Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog (Magic Carpet Books) (10 page)

Val said eagerly, “You could kill Buck and let her heir take her place as the new Head of the House. Idden and I always got along quite well, I am sure
she
would restore me—oh ayah, it was just an idea. You don’t have to get all stuffy about it, Flora. Remember, there will be Fyrdraacas in this House long after you are gone.”

“I will not kill Mamma,” I said, adding maliciously, as payback for such an awful suggestion, “I guess, then, you are out of luck.”

Val turned the piteous all the way up to high and wrung his narrow hands together. “You don’t know how it is, Flora. To be all alone in this empty room, to hear voices from so far away, lovely voices, and to know that they cannot hear you. To sit alone, with all these books telling the stories of other lives, not your own. And to feel yourself growing weaker and weaker every day, whilst your walls crumble and your family falls into ruin. And there is nothing you can do, alone, outcast, adrift, lost.” “There’s got to be something that we can do, Flora,” Udo said. “It sucks to be in lockdown; boy, don’t I know it. I’m with Valefor on this, all the way. Wasn’t Nini Mo’s motto ‘Free the Oppressed’?”

“Thank you, Sieur Landaðon,” Val sobbed. “You are so very kind.”

“Quit crying, Val,” I said. “We will find your fetish.”

The sobbing stopped, and the tears on Valefor’s pale cheeks were gone. “How?”

“We will use the Discernment Sigil.”

R
ANGERS, OF COURSE,
are always looking for things—information, people, clues—and so
The Eschatanomicon
was full of sigils that find things. There was the Acquisition Sigil to find something you need but don’t have; the Retrieval Sigil to find things you had but then lost. The Recovery Sigil, which seemed to be exactly like the Retrieval Sigil, only you had to have lost by your own fault the things you were looking for. The Discovery Sigil to find things that you didn’t even know that you needed, and the Recollection Sigil to help you remember what you had forgotten. And the Revelation Sigil for things that were in front of your eyes but you were looking right through.

Some of these sigils were quite complicated. The Recollection Sigil was the obvious choice, but it called for several arcane ingredients (attar of crimson corn, starfish eyes, and a bowline knot), required that the adept prepare by drinking nothing but fizzy lemonade for three days before, and ended with the adept setting herself on fire. The Revelation Sigil would have also probably worked, but it called for six adepts and copious bloodletting. The Recovery Sigil required actions too disgusting to even contemplate.

But the Discernment Sigil, which helped you recognize what you were looking for when you saw it, seemed to fit the bill perfectly. It was short and sweet, required only two magickal Gestures, neither of which called for headstands or extra fingers, and it used only one very short and easy-to-pronounce Gramatica Word. No setting on fire and no bloodletting. It was not so much different from the Ignite Sigil, which I had done many times before. I was confident I could handle it.

“You will do it right, Flora Segunda, won’t you?” Valefor said, worriedly. “If you do it wrong, your head could explode.”

“If your head explodes, I am not cleaning it up,” Udo said. He had grabbed
The Eschata
and was now flipping through it. “What about the Recovery Sigil; it looks like fun—”

“I’ve decided, Udo!”

“Who am I? Boy Hansgen?” Udo protested. “Who dropped and made you the boss?”

Boy Hansgen was Nini Mo’s sidekick. When she died, he took over the Ranger Corps, and fought hard against the Birdies during the War. Afterward, when Rangers were outlawed and the Corps disbanded, he disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since. He was a good ranger, but no Nini Mo.

“You are not nearly tall enough to be Boy Hansgen,” I said. “Give me the book back, Udo. My head will not explode, I promise you. I know what I am doing.”

Udo tossed the book to me, grinning at my awkward catch. “You are lucky I am so easy, Flora. If Valefor is the one who is supposed to be recognizing the fetish when he sees it, shouldn’t he be the one who does the sigil?”

“He can’t. His only purpose is to act in regards to the House. He can’t act in any other capacity So I will charge the Word, activate it, and then pass it on to him, so that he’ll feel its effects. Then he should know the fetish when he sees it. I would have rather done the Recollection Sigil, but this is the best we can manage.”

“And once we have the fetish, then what?” Udo asked. “We have to have the fetish first; then we’ll be able to figure out how to restore Valefor. We won’t know what Mamma did to disconnect them until we have the fetish.”

“Well, let’s fall to,” Udo said. “I gotta be home by six, and I don’t want to be late and risk another lockdown.”

I didn’t want to be late to meet Mamma, either; she frowns on tardiness as much as Sanctuary does, and after not seeing her in so long, I did not want to start out on the wrong foot.

So, Valefor cleared the table of its mess of papers, Udo took off his hat, and I reread the Sigil, to make sure of the steps. Read it another time, just in case. Udo arranged himself to one side of me, and Valefor across. Between us, I lay
The Eschata,
open to the Sigil, just in case.

My stomach was fluttering, in a very nonrangery way. I had never heard of anyone’s head exploding from a wrongly done Working, but there is always a risk that problems will arise.
The secret to having confidence is acting confident,
Nini Mo said. I wiped my sweaty hands on my kilt and shifted so that my stays were not cutting so harshly into my back.

Strike hard, and with all your Will,
Nini Mo said.

Closing my eyes, I rested my left hand on my knee and made the Invocative Gesture with my right. Pinching my left nostril closed with my thumb, I breathed in through my right nostril for four beats. Then I pinched my right nostril closed and exhaled through the left for four beats. Three times I did each side, and I started to feel the distant dizzy warmth that indicated the Current was building within me.

The fourth breath, I drew in through the right nostril, and then, pinching both nostrils closed, held the breath in. At first it was hard to focus; I kept hearing Valefor’s cough, or the crunch of Udo’s satin kilt as he fidgeted. Then my lungs began to grow tight and the urge to breathe started to build. I swallowed, feeling pressure in my ears, but ignored the sensation and focused my Will on the image of the Gramatica Word, focusing focusing focusing. The pressure grew, and the blobby darkness before my closed eyes bubbled and swam. Everything around me receded. The pressure burned; now there was nothing but it and the overwhelming urge to gasp.

Lungs scraping, I opened my eyes.

A thin light was spilling from the open pages of
The Eschata
lying before me. The light curled about itself, contracting into sparks, which in turn shifted and turned until they hung before me in the glowing sinuous letters of the Exhortation.

I opened my mouth and sucked in the glittering gnatlike letters. For a moment my mouth was filled with a sparkly crackling, and then, in shock and surprise, instead of expelling outward as I should have, I swallowed. The letters burned as they went down my throat, burning hot and burning cold. I gasped and started to choke, redness dotting my eyesight. My stomach convulsed in a horrible searing pain, and I doubled over, then the letters were boiling back up my throat in a scream:

The Word was as loud as thunder, as wide as the sky, as concentrated as a sword swing, as bright as a mortar flash. It flew as true as an arrow toward Valefor. He opened his mouth to receive it, and such was its force that he fell backward, disappearing under the table.

“Wow!” I dimly heard Udo say. My mocha had had enough; it no longer wished to be friends with me, and its desire to depart was extremely urgent. I leaned over and let it go. Afterward, my throat felt like it had swallowed a cat, a cat who had clawed all the way down.

“Valefor!” I croaked, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. My mouth tasted of fur; I spit, and spit again.

“I’m all right! I am fine!” Valefor popped up like a Springheel Jack-in-the-Box. “That was fantastic, Flora! Let’s go, I feel great.”

He danced his little happy dance, and I could see, clearly burning inside him, the glittery glow of the Sigil.

“That was something, Flora!” Udo said. “Did you hear that noise?”

“I didn’t think it would be so big,” I whispered. “Val, can I have some water?”

Valefor produced water and after about half a quart of guzzling down, and then a pint or so of spitting up, I started to feel better. My mouth still burned, and the rest of me felt as though I had been beaten with a stick, but it was a good sort of pain, and it was mitigated by the happy sensation of success.

“Hurry! Hurry!” Val sang, “Let’s go a-hunting! It’s near, I can tell, almost on the tip of my tongue, let’s go! I have eleven thousand rooms, so there’s no time to waste!”

So we went, wasting no more time, Valefor leading the way. My trek through Crackpot before had been a bare little jaunt, but now we were on a full-fledged expedition. Up narrow staircases and down broad staircases we went. Through antechambers, bedchambers, closets, parlors, dining rooms, sitting rooms, furnace rooms, bathrooms, water closets, attics, cellars, receiving rooms, and on and on. All the while, Valefor kept up a running commentary, like a tour guide:

“...Slippery Stairs, where Anacreon Fyrdraaca broke his nose sliding down on a tea tray ... Beekeeping Room, don’t bother them, Udo, and they won’t bother you ... Formerly Secret Cubbyhole ... Because it can’t be secret if you know where it is, that’s why Madama Smartie ... Luggage Mezzanine ... I wonder if that salesman is still in the linen basket, I should come back and check ... Eternal Atrium, look how large that tree has become, I must raise the roof in here or it’s going to go right through the ceiling ... The Gun Room, what on earth did Buck do with my .50 caliber Gatling ... The Halfway Point—”

“Stop, Valefor, stop!” I said finally. I had a stitch in my side from trying to keep up.

“I gotta go, Flora,” Udo said, halting as well. He’s a championship fencer, but he also was looking a bit winded. Valefor, energized, was
fast.

“I’ve got to go, too.
Valefor,
come back!”

Valefor slid back up the balustrade. “What? Why do you linger?”

“Haven’t you seen your fetish anywhere, Val?” Udo asked. “We’ve been through half the House.”

“Not even half. Remember, eleven thousand rooms?” Valefor said, “Come on—”

“Haven’t you seen anything at all that could be your fetish?” I asked. “Nothing at all?”

Valefor hopped impatiently, “No. Come on!”

“I have to go, or Mam will ground me again,” Udo complained.

I said, “And I have to go, too. We’ll have to look more later.”

“When?” Valefor cried. “Oh, when?”

“As soon as we can. It will be hard with Mamma around, but we’ll think of something. Lead us back.”

Valefor protested and whined and wrung his hands as he led us back through the maze of corridors, rooms, and galleries, Udo and I both urging him to hurry up, and he insisting we were going as hurriedly as possible. But then suddenly Valefor’s whine changed to hoots of surprise.

“Flora! I can feel it! I can feel it! We are close, very close!” He took off at a dead run, and we followed him, barely able to keep up. A doorway loomed at the end of the hall, and Valefor effortlessly passed through it. The door was locked. Udo pounded and banged, and I shouted for Valefor to open it, and after a minute, he did.

Inside, the curtains were drawn. Valefor’s thin purple glow and the liquidy luminescence of the Sigil cast tremulous light over the small room, stretching monstrous shadows. Valefor was flitting about maniacally, tossing things hither and thither: a fishing net, polo mallets, old boots, pillows, dead flowers.

“Valefor! Cool down!” I ordered, dodging the footstool coming toward me.

“I can tell—it’s near—I can tell, Flora Segunda,” he said excitedly, descending upon the narrow gilt bed that was pressed up against one wall and tearing the sheets and blankets asunder. Great clouds of dust rolled up, and I put my hand to my mouth to keep from choking.

“The window!” Udo gurgled, retreating back into the hallway.

I stumbled my way across the room and pulled at the curtains; the fabric tore in my grip, and with a clatter, the rod came down and almost beaned me on the skull. The cloud of dust that came from this plummet made the dust Valefor was roiling up seem like nothing, but once Udo helped me wedge the window up, we had fresh air and light.

Valefor was dismembering the bed, tossing the mattress over and dislodging a sheaf of yellowbacks. The walls were pinned with prints torn from old
CPGs
and polo flags, and a model sailboat perched upon the mantel. A yellowback whizzed by me and hit the wall, knocking a dartboard askew; I automatically bent down to pick the pamphlet up and grimaced.
Naughty Nan's Risque Review
was the title, and the illustrations were of scantily clad showgirls posing acrobatically.

“What room is this?” Udo asked, looking at a silver urn. Val had tossed it in his direction, and instead of dodging, Udo had caught it. “Hey, look, it’s a trophy for best horseman at the Califa summer fair, and look who won it—Hotspur!”

“Bedchamber of Redoubtable Dreams.” Valefor huffed, still chucking things. “Hotspur’s bedroom, you know, when he was a kid. Can you believe all this junk? My fetish is buried in here somewhere under all this stuff. What a mess. I’ll never find it.”

“Poppy? This was Poppy’s room?” I said, amazed. I looked around with new interest. Poppy had torn those prints out and stuck them on the wall? Those were Poppy’s old cloaks hanging on the back of the door? Poppy’s polo mallets in the corner and Poppy’s hippo bank on the bookshelf? “Why would your fetish be in Poppy’s old room?”

“I don’t know—but it’s here somewhere, I can tell, I can tell!” Valefor said. “I can feel it so close, it tingles, it tingles!”