“Yes. How do you know of them?”
“My father claimed he saw the body of one of their sort, Lord, washed up on the beach near Fulgore’s Cove. Huge it was, even though it had been mostly eaten and rotted away. Still . . . its eye or the hole where the eye had been . . . was so big that my father could have stood inside it and not touched the top.”
“Then our Mr. Pixler is going to have to be careful down there,” Carrion said, still not taking his eyes off the black waters. “Or he’s going to leave the Commexo Kid an orphan.” He chuckled to himself at the thought.
“So that’s not where we’re going?” Shape said.
“No. That’s not where we’re going,” Carrion replied, turning his attention to the other passenger who was with him on the funeral barge. His name was Leeman Vol, a man whose reputation went before him, just as Carrion’s did. And for much the same reason: to see him was to be haunted by him.
Nothing about Vol was pleasant or pretty. He did not like the company of his fellow bipeds much, preferring to enjoy the fellowship of insects. This in itself had gained him a measure of infamy around the islands, not least because he bore on his face more than a few mementos of that intimacy. He had lost his nose to a spider many years before, the creature having injected his proboscis with a toxin so powerful that it had mortified the skin and cartilage in a few agonizing minutes, leaving Vol with two slimy holes in the middle of his face. He had fashioned a leather nose for himself, which effectively masked the mutilation but still made him the target of taunts and whispers. Not that the nose was the sole reason that people talked about him. There were other facts about Vol’s appearance and personal habits that made him noteworthy.
He had been born, for instance, with not one but three mouths, all lined with bright yellow teeth that he had meticulously sharpened to pinprick points. When he spoke, the mingling and interwoven sounds of these three mouths was uncanny. Grown men had been known to block their ears and leave the room sobbing because the sound put them so much in mind of their childhood nightmares. Nor was this second grotesquerie all the vileness that Vol could boast. He had claimed from his childhood that he knew the secret language of insects and that his three mouths allowed him to speak it.
In his passion for their company, he had made his body into a living hotel for members of the species. They seethed over his anatomy without check or censure: under his shirt, in his trousers and over his scalp. They were everywhere. Miggis lice and furgito flies, threck roaches and knuckle worms. Sometimes they bit him, in the midst of their territorial wars, and often they burrowed into his skin to lay their eggs; but such were the small inconveniences that went with being a home for such creatures.
“Well, Vol?” Carrion said, watching a line of yellow-white miggis lice migrate across the other’s face. “Where are we headed? Any ideas?”
“The Pyramids at Xuxux, perhaps?” Vol said, his three mouths working in perfect unison to shape the words.
Carrion smiled behind the circling nightmares in his collar.
“Good, Vol. Exactly so. The Pyramids at Xuxux.” He returned his gaze to Mendelson Shape. “You see now why you were invited to join me?”
Poor Mendelson didn’t reply. Fear had apparently seized hold of his tongue and nailed it to the roof of his mouth.
“After all,” Carrion went on, “we wouldn’t be here, preparing to get into the Pyramids, if you hadn’t crossed over into the Hereafter to get the Key.”
He slid his gloved hand into the folds of his robe and slowly brought into view the Key that Shape had pursued, along with its thieves, John Mischief and his brothers, across the forbidden divide between the dimension of the Abarat and that of the Human World. It had not been an easy chase. In fact, Shape had ended up returning to the Abarat on the heels of the girl to whom Mischief had given the Key: Candy Quackenbush. It had not been he, in the end, who’d got the Key back. It had been the wizard Kaspar Wolfswinkel, into whose hands Candy had later fallen. But Mendelson could see by the appreciative smile on his Lord and Master’s face that Carrion knew his servant had done the cause of Darkness no little service in his pursuit. Now Carrion had the Key back. And the Pyramids of Xuxux were to be unlocked.
“Well . . . will you look at that?” said Vol.
The six Pyramids were appearing from the murk of the Night Hour, the largest of them so tall that clouds formed around its summit. The Hour here was actually One O’clock in the morning, and the sky was completely lightless. The Sea of Izabella was not, however. As the funeral barge approached the steps of the Great Pyramid, its presence (or more correctly, the presence of its most powerful passenger) summoned to the hull a vast number of tiny creatures, specks of crude and unthinking life, that were somehow drawn to be near a great force such as Carrion. They each flickered with their own tiny bud of luminosity, and perhaps it was this fact—that they had been made as carriers of light, while Carrion was a Prince of Darkness, light’s smotherer—that made them so attentive to him. Whatever the reason for this uncanny assembly, they came to see the barge in such numbers that they threw a garish radiance up out of the water. And as though this weren’t strange enough, there now came a din out of the Pyramids, such as might have been made by an orchestra of demons, warming up for some monstrous overture.
“Is that noise really coming from the Pyramids?” Shape said.
Carrion nodded.
“But they’re tombs,” Shape said. “The royal families were laid to rest there.”
“And so were their slaves and their eunuchs and their horses and their cats and their sacred serpents and their basilisk.”
“And they’re dead,” said Shape. “The serpents and the eunuchs and the . . . whatever. They’re all dead.”
“All dead and mummified,” Carrion replied.
“So . . . what’s making all that noise?”
“It’s a good question,” said Carrion. “And given that you will be seeing for yourself in a few minutes, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. Think of the dead as flowers.”
“Flowers?”
“Yes. What you hear is the noise of insects, drawn to those flowers.”
“Insects? Surely not so loud a noise, Lord, would come out of insects?” Shape made a stumbling laugh, as though he thought this was a joke. “Anyway,” he went on, “what would inspire them to make such a sound?”
“Explain to him, Vol.”
Vol grinned and grinned and grinned.
“They make that noise because they smell us,” he said. “Especially you, Shape.”
“Why me?”
“They sense that you’re close to death. They lick their lips in anticipation.”
Shape grew contemptuous now. “Insects don’t have lips,” he said.
“I doubt . . .” said Vol, approaching Shape, “. . . that you’ve ever looked closely enough.”
Vol’s three yellow smiles were too much for Shape. He pushed the man away with such force that many of the insects living on his skull fell off and pattered into the water. Vol let out a sob of quite genuine distress and spun around, leaning over the edge of the barge and reaching down into the water close to the steps, scooping his infestation up.
“Oh, don’t drown, little ones! Where are you? Please, please, please, please don’t drown.” He loosed a low moan, which began in his bowels and climbed up through his wretched body until it escaped his throat as a howl of rage and sorrow. “They’re gone!” he yelled. He swung around on the murderer. “You did this!”
“So?” said Shape. “What if I did? They were lice and worms.”
“They were my children!” Vol howled. “My children.”
Carrion raised his hands. “Silence, gentlemen. You may continue your debate when we have finished our business here. Do you hear me, Vol? Stop sulking! There’ll be other lice, just as adorable.”
Leaving the two men staring at each other in sullen silence, Carrion went to stand in the bow of the barge. During the argument the unmelodious din f
rom inside the Pyramids had ceased. The “bees”—or whatever else had been making the noise—had hushed in order to listen to the exchange between Vol and Shape. Now both the occupants of the Pyramids and their visitors were silent, each listening for some telltale noise, each knowing it was only a matter of time before they laid eyes upon one another.
The barge came alongside the flight of stone steps that led up to the door of the Great Pyramid. The vessel nudged the stone, and without waiting for the stitchlings to secure the barge, Carrion stepped off the deck and began his ascent of the stairs, leaving Mendelson Shape and Leeman Vol to hurry after him.
Chapter 13
The Sacbrood
IT HAD TAKEN A great deal of organization—and more than a little bribery—to arrange Carrion’s visit to the great Pyramids of the Xuxux. They were, after all, sacred places: the tombs of Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses; and in their humbler chambers, the servants and animals belonging to the mighty. The royal dead had ceased to be laid there several generations ago, because all six Pyramids had been filled with the deceased and their belongings. But the Pyramids had continued to be carefully guarded by soldiers working for the Church of Xuxux. They circled the Pyramids on a fleet of vessels elaborately decorated with religious insignia, and they were armed with weapons of fearsome firepower. Furthermore, they had the complete freedom to use their weaponry in defense of the Pyramids and the royal remains that were contained therein. But Carrion had arranged to have the patrol interrupted for a time so that his funeral barge could slip in, unnoticed, to the steps of the Great Pyramid.
As he approached his destination, however, his thoughts were not upon the difficulties of arranging this journey, nor on what lay inside the Pyramid to which he had spent so much trouble getting the Key. They were upon the girl whose presence in the Abarat had come about because she had accidentally interrupted the thief of the Key and his pursuer. In other words, on Candy Quackenbush.
Candy Quackenbush!
Even the name was ludicrous, he told himself. Why did he obsess about her the way he did? She was here because of a fluke of circumstance, nothing more. Why then could he not get her wretched name out of his head? She was a girl from some forsaken little town in the Hereafter, nothing more. Why then did she haunt his thoughts the way she did? And why—when thoughts of her did arise—were there other images following on after her? Images that troubled him deeply; that sickened and shamed him. Images of a bright Afternoon on the Nonce, and bells ringing in jubilation, and every flower, as if by some unspoken understanding of the Hour’s flora, becoming white for a marriage ceremony . . .
“Sickening,” he said to himself as he ascended the Pyramid steps. “She’s nothing. Nothing.”
Shape overheard his master’s mutterings.
“Lord?” he said. “Are you well?”
Carrion glanced back at his servant. “I have bad dreams, Shape,” Carrion told him. “That’s all. Bad dreams.”
“But why, my Lord?” Shape said. “You’re the most powerful man in the Abarat. What is there in this world that could possibly be troubling to you? As you yourself said: She’s nothing.”
“How do you know what I was talking about?”
“I just assumed it was the girl. Was I wrong?”
“No . . .” Carrion growled. “You weren’t wrong.”
“Mater Motley could surely deal with her for you,” Shape went on, “if you don’t care to. Perhaps you could share your fears with her?”
“I have no desire to share anything with that woman.”
“But surely, Lord, she’s your grandmother. She loves you.”
Carrion was becoming irritated now. “My grandmother loves nothing and nobody except herself,” he said.
“Maybe if I told her—”
“Told her?”
“About your dreams. She would prepare something to help you sleep.”
At this, Carrion let out a raw noise of rage and caught Shape by the windpipe, drawing him so close that his face was pressed against the sweaty surface of Carrion’s collar. The nightmares seething in the fluid on the other side came to peer at him, tapping their bright snouts against the glass.
“I warn you, Shape,” he said. “If you ever say anything to my grandmother about my bad dreams . . . your life will become one.”
Mendelson scrambled to be free of his master’s hold, his good leg pushing Carrion away from him, while his peg leg shook rhythmically in the air.
“I—I—I am loyal to you, Lord,” Shape sobbed. “I swear, liege, by all that’s dark.”
As quickly as Carrion had picked Shape up, he let the terrified man go. Shape dropped from his hands like a sack filled with stones and lay splayed on the step, his terror giving off an unmistakable smell.
“I wouldn’t have killed you,” Carrion remarked lightly.
“Thank . . . thank you . . . Prince,” Shape said, still watching his Lord from the corner of his eye as though at any moment the coup de grâce might still fall and his unhappy life be summarily ended.
“Come on now,” Carrion said with a brittle brightness in his voice. “Let me show you how much trust I have in you. Get up! Get up!”
Shape got to his feet. “I’m going to give you the Key to the Pyramids,” Carrion said. “So that you can have the honor of opening the door for me.”
“The door?”
“The door.”
“Me?”
“You.”
Shape still looked queasy about all this. After all, who knew what lay on the other side of that door? But he could scarcely refuse an invitation from his Prince. Especially when the Key was there in front of him, shimmering and seductive.
“Take it,” Carrion said.
Shape glanced over Carrion’s shoulder at Leeman Vol, who was staring at the Key. He wanted it badly, Shape could see. If he’d dared, he would have snatched it out of Carrion’s hand, run to the door and opened it up, just to say that he’d been the first to see what lay inside.
“Good luck,” Vol said sourly.
Shape made an attempt at a smile—which failed—and then went to the door, drew a deep breath, and slid the Key into the lock.
“Now?” he said to Carrion.
“The Key is in your hand,” Carrion replied. “Choose your own moment.”
Shape took a second deep breath and turned the Key, or at least made an attempt to do so. But it would not move. He leaned against the door, grunting as he attempted to force the Key to turn.
“No! No! No!” Carrion ordered him. “You’ll bruise the Key, imbecile. Step away from the door! Now!”
Mendelson obeyed instantly.
“Now calm yourself,” Carrion instructed him. “Let the Key do the work.”
Shape nodded and limped back to the door. Again he put his hand on the Key, and this time—though he was barely pressing upon it—the Key turned in the lock all on its own. Astonished, and not a little terrified, Shape retreated from the door, his work done. The Key was not only turning in the lock, it was slipping deeper into the door as it did so, as if to deny anyone a change of heart. In response to the turning of the Key, an entire area of the door around the lock—perhaps a foot square—began to grind and move. This was no ordinary mechanism: as its effect spread, waves of energy came off the Pyramid like heat from a boiling pot. The door was opening, and its shape echoed that of the building itself: an immense triangle.
A stench came out from the darkness on the other side. It wasn’t the smell of the long dead or the spices in which they had been preserved. Nor was it the smell of antiquity; the dull dry fragrance of a time that had been and would not come again. It was the stink of something very much alive. But whatever the life-form that was sweating out this odor, drooling it, weeping it, it was nothing any of the three had ever encountered. Even Carrion, who had a weary familiarity with the world in all its corruptions, had never smelled anything quite like this before. He stared into the darkness beyond the door with an odd little smile on his
face. Mendelson, on the other hand, had decided that he’d had enough.
“I’ll wait in the barge,” he said hurriedly.
“No, you don’t,” said Carrion, grabbing hold of his collar. “I want them to meet you.”
“Them?” said Leeman Vol. “Are . . . are there many of them?”
“That’s one of the things we’re here to find out,” the Lord of Midnight replied. “You can count, can’t you, Shape?”
“Yes.”
“Then go in there, and bring out a number!” Carrion said, and pressing Shape in the direction of the door, he gave his servant a shove.
“Wait!” Shape protested, his voice shrill with fear. “I don’t want to go alone!”
But it was too late. He was already over the threshold. There was an immediate response from the interior; the din of an infinite number of carapaced things roused from invertebrate dreams, rubbing their hard, spiny legs together, unfurling their stalked eyes. . . .
“What have you got in there?” Vol wanted to know. “Hobarookian scorpions? A huge nest of needle flies?”
“He’ll find out!” Carrion said, nodding in Shape’s direction.
“A light, Lord!” Shape begged. “Please. At least a light so I can find my way.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Carrion seemed to soften, and smiling at Shape, he reached into his robes, as if he intended to produce a lamp of some sort. But what came out appeared to be a small top, which he set on the back of his left hand.
There it began to spin, and in spinning threw off waves of flickering light, which grew in brightness.
“Catch!” Carrion said, and flipped the top in Shape’s direction.
Shape made an ungainly attempt to catch hold of it, but the thing outwitted him, spinning off between his fingers and hitting the ground. Then it spun off into the Pyramid, its luminescence growing.
Shape looked away from the top and up into the space that its ambitious light was filling. He let out a little sob of terror.
“Wait,” Leeman Vol said. “There can only be one insect that gives off a stench such as this.”