Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 59

A Whisper of Infinitude

THE EMPRESS THANT YEYLA Carrion stood at the fifty-foot-wide battle window of her Stormwalker and viewed with immense pleasure and subtle satisfaction the spectacle of the Ceremonial Assembly of the Imperial Executioners. Everything was proceeding in an orderly fashion. There were eight battalions of stitchling executioners, each a thousand stitchlings strong. The excess of knives to hearts was intentional, a precaution taken in case the number of condemned turned out to be significantly larger than expected, or there was a failure to successfully kill among some portion of the executioners. Their commander stitchlings were sewn with special symmetry from remnants of finely woven fabric and the bleached skins of scaly reptiles.

The Empress stood, admiring her steamstresses’ handiwork, when a voice, entirely unwelcome, interrupted her reverie.

“Hello, Grandmother.”

The Old Hag bristled.

“Christopher.” She didn’t turn. She didn’t need to. She saw his reflection in the window as he stepped out of the shadows. “This is—”

“Unexpected? Yes. I have new scars. But then you know that. You gave them to me.”

As he spoke, a flicker of the old rage, the fury that had erupted from him on the deck of the Wormwood, reappeared. The nightmares caught the infection of anger, and became still more livid.

“I sense that you still harbor a measure of resentment toward me,” the Empress said, turning to face her grandson.

He hardly resembled at all the despairing, forsaken creature Candy Quackenbush had met in the alleyway behind the marketplace at Tazmagor. Now he was wearing fine robes, new white linens that made a perfect screen for the light from the blazing ziggurat on Scoriae. And the nightmares in his new collar threw their own illumination up onto his face as they circled his head.

“Are my reasons hard to fathom, lady?” Carrion said. “With just a few words you could have saved me.”

“You suffered. And so did I. But we recovered. We can still plan for the future.” She looked past the interwoven strands of nightmares to find the glittering gaze of her grandson. “Now you should go.”

“I don’t choose to go now, Grandmother. I want to see why you’re not going home to Gorgossium. I hear you tore my tower down—”

“I tore all of those ugly things down.”

“Why?”

“Don’t be angry about your tower, darling, please. I thought you were dead.”

“You thought no such thing. You knew I was still living, just as you knew the soul of my Princess was hidden in Candy Quackenbush. You just see the things you want to see and disregard the rest.”

The Empress offered no reply to this. At least not for half a minute or more. She just tapped on the window, watching her army. Finally she spoke: “You can take my tower!”

Carrion was genuinely shocked at the proposal.

“I can . . . take it?”

“It’s yours. I’ll have you escorted back to Gorgossium.”

Carrion laughed into his night terrors.

“Oh, you are very clever, aren’t you? You can’t slip out of this so easily. I want to see what you’ve got hidden in Scoriae.”

“Enemies, Christopher. Just the same old enemies. Only in an hour they’ll all be dead. Every last one of them.”

“Ah. Now I see. A knife for every heart.”

The Old Mother nodded, the weight of the years and the crimes and the betrayals heavy upon her.

“Yes, a knife for every heart,” she confessed. “Are you happy now? I am about to do the last and bloodiest business of a very bloody time. You needn’t witness it.”

“No, but I will. You may keep your fine tower, lady. I want to see this business to the very end. Then you can deny me no part of the spoils. For my hands will be as stained red as yours.”

“Then come,” she said. “But they all die. Understand that. All of them die, no exceptions.”

“Of course not, lady,” he said as though he had ever been the compliant student, learning the ways of the Empire. “What must be done must be done.”

“You want all of them out in a single glyph?” Zephario said.

“There’s no other way to do it. There are thousands of people here.”

“It’s impossible.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It’s never been done.”

“Maybe not. But that doesn’t make it impossible. The two of us working together . . .”

“I’m no magician,” he said.

“Well, then why do I get such a buzz of power off you?”

“Maybe it’s the cards.”

“I’m holding the cards, Mr. Carrion, so try again. We have very little time. Tell me about the Abarataraba.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Not very much,” Candy said. “I know what it isn’t. It’s not like the Almenak. It’s not a guide to magic. I think maybe it’s magic itself. Am I right?”

“Well, to an extent, yes. Wherever there’s the Abarataraba, there is magic. A lot of magic.”

“Is ‘a lot’ enough?”

“Enough to fuel the creation of a glyph to carry all these innocent people away from here before their executioners arrive? If I had an entire book, the answer would be yes. More than enough.”

“But you don’t.”

“No,” Zephario said. “No.”

“You have a piece?”

“A piece of a page.”

Disappointment crossed Candy’s face.

“You have one piece of one page?”

“I know it seems like a small amount but it isn’t. Each book had eight pages. Each page was square, and divide: eight horizontally, eight vertically.”

“Sixty-four squares on each of eight pages. That’s . . .” She closed her eyes to do the calculation in her head. “. . . that’s sixty times eight . . . is four hundred and eighty, plus eight times four . . . is thirty-two . . . so that’s . . . five hundred and twelve. What does that even mean?”

“It brings us back to eight again.”

“How?”

“Five plus one plus two.”

“Equals eight. Okay. So what’s the big deal about eight?”

“If you turn the number on it’s side, it’s infinitude.”

“Oh, that little squiggly sign. I suppose that is more or less an eight, isn’t it? Where’s this all going?”

“I only have a little piece. But it’s a piece of an infinite thing. So it too is infinite. At least in theory.”

“Your piece of paper. What does it say?”

“Nothing. There are no words in the Abarataraba.”

“Then what’s in it?”

“Squares. Lots of squares, filled with color. And it is in the energy between the pieces that the magic ignites.”

“I want to see it.”

“I’m not sure you should.”

“What? Now you don’t want to show it to me?”

“It’s unpredictable.”

“All right, but we don’t have a lot of time. We agree on that, right?”

“Yes.”

“So unless you—”

“All right, all right,” Zephario said. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. I hope this isn’t more power than you can handle.”

He reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope made of coarsely woven cloth, pressing it into her hands. There was a strange fumbling moment between them when it seemed to Candy that, even though her head was telling her hands to take the package, they were refusing to play along.

“The flesh fears it,” Zephario said.

“Why?”

“Because the Abarataraba changes all that it touches.”

“I’m not afraid of change,” Candy said, her voice no longer playing tricks.

“Then take the magic wisely and regret nothing.”

That sounded like good advice, even to Candy’s reluctant hands. They accepted the envelope, and now resigned to the consequences, whatever they might be, they opened it up.

There was a piece of thick paper—perhaps four inches square—inside it. She saw red first, brighter than the hull of any ship she’d seen plying the waters of the Izabella. A blue current had caught it up, and it burst against one of the sides, shattering into blue and green. Not one blue, but a thousand, and green the same, every fleck of paint that the brush deposited a variation on the originating note.

“Be careful,” she heard Zephario say.

She glanced up at him, but her gaze never focused on his face. It slipped over his shoulder, through the crowd of prisoners and up over the fence, slipping through the coils of barbed wire on top of the boundary fence, and out, across the wasteland that lay between the camp and the slopes of Mount Galigali. It ascended in a heartbeat, up the steep slope. Her eyes had no interest in studying the barren heights, however. There was something above the volcano that had claimed their attention.

There was a storm up there, vast and implacable, moving in with the obscene certainty of a blood-hungry army. There was thunder in it, but it wasn’t a natural thunder, rising up to crack the sky then falling away again, muttering its complaint as it retreated. No, this was the churning thunder of an endgame machine; a funeral march played for those about to die. It neither cracked nor complained; it simply grew louder as its source approached.

“Oh, Lordy Lou,” Candy said very softly.

“What can you see?”

“The biggest storm clouds I’ve ever seen. It’s ridiculous how big they are. And that thunder.”

“That’s not thunder,” Gazza said as he climbed down the boulder, the rest of the group following closely behind.

“Who are they?” Zephario quickly demanded.

“They’re fine,” Candy said. “They’re my friends.”

“Nobody’s fine. Not around this much power.”

“Well, it’s too late.”

Gazza was staring at the Abarataraba.

“It’s so beautiful,” he said.

“See?” Zephario told Candy. “What did I tell you? Give me the piece back.”

“Let me look at it,” Gazza demanded.

“No,” Candy said. “We have to hurry. You see that storm? Motley’s in there somewhere. Her and the stitchlings she’s bringing to execute us.”

“Mother . . .” Zehpario whispered.

With those two syllables, Zephario gained everyone’s silent attention. It was Malingo who broke it.

“Are we supposed to trust him?” Malingo said. His nostrils were widening ever so slightly, as he suspiciously inhaled the scent of Carrion the Elder. “I’ve had bad experiences with Carrions.”

“My mother has a lot to answer for,” Zephario said. “And it will be up to you to make sure she doesn’t get to keep her Empire. She’s murdered a lot of innocent people to get it.”

“We can talk about the future once we have it in our hands,” Candy said.

“And how do we do that?” Malingo said.

“A glyph,” Candy said with certainty.

“A glyph? How are we going to keep all these people from asking stupid questions and getting in our way?”

“Why would they get in our way?”

“Because they’ve never made a glyph before and we don’t have time to explain.”

“Just because it’s never been done before doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We just have to spread the word. Very quickly.”

Candy looked back at Zephario, who must have sensed her gaze on him because he said: “Go on. You’re doing just fine.”

“Mr. Carrion gave me a piece of magic. And we’re going to use it to spread the gospel of the glyph. It’s either that or waiting for the executioners to arrive.”

“Well, that’s an easy choice,” Gazza said. “Let’s spread the gospel.”