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) (19 page)

An idea was forming in my mind that perhaps, for the first time ever, it might pay off to have a mad, irresponsible father. If Poppy were as good at forgery as he said, then one of our problems was solved, and if he mentioned it to Mamma later, well, who ever believes anything Poppy says?

Udo moved from the desk and gave Poppy fresh paper and a pen. He examined the pen, announced the nib had lost its sharpness, and demanded another. He sat straight as a ramrod and squinted down at the empty sheet of whiteness. He dipped his pen and drew a thin line on his forearm to test the flow, and thus I realized that he was left-handed, just like me. Mamma and Idden are right-handed both, and now I saw where I had gotten the trait.

Poppy dipped the pen again, and then sloped it across the paper, smooth and even.

“‘Juliet Buchanan Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca.’” Udo read. “That’s pretty good, Hotspur. It looks exactly right.”

“Oh, Buck is easy Now here’s a huckleberry. Watch this.”

Poppy wiped the pen off on his sleeve and dipped again. This time his pen skittered and hopped, swirled and twirled, slithered and jumped, and finally skittered into a long black slide. The result was elaborate and complex, twisty letters that arched up and plunged down, entwining each other like snakes. Even though I couldn’t read the name, I could tell that whoever belonged to this signature was as big as boots, and firm in his or her authority.

“I wasn’t sure I still had that one in me,” Poppy said proudly He blotted, then blew gently. “It’s worth your life.” Udo said, “I can’t even read it.”

“‘Banastre Micajah Haðraaða ov Brakespeare,’” Poppy said. “Old Hardhands himself. Ah, he’d have eaten my liver if he’d known I could copy him.”

“Wow. What a signature.” Udo was impressed, clearly thinking he needed to start working on a better signature of his own.

“He was a proper bastard, old Hardhands, but his warrant had class.”

Now that Poppy’s skill was established, there was only one signature I wanted, and I could wait no longer to get it. We had to be on the road within an hour if we wanted to make our interception.

“Can you do the Warlord?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I have seen it.”

I pushed Udo’s citation to Poppy, and he held it up, examining it carefully. “He has the handwriting of a five-year-old, our Warlord. It shall be easy as pie. Here, let me show you a trick.”

He spun the citation around until it was upside-down. “It’s easier to copy if you don’t let the word get in the way. Think of it like a pattern you are drawing, like when your hair colors the sea.”

I had no idea what he meant by that last comment. “Can you do it, Poppy?”

Poppy closed his eyes and ran his finger over the spindly letters. He made a few wiggly lines with the dry pen, incising an imprint upon the paper. After dipping the pen, he turned the edge of the nib so that the lines were thick going up and thin going down. He made a few little twirls, then drew a little pig with floppy ears and dancing slippers. He pushed his scribble paper away, lay a new sheet down, and dipped his pen freshly.

Then, swiftly, he began to write. The ink slid across the paper, as smooth as skates on ice, without hesitation, without pause. He raised his pen, pressed blotting paper down, and grinned. “There! I am charmed!”

I flipped the citation around, and we stared at the two signatures, side by side. They were perfectly alike, right down to the monogram that came after the name:
Florian Abenfarax de la Carcarza, ADLC.

“You are a genius, Hotspur,” Udo said.

Poppy grinned, and this grin rounded his bladelike cheeks and crinkled his eyes. For a moment he looked almost handsome. Then the smile drifted from his face, and he was the same sad Poppy again.

He dropped the pen and said, “But you know, I think I have forgotten how to sign my own name.”

N
INI
M
O
’
S YELLOWBACKS
always play up the excitement and adventure—they never mention the anxiety and alarm that comes before the excitement and adventure. The hour you spend riding toward your target, while your neck gets colder and your bottom goes numb. The knot of nervousness in your tum, which only gets knottier and more nervous as the place where you can still turn back gets farther and farther behind.

We left Crackpot just at dusk, slightly behind schedule but not by much. Broad-brimmed hats hid our faces, and underneath our concealing cloaks, we both wore stolen uniforms. Udo’s was kipped from one of his fathers, and it fit him perfectly. Mine was borrowed from Idden’s closet; it was the fatigue uniform she’d worn the summer she’d spent as Mamma’s ADC, her third year at the Barracks. It was tight across the shoulders and long in the kilt, but otherwise would do.

Zoo Battery guards the southern end of the Pacifica Playa, far out at the end of Sandy Road in what are called the Outside Lands because they lie beyond the City’s limits. No horsecar went out that far at night, and even if it had, we certainly couldn’t take it without compromising our disguises. So we rode, me on Bonzo, and Udo on Mouse.

It’s a longish ride, through Portal Pass, which marks the City’s official limits, and across the Great Sand Bank, which stands between the Pass and the ocean’s edge, and so I had plenty of time to think anxious thoughts. Nini Mo says that the time for thinking is before you make the decision, and once you’ve decided, it’s time to act. That’s easier said than done. Particularly when not everything has gone according to plan.

I looked at Udo, or, rather, at his back, since he was riding ahead of me. Mouse is a tail-biter, and it’s always better to keep her teeth out of temptation’s way. From the back, he looked like pretty much the same Udo. But when he turned to say something to me, he had the face of a stranger.

After Udo’s close call with recognition at Pete’s Clown Diner, we had agreed that stronger disguises were required, and for that we needed Glamours. This turned out to be easier decided than actually done. A Glamour should be easy baby ranger stuff, not too hard, and not too complicated. And the first Glamour, though tongue-burning and headache-making, had turned out just dandy.

Udo’s own parents would not recognize him. I
knew
he was Udo and yet could hardly believe it. Now he looked ruggedly efficient; his chest was broad, his shoulders even broader, and his chin as squarely carved as a bar of soap. His face, perched above a bull neck, was leathery and wise, and his black eyes had a humorous squint to them. The biggest shock was the hair. Udo’s fondness for his own blond locks has kept them long and flowing, but now his hair was so short that the scalp beneath was as tanned as his face.

In fact, Udo looked a little too much like Sergeant Shanksworthy, the hero of the long-running yellowback series Sergeant Shanksworthy of the Steelheart Brigade. Though I wasn’t a particular fan of Sergeant Shanksworthy, I guess the back of my brain had somehow decided that he was the perfect specimen of military manliness, and thus the Masking Glamour had so resolved.

“What are you goggling about?” asked Udo in a rumbling baritone that was as unlike his own boyish treble as the lion’s roar is to the cat’s meow.

“It’s hard to get used to.”

He pulled Mouse back so we were abreast, and the horses twisted their heads to snuffle at each other. “I know. It
feels
strange, too, as though my skin is too small.
How do I look with a mustache?” He tugged one of the waxed spikes that stuck out at least two inches on either side of that stranger’s mouth.

“I don’t know what
you
look like with a mustache, but that face looks fine. Would that I looked so wonderfully different,” I said, somewhat bitterly.

I was disguised not by a Masking Glamour, but by ten pounds of makeup that Udo had applied to my face with a trowel. This because the second Masking Glamour had failed utterly.

Magick is hard, I know that, and it takes long hours of practice to get things right. I thought I had been sticking to the easy stuff, the fail-safe stuff, but maybe I had just been lucky before. But what a time to fail! The Glamour had flickered briefly and then guttered, and all the Invoking, Evoking, and just plain Hysterical Entreaties to the Current had not gotten it to rekindle. I had tried other Glamours as well—a Concealment Glamour, a Dazzle-ment Glamour—but they only resulted in a pounding headache and the upchucking of my snack. Now, in addition to anxious, I felt rather dizzy and weak. I’d never realized magick involved so much urping.

“I swear I wouldn’t recognize you in a hundred years, Flora. I swear that even Buck would not recognize you. You’ll be fine,” Udo said soothingly. “You’ll be fine.”

“I hope you’re right, Udo. Get that horse over, she’s squashing my leg. Do you remember the plan? You won’t jump the gun like you did last time, will you?”

Udo edged Mouse sideways.

“I remember the plan perfectly, no fear, Flora. Don’t worry. But remember, I will do all the talking. It will look odd if you keep piping up, when I outrank you.”

The plan, of course, had been that I would lead and Udo would follow. But now he had the mature, authoritative face, and I, though disguised, did not look old enough to be an officer, even a shavetail lieutenant. There was no way around Udo’s having to take the lead, and my insides quivered at the thought.

“I’ll be quiet as long as you don’t say anything foolish, Udo. Do not deviate from the plan even a tiny little bit, I’m warning you.”

“Never fear—oh, and it’s Captain Gaisford to you, Corporal. I think we should get into character now. That’s the secret to great acting—you get inside the skin of your part and never leave.”

“Udo—”

“Captain Gaisford, Corporal, and don’t forget it, or I shall write you up for insubordination. Ride on, we are burning daylight.” He spurred Mouse into a trot. Sometimes the only way to win with Udo is to ignore him, so I merely urged Bonzo on and fell in after Mouse.

After a while, the smell of wood smoke began to seep through the fog, and then the shadow of a squat building suddenly reared from the gloom: the Bella Union Saloon, as notorious a deadfall bar as you would never want to see. The Bella Union sits right across the Califa city line, where the Sandy Road turns southward toward Zoo Battery, near the Presidio’s back gate, and this central location has made it a favorite hangout joint for drunken off-duty soldiers. Mamma has declared it out of bounds to the military and twice sent patrols to burn it down. Twice it has sprung up anew, a blot upon the landscape that not even fire will erase. The
Califa Police Gazette
is always reporting dire doings at the Bella Union: ear-chewing, bar fights, tar-and-feathering.

A high-riding covered wagon stood in front of the Bella,
THE HORSES OF INSTRUCTION
inscribed upon the canvas in luminescent paint. Grunts carried musical equipment inside as a tall man stood by, watching and smoking, a hurdy-gurdy slung over his back. The Hurdy-Gurdy Man was clearly going for a deathly, gothick look: greenish black hair straggling out from under a moldering tricorn, sagging pink trunk hose. As I rode by, he looked up, his livid face wreathed in cigarette smoke, and flashed gold teeth at me, touching a salute to the front point of his hat.

The Bella Union behind us, darkness followed the fog’s slow advance. My feet felt like blocks of ice, and my hands hardly gripped the reins. I wasn’t sure if this feebleness was from the weather or all the Invoking I had done. Either way, I felt weak and tired.

Somewhere high above the fog, the moon must have risen, because the air was strangely light. I pulled up the collar of my sack coat; the wool rubbed the back of my neck, but moisture was dripping from my hat brim and I’d rather be raw than wet. Everything is always so much colder with a damp neck.

“Hey, Corporal—” Udo’s blur made a vague gesture, and I turned around to follow his point. Just fog, thick and wet, but then, suddenly, there was a bright blue pulse of light, like a tiny fragment of sky cracking through the gray.

We reined in and watched as the light pulsed again. The horses shimmied, as though they could hear something we could not, and then distantly, we did hear something, a low rumbling that was as much vibration as noise. The horses shimmied again, squeezing together, and I kicked my foot out so Mouse wouldn’t crush my leg.

“Cannon fire?” I guessed.

“Your ignorance astounds, Corporal Ashbury, but then what can you expect from a mere bouncer?” Udo answered.
Bouncer
is the Army nickname for cavalry, yet my hat brass proclaimed I was a webfoot, or infantryman. I started to correct him, but he cut me off. “Cannon fire does not spark blue. And besides which, that’s north, and there ain’t no guns to our north.”

“Cannon fire can too spark blue if—”

Udo looked annoyed. “Your insubordination is grotesque. I do not know what the Army is coming to these days, with impertinence so common and respect so rarely valued. In my day, no mere corporal would ever dare contradict a ranking officer.”

I almost answered Udo with something short and not so sweet. But I bit my tongue, because there was some truth to what he had said about staying in the skin of your disguise. Didn’t Nini Mo once say that the best way to impersonate a rustler was to
be
a rustler?

“I beg your humble pardon, Captain Gaisford, sir. I did not mean to contradict you. Please enlighten me. If then, there are no guns to the north, what does lie in that direction that could create such a singular sight?” I asked.

“You are overdoing it, Corporal. Not so heavy on the sop, please. And the answer is Bilskinir House.”

Bilskinir House, indeed. Another blue note pulsed, and this time the ground really did tremble underfoot for a moment. A shiver ran across the back of my neck.

“I guess the papers were right.” Udo continued. “Maybe Paimon is awake after all. What do you think he’s doing in there?”

“Making dinner, I wager. As long as I am not on the menu, then I bid him good eating. Come on.”

“I give the orders, Corporal Ashbury,” Udo said curtly. “Ride on.”