Abarat: Absolute Midnight
Clive Barker
Dedication
Johnny 2.0 Raymond
Mark Miller
Robbie Humphreys
Epigraph
There’ll be no sun tomorrow morning.
There’ll be no moon to bless the night.
The stars will perish without warning.
These lines proclaim the death of light.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: What the Blind Man Saw
Part One: The Dark Hours
Chapter 1. Toward Twilight
Chapter 2. The Council Speaks its Minds
Chapter 3. The Wisdom of the Mob
Chapter 4. The Kid
Chapter 5. Remnants of Wickedness
Chapter 6. Under Jibarish
Chapter 7. The Sorrows of the Bad Son
Chapter 8. Laguna Munn
Part Two: You, or Not I
Chapter 9. A New Tyranny
Chapter 10. The Sorrows of the Good Son
Chapter 11. Severance
Chapter 12. One Becomes Two
Chapter 13. Boa
Chapter 14. Empty
Chapter 15. Face-to-Face
Chapter 16. Laguna Munn Angered
Chapter 17. Snake Talk
Chapter 18. An EndGame
Chapter 19. The Price of Freedom
Part Three: Many Magics
Chapter 20. Tomorrow, Today
Chapter 21. Boa at Midnight
Chapter 22. Turning Away
Chapter 23. Cold Life
Chapter 24. At the Preacher’s House
Chapter 25. No More Lies
Part Four: The Dawning of the Dark
Chapter 26. The Church of the Children of Eden
Chapter 27. Interrogation
Chapter 28. Altarpiece
Chapter 29. Midnight has Wings
Chapter 30. Draining the Ghost
Chapter 31. The Flock
Chapter 32. Sacrilege
Chapter 33. No Stranger Now
Chapter 34. Unfinished
Chapter 35. Stealing Away
Chapter 36. The Shadow-Shroud
Chapter 37. Love and War
Chapter 38. An Old Trick
Chapter 39. Looking Forward, Looking Back
Chapter 40. Bones and Laughter
Chapter 41. Dragon Dust
Chapter 42. The Fiends
Chapter 43. Dark Waters
Chapter 44. Pariah
Part Five: Stormwalker
Chapter 45. The Business of Empire
Chapter 46. Talking of Mysteries
Chapter 47. Convergence
Chapter 48. Smiles
Chapter 49. Of Those Who Walk Behind the Stars
Chapter 50. Out of the Deep
Chapter 51. Father and Son
Chapter 52. Atrocities
Part Six: There is No Tomorrow
Chapter 53. Forgiveness
Chapter 54. The Empress in her Glory
Chapter 55. Below
Chapter 56. The Hand in Fire
Chapter 57. A Knife for Every Heart
Chapter 58. Now, Because
Chapter 59. A Whisper of Infinitude
Chapter 60. Abarataraba
Part Seven: Oblivion’s Call
Chapter 61. Missing
Chapter 62. The Volcano and the Void
Chapter 63. Pigs
Chapter 64. No Plan B
Chapter 65. Lullaby
Chapter 66. Love, Too Late
Chapter 67. Yat Yut Yah
Chapter 68. Deliverance
Chapter 69. For Every Knife, Five Hearts
Chapter 70. Nothing But Stones
Chapter 71. An Execution
Chapter 72. Truth
Chapter 73. Souls
Chapter 74. The Hammer of the Nephauree
Chapter 75. The End of the World
Chapter 76. And Beyond
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue What the Blind Man Saw
Dream!
Forge yourself and rise
Out of your mind and into others.
Men, be women.
Fish, be flies.
Girls, take beards.
Sons, be your mothers.
The future of the world now lies
In coral wombs behind our eyes.
—A song sung in Paradise Street
ON THE EARLY COAST of Idjit, where two a.m. looked south over the darkened straits toward the island of Gorgossium, there was a house, its facade much decorated, set high upon the cliffs. Its occupant went by the name of Mr. Kithit, and several others besides, but none of the names were truly his. He was known simply as the Card-Reader. The cards he read were not designed for games of chance. Far from it. He only ever used the Abaratian tarot deck, wherein a reader as expert as Mr. Kithit might find the past murmuring, the present in doubt, and the future barely opening its eyes. A decent living could be made from interpreting the way the cards fell.
For many years the Card-Reader had served the countless customers who came there in search of wisdom. But tonight he was done with serving the curiosity of others. He was done with it forever. Tonight, it was not the future of others he was going to find in the cards. They had summoned him to show him his own destiny.
He sat down and took one slow, calming breath. Then he proceeded to lay out a pattern of nineteen cards chosen by the will of his fingertips. Blind though he was, each image appeared in his mind’s eye, along with its name and numerical place in the pack.
There was Fear. There was The Door to the Stars. There was The King of Fates and The Daughter of Curiosity. Each card was not only to be read for its own values, but also calibrated against the cards surrounding it: a piece of mythological mathematics, which most heads could not fathom.
The Man Lit by Candles; Death’s Island; The Primal Form; The Tree of Knowing . . .
And of course the entire arrangement had to be set against the card that his customer—in this case himself—had chosen as his Avatar. In this case, he had elected a card called The Threshold. He had put it back into the pack and then shuffled the cards twice before laying them out by instinct in the Naught Hereafter Spread, its name signifying that all things the Deck contained would be here displayed: all reparations (the past), all possibilities (now), and all risk (henceforth and ever).
His fingers moved quickly, summoned by a call from the cards. There was something here they wanted to show him. He quickly understood that there was news of great consequence here, so he neglected the rules of reading, one of the first being that a Reader waited until each of the number of cards required for the Spread had been laid out.
A war was coming; he saw it in the cards. The last of the plots were being laid, even now, the weapons loaded and polished, the armies assembled, all in readiness for the day when Abaratian history turned the final corner. Was this the cards’ way of telling him what part there was for him to play in this last, grim game? If so then he would attend to whatever he was being taught, trust to their wisdom as had so many who had come to him over the years, despairing of all other remedy, seeking that which the cards would show.
He was not surprised to find that there were many Fire cards around his Threshold, laid out like gifts. He was a man whose life—and flesh—had been re-wrought by that unforgiving element. Touching the cards with his seared fingertip, it was impossible for him not to remember the merciless conflagration that had beaten him back as he tried to save his family. One of his children, the youngest, had survived, but the fire had claimed all the rest except his mother, and it had only granted her a reprieve because she had always been as pitiless and all-consuming as a great fire; a fire large enough to reduce a mansion and most of a dynasty to ashes.
In effect he’d lost everything, because his mother—crazed by what she’d witnessed, it was said—had taken the infant and disappeared into Day or Night, perhaps in her madness to hide the one survivor of her twenty-three grandchildren from the slightest hint of smoke on the wind. But the insanity plea had never been sufficient to quite calm the Card-Reader’s unease. His mother had never been a very wholesome woman. She’d liked—more than was good for an unbalanced spirit such as hers—tales of Deep Magic, of Earth-Blood Doing and worse. And it had troubled the Card-Reader more than a little that he had lost track of both his mother and son; it troubled him because he’d not known what they were up to. But even more because they—the one who had borne him, and the one he had fathered—were out there somewhere, a part of the powers assembling for the labors of destruction that were signaled everywhere in the lay of the cards.
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