Abarat: The First Book of Hours - Barker Clive - Страница 38

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The great moth, though it was certainly dead, did not fall from the sky like a stone. Its wings were so large that it spiraled down like a kite that had lost the wind. Candy held on to its thorax, praying aloud:

“Please, God, help me!”

But the words were snatched out of her mouth by the speed of their descent, which grew faster and faster.

She caught a glimpse of what lay below. It wasn’t bare rock, but it wasn’t a featherbed either: it was a stretch of what looked like moorland, with here and there a few scattered trees.

And then—as if things weren’t bad enough—Mendelson Shape reached down around the body of the moth and began to shake her loose. Quite why he was doing this was beyond her; perhaps he was simply trying to lighten the load. Whatever his reasons, they were his undoing. In his attempt to throw Candy off, he lost his own grip on the animal and started to pitch forward over the moth’s head. In desperation he snatched hold of the moth’s antennae, but his body weight simply flipped the insect’s whole cadaver over.

It was now Shape who started to pray aloud for help, though he did so in a language Candy didn’t understand. His pleadings were no more efficacious than Candy’s had been. She heard him clawing his way up over the moth, each breath a sob. But he was lost. His pleadings became more desperate than ever; then the wind gusted with particular force, and he was carried away. Candy glimpsed him as he swept past her. He plunged out of sight through the darkened air, leaving her lying face up on the belly of the insect as it too plummeted earthward. The spread of the moth’s wings slowed its descent, which was about the only good news about Candy’s situation. She held on tight, anticipating a massive blow when they hit the ground.

But she was lucky. The wind had carried the moth away from the rocks where Mendelson had fallen, and toward one of the copses. The insect’s body landed in the canopy. Twigs and branches snapped, and the huge body threatened to continue its fall to earth, but the young trees had sufficient resilience to bear the moth’s body up.

Leaves flew into the air and came spiraling down on top of Candy. She lay absolutely still, waiting for the last of the motion to subside. Then she gently rolled over onto her stomach and peered down through the creaking branches.

The ground was still twenty feet below her, perhaps more. She needed to proceed with extreme caution, she knew, if she was going to get down to terra firma without doing herself harm. As it turned out, it wasn’t too much of a problem. The trees presented her with easy hand- and foot-holds. Though she still was shaky from the last few minutes of high drama, she managed to clamber down to earth without any further incident.

The first thing she did was to relieve Squiller of his duty by gently unknitting him from her head. The poor squid was trembling violently. She did her best to reassure him with soft words.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “We’re perfectly safe now.”

She would have to get him back to the water as soon as possible. Squiller had been serving her sight for an hour or more; she was surprised he was still alive.

Now that she was on the ground she took stock of the situation. What place was this? Or, more correctly, given that she was in the Abarat, what Hour?

It was dark here—darker than the Yebba Dim Day—but not yet deep night. Her guess was that this was Ten O’clock in the Evening, which she remembered from her lessons with Klepp was the island of Ninnyhammer.

There was a little chill in the air, and on the breeze, from some distance away, she could hear an orchestra playing some mournful music.

She ventured to the edge of the little stand of trees to see if she could discover the source of the music. She did so easily. As she peered out from the trees, two of the hunters set their balloons down gently, not fifty yards away from her, the floodlights on their gondolas illuminating the ground in every direction. Rather than step out into the light and make herself a potential target for the hunters she retreated into the cover of the trees again and watched while events unfolded.

First she heard the sound of the gondola doors being opened, and then—with a quiet hum—a set of steps emerged, so that these pampered hunters didn’t have to jump the short distance from the doorway to the ground.

The three men who emerged were all wearing identical clothes: high-collared gray suits and highly polished gray boots. The leader—to judge by the way that the other two men fawned upon him—was not the oldest. He was a diminutive young man with a shock of orange hair that fell over his brow, and the perpetually narrowed eyes of one who was deeply suspicious of the world.

The other two—his bodyguards, perhaps—were almost twice his size, and they instantly proceeded to survey the territory into which their leader was wandering. Both carried guns.

Finally, bringing up the rear of this little group was a black man so tall he had to bend his head in order to get out through the gondola’s door. He wore a pair of small silver glasses and he carried some kind of large electronic tablet, the screen of which gave off a pulsing glow that illuminated his face with light: sometimes white, sometimes turquoise, sometimes orange. He attended closely to everything the man with the orange hair said or did, and in response his long agile fingers moved restlessly back and forth over the tablet, missing no detail of whatever his boss said or did as he set it down.

The man with the suspicious eyes had already fixed his gaze upon the moth in the tree; and he approached the creature, talking as he went.

“Have you ever seen any life-form quite like this, Mr. Birch?” he said to the man in the silvered glasses. He didn’t wait for a reply. “Doggett?” Mr. Suspicion said, now addressing the larger of the two bodyguards. “You’d better get some grappling hooks and ropes, so we can bring this thing down. I want it preserved for our collection.”

“It’s as good as done, Mr. Pixler,” Doggett said, and left the little company to get the work underway.

Pixler? Candy said to herself. Was it possible that this little man was in fact the master architect of Commexo City?

“What do you make of it, Birch?” Pixler asked his companion.

The man came to Pixler’s side. He was fully two and a half feet taller than his boss, and despite the insipid, functional cut of the pale suits they were all wearing, he wore his with a curious elegance. “I’ve been going through Willsberger’s Flora and Fauna of the Islands and—”

“There’s no entry for a giant moth?” Pixler said, gently patting his quiff to be sure it hadn’t lost its shape.

“No.”

“I’m not surprised,” Pixler said. “It’s my opinion that this thing was made by magic. Look at the color flowing out of it, Birch. It was a conjuration that made this. And a powerful one.” Pixler smiled. “It’s going to take time to root out all the magic in these islands. We’ve got a lot of books to burn, a lot of spirits to break—”

Candy listened to the man speaking of book burnings and spirit breaking with a little smile of anticipation on his face, and it made her shudder. So this was the philosophy of Rojo Pixler, the great architect of Commexo City. It made grim listening.

“I don’t want them going to their local shamans and witch doctors for their healing and their revelations. I want them coming to us. To me! If people want a taste of magic, let it be our magic. Sanitized. Systematized.”

“Hallelujah,” Birch said.

“You’re not mocking me, are you?” Pixler snapped, reeling around on the man, his finger jabbed in the man’s face.

Birch raised his hands in surrender, the tablet slipping from his hands. “Good Lord, no. Absolutely not, sir.”

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