Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 63

Pigs

“. . . YETHASIHA.”

The stairway of fog had understood very well the urgency of Candy and Zephario’s situation. It had formed beneath their feet, and instantly closed up like an accordion, lifting them up into the belly of the Stormwalker through an open door that then closed very quickly, protecting its passengers from the explosion that peppered the hull on which they were sprawled with a number of projectiles that struck it like bullets.

They were alive. The breath had been knocked out of them, and they were a lot closer to the Hag of Gorgossium than either of them would have wished, but they were alive.

“That was quite a word,” Candy said. “I’ve never wielded something that moved so quickly—”

She stopped, silenced by the sound of two low-ranking stitchling soldiers engaged in a fierce exchange as they opened an iron door that brought them into this portion of the hold. Judging by their banter, the Old Hag’s seamstresses had devoted considerably little time to their mental capacities.

“There’s Quagmites on this vessel. I swears.”

“You and your Quagmites, Shaveos,” the other stitchling said as it sniffed the air. The sound of its voice changed suddenly. “Huh. You right. You right.”

“See! You smells it too?” said Shaveos excitedly. “That’s a Uman Been. I told you I knows it, Lummuk!”

“How’d you know what a Uman Been smells likes?” Lummuk wanted to know.

“I were on the Wormwood, whens it went the Hereafter.”

“You saw that Chickumtomb?”

“I did. I saw all that drownsd.”

“Were it horrible?”

“Oya. It were Viley!” Shaveos said gravely. “I was trown out the ship. I ended up in . . . I forgets. I still got the paper!” Candy heard the sound of the stitchling rummaging for something. “Here. Hold my knife,” he said.

This probably wasn’t a bad time to snatch a look at the enemy, Candy thought. She peered out from behind the tarpaulin-covered crates where she and Zephario had hidden and got a clearer look at stitchlings than she’d ever had before. There was an intelligence in their behavior, though not in their speech, that she hadn’t expected to see in the sacks of walking mud. And she noticed that the mud didn’t simply fill the sack, the way dirt might, rather it pushed out of little holes, as though it was constantly in the process of reinventing itself. There was something in the weave of the sack that then crawled all over the stitchlings’ forms, repairing any larger tears by crudely restitching the thread. They were, quite obviously, as she had been, Two In One: the thing occupied, and the occupying thing.

These two stitchlings in particular were chaotic, asymmetrical beings. One had an arm that ended in something more like a lobster claw than fingers, while the other, thanks to some seamstress’s whim, had no less than four hands at the end of one arm, two pairs set palm to palm, and no hand at all on the other arm.

Lobster Arm was apparently Shaveos, because it was he who now brought a tattered piece of folded paper out of the jacket of his mud-and-blood-splattered uniform. He pulled out a pair of spectacles with both lenses cracked, and peered at the map.

“This ams the place,” he said proudly. “The place I fell from Wormwood.”

“Whoaya now!” said Lummuk, obviously skeptical. “How’s that certain? What that sign sayings?”

“Sign? It sayings ‘Fort Com’!”

In less stressful circumstances, Candy might have found some humor in the stitchling’s error. He had an advertisement for the Comfort Tree Hotel in his hand.

“Was there battles?” Lummuk wanted to know.

“Was there battles? Was there battles? Nine Peep-Holes was killed just from by frights! And it was all the Uman Beens that was doin’ the crazies. I din’t do nuffin! I was just . . . smellin’ ’em.”

“And you smell ’em here now. That’s how comes you knows, huh?”

“Yeps.”

They both inhaled.

“Oh yes,” Lummuk said. “I smells it.”

“Give me my knife back,” Shaveos demanded. “I’ll cutsem!”

His knife was, in fact, a machete. He felt the heft of it, and even in the shadows Candy could see the sick smile of pleasure that came onto his face as he did so. This was a weapon he’d used. She knew it. The evidence was there in his lipless smile.

“Ready?” he said to Lummuk.

“I was stitched ready,” Lummuk said smugly.

“We gotta be ready for thems to come at us all at once. They’s vicious, these—”

His remark was interrupted by what was unmistakably the grunting of a pig. A very large pig, its grunting encouraging more noise from pigs in its vicinity.

“Oh! Piggie wiggies!” said Shaveos. “Look a’ ’em!” He pushed Lummuk aside. “I sees me some piggie wiggies, I does, I does.”

“What ams you doing?” Lummuk wanted to know.

“I wants to hug a piggie wiggie. And then maybe takes a bite. Just one bites.”

“Fooly fool! Thems not your piggie wiggies to hug and bites. Thems the Empress’s piggie wiggies!”

“She don’ts gives care how many piggie wiggies she’s has. What you think, she come up down every morning to countsem?” Shaveos replied, pulling open the cage door. He reached in. “Come on, you. You looks delish!” He talked to the pig as though he might have spoken to a baby, in a singsong voice. “Come come, piggie wiggie. Pretty piggie wiggie.” The charm didn’t last very long. When the pig failed to respond to his request, he quickly lost his temper. “Come, you vilely porkund!” he yelled, throwing the cage door open. “I needs my belly filled all up! Wally on, porkund! Wally on!”

He reached in to grab the hog with both hands. The creature squealed as it was hauled out by the stitchling and lifted up into the light. It was a big beast, its body striped orange and blue, except for its head, which was that of an albino, its flesh stark white, its eyes bloodred with long white lashes. Though it retained some porcine snout, its features were flatter than those of an ordinary pig, making the animal look almost human.

“Oh, yous is a gorgeous. Yous is! I could . . . I could—”

Apparently besieged by his own appetite, Shaveos opened his mouth, which was lined with rows of daggerlike teeth—and bit down on the animal’s neck. The pig’s squeal became even shriller. Candy kept her eyes fixed on the struggle between the diner and his dinner. It was seconds away from catastrophe, she sensed. The pig was too strong, and the stitchling too concerned about his empty belly to notice. Keeping her eyes locked on the two devourers, she caught hold of Zephario, tugging on his arm to let him know the moment of departure was near.

But before Candy could say a word, the pigs broke free, all of them squealing now.

“Backs! Backs! Dumdum poogoos!” said the fooly fool.

“Aw. Now lookee what youms done!” hollered Lummuk.

“We should move. Now,” Candy said.

“Good plan,” said Zephario.

Pigs were jumping and scrambling under them and scrambling to free themselves of two stitchlings’ grips. The chaos was good news. It distracted the stitchlings long enough for Candy and Zephario to reach the door. Their luck, however, quickly ran out. At the last minute, Shaveos flung his claw about wildly and accidentally entangled itself in Candy’s hair. The stitchling turned to see what it had snagged. Its face went slack.

“Uman Been!” the stitchling said.

He turned Candy toward him, and she was treated to her first close-up view of a stitchling’s face. It was a mixture of genius and crudity: the stitches were large and uneven, but there was an uncanny realism in the way it moved. This was no simple brute. The Todo mud that gleamed in his eyeholes, forming his shiny-wet eyes, had intelligence in it.

“I knows yous,” Shaveos said. “Chickumtomb girl! Candy Quackenbush!”

It said her name with remarkable clarity. But the words had barely escaped his lips when Candy felt a wave of force, like a narrow wind, rush past her. The air ignited all around her, just for a second, then the ring of light and power passed her by, closing like an iris as it did so. It struck both stitchlings in their chests. They loosed a shock of rage and pain. Shaveos’s claw went limp, freeing Candy’s hair from its grip.

She instantly turned to look for Zephario.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He was reaching into the interior of his jacket, mumbling to himself as he did so.

“Can I help?” she said, reaching toward him.

Though her fingers didn’t touch him, she sensed how close they were, and retreated from him with guilty haste.

“That power surge,” she said. “It was you.”

Behind her, Shaveos bellowed:

“Candy Quackenbush. She ams here!”

“Oh, great,” Candy groaned.

“Cargo Hold Nine! Cargo Hold Nine!” shouted Lummuk.

“I’ll killser!” said Shaveos.

And so saying, he stood, picking up his machete as he did so, and ran for Candy, swinging his machete in the air.

She saw the machete coming, and tried to throw herself out of its path through the door into the next hold. But the thresholds of the doors between the holds were abnormally high, and she stumbled. She might well have cracked her shinbones had she not reached out and caught hold of the door frame. Shaveos swung at her again, and this time she might have perished had he not lost hold of his dinner. At that moment, a pig a charged into him, knocking him over, and taking Candy with him in the process.

Candy was shoved aside by the stitchling’s bulk. She lost her grip of the door frame and fell back among the pigs. There were several seconds when all Candy could see was a blur of wet snouts and curly pink tails, then she sat up, in time to see Lummuk stagger away from Shaveos, whose machete was buried deep in Lummuk’s head: so deep that the blade was entirely hidden for several inches of its length before its painted end could even be seen.

Shaveos reached out and caught hold of the machete’s handle as his companion toppled backward. This had two consequences. One, it stopped Lummuk from falling backward; indeed it pulled him back into an upright position, where he teetered for several seconds, while Shaveos twisted the machete this way and that, attempting to free it.

Candy was watching Shaveos’s face when he finally worked the blade loose. She saw his expression shift from frustration to pleasure—there! The blade was coming free!—only to decay seconds later into puzzlement, more than puzzlement. Fear. And Candy knew why.

It was only common sense.

She saw Shaveos try to push his machete back into the hole he’d just unstopped, like a man with a fat cork trying to fit it back into the narrow opening of a bottle from which a djinni was escaping. It was a lost cause. Still he pushed, and as he did so the mud from Lummuk’s head leaped at him. So fast. So horribly fast! Tentacles, black as the stitchling’s eyes had been, but shot through with smears of vivid color that had surely never been in gray-brown muck mined on Gorgossium. Shaveos knew he was in trouble. He let go of the machete and instead used his free hand to stem the flow of mud.

“Lummuk! Shaveos ams sorry! Accident! Oopsies! Lummuk! She ams to blame! The—” He drew breath and yelled: “CANDY QUACKENBUSH!”

The mud that had once been Lummuk didn’t care about his explanations. It continued to crawl up Shaveos’s arm, leaping over his fingers, and then—just as Shaveos drew breath to yell Candy’s name one more time, Lummuk oozed into his open mouth.

Candy shook herself out of her trance of curiosity and turned to Zephario.

“We should get—” she started to say.

But the blind man had already gone.