trouble you’ll make.”
“Who for?”
“For innocent beasts like me,” Methis growled.
“Innocent!” Candy said. “You came to steal fish, remember?”
“Oh, stop the self-righteous talk! So I was going to steal a few fish. Big deal! For that I get beaten around by you and your magic, put in a cage and sold to a freak show, and then made to carry you on my back! Well, you know what? You can freeze to death right here for all I care.” He flapped his wings hard, deliberately aiming the icy draft in Candy’s direction. She shuddered.
“Enjoy yourself,” he said with a sneering smile. “If you’re lucky, maybe Galigali will explode. That’ll keep you warm.”
Candy was too cold to waste words on a reply. She just watched while the zethek flapped his wings violently to reach takeoff velocity and then ascended gracelessly into the air. He took a moment to fix the direction of Gorgossium, then he headed off across the water, staying close to the waves as he went, in the hope, presumably, of spotting an unlucky fish.
In less than a minute, he had disappeared from sight.
AT JUST ABOUT THE same time that Methis was heading back toward the Midnight Isle, a small vessel—the kind that no zethek would attack, hungry though they always were—was departing from Shadow Harbor, on the eastern flank of Gorgossium. The vessel was a funeral barge, beautifully appointed from bow to stern with black sails and blackbird plumage surrounding the place where the deceased would normally be laid. This was a funeral barge without a body, however. In addition to the eight oarsmen who labored to propel the vessel through the icy waters at a very nonfunereal pace, there was a small contingent of stitchling soldiers, who sat around the edges of the vessel, prepared to ward off any attacker. They were the best of troops, every one of them ready to give up his life for his master. And who was that master? The Lord of Midnight, of course.
He stood dressed in voluminous robes of thrice-burned silk (the blackest, most portentous; the silk of all melancholias) and studied the lightless waters of the Izabella as the barge sped on. Besides the soldiers and the oarsmen, he had two other companions on this vessel, but neither of them spoke. They knew better than to interrupt Christopher Carrion while he was in the midst of his meditations.
At last he seemed to put his thoughts aside, and turned to the two men he had brought with him.
“You may be wondering where we are heading today,” he said.
The men exchanged glances but said nothing.
“Speak. One or the other.”
It was Mendelson Shape (whose ancestors had been in the employ of the Carrion dynasty for generations) who chanced a reply. “I have wondered, Lord,” he said, eyes downcast.
“And have you by now guessed?”
“I think perhaps we’re on our way to Commexo City. I heard a rumor that Rojo Pixler is planning a descent into the deepest parts of the Izabella to see what lives down there.”
“I heard the same rumor,” Carrion said, still studying the dark waters. “He spies down into the depths and has made contact with the beasts that live in the trenches.”
“The Requiax,” Shape said.
“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