Abarat: Absolute Midnight Read Free Page A

that’s what you’re saying.”
    “Have you made any such claims?”
    “This is an accident. Me being here.”
    “Answer the question.”
    “If I was to take a wild guess I’d say she’s trying to do that, Nyritta,” said the representative from the Nonce. It was a spiral of warm dappled light, in the midst of which flakes of poppy and white gold floated. “Just give her a chance to find the words.”
    “Oh, you really like the lost ones, don’t you, Keemi.”
    “I’m not lost,” Candy said. “I know my way around pretty well.”
    “And why is that?” said a third Council member, her face an eight-eyed, four-petaled flower with a bright-throated mouth at its center. “Not only do you know your way around the islands, you also know a lot about the Abarataraba.”
    “I’ve just heard stories here and there.”
    “Stories!” said Yobias Thim, who had a row of candles around the brim of his hat. “You don’t learn to wield Feits and Wantons by hearing stories. I think what happened with Motley and Carrion and your knowledge of the Abarataraba are all part of the same suspicious business.”
    “Let it be,” said Keemi. “We didn’t summon her here to Okizor to interrogate her about how she knows the Abarataraba.”
    She glanced around at the Councilors, no two of whose physiognomies were alike. The representative from Orlando’s Cap had a brilliant coxcomb of scarlet and turquoise feathers, which were standing proud in his agitated state; while the face of Soma Plume’s representative, Helio Fatha, wavered as though he was gazing through a cloud of heat, and the dawning face of the Councilor from six a.m. was streaked with the promise of another day.
    “Look, it’s true. I do know . . . things,” Candy admitted. “It started at the lighthouse, with me knowing how to summon the Izabella. I’m not saying I couldn’t do it, I could. I just don’t know how I did. Does it matter?”
    “If this Council thinks it matters,” growled the stone visage from Efreet, “then it matters. And everything else should be of little consequence to you until the question has been satisfactorily answered.”
    Candy nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do my best. But it’s complicated.”
    So saying, she began to tell them as best she could the parts that she did know, starting with the event from which everything else sprang: her birth, and the fact that just an hour or so before her mother got to the hospital on an empty, rain-lashed highway in the middle of nowhere, three women of the Fantomaya—Diamanda, Joephi and Mespa—had crossed the forbidden divide between the Abarat and the Hereafter looking for a hiding place for the soul of Princess Boa, whose murdered remains lay in the Nonce.
    “They found my mother,” Candy said, “sitting, waiting for my dad to come back with gas for the truck . . .”
    She paused, because there was a humming sound in her head, which was getting louder. It sounded as though her skull was filled with hundreds of agitated bees. She couldn’t think straight.
    “They found my mother . . .” she said again, aware that her voice was slurring.
    “Forget your mother for a moment,” said the representative from Ninnyhammer, a bipedal tarrie-cat called Jimothi Tarrie, who Candy had met before. “What do you know about the murder of Princess Boa?”
    “Boa.”
    “Yes.”
    Huh . Boa.
    “Quite . . . quite a lot,” Candy replied.
    What she’d thought to be the voices of bees, was forming into syllables, the syllables into words, the words becoming sentences. There was somebody speaking in her head.
    Don’t tell them anything, the voice said. They’re bureaucrats, all of them.
    She knew the voice. She’d been hearing it all her life. She’d thought it was her voice. But just because the voice had been in her skull all her life didn’t make it hers. She said the other’s name without speaking it.
    Princess Boa .
    Yes, of course, the other woman said. Who