climbing over the rooms. He knew every rock and cranny. Before the eeriac could reach him, up he went, like a spider on the wall. The creature pursued him, the hooks on its numberless tentacles striking sparks off one another, bright enough to flood the room with a rancid light.

Wolfswinkel was pleased with the spectacle he'd created. He applauded like an egotistical child as the chase set the chandelier swinging. A dry rain of dust and dead moths came down off the crystals as they twinkled and shook.

"Get out !" Malingo yelled down to Candy. "Go !"

The moment that he took to beg her to leave was his undoing. The creature closed the distance between them in a heartbeat and clamped both sets of jaws upon him.

Candy couldn't bear to look. She averted her eyes, her gaze going instead to Wolfswinkel. He was totally engrossed by the spectacle overhead. Surely she could creep up on him and not be noticed.

Did she dare? Yes, of course she dared. Anything to save Malingo from Wolfswinkel's monster.

She glanced up once to see how Malingo was faring. Not well was the answer. The eeriac was wrapped around Malingo, its hooks seeking to catch his skin. But he wasn't quite as vulnerable as a human being. Though doubtless his skin was tender from the beating he'd endured, the hooks did not wound him.

Even so, he was in dire jeopardy: not from the hooks but from the eeriac's teeth. He did his best to hold the beast's two mouths away from his face with his hands, and for a while he succeeded. But the eeriac was strong. It was only a matter of time before the monster's needle teeth pierced him.

Candy waited no longer. As Wolfswinkel continued to applaud the horrible spectacle, Candy moved behind him. Then she pitched herself at his back.

Wolfswinkel turned at the last moment and raised his hand to strike her, but he was too late. She threw herself at him, and with a backward sweep of her hand, she knocked all of his hats off his head.

Wolfswinkel unleashed a howl of fury and went down on his knees in a desperate attempt to pick up the fallen hats. Candy did her best to prevent him from doing so by kicking them out of his hands.

From overhead there came a din like the sound of an enormous firecracker exploding.

Candy looked up to see that the eeriac was no longer threatening Malingo. With Wolfswinkel's power suddenly removed, the eeriac was diminishing. It had let Malingo go and was bouncing back and forth around the room like an over-filled balloon that had suddenly had the air let out of it. As it struck a solid object—a wall of books, the chandelier, a table, the floor—it erupted in a shower of black sparks, its body getting smaller each time it did so. Candy watched it for a moment, then she called up to Malingo, who was still hanging on the ceiling.

"Come on! Quickly!"

He dropped down to stand in front of her.

"Are you all right?" she said.

"It didn't hurt me." He smiled. "It tried, but—"

Candy smiled and caught hold of his clammy hand.

"We have to get out of here!" she said, and they ran toward the front door.

As they reached the door the beast slammed into the wall above it and released one last stinging rain of black sparks. Then it dropped to the ground between them. It was deflated to a tiny version of its former self. It writhed on the floor, its minuscule mouths still loosing that throaty hiss.

"Look away," Malingo said.

"Don't worry, I'm not squeamish," Candy said.

Malingo stamped his heel down on the eeriac, grinding out the last of its magical life. When he lifted his foot, the creature was no more than a dark stain on the carpet.

"Now we go," Malingo said.

He pulled open the top bolt of the front door. Candy took the middle and the bottom. "Wait. What about the Key?" she said to Malingo, as she threw open the door.

"This isn't the time to be worrying about that," Malingo said, as Kaspar's din became louder behind them.

Candy agreed with a little nod, and hand in hand they pitched themselves over the threshold.

They didn't look over their shoulders.

They just stumbled away from the house into the early night of Ninnyhammer, leaving Kaspar Wolfswinkel to roar his threats and his frustration at their backs.

29. CAT'S EYES

"I'M FREE ," MALINGO YELLED as they ran. "I can't believe it! I'm free! I'm free !"

Suddenly he stopped running and picked Candy up in his arms, hugging her so tightly she could barely catch her breath.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," he said, swinging her around. "You gave me the courage to do it! Whatever happens to me after this, I'll always be grateful to you."

Then he planted a loving, leathery kiss on her cheek and set her down again.

Candy was a bit flustered by all this. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been hugged or kissed. But she quickly regained her composure and turned the conversation back to practical matters.

"We're not out of the woods yet," she pointed out. "We need to put as much distance as we can between us and Ol' Banana Suit."

Malingo laughed. "Agreed," he said. "Do you have a boat?"

"No. And I don't suppose you have a luxury yacht in the vicinity?"

"No. 'Fraid not. How did you get here, by the way?"

"Well, there was this giant moth, you see—" she said.

"Giant moth?"

"Sent by Christopher Carrion."

"So the Lord of Midnight has been after you for a while. What's he so interested in?"

"Well, I had this Key—" Candy began. Then she stopped herself. "But that can't be why he was after me. He didn't even know I had the Key until Wolfswinkel found it."

"Do you know what this mystery key is for?"

"No, I don't. I don't think I was ever told."

Candy had no sooner spoken than she heard the voice of Kaspar Wolfswinkel. He was somewhere nearby, to judge by the way he whispered.

"Oh the Key ," he said. "You want to know what the Key is for…"

Malingo turned to Candy, the joy stripped from his face, terror replacing it. "He's here!" he said.

"It's all right," Candy murmured. "He's not going to hurt us."

As she spoke, she looked around for some sign of Wolfswinkel in the murk. But despite the eerie intimacy of his voice, he was nowhere to be seen.

"For your information," the magician went on, "the Key opens the Pyramids at Xuxux."

"Really?" Candy said, hoping to keep the chat going while she tried to locate Wolfswinkel. "The Pyramids, huh? Very interesting." She leaned close to Malingo. "Let's stand back to back," she said. "That way he can't creep up on us."

Malingo did as she suggested and carefully stepped into place, his back against Candy's.

"Believe me," Wolfswinkel went on boastfully, "I will be massively rewarded for what I did this Hour. I will have power on a scale that would be unimaginable to the likes of you—"

"Where is he ?" Candy whispered to Malingo. "He's close. I know he's close. Why can't we see him?"

"It's driving you crazy , isn't it?" Wolfswinkel said. "You're wondering if your pitiful senses are finally giving out? Perhaps you're going crazy. Have you thought about that? What is it the poet says? The mind cannot bear too much reality. You poor thing. It's the madhouse for you."

Malingo seized hold of Candy's hand. "You are not going crazy," he said.

"Then why does he sound so close to us?"

Malingo was trembling violently. "Because he is close," he said. "He's very close."

"But I don't see him," Candy said, still inspecting the landscape around them.

"Those hats of his give him a lot of powers," Malingo whispered. "He's just made himself invisible."

"So so he could be anywhere?" Candy said.

"I'm afraid so."

Armed with this new information Candy studied the landscape around them for some sign, however subtle, of their enemy's presence. A bush shaking as Wolfswinkel brushed past it; a pebble cracking beneath his invisible heel. But in the flickering, deceptive light from the fire-poles, it was difficult to be sure of anything. Was that Wolfswinkel moving through the grass off to her left, or just a trick of the light? Was that his breath, close to her ear, or simply the wind?

"I hate this," she whispered.

She'd no sooner spoken than there was a loud slapping sound, and Malingo stumbled forward, crying out. He instantly let go of Candy's hand and swung around, raising his fists like an old-fashioned boxer.

"He's right here !" Malingo warned. "He's right here ! He just hit the back of my—"

He didn't finish. There was another smack, and then a third, this one so violent that it threw Malingo to the ground. He put his hands over his head to protect himself from any further assault.

"Run, Candy!" he yelled. "Get out of here before he starts on you."

At this point Candy felt Kaspar's arms catching hold of her, and she was lifted up into the air. It was a supernatural strength Wolfswinkel was displaying: the source of it, of course, those ridiculous hats of his. Candy flailed around, hoping by chance to knock them off his head again, but he had her held in such a position that she was powerless to do so. "You're coming back to the house with me," he said. "Right now ."

Candy continued to struggle, but the man's strength was simply overwhelming. She started to yell for help, hoping there might be somebody out there on the murky slopes that could save them.

"It's a lost cause, I'm afraid," Wolfswinkel said, his invisible mouth inches from Candy's ear. His breath stank of rum.

Before Candy could reply, there was a lot of motion in the grass around them, and out of the darkened landscape came a number of tarrie-cats. It was not a small assembly. One minute the place was deserted; the next the beasts seemed to be all around them, their ears pricked, their eyes incandescent, watching Candy intently as she struggled in the arms of her invisible captor. As they approached, she remembered the horrendous crimes Wolfswinkel had claimed the cats had been responsible for. Had any of what he'd told her been true ? Had the tarrie-cats come here now to commit some new atrocity? To leap on poor Malingo while he lay on the ground and scratch out his eyes? Or to climb up her body and smother her?

As if their situation wasn't bad enough, it had now become incalculably worse.

Or so she thought.

But as the tarrie-cats advanced upon them, she felt Kaspar's hold on her weaken a little, and a few muttered words escaped his lips.

"You stay away from me…" he warned them.

The tarrie-cats ignored him. They simply continued their approach, their scrutiny frighteningly intense.

"Don't look at me that way," Wolfswinkel said to them.

Look at me ? Candy thought. What did he mean by look at me? He was invisible, surely. How could they possibly be seeing him? Suddenly it was clear to Candy.

"They can see you," she said to Kaspar.

The magician made no reply. But he didn't need to. His body was answering for him. He'd begun to shake, and his grip on Candy had weakened so much that she was able to slip free of him. She went immediately to tend to Malingo, who was still curled up on the ground.

"It's all right," she reassured him. "The tarrie-cats are here."

"That's good ?" he said, turning over to look at her. There was blood and fear on his face.

"Oh, yes, it's good," she said.

"How so?"

"Because the tarries can see him, Malingo."

"They can?"

They both looked up.

The animals' eyes were all focused on the same spot, just a few feet from Candy and Malingo. And from that exact place came Wolfswinkel's voice.

"You keep your distance, you spit rags!" he wailed at the tarries. "Stay away, I'm warning you, or I'll set fire to your tails. I mean it. You don't know the things I can do to the likes of you!"

A few of the tarries exchanged anxious glances at Wolfswinkel's outburst, but none of them were intimidated enough to retreat.

"He's bluffing," Candy said to them. "Do you understand me? He's afraid of you."

"You be quiet , bug-rot!" Wolfswinkel yelled, his voice shrill now. "I'll deal with you later."

Malingo, meanwhile, had got to his feet. The blood was running down the side of his face from the wound on his brow, but he seemed indifferent to his own hurt. There was a strange new confidence about him.

"You know all you ever do is threaten people," he said, striding toward the place where the many stares of the tarrie-cats converged; in other words, the spot where the wizard stood. Wolfswinkel said nothing more—presumably hoping to keep his ex-slave's hands from touching him. Then he beat a rapid retreat. Candy and Malingo could hear the dirt his heels kicked up, and they could see the collective gaze of the tarries moving up the slope, following the magician as he fled for the sanctuary of his house.

Malingo wasn't about to let him get there. He chased Wolfswinkel up the slope, glancing back at the animals now and again to confirm that he was indeed running in the right direction.

He was twenty yards shy of the front door when he pounced.

There was a loud, profoundly outraged yell from the murk.

"Unhand me, slave!" Wolfswinkel yelled.

"I am not your slave!" Malingo yelled back.

Clearly Wolfswinkel fought to be free of Malingo's hold. It looked as though Malingo was wrestling with two armfuls of invisible eels, all slathered in fat. Threats and curses poured from Wolfswinkel.

Tired of the wizard's endless mouthing, Malingo shook his prisoner back and forth.

"Show yourself ," he demanded.

He had grabbed Wolfswinkel's neck, as far as Candy could guess, and was threatening to choke him.

"Take the hats off and show yourself ." he demanded.

A moment later a flickering form began to appear in Malingo's arms, and an irate Kaspar Wolfswinkel came into view. He had taken off his hats, and he was clutching three in each hand. By the expression on his face, he would gladly have murdered every living thing on Ninnyhammer at that instant—starting with Candy and Malingo, then going on to the tarries.

"So now, Kaspar," said a voice behind Candy, "you should perhaps go back to your house and stay there. You know you're not supposed to be running around."

Candy turned, wondering who the speaker was, and found herself face-to-face with a two-legged creature who had clearly some familial relationship with the tarries. Its wide face was covered with a subtle down of red-dish-brown fur. Its luminous eyes were decidedly feline, as were the whiskers that sprouted from its cheeks. It had apparently wandered up the hill to see what was going on.

"She started all this, Jimothi!" Kaspar said, pointing at Candy. "That damnable girl. Blame her , not me."

"Oh, for A'zo's sake, be quiet, Wolfswinkel," the creature said.

Much to Candy's surprise, Wolfswinkel did exactly that.

The creature returned to its gaze to Candy. "My name is Jimothi Tarrie."

"I'm very pleased to meet you."

"And you, of course are the famous—or is it infamous?– Candy Quackenbush."

"You know of me?"

"There have been very few visitors to these islands whose presence has been so widely discussed," Jimothi said.

"Really?"

"Oh, certainly." He smiled, showing his pointed teeth. "I've been out among the islands these last two days, and it seems every second soul I met knows of you. Your celebrity grows by the Hour. People who can't possibly have met you claim they have."

"Really?" said Candy.

"Believe me. Did you buy a slice of Furini from the cheese maker in Autland?"

"No."

"Well, he says you did. What about the shoes you ordered from a cobbler in Tazmagor?"

"I've never even been to Tazmagor."

"You see how famous you are?" Jimothi said.

"I don't understand why," Candy said.

"Well, there are several good reasons," Jimothi said. "One, of course, is your origins. You're the first soul to have come through from the Hereafter in quite a while. Then there's the fact that you seem to have left consternation wherever you traveled. Admittedly, none of this was of your doing. Others were causing trouble by pursuing you with such vehemence. But trouble is trouble."

Candy sighed, still confused.

"And then," said Jimothi, "there's the matter of when you arrived."

"Why's that so important?"

"Well, because a lot of people, from street-corner elegiacs to the most respected bone-casters in the Abarat, have been saying for a long time that some transforming force was imminent. A force that would somehow upset the sad order of our lives."

"Why sad?" said Candy. "What's so sad about things?"

"Where do I begin?" Jimothi said softly. "Put it this way. We do not sleep well these days."

"We?"

"Those of us who care to wonder where our lives are going. And what our dreams are worth. We wake with the taste of Midnight in our throats."

"You mean Christopher Carrion?"

"He's part of it. But he's not the worst part of it," Jimothi said. "After all, the House of Carrion has had its place in the balance of power since there were historians to write these things down. Darkness has always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It's only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes—if necessary—brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must. In the end, following the Dark Road is no less honorable than following the Light, as long as it is done with a clear purpose."

Candy was not sure she entirely understood what she was being told, but she was sure when she thought it all over that Jimothi's observations would come to make sense. Anyway, she had no chance to ask the tarrie-cat questions. Jimothi was continuing to talk about the state of the Abarat, and Candy drank it all down.

"The real trouble is Commexo," he said. "Rojo Pixler and his Kid. He buys holy sites and builds restaurants on them. And nobody seems to care. They're too busy drinking his Panacea. It makes me sick. Hour by Hour, Day by Day, we're letting him take the magic out of our lives. And what do we get in exchange? Soda and Panacea." He shook his head in despair. "Do you begin to understand?" he said.

"A little," Candy said.

"And now, here you come, out of the Hereafter. And the moment you arrive everybody starts to talk, everybody starts to wonder… is she the one?"

"The one?"

"To cure our ills. To save us from our own stupidities. To wake us up !"

Candy had no answer to this, except to say no, she wasn't the one; she was a nobody . But Jimothi didn't want to hear that, she knew. So she kept her silence.

"You're an extraordinary spirit," he said to her. "Of that I'm certain."

Candy shook her head. "How can that… ? I mean… me?" She sighed, the words failing her, just as she knew she would fail Jimothi's high hopes for her. How could she wake up anybody? She'd been asleep herself until a few days ago, doodling in her dreams.

"Take courage in your purpose," Jimothi said. "Even if it isn't yet clear."

Candy nodded.

"It's amazing that you've survived your journey thus far. You do know that? Somebody must be taking care of you."

His observation brought to mind all that Candy had faced in the hours since she'd met John Mischief: narrowly avoiding death at the hands of Mendelson Shape, and nearly drowning in the Sea of Izabella; the bolts of Pixler's hunting party whistling past her head; then falling out of the skies, clinging to the corpse of the great moth. Finally, of course, there'd been her encounter with Wolfswinkel. Everywhere she looked there was jeopardy.

"This all began with a key," she said, trying to make sense of what had brought her to this moment. "And Wolfswinkel took it, out of my mind. Can you get it back from him?"

"Unfortunately there's nothing I can do about that. Although Wolfswinkel is a prisoner and I am his warden, I have no authority to take back what he has taken from you, any more than I can confiscate his hats."

"Why not?"

Here Wolfswinkel, who had once again set his hats upon his head, spoke up:

"Because I'm a great magician, and a Doctor of Philosophy, and he's just a flea-bitten tarrie, who happens to stand on two legs. He can't do anything to me, except prevent me from getting off this wretched island. And all of that will change when Otto Houlihan gets here."

"Houlihan!" Candy said. She'd been so engrossed in listening to Jimothi she'd forgotten Houlihan.

"What business does that wicked man have with you?" Jimothi asked.

It was Wolfswinkel who replied.

"Arrangements have been made to have him take her to the Lord Midnight, along with the Key she stole."

"Go back to your house, wizard," Jimothi said, waving Wolfswinkel away. "I don't want to hear any more of you. Brothers and sisters, take him ." The cats, which had followed Wolfswinkel up the hill, gathered around him now, yowling as they pressed him back toward his prison.

"Damnable creatures," Kaspar said. Then, calling back to Candy: "Why couldn't you just have poisoned them when I asked you to?"

The cats set up a chorus of yowling that blotted out whatever else he had to say.

"He's a lunatic," Candy said.

"Maybe," Jimothi replied, though he sounded doubtful. "I'm sorry you had to deal with him. But in the end he's a very small player in a very large game."

"Who's organizing the game?" Candy wanted to know. "Christopher Carrion?"

"I'd rather not talk about him, if you don't mind," Jimothi said. "I believe the more you talk about death and darkness, the closer it comes."

"I'm sorry," Candy said. "This is all my fault."

"How so?"

"Because I let that man have the Key. I should have fought him harder."

"No, lady," Malingo said, speaking for the first time since this whole exchange had begun. (He calls me lady , Candy thought, like John Mischief. That's nice.) "You're not responsible," Malingo went on. "He had a Spell of Revelations on you. Nobody could have resisted something like that. At least, nobody who was not a magician."

"He's right," Jimothi said. "Don't blame yourself. It's a waste of energy."

Up on the hill Wolfswinkel slammed the door to his house. His threats and inanities were finally silenced, and so was the barrage of yowling that the tarrie-cats had set up to drown him out.

All that remained was the moan of the wind in the long grass. Its sighing put Candy in mind of home, of the tall-grass prairie around Chickentown. She suddenly felt a pang of loneliness. It wasn't that she necessarily wanted to be back in the confines of Followell Street. It was just that the distance between this windy place and that modest little house seemed so immeasurably immense. Even the stars were different here, she remembered. Lord, even the stars.

Whatever this world was—a waking dream, another dimension, or simply a corner of Creation that God had made and forgotten—she was going to have to find herself a place in it and make sense of why she was here. If she didn't, her loneliness would grow and consume her in time.

"So what happens to me now?" she said.

"A very good question," Jimothi replied.

30. "COME THOU GLYPH TO ME"

"Our first priority," jlmothi said, "is to get you both off this island before Otto Houlihan arrives. I don't want to see you taken to Christopher Carrion."

"Do you happen to have a boat?" Candy asked him.

"Yes, I do," Jimothi said. "Cats hate to swim. But I'm afraid the boat's way off over on the other side of the island. If we tried to get you to it, Houlihan would have caught up with you before you were halfway to the harbor."

"I… I have an idea," Malingo put in tentatively.

"You do?" Jimothi said.

"Go on," Candy said. "Let's hear it."

Malingo licked his lips nervously. "Well…" he said. "We could leave the island in a glyph."

"A glyph?" Jimothi said. "My friend, it's a fine proposal, but who among us has the knowledge to speak a glyph into creation?"

"Well…" said Malingo, looking modestly down at his oversized feet, "I do."

Jimothi looked frankly incredulous. "Where in the name of Gosh and Divinium does a geshrat learn how to conjure a glyph?"

"When Wolfswinkel used to pass out from drinking an excess of rum," Malingo explained, "I would read his books of magic. He has all of the classics up there in the house. Saturansky's Grimoire; The Strata Pilot's Guide; The Wiles of Gawk; Chicanery and Guising . But it was Lutneric's Six that I really studied."

"What are Lumeric's Six ?" Candy asked.

"They are seven books of Incantations and Profound Enchantments," Jimothi said.

"If there's seven books, why are they called Lumeric's Six ?"

"It was Lumeric's way of helping a true magician to quickly discover if they were dealing with a false one."

Candy smiled. "That's clever," she said.

"There is another way," Malingo said.

"What's that?" Jimothi wanted to know.

"Just ask whether Lumeric was a man or a woman."

"And what's the right answer?" Candy asked.

"Both," Malingo and Jimothi replied at the same moment.

Candy looked confused.

"Lumeric was a Mutep," Malingo explained. "Therefore both a he and a she ."

"So…" said Jimothi, obviously still a little suspicious of Malingo's claim to the skill of glyph-speaking. "You've read the books. But have you actually done any of the magic?"

Malingo made a little shrug. "Some small spells," he said. "I got a chair to sit up and beg, one time." Candy laughed, amused by the image. "And I made fourteen white doves into one… uh… one very big white dove."

"Ha !" said Jimothi, apparently suddenly convinced. "I've seen that dove of yours. It's the size of a tiger-kite. Enormous. That was your handiwork?"

"Yes, it was."

"You swear ?"

"If he says it's his work, Jimothi, then it's his," Candy said. "I believe him."

"I'm sorry. That was remiss of me," Jimothi replied. "Please accept my apologies."

This was plainly the first time Malingo had been offered an apology. "Oh," he said, looking at Candy, his eyes wide. "What do I do now?"

"Accept the apology, if you think he means it."

"Oh… yes. Of course. I accept the apology."

Jimothi offered his hand, and Malingo shook it, plainly delighted at this new proof of his advanced position in the world.

"So, my friend," Jimothi said. "I believe you have it in you to make a glyph. Go to it."

"I did tell you I've never actually done this before?" Malingo pointed out.

"Just give it a try," Candy said. "It's our only way out. No pressure of course."

Malingo offered her a nervous smile. "You'd better both stand back then," he said, spreading his arms.

Jimothi took a small telescope from his jacket pocket, opened it up and wandered away to scan the skies.

"Don't be nervous," Candy said to Malingo. "I have faith in you."

"You do?"

"Don't sound so surprised."

"I just don't want to disappoint you."

"You won't. If it works, it works. If not—" She waved the thought away. "We'll find some other escape route. After all that you've done in the last few hours, you don't have to prove anything."

Malingo nodded, though he looked far from happy. To judge by his expression, Candy guessed that a part of him was regretting that he'd spoken up in the first place.

He stared down at the ground for a moment, as though recalling the spell.

"Please stand away," he said to Candy, without looking up. Then he raised his arms from his sides and clapped them together above his head, three times.

While he spoke these words, he walked in a circle about six or seven feet wide, grabbing hold of the air and appearing to throw what he'd caught into the circle.

Then he began the words of the ritual afresh.

Three times he made the circle, throwing the air and repeating the strange words of the conjuration.

"I don't want to hurry you," Jimothi said, glancing back at Candy, his eloquent eyes flickering with anxiety, "but I can see the lights of three glyphs coming this way. It must be the Criss-Cross Man. I'm afraid you don't have much time, my friend."

Malingo didn't break the rhythm of his invocation. He went on, around and around, snatching at the air. But nothing seemed to be happening. From the corner of her eye, Candy caught sight of Jimothi making a tiny, despairing shake of his head. She ignored his pessimism and instead went to stand with Malingo.

"Is there only room for one cook in this kitchen?" she said.

He was still circling and snatching, circling and snatching.

"The pot looks pretty empty to me," Malingo said. "I need all the help I can get."

"I'll do what I can," Candy said, stepping into the circle behind Malingo, copying his every move and syllable.

It was remarkably easy, once she'd done it one time through. In fact, it was eerily easy, like a dance step she'd forgotten but remembered again immediately the music began, though where she'd heard the music of this magic before she could not possibly imagine. This was not a dance they danced in Chickentown.

"I think it's working," Malingo said hesitantly.

He was right.

Candy could feel a rush of kindled air coming out of the middle of the circle, and to her amazement she saw a myriad of tiny sparks igniting all around them: blue and white and red and gold.

Malingo let out a triumphant whoop, and his happiness seemed to further fuel the fire of creation. Now the sparks began to trail light, forming a luminescent matrix in the dark air. The glyph being conjured was a complex form, dominated by three broad strokes, between which there was a filigree of finer lines. Some rose up to form a kind of cabin. The rest swept down behind the craft where they knotted themselves together forming something that might have been the glyph's engine. Moment by moment it looked more solid. In fact it now seemed so substantial it was hard to imagine that the space it now occupied had been empty just a little time before.

Candy looked over at Jimothi, who was staring with naked astonishment at what Malingo had achieved.

"I take it all back, my friend," he said. "You are a wizard. Perhaps the first of your tribe to speak a glyph into creation, yes?"

Malingo had stopped circling. He now also stood back to admire the vehicle that was being called into existence.

"We are both wizards," he said, looking at Candy with a stare that contained surprise and delight in equal measure.

Jimothi was once again consulting the skies through his telescope. "I think it's time for you to go," he said.

"There's still more to do," Candy said, looking at the unfinished glyph.

"It should finish itself," Malingo told her. "At least that's what Lumeric writes."

Lumeric the Mutep knew its business. As Candy watched, the glyph continued to become more and more coherent, the lines of light running back and forth, knitting the matter of the vehicle, refining its form. But it was taking its own sweet time, and that was the problem.

"Is there no way to hurry it up?" Jimothi said.

"Not that I know of," Malingo replied.

Candy glanced in the direction of the approaching enemy. She could now see the glyphs Jimothi had spoken of; all three considerably more elaborate than the vehicle that she and Malingo had conjured. But a craft was a craft; as long as it could carry them, it scarcely mattered what it looked like.

As she watched, Houlihan's trio came in to land on a ridge perhaps four hundred yards from them. There they sat, looking like predatory animals.

"Why did they land over there?" Candy asked Jimothi.

"Because Houlihan is a military man. He sees traps and ambushes everywhere. He probably thinks we've got an army of ten thousand tarrie-cats hiding behind the hill. How I wish we had them. I'd tear him and his mires to pieces."

"Mires? What are mires?"

"The creatures he brought with him. They're a particularly brutal breed of stitchling."

Candy was just about to ask Jimothi if she could take a look through his telescope to see these mires when a voice they all hoped had been silenced—at least for a while—echoed across the island.

"There's nothing to be nervous about, Houlihan! There's only three of them. And a few cats."

It was Wolfswinkel, of course.

Candy glanced around at the house. The wizard had appeared in the dome, which functioned as a giant magnifying glass, grotesquely distorting Wolfswinkel's face and body. It was as though he was being reflected in a vast fun-house mirror. His head bulged, and his body looked dwarfed, so that he resembled an infuriated fetus dressed in a banana-skin suit.

"Come and get them, Houlihan!" he screamed, pounding his tight red fists against the glass. "They're weaponless! Kill the geshrat! He's a mutinous slave! And beat that girl! Teach her a lesson ."

"I really hate that little man," said Candy.

"There's a lot worse than him, I'm afraid," Jimothi replied.

"Such as… ?"

"Try the Criss-Cross Man," Jimothi said. "The list of his crimes is so long we could be here till the sun comes up over Ninnyhammer."

Candy licked her parched lips and went back to studying the glyph. It was still polishing itself, much to her frustration. Malingo was also staring hard at it, as though he was trying to will it to finish its autocreation.

"What about you, Jimothi?" Candy said to the tarrie-man. "If we get away, what happens to you?"

"I'll be fine and dandy," Jimothi said. "Houlihan won't touch me. He knows where to draw the line."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure," said Jimothi. "Don't worry about me. Oh, A'zo. He's coming."

Candy returned her gaze to the ridge. Houlihan and his gang of mires had vacated their glyphs and were approaching, confident– thanks to Wolfswinkel—that they had nothing to fear. Houlihan wore a long purple coat with a blood-red lining; his face was faintly jaundiced, and there seemed to be a checkerboard design tattooed upon his cheeks. The seven mires that followed on his heels were all bigger than he was, the largest nearly twice his size. Like all their vile species they were patchworks of flesh and fabric, all crudely sewn together. Their heads, however, were of inhuman design: like the skeletal remains of devils, with horns and snouts and vicious teeth. They all carried elaborately configured blades; three of them carried one in each hand.

All in all, it was a terrifying spectacle.

"How much longer?" she asked Malingo.

"I don't know," the geshrat replied. Then, with a little puff of pride: "It's my first." He glanced up at the approaching posse. "I suppose we could get in it now, but I'm afraid it would decay, and we'd fall out of it."

At this juncture, there came a shout from Houlihan.

"Candy Quackenbush ?'' he hollered. "You are under arrest, by order of Christopher Carrion."

Jimothi laid a light hand on Candy's shoulder. "I'll get the tarries to do what we can to delay him," he said. "Safe voyages, lady. It is my sincerest hope that we meet again when matters are not so… rushed. Good-bye, Malingo. A pleasure, truly."

So saying, he started away, then returned to tell Candy: "If you should get caught—now or at any time—take courage. I don't believe Carrion wants your life. He has some other purpose for you.

He didn't linger for a reply. There was no time. Houlihan was no more than thirty strides away.

"Brothers and sisters," Jimothi called. "Come to me. Come."

At his summons the tarrie-cats appeared from the gloom and followed on his heels. They were only a dozen or so at first, but then, miraculously appearing from the long grass, came two or three dozen more.

Jimothi Tarrie positioned his feline soldiers directly in Houlihan's path.

The Criss-Cross Man raised his hand and brought his mires to a halt.

"Jimothi Tarrie," he said. "Surprise, surprise. I didn't expect to meet the scum of High Sladder here. I thought they'd rounded up all you strays and put you out of your misery."

Jimothi ignored the insult.

He just said: "You can't have her, Houlihan. It's as simple as that. She's not going to Carrion. I won't let you take her."

They spoke, Candy thought, like the most ancient of enemies, their words steeped in the curdled blood of old feuds.

"She's a trespasser, Tarrie," Houlihan replied, "and a thief. And the Lord of Midnight demands that she be delivered directly to him."

"You don't understand, Houlihan. The girl is not going with you."

"No, it's you who doesn't understand, animal. This is the law . She's under arrest."

"Under what warrant?"

"Midnight's warrant."

"Ninnyhammer isn't part of Carrion's empire, Criss-Cross Man. You know that. His laws mean nothing here. So you go back to him and tell him… whatever you like. Tell him she slipped away."

"I can't do that," Houlihan said. "He wants her. And he won't be denied. So stand aside, or I'll have to take her by force."

"Tarries !" Jimothi yelled suddenly. "Take down the mires !"

The animals needed no further instruction. They surged through the grass like a striped tide and leaped upon Houlihan's faceless crew, climbing their bodies by digging their claws into their coats and attacking their hooded heads. The mires let out no sound in response, but they used their swords with terrible efficiency. Several of the bravest tarrie-cats dropped into the grass, slaughtered within seconds. It was a horrible sight. The fact that her presence had brought this battle about tore at Candy's heart.

"I have to stop this," she told Malingo. "I won't let this go on. I'll just let Houlihan take me."

"No need," Malingo said. "Look."

He pointed to the glyph. The process of its construction was finally completed. The vehicle was steaming lightly in the cool evening air, warm from the fever of its creation.

"Come on," Malingo urged. "Climb in!"

As Candy climbed into the vehicle, she yelled to Jimothi Tarrie. "Call the tarries off, Jimothi!"

He instantly threw back his head and let out a high-pitched yowl. The cats, having done their brave work, and having in several cases paid the ultimate price, now retreated from the battlefield.

Houlihan led the mires unopposed toward the glyph, his teeth bared, his eyes blazing.

He pointed straight at Candy as he approached.

"Don't move, girl !" he roared.

"Quickly, lady!" Malingo urged. "Say the words!"

"What words?"

"Oh, yes. Nio Kethica . It means: Answer My Will."

"And then what?"

"It will answer. Hopefully."

"I have you, girl!" the Criss-Cross Man was yelling. "I have you !"

Houlihan was ten strides away, but one of the mires, whose headpiece resembled some monstrous bird, had moved ahead of him, clearly intending to stop Candy and Malingo. Luckily, he had lost his weapon in the short battle with the tarrie-cats, but his arms were enormous, like claws, in fact, with curled, silvery talons.

There was no response from the glyph.

"Nio Kethica ," Candy said. "Nio Kethica ! NIO KETHICA!"

The mire was almost upon them. Reaching out—

Suddenly, the glyph shuddered. A noise escaped its engine, like the sound of an asthmatic taking a painful breath.

Candy saw the mire's talons inches from her ankle. She lifted her leg to avoid its grip, and as she did so the glyph miraculously obeyed her instruction. It shuddered and began to rise slowly into the air. The mire threw itself forward and caught hold of the craft as it ascended. In a matter of seconds the vehicle was twenty, thirty, forty feet off the ground. But the mire wasn't about to let go. It hung on tenaciously, throwing its body back and forth in a deliberate attempt to unbalance the craft.

"He's trying to overturn us," Candy said, grabbing hold of the glyph's armrests.

Malingo seized her arm. "I won't let you fall," he said.

It was a sweet promise, but in truth it was little reassurance. The mire was throwing its body around, making the vehicle-rock back and forth more violently by the moment. It was only a matter of seconds before its assault succeeded and the craft flipped over.

"We have to shake him loose," Candy said to Malingo.

"What do you suggest?" Malingo replied.

"First we have to get that wretched helmet off him. He's on my side, so you hold on to me."

She leaned over the edge of the vehicle and grabbed hold of the vicious beak of the mire's headpiece. The creature could do nothing to fend her off. All it could do was cling to the glyph as it tipped and rolled like some lethal fun-fair ride.

"Pull !" Malingo yelled.

"I'm doing my best!" Candy yelled back. "I need to go farther over the side."

"I've got hold of you," Malingo reassured her, grabbing her even more tightly.

Candy leaned as far out of the reeling, rocking glyph as her balance would allow. She was now farther out of the vehicle than she was in it. Meanwhile the glyph continued its unchecked ascent, the wind steadily moving it away from the spot where it had been conjured into being. Wolfswinkel's house was coming into view below.

The wizard had apparently witnessed the vehicle's whole gid-dying climb, because his bizarrely magnified head was pressed against the glass dome, his expression demented.

Candy ignored Wolfswinkel's wild stare and concentrated on trying to wrench the spiked hood off. Besides its savage beak, the headpiece had countless tiny barbs on its surfaces, which pricked and stung her palms. But she refused to let go. She was fighting for their lives here. The mire seemed to comprehend this too and was apparently prepared to kill itself in order to bring the glyph down. It thrashed around with incredible violence. But its appetite for destruction was to Candy's purpose. When the mire twisted to the right, she wrenched the headpiece to the left, and "when it pulled left, she wrenched right.

Finally, as the glyph moved directly over Wolfswinkel's house, there was a series of strange noises from the mire's skull. First there came a cracking sound, as though a heavy seal were being broken, then a loud, sharp hissing.

When Candy pulled the spiked head toward her, there was a third sound: a wet, glutinous noise, like a foot being pulled out of a sucking pit. And finally the mire's headgear came away in her hand. It was heavy, and she let go of it instantly. It dropped from her hands and tumbled away toward the roof of Wolfswinkel's house, turning over and over until it struck the glass dome below.

Now Candy was looking at the mire face-to-face. The shape of the creature's head was the same shape as its headpiece: the snout and horns were identical. It had no features, no coloration. It was precisely the same gray as its headpiece, except that it glistened horribly, like a fresh wound.

"Mud," Candy murmured to herself. "It's made of mud."

"What?" Malingo yelled over the din of the wind.

"It's made of mud !" Candy yelled back.

Even as she spoke, the mire's head began to lose the shape of its mold. Clots and globs of mud began to detach themselves and fall back through the air toward the dome.

The mire stopped struggling, as its body—which was entirely made of mud, Candy guessed, all encased in hood, suit, boots and gloves began to lose its coherence. Its head collapsed completely, releasing the vile reek of putrefaction. Gobs of mud spattered the dome of Wolfswinker's house, as though a vast passing bird had defecated on the glass.

Headless now, its body full of little shudders and twitches, the mire had little strength left to resist Candy. She began to pry its talons off the edge of the glyph, one by one, and finally the mire's grip on the vehicle slipped. Candy let out a whoop of triumph as the creature fell away, trailing mud from the open wound of its neck.

In the shiny glass dome below, Kaspar Wolfswinkel saw the mire's body tumbling toward him and began to retreat from the glass, a look of fear crossing his rage-flushed face. He had barely begun his retreat when the great bulk of the mire smashed into the glass. One moment Wolfswinkel was a huge, leering presence, his face massively magnified. Then the leaking body hit, and as the glass shattered, Candy and Malingo saw the tyrant as he truly was: a ridiculous little man in a yellow suit.

Even his voice, which had echoed across the slopes earlier like the voice of a tyrant, was reduced to a petulant shriek as glass rained down on him.

Candy watched as the mire's body hit the tiled floor and broke open, like a watermelon dropped from a tall building. Its swampy contents were splattered in all directions. There was no anatomy to speak of. No blood, no bones, no heart or lungs or liver. As she had guessed, the mire was made of mud from head to foot. And although the fleeing Wolfswinkel had attempted to avoid being hit by the contents of the mire's suit, he hadn't retreated fast enough. His yellow jacket was covered in mud and his long blue shoes were similarly bespattered, their heels slip-sliding under him.

He did his best to keep his balance, but he failed. Down he went, falling hard on his backside, his humiliation complete. There was no further for Kaspar Wolfswinkel to fall.

The last sight Candy had of him, before the glyph carried them away from the shattered dome, was Kaspar Wolfswinkel as the silent comedian, struggling to get to his feet and falling down again, his face now as besmirched as his suit and shoes.

The sight made her laugh, and the wind carried her laughter away over the darkened slopes of Ninnyhammer.

Jimothi Tarrie, who was kneeling in the long grass giving the last rites to one of his dying sisters, heard the girl's triumphant laughter, and despite the fact that he had lost five of his dearest in the battle with Houlihan's monstrous crew, managed to make a little smile.

Otto Houlihan heard the laughter too, as he sent his surviving mires back to their glyphs to give chase. He had left three of his creatures on the battlefield, their hoods clawed off them by the tarrie-cats, the stinking mud running out of their suits. He wasn't optimistic that the mires pursuing the girl and the slave in their makeshift glyph would catch up with them. Mires were fearless fighters, but they didn't have brilliant intellects. They needed close instruction or they rapidly lost their grasp on their purpose. More than likely the clouds over Ninnyhammer would conceal their quarry from them, and after a time they would forget why they were up there and begin circling around. Unless they received fresh directions they would simply continue to circle and circle and circle, until their glyphs ran out of significance and crashed.

But Houlihan—though he was sorely tempted—could not afford to give chase personally. The girl was important to Carrion, and the Key was more important still. His priority was to go back up to the house and get Wolfswinkel to hand the Key over. The girl would have to wait. It wouldn't be difficult to find Candy Quackenbush again. She was noticeable, that one. There was something about the eyes; something about the bearing. She'd find it hard to hide.

He ascended the little hill on which Wolfswinkel had built his domain and stepped into the chaotic ruins, calling the wizard's name. There was no immediate reply so he went through the living room and up the stairs to the dome. He'd seen the glass shattering of course, so he knew what to expect when he got up there. What he didn't anticipate was the sight of Kaspar Wolfswinkel standing in his underwear, socks, and mud-smeared blue shoes, staring up at the star-filled sky through the gaping remains of his precious dome.

His dirtied clothes lay in a heap on the floor.

His near-nakedness was not a pretty sight.

"The Key," Houlihan said.

"Yes, yes," Wolfswinkel said, going to his pile of muddied vestments and searching through the pockets. "I have it here."

"You will be rewarded," Houlihan said to him.

"I should hope so," Wolfswinkel said, handing the Key over to Houlihan. He was trembling, the Criss-Cross Man saw.

"What's troubling you?" Houlihan said.

"Oh, besides all this ?" Wolfswinkel said, spreading his arms and circling on the spot. "Well, I'll tell you what's troubling me. That girl."

"What about her?"

"Her presence here is no accident, Otto. You do realize that?"

"It's occurred to me. But what's your evidence for this?"

"She finds it too easy, Otto."

"Easy?"

"Being here," said Wolfswinkel. "Back in the old days, before the harbors were closed—"

"You weren't even born, Kaspar."

"No, but I can read , Otto. And all the books agree: it took visitors from the Hereafter days, weeks, sometimes months to become acclimatized to being in the Abarat. If you tried to speed up the process, people went crazy. Their fragile imaginations couldn't take it."

"Well, they're weak," Houlihan said.

"You're missing the point, Otto, as usual. I'm talking about the girl. This Candy Quackenbush . For her, being here is nothing. She's doing magic as though she was born to it. Born to it, Houlihan ! What does that tell you?"

"I don't know," Houlihan said.

"I'll tell you what it tells me ."

"What?"

"She's been here before."

"Huh. Well that's something for Carrion to puzzle out," Houlihan said, plainly not interested in debating the subject with Wolfswinkel.

"What about me?" Kaspar said.

"What about you?"

"I found the Key. And the girl."

"Then lost her. You let her slip away."

"It wasn't my fault. That was your damn mires. They could have had her. Anyway, two minutes ago you were telling me I'd be well rewarded."

"That was before I had the Key in my hand."

Wolfswinkel's lip curled. "You—"

"Now, now, Kaspar. No foul language. Accept your error. She was in your charge."

"What could I do? She turned my slave against me. He broke my staff."

"That seems rather careless of you," Otto said. "What was he doing with your staff in the first place?"

"I was outnumbered by them!" Wolfswinkel protested.

"By a girl and a geshrat?"

Wolfswinkel paused. Then, narrowing his eyes, he pointed his fat forefinger at the Criss-Cross Man. "I know what you're doing, Otto," he said.

"And what's that?" Houlihan replied.

"You're going to try and take all the glory for yourself and leave me with all the blame."

"Oh, Kaspar. You are so paranoid."

"That is what you're going to do, isn't it?"

"Very possibly," said Houlihan, with a little smile. "But you can't tell me you wouldn't do the very same thing if you were in a similar situation."

Wolfswinkel was defeated. He drew a deep, anguished breath. "At least tell Carrion I languish here," he said, pitifully. "We used to be friends, Otto. Do something for me. Please."

"I'm afraid our Lord Midnight is a practical man. He has what he needs from you. So now? You're forgotten. It's on to new business."

"That's not fair!"

"Life's not fair, Kaspar. You know that. You had a slave for—how long?"

"Twelve years."

"Did you treat him fairly ? No, of course not. You beat him when you were in a bad mood, because it made you feel better, and when you felt better you beat him some more."

"You think you're clever, don't you, Houlihan?" Wolfswinkel said, bitter tears of frustration and rage spilling into his eyes. "But let me tell you: the Hour of your undoing will come. If you don't let me track this girl down and kill her, she'll make such trouble for you—" He looked around at the ruins of his precious dome. "This is just the beginning, believe me."

Houlihan went to the door.

"You like playing prophet of doom, don't you? You always did, even back in school."

Wolfswinkel reached out for this last, fragile hope. "Ah, school. Otto, do you remember how close we were back then?"

"Were we?" Houlihan said. Then, considering the forlorn figure before him, he managed a scrap of compassion.

"I'll do what I can for you," he said. "But I'm making no promises. These are unruly times. Crazy times."

"All the better. In times like these a smart man profits."

"And which of us is the smart one?" Houlihan said, smiling. "The one standing in his underwear covered in mud, or the man with the Key to his Master's heaven in his pocket?

"Never mind, Kaspar," Houlihan said, walking away from the door, leaving Wolfswinkel in the filth and chaos, unable to cross the threshold without having tarrie-cats on his throat. "All you can do is hope your chance for revenge comes around again, eh?"

"That would be something to look forward to, at least," Wolfswinkel said.

"Then I'll leave you with this thought, Kaspar. If I do secure your freedom—"

Kaspar turned, the light of hope rekindled in his eyes.

"Yes?" he said. "What?"

"Then you must swear now that you will serve me. Be my cook, if I so desire. My knife washer, my floor scrubber."

"Anything! Anything! Just get me out of here!"

"Good. Then we understand each other," Houlihan said, turning away.

"Good night to you, Otto."

"Good night to you, Kaspar," said the Criss-Cross Man. "And sweet dreams."

31. THE TWENTY-FIFTH HOUR

The trio of houlihan's glyphs came chasing after Candy and Malingo at considerable speed, but with a little maneuvering Candy left them behind in a bank of purple-blue cloud. Though she'd never driven a vehicle of any kind (besides her bike, which didn't really count), she found the task of piloting the glyph remarkably easy. The craft responded quickly to her will and moved with a grace that pleased her greatly.

Once she and Malingo were convinced that their pursuers were not going to put in another appearance, she slowed their frantic pace and guided the glyph down so that they were just skimming the curling waves. That way if anything unpredictable were to happen to the glyph—if, for instance, it were to decay for some reason—they would not have more than a few feet to fall.

It was time for a little mutual congratulation.

"The way you conjured this thing!" Candy said. "It was amazing. I had no idea—"

"Well, I wasn't really sure I could do it," Malingo said. "But I guess in a tight squeeze you find out you can do all kinds of things you didn't know you could do. Besides, I couldn't have done it without your help." He grasped Candy's hand. "Thank you."

"My pleasure," Candy said. "We make a good team, you and me."

"You think so?"

"I know so. I'd be on my way to Midnight if it weren't for you."

"And I'd be a slave if it weren't for you."

"See? A team. I think we should stick together for a while. Unless of course you've something else you need to do?"

Malingo laughed. "What would I have to do, that was more important than keeping you company?"

"Well… I thought, now that you're free you'd want to go back and see your family."

"I don't know where they are. We were all split up when we were sold."

"Who did the selling?"

"My father."

"Your father sold you to Wolfswinkel?" Candy said, scarcely believing what she was hearing.

"No. My father sold me to a slave trader called Kafaree Skeller, and he sold me to Wolfswinkel."

"How old were you?"

"Nine and three quarters," Malingo said, with the precision of a child who'd been asked the same question. "I don't blame my father. He had too many children. He couldn't afford to keep all of us."

"I don't know how you can be so forgiving," Candy said, shaking her head. "I wouldn't be able to forgive my father if he did that to me. In fact, there are some things nowhere near as bad as that that I can't forgive my father for."

"Maybe you'll feel differently when you get back home," Malingo said.

"If I ever get back."

"You will if you want to," Malingo said. "And I'll help you. My first responsibility is to you."

"Malingo, you don't have any responsibility to me."

"But I owe you my freedom."

"Exactly," said Candy. "Freedom . No more being ordered around, by me or anybody else."

Malingo nodded, as though the notion was very slowly beginning to make sense to him.

"Okay," he said. "But what if I want to help you?"

"That would be nice. As I said, I think we make a very good team. But it's your choice. And I think I should warn you that it isn't always safe being around me. Ever since I arrived in the Abarat, it's been one thing after another."

"I won't let anything happen to you, lady," Malingo said. "You're too important."

Candy laughed. "Me? Important? Malingo, you don't understand. A few days ago I was a lost schoolgirl from a place called Chickentown."

"Whatever you were back there, lady, it's not what you are here. You can make magic…"

"Yes. That is strange," said Candy, bringing back to mind her strange familiarity with the working of spells. "So many times on this journey I've felt as though… I don't know… almost as though I'd been here before. Yet I know that's impossible."

"Maybe it's in your blood," Malingo suggested. "Maybe a relative of yours came here, in the distant past?"

"That's a possibility," Candy replied.

She pictured the faded photographs lined up on the wall of the Almenak Press: the old jetty of Hark's Harbor, with its row of stores and the great vessel moored at the quayside. Was it possible that one of the people in that crowd had been a relative of hers?

"Wolfswinkel's grandfather used to trade with your people all the time. He made a fortune from it."

"Selling what?"

"Abaratian magic. Copies of Lumeric's Six . That kind of thing."

"Surely that must have been forbidden?"

"Oh certainly. He was selling some of the most precious secrets of the Abarat. Anything for profit."

"Which reminds me," Candy said. "What was it with the hats? Magic doesn't always come in the form of headgear, does it?"

Malingo laughed. "No, of course not, it can be in any form: a thought, a word, a fish, even in a glass of water. But you see it was a tradition of the Noncian Magic Circle that you kept most of your power in your hat. I don't know how it started; probably as a joke. But once it began, it stuck. And then when Wolfswinkel killed all the other magicians and he wanted to transfer their power to something more convenient, he couldn't. They'd all put their power in the hats when they were a circle, and once the circle was broken—"

"He was stuck with the hats."

"Exactly."

"How very undignified for Ol' Banana Suit."

"Oh yes, he was in a fine state when he found out. He went crazy for a week."

"Changing the subject—"

"Yes?"

"Do you have any idea where we are?"

They had entered a patch of dense shadow, cast by mountainous peaks of clouds that were passing overhead. In the sea below them an enormous shoal of fish, possessed of some exquisite luminescence, moved into view. Their brightness seemed to turn the world on its head: light spilling up from below, while darkness was cast down from the sky.

"Where did you intend to take us?" Malingo asked Candy.

"Back to the Yebba Dim Day. I know a man at The Great Head called Samuel Klepp. He could give us some advice about how to—"

Before she could finish speaking, the glyph, which until now had been proceeding forward effortlessly, did a very peculiar thing. It made a sideways motion, as though something was tugging on it. For a moment it zigzagged wildly, and Candy had to use all her willpower to stop it from veering off in another direction.

She finally brought it back on course, but the swerve had unnerved her.

"What was that?" she said. "Is the glyph deteriorating?"

Malingo slapped the side of the vehicle with the flat of his hand. "I don't think so," he said. "It feels solid enough."

"Then, what– oh no, Malingo, it's happening again!"

The glyph veered a second time, much more violently than it had the first, and for a moment it seemed that they were about to be pitched into the sea. Malingo slid from his seat, and would have fallen had Candy not caught hold of him at the last possible moment and hauled him back to safety.

The glyph, meanwhile, was gathering speed. It seemed to have elected a new destination and was simply racing toward it, all previous instructions forgotten. All Candy and Malingo could do was hang on for dear life.

"Can't you slow it down?" Malingo yelled to Candy over the rushing of the wind.

"I'm trying!" she hollered. "But it doesn't want to listen to me. Something's got hold of us, Malingo!"

She glanced over at her companion, who had an expression of raw astonishment on his face.

"What?" she said.

"Look ." His awed voice was so low she didn't hear the word; she only saw its shape replied on his lips. She saw too the shape of the words that followed:

"The Twenty-Fifth Hour," he said.

Candy looked up.

Straight ahead of the hurtling glyph was the vast column of spiraling cloud that Samuel Klepp had pointed out to her. It was indeed the Twenty-Fifth Hour, the Time Out of Time.

"Something in there must be pulling us," Candy yelled.

"But what?" said Malingo. "And why?"

Candy shook her head. "I guess we're going to find out very soon," she said.

There was no doubt of that. The vehicle was moving so fast that the sea and sky were virtually a blur. Candy had relinquished all mental control over the vehicle. There was no purpose in wasting energy fighting a power so much greater than her own.

But as the glyph rushed toward the cloud she could not help but remember the stories she'd been told about the travelers who had entered the Time Out of Time. Most had never returned, Klepp had told her. And those who had come out of the cloud had returned crazy. Not a happy thought.

"Maybe we should throw ourselves out ?" she yelled to Malingo over the whistling of the wind.

"At this speed ?" he yelled back. "It would be the death of us !"

He was probably right. But then what would happen when they hit the wall of cloud that concealed the wonders—or the terrors– of the Twenty-Fifth Hour? Wouldn't that be equally suicidal?

And then—all in one sudden moment—it became too late to pitch themselves out.

The glyph threw itself over and over, three hundred and sixty degrees, flipping so fast its passengers remained in their seats. Candy heard poor Malingo yelling in mortal terror beside her, then all the sounds that were filling her head—Malingo's cries, the rushing of the wind, the crash of the glyph as it came to a violent halt– all of them disappeared.

She was plunged into a sudden and absolute silence, and a darkness just as sudden, just as absolute.

She couldn't feel the glyph beneath her; nor, when she reached out, could she feel Malingo at her side. She seemed to be floating in blank space, her body removed from all physical contact.

Then, of all things, she heard rain.

It was distant, but it was reassuringly real. Whatever this lightless place was, it rained here. Seconds later another sound came to find her. No, not one sound, two.

Two heartbeats .

Somebody was here in the darkness with her. And whoever it was, they were very close.

She tried to shape a question, a simple: "Who's there?" But for some reason her mouth wouldn't obey the instruction. All she could do was wait and listen, while the twinned hearts beat on, and the downpour continued.

For some reason she wasn't afraid. There was something reassuring about the mingling of heartbeats and rain.

And finally, there came a third sound. The last sound she expected to hear in this mysterious place: her mother's voice.

"Please don't be long, Bill ," Melissa Quackenbush said. "I can't wait long ."

Her voice sounded remote from Candy, dulled not by distance but by something placed between them. A wall of some kind.

"Did you hear me, honey? I don't like being here on my own."

Here ? Candy thought. What did her mother mean by that? Was Melissa Quackenbush in the Twenty-Fifth Hour with her? Surely not. Besides, there was something about the way her mother sounded that made Candy think that it was a younger woman who was speaking. It wasn't the tired, sad woman she'd last seen making meatloaf in the kitchen in Followell Street. How long, for instance, had it been since she'd heard her mother call her father honey ? Years.

And now—astonishment upon astonishment—she heard her father's voice replying.

Like Melissa's voice, Bill Quackenbush's speech was muted. But again, it was a gentler, more loving version of her father Candy was now hearing.

"I promise I'll be quick, sweetheart. You just hold on. I'll be back in just a few minutes."

"Maybe I should come with you … "Melissa said.

"In your condition, baby ?" Bill Quackenbush replied lovingly. "I don't think that would be too smart. It's cold out here. You stay in the car and keep that blanket wrapped up tight around you, and I'll be back so fast you won't even know I've gone. I love you, Lambkins."

"I love you too, Nachos."

Lambkins? Nachos ? Candy had never heard her parents exchange pet names, not even when she was very young. Perhaps she'd forgotten, but she doubted it. Lambkins and Nachos she would have remembered. She felt slightly uncomfortable, as though she was spying on a secret part of her mother and father's life. A part that belonged in some distant Once Upon a Time when they'd both been young and happily in love. Probably before—

"Before I was born ," Candy murmured to herself.

This time, for some reason, her mouth obeyed her instruction, and the words came out.

She even got an answer.

"That's right ," said a woman, somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. It wasn't her mother who replied to her. This woman had subtle Abaratian inflections in her words, her tone warm and reassuring. "You haven't been born yet ," she said to Candy.

"I don't understand."

"We just wanted to give you a hint of your past ," said a second woman, her voice slightly lighter than that of the first speaker. "You need to know who you were before you became who you're going to be."

"How do you know who I was?" Candy said. "Or who I'm going to be? Who are you, anyway?"

Questions .

Questions.

"Questions."

A third woman laughed along with the other two, and as they did so there was a gentle blossoming of light in Candy's vicinity. By it she saw all three women. In the middle of the trio, standing a little closer to Candy than her companions, was a woman who looked to be extraordinarily old. Her face was deeply etched with lines, and her hair—which was woven into navel-length braids– was pure white. But she still carried herself with great elegance, even in her antique phase. Nor did she seem weakened by age.

There was a dark energy that flickered in the delicate veins of her face and hands.

The women who stood to the right and left of her were somewhat younger than the old lady, but there was nothing fixed about any of the trio. Their faces, despite the welcoming expressions they offered Candy, seemed to be full of subtle hints of transformation.

The youngest of the three—her black hair cropped to her skull—carried a glimpse of something feral in an otherwise benign expression, a beast that was just out of sight behind her lovely bones. The other woman, who was black, had the strangest gaze of the three. When her long hair—which was filled with hints of bright color—parted and showed Candy her eyes, they had the glory of a night sky in them.

So there they were, three protean souls: one carrying lightning, one carrying sky, one touched with wilderness.

Candy felt no fear in the presence of these three: just mystification. By now, of course, she was used to experiencing that particular feeling here in the Abarat. And she'd learned what she should do in the face of mystery. She would watch and listen. The answers to her questions would probably make themselves apparent, after a time. And if they didn't , then she wasn't meant to know those answers. She'd learned that too.

The women now started to identify themselves. "I'm Diamanda ," said the old woman. "I'm Joephi ," said the wild one.

"And I'm Mespa ," said the one with the night sky in her eyes. "We are Sisters of the Fantomaya," said Diamanda.

"The Fantomaya?"

"Ssh! Keep jour voice down ," said Joephi, though it hadn't seemed to Candy that she'd spoken any more loudly than the other three. "By law we shouldn't have brought you into the Twenty-Fifth. But one day you'll be coming here with work to do of your own. Great work —"

"So we felt you should get a taste of it —"said Mespa.

"That way" said Diamanda, "when you come back you'll be prepared. You'll know what it's like ."

"You sound very certain that I'm coming back," Candy said.

"We are," Diamanda said. "You will have things to do here, in the future—"

"If we are reading the future right," said Mespa. "Sometimes it's hard to be sure."

Now Candy thought about it, the idea didn't seem so very unlikely. If the Twenty-Fifth Hour had let her in once, then why not again, when she better understood who she was, and what purpose she had in this strange world?

"I want to see more of this place," Candy said, staring into the darkness that surrounded them.

"Do you indeed?" said Mespa.

"Yes."

The three women exchanged tentative looks, as though to say, are we ready to do this, or not?

It appeared that they were, because the air suddenly quickened with life around Candy, and in it, like tiny silver fish being carried in a fast-flowing river, she saw glimpses of extraordinary things. At first the images moved past her so fast she could make only the most rudimentary sense of them: a white tower, a field of yellow blossom, a chair sitting on the blue roof of a house, and a man in gold sitting upon it. But as her eyes grew accustomed to the way the shoal of pictures were flowing past her, she in her turn became more able to snatch hold of one for a few moments; like a hot coin, caught in the palm of her hand, that she had time to turn over and examine on both sides before the discomfort obliged her to let it go.

And there was an undeniable discomfort in seeing many of these images. They were so powerful, their shapes and their colors so full of strangeness that it hurt her head to catch them and hold them, even for a moment.

It wasn't just the intensity of each image that ached, it was the fact that there were so many of them. For every coin that she caught and flipped, there were a thousand, no ten thousand, that tumbled by, glittering and unexamined.

What did she see?

A woman walking upside down, fish in the sky above her, birds at her feet.

A man standing in a moonlit wasteland, his head flowering like an oasis of thoughts.

A city of red towers, under a sky filled with falling stars; another city, made in perfect miniature, and raised up on legs, with a blue bird—surely vast, even monstrous, to the city's inhabitants– wheeling overhead.

A grotesque mask singing as it floated in midair; a creature the size of a lion, with the head of a human being, vast and bearded, sitting on the lip of a volcano. A shore of some tropical island, with a tiny red boat in the bay, and a single star hanging over the horizon.

And so on. And on. And on. The images kept flying.

Sometimes there would be a sound attached to the scene, though it didn't always seem to fit, as though– just like lightning preceding thunder—the images came more quickly than the sounds, so that they were out of step with one another. Sometimes she glimpsed things that she recognized, albeit briefly. The Yebba Dim Day, rising from the misty waters of the Straits of Dusk. The Gilholly Bridge being crossed by an army of people with bright white fire springing from their heads. Even Ninnyhammer, in the midst of a storm so violent that its young trees were being plucked from the earth and carried away.

At last—just as the flow of images came close to overwhelming her—the shoal of fish began to thin out, and between the occasional flash of strangeness, the relatively reassuring vision of Diamanda, Joephi and Mespa began to reappear.

Candy was left breathless.

"What… ?" she gasped.

"What was all that ?" Mespa said.

"Yes."

It was Diamanda who replied.

"An infinitesimally small piece of a tiny fragment of a virtually invisible fraction of what is here at Odom's Spire. The past and the present-past and the future-present. They're all in this place, you see. Every particular of every thing in every moment of forever."

"And you?"

"The Fantomaya?"

"Yes. What do you do with the images?"

"We study them. We immerse ourselves in them. We protect them."

"From who?" said Candy.

"From any and all. These are not things a common soul needs to see."

Candy laughed.

"What's so funny?" said Joephi.

"Well… aren't I a common soul?" said Candy.

"Good question" said Diamanda. "The fact is you are many things, my dear. Many, many things. One of them is Candy Quackenbush of the town of Murkitt —"

"You mean Chickentown?"

"Oh. Yes, of course. I mean Chickentown. Back when I was there, it was called after my husband's grandfather."

"Wait a moment," Candy said, a little smile of realization creeping into her face. "I knew I'd heard the name Diamanda before. You're Diamanda Murkitt. You were married to Henry Murkitt."

The old woman nodded slowly, staring at Candy with fresh intensity. "I am that woman. Much changed, but in many ways the same ."

"Amazing," said Candy.

"Isit ?" Diamanda said. "I mean, am I? Why ?"

"Everything's coming full circle."

"Please explain ," said Diamanda.

"Well, my journey began with Henry Murkitt," Candy said. "You see, I wrote something about him."

"About Henry ?" said Diamanda, speaking her husband's name with no lack of tenderness. "You wrote about Henry ?"

"Just a few pages," Candy said. "I was in the room where he committed suicide.".

"Ah ," said Diamanda softly. "Sothat's what happened to him ."

Candy nodded. "I'm sorry to be the one to tell you."

"No, don't apologize. It's better I know than not. I knew I'd have to make my peace with the truth sooner or later. I ran out on Henry, you see. He had so few dreams."

"Yes, I heard," Candy said. "Not about the dreams, but about you running out on him."

"He thought I went to Philadelphia, but why would I do a thing like that, when I knew about the Abarat? No… I caught the first ship out of that wretched world…"

"You did the same, yes ?" said Joephi.

"Yes. I did the same. I didn't have a ship to carry me. I came by Sea-Skipper." Candy smiled at the memory; it seemed so long ago.

"But my, you got here quicker than we expected" said Mespa. "A lot quicker"

"Well sisters ," said Diamanda, unbraiding her hair as she spoke, "it seems we will have to be very careful about laying our plans in future. A new and highly unpredictable element has entered our sphere. And she changes everything. It will be impossible to guess the future with any of the old confidence ." She looked back at Candy. "All we know is that we've got our hands full ."

"What's changed?" said Candy. "Please explain. There's so much I want to know. I feel as though I belong here for some reason. That this is really my home."

The three women didn't make any attempt to dissuade her of this. Apparently they believe I belong here too , Candy thought. The realization made her eyes sting with happy tears. The women's smiles and silence were confirming something she hadn't dared to believe until now. She had a reason to be here. Even if nobody yet knew what it was, she still belonged .

"If I really do have some purpose here," Candy said, "I mean, if I'm more than just some dumb sightseer, then can you help me understand what that purpose is?"

"We'd be happy to," said Joephi.

"But I'm not sure we understand ourselves," Mespa went on. The starlight in her eyes trembled. The woman wasn't afraid, Candy thought; but filled with a curious excitement.

"Something's going to happen to me, isn't it?" Candy said.

"My dear, something already has," Diamanda replied. "You're not the same girl who threw herself into the Izabella, are you ?"

Candy took a moment to think about this. But no more than a moment.

"No. No, I'm not." Then she said: "I'm somebody else. I just don't know who that somebody else is yet."

"Well that's what journeys are for ," Diamanda Murkitt said. "Remember, I made the same trip myself. Looking for something I didn't have. And trust me, Candy, wherever you think you're going, the real destination is… right here ." She tapped her chest, directly above her heart.

"Will I ever go back to the Hereafter?" Candy said.

The three women exchanged anxious looks.

"What's wrong?" said Candy, reading the discomfort in their eyes. "Do you know something about this?"

"We've had glimpses …" Diamanda said, "only glimpses ."

"There isn't much to tell ," Joephi said.

"But the news is bad?" Candy said.

"Not for you ," Mespa said.

"Then who for?"

Joephi and Mespa both looked at Diamanda, as though seeking some guidance from their elder.

"I'm not going to start making prophecies on the basis of glimpses," Diamanda said. "But you should know, my dear, that from now on there is jeopardy at every step. For you. For those who travel with you. And even for the places you choose to go. You may bring down cities before you have solved all the mysteries that lie ahead of you ."

"That sure sounds like a prophecy tome ," said Mespa.

"Well, what do you suggest we tellher ?" the old lady said, a little irritated.

"We could begin with the stories we've been hearing about Finnegan."

"Who's Finnegan?" Candy said, thinking halfway through the question that perhaps somebody on this journey had already told her, because the name rang a bell. Or did she maybe know a Finnegan in Chickentown?

"Oh, you'll like Finnegan," Diamanda said, with a teasing little smile.

"That she will," said Mespa.

"Then there's the Requiax ," said Joephi, moving on before Candy had time to ask about Finnegan.

"Who are the Requiax?" Candy asked, determined to get an answer this time.

There was silence for a moment. Candy looked from face to face. "Please," she said. "I need some help here."

Mespa began: "The Requiax are the worst of the worst ," she said.

"They're the enemies of love ," Diamanda went on. "The enemies of life. Wicked beyond words …"

"And where are they?"

"Right now ," said Joephi, "they're deepinthe Izabella, and let's hope they stay there ."

"Doubtful ," Diamanda went on. "We hear all manner of rumors about the Requiax being on the move. And there are those who say that when they surface, it will be the end of the world as we know it ."

"You're scaring me," Candy said.

"I forbid you to be scared ," Diamanda replied, gently. "She was neverscared, so you shouldn't be ."

"She?" said Candy. "What do you mean, she?"

Curiously enough, all three women opened their mouths to reply to this, but before any of them could answer, there came the sound of a series of doors closing—maybe ten in all—the smallest of which sounded like the noise of a doll's house door, the largest a solid oak door, slamming somewhere nearby.

"He's coming ," cried Joephi.

"We've got to be off, Candy ," Diamanda said. "Abraham Hollow, the Keeper of the Twenty-Fifth Hour, doesn't approve of anybody from the outside world being brought into the Time Out of Time. If he knew you were here, he'd have the Fugit Brothers tear you from limb to limb ."

"Nice," said Candy. "What do I do with all the questions I've still got?"

"Keep them for another time," said Joephi.

"But I have so many ," Candy said.

The women were clearly preparing to make a hasty exit, gathering up their robes, glancing around nervously as they did so. Obviously they did not want to encounter this Abraham Hollow.

"We'll find one another again" Diamanda said. "Don't you worry about that. There is so much to tell, on both sides. Thank you for the news about Henry, by the way. You've shamed me into an apology."

"But… he's dead," Candy said.

"A matter of little consequence here ," said Diamanda.

"Why?"

"Because this is the Twenty-Fifth Hour. Everything is Here. Everything is Now. Even Yesterday."

"I don't—"

"Will you hurry up, Diamanda Murkitt ?" said Mespa, catching hold of the old woman's hand. "I hear Old Abraham coming ."

"Yes, yes ," said Diamanda. "I'm coming. I just wanted her to understand —"

"We don't havetime ," said Mespa.

"No time?" said Joephi, laughing. "That's the one thing we surely have in abundance. Time and more time and time again ."

"Don't get clever ," Mespa snapped. "I don't want Abraham finding us. Any of us. NOW COME ON ."

She was pulling on Diamanda's arm now.

"I'm sorry," the old lady said to Candy, "there's so much more I wanted to show you here. And we won't get another chance to sneak you in, I'm afraid. Even this little peep took a lot of maneuvering —"

"Will you stop gabbing ?" Mespa said.

"Yes, yes. Coming."

The light that had first revealed the women was brightening all around them. In a few seconds they would be gone. But before the sisters were eroded by the brightness, Diamanda reached out and touched Candy's arm.

"I envy you ," she said.

"You do?"

"The journey ahead of you… it's going to be quite something. The things that are out there waiting to be discovered …" She smiled and shook her head. "You cannot imagine ," she said. "Truly…you cannot imagine ."

Then her fingers drew back from Candy's arm, and the three women vanished into the flux of light.

As they disappeared, Candy caught a glimpse of the door slammer: Abraham Hollow, the Keeper of the Time Out of Time. He was no more than ten yards away, standing on the threshold of a door that he had just closed, and staring down at something at his feet. He was dressed in voluminous scarlet robes, and his thin face was possessed of that smoothness and translucence that sometimes comes with extreme old age. He wore tiny round black-lensed spectacles, which concealed his eyes, and had a matted mop of white hair on his head.

"There you are, Tattle," he said, addressing a large piebald Abaratian rat, which had appeared from between his feet. With great effort Hollow bent down and offered the sleeve of his robe to the rat. The animal instantly scampered up the sleeve and ran along Hollow's stooped shoulder to his ear, as though whispering into it. Indeed, perhaps the rat was doing just that, because the old man then muttered to himself:

"An interloper, eh? I should maybe summon the brothers…"

He opened the door behind him and called back through it.

"Tempus! Julius!"

Time to go , Candy thought, before I'm caught trespassing . But in which direction should she run? There was darkness everywhere except for the light on the threshold where Abraham Hollow and his telltale rat stood. She decided the best thing to do was simply turn her back on the old man and run in the opposite direction.

She did exactly that, racing off into the darkness, and silently cursing the three sisters for heading off without taking her with them.

"There !" said Abraham Hollow. "I hear our trespasser's feet. Over there !"

Candy glanced back over her shoulder. The door at which Hollow and Tattle stood had been flung wide, as had the door behind it, and the door behind that door. And through them came the Fugit Brothers.

Candy had been warned, of course, about the dangers of the Twenty-Fifth. She'd been told how all the people who'd ventured here over the years had either disappeared, or been driven mad. One glimpse of the Fugit Brothers and she understood why. They had the faces of clowns: white skin, gaping mouths and pop eyes. But that was the least of it. What was truly distressing was the fact that their features—their eyes, their mouths, their noses, their ears, and even the three little tufts of red hair they sported, were moving around their faces like the hands of crazy clocks. Despite the fact that their mouths were on the move, they still spoke:

"I see her, Brother Julius!" said one of the brothers.

"Me too, Brother Tempus. Me too!"

"I say we tear out her heart, Brother Julius!"

"I say we make her crazy first, Brother Tempus!"

So that was the way of it , Candy thought. One vote for lunacy, one vote for murder. Either way, if these two caught her, she would never live to learn from what she'd seen in the Time Out of Time.

She didn't wait to hear any more of their chatter. She fled into the darkness, which enveloped her completely. She could see no sign of a way out in any direction: no door, no window. Not so much as a sliver of light from the outside world.

There was nothing to be lost from yelling for help, she thought. After all, these clock-faced clowns knew where she was. So she called to Malingo, in the vain hope that he would hear her.

"Malingo? I'm over here!" (Wherever here was.) "Please, if you can hear me, yell back."

She got an answer, but it wasn't the one she wanted. It was an echo of what she'd just yelled, but the walls it had bounced off of had rearranged the words, and made nonsense of them.

"You can if me. Yell back here, hear? I'm over Malingo."

Even the echoes had their own tricks in this place.

As the words died away, she heard two soft voices, horribly close.

"I believe we should take her, Brother Julius ."

"I believe we should, Brother Tempus, I believe we should."

They sounded as though they were two or three yards away. She didn't wait for them to get any nearer. She headed off into the darkness again, not caring where she went, just determined not to allow the Fugit Brothers to catch up with her.

She couldn't run forever, she knew. It was only a matter of time before the clowns on her heels caught up with her. And then what? Well, they'd already laid out their options. Even if she escaped their clutches, the echoes, and the memory of her pursuers' circling faces, would take their toll. Whatever wonders she had witnessed here would be erased by insanity.

No! She couldn't let that happen. She ran on blindly, determined she was not going to be numbered among those who'd escaped the Twenty-Fifth too crazy to tell their tale.

32. MONSOON

The exhausted survivors of the sinking Belbelo spent their first day on the Island of the Nonce at the beach where they'd been washed ashore. Every time the tide came in it would bring more pieces of the wreckage up onto the sand: splintered timbers and rope, mostly. They didn't expect to have to build fires on the island (it was warm at Three O'clock in the Afternoon; what need would they have of fire?) so the timber was of very little use. But every now and again a box of supplies was washed up, including a box of emergency rations.

Unfortunately there was no medication for Mischief and his brothers, who were still in very poor condition. Though their wounds had stopped bleeding, there was no sign of consciousness returning. All Geneva, Tom, the Captain and Tria could do was to work together to build a small shelter out of branches and leaves, and lay the brothers in it, away from the heat of the midafternoon sun.

Luckily both Tom and the Captain still had their copies of Klepp's Almenak , and each had a different edition, so they were able to consult the pamphlet on a wide variety of matters.

"It isn't always reliable information," Geneva cautioned them, as Tom proposed to make a stew of berries he'd found when he'd ventured a little deeper into the island. "We could very well poison ourselves."

"I doubt there'd be a recipe in the Almenak which produced poisonous food," Tom said.

"So you say," Geneva said, plainly unconvinced. "But if we all get sick—"

While they'd been arguing about this, Tria had been picking up the berries, one by one, and sniffing them. A few, particularly the smaller, greenish berries, she tossed away. The rest she left in the bag in which Tom had collected them, and declared with her usual strange confidence: "These are all right."

The stew was duly cooked, and it proved to be delicious.

"We still could have got sick from the green ones," Geneva reminded Tom and the Captain, "if Tria hadn't stopped us from eating them."

"Oh, for goodness sake, Geneva," MeBean said, "let it go. We've got more important things to worry about without arguing over stew."

"Such as?"

"Such as him." MeBean glanced in the direction of Mischief. "I mean them," he said, correcting himself. "I'm afraid they're slipping away from us."

"I don't know where we go for help," said Tom. "According to the Almenak , there aren't any towns on the island, so if there are any doctors around, they're living in the wild. There are a lot of churches, but Klepp describes most of them as abandoned."

"There's the Palace of Bowers," Geneva said. "Perhaps there's still some people there…"

"How far is the Palace from here?" Captain MeBean asked Tom.

"See for yourself," Tom said, proffering his edition of Klepp's Almenak so that all of them could see it. He pointed to a bay on the north-northwesterly side of the island. "I believe we're here ," he said. "And the Palace is way over here . It's probably two days' walk, maybe more if the landscape between here and there is hilly."

"Which it is," said Geneva. "The whole island is hilly. But we can still carry Mischief between us."

"Is moving them a wise idea?" MeBean asked.

"I don't know," Geneva replied, shaking her head. "I'm no doctor."

"That's the problem; none of us are," said Tom. "If I had to guess, I'd say moving them would be fatal, but maybe waiting here is an even worse idea."

At that moment, everybody stopped staring at the map and looked up. The wind had suddenly risen, making the great blossom-filled banks of foliage in whose shadows they sat churn and sigh. And carried on that wind there came the sound of hundreds of voices, all singing a wordless song.

"We're not alone," said the Captain.

The music was both majestic and serene.

"Snakes," said Tria.

"Snakes?" said the Captain.

"She's right," Tom told him. "There's a red-and-yellow serpent on the island called the vigil snake. They sing. It says so in the Almenak ."

"I don't remember snakes on this island," Geneva said.

"Yes you do," said Tom. "They were requested by the Princess—"

"For the wedding."

"Exactly. Finnegan had them brought over from Scoriae, which is their natural habitat. Apparently they liked it here. Klepp said they all escaped in the confusion after… all that happened at the wedding. And they have no natural enemies here on the Nonce. So they bred and bred. Now they're everywhere."

"Are they poisonous?" Tria asked. It was perhaps the first time that any of them had heard her voice any fear about the natural world.

"No," said Tom. "Very mild-mannered, as I remember. And very musical."

"Amazing," said the Captain. "What are they singing? Is it just nonsense?"

"No," said Tom. He read from the Almenak. "'The song that the Vigil Snake sings is in fact one immensely long word; the longest in the ancient language of the species. It is so long that an individual can sing it for a lifetime and never come to the end of it !"

"That sounds like a Kleppism to me," Geneva said. "How would they ever learn it?"

"Good question," said Tom. "Maybe they're born with it, like a migration instinct?"

"Born with a song," said Geneva.

Tom smiled. "Yes. Don't you like that idea?"

"Liking it and having it be true aren't the same thing, Tom."

"Huh. Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head, Geneva."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" snapped Geneva.

"Never mind."

"No, tell me Tom," she said, bristling. "Don't make sly remarks and then—"

"It wasn't sly."

"Well, how else would you—"

"I resent being called—"

"And I resent—"

"Stop it," said Tria. "Both of you ." The girl had sudden tears in her eyes. "Look at them."

While the argument between Tom and Geneva had been mounting, Mischief and his brothers had started to breathe in a most terrible fashion, a rattle in their collective throats that did not bode well.

"Oh Lord…" Tom threw aside the Almenak and went over to the little bed of leaves and blossoms where they'd laid the brothers. "This doesn't sound good at all."

He went down on his knees beside Mischief and laid a hand on his brow. Mischief's eyes were rolling back and forth wildly behind his lids, and his breathing was getting quicker and shallower with every passing moment.

At the same time, as though there was some strange synchronicity in the air (the argument, the singing, the wind and now Mischief's anguish all happening within seconds of one another), the Captain looked skyward and announced: "I think we should get our stuff under cover."

He didn't need to explain why. A vast thunderhead moved over the sun as he spoke, and the wind in the trees grew suddenly stronger, stripping some of the more fragile blooms of their petals.

There was a sudden burst of activity as everyone did as the Captain had suggested. But fast though they were, they weren't fast enough to move everything before the rain began. There were a few scattered drops, and then—in a matter of seconds—the drops became a torrential downpour, the rain coming down with such vehemence they had to shout to make themselves heard.

"You and me, Tom!" the Captain yelled, "We'll take Mischief together!"

"Where are we going?" Tom hollered.

"Up there !" McBean said, pointing up a small slope between the trees. The rainfall was so powerful that rivulets of sandy-brown water, carrying a freight of dead leaves, twigs, blossoms and the occasional dead rodent, were running down the slope. The area around Mischief's makeshift bed was already an inch deep in water.

There was a flash of lightning now, followed by a roll of thunder; the rain came on with fresh attack, as though it wanted to wash the world away.

"Let me carry him !"Tom said, having to yell until his throat was a roar over the noise of cracking boughs and rolling thunder.

The Captain didn't have an opportunity for argument. Tom simply picked up Mischief in his arms and, putting his head down so as not to be blinded by the rain, proceeded to climb to higher ground. The others followed, all carrying what they could rescue from their little encampment.

And still the rain came on, with mounting power, until the world was reduced to a deafening gray-green blur.

Step by step Tom climbed the slope, until he was two thirds of the way to the top. Then out of nowhere a large log came down the slope carried by the force of the flood. Tom tried to move aside to avoid being struck, but the weight of the brothers slowed him. The log caught him a heavy blow, knocking his legs out from under him. Down he went, and Mischief slipped from his arms. They were both carried back down the slope, knocking everybody else over as they descended.

When they reached the bottom, it was like being thrown into the midst of a fast-flowing river. Geneva caught hold of Tria to stop the child from being swept away down the beach and out into the sea. McBean in turn caught hold of Geneva with his right hand and grabbed a tree with his left, holding on for dear life until the monsoon had exhausted itself.

And still it mounted, beating down on their heads. It was as if the skies had opened and unleashed a hundred years of rain.

And then, just as abruptly as it had begun, it all ceased. It was as though a faucet had been turned off. The sun broke through the exhausted clouds, and it illuminated a battered world. Every single blossom had been stripped of its petals by the force of the rain. The smaller leaves had been pulled off the twigs, the larger ones shredded. Bushes had been uprooted and carried down onto the beach and into the surf, which was no longer white but tinted reddish brown by the mud that had been washed into it.

Weary from the relentless assault of the rain, McBean, Geneva, Tria and Tom stood ankle deep in mud and debris. Unable to speak, they stared up at the sky, watching the patches of blue grow between the thinning clouds.

As the warmth of the sun pierced the bruised canopy and touched the greenery around the survivors, they were all witness to a phenomenon that Klepp had failed to mention in his Altnenak . Apparently he had never been on the Nonce when a rainstorm had been unleashed, because if he had the ensuing miracle would surely have been reported in his Almenak's pages.

Everywhere around them, the wounded plant life was beginning to grow again. Roots, many of which had been exposed by the force of the water, stretched down like gnarled fingers into the muddied ground. From broken twigs and cracked boughs new growth sprang up, healthy and green, buds fattening and bursting in front of their astonished eyes. Vines curled and climbed from the remains of their rain-beaten elders like eager green children, while ferns sprang up, uncoiling their tender shoots at such speed they were grazing the lower boughs of the trees in seconds.

"Oh. My," Tom said.

"Have you ever seen anything like this before?" Geneva asked the Captain.

He slowly shook his head.

"Never," he said.

This spectacle of growth would have been extraordinary enough in itself; but there was more. The monsoon had awoken dormant elements in the greenery, parts of its blossoming anatomy that did not entirely resemble plants. Wasn't that an eye surreptitiously opening in the head of a flower? And something uncannily like a mouth, gaping in the moisture-fattened bulbs of a plant that sat half in the earth and half out, like a bright green onion?

On all sides there were signs of this uncanny life: cracklings and mutterings and stretching and yes, even something like laughter, as though the plants were hugely amused by the sight of their own protean lives.

It was Tria who first said: "Where's Mischief?"

Everybody looked around. The John brothers were not to be seen. The Captain sent everyone in different directions, telling them to look quickly, as this was a matter of life and death.

"If they're lying facedown in water, they could be drowning right now!"

His words gave urgency to everybody's search. There were large, shallow pools of muddy rainwater at the bottom of the slope; they went through them from end to end on their hands and knees, desperately hoping to find Mischief before too much time passed.

Meanwhile, the greenery continued to become more active and more fruitful around them, the buds bursting like popcorn, releasing the sweet fragrance of new flowers. Some of the plants were so eager to be fruitful that they were already releasing clouds of pollen that filled the air like soft golden smoke.

The survivors, of course, noticed none of this. They were concerned about Mischief.

Nothing was said, but everyone was beginning to fear the worst. Perhaps the force of the water had carried him down the slope of the beach and out to sea. If not, where was he ?

It was Tria—the ever-observant Tria—who pointed out what had happened to the rest of their belongings. The things that they'd attempted to save from the monsoon, and had successfully carried back up the slope, only to lose them again when they'd tumbled back down, were all in one spot. They had been gathered together, it seemed, by the large, serpentine tendrils of an enormous plant that sat in regal solitude at the bottom of the incline.

They went to examine it. The plant was continuing to grow and thrive, its huge seedpods shiny green with health. They creaked as they grew, and gave off the pungent smell of all green growing things. The plant was like a little grove unto itself, its outer layer a knotted thicket of freshly sprung and interwoven flora. It was here that articles from their encampment had been brought by the water. Now they were part of the elaborate network of tendrils, as though some ambitious intelligence in the plant was attempting to turn them into bizarre blossoms.

Beyond the thicket—at the heart of this miniature forest—the foliage grew considerably denser. So dense, in fact that it almost hid from sight an enormous seedpod, dripping with the juices of its recent creation.

"Will you take a look at that?" said Tom, parting the veil of tendrils.

"There," Tria said. "He's in there."

"Mischief?" Geneva asked her.

Tria nodded.

The other three exchanged confounded looks.

"Here, Captain," Tom said. "Lend me a hand, will you?"

They began to pull at the outer layer of the thicket, and the tendrils uncoiled and wrapped around their hands and arms, around their legs too. They were too thin—perhaps too playful—to do any real harm, but they still slowed the men's advance.

"I wish I had a knife," the Captain said.

"Oh, let me at it!" said Geneva. "You two will be fighting that stuff all day!"

She stepped between them and started to pull at the tangled mass. Now all three of them were in the midst of the green coils, and pieces of flora were flying in all directions.

But Geneva was a better tactician than the other two. She ducked down under the great mass of thicket, and then—once she was on the other side—pushed it out, like two enormous doors, which Tom and the Captain grabbed hold of, creating a passageway into the heart of the grove.

They were all breathless now, fragments of the leaves stuck to the sweat on their faces and caught on their eyelashes and in their hair.

They stood aside as Tria entered through the opening they'd made and approached the pod that all this foliage had been protecting.

"Be careful," Tom said to her.

He'd no sooner spoken than the pod—which was hanging from a great looping network of vines—began to move. Small tremors ran through it, as though something inside was having a little fit. Its seam began to split with a sound of tearing canvas, spitting gobs of sweet juice as it did so.

Tria turned and looked at the adults.

"See?" she said, an expression of delight on her face, a rare sight indeed.

The top of the pod now flew open like the lid of a casket. And there, lying in a mess of mud and water, but cushioned by the leaves and the coiled tendrils that lined the pod, was John Mischief and his brothers.

Their eyes were still closed, but something—perhaps the light suddenly falling on their upturned faces when the lid rose—now stirred them.

John Moot was the first to open his eyes. He blinked hard. Then he frowned and let out a little laugh.

"What happened?" he said.

"You're awake…"said Tom.

John Drowze piped up next. "So am I!"

It was like watching the stars come out at night, as now—one by one—the John brothers opened their eyes and the light of full consciousness returned into their puzzled faces.

Mischief himself, however, remained comatose, even though in a short time every other one of his brothers was awake.

"We should lift you out of here," Tom said to them, "before the greenery thinks about swallowing you up again."

"Don't bother," said Serpent. "We'll wake him, and then he can climb out himself."

"You might have difficulty," said Geneva, peering closely at Mischief. "He's showing no sign of stirring."

"Don't worry—" said John Sallow.

"—we do it all the time when he's dozing," John Slop said.

Then, looking at his brothers, "Is everybody ready?"

There were murmurs of affirmation from both antlers.

John Serpent took the countdown:

"Three. Two. One—"

And as a single voice, the Johns all yelled:

"MISCHIEF?"

At first there was no response, absolutely none. They held their breath; Fillet, Sallow, Moot, Drowze, Pluckitt, Serpent and Slop included. Then there was the tiniest of twitches in Mischief's left eyelid and a moment later his eye opened. His right eye followed a heartbeat later.

"What am I doing lying in this plant?" was the first thing he said, and rolled out of it, onto the rain-sodden, root-covered ground. He winced as he fell.

"Damn fool, Mischief," John Serpent said. "Will you be more careful? This body of ours is wounded , remember?"

"The dragon…"John Mischief said.

"You remember?" said Geneva. Mischief nodded. "Well, that's good."

"Of course we remember," John Serpent said. "A thing like that you don't forget."

'"I just don't know how I got from there to here," Mischief said.

"Well, that's for us to tell and you to listen," Geneva replied with a smile.

"Give me a hand up, somebody," Mischief said, offering his arm to Tom.

"I've got you," Tom said, hauling the brothers to their feet.

The greenery was still burgeoning on every side, so they all stumbled out of the grove together, picking pieces of tendril and shredded leaf out of their hair and from inside their clothes. The sun was bright and warm; there was not a cloud in the sky. Even the deepest of the puddles was rapidly soaking into the ground.

"Welcome to the Nonce," said Tom to the Johns. "You were as close to death as anyone could get and still come back."

"We're not going anywhere," John Mischief said, carefully stretching in the warmth. "We've got a lot of adventuring to do. Dragons to fight. Finnegan to find."

"What is that music?" John Sallow said.

"It's the snakes of the Nonce singing," Tom replied.

A broad grin spread over John Mischief's face. "See?" he said, making a tiny shake of his head. "That's another thing we've got to do. We've got to listen to the snakes sing."

33. ALL THINGS IN TIME

Candy ran, and kept running, without daring to look back over her shoulder at the Fugit Brothers. She didn't need to. They kept up an almost ceaseless exchange as they came after her. "She doesn't know where she's going, Brother Tempus."

"Nor she does, Brother Julius, nor she does."

"She could trip at any moment, Brother Tempus."

"Flat on her face, Brother Julius, flat on her face."

They were like a couple of bad comedians—all talk and no punch line. In fact, their chatter was so irritating she was half tempted to turn around and tell them to shut up. But then she thought of their vile unfixed features circling and circling and her appetite for confrontation faded. Better to just run. There had to be some way out of here. After all, she'd got in , hadn't she?

But no matter which way she looked, there was no sign of an exit. Just the same featureless darkness in all directions. And she was getting tired. Her chest was tight, and her throat was raw. Sooner or later, she knew, she was going to stumble. When she did her talkative pursuers would be on her in a heartbeat.

"She's slowing down, Brother Julius."

"That I see, Brother Tempus. That I see."

Just to prove the pair wrong, Candy put on an extra spurt of energy. As she did so she remembered the chaotic moments that had preceded her entrance into this dark place. How the glyph had turned over, flinging her out.

Ah , she thought, maybe that's the answer to my problem .

Here she was looking for a door, assuming there was no way out except through a door. But she hadn't come in that way, had she? Maybe her best escape route was to throw herself into the darkness, and trust to fate.

She glanced over her shoulder. The brothers were no more than a few strides behind her. If she was going to try and escape them, it was now or never.

She counted to three. "One —"

"What did she say, Brother Julius?"

"Two."

"I didn't catch it, Brother Tempus."

"Three —"

And with that she pitched herself forward, almost as though she were diving into a pool of water. It worked. The moment her body was free of the ground, the darkness around her seemed to convulse. She was instantly released from its grip, and she felt herself tumbling over and over. A moment later, there was light! And she fell heavily among the rocks on the shore of the Twenty-Fifth.

She landed so hard that her breath was knocked from her. For a few moments she lay there gasping and bruised, listening to the sound of the waves and the din of the seabirds squabbling over some piece of fish that had been washed up.

Then, from nearby, there came a reassuring voice.

"Lady?"

Seconds later Malingo's face came into view, upside down.

"You're here! You're alive!"

Candy was still in a mild state of shock. She opened her mouth to answer Malingo, but at first all that would come out was a trail of disconnected words. "Running. Clocks. Faces. Tempus Fugit. And Julius. Horrible. Two. Horrible."

"Oh my poor lady," Malingo said. "Did they make you crazy in there?"

"I'm not crazy!" Candy said, pushing herself up into a sitting position. She took a deep breath and tried to construct a more coherent sentence. "I've got a few bruises," she said. "But I'm sane. I swear I am. And I'm alive."

"Alive you are," Malingo said, with a bright smile.

Candy laughed. She'd done it! She'd actually escaped the Twenty-Fifth Hour!

She got to her feet and embraced Malingo. "The things I've seen," she said to him. "You wouldn't believe some of the things…"

"Such as?" said Malingo, eyes gleaming with curiosity.

Candy opened her mouth, intending to describe her adventures inside the Twenty-Fifth. But then she decided against it.

"You know what?" she said. "Perhaps it's best not to do it here."

She stared at the wall of roiling mist that separated the beach from the secret world on the other side. Anybody could be on the other side, she reasoned. Listening; or worse, ready to pounce and drag her back in.

"We should get out of here first," she said to Malingo, "before the Fugit Brothers catch up with us."

"Who are the Fugit Brothers?" Malingo said.

Before she could offer a reply, Candy caught sight from the corner of her eye of something emerging from a crack between the stones.

She looked around and focused on it. The thing moved sideways, like a crab. But it was no animal. It was a mouth. A mouth with legs.

"Oh no…" she said softly.

"What's wrong?" said Malingo.

"Where's the glyph?" Candy said.

"The glyph?"

"Yes, the glyph !" Candy said, as an eye with legs appeared from under the rocks and blinked up at her.

This time Malingo followed her gaze. "What are they?"

"They belong to the Fugit Brothers," Candy said, catching hold of Malingo's arm and pulling him away from the spot. If a mouth and eye were here, could the brothers that owned them be far behind?

"They live in the Twenty-Fifth," Candy said hurriedly. "And if they get hold of us—"

She didn't have a chance to finish. The rocks nearby had started to shake, their motion gentle at first, but quickly becoming stronger. It wasn't hard to guess what was going on. Tempus and Julius had somehow burrowed out, under the stones, and they were planning a surprise attack from below. They would have succeeded in their surprise, too, if their wandering features hadn't given their sneaky game away.

"We have to get out of here!" Candy said.

Malingo was still staring at the stones, which were rattling together.

"Where's the glyph, Malingo?" :

"That's an eye on legs!"

"Yes. I know. Malingo. Where's the glyph?"

He pointed back down the beach, without looking at where he was pointing. She followed his finger, and yes, there was the craft, lying on the stones. It was overturned, but at least it looked to be intact. The impact of striking the wall of the Twenty-Fifth hadn't smashed it to smithereens.

"Come on!" she said to Malingo, pulling on his arm again. He didn't move, however. The strange life-forms on the stones had him entranced.

"We can't wait around here," Candy said. "Or we're dead."

The rocks were being rolled aside now—the smaller ones thrown into the air—as the Fugit Brothers prepared to make their entrance.

"I never saw anything like that before," Malingo said, his voice filled with fascination.

"Can we please go ?"

Before they could take a step however, a dark voice rose from the crevices between the rocks.

"You won't escape us, Candy Quackenbush ," said one of the brothers.

"Not will your flap-eared friend ," said his sibling.

The sound of the Fugits' voices punctured Malingo's curiosity. Now it was he who backed away from the spot where the rocks were shaking.

"You're right," he said to Candy. "We should go."

"Finally."

There was no more hesitation. The two of them raced together over the slimy stones toward the beached glyph.

"Let's just hope it still works," Candy said to Malingo, as they ran.

"What do we do if it doesn't?"

"I don't know," Candy said grimly. "We'll worry about that if it happens."

They had reached the vehicle now, and they instantly got to work pushing it back into an upright position. Something rattled as the glyph rocked back into place, which didn't sound particularly optimistic.

"Get in!" Candy said.

As Malingo slipped into his seat, Candy dared a momentary glance along the beach. One of the brothers—Candy didn't know whether it was Julius or Tempus—had now dug himself clear of the stones. But there was no sign of the other. Still, she thought, one of them could do plenty of damage.

He started to stride along the beach toward Candy and Malingo, pointing toward them as he did so.

"You will not leave this island !" he yelled as he approached. "Do you hear me? You will not leave ."

Even as he spoke he proceeded to pick up his speed, his stride quickly breaking into a run.

Now it was Malingo who was urging Candy to get into the glyph. "Hurry!" he said.

Candy put one foot into the glyph.

As she lifted her other leg, an arm was thrust up out of the stones beside the glyph and seized hold of her calf.

She let out a yelp of shock. The stones rolled away as the second Fugit Brother pushed himself out of the ground, using Candy to haul himself up.

"Hold her, Brother Julius! " Tempus yelled as he came racing down the beach.

"Help me!" Candy yelled to Malingo.

She reached down and tried to unknot Julius' fingers, but his grip was cold and strong.

Malingo put both his arms around Candy and pulled hard on her. Desperation gave him strength. Candy's clothes tore, and Fugit's grasping hands were left holding two pieces of shredded fabric.

Freed of the monster's grip, Candy looked straight down into Julius' face. His crawling features had assembled now. His eyes were wide and hungry. His mouth wore the contented smile of a hunter who believed he had his prey trapped.

"You're not going anywhere ," he said, and reached up to catch hold of Candy again. Without hesitation she put her foot down on the middle of Julius' face, putting all her weight behind it. The creature let out a cry of rage and frustration, and slipped back down into the darkness.

Tempus, meanwhile, was no more than twenty strides away, racing over the stones.

"Halt," he yelled. "Both of you. Halt !"

Candy ignored him. She climbed back into the glyph, her thoughts entirely focused on the next challenge: getting the craft into the air.

"What are the words?" she said to Malingo.

"Nio Kethica."

"Of course. That's it."

Candy took a deep breath and closed her eyes, picturing the glyph rising into the air. Then she spoke the words: "Nio Kethica ."

The response from the glyph was instantaneous. The vehicle's engine made a strangled choking sound, and for a moment it seemed the craft was going to ascend. It rocked and shuddered, but unfortunately there was no upward movement. Candy looked up. Tempus was getting closer by the moment.

"Nio Kethica!" she said again. "Come on, glyph! NioKethica !"

There was more noise from the craft's engine, but it wasn't promising.

"It's a lost cause!" Malingo said, his eyes on the approaching Fugit Brother. "We should get away—"

Before he could finish, Julius Fugit made another lunge from the hole beside the glyph. He failed to catch hold of Candy, but his hands seized the craft. The vehicle started to tip over. Candy let out a yell as she slid from her seat toward Julius' grinning face.

Malingo caught hold of her arm and pulled her back, scrambling to get them both out of the craft. As he did so, Candy tried one last cry of "Nio Kethica !" in the hope of awakening the glyph's engine. But it didn't work.

"Come on!" Malingo yelled, hauling her over the side of the toppling machine. He was just in time. As Candy stumbled backward into Malingo's arms the glyph fell over, trapping Julius Fugit beneath its weight.

"Help me, brother !" Julius yelled.

Tempus was two or three strides away. "I'm coming for you, brother !" he yelled, and threw himself on the craft, tearing at its decaying structure to reach his sibling.

"Don't make me wait, Brother Tempus!"

"I'm doing the best I can."

"I'm sure you are, brother. I'm sure you are."

"We're in trouble…" Malingo murmured to Candy.

He was right. It would take Tempus only a minute or two to free his brother, then the two of them would come in pursuit of their quarry with fresh zeal. And where were Candy and Malingo to go? The beach offered nothing by way of hiding places, and they couldn't outrun the Fugit Brothers for very long.

Candy shook her head in desperation.

"It can't end this way," she said to herself.

For all the grimness of their prospects, she couldn't believe it was all going to end here. After the journeys she'd taken, and the visions she'd seen she couldn't die on a deserted beach at the hands of a couple of crazy brothers. It wasn't right! She knew in her heart that she had more journeying to do, more visions to see. Wasn't that why the three women had allowed her that glimpse into the mysteries of her life before she was even born? They were preparing her for something, telling her to be ready to solve some major secrets.

The Fugit Brothers weren't going to put a stop to all that. She wasn't going to let them.

"It can't end here," she said aloud.

"What can't?" Malingo replied.

"Our lives. Us." Malingo looked startled by the fierceness in her voice, and in her eyes. "I won't let it ."

She'd no sooner spoken than a breath of wind came from off the sea, as though it were somehow answering her heartfelt plea. The gust cooled the sweat on Candy's face.

Despite everything, she managed a smile.

"We'd better start running," Malingo said. He pointed back toward the glyph.

The Fugit Brothers were now clear of the glyph's wreckage and were coming toward Candy and Malingo. Their features were on the move again, their grinning mouths racing around their faces like runners circling a track.

"Our friends appear to have nowhere left to run, Brother Tempus."

"So it would seem, Brother Julius. So it would seem."

There was another gust of wind from the sea, and its coolness made Candy unglue her gaze from the approaching assassins and chance a look toward the water. The wind had thinned the colorless mist that hung over the waves. And through it came a patch of bright red.

Red.

"A boat!" Candy yelled.

"What?"

"Look! A boat!"

The mist parted, and a simple little vessel, with a single mast and much mended sail, came into view. It had neither captain nor passengers.

"Ha !" said Malingo. "Will you look at that?"

They raced down to the water and strode into the mild surf. The wind was coming in stronger and still stronger gusts. It filled the patchwork sail until the ropes creaked under the strain.

"Get in!" Candy said to Malingo. "Quickly! In !"

"But the wind's just blowing the boat back to shore!" Malingo said. "Back to them!"

The Fugit Brothers had followed them down to the water's edge. They too had read the direction of the wind, and had apparently decided they had no need to get their feet wet. All they had to do was wait. The boat would come to them.

Candy glanced back at them as a large wave came in, wetting her all the way up to her neck. She let out a little yelp of shock, much to the amusement of the brothers.

"Please," she said to Malingo. "Just get in. Have a little faith."

"In what?"

"In me."

Malingo stared at her for a moment, then shrugged and clambered in a rather ungainly fashion into the boat. Candy stole a moment to offer up a little prayer to the women of the Fantomaya. Surely it had been they who'd sent the boat. But what was the use of a boat without the right wind?

"Help me ," she murmured.

And as she spoke the sail of the boat snapped like a flag in the wind, and Candy looked up to see the women—all three of them—standing in the boat. It was a vision intended for her eyes only, it seemed. Neither the Fugit Brothers nor Malingo responded to the sight.

Malingo offered his hand to Candy. She caught hold of it, and he hauled her onboard.

She had no sooner set foot on the timbers of the little boat than Diamanda lifted her hands into the air. They were clenched tight, Candy saw. White-knuckled fists.

"Travel safely ," the old lady said.

Candy nodded. "I will."

"And don't breathe a word of any of this ," said Joephi.

"I won't."

"What is this Iwill, I won't stuff?" Malingo said. "Are you talking to me?"

Luckily Candy didn't have any need to tell a lie, because at that instant Diamanda unclenched her fists. As she did so the wind abruptly shifted, swinging around so fast that Candy could feel it move over her face: blowing against her left cheek one moment, and two seconds later blowing hard against her right.

The boat shook from bow to stern. The ropes creaked. And the old patched sail filled with a fierce wind that now came from the landward side, a wind so strong that its gusts fattened the canvas to near-bursting point.

Candy looked back over her shoulder at the Fugit Brothers, who were now wading into the frenzied surf in pursuit of the escapees. But the waves broke against them with no little force, slowing them down. Tempus lunged forward, attempting to catch hold of the boat before it was beyond his reach, but he was too late. The wind bore the little vessel away at such a speed he missed his grip and fell facedown in the water.

Candy smiled up at the women. They did not linger more than another moment. Just-time enough to return Candy's smile. Then they were gone, their delicate forms blown away by the very wind Diamanda had summoned.

"That was a close call," Malingo said. He was watching the diminishing figures of the Fugit Brothers, neck high in the surf. They were hoping, presumably, that the wind would veer and carry their quarry back to them.

But theirs was a lost cause. The gusts quickly drove the little vessel away from the island, and very soon the mist that always hung around the Twenty-Fifth Hour covered the sight of the rocky shore.

Exhausted but happy, Candy turned her back on the island and faced the open sea. There would come a time when she would think very closely about all that had happened to her in the labyrinths of the Twenty-Fifth Hour. About what the women had said and shown her: the visions of tomorrow, the mysteries of yesterday. But she was too tired to think such weighty thoughts now.

"Do you have any clue where we're heading?" she asked Malingo.

"I just found this old copy of Klepp's Almenak in the bottom of the boat," he said, proffering the sodden pamphlet for Candy to study if she wished. She shook her head. "I think there's a sea chart in here somewhere," Malingo went on. "The trouble is, half of the pages have rotted together." He delicately worked to tease the pages apart, but it was a nearly impossible task.

"I guess we're just going to have to trust to the Izabella," Candy said.

"You make her sound like a friend of yours."

Candy trailed her hand in the cold water and splashed some up onto her face. Her eyes were heavy with fatigue.

"Why not?" she said. "Maybe she is a friend of mine."

"Just as long as she treats us nicely," Malingo said. "No twenty-foot waves."

"We'll be fine," Candy replied. "She knows we've been through some hard times."

"She does?"

"Oh sure. She'll carry us somewhere nice." Candy lay her head on her arm and let her hand trail in the water. "Like I said: have faith, she'll bring us where we need to go."

34. DIFFERENT DESTINIES

Once before, at the beginning of her adventures in the Abarat, Candy had been told to entrust herself to the care of Mama Izabella. On that occasion she'd needed some extra help to survive her journey. This time, however, safe aboard the nameless boat that had come to find her on the shore of the Twenty-Fifth, she let the sea carry her where it wished to; and all was well. There were some provisions on the boat, plain but nourishing. And while she and Malingo ate, the wind carried them away from the Time Out of Time, and off between the islands.

As they traveled—having no idea of where the tide was taking them, nor any fear that it would do them harm—there were people across the archipelago who would have significant parts to play in Candy's destination who were about their own business.

At Midnight, for instance, Christopher Carrion was wandering the mist-shrouded island of Gorgossium, plotting, endlessly plotting.

He was like a ghost haunting his own house. People were afraid of encountering him, because lately the nightmares that moved in the fluids were more active than ever, lending him an even more terrible appearance. Nor was there any way to predict where he might next appear. Sometimes he was seen in the Gallows Forest, feeding scraps of rotted meat to the vultures that assembled in stinking flocks there. Sometimes he was seen down in the mines, sitting in one of the exhausted seams. Sometimes he was spotted in one of the smaller towers, where Mater Motley's seamstresses worked on creating an army of stitchlings.

Those who did have the bad luck to encounter him in one place or another were always closely interrogated by those who did not. Everybody wanted to know what the likely mood of their lord might be. Did he look angry, perhaps? Not really, came the reply. Did he look distracted, as though his thoughts were elsewhere? No, not distracted either.

Finally, some brave soul asked the question that everybody wanted an answer to, but all were too afraid to voice. Did he look demented ?

Ah now, came the reply, yes perhaps that was it; perhaps he did act a little crazily. The way he talked to himself as he wandered among the gallows, or sat in the tunnels, speaking softly as though he imagined that he was talking to someone very dear to him. A friend, perhaps? Yes; that was it. He spoke as though he was sharing secrets with a friend. And sometimes, as he talked, he would reach into the seething fluids that he breathed and he would fish out a nightmare, and proffer it, as if to his invisible guest. The gift of a nightmare.

Was all this evidence of insanity? In any man other than Christopher Carrion the answer would surely have been yes . But Carrion was a law unto himself. Who could judge the depths of his thoughts, or of his pain?

He kept no councils; partook of nobody's advice. If he was planning a war, then it was not with the assistance of his generals. If he was planning murder, then he did not look to the advice of assassins.

The only clue to the subject of his present meditations was a name he was several times heard to mutter; a name that did not yet mean anything much to those who heard it, but very soon would.

The name he spoke was Candy . He said into himself not once but many times, as though repetition would somehow summon up the owner and bring her near to him.

But she did not come. For all his power, Christopher Carrion was alone at Midnight, having nothing for company but the vultures at his heels, and the nightmares at his lips, and the echoes of that name he spoke, over and over again.

"Candy."

"Candy."

"Candy."

His behavior did not go unnoticed, or unreported. There were creatures in the shadows all around the island, watching what Carrion did, and bringing reports of it to the top of the Thirteenth Tower, where the Lord of Midnight's grandmother, Mater Motley, sat in her high-backed rocking chair, sewing stitchlings.

It was her perpetual labor; she never stopped. She didn't even sleep. She was too old to sleep, she'd once said. She had no dreams left to dream. So she sewed and rocked and listened to the stories of her grandson's lonely vigils.

Sometimes, when the skins of the stitchlings had piled up around her, and she was filled with a strange dementia of her own, Mater Motley also talked to herself. Unlike her grandson, she did not call out for company. She spoke in an ancient language known as High Abaratic, which was incomprehensible to all those who listened to the old woman. But the listeners didn't need to comprehend her words to understand what Mater Motley was debating with herself. One look at the army of stitchlings she was assembling provided the answer to that question.

War was her subject; war was her obsession. She was sewing the skins of soldiers together, and planning their deployment as she labored. Over the years the old woman and her seamstresses had created tens of thousands of warriors. Most of them, having only mud for muscle, needed neither to eat nor breathe. She had them assembled in great labyrinths beneath the island, where they waited in the darkness for the call to arms.

And while they waited in the bowels of Gorgossium, Mater Motley waited too. Waited, sewed and chatted to herself in the language of the Ancients about the great coming time when Christopher Carrion would declare war upon the islands of light, and her army—her vast, soulless army of mud and thread and patches—would march to war in the name of Midnight.

As for the architect of Commexo City, Rojo Pixler, he had labors and ambitions and meditations of his own.

At the heart of his silver city, hidden away from the busy citizens that filled the streets of that metropolis, there was a great circular corridor. A hundred feet in height, it was lined from floor to ceiling—on both of its walls—with screens. This was the place to which Pixler's tens of thousands of spies, the voyeuristic children of Voorzangler's Universal Eye, sent their reports.

It had become a place that Rojo Pixler frequented more and more often, circling the corridor for hours on end, inspecting the numberless screens. In truth, he was not really interested in the information that came from Tazmagor or Babilonium or the Yebba Dim Day. It was those reports that came up from the depths of the Izabella that had lately caught Pixler's attention.

Hour upon Hour he would traverse the Ring on his flying disc—his hands locked behind his back, his feet set wide apart studying the screens for news from the deepest trenches of the Izabella. And why? Because there was life down there. His fishy spies, wandering deeper than they usually went, had sighted vast claw marks on the walls of the crevices, indisputable evidence that there was some order of creature in the depths of the Izabella that demanded his study.

When he had consulted the grimoires he'd had stolen, searching their heavy pages for some clue as to the nature of these beasts, he had found more than he expected.

In the seventh volume of Lumeric's Six , he'd discovered an apocalyptic text that described all too well the occupants of the abysses of the Izabella. They were a race of creatures called the Requiax – beasts of sublime wickedness that lived, according to Dado Lumeric "in the profounde entrailes of the Mother Sea ."

They would not always remain there, Lumeric prophesized. There would come a time when these creatures would rise out of the depths.

"… they have long hungered ," Lumeric wrote, "for that time when darkness fell upon these many islandes of ours, erasing the lighte of sunne, moone and starres. In that terrible Midnighte, when all lighte hath passed away, they will come like a great pestilence; and commit such crimes against life as will change the order of thinges forever .

"This I, Dado Lumeric, tell to be a thruthfulle prophesie, and count myself gladde to my soul's core that I will not be upon the living stage to witness these sightes,for it will be beyond the wittes of men to endure. The great cities will go to duste, and the great men and women also, and all be carried away by the winde…"

Pixler took Lumeric's words to heart, especially the part about the crumbling cities. To see Commexo City wiped away? Erased as though it had never even existed? It was unthinkable.

He had to be ready for this "terrible Midnighte ," when the Requiax rose into view. Plans had to be laid; defenses strengthened. If the Requiax appeared, as Lumeric predicted, he and his dream city would be ready to defy the prophecy, and stand against the darkness.

Meanwhile, the architect of Commexo City rode the Ring, around and around, studying the screens, watching for some sign of movement in the uncharted depths of Mama Izabella…

It was snowing in Chickentown. Or so it seemed.

Candy stood in the backyard of 34 Followell Street while fat flecks of white swirled around her and carpeted the brown dirt and the gray grass.

But there was something odd about this blizzard. For one thing, it seemed to be happening in the middle of a heat wave. Candy's hair was pasted to her forehead with sweat, and her T-shirt glued to her back. For another thing, the snow was spiraling down out of a perfectly blue sky.

Strange , she thought.

She reached up and caught hold of one of the snowflakes. It was soft against her palm. She opened her hand. The flake had a drop of blood on it. Suspicious now, she examined the snowflake more closely. Despite the warmth of her hand, the flake wasn't melting. Before she could examine it more closely however, a gust of wind came along and carried it away, leaving a fine trail of scarlet across the middle of her palm.

She reached out and snatched at another flake. Then at another, and another. They weren't snowflakes, she now realized. They were feathers . Chicken feathers. The air was filled with a blizzard of chicken feathers.

She felt them brushing against her face, some of them leaving little trails of blood. Horrible. She tried to wipe them off with the heels of her hands, but the storm of feathers seemed to be getting worse.

"Candy?"

Her father had come out of the house. He had a beer bottle in his hand.

"What are you doing standing out here?" he demanded.

Candy thought for a moment, then shook her head. The truth was that she didn't know what she was doing out here. Had she come to look at the snow? If so, she didn't remember doing so.

"Get back inside," her father said.

His neck was flushed, and his eyes were bloodshot. There was a mean expression in his stare that she knew to be careful of: he was close to losing his temper.

"You heard me," he said. "Go back in the house ."

Candy hesitated. She didn't want to contradict her father when he was drunk, but nor did she want to go inside. Not with him in his present mood.

"I just want to take a little walk," she said softly.

"What are you talking about? You're not taking no walk. Now get the hell inside ."

He reached out and caught hold of her, gripping her neck close to her shoulder so tightly she let out a yell.

As though in response to her cry there was an eruption of din in the yard around her: the clucking of countless chickens. The birds were everywhere, filling the yard in all directions. She felt a kind of revulsion at the sight of so many chickens. So many beaks, so many bright little eyes; so many heads cocked so that they could look up at her.

"How did they get here?" she said, gently reaching up to free herself from her father's grip.

"They live here," he said.

"What?"

"You heard me!" her father said, shaking her. "God, you are so stupid. I said: they live here. Look. "

Candy turned her sickened gaze toward the house. He was right. There were chickens on the roof, carpeting it like beady-eyed snow; chickens at the windows, lining the sills; chickens squatting all over the kitchen. On the table; on the sink. She could see her mother standing in the middle of the kitchen with her head bowed, weeping. "This is crazy," Candy murmured.

"What did you say?"

Her father shook her again, harder this time. She pulled herself free of him, stumbling backward as she did so. Somehow she lost her balance and fell down on the hard dirt, the bitter stench of chicken excrement filling her nostrils. Her father started to laugh; a mean, joyless laugh.

"Candy!" somebody said.

She had covered her face with her hands to keep the chickens' claws from scratching her, so she didn't see who it was, but somebody was calling her. Somebody in the house, was it? She peered between her fingers.

"Stupid girl," her father said, reaching down to catch hold of her again.

As he did so, the voice came a second time.

"Candy?"

Who's voice was that? It obviously wasn't her father. She cautiously let her hands fall from her face, and looked around. Was there somebody else in the vicinity? No. Just her father, laughing. And her mother, weeping in the kitchen. And the chickens. The endless, ridiculous chickens.

None of this made any sense. It was like some horrible…

Wait , she thought.

Wait! This is a dream.

As she formed this thought the voice that had been calling to her called again.

"Please, Candy," he said. "Open your eyes."

That's all I have to do , she thought to herself. All I have to do is open my eyes .

The idea was so simple it made her weep. She could feel the tears pressing between her locked lashes and running down her cheeks.

Open your eyes , she told herself.

"You're a great disappointment to me," her dream-father was saying to her. "Did you know that? I wanted a daughter who'd love me. Instead I get you. You don't love me. Do you?" She didn't reply to this. "ANSWER ME!" he yelled.

She had no answer to give—or at least none that he wanted to hear—so she simply looked up at him and said:

"Good-bye, Dad. I gotta go."

"Go?" he replied. "Where the hell are you ever going to go? You're going nowhere. Nowhere ."

Candy smiled to herself.

And smiling, she opened her eyes.

She was back in the single-sailed boat that had carried them away from the shore of the Twenty-Fifth Hour. It was rocking gently, like a cradle. No wonder she'd been lulled to sleep. Malingo was kneeling beside her, his leathery hand laid lightly on her shoulder.

"There you are," he said, when her eyes focused on him. "For a minute I didn't know whether to wake you or not. Then I decided you weren't enjoying your dream very much."

"I wasn't."

She sat up, and the tears she'd shed in her sleep ran down her cheeks. She let them fall. They seemed to have washed her sight clean, in a curious way. The world around her—the Sea of Izabella, and the sky filled with light-shot clouds, even the round-bellied sail—looked more beautiful than she had words to describe.

She heard what she thought was laughter from the side of the boat, and looked over to see that a school of fish the size of small dolphins, only covered in scales that had a golden sheen to them, were swimming beside the vessel, taking turns to leap into the bow wave and feel its foam seethe over their backs.

The noise they were making was like laughter. No, she thought, it was not like laughter. It was laughter. And it was a sound that went well with the whole bright world that she'd woken to: sea, sky and sail. There was laughter in all of it at that moment.

She got to her feet, the wind at her back. Its insistence reminded her of being in the lighthouse, what seemed an age ago; feeling the light pressing against her back as it summoned the Sea of Izabella.

"I'm here , aren't I?" she said to Malingo, holding onto the mast to steady herself.

Malingo joined the laughter now. "Of course you're here," he said. "Where else would you be?"

Candy shrugged. "Just… somewhere I dreamed about."

"Chickentown?"

"How did you guess?"

"The tears."

Candy wiped the last of the wetness from her cheeks with her free hand.

"For a minute—" she began.

"You thought you were stuck back there."

She nodded.

"Then when I woke up I wasn't sure for a moment which one was real."

"I think they probably both are," Malingo said. "And maybe one day we'll catch the tide and go back there, you and me."

"I can't imagine why we'd ever do that."

"I can't either," Malingo said. "But you never know. There was a time, I daresay, when you couldn't have imagined being here."

Candy nodded. "It's true," she said.

Her eyes had gone again to the laughing fish. They seemed to be competing with one another to see which of them could leap the highest, and so gain her attention.

"Do you think maybe a part of me has always been here in the Abarat?" Candy asked Malingo.

"Why do you say that?"

"Well… it's that this place feels as though it's home. Not that other place. This ." She looked up. "This sky ." Then at the water. "This sea ." Finally she looked at her hand. "This skin ."

"It's the same skin here as it was there."

"Is it?" she said. "It doesn't feel that way somehow."

Malingo grinned.

"What are you laughing at now?"

"I'm just thinking what a strange one you are. My heroine." He kissed her on the cheek, still grinning. "Strangest girl I ever did meet."

"And how many girls have you met?"

Malingo took a moment or two to make his calculations. Then he said: "Well… just you, actually—if you don't count Mother."

Now it was Candy who started to laugh. And the leaping fish joined in, jumping higher and higher in their delight.

"Do you think they get the joke?" Malingo said.

Candy looked skyward. "I think today the whole world gets the joke," she said.

"Good answer," Malingo replied.

"Look at that," Candy said, pointing up into the heavens. "We must be moving toward a Night Hour. I see stars."

The wind had carried all the clouds off toward the southwest. The sky was now a pristine blue, darkening to purple overhead.

"Beautiful," she said.

Staring up at the pinpricks of starlight, Candy remembered how she had first noticed that the constellations were different here from the way they were in the world she'd come from. Different stars; different destinies.

"Is there such a thing as Abaratian astrology?" she said to Malingo.

"Of course."

"So if I learned to read the stars, I'd maybe discover my future up there. It would solve a lot of problems."

"And spoil a lot of mysteries," Malingo said.

"Better not to know?"

"Better to find out when the time's right. Everything to its Hour."

"You're right of course," Candy said.

Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now—in this bright, laughing moment—and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.