“But before the Kid was you, Mr. Pixler. You are the creator.”

“Am I . . . ?”

“Yes . . .” Voorzangler said, his voice a little less certain now, “. . . of course you are. Without you . . . There’s nothing.”

“The Kid?”

“Sir. You came before the Kid. The father must come before the son.”

“Yes . . .”

“So the city, sir.”

“Yes, the city . . .” He seemed to remember the words he’d once believed above all things.

“Commexo City belongs to the Spirit of the Kid and always will.”

“Good,” Voorzangler said, relieved that the genius he worked for had not lost his grip on the order of things. “So what do we do about the . . . Stormwalker, sir? It hangs above us with all its firepower directed at the city. You don’t want any harm to the Spirit of the Kid, surely.”

“Absolutely not. This city must stand as a testament to the dreams of the Commexo Kid.”

“Good, Mr. Pixler. So . . . What should I do?”

“What would you advise?”

“Me?”

“Yes, Doctor. What would you advise for the health of the Kid’s city?”

“I don’t think we have any choice, sir. We are either destroyed or we surrender.”

“Do you think if I were to surrender to this Empress person she might come for me here?”

“I’m sorry, sir. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if she wants total supremacy, then it would be quite a coup for her, would it not? My priceless body in return for the safety of the city.”

“Is that what you want to offer her, sir?”

“I accept,” Mater Motley said.

“Is that her?” Pixler asked, sounding quite puzzled.

“Yes, sir,” said Voorzangler. “It is.”

“How did she get onto our secure line?”

“She’s not on the line, sir. She’s here. With me.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I had no choice.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“She forbade me, sir.”

“And like the sensible coward he is,” the Old Mother said, “he preferred to keep his one good eye rather than tell you the truth.”

“I don’t blame him,” Pixler said. “No doubt he thought his little life was all he had. So losing it meant more to him than it would have if he’d known the truth.”

“What are you babbling about, Pixler?” Mater Motley demanded.

“Once we witness the great certainties of the High Worlds and the Deep Worlds, once we know darkness absolute and breathe the truth of light, everything else—like life—seems inconsequential.”

“You make no sense.”

“Do I not? Well, the fault is surely mine, lady. I’m afraid I’m sick. Some strange contagion I picked up on my descent into the waters of the Izabella.”

“You’re not going to frighten me off with stories of deep-water plagues, Pixler. I fear nothing and no one.”

“Oh, Empress, that’s extraordinary! To have no fear. I want to look in your eyes and see that for myself. Voorzangler?”

“Sir?”

“Will you escort the Empress into the library?”

“Of course, sir.”

“I will be with you in just a moment, Empress.”

The line was broken and went to black noise.

“He’s no longer in contact,” Voorzangler said. “He’s never done that before. He’s always been listening.”

“Apparently not today, Doctor. Or he would have realized I was here with you. So take me to him.”

“I can only go as far as the door. I’ve never entered the sanctum. It’s his private world.”

“Well, today you will accompany me, Voorzangler. I am your Empress. Serve me, and I will always be with you.”

“Then of course I must obey you.”

Voorzangler proceeded to make his way through the poorly lit rooms. The only consistent illumination was from the hooded lamps above the paintings that lined the walls.

“Pixler has very eclectic taste, Voorzangler.”

“The paintings?”

Mater Motley paused to look at one of them: a very brightly colored canvas, depicting a simple white cottage, some trees, a small shed and a single star.

“Voorzangler?”

“Yes?”

“What is this atrocity?”

“I believe it’s called The Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”

“Decadence. Look at it, showing off its colors. It sickens me.”

“I’ll have it removed.”

“No need,” Mater Motley said.

She raised her hand and the canvas was consumed by an invisible flame, the bright color blackening and blistering until every last fleck of color had been consumed, leaving the antique gilded frame to enclose a view of almost any part of Abarat at that moment.

Just a few paces farther on was another picture, its style and subject as agitated and violent as the first image had been calm and peaceful. It appeared to be a body hung on a grid of barbed wire, but the details were hard to decipher. Again the cremating hand was raised, and Voorzangler flinched. But Mater Motley simply pointed.

“Now that,” she said, “I like.” She looked at Voorzangler. “All right. I’ve had my fill of art.”

She didn’t linger in front of any other painting, but followed Voorzangler to the large room at the end of the passageway.

“You seem to have a problem with your drains, Pixler,” she said as she stepped into the room.

“And with the lights . . .” Pixler replied from somewhere in the darkness. “Everything in here has failed, I’m afraid. Your . . . your . . . forces . . . Empress . . . have . . . taken . . . their . . . toll. My perfect city is no longer perfect.”

“Forget about your city. It’s you I need to see. Are there no lights in here at all?” There was an edge in her voice, more than a touch of suspicion. “Surely the chamber has a window, Doctor? The light from the burning city would—”

“Light . . .” Pixler replied, “would not . . . show you . . . anything your eyes would want to see.”

“You would forbid me?”

“No. Of course nnnnot. How could I? You are the Empressssss.”

“Then what’s going on in here? I demand to know.”

“If that is what the Empresssss wishes . . .”

“It is.”

“Then . . . sssseeeee.”

And suddenly there was light in the chamber, though it didn’t emanate from a lamp. It was Rojo Pixler, himself, who was the source of this frigid light, though his human anatomy was merely the frail centerpiece of a living form that had taken over the entire chamber, an intricate filigree of lacy tissue that covered the walls and hung in lazy decay from the ceiling. A foul stench was in these layers of rotting tissue, which here and there clotted, forming sluggish creatures that were attached by pulsing cords of matter to the body of Pixler himself.

Mater Motley seized hold of Voorzangler, her fingers digging so deep into his body that he cried out in pain.

“A crude trap, Doctor.”

“I had no knowledge of this, Empress,” Voorzangler said.

“She . . . is no Empress,” Pixler replied, his corrupted voice thick with contempt.

He rose up now, although there was little sign that it was the work of Pixler’s limbs that allowed him to do so. It was the creature within whose body he was enmeshed that drew him into a standing position.

“I . . . ammmmm . . . a part of something greater now,” Pixler said. “And I do not . . . ffffearr your DARKNESS, witch.” The light in the lace body flickered. “I . . . have passed eons in a deeperrrr darknesssss than your gray Midnight.”

Again, the light flickered. But it didn’t plunge the room into darkness. Instead it revealed, like a corrupted X-ray, the single vast anatomy of man and monster, exposing with appalling clarity how Pixler’s bones were interwoven with the stinking substance of his possessor. Rojo Pixler, the great architect himself, had become a piece of a piece of something that existed in all its unknowable immensity somewhere in the depths of the Sea of Izabella.

He rose up off the floor, lifted up on fans of fluttering tissue that shimmered as they worked. Rows of wet-rimmed valves twitched and spat; soft spines swelled into clusters of vicious barbs, surges of power passed through translucent ducts from one body to the next, noisily spilling Requiatic liquids onto the marble floor when they brimmed over.