Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 36

The Shadow-Shroud

DESPITE THE CURRENT DEFYING power of the Kreymattazamar, which returned Mater Motley and her entourage back to Midnight’s island faster than any other vessel in the Abarat, and despite the speed with which she was transported from the harbor to the circular room atop her Needle Tower, the shadow shroud of the sacbrood had already begun to spread in all directions from the pyramids.

Such was the passionate bloodlust of the brood to be out and doing their murderous duty, that when the path to the sky became blocked they set upon one another with unbounded brutality. Very quickly the areas surrounding the exits of the pyramids were littered with the remnants of the weak or unlucky, who had perished before reaching the stars they had been born to extinguish.

But such wastage had been factored into the calculations from the beginning. They did as they were programmed to do. They rose up and they spread across the sky. They went east to darken the skies over Babilonium, southeast to cover Gnomon’s wilderness, in the midst of which stood its Great Ziggurat; and northeast to Scoriae, where the darkness overhead seemed to encourage Mount Galigali to stir up the fire in its belly and spit streamers of liquid rock into the starless heavens. North it went to Pyon, where the lights of Commexo City burned so brightly that its apocalyptic effect was not felt. On other parts of the island, of course, places so far uncivilized by Pixler’s influence, the peasant community thought the blanking out of all the stars was just one more show of power by the great architect, and resigned themselves to finally giving up their independence and going to the bright streets of Commexo City where they would add to the sum of beggars there. The same northerly advance also encompassed Idjit, where that island’s incessant lightning storms became even more violent, stirred up by the blinding of the heavens. Finally the cloud spread west, southwest, and south, erasing the moon and stars from the skies over Jibarish, and Ninnyhammer, and extinguishing the late afternoon sun that bathed Gnomon where there had been many oracles, all of whom were quite capable of seeing this approaching catastrophe.

Notwithstanding the egotistical attitude that had silenced most of them, a few had been foolhardy enough to speak of what they’d seen. All had been dead within the hour. The rest, having quickly got the message that this was a future that would be fatal to talk about, kept what they knew to themselves, or left Gnomon entirely thinking they’d be safer talking about the approaching apocalypse on some other island. But wherever they went—some to the Yebba Dim Day, in the hope of talking to the Council, a few to Yzil or farther—it all failed to change their own futures. Those who spoke their fears aloud were murdered within the hour, leaving the others two options: to live in silent anticipation of the world’s end, or to take their own lives before it came.

So the secret of Absolute Midnight had remained secure. And when the sacbrood rose up in their millions, the noise of their innumerable beating wings was like no sound those hearing it had ever heard before, nor would again. They were out. Out and up, covering the sky. And it wasn’t only the bodies and wings of the brood that were blocking the light. They exuded a thick juice called broodgrume from their abdomens, which dried to a dense, hard, shell-like substance within a few moments of being exposed to the air. They had been programmed generation upon generation that, once they were up above land and water, they were to completely empty their sacs of this broodgrume. The consequence? That they all would become helpless prisoners of their own secretion; countless millions of their insectile brains too simple to understand that the instruction to void themselves of the grume would be the first and only act they would perform in the world outside their hives.

There had been times when Mater Motley had trouble believing that such a massive number of living things, however simplistic their thinking, would do as they had been programmed to do so blindly. At such times she went to a secret and sacred place that she had never named aloud. Its name was Zael Maz’yre, and from it all dark blessings flowed. She had bathed in those blessings for many years, and in due course she would pay the price, gladly. But for now, there was pleasure to be had hearing creatures of every kind raising their voices in panic as the erasing darkness spread across the sky, wiping out star after star, blinding moons and blotting out suns. Even the constellations had gone. Every last star had been like candles in a hurricane.

People offered prayers to the divinities of every Hour, but outweighing the prayers offered to gods and saints a hundred to one were those prayers offered up to the most ubiquitous force for happiness in the Abarat—the Grinning Boy himself—the Commexo Kid. He was the savior to whom countless terrified souls called out as the shadow-shroud moved on, its layers of living brood and their excreted grume two or even three layers thick in some places. Jibarish was plunged into utter darkness. So too was Ninnyhammer, and the Rock of Some Distinction called Alice Point; and the Nonce, and the Isle of the Black Egg, and Huffaker, and Orlando’s Cap, and Hobarookus . . .

Cries of terror and panic still rose up out of the islands that were newly overtaken by darkness. But out of those that had first fallen under the influence of the shadow-shroud the fear was punctuated with a new and very particular sound: that of accusation. Who had done this, and why? Why? Somebody needed to own up to this crime and do so quickly or there would be consequences. On island after island, in Hour after Hour, people started to seek out anyone that was in some way odd, and found, in mere distinctions, evidence of guilt. The signs were usually very small—a harelip, a slow eye, a tic, a stammer—but all that mattered was that the voices of accusation were able to rouse a mob into believing that these innocents were in some way responsible for this terror.

Mater Motley watched all of this with gluttonous satisfaction. She had reports from Nightseers, seamstresses whose eyes were powerful enough to pierce the darkness even at its densest. On Gnomon she was shown a crowd of three hundred or more, having lit fires to illuminate an ancient place of judgment, start the business of dealing with those that their collective madness had decided were responsible for the death of light.

The leader of the mob was a little man with some Skizmut blood in him somewhere. His name was Dyer Mere, and he had elected himself as the leader of the court among the trees. He demanded that the three prisoners the mob had selected—two sisters, Juup and Namena Chantamik, and a sometime tax inspector called Theopolis Kalapao—confess their guilt. The mob was convinced that it was they who had brought this calamity upon the islands. The two sisters were sobbing and quite beyond saying anything coherent, so it fell to Theopolis to reason with the crowd.

They all knew him, he reminded them. Had he not always been honorable in his dealings? Had he not possessed a sense of what was fair and right? He had no knowledge of the monstrous powers that had been used to blind the heavens. He was a victim of this catastrophe, just as they were. Unfortunately for him, Theopolis the tax inspector stammered, and the more he realized he wasn’t winning the argument against his accusers, the worse his stammer became, until his words of self-defense, reasonable though they were, could not even be understood.

The crowd didn’t listen. The deaths of Theopolis and the sisters were swift.

“Now the culprits are dead,” Dyer Mere declared. “Their spell will be undone very soon. Unless, of course, there are more conspirators we have not yet rooted out.”

By now the darkness had reached the eastern limits of the Abarat, as it had to the north and south. It was as though the Abarat was a vast coffin and the sacbrood its lid. And still, when Mater Motley turned her gaze toward the pyramids, she saw the brood emerging from their hives like a black snake, their numbers apparently undiminished, rising to extinguish every last light in the skies, their programming so powerful, and their hunger so vast, that they cared not at all that those of their species who’d emerged an hour earlier were now trapped in a vault of bodies and solidified grume. All that mattered to each was the task they’d been programmed to perform. To any other subject—such as the suffering of their own kind (which they would soon share)—they were as blind as the Abaratians on the islands below.

Within forty minutes, the number of innocents accused of causing the darkness to descend, and summarily hanged for their wickedness, had risen from three to eighty-five. Among that number was Dyer Mere himself, who had overseen the executions of his own wife and son-in-law before the finger of suspicion had turned on him. Now he was dead. Strung up from the same branch from which his first victim, the stammering tax inspector, Theopolis Kalapao, had been hanged.

The same insanity had possessed mobs of frightened souls on every island. The spectacle of their panic turning to judgment and slaughter was not something Mater Motley had considered when she’d been calculating the way that the events of this Midnight would play out. But what came next she had foreseen: the arrival of the Ziaveign. The eight families of monsters and their vile hybrids who had been hiding all across the island, harboring their hatred, waiting for a long-promised darkness to spread across the Abarat, now came out of hiding.

The Old Mother had made it her business over the years to reach as many of them as possible herself, finding them in their grim sanctuaries, hidden from the light and its servants. So she knew many of the demonic creatures that now rose up to sew havoc among the tribes who had hunted them when their sacred suns and moons had been high and mighty. Now the skies were black, and the light-givers gone. In the dark the hunters were about to become the hunted.

There were creatures in this rising multitude that were as ancient as the elements. The Crawfeit, for instance, whose bodies were bone cages filled with flocks of burning birds; their heads black iron pots brimming with a vile stew of venom, angel’s grief, and human meat; their limbs lengths of burned muscles held together with hair and hooks, and arrayed with dagger fingers. They were not demons. The Abarat had no known hell. The Crawfeit, like the other seven Ziaveign from which root all forms of night-beast, each corrupted in its own particular way, sprang from the presence of cruelty, pain, and loneliness among the Hours.

The Old Mother caught sight of all the Fiends she’d hoped to discover as she scanned the islands. On Scoriae she found the Abarat’s first executioner, Quothman Shant, at his bloody work. On Soma Plume, she saw Lailahlo, the Queen of Murderous Song, leading a chorus of tiny Pulcinellas. The Binder, Tarva Zan, who wrapped the hearts of her victims in fire, was walking the silent boardwalk of Babilonium. Gan Nug was still standing at the highest point of The Great Head calling forth more horrors. At his feet, gazing up at him in adulation, were nine of his Preyers, or priests. Clowdeus Geefee she found on a boat, alone, the Izabella stained bloodred all around, while Shote, the Plaguer, she discovered seeding diseases in the fields of the Nonce, and on Huffaker, caught sight of Ogo Fro, who was entropy and fatigue incarnate, among a crowd of the wanderers lost in the dark.

It was a triumph for darkness. All eight of the Great Fiends had risen up and shown their faces. And if they were here, then their children would surely be here too. And their children. And theirs. None of them as powerful as their legendary forebears to be sure, but they still possessed the genius to terrify. The Old Mother was happy—at least as happy as she knew how to be. She had thrown a party in the name of darkness, and all the guests she’d most wanted to attend had done so.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour, however, had been entirely unaffected by the invasion of the sacbrood. It not only protected itself at sea level, effortlessly repelling the darkness that attempted to touch the shore, but it also defended the air above with a sheath that reached up into the stratosphere, and instantly cremated those sacbrood who, in their thoughtless conviction, treated the air above the Twenty-Fifth Hour like any other. It was not. The rules of physics were inverted over that timeless place.

Air that should have been lightless was instead pale yellow, while the stars, whether they were fixed or falling, blazed black against its brightness. The Twenty-Fifth had no intention of allowing the brood to invade its sacred air. Though the forces encircled the island, throwing wave after wave of forces against it, the power that the Hour emanated was too unpredictable to be overwhelmed. Finally, the brood seemed to comprehend that this was not a battle they could win, and left off the attack to move on to new conquests: some breaking north to the Outer Islands, others around the island to follow an easterly course.

The fact that the Twenty-Fifth had not succumbed irritated Mater Motley.

“You hear me make this oath, Maratien,” she said when word reached her that the brood’s attempts to get onto the island had failed. “Before very long, you will follow me as I walk up from the water’s edge into the heart of the Twenty-Fifth. And I will stand there as its owner, and I will sink it if I so choose.”

“And it will be the same with Commexo City?” Maratien said.

Mater Motley made a snort of contempt as she strode toward the mosaic of the island of Pyon, and set her foot upon the spot where Rojo Pixler had built Commexo City.

“The stars no longer shine over Pyon,” she said, “but the city still burns as brightly as ever.”

“Is Pixler there?”

“Why would he not be?”

“He went down into the Izabella.”

“So he did. An odd coincidence. Something vast happens in the heavens, and Pixler is down in the deep . . .”

“I heard a rumor,” Maratien said.

“Go on.”

“That he came back, but he’s not himself.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He supposedly went in search of a Requiax. Those don’t really exist, do they?”

“Everything exists at some depth, Maratien.”

“Everything?”

“Yes. Everything,” the Hag replied. “Perhaps he’s come back suffering from deliriums of the deep.” She took one of the needles from her dress; needles forged in cold fires that Zael Maz’yre itself had called up. She gave the needle to Maratien. “Take this down to General Axietta. You know which of the women she is?”

“She’s the bald one with the birthmark?”

“That’s her.”

“She’s beautiful,” Maratien said.

“Well you take the needle down to her as proof that these orders came from me.”

Maratien took the needle.

“What orders, m’lady?” the girl said.

“She’s to take four warships, with six legions of stitchlings in each vessel. Head straight for Pyon. There’ll be plenty of distraction to keep Mr. Genius Pixler from expecting an attack from the sea. When she gets into the city she’s to take it—destroy it if she’s in the mood. I don’t care. But there are two things I need her to do without fail.”

“Yes, m’lady?”

“Kill every light that burns in that damn city. And make it her personal business to bring me back the heads of Rojo Pixler and the boy.”

“The boy . . . ?”

“The Commexo Kid.”

“Is he a living thing?”

“We won’t know until we have his head in our hands, will we?” Mater Motley said. “Now go. I want Commexo City dark in two hours.”