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) (25 page)

But I didn’t answer—he had stood up, and with that movement, the towel shrugged off his shoulders. In the thin dawn light I saw a large tattoo in the middle of his concave chest. A tattoo of a hand holding a whip. The same insignia as on the seal lock on Valefor’s tea caddy.

“Poppy—that tattoo—what is it?”

He looked down his chin at his chest, grinning. “Like it, eh? It’s my seal—the Flexing Whip.”

“Your seal?” I choked. Suddenly I felt like an idiot. We had found Valefor’s tea caddy in Poppy’s trunk, so Poppy must have put it there. Why shouldn’t the seal lock be his?

“Ayah, see.” He tugged the cord around his neck up and over his head, and dangled it before me. “Take it. I don’t need it anymore.”

I took it, and there was the seal I needed to unlock the tea caddy that contained Valefor’s fetish. As easy as that.

Poppy ran his hand over his cropped skull and frowned. “I’m sorry, Flora.”

“Sorry about what, Poppy?” I asked, still staring at the seal.

“I thought the Current would help you, but it didn’t. I can still see right through you.”

I
FLEW FROM THE GARDEN
into the kitchen, from the kitchen upstairs, so quickly that my feet barely touched the ground, set speedy on wings of panic and fear. Udo lay snoring on the settee in my room, still fully dressed, his big boots hanging over one end, his head almost hanging over the other. He hadn’t drawn the blinds, and the room was already suffused with the slight glow of dawn.

I still clutched Poppy’s seal in my hand; now I shoved it into my pocket and poked Udo, hard. “Udo, wake up!” He moaned and threw up an arm to ward me off.

“Uhhhh...”

“Can you see through me?” I hollered, yanking away the shawl draped over him and poking him hard again. “Can you see through me?”

Blearily he sat up. “What the hell is wrong with you—”

“Poppy said he could see through me! He said I was transparent! He said he could see right through me!”

Udo stood up, took me hard by the arms, and shook me. “Hotspur is crazy,” he said calmly. “Calm down. And why are you all wet?”

I wrenched out of his grasp and flew to the mirror. I did look a bit blurry around the edges; my eyes were tiny blue marbles and my freckles looked rather gray. “I am blurry! I am fading! Valefor—”

Reflected in the mirror, standing behind me, Udo stared at me. He didn’t look so good himself. His hair had disintegrated into a mass of matted elflocks, and his eyes were little slits of sleepiness. But he looked solid and firm, not insubstantial and flyaway.

I said hysterically, “Boy Hansgen said I had something—Anima Enervation—he said that Valefor was sucking all my Will. He said that Valefor would take it all and I would dwindle to nothing. He’s done it, Udo! Valefor said we were connected, and as he goes now, so will I!”

Udo suddenly looked wide-awake. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he roared. He grabbed me and shook me again, this time hard enough to clack my teeth together.

“I don’t know. I just didn’t. I forgot,” I said weakly, knowing I sounded lame. “Anyway, never mind that. Valefor said there was no way to break the link between us, but that if we restored him, then he would be made strong again, and so would I.”

“Do you believe him?” Udo asked. “You look all right to me, although maybe a bit wiggly about the edges. But perhaps I just need coffee.”

“At this point he has nothing to gain by lying.” I said. “And Poppy can see through me.”

“Hotspur is crazy,” Udo repeated. “What did you say the Dainty Pirate said you had?”

“Anima Enervation.”

“Did you look it up in
The Eschata?”

I shook my head. I had been too busy panicking to do anything that sensible.

Udo found an entire section on Anima Enervation—a section I could have sworn hadn’t been there before or surely I would have noticed it and been warned. (Or maybe, Udo suggested, I had just not wanted to see it and had ignored everything that didn’t suit my purpose? I doubted that, but didn’t feel up to arguing with him.) The condition occurs when a galvanic egregore attaches itself to an energy source and then begins drawing so much Will that the source is completely drained and ends up with no Will at all.

Udo said, “Even if he sucked away your Will, that doesn’t mean you would disappear, or be transparent—it only means you would lie around like a noodle, doing nothing.”

“It is because I am abrogated,” Valefor’s voice said, from somewhere on high. We looked up from the book and didn’t see Val himself, but his voice continued, “The abrogation is draining me, pulling me back into weakness, and now that Flora is connected to me, she’ll be pulled, too, like me, from the Waking World to Elsewhere, and then to the Abyss of Nowhere.”

“Break the link!” Udo commanded. “Leave Flora out of this!”

Valefor answered, still invisible, “I cannot; I haven’t the strength to pull away, and neither does Flora. But if I were restored, we’d both be fine.”

“Then we’ll try the Restoration Sigil,” Udo said. “If that’s the only way.”

“Finally, you all come to your senses!” Now Valefor’s voice resolved into the rest of him. From the waist down, his figure had blurred into a purplish vapor, swirling and trailing like a train, and he looked airy and half transparent. “Finally, you do the right thing! Unlock my fetish, restore me, and I shall restore Flora!”

“You—” Udo made a lunge at him, but all for nothing, because Valefor whisked out of his reach, drifting up to float near the ceiling. “How could you do that to Flora?”

“Was it my fault she didn’t know her own weakness? I’m just a poor redacted denizen, powerless and forlorn. I looked to you for succor, Flora—and look how I was taken in!”

“Taken in!” Udo shouted. He was balanced precariously on my desk chair and was trying to whack at Valefor, but Val was so wispy that Udo’s snatches went right through him. “She was taken in by you, Valefor, by your promises—”

“I never promised nothing I didn’t deliver! Didn’t Valefor do your chores, Flora, and clean the house?”

“What price a clean house if Flora is gone?” Udo roared. “I don’t want a clean house—I want Flora!”

“Stop it! Both of you. We don’t have time for this!” I interjected. “Mamma will be home this afternoon, and my Catorcena is tomorrow!”

“Ayah so, but rest assured, Valefor, I’ll be taking this topic up with you later,” Udo said, climbing back down. “Where’s that tea caddy? I’m going to get it open even if I have to smash it open. We’ve got to have Val’s fetish.”

“Smashing won’t be necessary, Udo. I have the key.” I fumbled in my pocket, withdrew the cord, and swung it before Udo’s astonished gaze.

Udo grabbed at the cord and I let it fall into his grasp. “Pigface! Where did you get it, Flora? And why didn’t you mention it earlier—”

“I got it from Poppy, just now. And, Valefor, how is it that you didn’t recognize the insignia, when it was Poppy’s seal all along?”

“Let me see that!” Valefor demanded, drifting down for a closer look. He snorted. “That’s not Hotspur’s seal! Hotspur’s personal seal is Three Interlocked Rings Surmounted by a Star. I don’t know whose seal that is, but—”

I cut him off. “Poppy said it was his seal, and anyway, it doesn’t matter, because it’s the same seal as on the tea caddy, and so it could be the d^mon Choronzon’s for all I care, as long as it works.”

“Flora,” Udo said. He looked up from
The Eschata.
“I’m reading through the Restoration Sigil—and I think we have a problem.”

“What problem?” I asked, feeling dismay start to prickle. Just when I had started to feel hopeful again.

“Well, to activate the Sigil, we need a Semiote Verb.”

“A what?”

Valefor said helpfully, “A Semiote Verb is a Gramatica Word that is so concentrated that it can only be in one place at one time. It’s the most powerful type of Gramatica Word, very dangerous and not to be trifled with.”

“In this case, we need the Semiote Verb
to Quicken,
in the Present Participle form,” Udo said.

“And where is it?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Bilskinir House.”

I
SAT DOWN ON THE BED
, my confidence dribbling away. Would this nightmare never end? Each time I thought we had a solution, another problem arose, and my energies were rapidly ebbing. Again I felt cold and empty, and as limp as a piece of string. “We can’t do it, Udo. Paimon will eat us up! He’ll gobble us down!”

“Oh, pooh!” said Valefor. “Paimon will do nothing of the kind.”

“We can’t give up, Flora. We can do it. We’ll find a way,” Udo entreated me. “We’ll get the Word.”

“I don’t care if I disappear! Then I don’t have to worry about going to the stupid Barracks, or stupid Poppy, or Mamma, or anything!”

Udo was horrified. “How can you say that?”

“It’s the Fyrdraaca speaking,” Valefor said. “It always comes out—”

I cut him off, shouting, “I don’t care what happens to me! I just don’t care! I’m a horrible failure and it’s better this way. I thought I was so clever and rangery, and I wasn’t anything at all but a
stupid heartless mindless snapperhead!”

“Do you know who you exactly sound like, Flora?” Udo asked. He loomed over me with his arms crossed, looking lordly. “You exactly sound like Hotspur! Just exactly—‘I don’t care,’ ‘I’m so tormented,’ ‘If I die it’ll be all the same to me,’ ‘Oh, leave me alone to my darkness!’”

Anger bit at me, snapping with sharp teeth, for of course he was right, and yet it made me bitterly mad to know that he was. I turned away, biting my lip hard and wanting to smack him. So much for my belief in peace—when it came down to it, I was a Fyrdraaca all the way.

“She is her father’s child. What do you expect?” Valefor interjected. “But you should think, for once, of someone other than yourself, Flora.”

“Shut
up,
Valefor!” Udo shouted, and then to me: “You are always complaining that he won’t suck it up, that he whines like a baby, and now you are doing the same thing, Flora.”

“Leave me alone, Udo!”

“You are always talking about Nini Mo and how she didn’t give up. You’re right—you’ll never be a ranger, but not because you fail, because you
do
give up! Nini Mo failed plenty of times, and yet she kept trying. That’s what made her great!”

“Leave me alone!
Get out, Udo
!” I shouted, and even to my own ears, I sounded shrewish and stupid, and that just made me angrier. His words cut me to the very bone, because even in my blackest state, I knew they were true.

“What is Buck gonna say if she comes home and finds you disappeared?” Udo demanded.

I said wildly, “Maybe she’ll be glad—one less stupid Fyrdraaca for her to worry about.” I pushed by Udo, past Valefor, blindingly, wanting only to get away from them, wanting only to hide. I ran down the hallway, Udo following me, and slammed the bathroom door in his face.

My chest hurt like I might cry, but no tears came. I turned the taps on the tub and, while the bath filled, looked at myself in the mirror. I did look slightly transparent; if I stared hard enough at my reflection, I could see through to the stained-glass window behind me. I shivered, but from cold or fear, I wasn’t sure, then turned off the taps.

It was a relief to get out of my soggy clothes and slide into the hot water. I was so tired that when I yawned, it felt as though my jaw would crack. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

“Can I come in?” Udo’s voice asked through the door. I sank down until the bubbles tickled my nose, then called my assent. The door opened, and the steam parted, and there was Udo, with a coffee cup in one hand and a muffin in the other.

“I brought you breakfast. Valefor’s in such a cheerful mood that he broke his ban on helping, and cleaned the kitchen up.” Udo set the cup and muffin on the edge of the tub and flipped the loo lid down to sit. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Flora.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said in a small voice. I reached a soapy arm for the cup. It was perfect: hot, sweet, and milky. Udo always remembers how I like my coffee.

Udo continued, “But you drive me mad when you talk like Hotspur, and there is no reason for it.”

“But we just get in deeper and it just gets harder, Udo,” I said. “And I feel so tired and slow. I can’t go on.”

“That’s because Valefor is sucking your Will away, Flora. You gotta remember what you feel isn’t real. It’s just a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. You know, you aren’t the only one who feels pretty bad about last night, Flora—”

“Maybe, but—”

“Let me finish—but I can’t afford to feel bad right now. I have a plan and I’m gonna do it, Flora, and if you don’t wanna go, then that’s fine, I’ll do it myself. I’m going to Bilskinir and I’m going to get that Word, and then we’ll restore Val and you’ll be all right.”

I felt tears burn and hoped that Udo would think it was just the steam. He was really too good to me. “How are you going to do that? Remember what the
CPG
said about the kids on the field trip getting eaten?”

“The
CPG
is just trying to sell papers; you can’t believe anything you read there—remember last year when they ran that exposé claiming that the Warlord turns into a flamingo on the full moon? Valefor told me that Paimon was never that strong to begin with; he was really wrapped up with the Haûraaûa family, and without them in the House to sustain him, he’s probably withered away by now. I’m sure that he’ll be no problem, and just in case, I’ll be supersneaky. I reckon if I can get by Mam’s curfew, I can get by some scrawny denizen.”

“But what about that blue light we saw from the beach?”

“Valefor says there’s a lighthouse. It’s probably an automaton.”

“But Bilskinir’s a big House, even if there is no Paimon—how will you find the Word?”

Udo grinned and looked smug. “You should see how eager Valefor is now; he’s practically rolling around like a hoop to be helpful. He found me this book.” Udo displayed a small gilt-edged volume,
Califa in Sunshine and Shade: A Guide to the City and All Its Environs, Both Savory and Sweet.
“It has an entire chapter on Bilskinir, with a map, even. See”—Udo opened the book and began to read—“‘...and most assuredly not to be missed is the Saloon of Embarrassment of Riches. Here is kept the Haðraaða family’s greatest treasures, including Banastre Haðraaða’s gilded baby shoes, the Bilskinir Dollhouse, the Orb of Great Golden Weight, the Plushy Pink Pig, and several Semiote Verbs.’ It will be as easy as pie, Flora. I won’t be gone more than a couple of hours, and we’ll have plenty of time to restore Valefor before Buck gets home, and you’ll be as good as new. What do you say?”