Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 66

Love, Too Late

THERE HAD BEEN NO dissenting voice from anywhere throughout the glyph. The plan was simple: tell the ship where it was to go, and return with all possible speed to Scoriae.

“How?” said John Mischief.

“Good one,” said John Slop. “How?”

“Easy,” said Gaz. “We think.”

“We just have to think to make it obey?” Malingo said.

“I hope—”

Suddenly, the glyph responded to its creators’ instructions without a moment’s hesitation. It sped even deeper into the Void and then—when perhaps it sensed that it was so far from Scoriae that it was no longer visible, even to the keenest eye—it swung around.

“See?” Gazza said. “Here we go! I just hope wherever Candy is . . .”

“Do you think she knows we’re coming?” Malingo said.

“Yes,” Gazza said. “She knows.”

Events of great significance were happening out there, Candy knew. But what? She had to see.

“Window. Window. Window,” Candy said. “Carrion? I need to get to a window.”

It took a moment for the request to pierce Zephario’s anguish. Again, Candy had to say: “A window.”

“What about a window?”

“I have to find one.”

Zephario didn’t waste time with more questions. He reached out, open palmed, and touched the wall.

“I’ll wait with Christopher until she comes. You go, Candy. There’s nothing more you can do. Go on. I’m ready for her. It’s going to be quite a reunion.”

Even so, Candy paused. She wanted to be there when the Hag finally came face-to-face with the two men she had almost destroyed, but who had each survived, against all expectation. Candy, however, wasn’t here to watch. She was here to do some good.

“Go!” Zephario said. “I’ll find you again, somewhere. If not in this life, then in another.”

She didn’t like leaving him, but she knew she had to. She’d done what she could; now there was other work to do. Exactly what that work was she didn’t know, but her instincts told her it would all become clearer if she could just look out at the island. Perhaps they weren’t even over Scoriae any longer, but had drifted off out into the Void.

She got to the top of the next flight, and found herself surrounded by doors, all identical: gray, metallic, unmarked. She had no idea where she was in the vessel; all she had to rely upon was her instinct. It had served her well before and if she was lucky it would do so again. She just had to focus—

It was no sooner said than done. A door opened in front of her and she was running down a corridor, calling as she ran:

“Come on, windows. Come on! I’m here. Where are you?”

The corridor divided. Again she chose. Again she ran.

“Windows. Come on. Where are you?”

There were noises coming from all around her: through the walls, up from the metal gratings under her feet, and down from the tiled ceiling: shouts, roars, squeals, screams.

And thundering behind it all, the roar of the engines that fired up the storm on the legs of which the Stormwalker trod. She could run forever in this place, she knew, and never find—

Wait! A window! She sensed its presence like an open eye in the sealed brutal prism of this monstrous place. There was a door to her left. She opened it, moved through a passage to a second door, which again she opened. It brought her into a large chamber filled with what looked like suits of armor made for giants. She threaded her way between them, and came, finally, to the window. She was looking out into the Void.

Directly below her she could see the very edge of the Abarat: the limits of reality. Beyond that there was only Oblivion: a gray place that had neither depth nor detail, simply an unending nothingness.

“Must be a different window . . .” she murmured to herself. “Can’t be this. There’s nothing to see.”

She was about to turn when she realized her error. There was something out there in the nullity. And oh, Lordy Lou, it was coming at the Stormwalker at such speed, and so directly, that she had almost missed seeing it.

The glyph was coming out of the Void, set on a collision course with the Stormwalker. There would be no error in this. Her friends, no doubt assuming she was dead, were coming back to greet their executioners with a death blow of their own—

k

Mater Motley had seen her son through Carrion’s eyes, and had realized two things in the same moment: the first, that Zephario was now here in the sacred Temple of the Nephauree, and second, that the madness she had driven him into after the fire (some pitiful shreds of a mother’s love, incongruous though it was, had kept her from murdering him) had now been driven out of him. She knew without a moment’s thought whose handiwork this was: the witch from the Hereafter had touched him, damn her. It seemed every time Mater Motley encountered the girl she found another reason to despise her.

Well, no matter. It was all easily solved. Finally she would do what she should have done years ago: kill him. Nothing vicious. Just a quick execution to get him out of the way.The neatness of the solution pleased her. She was at the door, already thinking about how she was going to slaughter him, when she heard one of the stitchling Commanders say, “Empress?”

“Not now.”

“Empress.”

“I said NOT NOW!” her voice almost bestial this time.

She turned to reinforce her point, but her gaze never reached the Commander. Instead it went to the window, or rather the formless Oblivion beyond the window, and to the shape of a vast blade being flung out of that Oblivion.

At that moment, staring at the glyph as it hurtled toward her vessel, Mater Motley was given a helping of a kind of gruel she had not tasted since her childhood: helplessness.

“I hate you . . .” she said. “You and all the worlds.” But her hatred was not enough to stop the glyph. “They mean to strike us,” she said, her voice dead.

“Then it will break apart,” one of the Commanders said.

“You can’t break something that isn’t solid, you imbecile. It’s made of magic and hope. Damn her. Damn her.”

k

“Malingo? Gazza! I love you! Don’t do this! Can you hear me? It’s Candy! PLEASE SAY YOU CAN HEAR ME! STOP RIGHT NOW OR YOU’LL KILL YOURSELVES!”

“She said she loved me.”

“Who did?”

“Who’d you think, geshrat? Her! Candy! I heard her say she loved me.”

“I’M IN THE STORMWALKER!”

“She said—”

“She was in the Stormwalker. Yes, I heard her this time,” Malingo said.

“She’s alive!” Gazza said. “She’s in the Stormwalker and she’s alive!”

“But that’s terrible! She’ll be killed.”

“No. Not my Candy,” Gazza said, with unshakable confidence in the wisdom of his beloved. “She’s clever. She’ll think of something.”

In the Temple of the Nephauree, where Candy had left the father and the son, the great roar of the Stormwalker’s engines ceased the moment the vessel touched the Void. The temple was the wellspring for every bit of magic that kept the Stormwalker aloft, and for a few seconds the conditions of space itself—cold, silent, dead—took possession of the temple. Denied the air to feed their bright flames, the candles were instantly extinguished, every last light pinched out at the same instant.

Though both the silence and the darkness were utter, the two Carrions knew that something had entered the temple: something that even they, who lived lives steeped in nightmares, had no desire to see or hear. One of the Nephauree had crossed from its hiding place behind the stars and was here, in this place.

A primal terror clutched at father and son. Instantly, the sound of the engines came roaring back. But in the few seconds of its absence, its volume had risen by orders of magnitude. It wasn’t the sound of the vessel’s engines themselves that were so loud: it was the sound of the vessel itself. The Stormwalker was reverberating.

“The ship’s shaking, Gazza!” Malingo said.

“I don’t feel anything,” said Gazza.

“Not the glyph. The Stormwalker. Look at it. It’s rocking around. What’s she making it do?”

“Lordy Lou . . .” Gazza said. “I think we’re causing it. We’re pushing a piece of the Void in front of us—”

“How can an empty place have pieces?”

“Maybe it’s not empty at all. Like space isn’t really space. It’s full of stuff. Gas. Dust. Bits of—”

“Wait!” Malingo said. “Did you feel that? Now we’re shaking.”

“I think its trash from the Void,” Gazza said. “It’s breaking up against the ’Walker, and it’s flying right back at us!”

There was evidence that his theory was right. All but invisible energies were seething in the air ahead of the glyph. The garbage of Oblivion swept ahead of the glyph’s broom, breaking like a wave against the Stormwalker then thrown back at the glyph again.

“What happens now?” Malingo said.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Gazza replied. “There’s no turning back. That I do know. In ten seconds we’re going to hit. And then—”

“We’re all going to die,” Candy said, her tone quite matter-of-fact.

She hadn’t moved from the window. Where was there left to go? She was looking over the Edge of the World, with Oblivion ahead of her, and with nothing behind except a world of melting stone. She was better off where she was, staring at the glyph that she’d helped bring into being. It was a freedom machine. It would strike the Hag’s Stormwalker so hard it would fling the death-machine back the way it had come.

In the Temple of the Nephauree, in the company of the unseen Other, Zephario Carrion held his son in his arms, quietly singing to him the “Lullaby of Luzaar Muru.”

“Coopanni panni,

Coopanni panni,

Luzaar Muru.

Copii juvasi

Athemun yezoo.

Coopanni panni

Coopanni panni

Luzaar—”

And then the two vessels struck.