The mud that had once been Lummuk didn’t care about his explanations. It continued to crawl up Shaveos’s arm, leaping over his fingers, and then—just as Shaveos drew breath to yell Candy’s name one more time, Lummuk oozed into his open mouth.

Candy shook herself out of her trance of curiosity and turned to Zephario.

“We should get—” she started to say.

But the blind man had already gone.

Chapter 64

No Plan B

“WHY HAVEN’T WE FALLEN out of the sky?” Gazza said.

“Maybe because we haven’t stopped moving?” Malingo suggested, though there was precious little conviction in his reply. “How far have we come?”

Gazza looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’re a lot farther from Scoriae than I thought we were.”

Malingo got to his feet and turned around to look back through the glyph’s semitranslucent walls. It was a beguiling, rapturous spectacle, with layer upon layer of figures, their colors shimmering toward the stern of the glyph. There were people in all directions, some assembled in groups, many solitary. But he resisted the temptation to study them too closely. He needed to focus his attention on the northern coastline of Scoriae.

Gazza had been right. They were indeed a lot farther from Scoriae than he thought they’d be. If he squinted, he could just see the area of flat ground where the internment compound had been located, and beyond it, Mount Galigali, which was no longer the inert rock it had been for as long as any of these people could remember. A gaping hole had been torn open in its flank, and liquid magma blazed from the wound, hawking up phlegm-fire to spit at the sky.

“Galigali’s gonna go bang,” Malingo said.

“Hasn’t it already?”

“I think it’s got more destruction in it than the few fireworks we’ve seen so far.”

“Really? Funny, I feel like Galigali right now. I’m going to go bang. But a good bang. No . . . a great bang,” Gazza said.

“Oh? What’s brought this on?”

“Not what, Malingo, who.”

“Oh, her. What was it that got ya? Her eyes, right? Blue, brown. Blue, brown.”

“But each time, a different blue.”

“A different brown.”

“Lordy Lou,” Gaz said.

Malingo’s smile withdrew, only lingering in his eyes.

“I didn’t realize. I’m sorry,” Gaz said.

“What’s to be sorry for?” Malingo asked.

“You don’t look very happy now. I didn’t realize—”

“We geshrats seem to always want more than fate has given us.”

“That’s not just a geshrat problem.”

“No?”

“No. When you like something . . . even love something . . .”

“Or even love, yes.”

“Yes. Love. That’s the word.” His voice got louder with every syllable. “Why not use it?”

“Perhaps more quietly?” Malingo said.

“Why? She makes me happy. Crazy-happy. And I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but she’s . . . I don’t know . . . hypnotizing me with those eyes. Blue, brown. Blue, brown.”

“You do sound crazy. Be careful,” Malingo warned him. “Everybody can hear what you’re saying.”

“Fine by me,” Gazza said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” He raised his voice to be sure he could be heard by everyone in the glyph. “I love the girl who brought us together, Candy Quackenbush. None of us would still be alive if it weren’t for her,” he reminded them all, his voice coming back to him in mysterious echoes off the vaulted ceilings and the nine-sided chambers. “But we’re not safe yet. The Stormwalker that’s waiting for us back there is even bigger than our glyph, and it contains an army of stitchlings: one stitchling for every one of us. A knife for every heart. That’s what Mater Motley has planned for us. But we’re free and we’re going to stay free. The problem is there’s seven thousand knives they haven’t used yet.”

There were murmurs of assent from all directions, high and low, port and starboard.

“Does anybody disagree?” Gazza yelled.

He let the silence play out for a few seconds, to give any dissenting voice a chance to be heard. But there were no objections raised. Candy was the heroine of the Hour.

“All right,” he said, smiling. “So then it’s agreed. We have to go back. We’re—”

“Wait.”

The voice of a woman came from somewhere on the starboard side.

“Before we turn around, there’s something everybody should know. The vessel the Empress has come after us in is a death-ship. It’s called a Stormwalker. I saw copies of the plans for its construction. It could blow us out of the skies in a heartbeat.”

There were murmurs of suspicion:

How did she see plans for a thing like that?

Whose side was she really on?

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t on the side of what’s right,” the woman said. “I want Mater Motley brought to trial for murder. My brother, Kaltu Mothrass, was tortured to death by her and her seamstresses.”

“Why?”

“We don’t have time—” Malingo started to say but the question had been asked and the woman was already answering it: “I’m Juna Mothrass. My brother and his wife, Geneva Peachtree—”

“Wife?” Malingo said quietly to himself.

He had spent many hours in Geneva’s presence since they had all banded together around Candy, but not once had he heard Geneva make any mention of a husband, which would have sounded odd under any circumstances, but was particularly strange when the husband you were talking about was one of the most famous revolutionaries of Abarat. Malingo needed to be certain that this woman was who she claimed to be.

“So, Juna—” he said.

“Yes?”

“—do you know Geneva well?”

“Very well.”

“Well enough to tell me which book she knows by heart from beginning to end?”

The fact that Malingo had presented Juna with such a demanding question had a murmur of anticipation to make the colored compartments of the vessel churn, color flowing with color, creating hues that only existed in the ethereal or metafictional dimensions.

“Of course,” Juna Mothrass replied without hesitation. “The Testaments of Pottishak. She knows every word.”

“Is that the right answer?” Gazza said.

“Yup,” Malingo told him. “She knows Geneva. We should listen to her.”

“I don’t know much,” Juna said. “All I can say with any certainty is that if we try to come at the vessel from either side, we’ll be blown out of the sky.”

“So what do you suggest?” Gazza said. “Are we supposed to leave Candy on that island? Look at it! Look!”

He had picked, quite by chance, a particularly opportune moment to direct everyone’s attention toward Scoriae, because two and half seconds later the top of Mount Galigali, which had been a shape so recognizable it had been used on Ћ500 paterzem notes without need of identification for many years, blew off. A column of liquid stone poured heavenward, blackening a sky that was only just beginning to clear the dirt from the sockets of the stars when the flame turned into an oily-black smoke that blinded them again. Meanwhile, titanic shovelfuls of infernal cinders rolled smoking down the slope, pitched so far by the force of the eruption that some of them flowed down onto the beach, where they rolled into the water, throwing up clouds of steam.

“I think there’s only one way to go,” Juna said.

“And where’s that?” Gazza said.

“We go straight at the Stormwalker.”

“You mean fly straight at that thing?”

“That’s suicide, surely,” said somebody else.

“On the contrary. I think it’s our only chance because it’s the last thing she’ll expect. She thinks we’re frightened of her.”

“We are,” said John Slop.

“No,” said Gazza. “We’re not. And if we admit to fear, then we’re already lost.”

“So what’s going to stop us colliding with her?”

“Nothing. We will collide with it! And push it back, directly into the mouth of the volcano.”