Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 21

Boa at Midnight

BOA AND THE SNAKE, finding they both were of royal blood, parted amicably. And, rather than waste any more time with Laguna Munn or her sorry excuses for children, Boa fled Jibarish for Gorgossium. Something became apparent to her as soon as she set foot on Midnight’s earth: Gorgossium had changed. There was a new urgency about the island that she couldn’t remember ever sensing when she’d come here before. At the Todo Mines there was a steady stream of miners, thousands of Abaratians of every species from every island, some marching down to work in the open seams, which were illuminated by banks of lights fiercer than the noonday sun on Yzil, while other gangs of workers—many among them members of the Kooth nation, whose four huge eyes naturally produced strong beams of parchment-yellow light—were crowding into iron elevators, each big enough to carry two hundred workers, so as to be taken to work in the labyrinth of tunnels below. The noise of drilling and cursing and blasting made Boa’s head throb. She’d overtaxed her new body with the demands of the Sepulcaphs. It wouldn’t be an incantation she’d be using again any time soon.

Away from the mines she headed toward the forest of Ancients, trees of half wood, half stone. They were massive pillars that kept her from seeing her destination—the thirteen towers. It was there that she encountered further evidence of Gorgossium’s furious new appetite. A large group of merchants, who’d been traveling ahead of Boa by a half mile or so, had been attacked by a number of Corruption Flies, the form and color of which was exactly that of the flies Boa had seen crawling on rotted food in the alleyways of Chickentown, except that Gorgossium’s species were the size of cars.

She didn’t have to wait until the last of the merchants had perished to get past the place where the flies had found them. While the screams of those being plucked up and carried away was still going on, a wave of Old Red, which was the islanders’ nickname for the crimson mist that curled around the island like a gargantuan scarlet snake, appeared nosing its way between the stone-still Ancients. She cursed it under her breath. She had no choice: enter the mist, which wasn’t a pleasant thought, or contend with a pestilence of agitated Corruption Flies.

More than once Carrion had teased Boa by telling her that he knew of references in the Abarataraba, the most rare and powerful magical work of the Hours, concerning the true nature and purpose of Old Red. She wanted to know the details, but Carrion had refused to share what he knew.

“In time,” he’d said.

That had always been a favorite trick of his: putting off telling the juicy stuff until later, always later.

Well, later was here. She wanted knowledge and she would have it, even if it meant stepping into the skin of Old Red itself. She didn’t let her unease slow her down. She plunged into the churning mist and kept walking. Rather than allow her mind to dwell on her fears, she kept her thoughts on the future. She would have to be careful from now on. She had lived beneath the mask of an innocent Princess when she’d been here before. She no longer had such cover. Word of what had transpired on Laguna Munn’s island would surely have reached Gorgossium by now. And given that her rise to power in Carrion’s world had meant that others, who had doubtless expected to be elevated long before her, had seen those dreams dashed, there would be many here at Midnight who would gladly see her dead.

Carrion had been a man on the rise when she’d carefully orchestrated their “accidental” meeting. He had quickly made it plain to her that his ambition was almost limitless. He intended to go everywhere, know everything, and have knowledge of every state of being. She knew a man destined for power when she saw one.

Word was that he’d perished in the Chickentown fiasco. And she’d seen him, through Candy’s eyes, carried away by the Izabella, and lost in the flood that had overwhelmed Chickentown, but she could not bring herself to believe that he was dead. He had been badly injured, no doubt. But he’d been wounded many times before, often grievously, without forfeiting his life.

No. Her precious Christopher, who had taught her so much, was alive. She was certain of it. Somewhere she would find him. And somehow they would mend what had been broken between them.

The clammy folds of Old Red thinned and parted, and through its bloody veil Boa could see one of the towers ahead. She was almost there! The tower was being worked on, she saw, the old stone being replaced with polished plates of quamighto in the silvery surface of which reflected objects were fantastically distorted.

Despite her exhilaration at knowing she would soon be in Carrion’s presence she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of unease. If Carrion was indeed alive, and had come back to Gorgossium—where else would he go?—then she was perhaps but a minute or two from being in his presence. She brought an image of him into her mind’s eye. That almost naked head, with barely sufficient flesh to stretch over his jutting bones, and the two pipes that had been surgically implanted in the back of his skull, causing his nightmares to be siphoned off out of his brain and swim freely in the fluid that he breathed, allowing him to live in the company of his own darkest vision. But for all that was monstrous in his appearance, there was a tenderhearted creature within.

And she had betrayed that tender heart. She had used him for her own advancement as a magician, and then cast him aside to marry Finnegan Hob. For that crime against love, Carrion had hired an assassin to murder her at her own wedding. So, they were evenly matched. A heart for a life. Who could argue with that? They’d both paid terrible prices for what they’d done. If she could persuade Carrion of that—if she could make him understand that it was time to forgive and move on—then perhaps there was a chance he could forgive her betrayal. Words of love would no longer suffice, of course. He would want her closer than words: much, much closer.

But if that was the price of winning his devotion again, of healing the hurt she’d done him, then it was a tiny price, and she would gladly pay it. And it certainly didn’t hurt her case that she was returning to him with knowledge of the Hereafter; a world she knew he had long hoped to subdue with wieldings of unimaginable scale. Now she was familiar with that idiot world. She’d studied it for almost sixteen years through the eyes of Candy Quackenbush. She had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all. What might she and Carrion, the apprentice and her sometime master, not do if they went to work in that stupefied world with the intention of bringing it to its knees?

Oh, by A’zo and Cha:

WHAT MIGHT THEY NOT DO?

And then, as she came to the edge of the trees, Old Red dispersed completely, and Boa barely suppressed a cry of shock seeing how the scene before her had changed. She had seen only one three-spired tower through the mist. The rest had been demolished completely, their rubble removed and the ground where they’d stood pummeled flat, so as to make the size of the new tower seem even more prodigious. The spires had no windows for ninety-eight percent of their height.

Only at the top of the immense central spire, which was needle-fine, were there windows; a row of them, shaped like narrow eyes, all around the crown of the structure. As she studied it, however, she saw that there were vertical rows of symbols etched into the stone, which had the sheen of mercury. They were indecipherable to Boa, but she knew their origins. They were pieces of ancient Abaratian, the language of the Thread as it was sometimes known, meaning that it had been used to encode and connect all things beneath the Twenty-Four Hours and One that hung above the islands. In these sigils, every piece of the Abarat, from a dew drop to a mountain, from a flea to the Requiax, from a second of unendurable grief to an infant’s first smile—all written and entwined in the thread that ran unbroken through Time and Time Out of Time, connecting it all, forever and always.

But oh, she thought, what a fine and terrible thing it would be to cut that sacred cord! To sever all from all, in perpetuity and visit the despair that no prayer or calculation could cure. . . .

The thought of doing such sublime harm filled her with joy. A Princess capable of such ambition was inviolate. She had died, but lived again. No harm could possibly come to her. And, in thinking so, she stepped out from beneath the Ancients and started across the open grounds toward the Needle Tower. No one was guarding the tower for a very simple reason: it had no door. Boa circled the tower twice examining the wall for the slightest hint of an opening, however narrow or small. But there was nothing. Of course it was perfectly possible the door was concealed by a Seemi Feit, but she was in no mood to search for any trailing threads of Seemi Rope to carefully pull it apart. She was out of practice with decoding, and impatient to see what was inside the tower. So she gave her blood a charge of power by whispering three syllables—v’aatheum—against her wrist, then immediately biting into the meat, drawing off a mouthful of blood, and before it had time to dissolve on her gums and tongue, spat it with all possible force against her distorted reflection.

The reflecting seal bubbled, smoked and dissolved. She stepped inside, too curious to wait for the melt to stabilize, preferring instead to endure the sting of metal droplets on the top of her skull and on her shoulders as she entered.

Her impatience was quickly rewarded, the little hurts inconsequential compared to the astonishment that awaited her inside.

There were no stairs spiraling up the great heights of the Needle. Nor was there any kind of mechanical device to carry her up. Instead the walls of the tower were covered with elaborate growths of yellow, gray, and blue-purple tissue, which erupted into sentient blossoms of exquisite complexity and beauty, their membranes swelling and contracting, their intertwined stems flushed with speeding iridescence as they aspired to reach the moonlit chamber at the top. Very cautiously Boa reached up and touched a censer-shaped knot of multicolored matter, which hung at the intersection of several lengths of shiny-wet cord.

The Needle’s anatomy responded to the touch instantly. The ground beneath Boa’s feet rolled, and she might have been thrown down had it not instantly compensated by rolling in the opposite direction, allowing her to recover her equilibrium. She caught hold of a loop of knotted gut to prevent herself from being caught off guard again, but she had barely done so when the entire system of flowering entrails and light-bearing veins into which she had stopped began to raise her up on a platform of petal-flesh stretched over bone, rising at a breath-stealing speed, overtaking swift-seeded organs that oozed honeyed sap, and that raced ligament vines around the walls, fruited motes and glands bursting in celebration of her presence, spilling their luxurious juices upon her, staining her with their life (she, who had been a creature without form just a few hours before, expelled from solidity) blessing her with new ways to live this life After death.

She was almost at the top of the tower now, and she could see that the chamber was not only illuminated by moonlight. There were other sources of light up there as well, and they were moving.

“Carrion?” she said. There was no reply. “It’s me. It’s your Princess. I’m back.”

Being an island that saw the transportation of the living and the dead (along with many travelers who could not fall into either category), Gorgossium had need of three harbors.

The harbor equipped for the construction and launching of vessels of great magnitude was at Kythevai, in the northeast. This was the harbor from which Mater Motley’s newly commissioned warship, the Wormwood, had set forth to wreak havoc in the Hereafter, only to meet an undignified end on the flooded streets of Chickentown.

For sheer volume of vessels docked and unloaded, however, the commercial harbor at Uznak, in the south of the island, was the more important.

But it was from the third and smallest of the three harbors at Vrokonkeff, that the Old Mother was presently preparing to make her departure.

The voyage she was about to take was not of enormous length; she was merely crossing to the pyramids at Xuxux. The voyage may not have been of great consequence, but it was one of great significance, and she had prepared for it by fasting for nine days, and during that time, not uttering a single word. Even now, as she dismounted from the mummified hand that had long been her preferred mode of travel, and approached the simple vessel that would carry her to the pyramids, she did not speak. Nor, out of deference to their doyen, did the seamstresses who accompanied her.

She was half way up the gangplank when there rose a commotion farther down the quayside.

“Lady! Lady!”

It was a girl called Maratien, who for some years had attended upon the Old Mother in the tower, who came racing along the dock to speak with her mistress. Several seamstresses broke ranks to stop the girl from reaching Mater Motley for fear that Maratien’s intentions might be violent.

But the Old Mother had no fear of the girl.

“Let her go,” she instructed. “She may approach. What is it, Maratien? What’s distressing you, child?”

“There’s somebody in your tower.”

“Yes, of course. I left—”

“Not any of your seamstress sisters.”

“Who then?”

“I didn’t recognize her.”

“You were sufficiently concerned to race down and warn me?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“You do know how important this voyage is?”

“I know. Of course. And forgive me for having delayed you in your great work. I meant no disrespect. Please—”

“Ssh, ssh, ssh,” Mater Motley said with an almost loving indulgence in her voice. “You did well.”

“I didn’t think—”

“I said you did well, Maratien. And so you did. There will be another tide. I will return to the tower with you.”

“What if I’m wrong?”

“Then you will have made an error and you’ll learn from it, won’t you?”

“Yes, lady.”

“Now let’s see who has come to visit me.”