The only thing that would stop it was the only thing that stood in its path: Mount Galigali.

“The volcano!” Gazza yelled. “It’s going to hit the volcano!” He was up now, trying to find his way out of the maze of the glyph. “We need to dissolve this thing. Now.”

Once again, everyone was in accord.

Barely taking his eyes off the vessel, Gazza stumbled out of the glyph. The vessel had behaved impeccably: carried its creators from their place of execution and into Oblivion itself, only to return them to Reality without losing a single passenger. But now the short epic of its life was over. Its energies were dissolving into the sulfur-stained air of Scoriae.

There were many among the disbanding seven thousand who took a moment to offer a prayer of thanks to the glyph in its dissolution. But neither Gazza nor Malingo were among them.

They, like Eddie, the John Brothers and Betty Thunder, had their eyes fixed on Galigali, which the Stormwalker was seconds from striking.

Mater Motley had been in the act of reaching to tear a hole in Candy’s body when the vessel lurched. But she still put self-

preservation above her desire to kill, and instead caught hold of a door frame to keep herself from being thrown to the floor.

Candy however lost her balance and fell, awkwardly and painfully, slamming her head against the wall on her way down. She tried to get up again, but the tumultuous motion of the vessel hadn’t ceased. The passageway was no longer solid; it shook so violently Candy’s eyes couldn’t fix upon anything long enough to focus.

Candy hadn’t realized how hard she’d hit her head until she tried to get up again. Her brain seemed too small for her skull, and her legs shook. When she reached out to touch the wall she found her fingers were completely numb.

“Not good,” she muttered.

She wasn’t the only one who’d lost control. So had the Stormwalker. It wasn’t just shaking and reeling, it was moving. And moving fast. She could feel its helpless speed, the way she’d felt in the car when her dad was drunk and driving like a madman, and all she wanted to do was close her eyes. It was that terrible memory—of her father—that made her defy her numb, weak body and get up. She was just in time. As Candy rose, Mater Motley reached for her a second time.

“No, Dad!”

The words came out so suddenly and so loud that the Hag paused for the briefest moment.

That was time enough. Zephario’s magic, finally reaching its destination, came up through the floor off to Candy’s right, and her first absurd thought was that somehow a bright bird had been trapped in the death-ship. The idea lasted a moment only. Then the colors melted into a single exquisite iridescence, and she felt lightness—in both senses of the word, of luminescence and of weight.

Candy saw Mater Motley’s iron hand reach into her body. But the vision was short-lived. Her gaze quickly went where her body had already gone, leaving the Hag to grasp vainly at the space where Candy’s body had been only moments before. Candy had only time enough left to see Motley’s rage: her gray-white face suffused getting paler still, while the black of her pupils spread to extinguish every last gleam of whiteness in her eyes.

She’d lost again. Candy was gone. Small though the fragment of the Abarataraba was, it was big enough to reverse the route that had carried her aboard the vessel in the first place, melting all that lay in the way of her escape: ceilings and floors, creatures and cargo, all parting like smoke when Candy approached.

The Abarataraba pulled her out of the vessel, and for ten, eleven, twelve seconds Candy was held in the air, suspended only a few feet clear of the Stormwalker’s speeding underbelly, as it continued to hurtle toward destruction. The ground was a jagged grid of lightning, discharged by the Stormwalker in a desperate attempt to slow the vessel down. If she landed in its midst, it would have been the death of her.

So the Abarataraba kept her in the air until the vessel had passed overhead completely. Only then did it guide her down to the ground. And now, as she looked back across Scoriae to the island’s northern shore (her sight sharpened by the power blazing in her cells), she saw a reason to smile. There was a large crowd of people—she knew it to be around seven thousand—all running in her direction, from the Edge of the World. Beyond them, the last remnants of the glyph were losing every last glimmer of solidity as its final passengers disembarked. It had done its work, and now dissipated, back to the ether from whence it had been borne.

The moment of calm was indeed brief, interrupted almost instantaneously by a din of destruction that shook the ground on which Candy was standing. She turned so quickly she had time to see the Stormwalker plow nose first into the crater where the peak of Mount Galigali had once been, now a ragged wound spitting fire and stone hundreds of feet into the air.

There the vessel came to rest. In a happier world all would have been put right. The evil-doers delivered into an all-consuming fire, and those who had been saved from execution free to return to their homes, lives and loved ones unharmed.

But this was not that happier world.

Chapter 69

For Every Knife, Five Hearts

INSIDE THE STORMWALKER, ZEPHARIO lay in the darkness and listened without fear to the steady slowing of his pulse. He was dying. Very soon his laboring heart would start to miss beats entirely, until finally, it ceased. There would be light then, and in that light he would see his family again, whose innocent souls had preceded him by many years into paradise. He had always imagined that place to be a garden—a garden where no flower ever withered, nor was any fruit corrupted by an invading worm. There his beloveds lived in bliss, beyond the reach of any hurt or harm. And he would be there with them soon. Very soon.

But even as he lay in the darkness, and the time of his deliverance from life drew closer, so too did the Nephauree. And it was not about to let him slip away into that peaceful place where his children played, at least not without one final violation. It prodded him with pushing until he rolled over onto his belly. He moaned. The slivers pressed against his back, but this time their intention was not to move him but to weave their substance into his cells, to press their presence into him, in four or five places.

He could not resist them. There was no strength left in him. What did this last cruelty matter, anyway? It would only quicken the approach of death to have his body invaded with such alien matter. Or so he had imagined. But no. The deeper the Nephauree’s matter invaded his flesh the more strongly his heart beat. And further from him the bright, beautiful image of the garden receded.

“No . . .” he murmured. “Let me go to them. Please I have no wish to live.”

“What you wish is of no importance to us,” the Nephauree replied. “We have need of you alive. So you will live.”

There was pressure exerted on him now, raising him up, his body’s weight causing him to sink back upon the spines, until they transfixed him completely, and emerged from his chest and abdomen. He was helpless, more puppet than self-willed being.

Thus, carrying him before it, the Nephauree departed the temple in search of worshippers, leaving Christopher Carrion in darkness.

Mater Motley could taste her own blood. She had caught her tongue between her teeth when the Stormwalker struck the volcano. But apart from that minor harm, she was unhurt. She got to her feet. The vessel was apparently lying on its side, because the closest she could find to a horizontal surface was what had been one of the walls of the passageway a few seconds before. She walked to the nearest door, sick with rage that the girl had once again slipped away. No matter. They were at the Edge of the World. There was nowhere now for the little witch to go.