Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 27

Interrogation

AROUND THE TIME GAMBAT was leaving Malingo and Candy on the upper deck of The Sloppy (now the happy owner of two autographs from the hand of the most famous geshrat alive) a convoy of five vessels was about to depart from the harbor at Vrokonkeff, on Gorgossium. The largest of these five, the Kreyzu, was flying a smoke flag in the billows of which the stylized image of a needle and thread had been worked, marking it as the bearer of the presumptive Empress of the Hours, Lady Midnight herself, Mater Motley. The four ships that accompanied the Kreyzu were armed from waterline to crow’s nest with cannons and stitchlings, all in service of protecting the Lady Midnight.

Her departure had been delayed, of course. She had returned to her tower with the girl, Maratien, to find that Taint Nerrow, the seamstress she’d left to clean the mosaic map of the Abarat that was laid into the floor of her chamber, had been thrown out of one of the chamber windows and lay dead at the bottom. Mater Motley had liked the Seamstress Nerrow; the woman had been loyal and zealous. It didn’t please her that circumstances obliged her to now interrogate the dead woman, which would cause the deceased profound anguish. Mater Motley was certain that, had she been able to offer her opinion, Taint Nerrow herself would have volunteered her suffering in return for the name of her murderer.

Events many years in the designing were about to come to fruition: events that would transform the islands and all that lived upon them forever. She—who would be the mistress of that transformed world—could not afford to let a force as powerful as Taint Nerrow’s murderer go uncaught. She needed to know who the trespasser had been, and quickly. She bent down and turned Taint’s corpse over. Her face had a crack down the middle. But there was little blood. Ordering the rest of the women to retreat a few steps, Motley threw up a Dome of Diligences around herself, the body, and Nerrow’s spirit, which was hovering over the corpse, attached by a decaying cord of ectoplasm.

“Calm yourself, woman,” Motley said. “I don’t need more than a minute or two of your time.”

“I don’t want—”

“You have no choice.”

“—to go back—”

“You have no choice.”

“—into the flesh.”

“You have no choice. Hear me, witch?”

Taint’s spirit, a smudge of a panicked shadow, repeatedly flew against the inside of the Dome of Diligences like a fly trapped in a jar.

The Empress quickly became weary of Nerrow’s panicked cavorting.

“Enough,” she said.

She reached out and caught hold of her seamstress’s spirit. The shadow flailed, desperate to be free. Several of Nerrow’s sisters watched on in silent horror.

“Neysentab,” said the Old Mother, and with these three syllables she unmade the Dome. “If any of you find necromancy hard to witness, then I suggest you avert your eyes.”

Several did exactly that, one or two of the sisters even walking away from the body of Taint Nerrow entirely so as not to even hear what was happening. Meanwhile, Mater Motley went down on her knees beside Taint Nerrow’s corpse, telling one of the remaining sisters, “Fathoon? Open her mouth wide and hold her head.”

Kunja Fathoon, who was a big-boned woman with huge hands, did as she was instructed.

Mater Motley swiftly placed the spirit between Nerrow’s lips and ordered Fathoon to close the dead woman’s mouth and keep it closed whatever happened. Kunja Fathoon pinched the dead woman’s mouth to stop the spirit from exiting that way. She kept it pinched closed for as long as a minute. Nothing happened. And nothing. And still nothing. Then, suddenly, the woman’s leg twitched. Its motion was followed by an eruption of thrashings and kickings.

“Calm, Taint Nerrow. Calm,” Mater Motley said. “I know this must be horrible for you coming back into your broken body, but I only need a few questions answered.” She glanced up at Fathoon. “Are you ready?” Fathoon nodded. “Don’t weaken.”

“I won’t.”

“No,” Mater Motley said, her certainty confirmed by something in Fathoon’s eyes. “No, you won’t. Then let’s be done with this, shall we?”

“At your instruction, my lady.”

“Now.”

Fathoon uncovered Nerrow’s mouth.

“Cease this, Taint Nerrow! RIGHT NOW!”

The woman’s cries became less pitiful. Her contortions dwindled.

“That’s better,” the Old Mother said. “Now, answer me quickly and truthfully. Then I can let you go, and you can go to your death.”

Taint drew a second phlegmatic breath and then spoke, her voice unequivocally that of a dead woman: flat, thin, joyless.

“What did I do to deserve this?”

“The fault wasn’t yours, Nerrow. I simply want to know who murdered you.” Mater Motley leaned forward a little to catch the answer when it came. “Who was it, sister?”

“It was the Princess Boa.”

“Impossible!”

“I swear.”

“She’s been dead sixteen years, sister.”

“I know. Yet it was she.”

“And you have no doubt?”

“None. It was she. It was Boa. It was! It was!” Her reanimated body was beginning to defy her control. Her face was riddled with tiny tics and seizures. They seemed to give her pain, even though her nerves had only a ghost of life left in them.

Mater Motley studied the corpse at her feet without replying. Nerrow’s despairing eyes stared up at the woman who held her spirit hostage. “I’ve told you all I know. Let me go to death. It will be kinder than life was.”

“Well then . . .” the Old Mother said. “Let go, Fathoon. Peace in the Void, woman. Be gone.”

She had barely finished her sentence before the seamstress’s spirit had fled its confinement and was rising away from her prison and her imprisoner. Then the shadow-smudge had gone from sight, lightless against a lightless sky.

Mater Motley’s return to the Needle Tower, and her subsequent discoveries and dealings there, had delayed the departure of the Kreyzu a little over two hours. But once the immense vessel was out in the open waters it moved with extraordinary speed, the engine that blazed in the belly of the vessel—a brutal delirious conjoining of the harrowing with the depraved, the unforgivable with the insane—propelling the Kreyzu through the Izabella, defying every current.

The Izabella did not protest the vessel’s brutal power. The sea knew what dread influence had wrought the vessel, and had given it authority. She knew the monstrous power the Old Mother wielded. Simply by reading rumors and toxins in the streams that poured down the slopes of the islands into her tides, the Izabella knew how much worse things were soon to get. It would serve the myriad life-forms who dwelt within her waters no good to oppose the Midnight Empress for she was capable, the waters knew, of practically limitless acts of destruction. Not flesh nor wood nor stone nor dust was inviolate. She had it in her, this woman and her allies on high, to do death to every Hour of Day and Night if she did not get her way.

So for now, the Izabella decided, she must seem to do so. To have her will, however wicked.

Thus, untroubled by the sea’s enmity, the woman who would very soon change the Abarat out of all recognition speeded toward her destination.

On board the Kreyzu, the girl Maratien came into the Old Mother’s darkened cabin, her head reverentially bowed. She didn’t dare raise it until the Old Mother murmured, “What is it, child?”

“We are approaching the pyramids, my lady. You told me to come and tell you.”

Mater Motley rose from the hovering stone on which she sat and descended the air to come to the place where Maratien stood.

“Are you excited, child?”

“Should I be?”

“Oh yes. If you have the courage to stay with me today and for the days to come, I promise you that you’ll see such rare sights as will change forever the way you imagined the world to be. And of your place in it.”

“So I may watch?” Maratien said cautiously, not entirely certain that she had understood the invitation correctly.

“Of course. Right here at my side. And if you are as wise a child as I believe you to be, then you will take note of everything you see. Every detail. Because there may come a time when someone will ask you what it was like to have been there, and you will want to answer them truthfully.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now go to Melli Shadder, one of my sisters—”

“I know her.”

“Tell her that I ordered you be given my warmest coat. It will be bitterly cold when all the suns go out, Maratien. Go on. I’ll wait for you.”

“You will?”

“Of course. I’ve waited for the better part of six centuries for this Hour. I can wait a few minutes more while you find yourself a coat.”