The glyph was coming out of the Void, set on a collision course with the Stormwalker. There would be no error in this. Her friends, no doubt assuming she was dead, were coming back to greet their executioners with a death blow of their own—

k

Mater Motley had seen her son through Carrion’s eyes, and had realized two things in the same moment: the first, that Zephario was now here in the sacred Temple of the Nephauree, and second, that the madness she had driven him into after the fire (some pitiful shreds of a mother’s love, incongruous though it was, had kept her from murdering him) had now been driven out of him. She knew without a moment’s thought whose handiwork this was: the witch from the Hereafter had touched him, damn her. It seemed every time Mater Motley encountered the girl she found another reason to despise her.

Well, no matter. It was all easily solved. Finally she would do what she should have done years ago: kill him. Nothing vicious. Just a quick execution to get him out of the way.The neatness of the solution pleased her. She was at the door, already thinking about how she was going to slaughter him, when she heard one of the stitchling Commanders say, “Empress?”

“Not now.”

“Empress.”

“I said NOT NOW!” her voice almost bestial this time.

She turned to reinforce her point, but her gaze never reached the Commander. Instead it went to the window, or rather the formless Oblivion beyond the window, and to the shape of a vast blade being flung out of that Oblivion.

At that moment, staring at the glyph as it hurtled toward her vessel, Mater Motley was given a helping of a kind of gruel she had not tasted since her childhood: helplessness.

“I hate you . . .” she said. “You and all the worlds.” But her hatred was not enough to stop the glyph. “They mean to strike us,” she said, her voice dead.

“Then it will break apart,” one of the Commanders said.

“You can’t break something that isn’t solid, you imbecile. It’s made of magic and hope. Damn her. Damn her.”

k

“Malingo? Gazza! I love you! Don’t do this! Can you hear me? It’s Candy! PLEASE SAY YOU CAN HEAR ME! STOP RIGHT NOW OR YOU’LL KILL YOURSELVES!”

“She said she loved me.”

“Who did?”

“Who’d you think, geshrat? Her! Candy! I heard her say she loved me.”

“I’M IN THE STORMWALKER!”

“She said—”

“She was in the Stormwalker. Yes, I heard her this time,” Malingo said.

“She’s alive!” Gazza said. “She’s in the Stormwalker and she’s alive!”

“But that’s terrible! She’ll be killed.”

“No. Not my Candy,” Gazza said, with unshakable confidence in the wisdom of his beloved. “She’s clever. She’ll think of something.”

In the Temple of the Nephauree, where Candy had left the father and the son, the great roar of the Stormwalker’s engines ceased the moment the vessel touched the Void. The temple was the wellspring for every bit of magic that kept the Stormwalker aloft, and for a few seconds the conditions of space itself—cold, silent, dead—took possession of the temple. Denied the air to feed their bright flames, the candles were instantly extinguished, every last light pinched out at the same instant.

Though both the silence and the darkness were utter, the two Carrions knew that something had entered the temple: something that even they, who lived lives steeped in nightmares, had no desire to see or hear. One of the Nephauree had crossed from its hiding place behind the stars and was here, in this place.

A primal terror clutched at father and son. Instantly, the sound of the engines came roaring back. But in the few seconds of its absence, its volume had risen by orders of magnitude. It wasn’t the sound of the vessel’s engines themselves that were so loud: it was the sound of the vessel itself. The Stormwalker was reverberating.

“The ship’s shaking, Gazza!” Malingo said.

“I don’t feel anything,” said Gazza.

“Not the glyph. The Stormwalker. Look at it. It’s rocking around. What’s she making it do?”

“Lordy Lou . . .” Gazza said. “I think we’re causing it. We’re pushing a piece of the Void in front of us—”

“How can an empty place have pieces?”

“Maybe it’s not empty at all. Like space isn’t really space. It’s full of stuff. Gas. Dust. Bits of—”

“Wait!” Malingo said. “Did you feel that? Now we’re shaking.”

“I think its trash from the Void,” Gazza said. “It’s breaking up against the ’Walker, and it’s flying right back at us!”

There was evidence that his theory was right. All but invisible energies were seething in the air ahead of the glyph. The garbage of Oblivion swept ahead of the glyph’s broom, breaking like a wave against the Stormwalker then thrown back at the glyph again.

“What happens now?” Malingo said.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Gazza replied. “There’s no turning back. That I do know. In ten seconds we’re going to hit. And then—”

“We’re all going to die,” Candy said, her tone quite matter-of-fact.

She hadn’t moved from the window. Where was there left to go? She was looking over the Edge of the World, with Oblivion ahead of her, and with nothing behind except a world of melting stone. She was better off where she was, staring at the glyph that she’d helped bring into being. It was a freedom machine. It would strike the Hag’s Stormwalker so hard it would fling the death-machine back the way it had come.

In the Temple of the Nephauree, in the company of the unseen Other, Zephario Carrion held his son in his arms, quietly singing to him the “Lullaby of Luzaar Muru.”

“Coopanni panni,

Coopanni panni,

Luzaar Muru.

Copii juvasi

Athemun yezoo.

Coopanni panni

Coopanni panni

Luzaar—”

And then the two vessels struck.

Chapter 67

Yat Yut Yah

GAZZA’S THEORY—THAT THE DETRITUS of the Void, the trash of Oblivion, had somehow gathered up in front of the glyph as it speeded back toward Scoriae—was confirmed when the glyph hit the Stormwalker, pressing it closer to the gaping emptiness. The Empress’s vessel began to shudder, the motion minor at first but rapidly escalating, intensifying the assault of the detritus upon the Stormwalker. The ship’s dark armor cracked in places, and jagged pieces were torn away, their tumbling departure over the surface of the machine stripping away further pieces.

“Candy? Where are you? CANDY!” Gazza cried.

Gazza called out to her over and over, but now there was no answer. All he could do was watch the terrible spectacle of the machine in which she was trapped coming apart. It would not be destroyed quickly, he knew. The death-machine had been built, after all, to be a womb of storms. Not only to contain such birthing, but to channel their forces and to walk upon them. It would not succumb easily.

Even so, she was inside.

And she wasn’t answering him, even though he kept on calling.

“Candy? Candy? Candy?”

Standing at the window still, watching the collision, the Empress delayed going down to meet with the visitor she knew had entered the temple. The Nephauree were quickly offended; even now she should have been hurrying down to find out what this one wanted. But there was another piece of business more pressing still.

Candy Quackenbush.

The girl from Chickentown had been nothing at the beginning. Just a stupid adolescent who’d fallen off her world into the Izabella and been washed up on the shores of the Abarat. Insignificant, she’d thought; a nobody, who would somehow find her way to the Hereafter again, or would perish quickly in a world that she did not understand.

But she’d been mistaken. The girl was an enigma sealed up inside a conundrum with a tribe of puzzlements, nonsense and contradictions. And she had an uncanny knack for self-preservation, even when circumstances were not promising; even when Otto Houlihan, the Criss-Cross Man, one of the most successful assassins in the Abarat, had slipped and fallen before her.