“This is a pleasant surprise,” Carrion said, his tone carrying not the least hint of genuine pleasure.
Mater Motley seemed to be equally unmoved to be in the presence of her grandson. She took her left hand out of the flames and picked up the sewing that lay on her lap.
“You never come to see me anymore,” she said, not looking at Carrion. “So I am obliged to come and see you.” Her voice was as unlovely as her expression, harsh and joyless. “You are ungrateful, Carrion.”
“I am what?”
After a long moment the hag’s eyes lifted from the rhythm of the needle and thread and fixed on him. “You heard me,” she said. “The Sisterhood toils Night upon Night upon Night to make an army for you—”
“For us, Grandmother,” Carrion said, refusing to be intimidated by Mater Motley’s stony stare. “This is our great work. Our dream.”
Mater Motley unleashed a sigh of epic gravity. “I’m too old for dreams,” she said. “You’re the one who’ll lord it over the islands when the great work is done.”
Carrion shook his head. He’d heard this all before. She was always the victim, always the martyr. “And of course you don’t have the strength to do harm to anybody, do you?” he said. “You’re just a weary, poorly served old lady who will be dying soon in a blaze of sainthood.” He laughed. “You are ridiculous.”
“And you are cruel,” she said. “And one day you will suffer for it.”
“Yes, yes,” Carrion said. “One day, one day. Now leave your needle awhile,” he said. “Let’s walk together in some quiet place.”
The old woman’s lip curled. “You think you’re so clever, Carrion. Just because you lived and all your brothers and sister perished. But who was it saved you?”
“It was you, Grandmother. And not an hour passes without my giving up a prayer of gratitude.”
“Liar,” the Hag said coldly. She slipped her needle and thread into the pincushion hanging from her waist and put aside the stitchling she was working on. Then she uttered a little word of Old Abaratian—yethasiha—and a gaseous staircase spilled from the front of the platform. She rose and descended it.
She was wearing, as always, a dress of eerie luxury and magnificence, the length of which was decorated with what might have been dolls, or the remains of dolls, when in reality they were the shrunken remains of her victims, reduced to plaintive scraps and sewn onto the dress in place of silky bows.
“You look wonderful, Grandmother.”
“And you look haggard. What’s wrong with you? Lovesick?”
“Lovesick? Me? Who would I be sick with love over?”
“I don’t know, you tell me. Come, we’ll walk, and you can confess to me.”
Chapter 22
A Death Sentence
TOGETHER CARRION AND HIS grandmother walked along the lip of the mine working, and as they walked they talked of the future.
“Just so you know, I didn’t believe a word of what you were saying back there,” Carrion remarked to his grandmother. “You want to control the islands every bit as much as I do. Maybe more. After all, you’ve had rather longer to covet them.”
Mater Motley stopped walking and stared at her grand-son without a trace of affection.
“And what if I have coveted them?” she said. “Don’t you think I deserve an empire after all that I’ve suffered?” Her face bore the unmistakable signs of that suffering, even by the forgiving light of a Gorgossian moon. Her skin was riddled with lines. Rage was in them, and envy; and most of all hatred, endless hatred.
“You deserve whatever you can get,” Carrion said to her. “I’m not questioning that. The question is: how do we get this empire?”
“In the long term, we’ll have to take the Twenty-Fifth Hour. Occupy it, root out its secrets.”
“And if it doesn’t want to give up its secrets?”
“Destroy it.”
“That can be done?”
“Well, it won’t be easy, but yes, anything can be done if we have the will to do it. First, however, we have to get the troublemakers out of our way. Which brings me to the matter at hand. Shall we walk a little farther?”
A wall of acrid smoke rose up out of the pit of the mine ahead of them, as the mud was mixed with various toxic agents in preparation for its being piped into the bodies of the stitchlings. The heat and stink were practically overwhelming, but Mater Motley was untouched by either. She led Carrion on through the oppressive smoke as though she were wandering in a sunlit field.
“Who’s the boy, by the way?” Mater Motley asked Carrion. “The one following us.”
“His name’s Letheo. He wants to be an assassin when he grows up. So he came to me for some schooling.”
“Sensible child. There’s never a time when a good assassin can’t find employment. You’ve heard about Houlihan, I suppose?”
“What about him?”
“You sent him on a mission to find the girl from the Hereafter, yes?”
“Yes. I sent him after Candy Quackenbush. The last I heard—”
“He’s dead, Carrion.”
“What?”
“I don’t have any of the details yet. But I heard from one of my spies on Scoriae. A very reliable source. The Criss-Cross Man is dead. And the girl did it.”
Carrion turned his back on his grandmother, while an image of the girl appeared in his mind’s eye, standing with one foot planted on Houlihan’s chest.
“She has to die, Carrion.”
“Yes?”
“Yes! We’ve underestimated her somehow. She’s no simpleton schoolgirl from the Hereafter. She’s some kind of crazy incantatrix.”
“Impossible.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I . . . researched her . . .” Carrion said somewhat uncomfortably.
“What induced you to do that?”
Carrion turned back to his grandmother. “She . . . intrigued me,” he said lightly.
“And what did these researches of yours turn up?”
“Not much. She’s here by mistake; I think that much is clear. I had sent Mendelson Shape—”
“The late Mendelson Shape,” Mater Motley said.
“You hear everything, don’t you?”
“Where death’s concerned, I have an ear. Go on. You were saying, you sent Mendelson Shape—”
“To get the Key to the Pyramids, which had been stolen.”
“By John Mischief and his brothers.”
“Yes. And having stolen it, they fled. To the Hereafter. At the moment that Shape caught up with them, the girl appeared in the vicinity. Pure accident. Mischief passed the Key over to her—lodged it in her mind—thinking, I suppose, that he’d collect it later.”
“But it didn’t happen that way?”
“No. The tide picked them all up and carried them back here.”
“The way you tell it, it all sounds perfectly innocent.”
“But you don’t think it is?”
“No! Of course not! You listen to me. This girl is not some innocent bystander. You’d see that if you could only get a clear perspective on her. Put any tender thoughts about her aside. You do have tender thoughts about her, don’t you?”
Carrion averted his eyes and stared into the poisonous pit.
“Answer me,” the old woman said, her voice like iron nails on slate.
“How could I have any tender feelings for her? I’ve never even met the damn creature.”
“So then you won’t feel bad about killing her.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Don’t send one of your minions to do the job, or he’ll end up the same way as the Criss-Cross Man. Remember, Houlihan was good. But somehow she bested him.”
“A fluke,” Carrion said.
“Maybe.”
“You’re not trying to suggest that this girl is actually a threat to us, are you?”
Mater Motley sighed, her patience thin. “My point is that her presence here is not an accident.”
; “But the Sea—”
“Yes, let’s just consider the Sea, shall we? Why did the Sea of Izabella go to the Hereafter? Because somebody called it, Carrion. Who was it? Not Mendelson Shape.”
“No. No, of course. Shape wasn’t capable of that kind of magic. He was a functionary. Nothing more.”
“What about Mischief and his brothers? Are they trained in magic?”
“I doubt it.”
“So do I. And yet the Sea was summoned to the Old Shore, Carrion. Who summoned it?”
“I don’t think there’s any great mystery there,” Carrion said. “There’s a lighthouse left over from the Days of Empire.”
“Yes, but somebody had to make that beacon burn to bring the Sea, Carrion. And again I ask you: who?”
The Lord of Midnight didn’t answer this time. At least not immediately. His hands went up to his collar, and he tapped his fingers against it. As he did so, the nightmares came up from the shadows and rubbed their intestinal lengths against the glass, as though seeking their creator’s reassurance, and he theirs.
“So we’re back to the girl again,” Carrion said.
“Who else?” the old woman said. Though Letheo was standing a respectful distance away from the conversation and could not have heard the debate over the din of the diggers below, Mater Motley nevertheless drew closer to Carrion and spoke in a near whisper. “We are more vulnerable than I would like right now, Carrion. If the Grand Court of the Hours were to get even a sniff of what we’re plotting, we would be stripped of all titles, all possessions and—if they felt so predisposed—of our very lives.”
A thrill of fear—or even some perverse excitement—must have passed through Carrion at that moment, because the nightmares threw out threads of lightning, which illuminated his face all the way through his flesh to his corrugated bone.
“Nobody would dare,” he said.
“You think Princes are beyond harm?” She took one of her spare needles from the sleeve of her dress and raised it in front of his face. “Don’t you remember how this hurt?”
The nightmares became more agitated than ever. They remembered. So did Carrion. How could he ever forget? How she had meticulously stitched up his lips for speaking the word love. And how the rage had flared up in his soul while he was muted, so that it seemed sometimes he would surely catch fire.
“All right,” Carrion said. “So I’m not beyond harm. Thank you for the reminder.”
“Now, just get rid of the girl. The sooner she’s dead, the happier I’ll be. And I know you only live to make me happy.”
Carrion smiled. “How right you are.”
“But be sure the thing is done in absolute secrecy.”
“Of course. I may take Letheo. He can help me work.”
“You warn him, though,” Mater Motley said, throwing a sideways glance at the youth, “that if he gives me any reason to suspect his loyalty, he will not be able to count on your protection to save his hide.”
“I’ll tell him,” Carrion said. “You said the girl is on Scoriae?”
“Last I heard. Somewhere in the vicinity of the old Twilight Palace. But she won’t be there for long, I can guarantee it. So be quick, Carrion.”
“I will. I will.”
“Good.”
Mater Motley had no more to say to him and wasn’t going to waste valuable breath on pleasantries. Turning her back on her grandson, she followed the path along the edge of the mine, slipping her beloved needle back into her sleeve as she went.
Chapter 23
Dreamer to Dreamer
WHEN CANDY EMERGED FROM the Cabinet of Wonders—her heart still pounding ferociously as a consequence of all that she’d witnessed, all that she’d done— she went to sit down in a spot under the trees. Hopefully the gentle sound of the breeze in the mist-draped branches would soothe her, and she’d be able to make some sense of what had just happened.
Filth, meanwhile, scampered up the tree and sat in the branches, watching his visitor with a new nervousness.
She glanced up at him. “It’s all right,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. “I’m not going to go crazy or anything.”
As she said this, she remembered standing on the dock at Orlando’s Cap, with Malingo, and the old man with the knotted eyes pointing at her.
“They’ll lock you away.” Isn’t that what he’d said? “They’ll lock you away.”
Another piece of this puzzle was in those words. It was all connected. What had happened here, what had happened on the Parroto Parroto, and the warning she’d heard on the dock. All these things were part of one huge mystery.
“Do I frighten you?” she asked Filth.
He just gave her an anxious munkee smile, his lips curled back until the mottled pink of his gums showed.
“Yeah,” she said. “Well, if it’s any comfort, I frighten myself a bit too.”
“Huh.” Filth’s finger went to his nose and dug deep, his digging accompanied by the sound of comforted grunts. “What you did in there . . .” he said. “It was extraordinary.”
“I didn’t think about it,” Candy said. “I just did what seemed . . . natural.”
“Which makes it even more extraordinary.”
“I suppose it does.”
Filth cocked his head. “What was that grumbling noise?”
“That was my stomach. I’m hungry.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Filth complained. “The palace has got an enormous kitchen. I could cook us something.” He seemed relieved to be able to do something that might please her; soothe her even.
“Only if you promise to wash your hands first,” Candy replied.
While Filth went to the kitchen, Candy stayed under the tree, still turning over all that had happened, though nothing resembling a solution to the puzzle presented itself to her, just the pieces; everywhere she looked, pieces. Right back to the event that had brought her here, now that she thought of it. Her in the lighthouse back in the Hereafter, with Shape limping up the stairs to kill her, and her somehow knowing, knowing without knowing why she knew, how to light the lamp that would bring the Sea of Izabella to claim her. So many signs. So many clues. But what did it all mean?
After maybe twenty minutes, there was a call from the munkee: the food was ready. She followed the smell of cooking and found her way into the cavernous kitchen, where Filth was perched on a tall stool preparing a number of dishes. He’d already fried up a good portion of what looked like spiral-shaped doughnuts and had opened a selection of jars of fruit in syrup. Now he was taking the bones out of a large pickled fish, noisily sucking the meat off before tossing them over his shoulder.
Candy hadn’t realized quite how hungry she was until she was standing in the presence of all this food. Without even bothering to sit down, she started to eat, and she’d soon tasted just about everything that Filth had prepared for her and was starting to feel a warm glow of fulfillment. A distinct sense of sleepiness was also creeping upon her.
“You should go and lie down,” the munkee said. “Get a little shut-eye.”
“Mmm, maybe I will.”
“There’s a small bed in the corner over there,” Filth went on. “It’s where the cooks used to take a snooze. Lie down. I’ll wake you up if something interesting happens.”
“Thank you,” Candy said. Her limbs were pleasantly heavy, as were her eyelids. She went over to the low, narrow bed and pulled back the antiquated quilt. Underneath were no sheets, just a couple of threadbare blankets. She lay down, and her grateful limbs sank into the softness of the old mattress. She reached down and lifted up the quilt. She was in the process of pulling it up over her body when sleep overtook her.
She dreamed she was sitting on the stairs in Followell Street; but it was a different sensation than simply dreaming it, she felt somehow that she was there, in spirit. She could hear her brothers fighting upstairs, their voices shrill, their insults as crude as they’d ever been.
“Fat butt!”
“Ape brai
n!”
“Dog breath!”
“Cow’s ass!”
Now there came a third voice, this one slurred by too much beer.
“Will you shut the hell up, or do I have to come up there and beat the livin’ daylights outta you? Which is it goin’ to be?”
Candy looked down the stairs and saw her father standing in the shadows below, his face damp with sweat. She remembered how intimidating and unpredictable he was in moods like this. How the whole house seemed to hold its breath in anticipation of his next outburst.
“Well?” Bill Quackenbush yelled up the stairs. “Which is it to be?”
“We’ll be quiet, Dad,” Don said meekly.
“You’re damn right you’ll be quiet, because if you’re not quiet I’m gonna make you wish you’d never been born, you hear me? NEVER BEEN BORN!”
There was complete silence now from the boys. Not even a footfall. They knew from painful experience how cruel their father could be when he got into one of his drunken furies.
Growling something under his breath, Bill Quackenbush turned around and went back to the beer-stained splendor of his easy chair.
Even though she knew her father couldn’t see or hear her right now, Candy instinctively did as she had long ago learned to do whenever her father got into a mood like this. She sat very still and said nothing for a while. Only when it seemed his rage had quieted did she go in search of her mother.
Where was she? The kitchen was empty, but the back door was open, and Candy headed out, glancing up at the clock above the fridge as she went. It was 4:05 P.M. In Abarat, she’d be in Gnomon at this hour. But time ran differently here, in the world she’d called home for so long. Soon the sun would begin to slide down toward the horizon, and evening would settle in. All she had to do was stay still here, and the hours would slip on by. That idea seemed a little odd to her now. She’d become quite used to the notion that Time was a place, a spot on the map that you went to visit, just as you would any other place.
One day, she thought, I’m going to come back to Chickentown, to this house, to my mom and dad and my brothers. And thinking of that, she made a mental note to start collecting some souvenirs of Abarat to bring back with her. They couldn’t be things she could ever find in the Hereafter. They’d have to be totally Abaratian. A copy of Klepp’s Almenak. A compass watch like one she’d seen in the marketplace at Tazmagor, which showed you when was where, or where was when, or both. Maybe some photographs of the wilder flora and fauna of the Hours. Evidence, in short. Things she could show to people that would be incontestable proof that there was another, more wonderful place where gossip and beer and chicken production were not the only things that mattered.