Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) (20 page)

A keening howl echoed across the lake and suddenly I did not care to be left. Better jump in before he surfaced and noticed that I looked like a sausage in my bathing costume.

Dare, win, or disappear.

Clutching Poppy’s ranger badge in one sweaty hand, I held my nose with the other. I closed my eyes and jumped.

A
FTER THE COLD
night air, the water felt oily and warm. I kicked back up to the surface, then shook my wet hair out of my eyes, trying not to think about the daytime murk of the pond and the zillions of ducks that had contributed to it. I clenched my lips tightly shut. If I swallowed any of that water, I’d be squirting for the next month. Curious koi bumped me until I splashed at them and they darted away.

The swan boat had drifted off. A dark shape bobbed near me. Lord Axacaya said, “Hold on to my hand, and don’t let go. No matter what. I don’t want to get separated; it might be hard to find each other again.”

We splashed and found each other’s hands. Even wet, his grip was hot.

“Are you afraid, Flora?”

“A little.”

He laughed. “So am I. On the count of three, we will dive. It’s a bit of a ways, so suck in as much air as you can.”

He counted, I sucked, and then
three
—down he went, dragging me with him. I kept my eyes squeezed tightly shut, although it was probably too dark to see, anyway. Still, I didn’t relish the thought of that dirty water scouring my eyeballs. Down, down we dove. Mamma had made me and Idden learn to swim in the icy water off the Pacifica Playa, and all those years of battling the riptides and surf have made me a strong swimmer. But Lord Axacaya was a strong swimmer, too, and I hardly had to do any work, just hang on to his hand and kick to keep the momentum up. Once my foot hit something, and cold fear jolted through me. I suddenly recalled reading in the
CPG
about an alligator escaping from Woodward’s Zoological Exhibits, and then, of course, there was that grabby tentacle—

If you don’t peer at the shadows, you won’t see any ghosts,
Nini Mo said. So I turned my focus to the swim and tried to think of nothing else. Kick, kick, kick. As we went deeper, coldness began to swirl through the warmth. The water grew thicker, as though it was congealing around us. Soon I felt as though I was swimming through jelly I kicked harder, feeling my leg muscles burn, pushing deeper and deeper. Down, down we went. My ears popped.

And then I began to run out of air.

I pressed my lips together and tried not to snuffle out my nose, but the desire to breathe was becoming overwhelming. Pressure began to build in my head, pushing painfully against my ears. And still we continued down, down—even if I were to let go and turn back, it was too far. I’d never make it. The desire would be too strong—I would open my mouth—and suck in death. It dimly occurred to me that Lord Axacaya probably did not have small lungs and could swim much farther than I could on one breath.

Still we swam onward. The pressure became pain, and the pain became an urge so strong that I had to fight all my reflexes to keep from opening my mouth. With my free hand, I pinched my nose shut. My ears pounded and I couldn’t help but exhale, feeling the bubbles bob off my face, but it didn’t erase the desire to gasp. My lungs burned. I lagged, yanking on Lord Axacaya’s grip, trying to turn my mind toward anything that could distract me from the instinct to breathe. But it’s rather hard to distract yourself from the fact that you are suffocating.

Then Lord Axacaya twisted, and grabbed at my shoulders, pulling me into him. Our legs tangling, his lips were against my lips, forcing my mouth open. Just as I gave in to the horrible need to gasp, he exhaled, pushing air from his lungs into mine. I sucked the air in deeply, and he twisted again, pulling away, and kicking strongly Suddenly I felt buoyant and reenergized.

I opened my eyes and saw, instead of darkness, a rosy glow. Lord Axacaya floated next to me, a distorted silvery figure, his hair streaming behind him like seaweed. We hung in an immense nothingness, a hazy pink that seemed to extend forever. The emptiness of this huge Void was horrible—I felt very tiny exposed, puny. Overwhelmed. A wave of vertigo rolled over me—Lord Axacaya was gone, I was alone, lost, dwindling to a tiny speck of insignificance. The glow winked out, flooding me with a smothering oppressive darkness. I couldn’t feel my body, I couldn’t move, I was adrift and alone—

Then I felt a brief brushing against me, and that touch brought me back to myself. I could feel my body again, my arms and legs flailing. The brush became a grip, the grip a tug—

Close your eyes and kick.

I closed my eyes and kicked. Kicked and kicked and kicked. Once again the water felt thin against my skin. My head broke the surface and I was gulping in air, stale and musty air, but air. I opened my eyes, and through the sting of salt water saw the blurry world and was relieved. I rolled onto my back and wheezed and panted, reveling in the sensation of inflatable lungs. Next to me, Lord Axacaya whipped his head back, tossing wet hair out of the way.

“Are you all right, Flora? It didn’t occur to me that since you are so small perhaps the distance would be too great.”

“I’m all right,” I gasped.

“We will have to practice your breathing. You should be able to hold your breath for longer than that.” Lord Axacaya swam to the edge of the pool and slithered up the side, then hauled me up after him. I sat panting and dripping on the cold wet tiles. Above, instead of a sweep of darkness, the sky glowed with a pink pallor that made everything seem sickly and pale. In front of us a huge glass building loomed, long low wings stretching out from a central dome.

“You are shivering.” Lord Axacaya crouched before me, his hair clinging to his shoulders like a sodden veil. “Here—”

He reached out with a long finger and touched my forehead. For a second, I felt the pressure of his touch on my skin, and the pressure bloomed into a warmth that suffused my body with a pleasant glow. I no longer felt cold and soggy, but snug and dry. When I followed Lord Axacaya’s motion and stood up, I found that I
was
dry my hair no longer drippy, my bathing costume no longer soppy.

“How did you do that without using Gramatica?” I asked.

“I did use Gramatica. You just didn’t hear me. After a time, a magician no longer has to vocalize a Gramatica invocation; it is enough to think it. Come,
pequeña,
we are wasting the Current.”

I followed Lord Axacaya across the front drive, over a set of horsecar tracks, and up to the arching entrance of the building, which the large carved sign over the doors identified as Bilskinir Baths. But I’ve been to the ruins of Bilskinir Baths and they didn’t look like this at all. They are a twisted heap of fallen girders and blackened marble poised precariously over the cliffside, looking like they might, at any moment, collapse completely.

I said, “This is not a ruin.”

“Ayah, so. Every place in the Waking World has a corresponding impression Elsewhere. This is the Bilskinir Baths Elsewhere—the revenant of the original. It is the culmination of all the energies that were ever concentrated on the Baths. A ghost, if you like.”

“I thought only people could have ghosts. Don’t only people have Anima?”

Lord Axacaya laughed. “It’s a common misconception,
pequeña,
but you shall learn otherwise.”

The enormous door, wide enough to admit a pushing throng of people, was closed. That didn’t stop Lord Axacaya; he strode forward and walked right through it. I hesitated, for that door looked very real and very hard. Then I forced myself to move onward, trying not to flinch, closing my eyes just before I reached the point of impact. But there was no impact, just a waft of something soft on my skin, as though I passed through a curtain of gauze. When I opened my eyes, I was standing at the top of a magnificent marble staircase. At the bottom, dark water gleamed. And beyond that was a wide glass wall through which I could see the silvery shadow of the open ocean.

Lord Axacaya was already going down the marble stairs, and I hurried to catch up.

“Where is the denizen of Bilskinir Baths?”

“It’s gone.”

“Where did it go?”

“You are inquisitive, aren’t you?” He sounded amused.

“I want to learn.”

“So I see—watch that step.”

I watched that step, and put my foot down into a bright spurt of pain. “Pigface Pogostick!”

“What’s wrong?” Lord Axacaya turned back.

“I think I stepped on a piece of glass.” He knelt, coldfire light blooming around his hands, casting his eyes into shadow and making his gold butterfly lip-plug glitter. He bent his head, and I saw, through the golden haze of his hair, the thin blue lines of a tattoo etched on his scalp. I tottered and put my hand on his shoulder to steady myself, and his skin was hot beneath my hand.

“It’s just a little cut,” Lord Axacaya smoothed one finger along the slice on my heel, tracing the thin line of blood and smoothing the pain away. The snake tattoo on his arm wiggled, as though it were a real snake coiled around his arm. I shivered at his tickle, which felt as flickery as a snake’s tongue. He gently wiped the blood away with a hank of his hair, and I no longer felt pain or chill, but something much more fun.

“Is that better?” His face was so close I could see that his eyes were not completely black. In their depths a blue spark shone, tiny but bright. When I had met him once before in Elsewhere, his eyes had been bright blue, the color of the desert sky.

“Why are your eyes black?” I blurted.

“Shall I tell you?” he asked teasingly. “I think I shall, though few others know. Once, when I was not much older than you, I was burned alive.”

“Burned alive!” My stomach flipped in horror. “But how, then, do you live?”

“The inferno I was cast into was made not of ordinary flames, but of a voracious coldfire. The coldfire did not consume me, though it settled into my flesh so that even today I can feel its heat. And it burned away my vision. I am blind, Flora.”

“Blind! But how do you get around so well?”

“There are more ways to see than with your eyes, Flora. And now I see much more than I ever did when I had ordinary vision. It was a fair trade.”

It didn’t seem like much of a fair trade to me, at all. In fact, it was a horrible trade. I thought of never seeing the sunshine again, or Flynn’s silly face, or the color purple. Surely no trade could possibly make up for that—could it?
You have to give to get,
said Nini Mo. Losing your sight wasn’t a little thing—and yet, it had helped make Lord Axacaya the magician he was today. Powerful enough to be blind and yet to still see. And to hide this blindness from everyone. Maybe it
had
been a fair trade.

Lord Axacaya smoothed a lock of hair back from my face, and his touch made me shiver.

“The Art of Magick requires great sacrifices sometimes, Flora.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

He released my foot and stood up. “Ayah, so it did. Come.”

I followed Lord Axacaya down the stairs. It was hard to believe that he was blind. He moved so fluidly, so surely, with never a footstep wrong. But then, he’d said he could see more than I could. I really wanted to know what those visions were.

Every ten or so steps, the staircase leveled out into a wide landing. The hall was overrun with foliage; vines clung to the walls, thick with enormous flowers that filled the air with a heavy peppery fragrance. Trees grew along the edges of the stairs, their branches tangling overhead, so that the high ceiling was lost in a hazy lattice of leaves. The hot, wet air was hard to breathe.

Lord Axacaya said, “The Baths were destroyed before I came to Califa, so I never saw them when they were open. But they are glorious, aren’t they?”

Glorious and also a bit overdone, I thought. Plus, too wet. My dryness was rapidly turning soggy again. Huge green eyes glittered on the landing ahead of us and I pulled close to Lord Axacaya, only to feel foolish when I realized that the glow came from the glass eyes of an enormous stuffed walrus. The walrus was perched on a rock, its mouth open in a roar, tusks gleaming.

I said, “But why have we come to the Elsewhere Baths? Why can’t we just go to the ruins of the Baths themselves? Isn’t the Loliga there?”

“She is, but she’s hidden, guarded all around by various sigils, booby-trapped. Here, I can disable those sigils, so that I may visit her. I left the sigils undisturbed in the Waking World, to ensure that no one else might find her and try to meddle with her.”

Ahead of us lay the enormous expanse of a pool, its surface black and flat. We reached the bottom of the staircase; the next step led directly into the water. A framework of metal struts arched over the expanse, supporting a high glass ceiling; directly across, the glass formed a transparent wall, and the edges of the pool lined up so perfectly with the ocean that they appeared to form one contiguous body of water. I stared at the ocean. There was something strange about it, and it took me a minute to realize that it too was flat, with not a ripple marring its stillness. And silent, too. No boom of surf, or thunder of waves. Silence as flat as the water’s surface.

“The Salt Pool,” Lord Axacaya said. “Bilskinir’s glory. The true ocean is right there, but people preferred to bathe in a facsimile in which they were in no danger of being stung by jellyfish or eaten by sharks. To stay in the shallows where they could not drown. Most people want to stay where it is safe.”

“Most people are dull and boring,” I said, and he turned toward me and smiled.

“Are you most people, Flora Fyrdraaca?”

“No,” I said. “I’m bored all the time, and it’s horrible. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being bored.”

“Somehow I don’t think there is any chance of that,
pequeña.
Anyway, the Salt Pool allowed people to believe they were being daring. See—” I followed Lord Axacaya’s point. A long slide swooped down from the second-story gallery that overhung the south end of the Salt Pool. “And rope swings, too. And, of course, a denizen to fish you out if you ran into trouble.” At the north end of the pool, a lifeguard hut was perched on stilts, but it looked forlorn and empty, the denizen long gone.