I swear.”
“In truth, Shape, I can’t imagine any state in which you’d be of use to me.”
So saying, Carrion shoved Shape away. The man stumbled on his stump and fell to his knees in the shadow of the Brood-beast that had been talking to Carrion. For a fleeting moment the thing looked down at him with something close to pity on its misshapen face. Shape turned from it, and getting up, he fled across the littered ground, not caring that he was going deeper into the Pyramid, only determined to avoid both Carrion and the creature. As he hobbled away, he heard a sound above him. He froze on the spot, and in that instant a barbed, ragged form—wet and sinewy, and attached by a knotty length of matter to the ceiling—dropped on top of him. Shape cried out as it eclipsed him; then the living cord by which the thing was attached to the roof hauled on its freight, and the creature was taken back into the shadows, with Shape in its grip. He called out to his master one last time, his voice muted by the beast in whose maw he was caught. There was a final series of pitiful little kicks. Then both cries and kicks stopped, and Shape’s life ceased.
“They’re feeling murderous,” Leeman Vol said to Carrion. “I think we should go.”
“Maybe we should.”
“Do you have anything else you need to speak with them about?”
“I’ve said and seen all I need to,” Carrion replied. “Besides, there will be other times.” He went back to the door, calling to Vol as he did so. “Come away.”
Even now Vol watched the creatures with the fascination of a true obsessive, his head twitching left and right, up and down, in his eagerness to see every last detail.
“Away, Vol, away!” Carrion urged him.
Finally Vol made a dash for the door, but even now he paused to glance back.
“Go!” Carrion yelled to him, pulling the door shut. “Quickly, before they get out!”
Several of the brood, who were within a few yards of the threshold, made a last desperate attempt to reach the door and block it before it closed, but Carrion was too quick. The Pyramid door closed in the same bizarre fashion that it had opened, and he quickly turned the Key in the lock, sealing the sacbrood in their prison hive. They shook the stones of the Pyramid’s walls in their frustration and loosed such a din of rage that the stone steps on which Carrion and Leeman Vol stood vibrated beneath their feet. Still, it was done. Carrion reverentially removed the Key from the lock and slipped it into the deepest recesses of his robes.
“You’re shaking,” he said to Vol, with a little smile.
“I—I—I—never saw such things before,” Vol conceded.
“Nobody has,” the Lord of Midnight replied. “Which is why when I choose my moment and set them free, there will be chaos and terror in every corner of the Abarat.”
“It’ll be like the end of the world,” Leeman said, retreating down the steps to the funeral barge.
“No,” Carrion said as he followed Leeman down. “There you’re wrong. It will be the beginning.”
CANDY DIDN’T WASTE TIME shivering on the shore. It had been clear even from a distance where on the island she might find some place of relative comfort: in the mist-shrouded forest that lay a quarter mile along the beach. A light, warm breeze was coming out of the trees, its balm both welcoming and reassuring. Occasionally one of its gusts seemed to carry a fragment of music: just a few notes, no more, played (perhaps) on an oboe. A gentle, lilting music that made her smile.
“I wish Malingo was with me,” she said to herself as she trudged along the beach.
At least she wasn’t alone. All she had to do was follow the sound of the music and she’d surely find the music maker, sooner or later. The more of the melody she heard, the more bittersweet it seemed to be. It was the kind of song her grandfather (her mom’s dad, Grandpa O’Donnell) used to sing when she was little. Laments, he called them.
“What’s a lament?” she had asked him one day.
“A song about the sad things in the world,” he’d told her, his voice tinged with a little of his Irish roots. “Lovers parted, and ships lost at sea, and the world full of loneliness from one end to the other.”
“Why’d you want to sing about sad things?” Candy had asked him.
“Because any fool can be happy,” he’d said to her. “It takes a man with real heart”—he’d made a fist and laid it against his chest—“to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
“I still don’t understand…”
Grandpappy O’Donnell had cupped her face in his big, scarred hands. He’d worked on the railroad most of his life, and every scar had a story. “No, of course you don’t,” he said with an indulgent smile. “And why should you? A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you…there’s no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It’s not a bad feeling, child. That’s what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D’you see?”
She hadn’t seen. Not really. The idea that sadness could somehow make you feel good was a hard idea to fathom.
But now she was beginning to understand. Abarat was changing her. In the brief time she’d been traveling among the Hours, she’d seen and felt things she would never have experienced in Chickentown, not if she’d lived there a thousand years. The way the stars seemed to move when a traveler passed over the boundary between one Hour and the next, and whole constellations fell slowly out of the sky; or when the moon, falling brightly on the sea, called up slow processions of fish from the purple-blue deeps of the Izabella, all showing their sad silver eyes to the sky before they turned and disappeared into the darkness again.
Sometimes just a face she passed by, or a glance someone would give her—even the shadow of a passing bird—would carry a kind of melancholy. Grandpappy O’Donnell would have liked it here, she thought.
She was close to the edge of the misty trees now, and just a little way ahead of her a pathway began, made of mosaic stones that depicted a pattern of interwoven spirals, winding into the forest. It was a strange coincidence that her feet should have brought her precisely to the spot where this path began, but then her time in the Abarat had been filled with such coincidences; she wasn’t surprised any longer. And so she simply followed the pathway.
The people who had laid the mosaic had decided to have some fun with the design. Dancing in and out of the spirals were the likenesses of animals—frogs, snakes, a family of creatures that looked like green raccoons—which seemed ready to scamper or slide away as soon as a foot fell too close to them.
She was so busy studying this witty handiwork that she didn’t realize how far she’d come. The next time she looked up, the beach had gone from sight behind her, and she was entirely surrounded by the immense trees, their canopy alive with all manner of Night birds.
And still she heard the lament, somewhere off in the distance, rising and falling.
Beneath her feet the spiral designs of the pathway were getting stranger by the step, the species of creatures that had been woven into the design becoming ever more fantastical, as though to alert her to the fact that her journey was about to change. And now ahead of her she saw the threshold of that change: a massive doorway flanked by elegant pillars stood between the trees.
Though the hinges were still in place, and the remains of a hefty iron lock lay on the ground, the door itself had been eaten away by some rot or other. Candy stepped inside. The absent door had guarded a building of exceptional beauty. On every side she saw that the walls