sea-skipper, who had been the first friend Candy had made in Abaratian waters, came to find her, to tell her that word was being passed by every means in every direction, demanding her presence at The Great Head of the Yebba Dim Day. An emergency meeting of the Council of the Hours was presently assembling there to fully analyze the calamitous events that had taken place in Chickentown. Given that Candy had a unique perspective on those events, it was vital that she attend to give evidence.
It wouldn’t be an easy meeting, she knew. No doubt, the Council suspected that she was the cause of the events that had wrought so much destruction. They would want her to give them a full account of why and how she had come to make herself such powerful enemies as Mater Motley and her grandson, Christopher Carrion: enemies with the power to override the seal the Council had put on the Abarat and force the waters of the Izabella to do their bidding, causing it to form a wave powerful enough to wash over the threshold between worlds, and to fill Chickentown’s streets.
She quickly said her good-byes to those she’d only recently greeted again—Finnegan Hob, Two-Toed Tom, the John Brothers, Geneva—and with her geshrat friend Malingo for company she boarded the small boat the Council had sent and departed for the Straits of Dusk.
The journey was long, but went without incident. This was no thanks to the temperament of the Izabella, which was much stirred up, and carried on her tide plentiful evidence of the journey her waters had recently taken across the border between worlds. There were keepsakes from Chickentown floating everywhere: plastic toys, plastic bottles, and plastic furniture, not to mention boxes of cereal and cans of beer, pages of gossip magazines and broken televisions. A street sign, drowned chickens, the contents of somebody’s fridge, leftovers bobbing by sealed in plastic: half a sandwich, some meat loaf, and a slice of cherry pie.
“Strange,” Candy said, watching it all float by. “It makes me hungry.”
“There’s plenty of fish,” said the Abaratian in Council uniform who was guiding their boat through this detritus.
“I don’t see fish,” Malingo said.
The man leaned over the side of the boat, and with startling speed, he reached down into the water and pulled out a fat fish, yellow dotted with spots of bright blue. He proffered the creature, all panic and color, to Malingo.
“There,” he said. “Eat! It’s a sanshee fish. Very good meat.”
“No thanks. Not raw.”
“Please yourself.” He offered it to Candy. “Lady?”
“I’m not hungry, thank you.”
“Mind . . . if I . . . ?”
“Go ahead.”
The man opened his mouth much wider than Candy had thought possible, revealing two impressive parades of pointed teeth. The fish, much to Candy’s surprise uttered a high-pitched squeal, which died the moment its devourer bit off its head. Candy didn’t want to look revolted by what was probably a perfectly natural thing for the pilot to have done so she went back to looking at the bizarre reminders of Chickentown as they floated by, until finally the little vessel brought them into the busy harbor of the Yebba Dim Day.
Chapter 2 The Council Speaks its Minds
CANDY HAD EXPECTED TO be called into the Council Chamber, questioned by the Councilors about what she’d seen and experienced and then released to go back to join her friends. But it became apparent as soon as she presented herself before the Council that not all of the eleven individuals gathered here thought that she was an innocent victim of the calamitous events that had caused so much destruction, and that some punishment needed to be agreed upon.
One of Candy’s accusers, a woman called Nyritta Maku, who came from Huffaker, was the first to present her opinion, and she did so without any sweetening.
“It’s very clear that for reasons known only to yourself,” she said, her blue-skinned skull bound so as to form a series of soft-boned sub-skulls of diminishing size that hung like a tail, “you came to the Abarat without invitation from anyone in this Chamber, intending to cause trouble. You quickly did so. You liberated a geshrat from the employ of an imprisoned wizard without any permission to do so. You roused the fury of Mater Motley. That in itself would be reason for a stiff sentence. But there’s worse. We have already heard testimony that you have the arrogance to believe you have some significant part to play in the future of our islands.”
“I didn’t come here deliberately if that’s what you’re saying.”
“Have you made any such claims?”
“This is an accident. Me being here.”
“Answer the question.”
“If I was to take a wild guess I’d say she’s trying to do that, Nyritta,” said the representative from the Nonce. It was a spiral of warm dappled light, in the midst of which flakes of poppy and white gold floated. “Just give her a chance to find the words.”
“Oh, you really like the lost ones, don’t you, Keemi.”
“I’m not lost,” Candy said. “I know my way around pretty well.”
“And why is that?” said a third Council member, her face an eight-eyed, four-petaled flower with a bright-throated mouth at its center. “Not only do you know your way around the islands, you also know a lot about the Abarataraba.”
“I’ve just heard stories here and there.”
“Stories!” said Yobias Thim, who had a row of candles around the brim of his hat. “You don’t learn to wield Feits and Wantons by hearing stories. I think what happened with Motley and Carrion and your knowledge of the Abarataraba are all part of the same suspicious business.”
“Let it be,” said Keemi. “We didn’t summon her here to Okizor to interrogate her about how she knows the Abarataraba.”
She glanced around at the Councilors, no two of whose physiognomies were alike. The representative from Orlando’s Cap had a brilliant coxcomb of scarlet and turquoise feathers, which were standing proud in his agitated state; while the face of Soma Plume’s representative, Helio Fatha, wavered as though he was gazing through a cloud of heat, and the dawning face of the Councilor from six a.m. was streaked with the promise of another day.
“Look, it’s true. I do know . . . things,” Candy admitted. “It started at the lighthouse, with me knowing how to summon the Izabella. I’m not saying I couldn’t do it, I could. I just don’t know how I did. Does it matter?”
“If this Council thinks it matters,” growled the stone visage from Efreet, “then it matters. And everything else should be of little consequence to you until the question has been satisfactorily answered.”
Candy nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do my best. But it’s complicated.”
So saying, she began to tell them as best she could the parts that she did know, starting with the event from which everything else sprang: her birth, and the fact that just an hour or so before her mother got to the hospital on an empty, rain-lashed highway in the middle of nowhere, three women of the Fantomaya—Diamanda, Joephi and Mespa—had crossed the forbidden divide between the Abarat and the Hereafter looking for a hiding place for the soul of Princess Boa, whose murdered remains lay in the Nonce.
“They found my mother,” Candy said, “sitting, waiting for my dad to come back with gas for the truck . . .”
She paused, because there was a humming sound in her head, which was getting louder. It sounded as though her skull was filled with hundreds of agitated bees. She couldn’t think straight.
“They found my mother . . .” she said again, aware that her voice was slurring.
“Forget your mother for a moment,” said the representative from Ninnyhammer, a bipedal tarrie-cat called Jimothi Tarrie, who Candy had met before. “What do