Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 9

A New Tyranny

IT WOULD HAVE COME as no surprise to the occupants of Gorgossium that the sounds of demolition were audible from the waters surrounding the island. Its inhabitants could barely hear themselves think.

The Midnight Island was undergoing great changes, all designed to deepen the darkness that held Gorgossium in thrall. It was not the darkness of a starless sky. It was something far more profound. This darkness was in the very substance of the island. In its dirt, in its rock and fog.

Over the years many had attempted to find the words to evoke the horrors of Gorgossium. All had failed. The abominations which that island had brought to birth, and nurtured, and sent out often across the islands to do bloody and cruel work defied even the most articulate of souls.

Even Samuel Klepp, who in the most recent edition of Klepp’s Almenak, the standard guide to the islands, had written about Midnight in as brief and offhand a fashion as possible.

There is a great deal more, he had written, which I will not sully the pages of the Almenak by relating, horrors that haunt the Night-Noon Hour that will only go on to trouble our minds the more if their horrid visions are dwelt upon. Gorgossium is like unto a fetid carcass, rotting in its own consumption. Better we do upon these pages what we would do were we to encounter such a thing upon a road. We would avert our eyes from its foulness and go in search of sweeter sights. Then so should I.

There was worse to come, much worse. Whatever the fear-flooded mind might have imagined when it thought of Midnight—the unholy rituals performed there in the name of Chaos and Cruelty, the blank-eyed brutalities that took the sanity or the lives of any innocent who ventured there; the stink out of its gaping graves, and the dead who had climbed from them, raised for mischief’s sake, and left to wander where they would—all this was just the first line in a great book of terror that the two powers who had once ruled Gorgossium, Christopher Carrion and his grandmother, Mater Motley, had begun to write.

But things had changed. In an attempt to track down and finally slaughter Candy Quackenbush (who had caused her endless problems) Mater Motley had stirred up the Sea of Izabella and used their maelstrom to carry her warship, the Wormwood, into the Hereafter. Things had not gone well. The magic she had unleashed in that other world, contained perhaps by laws of matter that had no relevance in the Abarat, had lost its mind. The warship had been torn apart in the water—pieces of the Izabella and countless numbers of her stitchling warriors torn up the same way. Her grandson, Christopher Carrion, had drowned there too. Mater Motley had returned to Gorgossium alone.

Her first edict as the sole power now ruling Midnight was to summon up six thousand stitchlings—monsters filled with the living mud that was only mined on Gorgossium—to begin the labor of demolishing the thirteen towers of the Iniquisit. In their place, she would let it be known, there would be just a single three-spired tower built, far taller than even the tallest of the thirteen. From there she would rule, not only as the Sovereign of Gorgossium, but in time as the Empress of the Abarat.

She was a dangerous potentate.

Even among her hundreds of seamstresses—some of whom had known her for the better part of a century—there were few who trusted her affections. As long as she had need of their services (and at present she did) they were safe from harm, for without seamstresses there were no new stitchlings, and without stitchlings, no new legions to swell her army. But if that situation were to ever change, the women knew, they would be as disposable to the Old Mother as any stitchling.

Her weapon of choice when summarily executing one of her mud-men was her snake-wood rod, a simple but immensely powerful wand made of snake-wood that had been burned, buried, and raised up again on three consecutive midnights. It shot black lightning, destroying its target in an instant.

On several occasions, while surveying the work of demolition, she would catch sight of one of the stitchlings failing to labor as hard as the rest, and would summarily execute the brutish thing where it stood. The lesson: life and death were Mater Motley’s gift to give or take as she saw fit, and only a fool or a suicide walked where she walked without caution.

With such a powerful overseer, work on the demolition and removal of rubble proceeded at great speed, and in a matter of days the plateau where the many towers of the Iniquisit had stood there now stood a monumental structure. A single tower, designed by an architect of genius, incantatrix Jalafeo Mas, who used her knowledge of magic to defy the laws of physics and raise up a tower taller than the sum of the thirteen that had once stood there.

It was here, in the red-walled room at the top of the tower, that Mater Motley assembled the most trusted of her seamstresses: nine of them.

“The years of labor and faith are over,” Mater Motley said. “Midnight approaches.”

One of the nine, Zinda Goam, a seamstress half a thousand years old who had arranged to have her familiars raise her from the grave after her death so that she might continue to serve Mater said, “Are we not at Midnight now?”

“Yes, this is a time called Midnight. But now it’s Absolute. There is a greater Midnight than any in the making. A Midnight that will blind every sun, moon, and star in the heavens.”

Another of the women, whose emaciated body was draped with veils of fine cobwebs, could not silence her incredulity.

“I have never understood the Grand Design,” said Aea G’pheet. “It doesn’t seem possible. So many Hours. So many heavens.”

“Do you doubt me, Aea G’pheet?”

The seamstress, though her skin was pale, became paler still. She hurriedly said, “Never, m’lady. Never. I was just astonished is all—overwhelmed, really—and misspoke.”

“Then be careful in the future lest you find yourself without one.”

Aea G’pheet lowered her head, the cobwebs shimmering as they shook.

“Am . . . am I . . . forgiven?”

“Are you dead?”

No, m’lady,” Aea said. “I’m still alive.”

“Then you must have been forgiven,” the Old Mother said without humor. “Now, back to the business of Midnight. There are, as we know, many forms of life that have taken refuge from the light. Even the light of the stars. These creatures will be freed when my Midnight dawns. And they will make such mischief . . .” She paused, smiling at the thought of the fiends unleashed.

“And the people?” said another of the nine.

“Anyone who stands against us will be executed. And it will fall to us to spill their blood when the time comes, without hesitation. And if there is any woman here who is unwilling to fight this war upon those terms let her leave now. No harm will come to her. She has my oath on that. But if you choose to stay, then you will have agreed to do the work before us without fear or compromise.

“The labor of Midnight will be bloody, to be sure, but trust me, when I am Empress of the Abarat, I will raise you so high all thought of what you did to be so elevated will seem like nothing. We are not natural women, henceforth. Perhaps never were. We have no love of love, or of children, or of making bread. We are not made to tend fires and rock cradles. We are the unforgiving something upon which despairing men will break their fragile heads. There is no making peace with them, no husbanding them. They must be beneath our heels or dead and buried beneath the earth upon which we walk.”

There was a ripple of pleasure around the chamber at this remark. Only one of the younger seamstresses murmured something inaudible.

“You have a question,” Mater Motley said, singling her out.

“It was nothing, lady.”

“I said speak, damn you! I won’t have doubters! SPEAK!”

The seamstresses who had been surrounding the young woman now retreated from her.

“I was only wondering about the Twenty-Fifth Hour?” the young woman replied. “Will it also be overtaken by Midnight? Because if not—”

“Our enemies could find sanctuary there? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the question to which, in truth, I have no answer,” Mater Motley said lightly. “Not yet, at least. You are Mah Tuu Chamagamia, yes?”

“Yes, lady.”

“Well, as long as you are so curious about the state of the Twenty-Fifth, I will put two legions of stitchlings at your disposal.”

“To . . . do what, m’lady?”

“To take the Hour.”

“Take it?”

“Yes. To invade it. In my name.”

“But, lady, I have no skill in military matters. I could not.”

“Could not? You dare say COULD NOT to me?”

She stretched out her left arm, the fingers of her hand outstretched. The killing rod she used against the stitchlings flew from its place against the wall into her hand. She grasped it in a white-knuckled grip and in one sweeping motion pointed it at Mah Tuu Chamagamia.

The young woman opened her mouth to offer some further word of defense, but she had no time to utter it. Black lightning spat from the rod in her direction, and struck her in the middle of her body.

Now she made a sound. Not a word, but a cry of horror as her ghastly undoing spread out from her backbone in all directions turning her flesh and bone to flakes of black ash. Only her head remained untouched, so that she might better witness every moment of her dissolution.

But it was only long enough for her to see what her young beauty had been, and to turn her eyes up toward her destroyer one last time. Lone enough to murmur: “No.”

Then her head went to ashes, and she was gone.

“So dies a doubter,” the Old Mother said. “Any further questions?”

There were none.