“A Requiax,” Mater Motley said, her lip curling with contempt. “No wonder it stinks like a shore at high tide in here.”

“And . . . what is your stench, Hag?” the Pixler-Requiax said. By now Pixler’s body was ten feet off the ground, lit from below by the flashes of cold luminescence that spilled through the layers of tissue scattered everywhere.

“Tell your master to leash his tongue, Voorzangler, or else I will reach into that foul mouth of his and tear it out by the root.”

Voorzangler attempted to form some response to this, but she was killing him with her grip, and he was losing control of his body. His tongue could only flop about in his mouth, unable to shape a single coherent word. His whole anatomy had been drained of life force, and was now so weak that if the Empress hadn’t had her fingers buried deep in his shoulder he would have dropped to the ground and died where he fell.

But she held on to him, shaking him like a little one-eyed doll.

“Tell him, idiot!” All Voorzangler could do was shake his head in terrorized despair. “You thought to lure me into a trap, didn’t you? With this . . . fish.”

Again, Voorzangler shook his head, his control over his body seeming to become weaker with every passing moment.

“What do you want, fish?” the Old Mother said. “Are you hanging up there to terrorize me? Because you haven’t a hope of doing so! Whatever you assume you have made yourself, you are nothing, fish. Bow down! Do you hear me? Bow down before the Empress of the Abarat!”

As she spoke she let her free hand drop to her side, presenting her open palm to the floor. This simple gesture caused her to rise up into the air, dragging Dr. Voorzangler, his body now in the grip of something very close to a full seizure, with her.

Others had entered the room now, and were witnessing these grotesqueries: Voorzangler’s assistants from the Circular Room had followed him in, as had several seamstresses, but nobody made any attempt to intervene. This was a pitting of Higher Powers; everyone watching knew that. Anyone who attempted to interfere now would only earn themselves a quick death. So they all stayed close to the door in case things took a turn for the apocalyptic. And from there they bore witness.

“Bow down!” Mater Motley said again as she rose. “With your face to the ground.”

There was no response from the Pixler-Requiax, at least at first. Then, very slowly, the creature began to shake its head. The weight of the great architect’s brain distorted the soft bone as it swung back and forth, his mouth lolling open, allowing a stream of fluid that resembled molasses to pour forth. Its issue caused the stink in the chamber to become far, far worse: so vile and overpowering that three members of Voorzangler’s staff turned and fled, puking, back into the passageway.

But Mater Motley had seen and smelled far worse. She was untouched by this whole performance. She was standing on the air at the same height as the architect now and raising her hand, presenting her palm to the enemy.

“You have one last chance to bend to me. And then I will make you do so, even if I have to break every bone in you to do it. Choose, fish. Bow or be broken.”

The shaking of the head slowed, and then ceased. Pixler raised his own hand to wipe from around his mouth the last of the noisome fluid. When the thing spoke again the corruption of its speech was over. The Requiax spoke now with a clear intention to sound as though Pixler had regained control, enunciating each word with almost absurd precision.

“You would find it hard to break bones that are so soft—” the thing began. As it spoke, the thing lifted its arms above its head, seizing the wrist of his left with its right, and twisting it around as though the bones were made of rubber. “—I can let the currents carry me and never break.”

“So go back to your currents, fish.”

“I am no fish, woman,” the creature said. “I AM REQUIAX!”

Chapter 51

Father and Son

EVEN BEFORE THE FINAL syllable was out of the creature’s mouth it flung itself at Mater Motley. She had anticipated that it would do exactly that, because as it reached for her, something that resembled a fan, decorated in purple and gold, snapped open in front of her. She blew on it: the lightest of breaths, motes of purple and silver clouded the air around the Pixler-Requiax’s head.

Innocent though the weapon she had just called into service might have appeared, the innocence was a lie. It was that most guilty of things—a weapon possessed of the power to lay death down wherever its dart went. The purple and golden motes broke against Pixler-Requiax’s face like tiny sparks. As he threw back his pierced visage, finely knotted cords of dark matter flew up out of the many wounds and rose to strike the ceiling. Cobs of plaster came showering down, like brute snow. But their descent merely presaged a far more bizarre descent. The knots of dark matter burst like overripe fruit. Out of their split skins came a rain of the Requiax’s base matter; the raw sea muck from which its elaborate filigree was made. As soon as it fell on Mater Motley, it began to spread like a vine, insane with its own fecundity, coursing over her body in all directions; dozens of trails of the nameless stuff raced down her body, crisscrossing to form a foul-smelling net around her.

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.