Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 74

The Hammer of the Nephauree

“CANDY . . .”

Gazza was there, standing a little distance away from her, as though he wasn’t entirely certain that whatever he’d just witnessed happening was finally over, now that she was out of the fugue state that had put such a strange expression onto her face.

“It’s all right,” she said, looking up at him. She let him study her a while, to reassure himself that he did indeed have his Candy back with him. “I’m all right.”

“That thing . . .”

“The Nephauree?”

She glanced back over her shoulder. There were little bursts of brightness in the clots in the cloud of the Nephauree, as though its vast gaseous intelligence was speaking to itself, turning over possibilities.

“She instructed it to leave no witnesses,” Candy said.

“So now it’s going to kill everybody?”

“I would think so. If you were Empress of the Abarat would you want anyone—even a stitchling—to be able to report what they’d just seen? Poor Malingo. He’s already gone. I’m afraid we’re going to be following him very soon.”

“You’re not giving up?” Gazza said. He sounded appalled. “You, Candy Quackenbush? You can’t give up. What about the people whose lives you saved? The people here, thousands of them.”

“They . . . saved themselves.”

“Well, perhaps. But you showed them how to go on . . . and why.”

He looked away from her and attempted to clear his own eyes of tears with a quick wiping of his cheek.

“Please, Gazz . . .” she said.

“None of this was an accident, Candy; you meeting me, us coming here. I know you think you just brought more bad things here than good. And maybe Malingo would still be alive. But maybe he’d still be waiting for somebody to find him, and show him how to escape the wizard forever. You told me once, do you remember, not to think always of how something can happen. Only know they do.”

“I’ve got nothing left in me, Gazza. I couldn’t conjure a peanut, never mind a glyph.”

“We can still find a way out of here.”

“I don’t see how. We’re trapped.”

Behind them was the Void; in front of them the liquid fire of Mount Galigali, and to either side of the island the spumy waters of the Izabella, pouring off over the Edge of the World into Oblivion. Candy was right. There was no way out.

Meanwhile, the Nephauree was responding to Mater Motley’s last instruction; its virtually passive state became suddenly activated by the prospect of slaughter. The eruptions of light within each of the clotted areas threw out filaments of light, like lines drawn between constellations in the roiling darkness of the Nephauree’s internal universe.

As each line found its destination and moved on to the next, its brightness intensified, as though some vast mathematical equation was being solved in this geometry; a theorem concerned, paradoxically, with the ordered escalation of chaos. The speed with which the calculations took place continued to increase; it was only a matter of time before it reached critical mass.

“We’re not just going to stand here and look at it, are we?” Gazza said.

“No.”

“So we’re going?” Gazza said very quickly and softly.

“Yes.”

“Turn and run?”

“Better not to run, I think. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

“Got it,” Gazza said.

But the stitchlings, having been betrayed by their Empress once again, despite her promises of high remuneration, were beginning to understand that the Nephauree intended to massacre them as well, and took flight.

The Nephauree knew not where to begin its work of destruction. Finding a small window, together Candy and Gazza began to retreat, step after slow step over the baking earth. They had taken nine steps when the connection of black constellations ceased. The roiling motion in the interior went on, but now the darkness was being drawn toward a single place in the configuration. If the thing had an eye, then perhaps this was it.

“It’s watching us,” Candy said.

“Yeah, I get that feeling too.”

“Maybe we should . . .”

“Stop moving?” Gazza suggested.

“Yep.”

They stopped. It didn’t seem to help much. The eye continued to draw in strands of darkness from all around it. The point was very soon going to be reached where it could get no darker, nor any denser. Then surely, its killing power would fly.

The darkness flickered. Candy glanced at Gazza, and as she did so one of the stitchlings to the right of the creature lost its nerve, and turned to run. The Nephauree turned too. Not its entire body, just that little part within which the dark-amassing eye was set. A brief glance, sending a blur of shadows forth, and the stitchling—which had been one of the bigger brutes—was gone, as though the darkness had simply devoured it. Candy and Gazza turned and ran. And it hurt. Oh, how it hurt! Though the channeling of Zephario’s soul had been traumatic, and Candy’s body ached just about everywhere, it was, strange to say, a good hurt, a pain that made her aware of how alive she was, and how good it felt to be alive.

That was something worth running for, wasn’t it? To have more life, yes, more time to see the miracles of the Hours, and to help heal its wounds, more time to keep the company of the young man who was running as hard as she was beside her. All this raced through her mind as her body, filled with fury and gratitude, carried her over the broken ground—all this, and one other thing: the mystery of the Twenty-Fifth Hour, the Time Out of Time. There was a mystery being guarded there about which she knew nothing, except that it existed, and that she would never know the Abarat until she had solved it.

So much still to do: to explore, to solve, to feel. She couldn’t die yet!

But it was hard ground to race over, and they would have stumbled several times if each had not had the other to keep them from falling. They had a third companion, though Candy had not yet glimpsed it yet. One of the Abaratian seagulls had apparently decided to keep them company as they ran. Candy could hear its huge wings flapping somewhere overhead, and once she thought she saw it for a moment but it was such a brief glimpse—and what she saw was so large and preposterous—that she assumed her hallucinating senses were playing tricks. There was no doubt that the bird was keeping up with them, however. The more distance they were able to put between themselves and the Nephauree, the louder its wingbeats became. Finally, Candy slowed long enough to glance back. It was hard to judge how far they’d come.

The landscape had changed, even in the short time they’d been running. The wind had shifted, and the smoke from the volcano was drifting north, toward the Edge of the World. It obscured almost completely the remains of the Stormwalker, along with most of Mount Galigali’s northern flank. It only thinned out as it came close to the Nephauree. Or was it that the smoke had been consumed by the creature? That made sense. There was a jaundiced taint to the Nephauree now, as though it had somehow inhaled all the sulfurous filth in the cloud, and plucked up by its own devices shards of white-hot stone that hung like nascent stars in the Nephauree’s universe.

She took all this in—the smoke, the stolen yellow tainting the Nephauree, the bright white stars—in one brief glance. Then, realizing what she had not seen, looked again.

The stitchlings had gone. The burning ones, the ones that had just a flicker of fire here and there, and even those that had emerged from the wreckage whole: all of them, gone. The Nephauree had destroyed them all. Now the Nephauree had nothing left to delay it. Candy and Gazza were its only targets. And after them it came.

Candy didn’t look back a third time. She didn’t need to. She could feel the motion of the alien as it closed in on them; a profound disturbance in the ground over which she and Gazza were running.

There were people coming to meet them from the crowd of survivors at the far end of the island. And leading that crowd was John Mischief, arms outstretched. The gesture was optimistic, but the expression on his face was not. Even at this distance Candy could see that Mischief’s eyes were looking past Candy and Gazza. He was looking at the Nephauree. And he could see something terrible beyond words was about to happen.

“Bad news,” the bird said. “It’s attacking.”

Candy’s heart jumped, hearing the voice of the creature.

“Malingo?”

She slowed her run looking for the bird and, failing to find it, stopped entirely. Suddenly, down it swooped to hover in front of her. It was indeed Malingo. Or rather his head, the wound of his neck closed up and the leathery outgrowths on either side of his head flapping to keep him in the air.

“You’re alive!” Despite their desperate situation she couldn’t help but laugh: “Ha! Look at you!”

“This is how geshrats are born,” he said. “Heads with wing-ears. Our bodies are replaceable. I’ll just grow a new one when this is all over.”

“You never told me.”

“You never asked.”

“Well, that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” said John Moot.

“I disagree,” said John Serpent.

“Of course you do!” said John Mischief.

“Hey! I’m glad Malingo’s alive too,” Gazza said, “but we still have a problem.”

The Nephauree was no longer pursuing them. It had halted, twenty yards or so from Candy, Gazza and Malingo. Though Candy had seen countless images of power in her journeys through the Abarat, she’d never witnessed anything quite the equal of this. It was immense: a looming mass of contradictions. Despite its gaseous-liquid form there were places where the clotted darkness had a steely sheen to it, and others where it seemed the fine lines she’d seen drawn on its darkness had been etched there on countless previous occasions, an intricate matrix of line upon line upon line, darker even than the darkness into which they’d been scratched.

“Oh dear,” said John Fillet.

“What’s it doing?”

“Nothing good,” Candy said.

There was an insistent downward motion to the darkness now, the force of its substance pressing upon the solidified lava. It cracked open: jagged ruptures in the ground, which rapidly spread toward Candy and Gazza. There was nothing mysterious about either the motion of the fissures or of the light blazing out of them. The fissures were under the control of the Nephauree and they opened onto the molten magma that ran beneath the island.

Their way back to Mischief and the rest of the survivors was now denied. The widest of the fissures—seven feet wide and getting wider—had clearly been created to cut them off from their friends. They were being herded toward the northwestern corner of the island, where the waters of the Sea of Izabella became a roaring-white frenzy as they plunged helplessly on past the coast of Scoriae and over the Edge of the World. There was no real shore. The black lava rock simply sloped a little steeper before it met the panicking waters as they went to meet Oblivion.

The Nephauree was a stranger to itself, its mind a shadow on the wall of a chamber where the worst atrocities one living thing could visit upon another were commonplace. All it knew was the processes of fear, and how to multiply them. In the case of the young witch and her friends, it simply drove them back toward the waters until they were trapped between two unpleasant deaths: to be plunged into the white waters of the Izabella and drowned, or to drop into one of the fissures and be cooked alive.

At least, this had been its master plan. But the fracturing of the ground wasn’t proceeding as speedily as it had planned. There were more urgent claims upon its time right now than watching the little witch perish. It had come here to witness the elevation of the woman Mater Motley, into whose hands its species’ priests had put great power, for reasons more to do with their own Grand Designs than in service of her Imperial ambition. But she had underestimated the enemy, despite the elegance of her plotting.

The battle had been messier than the Nephauree had anticipated, but it had been won in the end. Even so, the priests who had dispatched the Nephauree here would not be pleased with the way things had gone. The sooner they had this news, the sooner they could make whatever strategic changes they judged appropriate. So the Nephauree could not afford to linger any longer. It needed this business with the girl and the fisherman over with, once and for all.

It needed to break the ground more effectively. And for that, it already had a plan. It willed its body to exude two horns of matter, into which it rerouted the darkness that had been dropped into its bowels. Now that same weighty darkness climbed up into the “horns” it had formed, turning them into vast hammers.

And down they came: two hammerheads of darkness that slammed into the wounded ground! Instantly, a fresh network of fissures appeared from the place where its hammerheads had landed. They zigzagged toward Candy and Gazza, separating them from the Johns, and causing every crack that had already gaped between the Nephauree and its victims to become even wider, creating a network of new fissures that drove the witch and her friends back and back and back, until they were at the top of the narrow shore that led down to the water’s edge.

The Nephauree lifted its hammerheaded horns again, reaching up even higher than it had previously, and brought them down like a judge slamming down his gavel to pass the final sentence. The shock wave it sent made the ground to gape everywhere, causing the tiny parcel of shore where the witch and her friends stood to be separated from the rest of the ground.

“We’re in trouble,” was all Candy could say.

Then the waters tugged at their little portion of ground with so much strength that it could no longer resist the demand. It parted from the rest of the shore with a violent shudder that threw Candy and Gazza to their knees.

Then the current caught it, and it was borne inexorably toward that place where the Sea of Izabella was lost to Oblivion.