But if that was the price of winning his devotion again, of healing the hurt she’d done him, then it was a tiny price, and she would gladly pay it. And it certainly didn’t hurt her case that she was returning to him with knowledge of the Hereafter; a world she knew he had long hoped to subdue with wieldings of unimaginable scale. Now she was familiar with that idiot world. She’d studied it for almost sixteen years through the eyes of Candy Quackenbush. She had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all. What might she and Carrion, the apprentice and her sometime master, not do if they went to work in that stupefied world with the intention of bringing it to its knees?

Oh, by A’zo and Cha:

WHAT MIGHT THEY NOT DO?

And then, as she came to the edge of the trees, Old Red dispersed completely, and Boa barely suppressed a cry of shock seeing how the scene before her had changed. She had seen only one three-spired tower through the mist. The rest had been demolished completely, their rubble removed and the ground where they’d stood pummeled flat, so as to make the size of the new tower seem even more prodigious. The spires had no windows for ninety-eight percent of their height.

Only at the top of the immense central spire, which was needle-fine, were there windows; a row of them, shaped like narrow eyes, all around the crown of the structure. As she studied it, however, she saw that there were vertical rows of symbols etched into the stone, which had the sheen of mercury. They were indecipherable to Boa, but she knew their origins. They were pieces of ancient Abaratian, the language of the Thread as it was sometimes known, meaning that it had been used to encode and connect all things beneath the Twenty-Four Hours and One that hung above the islands. In these sigils, every piece of the Abarat, from a dew drop to a mountain, from a flea to the Requiax, from a second of unendurable grief to an infant’s first smile—all written and entwined in the thread that ran unbroken through Time and Time Out of Time, connecting it all, forever and always.

But oh, she thought, what a fine and terrible thing it would be to cut that sacred cord! To sever all from all, in perpetuity and visit the despair that no prayer or calculation could cure. . . .

The thought of doing such sublime harm filled her with joy. A Princess capable of such ambition was inviolate. She had died, but lived again. No harm could possibly come to her. And, in thinking so, she stepped out from beneath the Ancients and started across the open grounds toward the Needle Tower. No one was guarding the tower for a very simple reason: it had no door. Boa circled the tower twice examining the wall for the slightest hint of an opening, however narrow or small. But there was nothing. Of course it was perfectly possible the door was concealed by a Seemi Feit, but she was in no mood to search for any trailing threads of Seemi Rope to carefully pull it apart. She was out of practice with decoding, and impatient to see what was inside the tower. So she gave her blood a charge of power by whispering three syllables—v’aatheum—against her wrist, then immediately biting into the meat, drawing off a mouthful of blood, and before it had time to dissolve on her gums and tongue, spat it with all possible force against her distorted reflection.

The reflecting seal bubbled, smoked and dissolved. She stepped inside, too curious to wait for the melt to stabilize, preferring instead to endure the sting of metal droplets on the top of her skull and on her shoulders as she entered.

Her impatience was quickly rewarded, the little hurts inconsequential compared to the astonishment that awaited her inside.

There were no stairs spiraling up the great heights of the Needle. Nor was there any kind of mechanical device to carry her up. Instead the walls of the tower were covered with elaborate growths of yellow, gray, and blue-purple tissue, which erupted into sentient blossoms of exquisite complexity and beauty, their membranes swelling and contracting, their intertwined stems flushed with speeding iridescence as they aspired to reach the moonlit chamber at the top. Very cautiously Boa reached up and touched a censer-shaped knot of multicolored matter, which hung at the intersection of several lengths of shiny-wet cord.

The Needle’s anatomy responded to the touch instantly. The ground beneath Boa’s feet rolled, and she might have been thrown down had it not instantly compensated by rolling in the opposite direction, allowing her to recover her equilibrium. She caught hold of a loop of knotted gut to prevent herself from being caught off guard again, but she had barely done so when the entire system of flowering entrails and light-bearing veins into which she had stopped began to raise her up on a platform of petal-flesh stretched over bone, rising at a breath-stealing speed, overtaking swift-seeded organs that oozed honeyed sap, and that raced ligament vines around the walls, fruited motes and glands bursting in celebration of her presence, spilling their luxurious juices upon her, staining her with their life (she, who had been a creature without form just a few hours before, expelled from solidity) blessing her with new ways to live this life After death.

She was almost at the top of the tower now, and she could see that the chamber was not only illuminated by moonlight. There were other sources of light up there as well, and they were moving.

“Carrion?” she said. There was no reply. “It’s me. It’s your Princess. I’m back.”

Being an island that saw the transportation of the living and the dead (along with many travelers who could not fall into either category), Gorgossium had need of three harbors.

The harbor equipped for the construction and launching of vessels of great magnitude was at Kythevai, in the northeast. This was the harbor from which Mater Motley’s newly commissioned warship, the Wormwood, had set forth to wreak havoc in the Hereafter, only to meet an undignified end on the flooded streets of Chickentown.

For sheer volume of vessels docked and unloaded, however, the commercial harbor at Uznak, in the south of the island, was the more important.

But it was from the third and smallest of the three harbors at Vrokonkeff, that the Old Mother was presently preparing to make her departure.

The voyage she was about to take was not of enormous length; she was merely crossing to the pyramids at Xuxux. The voyage may not have been of great consequence, but it was one of great significance, and she had prepared for it by fasting for nine days, and during that time, not uttering a single word. Even now, as she dismounted from the mummified hand that had long been her preferred mode of travel, and approached the simple vessel that would carry her to the pyramids, she did not speak. Nor, out of deference to their doyen, did the seamstresses who accompanied her.

She was half way up the gangplank when there rose a commotion farther down the quayside.

“Lady! Lady!”

It was a girl called Maratien, who for some years had attended upon the Old Mother in the tower, who came racing along the dock to speak with her mistress. Several seamstresses broke ranks to stop the girl from reaching Mater Motley for fear that Maratien’s intentions might be violent.

But the Old Mother had no fear of the girl.

“Let her go,” she instructed. “She may approach. What is it, Maratien? What’s distressing you, child?”

“There’s somebody in your tower.”

“Yes, of course. I left—”

“Not any of your seamstress sisters.”

“Who then?”

“I didn’t recognize her.”

“You were sufficiently concerned to race down and warn me?”