Days of Magic, Nights of War

  “Where?” said Tom.

  Standing on the same spot, Geneva turned fully through three hundred and sixty degrees, pointing outward with her sword as she did so. “All. Around. Us,” she said.

  “Oh Lordy Lou,” Mischief breathed.

  “An ouroboros,” said Tria.

  “What’s that mean?” John Mischief wanted to know.

  “The serpent that eats its own tail,” Tria whispered.

  “That’s why it’s all around us,” Geneva said, her voice so soft everyone had to strain to hear it.

  “I don’t see it,” said Tom.

  “Yes, you do,” said Tria.

  Her voice had a curious clarity to it despite the tiny volume. “It’s there.” She pointed to a gold-green slope. “And there.” To a ridge which seemed to be infested with cacti. “And there. That blue-green rock . . .”

  “It’s breathing . . .” said Tom, his tone more astonishment than fear. “I hear it.”

  “Does it know we’re here?” said John Serpent.

  “Why don’t you tell us that?” Moot remarked. “Serpent to serpent.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Serpent, very unamused.

  “In other words, you don’t know.”

  “At a guess,” Serpent replied, “it knows. It’s just trying to work out how many of us there are.”

  As he proffered this reply there was a fresh outburst of shouting from underground.

  “I think the earthworm has cornered him down there,” Tria said grimly.

  “That’s why he’s making such a din,” said Two-Toed Tom. “He’s trying to draw its attention. Trying to stop it from coming after us—”

  He’d no sooner spoken than the ground around them shook violently, and great walls of dirt and plant life flew up into the air. Ten, twenty feet it flew, and then came down again in a rattling rain.

  “She’s right!” John Serpent yelled. “It’s all around us!”

  Geneva was no longer whispering. She was yelling at the top of her voice. “Arm yourselves!” she hollered. “It knows we’re here! Get ready to fight!”

  Those who had small weapons wielded them in readiness, while the rest searched on the ground for something—anything—to fight with. Even as they did so the earth lurched, and the worm’s head—shaped like a giant shovel, flat and wide and ferocious—rose up out of the ground. Its head was of such size that its neck had difficulty bearing it up. There was nothing elegant or beautiful about it. A great mass of plant life sprouted from its skull, and a mud-clogged beard of roots hung from its lower jaw. It gave off a rotted smell as though its body had gone to corruption from lying in the wet earth for so long. Clumps of matter fell from the underside of its body as it raised itself up, but it was impossible to discern whether it was the dragon itself that was falling to pieces, or whether it was simply bits of dirt and decay that were dropping to the ground.

  “Distract it!” Geneva yelled, and while Tom and McBean attacked the dragon’s forelegs, Geneva went for the snout with the little dagger she had, piercing it as deeply as she was able. The blade barely penetrated the scales, however, and there was no sign that she was doing the beast much harm. Still, it knew it was under attack, and it fought back, opening its ragged mouth as though to swallow her. With a born warrior’s speed, Geneva feinted to the left, then struck to the right, digging her blade into the tender flesh around the dragon’s nostril and pulling down, opening a long wound. Viscous blood spat from the place, giving off a fierce heat along with the eye-stinging stench of excrement.

  The worm was hurt, no doubt of that. It reeled back, letting out something that sounded not unlike a sob. But the sound was its own kind of feint, for it had no sooner made the complaint than it came back at its wounder with surprising suddenness, landing on the ground with such force that it cracked the earth open. Dirt and rock dust rose up into the air in a choking cloud. For a few moments the dirt obliterated everything: all anybody could do was stand and wait for it to clear.

  And then, disaster. From somewhere in the dirt cloud came a noise of rushing earth, and then a cry from Tria.

  “Where are you?” Tom yelled.

  “I see her!” John Mischief called out, and pointed through the clearing air. The ground had given way beneath poor Tria, and she was slipping down into the darkness.

  Wounded though it was, the dragon quickly realized it had been offered a victim. The creature nosed toward Tria, growling in its throat, suddenly moving like a snake, belly to the ground.

  Tom threw himself in its path, but it casually batted him away with its snout and went on with its weaving pursuit of Tria.

  “It’ll get the child,” John Mischief said, sitting down on the edge of the slope and preparing to launch himself down at it.

  “John?” said Moot. “Are you crazy?”

  “We don’t even know what’s down there!” Serpent protested.

  “Tria’s down there!” Mischief replied.

  “Oh, spare me the heroism!” Serpent said. “She’s dead for certain—”

  Mischief didn’t waste time arguing. He simply pitched himself and his brothers down the slope where Tria had gone, and into the murk.

  The dragon raised its humongous head on its gnarled neck and scanned the scene, its eyes burning in its mud-caked visage. It had fixed its gaze upon McBean now. The Captain had fallen badly when the earth gave way, and now he was having difficulty getting up again. He was sitting a little distance from the hole, rubbing his leg, obviously in considerable pain.

  “McBean . . .” said John Drowze. “Be careful.”

  “I know, I know. It’s my leg—”

  “No, Cap’n, I’m not worried about—”

  Before Drowze could finish speaking, the dragon opened its mouth like a tunnel and rushed at McBean, approaching him so quickly that he had no time to defend himself. The dragon’s lower jaw pushed beneath the Captain, who fell backward into the throat of the thing. He cried out as he fell, a small boy’s cry that echoed against the roof of the beast’s mouth.

  “Nythaganius Pejorius!” somebody yelled.

  The dragon paused in midswallow. Tom, Tria, Geneva and the Johns looked down into the ground, from which direction the voice that had named the beast had come. There was a young man standing at the bottom of the fissure, his skin dark, his eyes a luminous green, his hair, a mass of dreadlocks, bright red.

  “Do you see me, Nythaganius Pejorius?”

  The worm cocked her head like an irritated parrot, and her pupils dilated as she sought out her namer.

  “Yes, I see you,” the worm said, petals being shaken off the flowers around her mouth as she spoke.

  “Do you see also what I have under my foot, Nythaganius Pejorius?”

  The man with the red dreadlocks lifted his bare foot a little higher, so that the worm would be in no doubt as to what she was looking at.

  “Yes, I see . . .” she said with an icy rage in her voice.

  “Then speak what you see.”

  “Finnegan, why do you infuriate me?”

  “I said speak.”

  “It’s an egg, Finnegan Hob. It’s my egg.”

  “Your only egg.”

  “Yes! Yes! My only egg!”

  “I could crush it.”

  “No! You wouldn’t. Not my egg.”

  “Then spit out the man you just ate.”

  “Me?” said the worm, attempting a look of pitiful innocence. “I didn’t—”

  Finnegan raised his long, bare foot above the egg and made it twitch and quiver as if he were barely preventing himself from bringing it down.

  “Monster!” the dragon roared.

  “Regurgitate, worm. I’m counting to three. One—”

  “Godless monster!”

  “Two—”

  “All right! All right! Have it your way.”

  The worm made a repeated scooping motion with her head, and a retching sound emerged from her throat. So, seconds later, did Captain McBean. He slid down the dragon’s tongue
and out of her mouth, landing with an undignified thump in the dirt that all this commotion had stirred up. He was covered in a thick layer of dragon spittle, but other than that he looked unharmed.

  “Now, Finnegan Hob,” the dragon said. “Keep your side of the bargain.”

  “Geneva Peachtree,” Finnegan yelled. “That is you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s me!”

  “Then I want you to get your friends, including him”—he pointed to McBean—“out of here. This regurgitating worm and I have business to finish. And it will end with the death of one of us; that is for certain. So please . . . Go!”

  And so saying, he broke his promise and drove his foot down on the dragon’s egg.

  Chapter 37

  The Owner of the Dead Man’s House

  MISTER MASPER WAS ALMOST certainly the most normal person Candy had encountered during her whole journey in the Abarat. In fact, he vaguely resembled a man called Mr. Wippel, who worked at the drugstore back in Chickentown: both meek looking, with pale, rather sad faces and round spectacles. Like Wippel, Mister Masper was losing his hair (the last few strands of which were plastered to his pate from ear to ear). He wore a dark, rather shabby suit and there were food stains on his gray tie; all in all, he was a forlorn sight. But his very ordinary appearance was in fact rather welcome after the wild ride Candy had just taken through Marapozsa Street.

  “I’m glad to see you back,” he said to her.

  “What is that thing? It felt like I was trapped in it.”

  “Oh, it’s just an antique, called a momentary. I really should put it under lock and key, where it can’t do any harm.”

  “Is the place inside it real?”

  Masper took off his spectacles, and teasing a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket, he cleaned the lenses as he spoke. “To be honest, I don’t know whether it’s real or not. I’ve always been of the opinion that such things are of little importance. What matters is the effect it has upon you.”

  “Well, I didn’t like it. Everybody was asking me where my dreams were.”

  “Well, it was all perfectly harmless,” Masper said. “You look fine.”

  “Well, I’m not!” said Candy with a sudden flash of anger. “I lost my friend Diamanda outside this horrible house of yours. And you had Letheo kidnap me to get me here. I don’t like that!”

  “Well, aren’t we direct?” Masper said, the first subtle hint of discourtesy creeping into his voice. As he spoke, he went to one of the absurdly tall and narrow windows and stared out at the bleak landscape of Efreet. The snow was coming down heavily now, the wind blowing the flakes so hard they burst against the window.

  “I had to get you here somehow. I apologize if the method was a little crude.”

  “Why did you need to get me here? I don’t know you.”

  “But I know you, Candy. Was Letheo cruel to you?”

  “No.”

  “Because if he was—”

  “I said no,” she replied. “Now when can I get out of here?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be wise to try right now. It’s very cold out there, as you can see.” He went to the door and called out: “Letheo! Come in here, please.”

  A few seconds later Letheo appeared. He looked entirely changed. Though his head wound was still raw, he had cleaned his face and combed his hair and was now wearing a black jacket and trousers; the jacket set off with shiny silver buttons, which held it closed all the way up to his Adam’s apple. He stood at the threshold and clicked the heels of his shiny black boots together.

  “Look at him,” Masper said proudly. “The first soldier in a new army.”

  “Whose?”

  Masper gave her a tiny smile. “I think we should leave that discussion for another Day, Candy, don’t you? Or better, another Night.”

  “May I have a moment of your time, sir?” Letheo said. “Alone.”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes. It’s urgent.”

  The mask of benign indifference slipped from Masper’s face for a moment, and anger flared there briefly. “Don’t be wasting my time,” Masper said.

  “Of course not, sir.”

  “Then quickly . . .” Masper said. He turned back to Candy: “Stay here, will you? This will only take a moment.” He walked past Letheo and out into the corridor. As soon as he’d gone, Letheo whispered: “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me—just get out. Break the window if you have to, but go. He means to kill you—”

  “Letheo . . .” Masper called from the hallway.

  “I’m coming.”

  Masper returned to the doorway with a faintly amused look on his face. “What do you think you’re doing, boy? Making a suicide pact?”

  He stepped back into the room, and to Candy’s eyes he seemed to shake, as though he were standing in the middle of a heat haze.

  “I was just—”

  “I know what you were doing, Letheo.” He shook his head. “You really are going to have to learn: you can’t be on both sides at the same time.” He shook his head. “Enough of these games,” he said. “I thought I might get your dreams from you the easy way. But I see after our little conversation that you’re too willful to be persuaded and too clever to be tricked. So we’ll have to do it the hard way.”

  As he spoke, it seemed to Candy that Masper’s eyes were deepening, darkening, and his mouth was growing wider. His hand went up to his face, and he took off his spectacles, which melted in his hand and ran off, between his fingers, the matter from which they’d been made evaporating into nothingness.

  “What’s happening to him?” Candy said to Letheo.

  “Just go . . .” Letheo replied.

  “Just a few dreams,” the man-who-used-to-be-Masper said. “Was that so much to ask? Just to see what’s going on in that head of yours? But no. No.” He reeled around on Letheo, jabbing his finger at him. “As for you—” he said, “—I warned you what would happen if you betrayed me. Didn’t I? Well, didn’t I?”

  The haze intensified as he spoke. His shape wavered, and the illusion that was Mister Masper began to fall away around him. The plain jacket dissolved, revealing robes of black and gold. His features—which had flickered, as though there were lightning behind his face—began to dissolve and on the third or fourth flash disappeared completely, revealing a very different man. Rising from his shoulders was a kind of translucent collar, which covered the lower half of his face. It was a reservoir for a dark fluid, which he inhaled as easily as a fish might breathe water. Something moved in the fluid. No, not moved, seethed, like a congregation of angry eels. They flashed with electricity intermittently—that was the lightning she’d seen flicker—and threw an uncharitable light on his face.

  And oh, that face! He was a portrait of living death. The muscles had half withered away, leaving his bones to jut through his parchment skin. His eyes had sunk into his sockets, and the flesh around them had become translucent and was filled with tiny tics. When he turned a little, she saw that the fluid in his collar (or else the creatures that lived in it) was being siphoned out of the back of his nearly hairless skull. It was horrible to see. And even more horrible, she saw, to live in, to pass every moment of every Day and Night trapped inside!

  The rest of his body was strong, as if in compensation for the frailty of his head; the suit of black and gold so designed that it seemed to amplify the anatomy beneath. His hands were bare, but huge: long fingered and pale. He wore a ring of elaborate design upon every finger—and upon his thumbs—and the middle finger of each hand was covered in exquisitely wrought silver sheaths, with needlepoints for nails.

  She did not need him to tell her his name. She knew it the instant the mirage of innocence was dissolved. This was Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight. She had been in his company without knowing it; he’d almost charmed her, in his way. But never again. Not now that she saw him clearly, never, she swore to herself, never again.

  “Take hold o
f her, Letheo,” Carrion said. “I want to ask her some questions.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, when it seemed Letheo might not do as he’d been ordered, and Candy seized her opportunity. She made a dash for the door, her shadow thrown up against the wall by the flickering beasts in Carrion’s collar.

  “Don’t waste our time trying to get out of here,” the Midnight Lord said to her. “Even if you did get out of the house, which is very unlikely, what’s waiting for you outside? Death by snow? Eaten by a Waztrill or a Sanguinius? And ask yourself: why are you running? I’m not even hurting you, am I?”

  “I’d still prefer to take my chances out there, thank you very much.”

  “Stupid, stupid girl,” Carrion said. “Letheo, for the last time. Take hold of her.”

  Letheo looked away from Carrion and glanced at Candy. She saw the signal in his eyes. He was telling her to go.

  She did just that. She ran.

  “STOP HER!” Carrion roared.

  For the briefest of moments she glanced back and saw that Letheo was stepping into his master’s way as Carrion moved toward the door. With one mighty backhanded blow, Carrion knocked Letheo across the room. Letheo struck the window, which shattered, and in a hail of glass shards he disappeared from sight.

  “Now,” Carrion said, calling after Candy. He lifted his hand and clenched his fist, which caused all the lamps in the room and corridor to go out at once. The only source of light was now the creatures in Carrion’s collar. Their ghastly luminescence threw his shadow up against the walls.

  The Lord of Midnight shook his head and proffered an indulgent little smile. “Enough, lady,” he said. “Come here. Come.”

  As he spoke he lifted his arms, as if to summon Candy into an embrace.

  “All I want to know is a little about your dreams,” he said.

  “So you trap me in that thing—”

  “The momentary? It’s usually quite painless. But you? You’re quite a piece of work, Candy Quackenbush. I hear all kinds of stories. Everywhere you go you seem to cause trouble.” He advanced toward her, his eyes transfixing her, as though he had the capacity to hold her with his gaze. “Well, you’re not going to cause trouble to me.”