“I won’t be long,” Izarith said.
“We’ll be fine,” Candy said, sitting down beside the child in front of the fire. “Won’t we, Maiza?”
The child smiled again, her tiny teeth semitranslucent, carrying a hint of blue. “Grish fritters with noga seeds!” she said. “All for me!”
14. Carrion
Over his many years of service to Christopher Carrion, Mendelson Shape had come to know the geography of the Twelfth Tower on the island of Gorgossium very well. He knew his way around the kitchens and the scrying rooms, he knew his way down through the vaults and the Black Chapel and through the Rooms of Tears.
But today when he returned to the Tower with the news that he had lost everything (the Key, Mischief
Scarebaby, scarebaby,
Where do you run?
Out in the graveyard,
To have you some fun?
Dancing with skeletons
Up from the ground?
Doing a jig
On the burial mound?
His lips moved as he scanned the words and it brought back a distant memory of his mother, Miasma Shape, sitting with her three boys—Nizz, Naught and Mendelson—reading aloud from Pincoffin’s opus. Oh, how he’d idolized his mother! He read on.
Scarebaby, scarebaby,
Horrid you are!
With the wings of a bat,
And a face with a scar,
The fangs of a vampire,
The tail of a snake;
You open your mouth
And the noise that you make
Is a song that the Devil sings,
Bitter and loud.
Tell me, my baby,
Was your mother proud?
“
Scarebaby, scarebaby,
Where do you run?
Not out to the morning,
Not out in the sun. Y
ou live in my nightmares,
You hide from the day;
And there, little—
“Shape?”
The one-footed man turned.
The voice had come out of the shadows, across the room. No door had opened to let the speaker in. He’d been here all the time, watching Mendelson. Listening to him practice his growls.
Mendelson didn’t move. He simply studied the shadows, waiting for the appearance of the person who had addressed him. He knew of course, who that somebody was. It was the Lord of Midnight himself: Christopher Carrion.
“Sit,” the voice said. “Please, Shape, sit. Are you fond of books?”
The voice was deep and—even in the simplest of questions—was somehow tinged with despair. It was the voice of someone who had walked in the abyss.
Mendelson could see him now, faintly. He was an imposing figure, six foot six or more, his long robes black, which was why he had blended so well with the shadows.
He walked toward Shape, and the candles on the table illuminated him a little.
He had the most piercing eyes of any man Mendelson had met. They glistened in his bald, pale head. As always, he wore a collar of translucent material that resembled glass, which had been devised to cover the lower half of his head. It was filled with a blue fluid, which was now suddenly lit up by the presence of several snaking forms. They flickered in their fluid—some white as summer lightning, some yellow as sliced fat—weaving bright patterns around the Lord of Midnight’s head. Plainly he took pleasure in their proximity, perhaps even a kind of comfort. When one of them brushed against his skin, he smiled, and that smile was so ghastly it made Mendelson want to run from the room.
He knew from what Naw had told him why Carrion smiled that smile, and what those bright shapes were. Carrion had found a way to channel every nightmarish thought and image out of the coils of his brain and bring them into this semiphysical form. He breathed the fluid, the flickering forms ran in and out of his mouth and nostrils, soaking his soul in his own nightmares.
His voice, reverberating through this soup of dark visions, was tinged with the power of those nightmares; their terror touched every syllable he spoke.