But it was her face that the Pixler-Requiax was most concerned to control, its matter wrapping itself around her skull from five or six directions at once.
“Idiot fish!” she said. “I’ve told you already. Why don’t you pay attention?”
She reached up and caught hold of the spreading networks of muck that had already overtaken two-thirds of her face. Her merest touch leached the color from the chaotic network of matter. Then she tore it, ripping it away from her face. There was more of the matter to replace it, of course, and the wrapping and tearing, wrapping and tearing struggle might have continued for a lot longer had a thin, shrill voice, that of a young boy, not said:
“Pops?”
Somewhere in the midst of the Requiax, the remains of Rojo Pixler woke from his nightmare of possession and saw—much to his horror—the only thing he had ever loved, the Kid, his Kid, at the threshold.
“Not now, son!” he yelled.
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing you need to know about. Now turn around and run!”
“Now what kind of cowardly lesson is that teaching the child?” Mater Motley said. She casually dropped Voorzangler, whose body was now inert, and reached out to the Kid. “Come here, Kid. I mean you no harm. Are you the last one standing?”
“No. I’m the First. The Original. The Kid of Kids.”
Pixler moaned to hear his own child condemning himself, but it was too late, the words were said.
“Oh, I think I need you in the Imperial Court, boy.”
“I can’t leave here, sorry. I gotta stay with Pops.”
“I’m afraid your poor father is lost forever.”
The copyrighted smile vanished from the Commexo Kid’s face.
“No,” he said softly. “My pops will live forever.”
“No. He won’t. Because your father has been taken over by something that found him in the deep trenches of the Izabella.”
“Don’t listen to it,” the Pixler-Requiax said. “She’s a liar. Always was. Always will be.”
Mater Motley raised her now-empty hand, proffering it to the boy.
“Come here,” she said, her voice all velvet and honey.
Her hands told a different story. The arm that reached for the Commexo Kid was becoming unnaturally long in its ambition to claim the child, its fingers also lengthening, their shadowy lengths sharpening into black points.
“Run, boy!”
“Pops! Help me!”
“Just go!”
The Kid started to race for the door. But Mater Motley’s hand snatched at his hair, her fingers growing longer, joints multiplying. The Kid lost his balance and fell backward, allowing the Empress to drag him back toward her as he shrieked for his father’s intervention.
“Stop her, Pops. She’s stealing me! POPS!”
It wasn’t his pops who replied, however. Or rather, it wasn’t simply his pops. It was the hybrid creature made of Rojo Pixler and the Requiax. And it wasn’t the Kid they spoke to. It was the woman.
“First you murder poor, stupid Voorzangler, who never did you the least harm. And now you go after my firstborn?”
The whole chamber shook, and the fractured marble on the floor split wider. Water started to pour up through it, its sharp, clean smell unmistakable. It was seawater that was bubbling up into Pixler’s stinking chamber, and it was coming up with such force that it threw over several more slabs of marble.
None of this distracted the Empress from her intentions. Her long-fingered hand closed over his face from which his trademark grin had vanished, and he screamed into her smothering palm.
“Don’t leave me with the bad woman, Pops!”
For those who had ventured over the threshold to watch this confrontation unfold, there was no choice now but to retreat and slam the door. It was either that or drown. The seawater was rising very rapidly in the chamber, the space itself repeatedly being battered furiously by the frenzied waters. The enemies fought with powers that invented some new crazed manifestation with every passing moment. Pieces of the bleached, dead matter fell away from Mater Motley’s face like shreds of a papier-mâché mask, while new, mutated forms of the Requiax’s matter rose up behind the Empress’s head like a black wave curling and curling, preparing to break.
She was too interested in drawing the Kid toward her to even notice. Or perhaps she did notice and, in her supreme arrogance, was simply indifferent to the threat that the riding wave presented. Either way, she had her eyes and her attention fixed upon the Kid. Her arm, impossibly elongated, resembled a long, leafless branch more than a limb of flesh and blood. But there were no diminutions in its strength. With her hand still covering his face she lifted the Kid up, his thin legs with their cartoony shoes dragging through the seawater that was continuing to flood the room, the water rolling up against the walls, taking down the pictures that had hung there.
The waters were merciless with them, as they were with everything else that the room contained: the antique furniture, smashed to tinder; the walls themselves cracking as all that the room contained was caught up in the spiral of foaming waters.
The Kid had been pulled clear of the chaos, but Mater Motley knew that while she held the child—who was still shrieking for his father’s help behind her hand—the Pixler-Requiax could not act hastily against her. One slip, and Pixler’s firstborn went into the vortex. However tough Pixler’s manufacturing methods had made his child, once he was caught in the battering waters he would not long survive.
“Accept me,” she said. “Or the firstborn slips out of my hand.”
She raised her forefinger from the head of the child, leaving him held by only three spiked fingers and her thumb.
The Kid knew his life hung in the balance.
“Please don’t let her hurt me! Pops! Don’t! Let! Her—”
“He’s just a child,” Pixler said.
“He’s no child!” Mater Motley replied. “He’s painted plastic, or whatever you make these toys from.”
“He’s not a toy. He has a fully functioning brain. He’s able to feel love. And fear.”
“Oh, you mean these screams are the real thing?”
She lifted her middle finger from the Kid’s face.
“Don’t struggle, Kid,” Pixler said. “Just be very still. Please, my boy. Very, very—”
Before he could again say still, something burst from the tumultuous waters beneath the Kid. Another portion of the Requiax, formed from its matter in the likeness of a vast double-thumbed hand, rose up out of the water and seized hold of Pixler’s firstborn. The Kid’s shriek became so shrill now that no child born from a womb could possibly have made the sound. This was indeed the shrill shriek of a machine.
The sound momentarily was so sharp and sudden that it made the Empress lose her grip. The Requiax’s double-thumbed hand closed around the boy and quickly carried him away, still holding him up above the tumultuous waters.
“Open that door!” Pixler yelled, his voice—in its sudden, absolute clarity—unmistakably that of a man used to being obeyed.
And obeyed he was. The doors were opened instantly, the presence of the water in the room quickly subsided. The violent rush threw just about all those who’d been watching the confrontation off their feet, carrying them out into the passageway. There was still enough force in the water to give it the power to sweep the Crucifixion and Mater Motley’s “Midnight Nativity” off the walls, dumping them in the same scummy soup in which the witnesses were being thrown around.
From every direction came the din of terror and destruction, as the invading waters of the Izabella carried Voorzangler’s staff into the passageway, mercilessly tossing them about. The weakest of Mater Motley’s stitchlings were simply torn apart by the force of the currents, the rest carried away. The dead doctor’s staff shrieked and begged for mercy, but the waters granted no reprieves.
“Such noise!” Mater Motley complained with the offended airs of some highborn woman who’d never heard th
e din of suffering in her life. “Enough of this! Enough!” She threw a glance at the doors. “Shut up, both of you!”
The doors did as they were told. It was something of a struggle, but they pulled themselves shut against the power of the departing waters. Then, without further instruction, the forces the Empress had unleashed in the room set about melting the lock, which sent up a column of sulfurous smoke. The job was quickly done. The lock was melted, leaving the chamber sealed shut.
The Empress took a moment to compose herself. Then she said: “Let’s finish this business once and for all.”
Chapter 52
Atrocities
IF A STRANGER HAD wandered into the battle-scarred streets of Commexo City at about that time, they would surely not have been blamed for thinking they had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and found themselves in the clutches of a nightmare. Even though there were fires consuming many of the fine, fancy houses along the brightly lit boulevards, nobody was attempting to extinguish them. There were bodies sprawled on the streets and sidewalks, some apparently the citizens of this noble city, unarmed and dressed for anything but sudden death, killed by shrapnel or bullets and left to lie where they’d fallen.
There were sights even more terrible, that this wandering stranger would have found it difficult not to see, given how numerous such horrors were. And though they might have tried to look away, the scene and the tragic story it left half-told would be imprinted on their memory forever, so that even at life’s end, when they no longer knew their children from a tree, they would remember being in Commexo City with the death-ship filling the sky, and the buzzing of the innumerable flies.
Inside the Commexo Building, there was another scene, just as profound. The drowned lay where the draining waters had left them. The Empress’s seamstress attendants waited in the room, idly watching events unfold across the Abarat. The seamstresses were scarcely strangers to things fearful and abhorrent. They had been chosen by the Old Mother to accompany her into Commexo City because they had each in the course of their lives proved as unrepentantly vicious and enthusiastically cruel as she. Or at least very nearly so. But even they, who knew the bellies and bowels of the monstrous as well as heart and head, stood in mute awe and astonishment, seeing what atrocious glories their Empress’s Midnight had called up out of hiding.
Some of these scenes the seamstresses knew; they were the stuff of nursery horrors. Queen Inflixia Grueskin was one such: she was the monstrous Queen of Efreet according to legend, who tended her blood garden where for centuries she’d attempted to grow the missing anatomy to fill the empty cage of her body. She was a terror to frighten children no longer. She was real. There she was, up on one of the screens, in all her ghastly splendor.
On another screen, a tree called the Brakzee, which was by reputation the oldest in the archipelago, had become a gallows from which hundreds of ordinary people had been hanged. This was not the work of some vile demonic force. The executioners had been, until the disappearance of the moon and stars, the neighbors of those they’d hanged.
Nor was the incident at the Brakzee tree an isolated case. All across the islands fear caused ordinary people to do monstrous things. One of the seamstresses, going from screen to screen to screen, thinking each time she’d found the worst horror, but then discovering something still more atrocious said: “This is the End of Everything.”
It was Mater Motley who set her right.
“This is the end of their world. The purposeless ones who wanted only to live their lives. Their time is over. Midnight has begun. And out of their hiding places now come the Heirs of the Lightless Hour. See! They come to inherit this broken, bloody world and rule in my name.”
On screen after screen, beings that the women had never seen before appeared from their sanctuaries: monstrous creatures that had never appeared in any bestiary of the Hours, nor ever would. Now they had a world to rule by the laws of chaos. A slothful slug lay upon a slimy rock with a raw tongue-tail and hooks for hands; a two-legged beast with a quadruped beside it, walked through a place on Obadiah where a deluge of fire rain was falling; two human-headed birds sat on a dead branch, debating the weather—
Suddenly, from out of the sealed Chamber, the Empress’s command—
“To me! Women!”
A beat, then—
“NOW!”
The seamstresses had kept up a fine illusion of indifference for the benefit of Pixler’s storm troopers but they had been ready for this moment.
Now eight of them, acting as though governed by one mind, returned through the littered passageway, throwing their collective will at the sealed doors. The hardened sealant on the inside cracked, and the doors were flung wide, pushed from behind by the weight of the water. The women were ready for its fall. They threw up a quilt of invisible patches around them, sewn together by their own hands. It was only woven fabric, like any other, but such lattices have strength in their pattern out of all proportion to the mild stuff from which they are woven. The doors smashed against the quilt and broke.
The seamstresses entered the chamber and saw what the exchange between their Empress and the Pixler-Requiax had come to. The combatants were still high above the ragged hole in the floor through which the waters of the Izabella continued to surge up, their ambition unquelled. The Empress was elevated by a pillar of seething darkness, while the frail form of Rojo Pixler was borne up by the fronds of the Requiax’s continuously regenerating anatomy, which drew up with it countless lengths of woven water. Each carried, within its length, a cord of the Requiax’s matter, through which the desires of its mind were communicated. The mind had one desire above all others: to see the monstrous woman standing in darkness before it dead. She was the enemy—not the greatest of them, to be sure. Other evil, vaster than her by orders of magnitude, was using her to gain a stronghold here in Time. That would not happen! She had to be brought down. The glittering cords of the Pixler-Requiax went about their labors, wrapping themselves around the pedestal of shadows on which she stood, and then rising through the soul-laden folds of her garment, forming a net of knotted sea around her.
“Get! It! Off! Me!” the Empress shrieked, appalled by this violation.
She couldn’t get the rest of the words out. The water ropes had climbed her torso, and there was a noose of water around her neck. It tightened.
“No!” she said, and raised the hand she’d used to seize hold of Voorzangler, its fingers sharp and dark. Only this time it was onto her own flesh that she turned her piercing fingertips, sliding them down between her throat and the noose. She pulled the water rope off her gullet, far enough at least that she could get two words out.
“Free . . . . . . me . . . . . .”
The seamstresses were already raising their hands and speaking in old Abaratian the Eight Names of the Creatrix, which would summon to them the means to liberate their Empress.
“Giathakat.”
“Juth and Junntak.”
“Kiezazaflit.”
“Enothu and Eyjo.”
“Yeagothonine.”
“Yuut.”
“Yuut.”
“Yuut.”
Even before all eight had been spoken motes of fire ignited in their hands, forming vicious instruments, far more effective at cutting than any knife. They exchanged no words. They knew their business. They came at the column of darkness on which their lady stood and cut at the silver-green waters of Pixler and the Requiax. The tools that had been the gift of the Creatrix were as efficient as they were strange. They lacerated the waters, like assassins in a world of throats. Back and forth! Up and down! The cords of water, severed, fell back into the churning flood that had produced them.
Pixler-Requiax roared his disapproval.
“You should have stayed out of this battle, women,” he roared. “It’s going to be the death of you.”
The water was still pouring up out of the ground, weaving replacement ropes as it did so. They rose up suddenly—only two of them, but
many times thicker than the cords that had climbed the column. They weren’t interested in disarming the women. It was the seamstresses themselves these two ropes of water were eager to claim.
The ropes did not linger to choose which women to take; they simply took, snatching two of the seamstresses from their cutting and summarily drowning them. The remaining seamstresses were too busy at their cutting to even notice that two of their number had gone. But the Empress did.
“Sisters! Take care!” she called to them. The meaning of her words was lost in the confusion. The ropes, having drowned two already, rose up to snatch another two.
“No, Pixler!” Mater Motley cried out, her voice heard at frequencies only living waters heard. “They are just women.”
Pixler was not a man without compassion. His spirit, in the Requiax’s cold embrace, saw that the seamstresses were indeed only women. They had let go of the instruments they had been cutting with. They wanted only to live.
We should show mercy on them, Pixler said, exchanging his thoughts with the Requiax.
Mercy? asked the Requiax, searching the grid of its mind for some clue to the meaning of the word. But it was like a piece of bone, or a flame. It had no need of mercy in its being. I feel nothing in me, Pixler.
No?
No.
Pixler could hardly blame the creature for what it had never known, or needed to know. He was the one who’d baited it with his lights and noise of his heart, drowning in the deep. He was the one who’d caused the Requiax to rise up and meet the sky. So it had no mercy to offer up? Such was its state.
“Let go of my sisters!” the Empress cried out yet again.