The nearest door, she found, was above her. It was heavy, but it took only a flick of her will to tear it off its hinges. Then she spoke—

“Yet—

-ha—

-si—

-ha.”

—and ascended the smoke steps that formed in the air before her. What lay on the other side of the door was a spectacle of destruction so widespread that she might have taken pleasure in it had it not been her own Stormwalker that had been so demolished. She didn’t linger, however. There were noises that might have been death-moans of wounded giants coming from all directions, the last complaints of the vast machine as it sank into the melting pot of Mount Galigali’s crater.

There would be other death-machines in time, she knew. The Stormwalker had been but a hint of the glorious engines of destruction the Nephauree were capable of conceiving. She had seen some of them with her own eyes when she’d first ventured beyond the Starrish Door to find them, risking soul and sanity in doing so. But thinking of them now, of their power, and how many of their secrets they had shared with her, gave her weary limbs fresh strength. She climbed on, turning her back on the source of heat, and watching for a glimpse of the sky to appear through the smoke. There was cooler air coming from somewhere nearby. She followed it, her trek finally bringing her out of the carcass of the broken vessel and out onto the steep flank of Galigali.

She discovered that she was not alone. Dozens of stitchlings had escaped the conflagration, and were standing under the night sky, a sizeable number of them on fire, apparently indifferent to the flames. They certainly felt no pain. None of them even moaned.

She began to roughly assess their numbers, but it was a lost cause. They continued to emerge from every part of the wreckage, their will to live—even in the face of traumatic maimings—unquenchable. Many had horrendous wounds; some even crawled out of the Stormwalker without legs to bear them up. But though these gashes gave the Todo mud the opportunity to escape its confinement in these crudely sewn bodies, it seemed to be loyal to the form it had taken, to the individual each had become.

They clearly knew that they had their Empress in their midst, for when she emerged from the wreckage, they were waiting for her, standing around the lava pit, indifferent to the blistering heat. When she rose with the air above the wreckage, they let out a moan she had not known they were capable of making; a low note of celebration as though to lift her to Divinity.

“You good loyal soldiers,” she said. “You will have countless proofs of my love in return for this moment. I will lift you higher than any creature that calls itself alive, for you, though made of mud, are worthier.”

The stitchlings’ great moan rose up again.

“Now listen all. This Night is not yet lost. Look at them, down there! They are trapped. Oblivion is at their backs, Galigali’s fires at their front, and us in between.” She laughed. “Now, we are no longer eight thousand strong. So you will have to take four, maybe five hearts instead of just one. So, five hearts it shall be! March, my soldiers, march!”

A voice, far quieter, yet infinitely more disquieting than Mater Motley’s, spilled forth from within the wrecked vessel. It said only one word:

“Wait.”

Although Candy was at the very bottom of the slope of Galigali, she could, thanks to Zephario’s magic, plainly see and hear the events taking place at the volcano’s turbulent crest. The Nephauree was emerging from a tear in the side of the Stormwalker; it looked like a fluid stain spilling forth through the gaping hole. As it moved, the air it trod upon trembled; as it spread, it parted like two enormous pieces of torn smoke. And to her horror, Candy saw that the entity was carrying before it a living trophy, Zephario Carrion. He was wounded. Blood soaked the front of his robes. And yet as the Nephauree moved, Zephario continued to show faint signs of life. Despite all that his body had plainly endured, he was still alive.

The Nephauree emerged from the wreckage entirely, and Mater Motley bowed her head before it. The clotted, textured forms within the being responded by assembling at its core, their heads coming together in the midst of the alien’s amorphous stain, so that collectively they resembled a black sun, from which hundreds of frayed tentacles seemed to sway in the grip of the Nephauree’s abstracted energies.

Having paid her respects to the creature, Mater Motley turned from her ragged army—its numbers still swelling as more burning stitchlings appeared from the wreckage—and whispered one simple order to them. Candy heard the Old Hag’s imperative all too clearly.

“Kill everything.”

Chapter 70

Nothing But Stones

CANDY WATCHED THE BURNING, muddled army shambling down the slopes of Mount Galigali, with their Empress wearing her gown of souls leading, and the drifting form of the Nephauree both behind them and above, the nearly dead body of Zephario hanging in the shadowy air like a terrible trophy. Unsummoned, fragments of a song she’d heard first in Babilonium came to her head. A meaningless little nonsense, which she sang quietly to herself as she watched the army coming:

“I got a cold in my nose,

But it comes and it goes.

I got a cold in my brain,

Which nearly makes me insane.

I got a cold in my toe,

That I can’t get to go,

I got cold,

Cold,

Cold . . .”

And while the monsters came, she stood there, watching, knowing that she had no hope of stopping them. She looked back at the crowd that had emerged from the glyph, and saw that Malingo and Gazza had started to walk toward her. Gazza beckoned to her. She glanced one more time at the approaching enemy. They were still five minutes away, perhaps. But no more than that.

She turned and started to run toward Malingo and Gazza. Gazza was close enough to call to her now.

“Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

He opened his arms as he approached her, and hugged her tight. She gave as good as she got, which only made him hug her more. Malingo put his own arms around them both, which nobody objected to.

“What do we do now?” Malingo said.

“We have to defend ourselves,” Candy said. “We’ve no other choice.”

“I’m all for a good fight,” Gazza said, “but we don’t have a hope against those things. Look at them! They’re burning and they still keep coming. No legs, so they crawl.”

Candy looked back toward the volcano. The approach of the stitchlings was indeed terrifying. Though a few of the most traumatically wounded creatures had finally perished on the slope, the greater number continued their shambling descent.

“The Abarataraba’s all used up,” Candy said. “There’s still some magic in me, but there’ll be no more glyphs, I’m afraid.”

“What about getting off the island by water?”

“There’s no chance of that,” Malingo said. “Izabella just pours away over the Edge of the World. If we got into the water, we’d go with it.”

“There’s going to be a lot of killing,” Candy said grimly. “We have to make a stand here.”

“We were all brought here to die anyway,” Malingo reminded her. “At least this way we have a chance.”

There was another eruption from the heart of Galigali: this one so violent it blew the front half of the Stormwalker apart. It did not draw Mater Motley’s gaze off the condemned, however. She simply kept walking down over the smoking slope.

“I wonder what happened to Christopher?” Candy wondered aloud.

“He’s there,” Malingo said.

“I don’t see him.”

“I did, I swear. He was a little way back from all the rest, but he was there.”

Candy looked up at the approaching army with fresh interest.

“You’re sure?” she said.