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)

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  “Are you saying that the Warlord’s orders are strange?” Udo asked in a quiet, dangerous voice.

  The lieutenant looked alarmed. “Oh no, oh no, of course not, sir. It’s just that—”

  “Just what?” Udo leaned in. His Glamour’s black eyes squinted into angry slits. He looked like someone about ready to cut.

  The lieutenant rubbed his hands and yanked on his sleeve buttons. “Let me just present your compliments to Captain Honeychurch, she’s in charge here, and you can give your special order to her. Do please have a seat.”

  “I shall stand,” Udo said imperiously.

  The lieutenant took the special order from Udo and hurried into the office, closing the door behind him. Udo stood, one hand tucked into his buckler, looking completely unconcerned, and I only hoped that my expression was equally nonchalant.

  “I will be filing a report.” Udo said to no one in particular. “A disgrace that a matter of such importance should be handled so carelessly.”

  Well, there he was certainly right. We had been left alone with two guards only and the one sitting by the redhot stove looked half asleep. In about three seconds, we could have disarmed them and taken control of the guardroom. Maybe two seconds. They weren’t even armed. Their rifles rested in the rifle rack, which was locked. Of course, the guns Udo and I carried were not loaded; they didn’t know that, and the threat might have been enough. But then we’d still have to find Boy Hansgen, and get the sally port unlocked. Better stick to the plan.

  “You there—,” Udo barked, pointing at the guard who was dozing by the fire. He strode across the room and grabbed the man by his collar, shaking him. “Are you asleep on duty? I’ll have you shot!”

  “I beg your pardon, sir, I beg your pardon!” The guard shook free of Udo’s grasp and snapped to attention. Udo poked him in the chest with his swagger stick. I had tried hard to talk him out of the swagger stick—hardly any officers carry them anymore, since Mamma banned the impromptu smacking of enlisted soldiers—but Udo insisted it helped him stay in character.

  “And your tie is untied and your blouse unbuttoned. I shall make a full report to the Warlord! Consider yourself under arrest as of this minute and report—” Udo raised the swagger stick like he was going to whack.

  “Captain Gaisford, sir!” I said frantically, before Udo walloped the poor man and got himself arrested, and then me arrested, and then Boy Hansgen would hang, and that would be it for our plan. “Shall I see what is keeping Lieutenant Samson so long?”

  The distraction worked. Udo turned back to me, and the guard sidled as far out of Udo’s reach as he could, then stood at attention as though he were on review.

  “I shall find out myself.” Udo strode toward the of' fice door, which luckily opened before he could kick it.

  Lieutenant Samson beckoned to Udo. “Captain Honeychurch will see you, sir.”

  “I applaud her good judgment,” Udo said, then, as I advanced to follow, “Corporal Ashbury, you may wait.” Not on your life, I thought, and made move to follow. Udo poked me backward with the swagger stick, and I gave him a look that felt as though it should fuse glass but had no effect whatsoever on Udo’s attitude.

  “I told you to stay, Corporal Ashbury. I will have you on charges if you don’t fall to.”

  I had no recourse but to stare desperately as the door closed behind Lieutenant Samson. Udo alone! We were doomed, doomed, doomed. What could I do? Nothing but hope for Udo’s best, and somehow I could only imagine Udo’s worst. My toes felt as cold as frozen grapes.

  I sat on the bench, and the other guard, a small woman with gray-streaked hair, brought me coffee. “Those bosses. They are fresh. Here, this’ll cheer you. I’m Hendricks, and that’s Jam over there.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The coffee was hot, and as sweet as syrup, and it tasted like heaven. But the caffeine swelled up awful fantasies in my now-jittery brain. My eyes fixed upon the door, my imagination fired with dire possibilities: Udo threatening Captain Honeychurch with the swagger stick, poking or pointing, or perhaps even whacking. Udo can get carried away; that’s exactly what led to Gun-Britt’s broken nose, Udo not knowing when to stop. I should have held firm on that blasted swagger stick. Perhaps I should go interrupt them, with some excuse—

  “A sloggy night to be out. And a sloggy night to die,” Hendricks said. “Bad enough to end on the rope, but on a cold wet night as this, what’s worse?”

  “I can think of worse ways to go,” Jam said. “There’s always worse ways to go.”

  “You with the Dandies?” Hendricks asked me.

  Mamma’s regiment is the Enthusiastics, so why she had Dandy hat-brass in her insignia-box was a mystery, but it worked out well for our plan. The Dandy Regiment is currently stationed on the Trinity Line, so there was no fear of running into any other Dandies.

  “Ayah so.” The door remained closed. Udo, oh Udo, don’t be a prat or a fool or a twit. Oh please, Udo, please.

  “I thought they were up north,” Hendricks said.

  “Ayah, I’m on detach. Medical leave, but now I’m better and was supposed to report to my regiment, but I got stuck on this detail—” I could hear the sound of Udo’s voice, but not his words. Any minute that door was going to open to eject a furious officer and we would be All Done.

  Jam said, “I pity you, that officer of yours is a right twit. He could use a good fragging. I’d like to punt that swagger stick right up—”

  The office door opened and here came Udo, the lieutenant, and behind them, another officer dressed in sangyn: a Skinner! In my tum, my coffee began to burn. Of all the people for Udo to get uppity with! Only one regiment in the Army is allowed to wear crimson uniforms instead of the ordinary black and gold: the Alacrán Regiment. They are nicknamed the Skinners because of their habit of marking their kills with scalps. They are the Army’s oldest and most decorated regiment, but they have a ferocious reputation for being arrogant and bloody-minded—and ruthless cold-blooded killers.

  Poppy is a Skinner, and that, no doubt, is part of his problem.

  A Skinner is not someone to be messed with, but Udo had not toned his high attitude down. If anything, he had nudged it up a touch.

  “Well, now, I am glad to see that you understand your duty so clearly, sir,” Udo was saying to Captain Honeychurch. “And attend to it so promptly.”

  Where the Skinner’s left eye should have been was a blackened pit. Each cheek was marred by a slashing mark: the zigzag scars that all Skinners get when they swear their Regimental Oath. It’s a mark of courage, supposedly, to stand firm while someone slashes at your face with a sabre. I think it’s more a mark of foolishness.

  “I follow the Warlord’s orders,” the Skinner said.

  “As do we all, though some of us do so with more alacrity. I want you to know, Captain Honeychurch, that I’ll be making a note of the condition of your guard to the Warlord—”

  Captain Honeychurch interrupted him: “Lieutenant Samson, take the guards and retrieve the prisoner.”

  The relief that flooded through me was so huge that for a moment I thought I might slide boneless to the floor. Udo had not gotten us killed; we were almost home, we were going to pull it off, bless the Goddess now and forevermore.

  “Attend, Corporal Ashbury!” Udo ordered, and I jumped to obey.

  Lieutenant Samson nodded to the two guards, then unlocked the rifle rack so they could take their weapons. Private Hendricks picked up a lantern and lit it with a trigger. I followed them out of the warm guardroom into the icy cold night. Back along the covered walkway, across the sally port, and into a small dank room beyond, empty but for a clutter of open barrels and cracker boxes. Beyond that, yet another dank room, completely empty.

  My pulse fluttered so strongly in my throat that I could hardly swallow.

  “You must be careful with him,” Lieutenant Samson was saying to me. I snapped to attention. “He’s been put under a geas not to speak Gramatica, so his magick is g
reatly muted, but he’s still dangerous.”

  “I will attend.” I wondered who had put the geas on Boy Hansgen. A geas is a kind of magickal interdiction, superdangerous and very difficult. It can easily backfire on the adept, who then might find herself the one constrained, caught in a trap of her own making that she cannot escape. Who in the Army had such ability—and more importantly why was that adept allowed to freely practice?

  “I am surprised the Warlord sent such a small detail, but I suppose it is not for me to question his orders,” Lieutenant Samson continued.

  “No, it’s not,” I said sternly. “We are all the Warlord’s obedient servants.”

  Hendricks held the lantern high, while Jam bent to fiddle with a heavy iron ring embedded in the floor. A tug on the ring, and it pulled upward, levering a square of the floor open to display the dark mouth of an oubliette.

  “Stand back,” Lieutenant Samson said. “Drop the rope, Private.”

  Jam slacked the coil of rope and let it drop into the oubliette, and then leaned way in to shout, “Take the rope and I shall draw you aloft.”

  After a second, a distant answer came, unintelligible. “He says he won’t,” said Jam.

  Another unintelligible shout drifted upward.

  “He says he’s fine where he is, the damp is extremely good for his complexion.”

  Lieutenant Samson wrung his hands and looked flustered. “Oh dear. What shall I say?”

  Hendricks offered, “Beg your pardon, sir, but tell him if he don’t take the rope and allow himself to be drawn upward, we shall fill the oubliette with water, and close the lid. How will drowning be for his complexion?”

  Jam leaned back over and shouted down the gist of Hendrick’s suggestion, seasoning the recitation with some pretty spicy adverbs and adjectives, then relayed back to us. “He says that he wagers that he can hold his breath for a long time, and anyway, he’d rather be drowned than hung.”

  This time Hendricks leaned in and did the shouting. “You aren’t to be hung yet, you fool—the Warlord wants to speak with you, and the execution has been suspended. Grab the rope and let us haul you upward!”

  Pause, and another shout from below, and Hendricks said to Lieutenant Samson, “He wants a wash and a clean shirt, first, before he goes to the Warlord.”

  “Tell him yes, anything, just let us pull him up,” Lieutenant Samson answered hurriedly. “The Warlord will be angry we’ve wasted his time.”

  It took all four of us to haul the rope up; Boy Hansgen weighed a ton. It would have been easier with a winch, but I guess that is the thing about oubliettes—once you put someone in, you don’t normally aim to bring them up again. (Which made me wonder why they had stuck him down there to begin with—perhaps it was the most secure cell at the Battery?) We heaved and ho-ed, and the rope burned my hands even through my gloves, but finally, eventually, a dark shape emerged from the oubliette, dirty and damp.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In the Jakes. Confession. An Awful Discovery.

  THANK YOU, SIEURS,” Boy Hansgen said, when he had achieved all the way out and stood up. He offered a sketchy courtesy—So Below Me I Hardly Bother—the manacles on his wrists and ankles clanking. “I hope that my poor starved weight didn’t prove too heavy.”

  Boy Hansgen had a syrupy kind of voice, slightly accented, and musical. The lantern light was so dim that it was hard to make out many details; my overwhelming impression was of a white shirt and extreme grubbiness. And there was no way to get around his smell. The goddess Califa could probably nose him in heaven.

  “I do hope you won’t be complaining to the Warlord about your rations,” Lieutenant Samson said plaintively from the position he had taken up behind Hendrick and her rifle. “You’ve had the same chow we’ve had.”

  “Ayah so, but perhaps your supper room is drier and your chow less sog. Or perhaps you are just used to hideous Army cooking. I will have that clean shirt now, and the wash.” Boy Hansgen had the same easy tone of command in his voice as Mamma; even as a prisoner, he acted as though he expected to be obeyed.

  “Do not try any tricky stuff.” Lieutenant Samson was still safely behind Hendricks. “We’ll be happy to shoot you and give the Warlord our regrets.”

  “I care for nothing at the moment but clean,” Boy Hansgen said, “and wouldn’t dream of blowing my date with soap. Lead on, and I shall follow as gently as a hairless Huitzil lapdog.” He twisted the last words into a tone that suggested he was nothing of the kind, but the others were exactly that.

  Back we went across the sally port, Boy Hansgen stepping jauntily, as though he were on his way to a lovely dinner rather than a supposed interview with the Warlord, and then his death. He must really like to be clean; I do, too, so there we had something in common.

  In the warm guardroom, Udo and the Skinner stood at Lieutenant Samson’s desk, Udo signing papers and saying: “...recommend you to the Warlord for your assistance, Captain Honeychurch—”

  “Here I be, the man of the hour, the boy of your dreams!” Boy Hansgen said, and clanked his manacles together again so they rattled loudly. Now, in better light, he was shorter than I expected, and older, too. But of course that followed—he’d been Nini Mo’s sidekick, after all, and she’d been dead for over twenty-five years, so he would have to be pretty old. In the Nini Mo yellowbacks, he’s always illustrated as a young man, with short spiky hair and a bass guitar tossed over his back. No bass now, and the blond hair was matted, silver under the dirt, but he still looked pretty pugnacious and tough.

  He continued, “Captain Honeychurch, dear brave Captain Honeychurch, my heart is pattering with pain to have to leave your tender care so soon.”

  Captain Honeychurch glared and said, “Would that my care had been as tender as you deserved.”

  “You is kind to me,” Boy Hansgen said snarkily, and the Skinner gave him a look that seemed to say, You aren’t even worth the effort of my knife.

  Udo finished signing and threw the pen down. He gave the Dainty Pirate an arrogant once-over and said, “So this is the pirate who has caused the City so much ruin.”

  “I am that boy, and more besides. And perhaps just getting started!”

  “I think you’ve come to the end, not the beginning.”

  “Hope springs, and who knows—maybe I will, too!”

  Udo said, “The best you can hope for is a broken neck to save you the struggle of strangling.”

  Cut it with the snappy small talk, Udo, I thought, trying to telegraph that thought to him. Let’s get out of here. But Udo was engrossed with his repartee and didn’t glance in my direction.

  Boy said, “You make such a dismal thought sound so cheerful, Captain What’s Your Face. We have not been introduced.”

  “Captain Seneca Gaisford, JAG Office.” As sign of his contempt, Udo made no courtesy bow at all.

  “I am your obedient servant, Captain Gaisford.” Boy Hansgen grinned and saluted with a closed fist to the chest. “But then, you knew that already. Lieutenant Samson here has promised me a cleanup before we go.”

  “I have no time for such things,” Udo said. “We must leave at once. The Warlord is waiting.”

  “There’s always time for soap. You don’t want me to go stinky to the Warlord, do you?” Boy Hansgen smiled winningly at Udo. His teeth twinkled like ice cubes through the grime on his face. “We all know how delicate Florian is.”

  “Captain Gaisford,” I said urgently, “we are late already.” Let us get going before we push our luck so hard that it breaks, Udo.

  “You do not need to remind me, Corporal,” Udo told me. “I know my own schedule.” He turned to the prisoner. “We have no time. I will see that you are given facilities when we reach Saeta. You have my word on it.”

  “At least let me piss. I promise I shall be quick. I’ll be happy to do so in the fire if that’s all the time—”

  Captain Honeychurch ignored Udo’s further protests and ordered us to take Boy Hansgen to the jakes. So Hendricks led h
im out, with Jam and me bringing up the rear, Jam’s rifle at the ready. We crossed the cold, windy parade yard and into the shelter of a casemate. At the door of the jakes, Boy went on, but the guards halted.

  “You go,” Hendricks ordered Jam. “Keep an eye on him.”

  “Not me,” protested Jam. “Not me alone. We should all go.”

  Hendricks shook her head. “We’ll guard the door. If he overpowers you, at least we’ll still be standing firm outside.”

  “I don’t want to be overpowered,” Jam said obstinately. “Let him overpower you. What if he changes me into a polecat?”

  “He can’t change anyone into anything, Jam. He’s under a geas—he’s powerless.”

  “Then, why don’t you want to go—”

  “I’ll go,” I said, both to move things along and because it was a chance to tell Boy we were here to rescue him. I didn’t really care to share Boy’s potty experience, but I could close my eyes, or stare at my boots, or something.

  Hendricks said, “All right, then, Ash. Better unholster, and keep your gun on him. If he does get you, holler, and we’ll make sure to bar the door so he can’t get through us.”

  Which wouldn’t help me any, I thought, trapped inside, but I wasn’t really worried about Boy getting me—not once he heard what I had to say. Still, I drew my pistol and cocked it. “If he pulls anything funny, I’ll shoot him.” Hendricks nodded approvingly. “That’ll save the Warlord the price of rope. Go on, then.”

  The jakes was the kind that has five holes in a row, with nothing to screen them, and across, a row of stone trough sinks. The Army is not a good place for the potty shy. A small stove smoked in a corner, but it did little to melt the chilly rime off the stone walls. Boy Hansgen was already leaning over one of the troughs, scrubbing soap into his face.

  “Um, excuse me,” I said. What would Nini Mo say? Something exciting and dramatic, like If you want to live come with me or Let us fly and be free. But I felt silly just thinking those things. “Um—sieur.”

  The running water was loud, but I didn’t want to run the risk of the guards outside hearing me, so I reholstered and stood by until he was done. Boy Hansgen scrubbed and scrubbed, and then straightened up, holding out his manacled hands. I gave him one of the ragged towels hanging over the troughs, and he dried his face, revealing a fantastically purple shiner around one blue eye.