“And once we have the fetish, then what?” Udo asked. “We have to have the fetish first; then we’ll be able to figure out how to restore Valefor. We won’t know what Mamma did to disconnect them until we have the fetish.”
“Well, let’s fall to,” Udo said. “I gotta be home by six, and I don’t want to be late and risk another lockdown.”
I didn’t want to be late to meet Mamma, either; she frowns on tardiness as much as Sanctuary does, and after not seeing her in so long, I did not want to start out on the wrong foot.
So, Valefor cleared the table of its mess of papers, Udo took off his hat, and I reread the Sigil, to make sure of the steps. Read it another time, just in case. Udo arranged himself to one side of me, and Valefor across. Between us, I lay The Eschata, open to the Sigil, just in case.
My stomach was fluttering, in a very nonrangery way. I had never heard of anyone’s head exploding from a wrongly done Working, but there is always a risk that problems will arise. The secret to having confidence is acting confident, Nini Mo said. I wiped my sweaty hands on my kilt and shifted so that my stays were not cutting so harshly into my back.
Strike hard, and with all your Will, Nini Mo said.
Closing my eyes, I rested my left hand on my knee and made the Invocative Gesture with my right. Pinching my left nostril closed with my thumb, I breathed in through my right nostril for four beats. Then I pinched my right nostril closed and exhaled through the left for four beats. Three times I did each side, and I started to feel the distant dizzy warmth that indicated the Current was building within me.
The fourth breath, I drew in through the right nostril, and then, pinching both nostrils closed, held the breath in. At first it was hard to focus; I kept hearing Valefor’s cough, or the crunch of Udo’s satin kilt as he fidgeted. Then my lungs began to grow tight and the urge to breathe started to build. I swallowed, feeling pressure in my ears, but ignored the sensation and focused my Will on the image of the Gramatica Word, focusing focusing focusing. The pressure grew, and the blobby darkness before my closed eyes bubbled and swam. Everything around me receded. The pressure burned; now there was nothing but it and the overwhelming urge to gasp.
Lungs scraping, I opened my eyes.
A thin light was spilling from the open pages of The Eschata lying before me. The light curled about itself, contracting into sparks, which in turn shifted and turned until they hung before me in the glowing sinuous letters of the Exhortation.
I opened my mouth and sucked in the glittering gnatlike letters. For a moment my mouth was filled with a sparkly crackling, and then, in shock and surprise, instead of expelling outward as I should have, I swallowed. The letters burned as they went down my throat, burning hot and burning cold. I gasped and started to choke, redness dotting my eyesight. My stomach convulsed in a horrible searing pain, and I doubled over, then the letters were boiling back up my throat in a scream:
The Word was as loud as thunder, as wide as the sky, as concentrated as a sword swing, as bright as a mortar flash. It flew as true as an arrow toward Valefor. He opened his mouth to receive it, and such was its force that he fell backward, disappearing under the table.
“Wow!” I dimly heard Udo say. My mocha had had enough; it no longer wished to be friends with me, and its desire to depart was extremely urgent. I leaned over and let it go. Afterward, my throat felt like it had swallowed a cat, a cat who had clawed all the way down.
“Valefor!” I croaked, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. My mouth tasted of fur; I spit, and spit again.
“I’m all right! I am fine!” Valefor popped up like a Springheel Jack-in-the-Box. “That was fantastic, Flora! Let’s go, I feel great.”
He danced his little happy dance, and I could see, clearly burning inside him, the glittery glow of the Sigil.
“That was something, Flora!” Udo said. “Did you hear that noise?”
“I didn’t think it would be so big,” I whispered. “Val, can I have some water?”
Valefor produced water and after about half a quart of guzzling down, and then a pint or so of spitting up, I started to feel better. My mouth still burned, and the rest of me felt as though I had been beaten with a stick, but it was a good sort of pain, and it was mitigated by the happy sensation of success.
“Hurry! Hurry!” Val sang, “Let’s go a-hunting! It’s near, I can tell, almost on the tip of my tongue, let’s go! I have eleven thousand rooms, so there’s no time to waste!”
So we went, wasting no more time, Valefor leading the way. My trek through Crackpot before had been a bare little jaunt, but now we were on a full-fledged expedition. Up narrow staircases and down broad staircases we went. Through antechambers, bedchambers, closets, parlors, dining rooms, sitting rooms, furnace rooms, bathrooms, water closets, attics, cellars, receiving rooms, and on and on. All the while, Valefor kept up a running commentary, like a tour guide:
“...Slippery Stairs, where Anacreon Fyrdraaca broke his nose sliding down on a tea tray ... Beekeeping Room, don’t bother them, Udo, and they won’t bother you ... Formerly Secret Cubbyhole ... Because it can’t be secret if you know where it is, that’s why Madama Smartie ... Luggage Mezzanine ... I wonder if that salesman is still in the linen basket, I should come back and check ... Eternal Atrium, look how large that tree has become, I must raise the roof in here or it’s going to go right through the ceiling ... The Gun Room, what on earth did Buck do with my .50 caliber Gatling ... The Halfway Point—”
“Stop, Valefor, stop!” I said finally. I had a stitch in my side from trying to keep up.
“I gotta go, Flora,” Udo said, halting as well. He’s a championship fencer, but he also was looking a bit winded. Valefor, energized, was fast.
“I’ve got to go, too. Valefor, come back!”
Valefor slid back up the balustrade. “What? Why do you linger?”
“Haven’t you seen your fetish anywhere, Val?” Udo asked. “We’ve been through half the House.”
“Not even half. Remember, eleven thousand rooms?” Valefor said, “Come on—”
“Haven’t you seen anything at all that could be your fetish?” I asked. “Nothing at all?”
Valefor hopped impatiently, “No. Come on!”
“I have to go, or Mam will ground me again,” Udo complained.
I said, “And I have to go, too. We’ll have to look more later.”
“When?” Valefor cried. “Oh, when?”
“As soon as we can. It will be hard with Mamma around, but we’ll think of something. Lead us back.”
Valefor protested and whined and wrung his hands as he led us back through the maze of corridors, rooms, and galleries, Udo and I both urging him to hurry up, and he insisting we were going as hurriedly as possible. But then suddenly Valefor’s whine changed to hoots of surprise.
“Flora! I can feel it! I can feel it! We are close, very close!” He took off at a dead run, and we followed him, barely able to keep up. A doorway loomed at the end of the hall, and Valefor effortlessly passed through it. The door was locked. Udo pounded and banged, and I shouted for Valefor to open it, and after a minute, he did.
Inside, the curtains were drawn. Valefor’s thin purple glow and the liquidy luminescence of the Sigil cast tremulous light over the small room, stretching monstrous shadows. Valefor was flitting about maniacally, tossing things hither and thither: a fishing net, polo mallets, old boots, pillows, dead flowers.
“Valefor! Cool down!” I ordered, dodging the footstool coming toward me.
“I can tell—it’s near—I can tell, Flora Segunda,” he said excitedly, descending upon the narrow gilt bed that was pressed up against one wall and tearing the sheets and blankets asunder. Great clouds of dust rolled up, and I put my hand to my mouth to keep from choking.
“The window!” Udo gurgled, retreating back into the hallway.
I stumbled my way across the room and pulled at the curtains; the fabric tore in my grip, and with a clatter, the rod came down and almost beaned me on the skull. The cloud of
dust that came from this plummet made the dust Valefor was roiling up seem like nothing, but once Udo helped me wedge the window up, we had fresh air and light.
Valefor was dismembering the bed, tossing the mattress over and dislodging a sheaf of yellowbacks. The walls were pinned with prints torn from old CPGs and polo flags, and a model sailboat perched upon the mantel. A yellowback whizzed by me and hit the wall, knocking a dartboard askew; I automatically bent down to pick the pamphlet up and grimaced. Naughty Nan's Risque Review was the title, and the illustrations were of scantily clad showgirls posing acrobatically.
“What room is this?” Udo asked, looking at a silver urn. Val had tossed it in his direction, and instead of dodging, Udo had caught it. “Hey, look, it’s a trophy for best horseman at the Califa summer fair, and look who won it—Hotspur!”
“Bedchamber of Redoubtable Dreams.” Valefor huffed, still chucking things. “Hotspur’s bedroom, you know, when he was a kid. Can you believe all this junk? My fetish is buried in here somewhere under all this stuff. What a mess. I’ll never find it.”
“Poppy? This was Poppy’s room?” I said, amazed. I looked around with new interest. Poppy had torn those prints out and stuck them on the wall? Those were Poppy’s old cloaks hanging on the back of the door? Poppy’s polo mallets in the corner and Poppy’s hippo bank on the bookshelf? “Why would your fetish be in Poppy’s old room?”
“I don’t know—but it’s here somewhere, I can tell, I can tell!” Valefor said. “I can feel it so close, it tingles, it tingles!”
“Is it this?” Udo asked, seizing a stuffed monkey that sat in the rocker by the fireplace.
“No!”
“This?”
Valefor said indignantly, “No! Not a blackjack, Udo, don’t be a snapperhead!”
“Maybe, Val, if you quit throwing things around and stood very quietly for a minute and focused, you’d be able to sense it better?” I suggested.
Valefor stopped his whirling and stood stock-still, clasping his hands under his chin as though he were praying, and closed his eyes. The Sigil burned inside him like a little sun, steady and bright, and its glow made his skin seem shimmery, like mother-of-pearl.
“Do you feel it?” Udo asked.
“Shut up, Udo—let me concentrate!” With his eyes still closed, Valefor extended one long arm in a point and began to spin. Once, twice, three times he twirled, his gown swirling around his legs and feet like water, his hair spinning out in a halo of purple. Then he stopped suddenly, his long finger pointing directly at the large trunk sitting in the fireplace alcove.
“There!”
“That dirty old trunk?” Udo said.
Valefor snorted. “No, my fetish is not the trunk, it’s inside the trunk. Open it, Flora, open it!”
We dragged the trunk, which weighed enough to have a body in it, out of the alcove and toward the daylight spilling in through the windows. Its flat top was covered in about two inches of dust, but when I wiped the dirt away with the bedsheet Udo handed me, purple paint was revealed. Spidery silver letters spelled out Reverdy Anacreon Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca.
“It’s Poppy’s Catorcena chest,” I said. It’s the custom that on your Catorcena, your family gives you a special chest with your name on it. You store your Catorcena clothing in it, and later, your heirlooms, the things that are important to you and that you wish to keep always.
“It’s pretty beat-up,” Udo said, and so it was, the paint rubbed off in places, and the wood rough and split. It looked like maybe Poppy had actually used the trunk as luggage. Valefor was already unlatching the clasps on either side of the open lock-face.
“Hold on, Valefor,” I said, grabbing at his arm. I could tell he was just going to start flinging. “It’s Poppy’s important stuff, and we need to be careful.”
“I’m surprised at your sudden interest about any of Hotspur’s stuff, Flora Segunda,” Valefor said. “But ayah so—we shall be very careful.”
Ayah so. The minute the lid was up, Valefor elbowed me out of the way and started tossing. My protests ignored, all I could do was try to catch what he threw before it got messed up or broken: a tiny pink baby dress and two little knitted booties, a leather tobacco pouch full of coins, a green velvet smoking cap, a leather-bound book, a hairy piece of leather—ugh, a scalp—this I also threw, rubbing my hands on my kilt to take away the yuck.
“Come on, Valefor,” Udo said impatiently. He caught the cadet jacket Valefor lobbed, and then the forage cap that followed.
Valefor’s response was muffled. He was leaning so far into the trunk that he was in danger of falling in completely I grabbed the back of his gown and pulled him out, and he came, sputtering ecstatically: “I have it! I have it!”
“A shoe box?” Udo said.
“Not a shoe box—a tea caddy?” I said, disappointed. Somehow it had seemed to me that Valefor’s fetish should be more exciting than a tea caddy. Or if a tea caddy, at least engraved silver or solid gold, but this one was only plain wood.
“This isn’t my fetish! My fetish is inside,” Valefor cried. “I know, I know, I am sure—can’t you feel it? Open it! Let’s open it!”
We pried the caddy out of Valefor’s grip to examine it more closely, but it appeared to be nothing other than an ordinary tea chest, slightly battered, made of dark red wood. It was locked. I shook it gently and it rattled slightly—whispering, like sand shifting.
“Smash it open,” suggested Udo.
“You can’t do that,” Valefor said, aghast. “You might break me, inside—”
“Can we pick the lock? Isn’t there a chapter in The Eschata about lock-picking?” Udo said. “Gesilher has a set of lock-picking tools he sent away for, from an advertisement in the back of the CPG. I could go home and steal them from him.”
There is an entire section in The Eschata about lock-picking, but the problem, as I pointed out, was there was no lock to pick. Or, rather, there was a lock, but it had no keyhole into which tools could be inserted. Instead, the lock plate was just flat and round.
“How do you unlock it if there’s no keyhole?” Udo asked.
“It’s a seal lock.” I’d never seen one before; they are old and quite rare, but a strongbox with a seal lock was described in Nini Mo vs. the Kickapoo Dollymop, so that’s how I knew about them. “The lock is keyed to a seal. To open it, you press the seal against the lock plate, and that turns the lock open.”
“What seal?” Udo asked. “The Fyrdraaca seal?” He and Valefor were leaning over my shoulder, breathing heavily and tickling my concentration.
I tried to squint the seal pattern into focus; the pattern incised on the lock plate was very thin, almost invisible.
“It’s not the Fyrdraaca seal. I can barely see it, but it’s not anything I recognize. I think it might be a bear holding a staff. Here, you look.”
Udo pronounced the seal to be a bear holding a parrot, but Valefor, after getting so close to the lock that his eyes crossed, pronounced it a falcon in flight. I looked at it again, and this time it seemed to me that maybe it was a hand holding a short whip with a tendrilly lash.
Distantly, a clock tolled, and its chime brought both me and Udo out of our inspection.
“Pigface! I gotta go,” Udo said. “We’ll have to finish this another time. I’m gonna get popped for sure, but it was worth it. Good job, Flora!”
“I was the one who found my fetish,” Valefor protested.
“Ayah, but Flora was the one who did the Sigil that helped you do it.”
“I have to go, too, Valefor, but we’ll figure out what to do next later.” I wasn’t going to have time to change if I wanted to make the horsecar, and Mamma was probably going to be annoyed I was late, but in my warm glow of success, I didn’t care. My Sigil had worked, and we had found the fetish. We would find the seal, too, and Valefor would be restored!
TWELVE
The Presidio. A Snack. Sneaking. Another Denizen.
WHEN FLYNN AND I got off the horsecar in front o
f the Officers’ Club, scores of canvas-clad privates were industriously polishing cannons, cutting grass, and bagging eucalyptus leaves. Maybe there was an inspection coming up, or maybe they were just trying to stay one step ahead of Mamma. All I can say is that I am grateful that she saves the white-glove treatment for work. Without Valefor, Crackpot would never pass her official muster.
Normally I am happy when Mamma comes home; it means that things will be as back to normal as they can ever be, and that while my chores don’t lessen any, at least Poppy is no longer my problem. She’d been in Angeles for two weeks, a long trip even for her. But this time part of me wished that she had not come back for a few more days, just enough time to deal with Valefor. Now that we had the fetish, all we needed was a way to get into the tea caddy. If we couldn’t find the actual seal, there had to be another way to open the lock. If you can’t go in by the door, says Nini Mo, go in by the window. The restoration was as good as done.
The Presidio is a pretty place, scattered with white buildings dappled by shade trees, surrounded to the south and east by sandy hills dusted with sea grass, and edged at the north and west by the glittering blue waters of the Bay of Califa. Despite being a place completely concerned with war, it always seems very peaceful.
Building Fifty-six, the headquarters of the Army of Califa, stands at the head of the parade ground, looking down its long slope toward the Bay. The parade ground is bigly huge, large enough to march ten regiments in unison, although the most I’ve ever seen is six, at the Fortieth Anniversary of the Warlord’s Conquest, three years ago. In the middle of the parade ground four cannons guard the flagpole where the colors of Califa and the Warlord flap and snap in the perennial whippy wind.
Troops of soldiers were starting to assemble in front of the Adjutant General’s office, preparing for the final afternoon Gun and Retreat. I hurried by, dragging the lollygagging Flynn behind me. If you are stuck outside within eyeshot of the Colors when Retreat starts, you have to stand at attention for the duration of the Color Guard marching out, saluting the Colors, lowering them, folding them, securing them, and removing them, while the Army band plays “Califa Forever” and the cannons sound the end of day. I’ve seen Retreat a hundred times, and I didn’t need to see it again.
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) Page 8