So laying on the floor didn’t ever solve anyone's problems...unless you're in a castle like St. Hernadine's. While I was laying there wishing I’d been a normal Siren who would probably be at a tea party right now in a pretty dress..., I got the impression I wasn't alone. "Hello?" I said. It was the same feeling I’d had when I’d tried to shortsightedly steal a piece of stone.
Was St. Hernadine’s....but no even in the magical world, castles weren't alive and they didn't tell you things. I was definitely too tired to think straight.
There was an herb that was in the hallucinogenic spectrum. It grew in the paws of sphynxs in the outer mountains. One leaf could make you think you were a unicorn that could hurl itself from the highest tower into a sea of rainbows (you weren’t really a unicorn, but everything you did made you feel like it was the most spectacular day of your life), or it could make you think you were slowly being eaten to death by millions of ants. You never knew which one you were going to be until you actually tried it. If you were one of the majority who feels like they're dying slowly by ant death, then you'd be stuck feeling like that for the rest of your life (and into the afterlife if a few ghosts are to be believed...which being ghosts they aren't the most reliable, but still...). But...there was always the chance you would draw the unicorn card.
That's how I felt about St. Hernadines. It felt way too risky to trust listening to it. It somehow made Master Dartor seem like a church choir boy in comparison, and yet it didn't feel terribly evil or anything. And i couldn't quite make enough sense out of anything to decide if I really did hear it, or if I was trying to imagine something that wasn't there. I was probably more at risk than the average person. Sirens are always in search of their own unicorns and rainbow seas, and its been the demise of more than one.
I picked up the carrot book again. I hadn't been really intending to, or had I? I couldn't tell.
"The magic in udigerous forests is said by some time contain the last traces of magic of the black variety. There are no known ways to combat it, and as such it is best not to use magic at all and issue a full scansa warning to the surrounding area until it can be contained by those that have skill in dealing with it such as the infantile monopod found in the Almagas region of the…”
It was impossible. It couldn’t be black magic. (I was now arguing with a castle that I didn’t believe existed). Black magic was way more sinister than this, and it didn’t go around wasting its time with bedpans. Did it? Who would believe me anyway? I could be like a kid who insisted on saying her room had been messed up by an angry brownie than admit she just didn't want to clean it. Plus, there was a good chance this wouldn't work.
I took a deep breath and opened the door. The pot was still there. My toes stayed firmly in the library and we eyed each other, trying to see what the other's next move was. Well I wasn't going to spend my first night being beaten by a bedpan even if it was ensorcelled by black magic (Which! I didn’t believe).
I wasn't entirely sure where Dires was, but I had a good notion that it was at the very top of the hospital. Stubby candles went up, right? I wouldn't worry about the nubs, as long as I went up, I had to reach Dires eventually.
This was where I wished I could use a spell to make me faster or something, but the problem with dark magic was that whatever you did, it fed off of too. So if you made yourself stronger, than it made itself stronger. If you tried to kill it, it killed you too. There was a good reason it was completely outlawed in both the civil world and the underworld. Not even criminals wanted to mess with it, because it always always won. And wasn't worth any amount of gold or power.
Even though I didn't think the bed pan could possibly have dark magic. (Did you hear that St. Hernadines? I don’t believe you). That old forest witch didn't look like she could even make a tea warming spell, let alone practice something that Hades himself wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
But I didn’t have any better ideas, my fingers were itching to use my wand, but my feet were going to have to rally ho and be the star player on this one. No magic. I counted to three and took off at a dead run. It took the surprised bedpan a moment to realize I was gone. Good. I dashed down the hallway looking desperately at each candle. They were all the same. Did that mean they were stubby or tall? How could you tell if you couldn't compare it to something. I rounded a corner, still all the same. Why couldn't they have picked signs or something more plain. Why something so obtuse as candles?
I turned left at the next corridor. These candles looked a little shorter than the hallway I just left. Or were they? It was hard to tell with the loud thumping of iron on stone getting louder and louder behind you. At this point it didn't matter. I had to choose one and go before they found my pulverized dusty bones a hundred years from now. Because the library was the bottom of the bottom and there were so many twists and turns I didn't think anyone had been back here in at least a century. Maybe two.
I took the shortest looking candle and put my finger in the flame, which was a lot easier than I thought my first time was going to be. Up until now, I'd always tagged along someone else's pathway, and I'd been worried I wouldn't be able to make myself put my finger in a candle, but turns out all your phobias disappear when you've got an insane bedpan trying to kill you.
The flames licked my finger and my whole body lurched forward as if it had a martyred death wish, and then suddenly I was staggering down a different hall.
I didn't look behind me to see if the bedpan was still behind me. Better to just assume it was. I ran past a gnome pushing a cart. "What floor is this?" I yelled.
He didn't say anything, or if he did, I couldn't hear him because i didn't stop to take tea and exchange pleasantries which Gnomes love to do. I just kept running.
"What floor is this!" I asked the next person I came across. A pretty witch who had her wand in her hand. I think she said something about Woes...I couldn’t quite tell, but it didn’t matter because I saw a distinctly stubby candle in between two longer ones. I grabbed it and up I went again. The shock was even more jarring this time. For a second I briefly considered that maybe I was dead, that the bedpan had gotten to me and this was my painful entry into the afterlife. And then I was on a new floor again. This time I ran smack into a stone wall. How many floors there were in St. Hernadines. At least a hundred I would imagine... which if that were the case then I needed a new plan. I wasn't sure how many more candle pathways I could survive without accidentally doing the bedpan’s job for it. I staggered down the hall and ran into a cart full of potions. They started fizzing and banging, I shouldn’t have noticed that one of them was a really expensive one that came from the mines of a disappearing island. If the bedpan didn’t kill me, Dr. Groats surely would. I don’t know how the bedpan did it (no, it’s not because of the black magic I’m sure) but it had somehow found a way to follow me, and so I clamored to my feet. My ankle throbbed and I smelled like eucalyptus, but one good thing did come out of it, there etched in black letters on the cart was “Do Not Remove From Dires.”
With relief I started yelling. “Where’s the Cyclops! Where’s the cyclops” to anyone and no one in particular. Turned out, it was pretty obvious because Cristina and Tad were just then lugging their giant book through a door that sort of swallowed them up. Swallow me! Swallow me! I thought, as I willed my legs just a little bit further. I felt like I was in the throat of a frog and then there was the cyclops. It felt very liquidy in this room and smelled like squid, which I only noticed because it’s very very hard to run through liquid and running was top priority in my brain.
The Cyclops rolled it’s eye at me, it was oozing green stuff. This clearly wasn’t a healthy cyclops otherwise it wouldn’t be on the most serious floor of the land’s best hospital. Did I have this in me? I would have changed my mind about my chosen plan, but it was too late, the bed pan was in the room. I heard Cristina yell, but it was too late.
I launched myself upward into the cyclops gaping snack hungry maw and grabbed a big scraggly tooth.
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