“What do you see?” Christopher asked her.

“A hole in the side of Galigali, and a lot of dust and dead rock.”

“So they’re dead?”

“Of course they’re dead. The ground opened up beneath both of them. And down they went into the fire.”

“What fire?” Christopher said, looking toward the window. “There’s nothing left burning in Galigali, surely.”

“I might have killed Candy Quackenbush, but I’ve resurrected Galigali.” Mater Motley turned and walked back to look at the volcano. “So many resurrections. First Boa, then you, now Galigali.”

“I was never dead, lady,” he replied. “If I had been, I would have remained that way. Happily.”

He didn’t look back at her. He just kept staring at the ever-multiplying streams of magma as they coursed down over the volcano’s flank.

“Stop obsessing on the girl! Did she really mean something to you?”

“Yes. She reminded me I’d been in love once. And that maybe I had deserved to be loved in return.” He stared past his grandmother at the wasteland visible through the battle-deck windows behind her. “She was quite a creature. Look! There! Her last miracle. She made them a glyph. That’s how they got away. She made a glyph big enough to carry all of the prisoners.”

“Impossible,” the Empress told him.

“I’m looking at it,” Christopher replied, pointing past her.

The Empress turned, following the direction of his finger, out through the battle-deck window.

Beyond the empty camp was a stretch of boulder-strewn wasteland, and beyond that, the Void. An empty darkness, into which was headed the immense glyph that Candy helped create.

“They’ve gone over the Edge of the World,” one of the stitchling Commanders remarked.

“Indeed they have,” the Empress replied.

“That’s the end of them then,” a second Commander said. “There’s nothing to hold them up out there. They’ll fall forever.”

“How did she do that?” Mater Motley said to herself.

“Does it matter?” Carrion said. “She’s dead. She won’t be doing it again.”

The Empress responded as though he hadn’t spoken.

“The amount of power that takes. Where did she get it?” She talked very quietly, almost to herself.

“They don’t seem to be falling,” Carrion said. “Are you sure that’s the Edge of the World?”

A copy of the Almenak had already been brought out, and the map in it carefully studied. Christopher went over to the Commanders and snatched the copy away to scrutinize for himself.

“Of course none of the information in these wretched Almenaks are reliable,” he said. To the north of Scoriae, the Sea of Izabella fell away into a featureless darkness, along the edge of which was written: This is the Edge of the World. Beyond the edge, etched in white letters against the blackness were four letters, widely sprawled:

VOID

“They will fall,” one of the Commanders said.

“Forever and ever,” said Motley.

“We should go to the very edge then,” Carrion said. He was smiling now, genuinely pleased at the prospect. “I want to see what this Void looks like.”

“I already gave the order,” the Empress said. “We’ll be waiting for them if they attempt to turn around.”

The Stormwalker had taken one lightning stride, and was about to take a second, moving the two-mile-long vehicle over the deserted camp toward the Edge of the Abarat with extraordinary speed.

“I see no sign of her glyph falling,” Carrion said.

“It will,” his grandmother said. “There’s nothing out there to hold it up. See for yourself.” She directed Christopher’s attention to the port side of the Stormwalker. There, beyond a stretch of solidified lava, the Izabella rushed on toward the edge of the world, where it fell away, throwing up churning clouds of spray.

“Impressive,” Carrion said.

“Yet her glyph still flies,” the Old Hag groaned. “How? Where does power like that come from?” She glanced at her grandson. “Did she ever talk to you about these powers?”

“The girl? No. But I have a theory. . . .” he said coyly.

“I’m listening.”

“The blind man who was with her. I knew him. Not the face, of course. There’s nothing left there, but . . . the eyes. Something about the eyes . . .”

“Don’t be coy. Talk!”

“It’s ridiculous,” he said, “but . . . I remember them from a dream. I was just a boy, and they looked down at me. Then he whispered something to me . . .”

“What did the man say?”

Carrion’s gaze slid in his grandmother’s direction for a second or two. Then he looked away.

“He looked down at me and he said, ‘I love you, Little One.’”

Chapter 63

Pigs

“. . . YETHASIHA.”

The stairway of fog had understood very well the urgency of Candy and Zephario’s situation. It had formed beneath their feet, and instantly closed up like an accordion, lifting them up into the belly of the Stormwalker through an open door that then closed very quickly, protecting its passengers from the explosion that peppered the hull on which they were sprawled with a number of projectiles that struck it like bullets.

They were alive. The breath had been knocked out of them, and they were a lot closer to the Hag of Gorgossium than either of them would have wished, but they were alive.

“That was quite a word,” Candy said. “I’ve never wielded something that moved so quickly—”

She stopped, silenced by the sound of two low-ranking stitchling soldiers engaged in a fierce exchange as they opened an iron door that brought them into this portion of the hold. Judging by their banter, the Old Hag’s seamstresses had devoted considerably little time to their mental capacities.

“There’s Quagmites on this vessel. I swears.”

“You and your Quagmites, Shaveos,” the other stitchling said as it sniffed the air. The sound of its voice changed suddenly. “Huh. You right. You right.”

“See! You smells it too?” said Shaveos excitedly. “That’s a Uman Been. I told you I knows it, Lummuk!”

“How’d you know what a Uman Been smells likes?” Lummuk wanted to know.

“I were on the Wormwood, whens it went the Hereafter.”

“You saw that Chickumtomb?”

“I did. I saw all that drownsd.”

“Were it horrible?”

“Oya. It were Viley!” Shaveos said gravely. “I was trown out the ship. I ended up in . . . I forgets. I still got the paper!” Candy heard the sound of the stitchling rummaging for something. “Here. Hold my knife,” he said.

This probably wasn’t a bad time to snatch a look at the enemy, Candy thought. She peered out from behind the tarpaulin-covered crates where she and Zephario had hidden and got a clearer look at stitchlings than she’d ever had before. There was an intelligence in their behavior, though not in their speech, that she hadn’t expected to see in the sacks of walking mud. And she noticed that the mud didn’t simply fill the sack, the way dirt might, rather it pushed out of little holes, as though it was constantly in the process of reinventing itself. There was something in the weave of the sack that then crawled all over the stitchlings’ forms, repairing any larger tears by crudely restitching the thread. They were, quite obviously, as she had been, Two In One: the thing occupied, and the occupying thing.

These two stitchlings in particular were chaotic, asymmetrical beings. One had an arm that ended in something more like a lobster claw than fingers, while the other, thanks to some seamstress’s whim, had no less than four hands at the end of one arm, two pairs set palm to palm, and no hand at all on the other arm.

Lobster Arm was apparently Shaveos, because it was he who now brought a tattered piece of folded paper out of the jacket of his mud-and-blood-splattered uniform. He pulled out a pair of spectacles with both lenses cracked, and peered at the map.

“This ams the place,” he said proudly. “The place I fell from Wormwood.”