Abarat 2: Days of Magic, Nights of War. Clive Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ said Carrion, plainly a little irritated that his honesty was being called into question by this monster. “I swear.” He looked defiantly at the creature. “What we have planned will come to pass,” he said. “No question of it.”

      At that moment the Brood-beast revealed that it knew more about the craft of communication than it had been displaying, because the creature now spoke again, but in a recognizable fashion. It spoke slowly, as though piecing the words together like the fragments of a jigsaw; but there was no doubting what it said.

       “You…will…not…cheat…us, Car-ri-on,”

      it said. “Cheat you? Of course not!”

       “Many…years…in…dark-ness…we…have…waited.”

      “Yes, I—”

       “Hungry!”

      “Yes.”

       “HUNGRY! HUNGRY!”

      The chorus was taken up from every corner of the Pyramid, and from the tunnels and hives many thousands of feet below, and even from the other Pyramids of the six where sacbrood had also bred over the years, and awaited their moment.

      “I understand,” Carrion said, raising his voice above the din. “You’re tired of waiting. And you’re hungry. Believe me, I do understand.”

      His words failed to placate them, however. They moved toward the door from all directions, the horrid details of their shapes more apparent by the moment. Carrion was no stranger to the monstrous—the pits and forests and vermin fields of Gorgossium boasted countless forms of the ghastly and the misbegotten—but there was nothing, even there, that was quite as foul as this loathsome clan, with their fat, wet clusters of eyes and their endless rows of limbs clawing at the rot-thickened air.

      “Lord, we should take care,” Vol murmured to Carrion. “They’re getting closer.”

      Vol was right. The sacbrood were getting far too close for comfort.

      Those overhead were moving the fastest, skittering over one another’s bodies in their unholy haste and shedding living fragments of their bodies as they did so, which twitched on the ground where they’d fallen.

      “They do seem very hungry,” Mendelson observed.

      “What do you suppose we should do about that, Mr. Shape?” Carrion wondered.

      Shape shrugged. “Feed them!” he said.

      Carrion reached out suddenly and caught hold of Shape by the nape of his neck. “If you’re so concerned about their well-being, Mr. Shape, maybe you should sacrifice your own sorry flesh to their appetite, huh? What do you say?”

      “No!” said Shape, trying to wriggle free.

      “You say no?”

      “Yes, Lord, please, Lord. I’d be more use to you alive, I swear.”

      “In truth, Shape, I can’t imagine any state in which you’d be of use to me.”

      So saying, Carrion shoved Shape away. The man stumbled on his stump and fell to his knees in the shadow of the Brood-beast that had been talking to Carrion. For a fleeting moment the thing looked down at him with something close to pity on its misshapen face. Shape turned from it, and getting up, he fled across the littered ground, not caring that he was going deeper into the Pyramid, only determined to avoid both Carrion and the creature. As he hobbled away, he heard a sound above him. He froze on the spot, and in that instant a barbed, ragged form—wet and sinewy, and attached by a knotty length of matter to the ceiling—dropped on top of him. Shape cried out as it eclipsed him; then the living cord by which the thing was attached to the roof hauled on its freight, and the creature was taken back into the shadows, with Shape in its grip. He called out to his master one last time, his voice muted by the beast in whose maw he was caught. There was a final series of pitiful little kicks. Then both cries and kicks stopped, and Shape’s life ceased.

      “They’re feeling murderous,” Leeman Vol said to Carrion. “I think we should go.”

      “Maybe we should.”

      “Do you have anything else you need to speak with them about?”

      “I’ve said and seen all I need to,” Carrion replied. “Besides, there will be other times.” He went back to the door, calling to Vol as he did so. “Come away.”

      Even now Vol watched the creatures with the fascination of a true obsessive, his head twitching left and right, up and down, in his eagerness to see every last detail.

      “Away, Vol, away!” Carrion urged him.

      Finally Vol made a dash for the door, but even now he paused to glance back.

      “Go!” Carrion yelled to him, pulling the door shut. “Quickly, before they get out!”

      Several of the brood, who were within a few yards of the threshold, made a last desperate attempt to reach the door and block it before it closed, but Carrion was too quick. The Pyramid door closed in the same bizarre fashion that it had opened, and he quickly turned the Key in the lock, sealing the sacbrood in their prison hive. They shook the stones of the Pyramid’s walls in their frustration and loosed such a din of rage that the stone steps on which Carrion and Leeman Vol stood vibrated beneath their feet. Still, it was done. Carrion reverentially removed the Key from the lock and slipped it into the deepest recesses of his robes.

      “You’re shaking,” he said to Vol, with a little smile.

      “I—I—I—never saw such things before,” Vol conceded.

      “Nobody has,” the Lord of Midnight replied. “Which is why when I choose my moment and set them free, there will be chaos and terror in every corner of the Abarat.”

      “It’ll be like the end of the world,” Leeman said, retreating down the steps to the funeral barge.

      “No,” Carrion said as he followed Leeman down. “There you’re wrong. It will be the beginning.”

       14 LAMENT (THE MUNKEE’S TALE)

      CANDY DIDN’T WASTE TIME shivering on the shore. It had been clear even from a distance where on the island she might find some place of relative comfort: in the mist-shrouded forest that lay a quarter mile along the beach. A light, warm breeze was coming out of the trees, its balm both welcoming and reassuring. Occasionally one of its gusts seemed to carry a fragment of music: just a few notes, no more, played (perhaps) on an oboe. A gentle, lilting music that made her smile.

      “I wish Malingo was with me,” she said to herself as she trudged along the beach.

      At least she wasn’t alone. All she had to do was follow the sound of the music and she’d surely find the music maker, sooner or later. The more of the melody she heard, the more bittersweet it seemed to be. It was the kind of song her grandfather (her mom’s dad, Grandpa O’Donnell) used СКАЧАТЬ