Abarat: The First Book of Hours - Barker Clive - Страница 34

“Every island is a different Hour of the day,” he began by saying. “And on each island you’ll find all the things that our hearts and souls and minds and imaginations connect with that Hour. Look there.”

He pointed toward a place not far from the Straits of Dusk.

“You see that island wreathed in light and cloud?”

Candy saw it. The cloud rose in a rolling spiral around what looked to be a vast mountain, or perhaps a tower of gargantuan size.

“What is it?” Candy asked Klepp.

“The Twenty-Fifth Hour,” he replied. “Sometimes called Odom’s Spire. It’s a place of mysteries and dreams.”

“Who lives there?”

“That’s one of those mysteries. Though I have heard the name Fantomaya associated with the place, I have no idea what it means.”

Candy’s new squiddy friend Squiller did his best to focus on the clouds around Odom’s Spire, but for some reason the billowing spiral prevented her closer scrutiny.

“If you’re looking for a glimpse of what’s on the other side of the cloud,” Klepp said, “don’t bother. The light plays tricks with the eyes, somehow, and you just can’t get a good grip on it. Then sometimes the clouds will part and give you the illusion that you’re going to see something—”

“But you never do?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“So what would happen if you sailed a ship right into the clouds?”

“Oh, people have certainly tried that,” Klepp said. “A few came out alive, but happily crazy. And of course completely incapable of describing anything they’d seen, while the rest—”

“—didn’t come out at all?”

“You guessed it. One of them was my father…” He let this information hang in the air for a moment. Then he said: “You look cold, my dear.”

“It’s just the wind.”

“Let me get you a jacket.”

“No, I’m all right.”

“I insist,” Klepp said. “I don’t want you getting pneumonia. I’ll be back in a moment.”

He headed for the elevator. Candy didn’t protest. The wind was a lot chillier than she’d expected it to be.

“You stay away from the edge now!” Samuel said, and pulling the elevator gate closed, he disappeared from sight.

While he was gone, Candy and Squiller kept up their perusal of the islands. Samuel had named them all for her several times, and Candy now tested her memory by putting the names to the locations. Some she remembered easily, others she had to puzzle over for a while.

The island to the west of the Yebba Dim Day was called Qualm Hah, and its red-roofed city was called… Tazmagor. Yes, that was it: Tazmagor. To the southeast of it was a mountainous island called Spake, which stood at Ten O’clock in the Morning. At Eleven O’clock was the Island of Nully, and at Twelve Noon, the island of Yzil, which was bathed in the warmest, most magical light imaginable.

At One O’clock was either Orlando’s Cap or Hobarookus, she couldn’t remember which. At Two, conversely, was either Hobarookus or Orlando’s Cap.

To the south-southeast lay another sun-drenched island, which was the place, she remembered, where Samuel had said life was supposed to have begun: Three O’clock in the Afternoon, also called the Nonce.

At Four was Gnomon, at Five an island called Soma Plume, in the center of which was a vast Ziggurat. At Six, far to the east of the Yebba Dim Day, though separated by only two hours, was an island called Babilonium, where it looked as though life was fun all the time. There were several huge circus tents pitched in the middle of the island, and colored lights in their tens of thousands flickered in the branches of every tree. I have to go there, Candy thought to herself.

To the north of Babilonium was an island the name of which she could not remember, though she remembered the name of the still-active volcano at its center, which was Mount Galigali. The tide of evening then wound around the archipelago, ending up where she was standing, at Eight in the Evening, looking down on the Straits of Dusk.

And then, in the vicinity of the Yebba Dim Day, lay a second series of islands. At Nine in the Evening was a place called Hap’s Vault. (She’d asked Samuel who Hap was, and he’d told her he didn’t remember.) At Ten in the Evening lay the island of Ninnyhammer, which had on it a town occupied by a species called tarrie-cats. The town was called High Sladder.

The name of the island at Eleven had skipped her mind, but she remembered the name of the Midnight Isle: Gorgossium. It’s the most terrifying place in all the islands, Samuel Klepp had said: avoid it at all costs!

There were six pyramids—some large, some small—at One in the Morning, which was called Xuxux, and at Two, another island, wreathed in darkness, the name of which escaped her. Next door to it, however, lay the island that was the most attractive to her eye, despite all that Samuel had said about its architect.

The island was called Pyon, and covering it from one end to the other (and so bright with light it couldn’t have mattered that it was the middle of the night there) was Commexo City. The towers and the domes of Commexo City were completely unlike anything Candy had ever seen before: huge and elaborate configurations that looked as though they’d been conjured from a geometry that didn’t exist back home, then raised in defiance of physics.

By contrast, the island beside it was an ominous place, with an impenetrable-looking mountain range. It was called The Isle of the Black Egg, and it was one of the Outer Islands, she remembered, along with Speckle Frew, which was at Five in the Morning. Beside Speckle Frew were the two islands, joined by the Gilholly Bridge that stood at Six and Seven in the Morning. That left only Obadiah, at Eight in the Morning, and she’d come full circle to the little sunlit city of Tazmagor, perched on the eastern flanks of Qualm Hah.

“You’re looking rather pleased with yourself,” said Klepp, as he emerged from the elevator. In his hand he had a light green jacket, covered with small bright-red designs. She accepted it gratefully and put it on.

“I was just trying to remember the islands,” she told him as she pulled the collar of the jacket up. “There were a few I couldn’t remember, but I think I made quite a good—”

She stopped talking.

A terrible look had appeared on Klepp’s face. His eyes had grown huge, and he was no longer looking at Candy, but instead was staring past her into the sky high above her left shoulder.

“What… is… it?” she said, almost scared to turn, but turning anyway.

“Run!”he yelled.

She heard him, but her feet failed to obey her. She was too astonished, and appalled, at the sight that filled the sky behind her.

There was a moth swooping down on her, a moth with the wingspan of a small plane. And mounted on the back of this stupendous and terrifying insect was her old pursuer, Mendelson Shape.

“There! You! Are!” he yelled at her.

Now, finally, Candy’s feet agreed to obey her panic.

She started to run toward the elevator, where Samuel Klepp was waiting to grab her and pull her to safety.

But even as she ran, some instinct deep in her gut told her she wasn’t going to make it. The moth was coming down too fast. She could feel the freezing rush of its wings against her back, so fierce it almost threw her over. As she stumbled, the moth’s immense and many-jointed legs closed around her body and plucked her up off the roof of the tower.

“Got you!” she heard Shape yelling triumphantly.

Then he spoke some incomprehensible order to his mount, and the moth beat its vast wings and rose up into the air.

Candy caught a smeared glimpse of Klepp’s horrified face as he reached up to try and snatch her out of the grip of the moth, but he was inches short of catching her hand.

Then she was carried up and away, over the edge of The Great Head of the Yebba Dim Day. She was terrified. Her heart became like a drum, thumping in her chest, and in her head. A trickle of sweat ran down her spine.