As a ranger should, I intended to make a good death when it came my turn, but as far as I was concerned, tonight was not a good time to die. I writhed and kicked, bit and scratched, but my struggles had no effect upon Paimon at all. He tucked me under one arm, and suddenly I found myself as limp as a noodle, unable to move. But at least I was not immediately going to the butcher’s block. Instead, he carried me to the far end of the kitchen and opened a large metal door. Frigid air gusted out.
The room was small, round, and lined with hooks, from which drooped a whole lot of dead birds, glassyeyed, feathers limp. Pigeons, pheasants, turkeys. A huge animal hung from a meat hook in the center of the room; skinned, headless, limbs removed. Its tendons glistened whitely, the muscles sickly red, and a slick of blood pooled on the floor underneath it. In my terror, it looked vaguely human. An empty meat hook dangled next to it. Tiny Doom’s coat was no protection against the cold; already my teeth were chattering.
Out of the tamale, onto the meat hook.
“Paimon,” I moaned.
“I’m sorry madama.” But instead of reaching for the meat hook, Paimon bent down and yanked on a large iron ring set into the floor. The ring pulled up a piece of the floor to reveal a dark, round hole: an oubliette.
Well, it was better than the meat hook, that was for sure.
“Down you go, Flora,” Paimon said.
“Paimon, haven’t we been friends, and—”
He looked at me sorrowfully. “Madama, this hurts me more than it hurts you.”
Somehow I doubted that. “If you will just let me go, then I promise to be good and I’ll never bug you again, and no harm will be done—Hardhands will never know. Please, darling Paimon?”
“I cannot. Not now. But later I shall return for you.”
“How much later?” I asked hopefully thinking I could probably manage an hour or two before I froze to death. I could wait a couple of hours; didn’t I have thirty-eight years before I had to be back?
“When there is a new Head of the House.”
“When will that be?”
“Twenty-three years.”
Thirty-Two
The Pit. Forlorn Hope. Fear.
I SAT WOEFULLY in the darkness for a long time. Once again all my plans had gone awry. I had failed in my mission. My lies had been useless. I’d been caught. All this made me feel very bad, but worst of all: I felt totally crushed by Tiny Doom’s betrayal. She’d seemed so cool and tough, and then she’d folded at the first sign of pressure. No wonder Hardhands had been able to keep her locked up—she might talk big, but she’d never be a ranger.
Rangers stick.
Rangers also don’t sit around woefully when they are caught. Did Nini Mo sit around sulking when she was captured by the Arivaipas, who planned to roast her like a pumpkin? No, she did not. The first duty of a ranger who is caught is to escape. Sulking would not help me achieve this goal. So, I swallowed my sulky crushed feelings and cupped my hands in front of me (or the best approximation of in front of me, for it was awfully dark).
A little blue lick of light glimmered in my palms and sputtered out; my Will was weak with fear. Well, I wasn’t going to spend twenty-three years in this hole, so I needed to get over that fear, and quick. I thought about all the stuff I had to do—figure out how to get home, and then save the City. Lord Axacaya was waiting for me. The coldfire flame flickered a bit, and then died again.
Nini Mo! I’d escape and find her. She’d know how to get me home, and she’d make Hardhands give me the Diario and we’d all be saved. This time the flame lasted a few seconds, but then it, too, faded.
Udo. I had to get out of this stupid hole to save Udo. He might have left me in the lurch, but I was not going to return the favor. Rangers stick. I thought about that again, and the flicker flared into a little blue ball of Ignis Light. When I took my hands away, it bobbed gently in front of me, shedding a happy little cerulean glow. I was glad enough to see it; already the heavy black weight of the surrounding darkness had begun to weigh heavily upon me.
Now the oubliette’s well-like wall was visible, at least thirty feet high and slick as marble. No handholds there. The floor was made of the same flat white tiles as the kitchen—so, no digging—and was ice-cold on my bare feet. Paimon had drawn the rope and basket up after me, of course, so no hope there. But the light also revealed a wonderfully familiar object: my dispatch case, which I had lost in the Vortex. Where Paimon had found it, or why he had left it for me, I couldn’t guess, but I was grateful he had. All my supplies were still inside: my extra bars of chocolate, two boxes of triggers wrapped in oil cloth, an extra pair of socks, my cutlery kit, my collapsible lantern, my pen case, my penknife, my flask, and, most important: The Eschata. I lit the lantern, ate a bar of chocolate, put on the dry socks, and felt much better. You’d be amazed, said Nini Mo, how much dry socks matter.
Then I tried to make myself comfortable on the cold floor and reread the chapter in The Eschata entitled “Escape.” Surely the answer to my exit must be there. Indeed, The Eschata offered many escape techniques. If I had some grape yeast and flour, I could make a smoke bomb to create a diversion—but I had neither grape yeast nor flour, and no need for a diversion. If I had six feet of hemp rope and a heavy weight, I could have perhaps swung the rope up, caught it above, and climbed out of the oubliette. But I had neither rope nor weight, neither, for that matter, did I have room to swing.
No prison can hold me, said Nini Mo. There had to be a way If I couldn’t get out via ordinary measures, perhaps something extraordinary would do the trick. I flipped beyond the practical escape methods to the impractical—the purely magickal. But here, too, I was hampered by lack of ingredients. I had thought my ranger kit was pretty well kitted out, but now I saw I was woefully undersupplied. I lacked various wacky ingredients: a hand of glory powdered centipede gall, a fuzzy lemon pop-stick. That eliminated the Pogo Sigil (jumping), the Diaphanous Sigil (floating), and the Gummy Sigil (sticking). With a tin can, a string, and an Amplification Sigil, I could create a telegraph and wire Nini Mo for help. I had string, but no tin can.
Left then were sigils that required no special ingredients, other than the magician’s Will and Gramatica Vocabulary that I did not have: a Transubstantiation Sigil (turn myself into a bird and fly out), a Vapid Sigil (turn myself into a fog and waft out), a Trans location Sigil (jump from one point to another). Once again I cursed my lack of Gramatica skills. If I were fluent—or even knew enough just to get by—well, all this would be easy.
A bubble of panic popped up my throat, and I tried to swallow it back down. I wasn’t sure how long I had been in the oubliette, but the distant thudding that had started up not long ago was surely the sound of a bass guitar. The Tygers of Wrath must have begun their set. Paimon’s attention would be fully engaged there, so the time for me to act was now.
Rangers don’t waste time wishing for what they don’t have; they use what they’ve got. What did I have? I had a satchel full of useless stuff—I had nothing. Fear bubbled again, almost choking me. Fear—I had plenty of fear, enough fear to swamp the Dainty Pirate’s ship, enough fear to turn me into a gibbering mindless fool.
Enough fear to amplify a Gramatica Word?
A good magician can take a small Gramatica Word and amplify its meaning by applying a Catalyst to it. There are two kinds of Catalysts—Inhibitory Catalysts and Excitory Catalysts.
An Inhibitory Catalyst is any method that involves the negative of something, like burying yourself alive, or withholding food, or poking yourself with a needle. Pain and deprivation are the footholds of an Inhibitory Catalyst—anything that leads to Not Enough. Not enough food, not enough air, not enough light.
An Excitory Catalyst is any method that involves the positive of something—dancing frantically, falling in love, eating lots of chocolate. Happiness and joy are the handmaids of an Excitory Catalyst—anything that leads to Too Much. Too much love, too much food, too much light.
These Catalysts ca
n be used to amplify a sigil, make it bigger, better, stronger. Or it can stretch the meaning of a Gramatica Word, make it last longer, go further.
In Nini Mo vs. the Xocholatte Rustlers, Nini Mo used an Excitory Catalyst (too much chocolate) to amplify the Gramatica Words jump and space to create a Translocation Sigil that catapulted her from the vat of boiling chocolate she had been plunged into, at the Rustlers’ secret chocolate factory, to the local sheriff’s office. After organizing a posse, she returned to the factory and arrested all the rustlers, who were later hung. (They take chocolate rustling seriously in Arivaipa Territory, as well they should.)
The Gramatica Word out was in The Eschata’s glossary It’s a four-syllable Gramatica Word, and I’ve only ever managed three-syllable Words, but you have to start someplace. With an Inhibitory Catalyst, I could make my fear work for me rather than against me, use it to Amplify the Gramatica, use the Amplified Word to Charge a Location Sigil, and then use that to jump myself out of this blasted oubliette. Tiny Doom had said that Georgiana Segunda had been buried with the Diario. From my previous visit to Bilskinir, I knew that the Haðraaða dead are kept in a crypt deep in Bilskinir’s depths. If I could jump directly from the oubliette to the Cloakroom of the Abyss, as the crypt is called, I could grab the Diario and escape Bilskinir before the band finished playing. Then find Nini Mo. She’d know what to do from there, how to get me home again.
The other option was to sit in the oubliette for the next twenty-three years. Translocation Sigils are extremely dangerous. Done wrong you could easily end up stuck inside a wall or, even worse, half stuck inside a wall. Or even worse than that, half merged with another person: four legs, four arms, two heads.
But if you don’t try, you are bound to fail for sure, said Nini Mo. She wouldn’t sit in an oubliette for twenty-three years.
The claustrophobic darkness lurking just beyond the flickering, fading light of my lantern, its candle already down to a stub; the creeping fear that Paimon might come back for a snack; the skin-crawling horror of that headless carcass on the meat hook—as far as an Inhibitory Catalyst went, I was more than halfway there.
I fished my notebook out of my pack, and a pencil, too, which I sharpened with my little penknife, then wrote The Cloakroom of the Abyss over and over and over again until the paper was covered with an unreadable scrawling pattern. A powerful adept, of course, doesn’t need a physical object to use as a focal point of her sigil, but I am not a powerful adept, and I wanted to be sure to get where I wanted to go. After I folded the paper into a small arrow shape, the signifier of a Direction Sigil, I was ready.
I blew out the light, and the darkness oozed around me, as thick as mud and almost as stifling. I crouched down, clutching the Sigil, and allowed my imagination to run free into horrible scary thoughts, and it didn’t take much, let me tell you, to get me lathered. I have a very vivid imagination. All I had to do was think about Paimon’s sharp teeth and the row of sharp shiny knives hanging in his spotless kitchen, and I began to shake.
My imagination had help, too. The darkness that surrounded me felt not ordinary pitch-black, but thick and old, as though years without the leavening of light had soured it and congealed it down, like when you leave the coffee pot on the stove and come back to find mud where your espresso should be. Sluggish and tired, but still with a spark of life—and curiosity. Although I knew perfectly well there was no wind, the dark seemed to move about me, stirring my hair and caressing my face with airy fingers.
Whispering voices surrounded me, and I knew that the darkness now stretched around me endlessly. It was an enormous Void full of horrible, hungry things, drawn to me like a moth to the flame, looking for tender young flesh, tender young Will, to snack upon. Chittering sounds, inhuman and diabolical. Claustrophobia bore down on me, the weight of the darkness crushing me. I have no idea how long I sat there, gasping for breath. An hour, a day, an eternity of darkness, with the grasping greedy creatures of the Abyss getting closer and closer. Something brushed my hair. I began to hyperventilate; I couldn’t breathe; panic overwhelmed me and I let out an enormously huge shriek, then another and another.
In my fist, my sweaty grip had condensed the Sigil into a little ball, which was now glowing with coldfire flare. The heat of it spread slowly up my arm, into my body, down my legs, up my chest, until it reached my head and exploded into a giant pulsing ball of staticky pressure. Now was the time.
I shouted.
The world shifted sideways, then whirled like a merry-go-round. For a moment, all my organs seemed to scramble and jump inside my skin, which was prickling and stinging as though I were engulfed in a cloud of extremely hungry mosquitoes.
I felt myself rise, and then drop. I landed hard, the impact shooting all the air out of my lungs and momentarily stunning me. I gurgled, lungs inflating, gasping. When I opened my eyes, I saw I was still in the oubliette.
When I tried to turn my head, I couldn’t—my hair was caught on something. I reached up, and when I realized why I was stuck, I had to fight down the urge to upchuck. The Sigil had worked after all ... partially.
The hair on the left side of my head was now embedded in the wall.
Thirty-Three
Bad Hair. A Key. An Unhappy Realization.
STILL FEELING QUEASY over my close call, I used my knife to cut my hair free. Needless to say, I was not going to attempt that trick again, though now my fear was such that an Inhibitory Catalyst would be mighty easy indeed. At least I had only lost hair. I could have lost a finger, or a hand—or worse.
Twenty-three years wasn’t that long, was it? I wouldn’t even be forty. Or I could try to persuade Paimon to free me the next time he visited me. I could take a nap and maybe I’d have another idea. Or I could just give up, curl into a little ball, and cry—
“Are you still down there, Flora?” a voice shouted hollowly.
High above me, Tiny Doom was backlit by a sputtering lantern. Something twisty fell down and almost whacked me on the head: Pig, with a rope tied around his waist.
I grabbed at him as he swung; he felt soft and cuddly in my arms. “What do you want?” I hollered back. “Come to gloat over your treachery?”
“Don’t be a fiking snapperhead. I hope you are good at rope climbing, because I couldn’t smuggle a ladder in. Come on, chop-chop ... I can only confuse Paimon for so long.”
Now, I didn’t trust Tiny Doom further than I could kick her (and oh, how I would like to kick her), but I wasn’t going to stay down in this oubliette just to spite her, either. I would let her help me escape the oubliette and then I’d escape her.
“I can’t climb and carry Pig, too!” I shouted.
“Never mind Pig, he’ll bring himself up. Come on, hurry!”
When finally I hauled my puffing self over the edge, Tiny Doom announced, “If we’d been under fire, I’d probably be dead and you sure as fike would be. You fiking took long enough.”
“I wouldn’t have been down there in the first place if it hadn’t been for you, pernicious traitor!” I gasped, rubbing my burning hands over my thighs.
“You didn’t think I was going to leave you to Paimon, did you?” Tiny Doom sounded surprised. She’d changed into a supercool fringed buckskin jacket and a black leather kilt. Black paint was smeared on her face, obscuring her bruises and making her eyes look as bright as blue coals. A black knit cap had been pulled over her tricolor hair. “Here—I brought you some boots.”
I caught the boots she tossed at me: purple, with jet buttons and sharp silver spurs. They were supercute, but they were not going to distract me from my ire. “You told him it was all my fault! What else was I supposed to believe? Paimon almost ate me!”
“Oh, Paimon wasn’t really going to eat you—he’s a vegetarian. I’m sorry about putting the juice on you, but we couldn’t both be caught, could we? Who would rescue us both? I had to put Hardhands off the track somehow. I can’t believe you thought I was really trying to do you in.” She looked wounded.
“What else was I supposed to believe?” I sat down on a large crate marked CRAYFISH and put the boots on.
“Rangers are supposed to trust each other,” she said, and a tiny feeling of badness began to wiggle inside me, for she was right, of course. Rangers do trust each other. And while I would have rather rescued myself than have been rescued by her, It doesn’t matter who rescues you, as long as you are rescued, Nini Mo said.
“Sorry,” I said. “But you sounded pretty sincere.”
“Well, I had to, didn’t I? To make them believe me. If Hardhands had thought I was lying, we’d both have been totally fiked. Anyway, I’m sorry it took so long to get down to rescue you. I had to go downstairs with Hardhands and make fiking nice-nice, and as soon as the Tygers started their show, I came down to get you. Hey—what happened to your hair?”
“I had an accident,” I hedged. I didn’t really want to admit my failure to her.
“What kind of accident?” She sniffed. “You smell of a Catalyst. What happened?”
“I tried to use an Inhibitory Catalyst to Amplify a Directional Sigil into a Translocation Sigil.”
“Are you fiking me? That’s one of the most dangerous Sigils ever. You could have ended up embedded in a wall somewhere.”
“Well, it almost worked. I did translocate a little. But I must have said the Word wrong.”
“That’s a hard one; it’s got that weird click in it. Still, you gotta lot of fiking nerve, Flora. I don’t know if I would try that one, no matter how fiked I was. You are crazy—and I mean that nicely Come on, let’s get a move on; I’m freezing, and the Tygers are into their second set—they’ll be done soon. We gotta get the Diario and get the fike out of here.” Tiny Doom stowed Pig in her knapsack, and I followed her to the door of the meat locker.
“The door’s locked,” I said, rattling the handle.
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) Page 22
