Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 52

Atrocities

IF A STRANGER HAD wandered into the battle-scarred streets of Commexo City at about that time, they would surely not have been blamed for thinking they had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and found themselves in the clutches of a nightmare. Even though there were fires consuming many of the fine, fancy houses along the brightly lit boulevards, nobody was attempting to extinguish them. There were bodies sprawled on the streets and sidewalks, some apparently the citizens of this noble city, unarmed and dressed for anything but sudden death, killed by shrapnel or bullets and left to lie where they’d fallen.

There were sights even more terrible, that this wandering stranger would have found it difficult not to see, given how numerous such horrors were. And though they might have tried to look away, the scene and the tragic story it left half-told would be imprinted on their memory forever, so that even at life’s end, when they no longer knew their children from a tree, they would remember being in Commexo City with the death-ship filling the sky, and the buzzing of the innumerable flies.

Inside the Commexo Building, there was another scene, just as profound. The drowned lay where the draining waters had left them. The Empress’s seamstress attendants waited in the room, idly watching events unfold across the Abarat. The seamstresses were scarcely strangers to things fearful and abhorrent. They had been chosen by the Old Mother to accompany her into Commexo City because they had each in the course of their lives proved as unrepentantly vicious and enthusiastically cruel as she. Or at least very nearly so. But even they, who knew the bellies and bowels of the monstrous as well as heart and head, stood in mute awe and astonishment, seeing what atrocious glories their Empress’s Midnight had called up out of hiding.

Some of these scenes the seamstresses knew; they were the stuff of nursery horrors. Queen Inflixia Grueskin was one such: she was the monstrous Queen of Efreet according to legend, who tended her blood garden where for centuries she’d attempted to grow the missing anatomy to fill the empty cage of her body. She was a terror to frighten children no longer. She was real. There she was, up on one of the screens, in all her ghastly splendor.

On another screen, a tree called the Brakzee, which was by reputation the oldest in the archipelago, had become a gallows from which hundreds of ordinary people had been hanged. This was not the work of some vile demonic force. The executioners had been, until the disappearance of the moon and stars, the neighbors of those they’d hanged.

Nor was the incident at the Brakzee tree an isolated case. All across the islands fear caused ordinary people to do monstrous things. One of the seamstresses, going from screen to screen to screen, thinking each time she’d found the worst horror, but then discovering something still more atrocious said: “This is the End of Everything.”

It was Mater Motley who set her right.

“This is the end of their world. The purposeless ones who wanted only to live their lives. Their time is over. Midnight has begun. And out of their hiding places now come the Heirs of the Lightless Hour. See! They come to inherit this broken, bloody world and rule in my name.”

On screen after screen, beings that the women had never seen before appeared from their sanctuaries: monstrous creatures that had never appeared in any bestiary of the Hours, nor ever would. Now they had a world to rule by the laws of chaos. A slothful slug lay upon a slimy rock with a raw tongue-tail and hooks for hands; a two-legged beast with a quadruped beside it, walked through a place on Obadiah where a deluge of fire rain was falling; two human-headed birds sat on a dead branch, debating the weather—

Suddenly, from out of the sealed Chamber, the Empress’s command—

“To me! Women!”

A beat, then—

“NOW!”

The seamstresses had kept up a fine illusion of indifference for the benefit of Pixler’s storm troopers but they had been ready for this moment.

Now eight of them, acting as though governed by one mind, returned through the littered passageway, throwing their collective will at the sealed doors. The hardened sealant on the inside cracked, and the doors were flung wide, pushed from behind by the weight of the water. The women were ready for its fall. They threw up a quilt of invisible patches around them, sewn together by their own hands. It was only woven fabric, like any other, but such lattices have strength in their pattern out of all proportion to the mild stuff from which they are woven. The doors smashed against the quilt and broke.

The seamstresses entered the chamber and saw what the exchange between their Empress and the Pixler-Requiax had come to. The combatants were still high above the ragged hole in the floor through which the waters of the Izabella continued to surge up, their ambition unquelled. The Empress was elevated by a pillar of seething darkness, while the frail form of Rojo Pixler was borne up by the fronds of the Requiax’s continuously regenerating anatomy, which drew up with it countless lengths of woven water. Each carried, within its length, a cord of the Requiax’s matter, through which the desires of its mind were communicated. The mind had one desire above all others: to see the monstrous woman standing in darkness before it dead. She was the enemy—not the greatest of them, to be sure. Other evil, vaster than her by orders of magnitude, was using her to gain a stronghold here in Time. That would not happen! She had to be brought down. The glittering cords of the Pixler-Requiax went about their labors, wrapping themselves around the pedestal of shadows on which she stood, and then rising through the soul-laden folds of her garment, forming a net of knotted sea around her.

“Get! It! Off! Me!” the Empress shrieked, appalled by this violation.

She couldn’t get the rest of the words out. The water ropes had climbed her torso, and there was a noose of water around her neck. It tightened.

“No!” she said, and raised the hand she’d used to seize hold of Voorzangler, its fingers sharp and dark. Only this time it was onto her own flesh that she turned her piercing fingertips, sliding them down between her throat and the noose. She pulled the water rope off her gullet, far enough at least that she could get two words out.

“Free . . . . . . me . . . . . .”

The seamstresses were already raising their hands and speaking in old Abaratian the Eight Names of the Creatrix, which would summon to them the means to liberate their Empress.

“Giathakat.”

“Juth and Junntak.”

“Kiezazaflit.”

“Enothu and Eyjo.”

“Yeagothonine.”

“Yuut.”

“Yuut.”

“Yuut.”

Even before all eight had been spoken motes of fire ignited in their hands, forming vicious instruments, far more effective at cutting than any knife. They exchanged no words. They knew their business. They came at the column of darkness on which their lady stood and cut at the silver-green waters of Pixler and the Requiax. The tools that had been the gift of the Creatrix were as efficient as they were strange. They lacerated the waters, like assassins in a world of throats. Back and forth! Up and down! The cords of water, severed, fell back into the churning flood that had produced them.

Pixler-Requiax roared his disapproval.

“You should have stayed out of this battle, women,” he roared. “It’s going to be the death of you.”

The water was still pouring up out of the ground, weaving replacement ropes as it did so. They rose up suddenly—only two of them, but many times thicker than the cords that had climbed the column. They weren’t interested in disarming the women. It was the seamstresses themselves these two ropes of water were eager to claim.

The ropes did not linger to choose which women to take; they simply took, snatching two of the seamstresses from their cutting and summarily drowning them. The remaining seamstresses were too busy at their cutting to even notice that two of their number had gone. But the Empress did.

“Sisters! Take care!” she called to them. The meaning of her words was lost in the confusion. The ropes, having drowned two already, rose up to snatch another two.

“No, Pixler!” Mater Motley cried out, her voice heard at frequencies only living waters heard. “They are just women.”

Pixler was not a man without compassion. His spirit, in the Requiax’s cold embrace, saw that the seamstresses were indeed only women. They had let go of the instruments they had been cutting with. They wanted only to live.

We should show mercy on them, Pixler said, exchanging his thoughts with the Requiax.

Mercy? asked the Requiax, searching the grid of its mind for some clue to the meaning of the word. But it was like a piece of bone, or a flame. It had no need of mercy in its being. I feel nothing in me, Pixler.

No?

No.

Pixler could hardly blame the creature for what it had never known, or needed to know. He was the one who’d baited it with his lights and noise of his heart, drowning in the deep. He was the one who’d caused the Requiax to rise up and meet the sky. So it had no mercy to offer up? Such was its state.

“Let go of my sisters!” the Empress cried out yet again.

This time, Pixler and the Requiax spoke with one united voice.

“This is its Absolute Midnight,” it said. “And in its darkness, your sisters must die.”