Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 71

An Execution

CARRION HAD THROWN UP a low-resolution Distraction Shield to keep the stitchlings he was moving among from noticing him, but it scarcely mattered. They had their attentions entirely fixed upon those they were about to execute. So after a while he simply let the wielding lapse, knowing that they neither saw him nor would have cared if they had. It was only when Carrion realized that the girl from Chickentown had started to walk back toward his grandmother’s army—the expression on her face completely defying interpretation—that he repowered the shield and once again slipped out of sight.

In his invisible state he had a little time to get his thoughts in some kind of order. He no longer knew where his loyalties lay, or even whether there were any advantages to having loyalties. He had obeyed his grandmother’s instructions for many years, doing servile work much of the time, and what had that got him? Death and a bitter resurrection on a stony beach. And love? Ha, love! That had been even more cruel than loyalty. True, it hadn’t killed him. It might have been kinder if it had. Instead it had left him looking like a fool, having been tricked out of every piece of magic he’d ever learned and then left without so much as a kiss by way of compensation. He’d grieved. Oh, Lordy Lou, how he’d grieved. But more, he’d raged, the anger blazing about his heart, so that he’d had to stoop to murder in order to extinguish it.

But even that hadn’t been the end of the anguish. Fifteen years or so later, the girl from Chickentown had come into his life, their paths crossing by accident, or so he’d thought. She’d been washed into the arms of Mama Izabella, carrying—again by chance; again, so he’d thought—only to find that Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, Minnesota, carried inside her the soul of the Princess whose manipulations and infidelities had left him stripped of power and love. Now Boa’s soul no longer occupied the girl, but it seemed not to matter. She still acted as though she could stand up against his grandmother! But she was wrong. This wasn’t the same Hag of Gorgossium any longer; the vicious old woman she’d faced on the Wormwood. The Empress was a different order of power. Why didn’t the girl understand that? Why didn’t she see with her own eyes the scale of his grandmother’s ally, the Nephauree? Didn’t she comprehend how incendiary a place this had become? Not because there was a volcano spitting air and earth around them, but because three generations of the Carrion dynasty were assembled for the first time since the fire that had wiped the future of that dynasty away, and returned all the power to the oldest surviving member of that family, in whose shadow he, the youngest, had been doomed to live?

Right now this was the most volatile place in the Abarat. And however much Candy might have learned about magic from Boa, she was still, at root, an ordinary creature of the Hereafter, strong of will, no question, perhaps even extraordinary in some regard. But she was still merely human, the shadowy places at the back of her mind still haunted by the beasts that had stalked the apes from which her kind had risen up. She would never be free of that fear, Carrion thought. And that would always leave her weak when facing Midnight.

And yet still she stood there, defying his grandmother, defying her own fear. Perhaps, just perhaps, she was something new. The next kind of woman, this girl.

Such a pity, if that was so, that she was going to die.

k

The two armies met. The Empress looked at Candy without any visible emotion.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I came because I saw Zephario in pain,” Candy said. “He’s your son. Doesn’t that make you a little merciful?”

“No, girl. I cleansed myself of mercy before I went to meet the Nephauree. I knew they would smell it upon me.”

“So you feel nothing for him?” Candy said.

She had no conscious notion of why she was even asking questions, but there was a reason, of that she was dimly certain. This was family business, and like all families the Carrions had their secrets. Whenever the members of her own family had got together, it had always ended with curses and fistfights. Perhaps there was some secret here that might yet change the way this fatal game ended.

“Oh, I do feel something for him,” Mater Motley admitted. “Something like maternal affection,” she went on. “Or as close as I could ever get.”

“Really?” Candy said. Now she was confused. What was the Old Mother admitting to?

“Yes, really,” the Hag replied. She reached down and caught hold of one of the ragged dolls that hung from the front of her dress. “I want his soul here,” she said. “Close to my heart.”

Candy said nothing. The Hag hadn’t finished, she sensed. So she still had something of significance to say. When she finally spoke, it was only to say five words:

“He won’t be alone there.”

That was it, Candy knew. That was the heart of it, in those words somewhere.

He won’t be alone.

The Hag had such a terrible malice in her face. Such a profound perversity. But why?

He won’t be—

Candy looked down at the doll, then back up at the Old Mother again, hoping to study the woman’s face a little while longer. But Mater Motley was already turning away from her so as to focus all her energies upon the broken figure of Zephario.

“Look at you; so old, so broken. I held you once, against my breast.” She began to walk back toward him. “Die now,” she said softly. “Give up your soul to me.”

She very slowly reached up toward him, as though she was capable of pulling his soul out of him. By way of response Zephario let out an anguished sound, something between a howl and a sob, the cry of a man losing his mind.

It was more than Candy could bear. She couldn’t just stand there and let the Hag go on tormenting him. She had to do something. What that something was she had not the remotest notion, but she had will, and she was free to use it. Whatever choices fate put in her head or heart or hands she’d use. Anything to stop the suffering.

She started to move toward the Hag, who was far too busy enjoying the anguish of her own flesh and blood to bother looking back over her shoulder.

“Stop that!” Motley said to her son. “It won’t do any good. I’m your mother, Zephario. I brought you into the world and now I’m going to remove you from it.”

Every despicable word of this quickened Candy’s step. She would do whatever she could to make the Hag regret her cruelty, she swore to herself. But that was more easily said than done, wasn’t it? Fate hadn’t provided her with any means to bring Mater Motley to her knees. She was up against the Empress of the Abarat with bare hands. But if that was how it had to be, that was how it had to be.

Without even thinking about what she was doing, she leaped, the very last traces of the Abarataraba’s magic lending her jump power it would never have had without it.

Without looking, the Hag turned, striking Candy with the back of her hand.

“Creeping up on me, girl?” She struck Candy a second time, and having nothing with which to shield herself from the blows, Candy was knocked to the ground, the breath beaten out of her. “I am so thoroughly sick of you,” she said, kicking Candy with unrestrained venom. “I’m going to kick you until your heart stops beating.”

She proceeded to make good on her promise.

“You.” She kicked.

“Stupid.” And again.

“Little.” And again.

“Nobody.”

“Stop it!” Malingo yelled.

Candy saw him from the corner of her eye, stumbling forward to put himself between Candy and the Hag’s assault. He distracted Mater Motley long enough to give Candy time to draw breath, but his intervention cost him dearly. The Empress cast a glance toward two of the stitchlings nearest to her and snatched the blades they were carrying out of their hands. Candy used the drawn breath to tell him:

“Run! Malingo! RUN!”

But even if he’d been willing to abandon Candy, which he wasn’t, his death sentence had been written. The blades came at him from left and right. Candy heard him cry out, just once, then the blades cut at him with horrible speed, slicing his head from his neck, his hands from his wrists, his arms from his torso—Candy’s horror and fury left her speechless, which was no bad thing. Not a scrap of her energies was wasted on words. All of it went straight from her heart to her hands. She reached up and grabbed hold of Mater Motley’s crowded skirts, hauling her aching body to its feet.

She had killed Malingo.

Her beloved Malingo, who had said he would be with Candy forever, Midnight or no Midnight. But the Hag had taken him from her. Snatched him away with a casual gesture, as though his life was worthless, his love was worthless, as though his body was no more than a slab of meat and she the butcher, casually cutting it up—

As she climbed, Candy found Mater Motley’s gaze, and for just a fraction of a second she saw the Hag recoil, her high regard for her Imperial Self shocked when it met such an intensity of hatred as it found pouring from Candy’s eyes.

It wasn’t enough, of course, to prick the Hag’s vanity.

She had killed Malingo.

No death was too terrible to revenge such a slaughter. Candy wanted to turn the Hag’s bones to blazing wood and her blood to gasoline, to watch the Old Mother consumed by the very element she’d used to kill her own flesh and blood all those years before. But she didn’t have sufficient magic to make such an execution happen. She’d have to do whatever damage she could do with her hands and fingers: gouge out the Old Mother’s vicious eyes and tear her lying tongue out by its rotting roots. She’d start with the eyes—

But the Hag wasn’t in the mood to die today. She reached up and caught hold of Candy’s hand, her grip so tight, and tightening still, that she plainly intended to grind Candy’s finger bones to dust.

With one hand holding Candy firmly, she reached out with the other. Her Imperial dignity was once again intact. And so was the power that accompanied it. She murmured a syllable or two, and one of the wide-bladed knives that had taken Malingo apart came to her outstretched hand. She closed her fingers around the sticky handle.

“I’ve had more than my fill of you, Miss Chickentown.”

So saying, the Empress raised the knife high above her head.

Candy refused to give the old woman the satisfaction of seeing her afraid. Instead she kept climbing, grabbing hold of whatever she could find, whether it was antiquated fabric of the dress or one of the dolls. Her bruises ached and her head throbbed, but not once did she take her eyes off Mater Motley’s turkey-neck throat, even as the knife came whistling down.