Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 47

Convergence

“SHE WAS HERE, CANDY, wasn’t she?”

Candy didn’t turn to look back at Malingo. She just kept staring out at the darkness of sea and sky.

“How did you know?”

“Something about your body. It was different when you were together talking to her. And then I got used to seeing you as you. Just Candy.”

“And when she came visiting . . .”

“I don’t know what it was exactly. But it didn’t seem to be a happy chat.”

“I have to go to Huffaker, Malingo.”

“Why? What’s there?”

“That’s where she’s got Finnegan. And I don’t think he’s as happy in her company as he expected to be. Not remotely.”

“How are we going to get there?”

“Not we, me.”

“There is no me, Candy. There’s only we.”

“Oh, Lordy Lou . . .” she murmured, her voice close to breaking. “What did you have to go and say that for?”

“Because it’s true. You saved me from Wolfswinkel—”

“And now you’re going to save me from the rest of the world?”

“If need be.”

“Do you want to tell the others then?” Candy said. “I know they’re all suspicious of me, and maybe they have good reason. You should tell them that what we saw out there was a part of a death-ship, a Stormwalker, Boa called it. Apparently it’s two miles long.”

“What? No. That can’t be.”

“Well we were just seeing a part of it, actually.”

“And what is it?”

“Boa called it a death-ship.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“I don’t know if anyone is interested in my opinion, but I suggest that the best thing everybody can do is just lay low. There are terrible things happening out there right now.”

“I’m sure.”

“But it won’t last forever. We’ve got to remember that. The sacbrood are dead up there, or dying. And it’s only a matter of time before they start to decay, and a rain of brood bodies will start falling.”

“Well, that’s something to look forward to,” Malingo said dryly. “And then the stars will start showing through again.”

“Oh yes. That will be welcome. But it’s going to be a grim, filthy mess, Malingo. Light or no light.” She drew a deep breath. “I’m going to walk a little way along the beach. Make a glyph.”

“I’ll talk to the rest of the folks.”

“Tell them I don’t think Boa is going to cause any more problems, will you? She’s gone, and I really don’t think she’ll be back.”

“Famous last words.”

“Well, I can hope, can’t I?”

“That you can,” Malingo replied. “That and not much else.”

The pieces of the Stormwalker converged on Gorgossium like nine vast curses carved out of gleaming black destruction. They made the Izabella crazy as they converged on the island, churning her waters up until they were white and the shadowy air through which they passed was stirred up into an insanity of its own, its particles sticking against one another, causing trillions of tiny fires to ignite all around them.

Atop the Needle Tower Mater Motley turned her clavicle, the black, polished surface of which was an unmistakable echo of the nine pieces which had now come to a halt all around the island’s perimeter. Like the air around the Needle, and the Needle itself, Maratien was shaking violently, out of sheer terror.

“What are you thinking, girl?” the Old Mother asked her.

“They’re so huge . . . how do they stay in the sky?”

“It isn’t Abaratian magic that made them,” Mater Motley said. “Or that moves them. It is the technology of Those Who Walk Behind the Stars.” She glanced down at Maratien. “Next time I go to them, you will come with me.”

“To the other side of the stars?” Maratien murmured as though she was testing the words to see if they contained the truth.

“Watch now,” the Old Mother said, raising the black clavicle higher than her head.

She uttered an instruction in a language that Maratien had never heard before. Something ignited in the marrow of the bone, and blazed from the hairline fissures, shards of flickering illumination that raced away in all directions. Time grew lazy, or so it seemed to Maratien. Her body lost its appetite for breath. The rhythm of her heart slowed to a funereal pace, from beneath the beat of which the noise of what might have been a thousand thousand thunders rose, one noise rolling into the next so that it became a single unbroken sound, its volume steadily climbing.

It was the sound of the Stormwalker’s energies she was hearing, she knew. There were lights coming in the nine parts of the ship: rows of tiny windows in one place, a vast sigil in another, as alien to Maratien’s eye as the words she’d heard the Old Mother utter had been to her ears. There were other signs of how remote from anything familiar to her the device was. As the power of the engines climbed, and the lights within the parts multiplied and grew stronger, they shed their illumination in sections of the vast machines that had not been visible until now. What had looked like plain black surfaces from a distance now showed their true faces. They were etched with elaborate detail, black on black on black.

She had no idea what she was looking at; whether this was an external manifestation of the Stormwalker’s engines, or a vast manifesto of destruction, Maratien had no way of knowing. But her instinct told her that the Old Mother’s claims to the origins of this massive creation were true. Maratien had been born into a family of sorcerers, and had been surrounded by books that chronicled the history of Abaratian magic from her infancy. But nowhere in the tens of thousands of pages, many illustrated or illuminated by artists of antiquity, had she ever seen anything that remotely resembled the monumental mysteries that were now assembled around Gorgossium. Though they had all halted without crossing the invisible boundary between sea and land, none of them were completely still, each in its own subtle fashion was preparing for the imminent convergence.

They did not need to wait long for the signal. Once again the marrow in the black bone caught fire, and again sheets of incandescence erupted from it, each striking one of the waiting pieces. The thunder of their energies suddenly rose a hundredfold. Then they proceeded to close in upon one another. As they did so, Mater Motley turned the black clavicle skyward, and a tenth sheet of brilliance escaped the marrow. Maratien followed its ascent, passing the incandescence and reaching its destination a second or two before the signal.

The Stormwalker didn’t have nine pieces, it had ten.

The tenth lay against the top of the lightless sky, its very lean body resembling a spine along the length of which perhaps fifty pairs of multi-segmented legs were arranged, the limb on the left a perfect mirror of that on the right, the symmetric severity of their design touched now and then by tics and tremors. The bone’s signal didn’t cure the waiting spine of its agitations. In a matter of seconds, the tenth part went from being a vast stillness touched by flickers of lunacy to a mass of intricate shifts and unfolding that multiplied a hundredfold, then ten hundredfold.

“It sees me . . .” Maratien said very softly.

“Perhaps so,” Mater Motley replied. “If it does, then it sees something insignificant. A fleck of living clay clinging to its Maker. Don’t think—don’t ever think you can understand it. You can’t. You can’t ever comprehend it, because you don’t know the intelligences that made it.”

The tenth part was now beginning its majestic descent from the top of the sky, and as it did the other parts picked up speed, still making adjustments in their positions so as to match more accurately the parts with which they were about to be knitted.

There was another sound behind the roaring of their many unknowable engines. There was a rising whine of power, which became sharper and harder as the pieces converged, and arcs of scarlet lightning leaped between the parts, and down from the descending tenth, to connect with the nine below: a spitting, blazing net of energies drawing them together.

Below them all, still raised high in Mater Motley’s hand, was the beacon bone. The Old Mother kept her eyes turned skyward watching the convergence. But the moment that Maratien covered her ears and closed her eyes she knew.

“What are you doing, girl? I didn’t bring you up here to have you whimper like a beaten child.”

“It’s too much.”

“Too much? This?” She reached down, her fingers suddenly horrifically long, digging into the girl’s hair and scalp. “Open your eyes!” she shrieked. “Or I’ll have the lids off them, so you’ll never close them again.”

“No, please, Mother, please! I’m just afraid!”

“I said: OPEN YOUR EYES!”

“Please, I can’t. Don’t make me.”

Mater Motley glanced down at the girl, with her face buried in the souls sewn to her gown. “Is that where you want to be, Maratien? You want to be wrapped up forever in a place you’ll be safe?”

Maratien didn’t open her eyes. She simply nodded and sobbed.

Mater Motley looked down at her with utter contempt on her face.

“You disappoint me, girl,” the Old Mother said. “You bore and weary and disappoint me. But if that’s what the child wants, who am I to deny her?”

“Thank you,” Maratien said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Oh don’t thank me too quickly, girl,” the Old Mother said. “Wait a hundred years.”

The fingers in Maratien’s scalp dug farther still, plunging into her thoughts and memories, reaching down with her needle fingers in search of the part she would keep: the soul.

Too late, Maratien understood the significance of the Old Mother’s words.

“No, Mother, please! No, I didn’t mean. No, no, no—”

Her words dissolved into a single shriek as Mater Motley’s fingers found her essence and closed around it. In desperation Maratien reached up and attempted to catch hold of the invading hand but before she could do so the will to act was taken from her in that same instance as her soul.

Out of the girl’s head the Old Mother drew the girl’s last light, delivering it into one of the countless rag dolls that were sewn to her gown, still awaiting a soul.

Mater Motley returned her gaze to the glories of the convergence that blazed above, allowing her hand to linger in Maratien’s head only long enough to raise the puppet corpse to its feet, then let it go. Gravity did the rest. The body toppled backward, and dropped off the point of the Needle Tower.

Just as the ten parts of the Stormwalker touched and fused, Maratien’s body met the ground. There it broke open, its pungent scent alerting scavengers from every direction to come partake of the feast while it was still warm.