Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 67

Yat Yut Yah

GAZZA’S THEORY—THAT THE DETRITUS of the Void, the trash of Oblivion, had somehow gathered up in front of the glyph as it speeded back toward Scoriae—was confirmed when the glyph hit the Stormwalker, pressing it closer to the gaping emptiness. The Empress’s vessel began to shudder, the motion minor at first but rapidly escalating, intensifying the assault of the detritus upon the Stormwalker. The ship’s dark armor cracked in places, and jagged pieces were torn away, their tumbling departure over the surface of the machine stripping away further pieces.

“Candy? Where are you? CANDY!” Gazza cried.

Gazza called out to her over and over, but now there was no answer. All he could do was watch the terrible spectacle of the machine in which she was trapped coming apart. It would not be destroyed quickly, he knew. The death-machine had been built, after all, to be a womb of storms. Not only to contain such birthing, but to channel their forces and to walk upon them. It would not succumb easily.

Even so, she was inside.

And she wasn’t answering him, even though he kept on calling.

“Candy? Candy? Candy?”

Standing at the window still, watching the collision, the Empress delayed going down to meet with the visitor she knew had entered the temple. The Nephauree were quickly offended; even now she should have been hurrying down to find out what this one wanted. But there was another piece of business more pressing still.

Candy Quackenbush.

The girl from Chickentown had been nothing at the beginning. Just a stupid adolescent who’d fallen off her world into the Izabella and been washed up on the shores of the Abarat. Insignificant, she’d thought; a nobody, who would somehow find her way to the Hereafter again, or would perish quickly in a world that she did not understand.

But she’d been mistaken. The girl was an enigma sealed up inside a conundrum with a tribe of puzzlements, nonsense and contradictions. And she had an uncanny knack for self-preservation, even when circumstances were not promising; even when Otto Houlihan, the Criss-Cross Man, one of the most successful assassins in the Abarat, had slipped and fallen before her.

There was no time for any more fumbled attempts. The girl simply had to die, now, in the chaos and confusion of this battle. Nobody would ever know how she’d died, or why. And as to who should do the job, she had no doubt about that. She would. Though she was an Empress now, and should have been above such squalid labor, she was the only person she trusted to do the job—the glyph, the state of her Stormwalker, even her guest in the temple—none of it mattered right now. All that mattered was to kill Candy Quackenbush. The girl was an abomination, a freak, and she would be dead within the hour. Only then, when she was looking down at the girl’s dead face—tasting her eyes and heart and liver—could she be certain that the First Empire of Midnight could begin.

The room where Candy had been standing, for reasons known only to those who had constructed the Stormwalker, was coming apart from both above and below, the metal panels of which the walls were constructed, buckling as though they were little more than pieces of tinfoil. Cracks spread across the window from left and right. Candy backed away from it, fearing it would shatter, and stumbled across the floor—which was collapsing in sections even as she crossed it—to the door. The door frame had cracked, however, and the door had been wedged closed. She wasted perhaps ten seconds trying to force it open before deciding that physical force wasn’t going to work. She was going to have to use the magical kind.

Many years before, her curious mind had plucked out of Boa’s private grimoire—for no other reason than that it was easy to remember—a wielding called the Cri Naz At. The spell was nine syllables, three of which were contained within its name.

Focusing her gaze upon the much-beaten door she recited them now.

“Cri Naz At

By Tu Hu

Yat

Yut

Yah.”

The syllables formed the image of a mallet in her head. Four syllables for its head, the other five forming its handle, which she held tight in her mind’s eye, her fingers wrapped around Tu Hu Yat Yut Yah.

The words slammed into the door, and a ragged crater four feet wide appeared in the metal. A shock of pain, all the sharper because it was completely unexpected, ran up through Candy’s hands and arms. This was something new completely: she was making a weapon with a spell, and literally wielding it. Now at least she understood what she was doing.

She gripped Yat Yut Yah even harder, and swung it with much greater force. This time, however, she was no innocent. She was entirely in the weapon—her thoughts, her news, her sinew, blood and bones. She was the bridge between the syllables and the force that it wielded. She was what turned words into action, into a force that would not be denied.

She slammed the syllables against the door

—Cri Naz At By Tu Hu Yat Yut Yah—

—and it flew apart!

Mater Motley heard the noise of the door breaking apart, but it would have meant nothing to her in the cacophony if it hadn’t been attached to a surge of power from the level below; a magical signature that she instantly recognized. The girl was right there, just a few walls away. She called out to her. If she knew that Quackenbush was close by, then surely the girl knew of her presence as well.

“I’m coming for you,” the Old Mother said.

In the Temple of the Nephauree, Christopher Carrion, ravaged by fear, whispered a flame into being. It was little more than a flicker, but it was enough to offer him a view of the ziggurat of extinguished candles.

“What are you doing?” Zephario murmured, his whispered voice carrying, despite the cacophony.

“I have to find the door.”

“You don’t want to see the Nephauree. Trust me.”

It was too late. The flame was already multiplying, leaping from wick to wick as it ascended the ziggurat, swelling to fill the temple with yellow-gold light.

From the corner of his eye—far off across the vastness of the temple—Christopher saw something no larger than a door that was opened just a crack onto a dark place. Then something that lived in that dark place threw the door open, and flowed through it, instantly swelling to become a vast incoherence, which possessed no sign of an anatomy whatsoever.

Gazing upon the Nephauree would certainly have been the death of him, but for the fact that at that very moment the blind man chose to act. He reached into his jacket, and seeing the iridescence that Zephario pulled out if it, the Nephauree unleashed a razor wire shriek that made blood pour from the blind man’s ears, nose and mouth.

It wanted what it saw in Zephario’s hand: a last fragment of the Abarataraba. And being the creature it was, it knew only one certain way to secure what it wanted. It would kill.

Sightless though he was, Zephario saw death.

Out of the Nephauree’s meaningless form came a horizontal flight of steel needles. The spears came within a hand’s length of Zephario’s skull, then they were casually deflected, blazing briefly in complaint, then flying out in all directions, dying as they fell. Even so, the Nephauree had not given up on the thought of capturing the errant shred of the Abarataraba. It unleashed another torrential shriek, which were orders of magnitude more distressing than the first. Zephario reeled away from its source though he knew he had no hope of outrunning it, nor indeed had any desire left in him to avoid his execution.

He had done all he could, made his farewells. He was ready for his trial by breath to be over, and in some place far from time and corporeality, have bright death finally begin.

With his back turned to his slaughterer he didn’t see the second descent of needle spears. And their piercing, when it came, was not as painful as the shriek of their maker had been. But the shriek was not silenced. It went on and on, his face streaming with fresh flows of blood from his eyes, like tears shed for the fact that he was not yet free. In his dying throes, he did the only thing he thought would make a difference: he sent the last fragments of his power to the girl, Candy Quackenbush.

“You’ve got nowhere left to go,” Mater Motley said.

Candy glanced back over her shoulder. The Empress of the Abarat was standing behind her, ten yards down the passageway. Everything was vibrating, much of it violently: the walls, the ceiling, the rivets in both. Only the Hag was still, uncannily still in fact, in perfect focus in a shaking world. Every detail of her dress was fixed, every doll hanging in there, each one of them a soul she had stolen, a prisoner: their suffering her constant pleasure.

“Yes is the answer,” Mater Motley told her.

“I didn’t ask a question,” Candy said.

“You were wondering whether I’m going to lock up your soul in one of my little dolls.” She smiled, showing her small gray teeth and mottled gums. “The answer is yes.”