“I won’t be long,” Izarith said.
“We’ll be fine,” Candy said, sitting down beside the child in front of the fire. “Won’t we, Maiza?”
The child smiled again, her tiny teeth semitranslucent, carrying a hint of blue. “Grish fritters with noga seeds!” she said. “All for me!”
14. Carrion
Over his many years of service to Christopher Carrion, Mendelson Shape had come to know the geography of the Twelfth Tower on the island of Gorgossium very well. He knew his way around the kitchens and the scrying rooms, he knew his way down through the vaults and the Black Chapel and through the Rooms of Tears.
But today when he returned to the Tower with the news that he had lost everything (the Key, Mischief
Scarebaby, scarebaby,
Where do you run?
Out in the graveyard,
To have you some fun?
Dancing with skeletons
Up from the ground?
Doing a jig
On the burial mound?
His lips moved as he scanned the words and it brought back a distant memory of his mother, Miasma Shape, sitting with her three boys—Nizz, Naught and Mendelson—reading aloud from Pincoffin’s opus. Oh, how he’d idolized his mother! He read on.
Scarebaby, scarebaby,
Horrid you are!
With the wings of a bat,
And a face with a scar,
The fangs of a vampire,
The tail of a snake;
You open your mouth
And the noise that you make
Is a song that the Devil sings,
Bitter and loud.
Tell me, my baby,
Was your mother proud?
“
Scarebaby, scarebaby,
Where do you run?
Not out to the morning,
Not out in the sun. Y
ou live in my nightmares,
You hide from the day;
And there, little—
“Shape?”
The one-footed man turned.
The voice had come out of the shadows, across the room. No door had opened to let the speaker in. He’d been here all the time, watching Mendelson. Listening to him practice his growls.
Mendelson didn’t move. He simply studied the shadows, waiting for the appearance of the person who had addressed him. He knew of course, who that somebody was. It was the Lord of Midnight himself: Christopher Carrion.
“Sit,” the voice said. “Please, Shape, sit. Are you fond of books?”
The voice was deep and—even in the simplest of questions—was somehow tinged with despair. It was the voice of someone who had walked in the abyss.
Mendelson could see him now, faintly. He was an imposing figure, six foot six or more, his long robes black, which was why he had blended so well with the shadows.
He walked toward Shape, and the candles on the table illuminated him a little.
He had the most piercing eyes of any man Mendelson had met. They glistened in his bald, pale head. As always, he wore a collar of translucent material that resembled glass, which had been devised to cover the lower half of his head. It was filled with a blue fluid, which was now suddenly lit up by the presence of several snaking forms. They flickered in their fluid—some white as summer lightning, some yellow as sliced fat—weaving bright patterns around the Lord of Midnight’s head. Plainly he took pleasure in their proximity, perhaps even a kind of comfort. When one of them brushed against his skin, he smiled, and that smile was so ghastly it made Mendelson want to run from the room.
He knew from what Naw had told him why Carrion smiled that smile, and what those bright shapes were. Carrion had found a way to channel every nightmarish thought and image out of the coils of his brain and bring them into this semiphysical form. He breathed the fluid, the flickering forms ran in and out of his mouth and nostrils, soaking his soul in his own nightmares.
His voice, reverberating through this soup of dark visions, was tinged with the power of those nightmares; their terror touched every syllable he spoke.
“The books, Shape…”
“Yes? Oh yes, the books. I have books. A few.”
“And what else do you have?” Carrion said.
The serpentine lights flickered around Midnight’s head. His eyes fixed on Mendelson.
“Or don’t have?”
“You mean the Key?”
“Yes, of course. The Key. What else would I mean?”
“Lord, please forgive me. I don’t have the Key.”
Mendelson waited, fearing that Carrion would come at him; strike him, perhaps. But no. He just stood there, piercing Shape with his hollow gaze.
“Go on,” he said quietly.
“I… I found the men who stole it from you.”
“John Mischief and his brothers.”
“Yes.”
“He escaped with the Key to Efreet and took a boat to the Hereafter. I went after him, and I sank the boat, and thought I would have him—”
“But?”
“The tide was with him. It carried him all the way to the other side.”
“All the way to the Hereafter?” Carrion said, with a little touch of yearning in his voice.
“Yes.”
“How is it there?” he said, almost conversationally.
“I saw very little of it. I was trying to catch Mischief.”
“Of course you were. You were doing your honest best, but he kept avoiding you. Eight heads are better than one, eh? You were outnumbered.”
“I was, Lord,” Mendelson said, beginning to dare think that his master understood the hazards his servant Shape had endured to get all the way to the Hereafter and back.
Carrion went to the largest of the chairs in the Chamber. He sat down in it and knitted his hands together lightly in front of him, as if in prayer.
“So?” he said.
“So…?”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Oh. Well… I almost caught up with him, at Hark’s Harbor.”
“The Harbor? I thought it was destroyed.”
“There are some minor portions remaining, Lord. A lighthouse. A jetty.”
“No ships?”
“No ships. I think those that were scuttled are buried in the earth. Anyway, I saw none.”
“So, go on. You went to the Harbor and—”
“He had an accomplice.”
“Besides his brothers?”
“Yes. A girl. A girl from the Hereafter.”
“Ah! He had an accomplice. And a girl, to boot. Poor Shape. You didn’t stand a chance.”
“No, Lord.”
“So he gave her the Key?”
“Did he? I don’t know. Yes. Possibly.”
“Did he or did he not give her the Key?” Carrion asked, his voice subtly gaining in volume and menace.
Mendelson looked at the floor. His teeth had begun to chatter, though he’d promised himself he would not let them.
“Look at me, Shape.”
Mendelson was afraid to do so. He kept his eyes downcast, like a man confronted by an enraged animal.
“I said:
Carrion’s face looked skeletal, the marks around his mouth (where, according to rumor, his grandmother Mater Motley had once sewn up his lips) like the teeth of a skull; the arid flesh above the line of the fluid close to mummified. Only his eyes had any real life. And that was an insane life, crazed beyond recall.
There was nothing in the world Mendelson Shape wanted more than to be out of the Library at that moment.
“
“I’m sorry. I did all I could. I swear.”
“What was the name of this girl?”
“I heard only one name. Candy.”
Carrion’s upper lip curled at the very idea of sweetness. “Would you know her again if you saw her?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Then it seems I must let you live, Mendelson. You have dealt with this girl. Presumably you know something of her nature?”
“Yes. I believe I do,” Shape said, through his chattering teeth. He wanted desperately to look away from Carrion’s face, but the Lord of Midnight held him there.
“I think she probably has the Key, don’t you?”
“But Mischief—”
“Gave it to her.”
“I didn’t see such a thing, Lord.”
“But he will have done so.”
“If I may ask… what makes you so sure?”
“Because he’s like you. He’s tired of the chase. He wants somebody else to be the object of my eye, at least for a while.” Carrion paused for a moment and looked up at the ceiling. The cherubic beasts, roused from their roosts by the sound of the torment below were circling in the Library vault, enjoying the spectacle.
Finally, Carrion said: “You have to go back and find me this girl.”
“But, Lord—”
“Yes?”
Pincoffin’s Rhymes
“
,” Carrion said. “
?”
Mendelson could barely manage a nod.
“Find me this… Candy. If she’s dead, find me her body. I can interrogate the dead if I need to. I want to know what kind of creature she is. The tide carried her, you say?”
“It seemed that way,” Mendelson said.
“That’s strange. After all that happened, I’m sure Our Lady Izabella would drown most souls, rather than carry them here.”
Carrion took his eyes off Shape for the first time in several minutes, and Shape felt the weight of the power upon him relax somewhat. “There is something
“Yes, Lord.”
“A
The bone-cracking weight removed from his chest, Shape rolled off the table, gasping for breath.
In the vaulted ceiling above, the vile cherubs were still circling, chattering to one another as they went, excited by the violence they’d just witnessed.
Mendelson ignored them. He hauled himself up to his foot and stump, and waited a few moments until the ache in his chest subsided.
Then he hobbled to the door and headed away down to the kitchens, promising to himself he would burn his few books when he went home, for fear they would put him in mind of the terrors he had just endured.