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) (42 page)

"Haðraaða bitch!” the Loliga cries. I dodge the curse just in time; when it hits the wall behind me, it explodes into a choking black cloud. She staggers toward me and then is stopped short by the length of the chain. "Free me!”

"But I thought my death would free you!”

"Your death freed me from the form of that monster, but no more!” the Loliga shouts, and then she screams again. The ground heaves and rolls, and a fissure opens up almost under my feet. I jump back, struggling to keep my footing.

I have been calm so far; death and immersion in the Current had taken the edge off my lively anxieties. Now, at the sound of the Loliga’s screams, at the chaos around me, those anxieties come flooding back. It’s all I can do to keep from screaming frantically myself. Here, deep in Elsewhere, the Loliga’s screams are tearing at the Working; higher above, her struggles are rippling through the City’s Current like a tidal wave. And in the Waking World, they are tearing the City apart.

"
Stop!”
I shout.

The Loliga’s scream abruptly stops, and she stares at me with enormous blue eyes.

"Look, I will free you and get you out of here, but you have to stop screaming. You are destroying the City.”

"I don’t care about your stupid City. It deserves to be destroyed.” She gasps, clutching at her middle.

"If the City is destroyed, then I won’t have any reason to free you.”

The Loliga lunges at me, but I have been careful to stay out of her reach. I say, "If you hurt me, I won’t be able to help you.”

"You are not helping me now.” A shadow passes over the Loliga’s face, but she doesn’t scream again.

"Look, madama, I died to free you—how is that not helping?”

The Loliga says scornfully, "Am I not still imprisoned?” Then she tosses her head back, neck straining, mouth opening silently. She pants and gasps, but she doesn’t scream.

I had expected to see the egregore still in squid form; I am shocked by the Loliga’s shape. She looks like an ordinary human woman. A human woman in labor. Does this mean she will give birth like a human woman? I know nothing about delivering babies, magickal or otherwise. I do not
want
to know anything about delivering babies, magickal or otherwise.

As soon as her spasm passes, I say, “I will unchain you, but you must promise not to hurt me. Then you can go, ayah?”

The Loliga bites her lip, nods. I stand on tippy-toe and she bends forward so that I can reach the collar around her neck. Her skin is as smooth as porcelain, tinted with lavender. I gently push her matted hair away from the collar, which I touch with my index finger, still encircled by the Key. The collar wavers, shimmers, and vanishes. As I am doing this, I notice a faint odor. It is not the Loliga; she smells of salt and fish. This smell is ripe and muddy, the kind of smell that makes your mouth taste bad. I sense movement above us. I look up, and there is the kakodæmon peering down through a hole in the glass ceiling. It sticks one long arm through, probing.

The Loliga sees the kakodæmon, too, and spits out, “A kakodæmon. Scum.”

The hole is too small for the kakodæmon to get through, but it’s picking at the glass, as though trying to make it big enough to slip through. I can’t wait and see if it succeeds. I had hoped that if I opened the doors for her, the Loliga could leave the Working on her own. But she can barely walk; clearly, she needs my help. The bottom of the empty pool is wet and slippery. I put my arm around the Loliga’s waist and together we stagger toward the stairs that lead to the pool deck. I can’t help but keep glancing up, and see that the kakodæmon has left off its picking and is following us, skittering from girder to girder.

Don’t look back,
Nini Mo says, and so I try to forget about the kakodæmon, to concentrate on not buckling under the weight of the Loliga. Still, I know by the stench floating down that the kakodæmon is keeping pace with us. Fear prickles me; I try to ignore it.

Our progress is not rapid. The Loliga staggers a few feet, and then falters. I urge her on, she staggers another few feet, and falters again.

"It’s close—” She pants. "It hurts!”

"We are almost there.” I point up the stairs. "Look. There’s the door.”

"I cannot go that way!” the Loliga cries. She collapses into a heap. "I cannot go through that door!”

"But it’s the only way out!”

"Georgiana put me under a geas not to go through that door. I thought you knew another way”

The Loliga begins to scream and thrash, drumming her heels on the floor. The tile cracks under her blows; the air around her sparks. In the Waking World, the City is falling down. And I am powerless to do anything about it.

My Will begins to bubble with panic. Fike Georgiana! She had not mentioned the geas in her
Diario.
I have done the one thing I know how to do: die. I had thought that would be enough. I don’t know how to do anything else. I have no idea how to tear the Working down. I have no idea how to lift a geas...

But, thanks to Tiny Doom, I know how to get around one.

The Loliga’s eyes are rolling wildly, and when I lean over, she strikes out at me. I grab her hands, trying to ignore the pain that pulses through her grip.

“Shhhuushhh...” I hum soothingly, the same hum that Mamma would use on Poppy to calm him down, a tuneless little hum that she would do for me when the monster under the bed (not nearly as horrific as the kakodæmon) tried to get me. The hum vibrates in my chest, up through my hands, into the Loliga, and she begins to calm down.

I say firmly and calmly, “Listen. Georgiana put you under a geas not to go through that door. But a geas affects your Will only, not mine. Understand?”

The Loliga nods weakly.

“So, you can leave through that door under my Will, if I make you go with me. But you gotta get up!”

Somehow I manage to hoist the Loliga to her feet, and we climb the last few steps. The stench is growing. I look up to see the kakodæmon is still shadowing us. Only a few more feet and we shall reach the door. When I glance up again, the kakodæmon vanishes—gone ahead to wait for us. If we go out that door, we will walk directly into its grasp and be consumed.

We are trapped, just as I was trapped before—in the oubliette, by the ghoul. I had tried to spring myself from those traps and failed. I had been freed because of someone else’s efforts, not my own. I had abandoned my comrade to save myself. I will not abandon the Loliga.

"The baby’s coming!” the Loliga howls, and flings me off, falls against the door, falls down. Her back arches, her arms flail. Under the blue gown, her belly ripples. Her howls are shattering the ceiling; glass twinkles down like a sparkly sharp rain. I lean over her, trying to protect her from the rain, try to grab her hands, try to hold her, heave her to her feet. But she’s frantic now, past reason, gone far beyond me, and I cannot get a grip on her. Her elbow rams my chin, and even though I have no blood to taste, my mouth fills with an iron tang. I have to get the Loliga out of here. Maybe I can distract the kakodæmon long enough to allow her to escape. Then maybe I can escape myself. And if not, at least she will be free and the City saved.

I am trying one last time to heave her to her feet, when the kakodæmon’s stench almost overwhelms me. I look up to see it fall through the ceiling, land upon a piece of broken marble, scrabble toward us on skittering legs. It is now between us and the door. The kakodæmon rears up, inflating its mantle, exposing the moist gash of its mouth, those horrible square yellow teeth. I throw myself upon the Loliga; our heads knock together in a bright burst of pain.

Right behind that burst of pain comes my panic. I can’t fight the kakodæmon and protect the Loliga at the same time; I can’t protect the Loliga and help her, too. We have to get out of here now. Instantly. If there was ever a time for a Translocation Sigil, this was it.

But what would happen if the Sigil went wrong? Where would we end up? In the Abyss? The Loliga would be free, but I would never be able to return to the Waking World. What if I said the Word wrong? That would be a calamity in the Waking World. In the Current it could be catastrophic. We could be instantly destroyed, and because our destruction would occur within Georgiana’s Working and this Working is tied to the City’s Current, the City could be destroyed, as well.

Panic runs through me like rushing water, quick and cold, threatening to drown me, and bobbing along in the rush is one thought: If I don’t try we shall be destroyed for sure. The Loliga’s back is arching like a bow; her mouth is open, but no sound is coming out. The kakodæmon is poised above us, pincers reaching down to cram us into those snapping teeth.

Now, or don’t bother,
says Nini Mo.

I lean over the Loliga and suck in all her pain, her fear, her anger; mix it with my pain, my fear, my anger. Those emotions run together, flood me with a huge pressure that grows stronger, stronger, stronger! No time to create a Direction Sigil; I don’t need a Direction Sigil. An image of the Cloakroom of the Abyss pops into my head and I fasten on that image—hold it within my Will.

The mantle begins to come down, enveloping us. Before it can touch us, I scream:

The pressure that has been building in me explodes. I am dwindling, dissolving, shrinking. My consciousness is swirling, twirling, as though I am spiraling down a giant drain. I am poured into darkness, where I float, diffused and formless. Images flash through me: the Loliga’s human form disintegrating into a huge ball of coldfire light, a color I have never seen before, rich and deep. With a flash, the light splits in two and vanishes, leaving shimmering streaks behind. The streaks fade, and the edges of the Void begin to whirl and spin, catching me in their dizzying movement. I blur, the Void blurs, and then—

G
ASPING
, I
SURGE UP
out of blackness. My vision swims around me, the world wavering, and then springs into focus. I splash to the edge of the pool and hang there, gasping, before hauling myself up out of the water into a familiar room: the Cloakroom of the Abyss. Familiar, but not the same as when I had last seen it. Hardhands’s catafalque has vanished; taking its place, the pool from which I have just crawled. In the dim wavery light, the water looks as flat and black as ink.

The Translocation Sigil
—my
Translocation Sigil—worked. We had escaped the kakodæmon. The Loliga and her child are gone. Free.

I am wrung out, exhausted, weak. I sit on the edge of the pool, dripping, shivering in the cool air. The crypt is absolutely silent. The alcoves are empty, biers bare. No sign of any Haðraaða corpses. There is only one dead Haðraaða here: me.

Surely by now Udo should have fished me out of the Cold Plunge, yanked me back to the Waking World. But instead here I am, where all dead Haðraaðas end up, apparently Maybe it is too late; I had been dead too long and now dead I would stay This fear is muted by exhaustion, so I just sit there at the edge of the pool, too tired to try to figure out what to do next.

The water begins to churn and froth. I remember the kakodæmon, and alarm overcomes my weakness. I scramble up and take drippy refuge in one of the alcoves. In the pool, something is poking up out of the whip-creamy froth: a black nose, a long snout, a flat head, two tufted ears. The Coyote paddles furiously; I run forward and grab its ruff. Paws catch at the pool’s edge; I pull, and we both fall over backward onto the icy marble floor.

The Coyote had escaped the kakodæmon after all. It scrabbles to its feet and shakes itself hard, hurtling diamondlike droplets through the air. Its fur shimmers, ruff flutters, fur flies—dissolves—and the Coyote is gone. In its place stands a laughing woman. She stamps her bare feet, tosses her magenta hair back and forth. Extends her arms, twirling, the fringe on her buckskin jacket whirling with her, and says, "Woo, that was fun!”

I sit on the cold marble floor, in a puddle of water, amazed.

“Sit there in that water, you just might get a cold. Catch the ague and die!” The woman slicks her hair back behind her ears, gold thumb-rings glinting. She is already completely dry. “Come on, girlie, get up!”

Still I sit, gaping at her like a broken window. Because I know who she is, and yet I can’t believe it is really her. I’ve seen her image a thousand times: the buckskin jacket, the bare feet, the magenta hair, the wide red mouth.

Nini Mo. The Coyote Queen. The greatest ranger of them all.

“Sorry about that back there,” Nini Mo says. “I thought I had that squirt licked. I let down my guard. A silly old kakodæmon, and the bugger surprised me. Aw, I tell you, I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”

“You are Nini Mo!” I blurt.

“So I’ve heard.” She grins at me. Her smile is electric. It makes me want to smile, too.

Instead, I say, “But aren’t you dead?”

“You are dead, too, my dolly. Though I hear you aren’t planning to stay that way.”

“What are you doing here? Didn’t you cross the Abyss?”

“And miss all the fun? Tiny Doom asked me to give you a hand, herself being unable to, ya know. Or give you a paw, I guess you could say Maybe a fang or two. Not that you needed much help from me, dolly Your mamma’s girlie, you are! And you got sand, my dolly, to try the Ultimate Ranger Dare. More sand than I ever had, that’s for sure.”