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) (3 page)

“This is not the Hallway of Laborious Desire,” I said crossly.

The Elevator did not answer.

Act as though you mean it, and you will,
Nini Mo says. I said firmly, “I want to go to the Hallway of Laborious Desire. And I am in a hurry, so let’s be snappy.”

No response.

“I’m going to tell Mamma.”

Idle words, really, because it would be my hide tacked up on the wall of Mamma’s study if she found out that I had disobeyed her. But bluff is always worth a try. The threat made no impact upon the Elevator’s smug silence.

“Well, if you are going to leave me here, at least give me more light.”
Sweetness is its own sticky trap,
says Nini Mo, so I added sweetly, “Please. Very pretty please, beautiful Elevator.”

Nada. So much for good manners. I gave the golden grille a good kick, then pulled it open, stepping out onto the creaky wooden floors into a cloying darkness smelling of dust, decay, and the distant sea. The pouty Elevator snapped its grille shut behind me. I turned and grabbed, but it yanked out of my grip and vanished into the murk. Now I was stuck.

I held my hand underneath the coldfire spark and focused all my Will upon its hazy gelid glow. A tiny pinpoint of pain tingled above my right eye, but the light winked and brightened. Now I could see hulking furniture draped in tattered dustcovers, floating whitely in the darkness like ancient ignored ghosts.

There's no way out but through,
Nini Mo said when she was lost in the Maze of Woefulness and Gloom in the yellowback novel
Nini Mo vs. the Flesh-Eating Fir Trees.

I cautiously stepped forward. Somewhere there had to be stairs down and out—I just had to find them. My feet stirred up a haze of mold and frothy dirt, which glittered in the coldfire light that I now carried before me, floating above my open palm.

And I thought
our
rooms were a mess! Mamma is too busy or too gone to pay much attention to housekeeping, and though I usually manage to keep the actual filth at bay, it’s hard to keep after the dust and spiders and all those dogs. Between laundry, cooking, cleaning, and homework, I can only do so much, and so our rooms are always dreadfully untidy. Judging just by our rooms, you might think Crackpot was only lazy.

But here it was obvious that the House was worse than lazy. Here, there were cracks in the walls, and the floor beneath my feet felt dangerously creaky, as though it might splinter and give way plunging me down, down—to where? I wandered in the darkness, through room after room, and saw nothing but decay and dirt. Piled furniture and cobwebby chandeliers. Wallpaper peeling off in long curling strips. Parquet floors so dirty that the dust was as thick as a rug.

Sometimes there was evidence of earlier grandeur: an orangery, though the stunted orange trees were all spindly and gray, their fruit withered to dry husks that crunched under my feet. The glass ceiling above was black with dirt and let no daylight in, for want of which, I guess, the poor trees had slowly died. A long echoing room, its ceiling held aloft by tall tree-shaped pillars, most of its floor space taken up by an enormous swimming pool. The shallow end of the pool was empty, its green and blue mosaic glinting sadly in my coldfire light. There was still a bit of water in the deep end, sludgy black water smelling of yuck.

But despite the occasional glimpses of grandeur, there was mostly just mess.

Mess, and no stairs, no way out. Rangers never get lost. They always know where they have been, where they are going, and all the bits in between. Nini Mo navigated her way from Puento to Angeles, with both hands tied behind her back and a sack over her head, by sense of smell alone—that’s fifteen hundred miles of burning desert! It was stupid, then, that I couldn’t even find a doorway out or a staircase down. I knew Crackpot was big, but I’d never imagined it could be
this
big.

A tiny idea was forming in my brain that maybe Mamma had been right about the Elevator. I remembered Poppy and his shouting and the pinched look on Mamma’s face as she waited for him to return. Only now did it occur to me that she had not gone looking for him herself—

Wah!
A ranger would never think such things. A ranger must look with utmost logic at where she is and what she is doing, not succumb to dire fantasy. Nini Mo had not panicked when the Up-Drawn Bandana Society tied her to a log and threw her into the Dellenbaugh Gorge in
Nini Mo vs. the Cattle Coolers.
She had coolly sawed through the ropes with a spur and used her kilt as a parachute, then climbed back up the ravine and garroted every last ruffian. She had survived because she had been coolheaded and considering. I would be so, too, if only I could get my hand to stop quivering. The coldfire light was getting dimmer, and this time my Gramatica Invocation had no strengthening effect. I remembered that First Rule of Rangering,
Never let down your guard,
only too well now—now that it was too late.

The Second Rule of Rangering:
Take your bearings.
I had walked into a narrow closet, its walls tiered with drawers that went up over my head. I pulled one open, and a burst of dusty lavender boiled upward. Inside lay the legendary towels. Idden is pretty fastidious, and in her stories of Crackpot’s glory, she always dwelled on those wonderfully fluffy towels. Now they didn’t look so fresh and clean.

I went to the window and rubbed away the grime with my free hand. All I could see was my smudgy reflection. How could it be dark outside? Had I been lost so long that the day had gone by and night fallen, and now I wasn’t only late for school, I had missed it entirely? I had to get out of here, and fast.

The Third Rule of Rangering:
Consider your options.
I did not want to climb out of the window into darkness. Goddess knew what hungry uglies were lurking down there, just waiting for a tasty little snack to plummet into their gaping maws. I had no option but to continue on. The dribble of panic I had been trying to swallow was turning into a torrent, and the coldfire light was almost gone. Though I tried to rekindle the Invocation, it would not spark again. A lone match would not be much aid against such very
dark
darkness.

So on I continued, down a short staircase, covered with well-torn carpet, and through a narrow corridor lined with empty chairs whose leather seats had rotted away. Then ahead—a thin slant of light.

I hastened toward it, passing through a room whose emptiness was indicated by the hollow echo of my footsteps. As I got closer, I could see that the light slanted from a slightly opened door.

But not just a regular door, regular-sized and everyday ordinary. This door was one of a pair, and these two doors were enormous, each as wide as a coach and twice as tall. They were smoothly silver, with no decoration of any kind, not even doorknobs or lock plates. The flat metal reflected the tiny spark of my coldfire light, getting dimmer by the second, and my own unflattering reflection, squat and wavery.

It was lucky for me that that door was slightly ajar; never would I have had the strength to push that mammoth weight open. My coldfire light winked out, but the brilliant summery shimmer coming through the crack kept the darkness at bay.

“There’s no way out but through,” I said, my voice thin and whispery. I had to suck my tum in and hold my breath, but I could just squeeze through.

A
FTER SO LONG IN
darkness, the bright light was blinding. For a second I saw nothing, then blurring gray spots swam across my eyes. After a few seconds the spots faded, and I found myself in a library.

And what a library! I had thought the Library Rotunda at Sanctuary was huge, but it was a tiny broom closet compared to this room, whose length seemed to go on forever, disappearing into a distant sunny haze. The width of the room was not so distantly long, but it was still plenty wide.

Like the doors I had squeezed through, all the surfaces of the room were sleek and silvery, the floor like polished steel, the bookcases angular and slick. To my left, the wall was one long sheet of glass, through which the hot sun spilled, making the dazzle that had so blinded me at first. The opposite wall was nothing but bookshelves, marching into the haze, climbing upward until they reached the round arch of a cloudy dragon-entwined ceiling far above.

But the books! Never had I seen so many books. Hundreds of sizes, colors, and shapes filled the bookshelves, and their brilliant bindings were the only contrast to the glittering silver monotone. More slick cases—these fronted with glass—stood freely about the room, and these contained more books, and there were still more piled on the floor in haphazard stacks. More books than I could read in a lifetime, even if I sat down in one of the stiff metal chairs that stood at intervals along the enormous windows and started reading right that very second.

I went over to the table that marched the length of the room. It was larger even than the Grand Council Table at the War Department—which means it was
big
—and it was covered in scattered papers, stacks of books, inky-pen wipers. Chewed pens lay haphazardly as though they had been tossed down in disgust, and there was a lovely big glass inkwell shaped like a turtle, half empty.

The papers were covered with thick black writing in the style called Splendiferous. It’s an old script, and very flourishing, with many long sweepy bits both above and below. Back in the day, it had been the official hand for writing official documents such as laws and proclamations. Now it’s just old-fashioned and rarely used. It’s an extremely hard script to read, and I couldn’t make out any of the writing.

“Hey, don’t touch that,” a voice hissed in my ear.

My heart nigh to jerking right out of my chest, I snatched my hand back from the book I had been about to pick up, then turned around.

A boy stood behind me, glaring, his arms crossed. He was tall, his gangliness wrapped in a tattered black gown with trailing torn sleeves. Grayish hair straggled around a narrow, starving face; colorless eyes peered over a pointy snuffling nose.

“That book is older than this City and even more fragile,” he said, “so keep your dirty paw to yourself.” The boy shivered and huddled deeper into a thick black woolly shawl, which was liberally dusted with shreds of torn paper.

“Says who?” I demanded. “Who the heck are you? And what are you doing here?”

“This is
my
library,” the boy said menacingly. He widened his flat white eyes and scowled. “I should ask what
you
are doing here!”

“Nayah,” I answered. “This is
my
House, or rather my mamma’s House, and therefore this library is hers. And so is the book.”

The boy’s scowl turned into a snarl. “Your mamma lives in this House by my leave.”

“Ayah? Says who?”

The boy puffed up like an adder and bellowed, “I say so—I, Valefor, the Denizen of House Fyrdraaca—I say so and so it is!”

At least, I think he tried to bellow. Really he just kind of hooted in a loud reedy voice and ruined the effect by sputtering into a cough at the end. The windmill arms and the scraggly hair did not help his bombast, either.

Although I am ashamed to admit it, I laughed. He had tried to look so important and had only succeeded in looking silly. He coughed and coughed. I tried to swallow my laughter; he raised his head and gave me a look to cut glass.

“You are mean, Flora Fyrdraaca.” The boy wheezed again, a terrible sound that made my own throat hurt in sympathy.

“And you are not our Butler,” I said. “Mamma banished our Butler.”

The boy stuck his pointy chin in the air. “Ha! I am an egregore of the fifth order—I can hardly be banished! Though Buck did try to get rid of me, this is as far as I can go, here to the Bibliotheca Mayor. If she banished me completely, the House would fall right down.”

Could this actually be Valefor, our Butler? My excitement was tempered by skepticism. Praterhuman entities such as denizens, at least in my experience, tend toward the fantastic. At Sanctuary, Archangel Bob stands seven feet tall, and his crimson wings flutter behind him like two giant flags. Poor Furfur, at Saeta, even though he is run ragged by the hordes of lobbyists and sycophants always hanging around the Warlord, has a noble hound-dog head and is always perfectly dressed. Bilskinir House has been shut for years, but legend has it that the notorious Paimon is hugely and fabulously phosphorescent, and always hungry. This boy did not look fantastic at all, only scraggly. If he was our Butler, I guess he had fallen on hard times, like the rest of us at Crackpot Hall. But could it really be him?

“I know who you are, Flora Nemain Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca the
Second.
Why do you not know me?” the boy said, scowling.

“Because I’ve never seen you before, and you sure don’t look like a Butler.”

He deflated a bit and wrung his bony hands melodramatically. “I know, I know. I’m really not in good shape. You should have seen me in my early days, before your dear mamma sucked me dry and cast me aside. Under Azucar Fyrdraaca, I had the mane of a lion and fingernails of gold. When Anacreon Fyrdraaca was Head of the House, I had six of the most perfect arms, and I was fifteen feet tall—”

“You must have banged your head a lot on the doorways then.”

He stuck his lip out at me. “My hallways were taller then, too. You are a snippy one, Flora. I’m surprised at you, and disappointed, too. Surely you are the shortest Fyrdraaca that I can recall, and my memory is pretty good. And those little blue eyes—don’t squint like that. It only makes you look mean. That hair—do you ever comb it? And that coat you are wearing! What a mess, those wide lapels and awful—”

Now I was not excited at all, just stung. It is true that I’m not pretty; my hair is rusty red and curly, with a tendency to frizz, and I am rather plump. But rangers don’t want to be beautiful; they want to be anonymous. Nini Mo wasn’t beautiful; she was strong and fast and clever, and those qualities are more important than looks. But it’s irksome to have a complete stranger comment so personally on personal things.