Abarat by Clive Barker

Author:Clive Barker [Barker, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fantasy - Epic, Epic, Fantasy (Young Adult), Action & Adventure, Fantasy fiction, Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy & Magic, Space and time, Children: Young Adult (Gr. 7-9), Children's Books - Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 9780060596378
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

24 - DIGGER AND DRAGONS

JOHN MISCHIEF HADN’T BEEN making an idle boast when he spoke of himself—or more correctly, of themselves, the brothers—as master criminals. During their long felonious career, they had stolen from all manner of places, coming away with all kinds of hauls. Only once had they been arrested, and slipped custody while being transported back to the Yebba Dim Day by throwing themselves overboard.

There were too many thefts for the brothers to remember every one, but there were some that they still liked to revisit in those idle moments of happy self-congratulation.

Their burglary of the chateau of Malleus Nyce on Huffell’s Hill, for instance, had been extremely profitable. They’d come away with every costume Nyce had ever worn to the Cacodemonic Carnivals on Soma Plume: sixty-one outfits, all set with precious jewels and sewn with Thread of Sirius. Just a year or so later, they had broken into the prison on Scoriae and stolen all the tattoos off the body of the gangster Monkai-Monkai, leaving him as naked as the day he was born.

Then there had been their picking of the locks on the door of the Repository of Remembrance, that contained one hundred and thirty-one rooms of treasures that had once belonged to the great and the good of the Abarat, going back to the time when the islands were twenty-four Tribal Territories.

Nothing in the Repository had been of any real value. There had been no jewels, no precious metals. But the rooms had contained objects of infinitely more value than wealth. Here, collected and cataloged on the Repository’s shelves was a hoard of the heart: the nursery toys of kings, the playthings of princes, the mud pies that potentates had dreamed would one day be palaces. The potential purchasers of all these objects of lovely inconsequence were the people across the archipelago who still idolized their one-time owners; and the brothers had anticipated making so many millions of zem they would never have to steal another fork.

But it was not to be. Monkai-Monkai had broken out of prison two days later and had come after the brothers and the only way Mischief and his siblings had escaped with their lives was by handing over their booty from the Repository to him.

But the treasure the brothers had been most proud of stealing, because stealing it had proved so difficult, was a painting known as The Beautiful Moment.

It had hung in what was known as the Stone House, the possession of the sometime lord of the Islands of Day, King Claus. Since the death of his daughter, Claus had become an obsessive eater, and weighed over a thousand pounds. He ate and slept in a vast clockwork car, and had chased the thieves in it when he’d awoken to find his painting being stolen.

That had been a close call. But the brothers had been proud of the job. And indeed so enamored of what they’d stolen that they had almost considered keeping it.

The Beautiful Moment was a lovely thing.

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