“Are they—?”
Malingo nodded grimly.
“The catch! The catch!” Skebble was howling. “Oh, Lord, no! No!”
Methis and Kud thought all this was hugely amusing. Having done their worst, they beat their wings and lifted off.
“Damn you! Damn you!” Skebble yelled as they flew past.
“That was enough fish to feed the village for half a season,” Galatea said mournfully.
“And they poisoned it?” Malingo said.
“What do you think? Smell that stink. Who could ever eat something that smelled like that?”
Kud had by now escaped into the darkness, following Nattum back to Gorgossium. But Methis was so busy laughing at what they’d just done that he accidentally clipped the top of the mast with his wing. For a moment he struggled to recover himself but lost his momentum and fell back toward the Parroto Parroto, hitting the edge of the wheelhouse roof and bouncing off onto the deck, where he lay unconscious.
There was a moment of surprised silence from everybody on deck. The whole sequence of events—from Candy’s speaking of the Word to Methis’ crash—had taken at most a couple of minutes.
It was old Mizzel who broke the hush.
“Charry?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Get a rope. And you, Galatea, help him. Tie up this burden of filth.”
“What for?”
“Just do it!” Mizzel said. “And be quick about it, before the damn thing wakes up!”
“SO,” SAID MIZZEL, ONCE the stunned zethek was firmly secured. “You want to know my plan?”
They were all sitting at the bow of the boat, as far from the stink of the hold as they could get. Candy was still in a mild state of shock: what she’d just witnessed herself doing (speaking a word she didn’t even know she knew) needed to be thought about very carefully. But now was not the time to do the thinking. Mizzel had a plan, and he wanted to share it.
“We’re going to have to dump out all the smatterlings. Every last fish.”
“A lot of people are going to go hungry,” Galatea said.
“Not necessarily,” Mizzel replied. He had a sly expression on his scarred and weatherworn face. “To the west of us lies the island of Six O’clock…”
“Babilonium,” Candy said.
“Precisely. Babilonium. The Carnival Island. Masques and parades and fairs and bug wrestling and music and dancing and freaks.”
“Freaks?” said Galatea. “What kind of freaks?”
“Every kind. Things that are too small, things that are too large, things with three heads, things with no head at all. If you want to see freaks and monsters, then Babilonium’s the place to find them.”
While the old man was speaking, Skebble had gotten up and gone to the door to study the bound zethek.
“Have you seen these freak shows on Babilonium?” he said to Mizzel.
“Certainly. I worked in Babilonium in my youth. Made a lot of money too.”
“Doing what?” said Galatea.
Mizzel looked a little uncomfortable. “I don’t want to go into details,” he said. “Let me just say it involved…um, bodily gases…and flame.”
Nobody said anything for a moment or two. Then Charry piped up. “You farted fire?” he said.
Everybody subdued their amusement with a great effort of will. All except for Skebble, who let out a whoop of laughter. “You did!” he said. “You did, didn’t you?”
“It was a living,” Mizzel said, staring fiercely at Charry, his ears bright red. “Now can I please get on with my story?”
“Go on,” said Skebble. “Get to the point.”
“Well, it seems to me if we could sail this damn boat to Babilonium, we would sure as certain find somebody to buy that zethek and put him in one of them freak shows.”
“Would we make much money from a deal like that?”
“We’ll make sure we do. And when we’ve done the deal we’ll sail to Tazmagor, get the hold scrubbed out
and buy a new supply of fish.”
“What do you think?” Candy said to Skebble.
He glanced out at the bound creature, scratching at his tatty beard.
“No harm in trying,” he replied.
“Babilonium, huh?” Candy said.
“What, you have a problem with this?” Skebble said testily. It had been a grim and eventful couple of hours. He was obviously weary, his energies exhausted. “If you don’t want to come with us—”
“No, no, we’ll come,” said Candy. “I’ve never been to Babilonium.”
“The playground of the Abarat!” Malingo said. “Fun for all the family!”
“Well, then…what are we waiting for?” said Galatea. “We can dump the smatterlings as we go!”
By chance Otto Houlihan was on Gorgossium at that time, waiting for an audience with the Lord of Midnight. It was not an appetizing prospect. He was going to have to report that though he came very close to capturing the girl in Hap’s Vault he had failed, and that she and her geshrat companion had most likely thrown themselves to their deaths. The news would not make Carrion happy, he knew. This made Houlihan nervous. He remembered all too well the feeding of the nightmares he’d witnessed in the Twelfth Tower. He didn’t want to die the same way as the wretched miner had died. In an attempt to put these troubling thoughts from his mind, he slipped away to a little inn called The Fool in Chains where he could drink some Hobarookian vodka. Perhaps it was time—he thought as he drank—to cease his life as a hunter and find a less risky means of making money. As a bug-wrestling promoter, perhaps; or a knife juggler. Anything, as long as he never had to come back to Gorgossium and wait…
His clammy meditations were interrupted by the sound of laughter from outside. He staggered out to see what all the fuss was about. Several customers, many in states of inebriation as bad or worse than his own, were standing in a rough circle, pointing to something on the ground in their midst.
The Criss-Cross Man went to see. There in the dirt was one of the uglier occupants of Gorgossium: a large zethek. He had apparently collided with a tree and had fallen to earth, under which he was now standing, looking very confused, picking leaves out of his hair and spitting out dirt. The drunkards just kept laughing at him.
“Go on, laugh at me!” the creature said. “Kud seen a thing you be way afraid of. A terrible thing I seen.”
“Oh yeah?” said one of the drunks. “And what was that?”
Kud spat out one last mouthful of dirt. “A witch-girl,” he said. “Does bad magic on me. Almost kills me with her Word.”
Houlihan elbowed his way through the crowd and grabbed hold of the zethek’s wing so that he wouldn’t try to escape. Then he peered into his broken, confounded face. “You said you fought with this girl?” he said.
“Yes.”