Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 10

The Sorrows of the Good Son

LAGUNA MUNN CLIMBED DOWN from her chair and called for her second son, her Good Boy.

“Covenantis? Where are you? I have need of you, boy!”

A joyless little voice said, “I’m here, Mother,” and the boy Laguna Munn had reputedly made from all the good in her came into view. He was an unfortunate creature, as gray and dull as his Bad Boy brother had been glamorous and charismatic.

“We have a guest,” said Laguna Munn.

“I know, Mother,” he said, his voice colorless. “I was listening.”

“That was rude, child.”

“I meant no disrespect, Mother,” the boy replied, his mother’s chiding only serving to increase the sum of hopelessness in his empty eyes.

“Lead her to the Circle of Conjurations, boy. She has come here to do dangerous work. The sooner it’s begun, the sooner it’s safely over.”

“May I stay and watch you teach her?”

“No. You may not. Unless you want to witness something that might well be the death of you.”

“I don’t much mind,” Covenantis said, shrugging.

His whole life was in that shrug. He seemed not to care whether he was alive or dead.

“Where will you be?” Candy asked the incantatrix.

“Right here.”

“So how are you going to help me with the separation?”

Laguna Munn looked at Candy with lazy amusement.

“From a safe distance,” she replied.

“What happens if something goes wrong?

“I’ll have sight of you,” Laguna Munn said. “Don’t worry. If something goes wrong I’ll do what I can to fix it. But the responsibility for the outcome falls on you. Think of yourself as a surgeon delicately separating twins born joined together. Except that you are not only the surgeon—”

“I’m also one of the babies,” Candy said, beginning to understand.

“Exactly.” Laguna looked at Candy with new admiration. “You know, you’re smarter than you look.”

“I look dumb? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. Not necessarily,” she said, and then raised her hand, which was a fist, and opened it.

Candy put her hand in her pocket and took out the photograph she and Malingo had taken in the market in the port city of Tazmagor, on Qualm Hah. In it, she was wearing the same clothes she was wearing now. She had purchased those clothes on a whim, but now that she took a closer look, she realized that she resembled her mother to an astonishing degree. She quickly put the photo back in her pocket. Laguna Munn was right: when this was all over, she was going to get a change of clothes as quickly as possible. She’d dress like the Nonce, she decided, all color and happiness.

Before she had fully broken from her thoughts, Candy saw something bright move toward her from Laguna Munn’s palm. It came too fast for her to make sense of what it was, but she felt it strike her like a gust of cold wind. There was a flicker of light in her head and by the time it was extinguished Laguna Munn had disappeared, leaving only poor, gray Covenantis at Candy’s side.

“Well, I suppose you’d better come with me then,” he said, showing not the least enthusiasm for the task.

Candy shook the last reverberations of the light from her mind, and followed the boy. As he stepped in front of her, she caught her first glimpse of his lower anatomy. Until now, she had been so caught up by the pitiful expression on his face she hadn’t realized that below the belt, he looked more like a child-sized slug than a boy. His legs were fused into a single, boneless tube of gray-green muscle upon which the upper portion of his body, which was simply that of an ordinary boy, was raised up.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said without looking back at Candy.

“And what’s that?”

“Can that really be the son she made from the good in her? Because he doesn’t look very good. In fact he looks like a slug.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were,” the boy said.

“You’re right, I was.”

“And you’re right. I do look like a slug. I’ve thought a lot about it. In fact it’s really the only thing I think about.”

“And what have you found out, after all that thinking?”

“Not much. Just that Mother never really loved the good in her. She thought it was boring. Worthless.”

“Now, I’m sure—”

“Don’t,” he said, raising his hand to stop her trying to pamper the hurt. “That only makes it worse. My mother’s ashamed of me. That’s the truth, plain and simple. It’s my evil little brother, with his glittering smiles, who gets all the glory. That’s what they call a paradox, isn’t it? I’m made from good, but I’m nothing to her. He’s made of all the evil in her and guess what: she loves him for it. Loves him! So now he’s the good son after all, because of all the love he’s been given. And me, who was made from her compassion and her gentility, was left out in the cold.”

Candy felt a flicker of anxiety run through her. She understood Covenantis’s words all too clearly. She knew the glittering beauty of evil. She’d seen it, and been in some ways attracted by it. Why else had she felt so sympathetic to Carrion?

“Stay here while I light the candles,” Covenantis said.

Candy waited while he moved off into the shadows. It was only when he’d gone that Candy’s thoughts returned to the strange gesture Laguna Munn had made before she had gone from view. And with the memory came other recollections, stirred up by the woman’s gift and Candy realized exactly how many coincidences, instinctual maneuvers, and twists of fate were really pieces of Boa’s magic at work within her.

She remembered it all now with uncanny clarity: she remembered the words that had come unbidden into her throat on the Parroto Parroto—Jassassakya-thüm!—and once spoken, they had had driven off the monstrous Zethek; she remembered instincts, when Mama Izabella had come at her across the grasslands, that had allowed her to relax in the grip of the sentient that might well have drowned her if she’d caused any trouble; and she remembered the way she’d fallen into a pattern of bittersweet exchanges with Carrion, who would have slaughtered her in a heartbeat if he hadn’t sensed something inside her that he knew. No, that he loved.

For the first time, Candy realized just how much of Boa there might be in her. A spasm of panic seized Candy.

“Oh no,” she said. “I don’t think I can do this.”

Of course you can. You’ve come this far, haven’t you?

“Do you think it’ll hurt?”

Hurt? Boa replied. HURT? A cut finger hurts, girl. A cracked rib. But this is the end of a union of souls that has defined you since the day you were born. When the connection between us is severed you’ll lose forever pieces of your mind you thought were yours.

“But they were yours. They were you.”

Yes.

“So why would I want them?”

Because it’ll be an unspeakable agony to lose them. You see, I know what it’s like to be alone in my head. I’m used to it. But you . . . you have no idea of what you have invited down upon yourself.

“I know perfectly well, I think,” Candy said.

Do you? Well, for what it’s worth, I doubt you’ll keep your sanity. How could anyone stay sane when you can no longer recognize the face in the mirror?

“That’s my face!” Candy protested. “A Quackenbush face!”

But the eyes.

“What about the eyes?”

You’ll look at your reflection and the mind you’ll see staring back at you won’t be yours. All the memories of glory that you thought belonged to you, all the beautiful mysteries that you believed you’d discovered for yourself, all the ambitions you hold dear—none of them are yours.

“I don’t believe you. You’re lying now the way you lied to Finnegan and Carrion.”

You keep Finnegan out of this, Boa said.

“Oh, feel a bit guilty do you?”

I said—

“I heard you.”

There were a few moments of extremely strained silence between them. Then Boa said: Let. Me. Out. Of. This—PRISON!

Covenantis appeared and looked at Candy with round, terrified eyes.

“Did you hear that?” he said softly. “A human’s voice, I swear. Tell me it’s not just me.”

“No, Covenantis, you’re perfectly sane. Will you get the conjuration underway please, before she gets murderous?”

“It’s already begun. I’m going into the labyrinth to prepare the site of separation. Follow me there. But first repeat the sacred word nineteen times.”

“Abarataraba?”

“Yes.”

“Does that one count?”

“No!”

Then the last thing he said before disappearing into the maze, leaving Candy to feel as though at the very moment she was making a life-changing decision for herself—a very adult thing to do—he’d reduced her to a kid in the school yard.

She smeared the last six Abarataraba into a single Abarrrarababa, and without alerting Covenantis to the fact that she was done counting and was coming, ready or not, she plunged into the maze, entering as Two-in-One and hopefully exiting as simply two.