Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 49

Of Those Who walk Behind the Stars

THOUGH THE OLD MOTHER had not known when she would have need of the Stormwalker, nor precisely to what purpose it would need to be put to when that time came, she had laid meticulous plans for how things were to proceed. It was crewed by three hundred and fifty stitchlings, and another four thousand were in the belly of the ship: massive legions of warriors, ready and waiting to go. They weren’t simple mindless cannon fodder. Far from it. They had been created to make war with the utmost ferocity and intelligence; war so terrible that once made would never be allowed to happen again, because the memory of its horrors would be so grim.

In addition, she had on board one member of that species who walked behind the stars. Its name was ninety-one syllables long, but it answered to Nephauree. The physical form it presented to her was an illusion: a thin wavering line of smoke-shadow, standing three times her height. Of its true form, she knew nothing. Once she’d made the error of demanding that she see it as it actually was, and the experience had almost made her ready to stab out her own eyes. The experience had been so traumatizing, she remembered nothing of what she’d seen, but she knew what lay just a few vibrations of vision beyond the smoke-shadow was a thing so vile, so repugnant, so utterly without beauty or virtue, that no mind could witness it and remain sane. It was an engine of venoms and despair.

The Old Mother was quite happy with this. She had no use for mercy or tenderness. She had given herself to the service of darkness and despair the day she had set fire to the mansion containing her entire family, murdering all those within, except for her baby, Christopher, whom she had raised after her own unholy fashion, educating him in all the joyless wisdom of her rotted heart.

But the teachings had failed. He’d fallen for Boa like a witless adolescent, giving her some of the most potent workings in Abaratian magic as tokens of his undying affections. Had Mater Motley not been more powerful she would have taken this betrayal of her trust more heavily. But Those Who Walk Behind the Stars had given her access to power that made Abaratian magic seem inconsequential. A power as old as Death itself was their muse. And what better proof of how inspiring this power was than the vessel in which the Old Mother presently traveled. The Stormwalker was full of the Nephauree’s genius for death dealing. One such creation was a vast display of the archipelago, which floated on the air before her, with the internal systems and structures of each Hour all rendered visible, so that, should it be her will to destroy an island completely, the maps knew of their frailties and would know exactly where to direct the missiles.

She studied it now, a thirty-foot-long tapestry, which looked as though it had been painted on fog with pastel luminosity. The things that were darkness were only a piece of the knowledge the tapestry provided. It also showed her what emotions were rife in the Hours. A simple map might have shown her the shape of an island, but never the feelings of those who lived there. This schematic showed the glad news that the islands were drowning in panic and terror. Fiends held sway over the ruins of what had once been places of calm and delight.

There were monsters in Babilonium now, walking the boardwalks. And the Legendary City of a Thousand Fiends, a creature that stood half a mile high, and was home—as its name implied—to ten hundred fiends, had been seen moving in the unpopulated wastes of the Island of the Black Egg. Meanwhile, in the southwest, The Great Head was no more than rubble, destroyed by some monstrous being summoned from the deeps of the Izabella. The Council who had once met in its towers, and written the entire laws of the islands and kept the peace, were now drowned or crushed in the rubble.

All the while, Mater Motley’s Arrest Squads continued to collect up anyone who was on the list of those whose names (and there were thousands) appeared on the List of the Empress’s Enemies. They continued to be shipped to the camp behind Mount Galigali, where the other device that the Nephauree had devised for her was being constructed: the Great Eraser of Souls, which was designed to put an end to every individual who had ever raised their voices against her, or that her prophetic seamstresses warned her would do so in the future.

There remained only two thorns in her side, both of which she and her legions, supported by the fury of the Stormwalker, would deal with. One was the garish nonsenses of Commexo City, where the Kid ran riot. The other was the Twenty-Fifth Hour.

She would leave the Time Out of Time until the last.

“To Commexo City then,” she murmured.

The Stormwalker heard her instruction. Walking on legs of lightning, scorching the earth black when it set one of its limbs upon an Hour, or boiling the waters of the Izabella to steam when it set one of its feet upon the sea, it turned its immensity toward Pyon, where Commexo City shone defiantly in the murk of Midnight.