Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 16

Laguna Munn Angered

IF CANDY HAD NOT had the sight of the Princess’s face to look up at, she would have quickly succumbed to her death grip. But luckily she only had to look up at Boa’s beautiful, hateful face to keep fighting, even though Boa’s hold on her throat had cut off most of her air. She just kept beating at Boa’s face, over and over and over, determined not to let the waves of darkness that lapped at her sight overwhelm her. But even with her fury at Boa to help keep her conscious she couldn’t hold back the black tide forever. Her blows were getting weaker, and Boa was showing not the least sign of being hurt or dissuaded from further attack. She stared down at Candy with the implacable gaze of an executioner.

And then, behind her joyless face, there was a blur of color, too chaotic for Candy’s weary eyes to make sense of.

But the voice that came with the colors was a different matter. That made perfect sense.

“Let go of the girl right now,” the incantatrix said, “or I swear I will break every bone in your body, Princess or no Princess.”

A moment later Boa’s hands let go of Candy’s throat and she gratefully inhaled two lungfuls of sweet, clean air. It took her body a little while to push back the tide that had come so close to drowning her, by which time the struggle between Laguna Munn and Boa had already taken the two of them some distance from the place where Candy lay. When she got to her feet and looked around she saw them a long way up the slope, standing several yards apart but locked together by several cords of conjuration—those pitched by Mrs. Munn, digging their blazing fingers into Boa, while the cords Boa had cast danced vicious tarantellas around Mrs. Munn. The cords had shed bright flakes of energy—some no larger than fireflies, others the size of burning birds—that littered the darkness around and above the circle of ash and blackened timber that the powers of the combatants had burned into being.

Candy knew when she was out of her league. These two were exchanging blows from a magic she had no comprehension of, much less the means to conjure. Even as she watched, each of the pair called out more incandescent hurts and harms, yelling their furies at each other in what Candy recognized as Old Abaratian, the mother tongue of time itself. She understood not even a syllable of what they were hurling back and forth. But there was strange proof of its potency in the branches and on the ground all around the fire-formed grove.

While most of the scraps of power remained in the arena’s zone of influence, a few escaped, and finding living subjects up among the branches and down between the roots, remade them. It was the sweet-songed capellajar birds that shed light on the spectacle, the magic transforming them into beasts that had something of the bat about them, and something about the lizard, their once modest beaks became snouts the length of their bodies, which pierced the dense lattice of branches, twigs and leaves as they descended from their high perches. The cavern’s crystalline roof threw down shafts of rainbow silver, lighting the shadow world below.

For a few seconds Candy was enraptured by the eccentric life-forms that were appearing from the trees and thicket: bizarre relatives of creatures that would have still had a certain strangeness to Candy, even in their unaltered state, but were even more extraordinary now.

The spectacle held her in thrall so completely that she failed to notice that the two women were no longer fighting in the burned-out grove, and were making their way back down the slope toward her, until she heard Mrs. Munn’s voice:

“Take it, girl!”

Candy persuaded her gaze to look away from the animals, and found that Laguna Munn was approaching her through the trees at an extraordinary rate, fearlessly careening through the thornbushes, no more than seven or eight strides from where Candy stood.

And again she shouted, as though the sense of what she was saying was utterly self-evident.

“Take it, girl!”

And as she shouted, and raced toward Candy, she offered up her right hand, which was partially open and completely empty.

“Be quick, girl. The vicious thing behind me means to take our lives!”

Candy looked back over Mrs. Munn’s shoulder and saw that Boa’s recently acquired flesh wore an expression of almost insane fury: her eyes gaping, her mouth gasping, and her lips curled back like those of a crazed dog, exposing not only her teeth but her gums too. Her body, though it was still without clothes, wore a pattern of shadowy stains that moved under the surface of her skin, dividing into smeared spots in one place and gathered into a single ragged shape in another, all constantly changing.

Even her face was stained: with a swarm of blots, then with rows of rising stripes, then a single black diamond, one form becoming another without lingering in any state for so much as a moment.

For some reason the display touched a nerve in Candy. It was literally sickening; it made her stomach rebel, and it was all she could do not to keep herself from puking.

Mrs. Munn’s half-opened hand was now in front of Candy.

“Take it!” Mrs. Munn said. “Just do it!”

“Take what?”

“Whatever you see in my hand.”

“It’s empty.”

“Look again. And be quick.” Candy was aware of Boa’s shape rising up behind Mrs. Munn, and beating at the air above her. “I can’t hold her off for long. The power in her!”

Candy could hear Boa calling to her as she beat at the Air Armor the incantatrix had put up to keep her from finishing the chase. The Armor, a conjuration Candy knew of but couldn’t wield, made Boa’s voice slurred and remote, but Candy could still comprehend enough to know what Boa was doing. She was trying to sow seeds of doubt in Candy concerning Mrs. Munn.

“She says you’re crazy,” Candy said.

“She’s probably right,” Laguna Munn replied. “Did she make you want to vomit when you saw the Sepulcaphs?”

“Is that what they’re called? Yes. It was horrible.”

“If she tries it again, you run, put your eyes out, bury your head in the ground, just don’t look at the patterns. If she’s strong enough to keep them in her skin, which she is, she can make you puke yourself inside out.”

“That’s . . . that’s not possible. Is it?”

“I’m afraid it is. She almost had me doing it two minutes ago, up the hill. Me? On my own rock! Where she got power to wield Sepulcaphs is . . .” She shook her head. “. . . unbelievable.”

“She was taught by Christopher Carrion.”

“Interesting. And of course the question remains: where did he get it? The Hereafter doesn’t have power. That’s why you did business with us. But even the Abarat doesn’t contain wieldings that powerful.”

There was a sharp stinging sound, as more pieces of the Air Armor behind Laguna Munn shattered beneath Boa’s assault.

“Lordy Lou. How did you ever live with her?”

“She wasn’t like this.”

“Or she was and you suppressed it.”

“Huh. I never thought of that.”

“No wonder you were a dull little batrat of a child. All your energy was going into keeping this monster from breaking out.”

“Who said I was a dull little ratbat—”

“Batrat.”

“—of a child?”

“You did. Who you are is the stone on which you stand. Now no more—”

There were two more brutal stings in quick succession. Then another three.

“She’s breaking through. Take your weapon!”

Once again she was offering her hand to Candy, and once again Candy was seeing nothing but an empty palm. There was a desperate urgency to the problem. Boa and her nauseating Sepulcaphs were a cracked plate of air away.

“Look again!” Mrs. Munn insisted. “Look away. Clear your head. Then look again. It’s right there!”

“What is?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Like a poisonous snake?”

She had but to ask, and there it was in Mrs. Munn’s hands: a seven-foot-long snake, its colors—a toxic yellow-green with a band of glistening black running along its length—designed to tell anyone that it was a venomous thing.

“Good choice, girl!” Mrs. Munn said, in a tone so ambiguous Candy had no idea whether she was serious or not. “Here! Take it!”

She tossed the snake at Candy, who, more out of instinct than intention, caught it in both hands.

“Now what?” she said.