Clive Barker - Absolute Midnight

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.