Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 68

Deliverance

“GAZZA . . .” SAID MALINGO, SOUNDING slightly concerned.

“Yes, I know. The Stormwalker’s pushing back.”

At that moment the Stormwalker responded to the immense pressure it was under. Its violently vibrating form shifted a little to the left, and then turned at great speed. It shifted ninety degrees, its starboard flank suddenly facing the Void-cloud.

Presented with a larger target, the Void’s detritus threw itself forward with fresh insolence. The trash struck the Stormwalker, pushing it farther back.

“Oh, Lordy Lou! The Stormwalker’s moving again!”

This time there was no doubt that it was the pressure of the Void-cloud, not the Stormwalker’s engines, that was moving it. The death-ship moved suddenly and swiftly, turning a full hundred and eighty degrees as it flew, its massive engines laboring to regain some control, but without hope. The vast ship had too much momentum to be slowed.

The only thing that would stop it was the only thing that stood in its path: Mount Galigali.

“The volcano!” Gazza yelled. “It’s going to hit the volcano!” He was up now, trying to find his way out of the maze of the glyph. “We need to dissolve this thing. Now.”

Once again, everyone was in accord.

Barely taking his eyes off the vessel, Gazza stumbled out of the glyph. The vessel had behaved impeccably: carried its creators from their place of execution and into Oblivion itself, only to return them to Reality without losing a single passenger. But now the short epic of its life was over. Its energies were dissolving into the sulfur-stained air of Scoriae.

There were many among the disbanding seven thousand who took a moment to offer a prayer of thanks to the glyph in its dissolution. But neither Gazza nor Malingo were among them.

They, like Eddie, the John Brothers and Betty Thunder, had their eyes fixed on Galigali, which the Stormwalker was seconds from striking.

Mater Motley had been in the act of reaching to tear a hole in Candy’s body when the vessel lurched. But she still put self-

preservation above her desire to kill, and instead caught hold of a door frame to keep herself from being thrown to the floor.

Candy however lost her balance and fell, awkwardly and painfully, slamming her head against the wall on her way down. She tried to get up again, but the tumultuous motion of the vessel hadn’t ceased. The passageway was no longer solid; it shook so violently Candy’s eyes couldn’t fix upon anything long enough to focus.

Candy hadn’t realized how hard she’d hit her head until she tried to get up again. Her brain seemed too small for her skull, and her legs shook. When she reached out to touch the wall she found her fingers were completely numb.

“Not good,” she muttered.

She wasn’t the only one who’d lost control. So had the Stormwalker. It wasn’t just shaking and reeling, it was moving. And moving fast. She could feel its helpless speed, the way she’d felt in the car when her dad was drunk and driving like a madman, and all she wanted to do was close her eyes. It was that terrible memory—of her father—that made her defy her numb, weak body and get up. She was just in time. As Candy rose, Mater Motley reached for her a second time.

“No, Dad!”

The words came out so suddenly and so loud that the Hag paused for the briefest moment.

That was time enough. Zephario’s magic, finally reaching its destination, came up through the floor off to Candy’s right, and her first absurd thought was that somehow a bright bird had been trapped in the death-ship. The idea lasted a moment only. Then the colors melted into a single exquisite iridescence, and she felt lightness—in both senses of the word, of luminescence and of weight.

Candy saw Mater Motley’s iron hand reach into her body. But the vision was short-lived. Her gaze quickly went where her body had already gone, leaving the Hag to grasp vainly at the space where Candy’s body had been only moments before. Candy had only time enough left to see Motley’s rage: her gray-white face suffused getting paler still, while the black of her pupils spread to extinguish every last gleam of whiteness in her eyes.

She’d lost again. Candy was gone. Small though the fragment of the Abarataraba was, it was big enough to reverse the route that had carried her aboard the vessel in the first place, melting all that lay in the way of her escape: ceilings and floors, creatures and cargo, all parting like smoke when Candy approached.

The Abarataraba pulled her out of the vessel, and for ten, eleven, twelve seconds Candy was held in the air, suspended only a few feet clear of the Stormwalker’s speeding underbelly, as it continued to hurtle toward destruction. The ground was a jagged grid of lightning, discharged by the Stormwalker in a desperate attempt to slow the vessel down. If she landed in its midst, it would have been the death of her.

So the Abarataraba kept her in the air until the vessel had passed overhead completely. Only then did it guide her down to the ground. And now, as she looked back across Scoriae to the island’s northern shore (her sight sharpened by the power blazing in her cells), she saw a reason to smile. There was a large crowd of people—she knew it to be around seven thousand—all running in her direction, from the Edge of the World. Beyond them, the last remnants of the glyph were losing every last glimmer of solidity as its final passengers disembarked. It had done its work, and now dissipated, back to the ether from whence it had been borne.

The moment of calm was indeed brief, interrupted almost instantaneously by a din of destruction that shook the ground on which Candy was standing. She turned so quickly she had time to see the Stormwalker plow nose first into the crater where the peak of Mount Galigali had once been, now a ragged wound spitting fire and stone hundreds of feet into the air.

There the vessel came to rest. In a happier world all would have been put right. The evil-doers delivered into an all-consuming fire, and those who had been saved from execution free to return to their homes, lives and loved ones unharmed.

But this was not that happier world.