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) (25 page)

I
CHOKED AND WHEEZED
and choked again. Someone rolled me over on my face and thumped my back. Still choking. Another thump—this time really, really hard. I gagged, gurgled, upchucked a hot rush of water. I convulsed and spit, and coughed and spit, and convulsed and coughed again. But I was breathing.

A voice said, “Where the hell did you come from?”

Still gasping, I opened my eyes, saw a swampy marble floor and two bare feet. The feet were small and white and the toenails were chipped with red.

“You ruined my Working!” the voice said accusingly.

The white feet were attached to white ankles; the white ankles were attached to white calves, which disappeared into a giant shocking-pink skirt that was square and wide. Above the flat top of the skirt: a low-cut bodice, rounded cleavage, white shoulders, and a white neck surrounded by a stiff spiky lace ruff. And above—I would have shouted if I’d had the breath. My rescuer had the curvy body of a girl but the shaggy head of a black bear.

The Bear Girl’s muzzle yawned, displaying very white sharp teeth. “Can you understand me?”

“Ayah. Where am I?” I sat up, ignoring the swimmingly dizzy feeling in my head, and saw in the flaring candlelight the pool from which I had been dragged. No, not a pool, but a perfectly round bathtub. Water had overflowed its rim and swamped the floor. Also swamped was the remnant of what clearly had been some sort of magickal Working: the pillar candles that ringed the bathtub were still burning, but the cornmeal sigils drawn on the floor had dissolved into a soggy mess. A pink plushy pig almost identical to my pink plushy pig sat upon the potty, which was as toweringly tall as a throne, gilded and carved.

“You ruined my fiking Working,” the Bear Girl said. “I spent two whole weeks getting ready, fasting and gorging and purging. Then I had to wait until the Current was high enough and Paimon was busy elsewhere—and
him,
too—and you fiking ruined it all.”

I clambered to my feet. My legs and knees felt wobbly and a spike of pain was beginning to throb over my left eye, but I had to shake the weakness off and focus. My shoulders felt oddly light and I realized that I had lost my dispatch case. And my boots, too. And my redingote. And my stays had sprung open. I pulled them the rest of the way off—good riddance—and hastily tucked the ranger badge back into my chemise before the bear-headed girl noticed it.

Was I in Bilskinir? Who was this bear-headed girl with the foul mouth? In my muddled state, I couldn’t remember seeing bear-human hybrids at Bilskinir before. A Vortex can go anywhere. I could be anywhere. All I knew for sure was that this bear-headed girl wasn’t friendly.

“Well?” she demanded. “What the fike do you have to say?”

Play it close until you know the situation,
said Nini Mo.

“That was one mighty big Vortex. What were you trying to do?” I coughed, trying to buy both time and information.

“I was trying to scry my future,” the Bear Girl said loftily, “using a pool of the Current as my mirror. I had the Vortex open, and the Current was just starting to reflect when you popped out of the Vortex, and, fike, that was it. Where the fike did you come from? How the fike did you get into my bathtub?”

I might not know where I was, but I knew the Working she was talking about. It’s in chapter 52 of
The Eschata,
in the section labeled “Excruciatingly Dangerous: for Reference Only.” In her notes, Nini warns that it’s not such a good idea to know your future: Such knowledge will either paralyze you with fear or make you go mad with despair, depending on the nature of your fate. The Bear Girl was clearly reckless—and skilled, too. To create a Vortex of that size requires a tremendous amount of Will and Concentration, and making the Current reflect is even harder.

The Bear Girl bared her gleaming fangs. "Are you from the future? The Vortex was open to the Future when you came through.”

I didn’t answer. The bathroom was walled with mirrors, and these mirrors reflected back, in a fun-house sort of way, a whole slew of angry Bear Girls, and soggy Floras, sloshy tubs, flickering candles, and wrecked Workings. And something that was not reflected in multitudes, but only singularly: a little point of coldfire that had winked into existence over the bathtub.

I saw this coldfire spark in the mirror behind the Bear Girl, which meant that it was really behind me, but when I looked over my shoulder at the tub, there was no coldfire there. I looked back into the mirror. The light, which a moment ago had been a mere pinprick, was growing.

"Are you?” the girl persisted.

"Did you close your Vortex?” I asked.

She followed my glance, then let loose with a string of curses that could have fermented grape juice."
Fike! Scit!
You made me forget to close the Vortex! FIKING SCIT!”

The light was the size of an orange now. A sudden gust of wind billowed from the mirror—the pillar candles fluttered and extinguished.

“Don’t just stand there! Close it!” I had to shout over the sound of rushing air. How could air rush out of a mirror? Never mind—it was. The Vortex only existed in the mirror. How could something exist only in a reflection? Never mind—it did.

I could barely keep my eyes open against the wind. The Vortex had grown to the size of a wheel—not a babycart wheel, but the wheel from a giant caisson for a giant gun, fully four feet across.

The Bear Girl waved her arms and shouted something in Gramatica, but the wind from the Vortex blew her sparkly Words back into her face and she staggered backward, choking on them. I put my hands up against my eyes, pushing my hair out of my face, and peered through my slitted fingers. There was movement within the Vortex—was I imagining that I could see something within this movement? Something that looked like a hairy finger, curved with a long curving talon? Somehow I knew to the very marrow of my bones that whomever that finger belonged to, it was Super Fantastic Bad News.

“CLOSE THE VORTEX!” I screamed at the Bear Girl.

The Bear Girl screamed back at me, “I TRIED! IT WON’T FIKING CLOSE! FIKE FIKE FIKE!”

The wind was pushing us backward; I staggered against the bathtub in a bright splash of pain; the Bear Girl fell against me. We clutched each other, for all the good that would do us. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the plushy pig still sitting, lordly, on his throne. His floppy ears were blowing back, but otherwise he looked unconcerned.

The Bear Girl was yelling something; I could barely hear her above the roar of the wind, but it sounded like “PIG PIG PIG!” I looked over the Bear Girl’s shoulder—the one finger had become many fingers, an entire hand—no, two hands—grabbing at the edges of the Vortex, stretching it open so that the rest of the Superbad News could come through.

The wind pinned us into place; we were huddled up against the bathtub, which kept us from being flung against the far wall. All sound had been reduced to a solid roar, and I swear I could feel my flesh blowing off my bones, rippling like water.

Superbad News kicked at the mirror with one large splay-toed foot, and the glass shattered into a thousand flying pieces. I closed my eyes against the flying shards, and when I managed to open them again, a dæmon had stepped out of the mirror. He was the exact color of swamp slime, greenish brown and glistening with ooze, with a toad-faced head, and a squat toadlike body—and, Pigface, did he smell bad, like rat-burger cheese, and blueberry poo-filled nappies, and rotting wet wool, and a hundred other horrible odors. I recognized him from
The Eschata
Entity Spotter: a tenth-level kakodæmon, whose stench can kill.

I tried very hard to breathe through my mouth. The Bear Girl wrenched out of my grip and hurled a bottle at him. It hit him in the head and doused him with blue bubble-bath—at least now he’d smell better—but it didn’t stop him. Trailing stink, the kakodæmon sprang down from the sink, swiping at the Bear Girl with one gnarly hand. His clout hit its mark. I watched in horror as her head flew up and off soaring through the air and landing with a splash in the bathtub. She collapsed like a rag doll.

A pink shape whizzed by me and hit the kakodæmon square on its bulbous nose, clinging there. The kakodæmon howled, scratching at his own face, his talons slicing deep lines into his cheeks, but the plushy Pig clung like a lamprey and would not be dislodged.

A Gramatica Word, thick and turgid as a black slug, squirmed out of the kakodæmon’s mouth. It leeched onto the Pig, which let go of the kakodæmon’s nose and dropped to the floor, where it and the Word began to writhe and roll. The kakodæmon, blood streaming from the gaping hole where his nose had been, staggered toward me.

The Gramatica Command shot out of my mouth, almost dislocating my jaw. Buzzing like a swarm of wasps, the Command hit the kakodæmon in his barrel chest and flung him backward, into the center of the Vortex. The Vortex snapped closed with a
pop
that almost turned every solid in my body to mush. My bones dissolved and I plopped to the ground in a heap.

After a while, the blankness began to resolve into a decidedly unpleasant soggy feeling. A while after that, the sog turned chilly; the marble floor was burning cold against my back, and something bright and painful was gouging my side: Broken mirror? Broken glass? Broken rib? I couldn’t quite summon up enough interest to investigate further. A warm trickle pooled in my lips; I licked, and tasted blood. Somewhere a buzzer was ringing, insistently, or maybe it was a fly right by my ear; no, the buzzing was
in
my ears. I hoped the noise wasn’t permanent, for if it was, it would drive me mad. I decided to get up. But it took a little while for my bones to harden up enough that I could rise, just as far as my knees.

From that not-so-lofty height, a horrific scene of destruction spread forth. All that remained of the Vortex was the coldfire splattering the ceiling, the floor, the cracked mirror. Blackish water had sloshed from the tub, washing the marble floor with putrid-smelling liquid. One pillar candle still burned, defiantly; the others had melted into charred piles of glassy wax. Silver oozed down the wall where the mirror had been. The awful stench still hung on the air, but much less strongly.

The only thing in the room that had survived intact was the thronelike potty. The plushy Pig had resumed perching upon its closed lid, as though he had never left it. I gave him the hairy eyeball, but he did not return the look. Was his snout a little redder? Perhaps blushed with blood? Maybe it was a trick of the sputtering lamplight. I didn’t plan on examining him more closely.

The Bear Girl had collapsed on the far side on the tub. All I could see were massive pink skirts, which looked rather like a fallen angel food cake. I crawled through the soggy cornmeal, which had solidified into a sort of wet dough, over the fallen candlesticks, trying to avoid the broken glass. Pulling myself up on the edge of the tub, I steeled myself. If I’d had the sense the Goddess Califa gave a duck, I’d have scarpered, but I had no sense, only the burning desire to
look.

For this we are rangers,
I whispered, as I looked down, expecting to see the Bear Girl’s head bobbing in the water. Something hairy and black
was
floating there.

For this we are rangers,
I repeated to myself, and reached gingerly down to fish the scalp out. It was limp and slimy—gaping eyeholes, gaping mouth. Then I realized, with bladder-weakening relief, that it wasn’t a scalp at all.

It was an extremely realistic mask.

A
T MY FEET,
the shocking-pink silk skirts trembled and heaved into an upright position, revealing an extremely human head. The Girl clutched it, groaning and swearing.

I held out my hand, and she took it. Grunting, I managed to haul her to her feet, though I still felt weak and wobbly myself.

The Girl moaned and said a lot of words, all of them foul. The entire left side of her face was already turning purple, and she was going to have a magnificent black eye. She picked a piece of mirror up off the floor and peered into it, baring her tiny white teeth as though to make sure they were all there and her jaw still worked. “What the fike happened?”

“The kakodæmon whacked you, and then I kicked it back through the Vortex and closed it down.” I didn’t mention that I had no idea
how
I had kicked the kakodæmon or closed the Vortex down.
Always act like you expected it all along,
said Nini Mo. My mouth, tongue, and throat felt as though I’d just gulped down an entire pot of scalding-hot tea—just another pain to add to the rest.

“I look like a clown!” she complained. “Califa fike it! Ratsbane!”

“You look alive.”

“I am alive,” she said wonderingly “I thought I was a goner, but I’m not. I’m still alive. Suck on that, you fiking kakodæmon!”

The Girl threw her head back and howled with laughter. I began to howl with laughter, too. We fell upon each other, clutching and howling, laughing so hard we were crying, so hard we could barely breathe. We staggered out of the bathroom, into the room beyond, which was cozy and warm with firelight, and collapsed on the sofa.