“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-mвchй 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 the 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.