Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 40

Bones and Laughter

FINNEGAN HAD BEEN ON the Nonce for a day, searching for a place that he had endeavored to find ever since the death of his Princess. He had finally discovered it, beneath the mountains of that Hour: the place where, according to the myth of the dragon families, their dying members went to pass the last portion of their lives. There they had perished, leaving their bodies to decay among the numberless bones of the worms who had come here to die over the centuries.

Now he was standing in that most secret of secret places, a cavern that had been fashioned over the millennia by the genius of water and stone into the likeness of a cathedral so big the city of Commexo could have comfortably fitted within it three or four times over. It was illuminated by the phosphorescence given off by a fungus that flourished on the bare architecture of the dead. They had spread to every corner of the caverns, laying a gray pallor on the air, which only served to add to the immensity of the space. But the

scale of this vast cathedral was barely large enough to contain the immense numbers of dragon’s bones that had collected here over the centuries, some laid here by mourners, carrying the corpses of dragon kings or common soldiers; some laid down by those who had owned them, and had made their final journey dressed in meat and scales, so as to lose them at least among the remnants of those who had gone before.

In places they were heaped like stained snowdrifts against the hundred-foot walls, in others simply littering the floor, broken by the passage of the centuries into splinters, the splinters into crumbs, and the crumbs to dust.

“That’s a fine sight,” Finnegan murmured to himself.

“Is that all it’s about, Hob?” said a voice of age and pain. Its vibrations, breaking the bleak silence, brought tiny changes among the bones. Dust ran hissing from eye sockets of dragons dead in their mothers’ wombs.

“Deetha Maas?” Finnegan said. He already had his sword and dagger drawn. “Show yourself.”

“I’m right here,” the ancient voice told him. “Look.”

Indeed, something directly in front of him did move. It was so uncannily slow that it was several seconds before he could make sense of the form. When he did so he recognized instantly that he was looking at a creature that was, like himself, the child of a forbidden union. Finnegan had been born of a Father of Day and a Mother of Night. But Deetha Maas, the keeper of this ossuary, had been made from a far stranger marriage: that of dragon and man. For sixteen years Finnegan had been slaughtering members of the Dragon Nation, but he had always let Maas see that in some secret place he knew that he was taking the lives of innocents. And that in allowing their corpses to be recovered and brought to this place was his way of making peace with that fact.

Once, perhaps, Maas had been an intimidating figure. He stood eleven or twelve feet tall, even stooped. His head was a calamitous mismatching of the infernal reptile—the long snouted skull, the slitted eyes, the gold-green scales, the teeth in a barbed array in rotting gums—with the humanish parts, the most significant part the fact that he was standing upright on his crooked back legs. He had fashioned a primitive walking aid out of bones bound with strips of cloth, on which he leaned his entire weight only advancing with the greatest difficulty, each step exacting its price in pain. There were other subtler signs of his human aspect: small places where his scales gave way to areas of translucent skin under which a network of dark blue veins was visible, pulsing against his pale purple sinew, his dirty white hair, which grew down to his waist, and here and there portions of a beard in the same wretched condition, which sprouted from pieces of flesh between the scaly patches beneath his snout.

“I’d expected you to be younger,” Finnegan said.

“I’m alive,” Deetha Maas said. “That’s some kind of triumph surely. I got to be one hundred and thirteen. And now I presume you have come to make sure I don’t see a hundred and fourteen.”

“You were the one who called me here,” Finnegan reminded him.

“Yes. Well, we go back sixteen years, Finnegan. I thought with what’s going on above we might never have another opportunity to meet face-to-face. So I seized the offer while it was there in the dust, so to speak.”

“What offer?”

“From the true dispatcher of the message I sent.”

“If not you, then who?” Finnegan said, raising his sword. It was a heavy blade, hard to wield with any great ease. Much broader, fuller, stronger men than Finnegan had attempted to use it and found it virtually impossible to wield. But Finnegan had its measure. It made him feel lighter on his feet to have it in his hand.

If—as he suspected—that this summons from Deetha Maas was a last attempt by the surviving dragons to kill him, he would not go easily. This was, after all, the night of Midnight’s Empire. He’d seen all the stars go out as he’d made his way here. If this was not the end of the world he would be surprised—in truth, disappointed. He wanted an end to his loneliness and to his rage. And if it was going to be anywhere, where better than here? And who better to cure him of life than one of the very species who’d also cured him of hope and happiness? One last battle then, fought to the death, his own.

“I’m ready,” he told Maas.

“I doubt that,” Maas said.

“Death holds no fears for me,” Finnegan replied.

“I didn’t imagine for a moment that it did. But it isn’t death that’s waiting for you.”

“What then?”

“Your love.”

“I have no love!”

A spring of clear, sweet laughter appeared from behind a litter of bones and echoed around the ossuary. An elegantly dressed woman emerged from the shadows. Finnegan let his raised sword sink down under its own tremendous weight.

“Hello, Finn.” Boa smiled.