by Tad Williams
"People can think what they like." Walter shrugged at the ways of the world. "Some people think I look like a lizard."
"Imagine that." The spunkie nodded. "Would you mind if I finished my lunch, sir? They said they might want me to bring you up later, so I'd just as soon eat now. I hardly get a chance to sit down around here, let alone eat."
"Of course." Now Theo was nervous again — very nervous. He didn't much like the idea of being brought up later, or at all. He did his best to calm himself, watching the fairy lords preparing for the conference. Well, one side was preparing. The other still hadn't made an appearance. Spunkie Walter had called it a gesture of contempt. Or, Theo couldn't help thinking, maybe it's something much worse. Maybe they're going to attack Daffodil House and try to kidnap me or something. But it was hard to believe that, hard to attach that much significance to himself, no matter what Hollyhock had said, let alone believe that any of the other fairy houses were desperate enough to attack the Daffodil clan here in the heart of their power, behind their mighty fortifications. Still . . .
"Hey, Walter? Does Lord Daffodil have . . . I don't know what you call it here. A standing army? A personal security force?" Walter slurped down another wiggling something. "Yes, sir," he said glumly. "Over a thousand of them. They have their barracks in the outwall. And there are always a hundred stationed in the main tower. After the last Flower War, nobody gets too trusting around here." "Thanks." Theo suddenly felt much better. And there must be magic too — lots of magic, all the charms and things Hollyhock had mentioned. These rival houses must be like the US and USSR during the Cold War — opposing forces too well balanced to start anything for fear that even the aggressor might not survive. No, it was leaving this armed fortress that he needed to avoid. His stupidity in letting Zirus Jonquil take him right to his enemy's doorstop was really beginning to rankle. Come on, Theo. You can't be shallow anymore. You can't just go along. That will get you killed . . . !
Lord Daffodil was standing now, talking down the table to some of the others on his side, but Theo couldn't hear a sound. "Is there a way that I can hear what they're saying?"
"Say, 'To my ears,' " Walter instructed him. Theo did; a moment later Daffodil's voice was in Theo's head, full of wellbred irritation that his counterparts from the other families had not yet arrived. It was not an external sound like the sort you got from speakers, however good: the fairy lord's voice was right in his head. It was such a strange and fascinating effect that Theo almost didn't look around when the door to the office opened.
The ruling class were still similar enough to Theo's eyes that it took him a few seconds to recognize the fairy standing in the doorway. The handsome, bespectacled figure nodded to Theo, then turned to the lizardsecretary and said, "Do you recognize me?"
"Of course, Count Tansy." "Good. I have a message for you from Lord Daffodil." He passed the spunkie a piece of paper. Walter looked at it; a frown crossed his scaly face.
"It should come through the hob." "It was not given to the hob, it was given to me. I was just with your lord a few moments ago."
"Then I must go at once," Walter said, rising. "There is a drinks cabinet on the far wall, Count Tansy. Please forgive me if I leave you to serve yourself. This appears to be urgent."
Theo had been staring. "Tansy. I didn't expect to see you here." The other smiled a little. "I cannot say the same — I have heard a great deal about you lately. I gather you have had many near misses and close escapes, but it seems you have been lucky. Still, I am very displeased that Applecore brought you here, against my orders."
"Yeah, that's right, you wanted me to go to . . . to . . ." The recalcitrant memory escaped for good, replaced by another thought. The din from the conference room had diminished when he gave his attention to Count Tansy, but it had not gone away, and it added to the confusion in Theo's head. "Hang on, it must have been you!"
Tansy, who had been approaching the table, stopped suddenly. "What does that mean?" "Applecore left me a message — said she saw someone I knew outside Daffodil House. I thought from what the secretary said that she meant she'd seen Rufinus — but he's dead."
"Yes, he most certainly is, the poor fool." Tansy slid into the seat beside Theo.
"Nice relative you are," Theo said. "But she must have meant you. I haven't been able to track her down — did you see her?" Tansy shook his head. "I have not, and I doubt it was me she saw, since I came not in my regular coach but a jitney from the station. My presence here is not generally known, you see." He looked at the view of the main meeting room. "I see that Hellebore and the others have not arrived."
"Yeah, Walter the spunkie said they'll come late, all of them, the Thornapples and the Larkspurs and the . . . Foxgloves, too . . ." He was suddenly as cold as if fever-chilled. "Oh my God. That's who you tried to send me to, wasn't it? Foxglove?"
"Foxglove? I might have." Tansy spoke in a distracted way. He was watching the mirror intently. "What of it? It has only been widely reported in the last few days that he has thrown in his lot with Hellebore's people."
Theo's heart was hammering. "Hollyhock couldn't figure out why you sent me to the City with so little protection. But that wasn't a mistake, was it? You . . . you sold me out."
"Sold you out? What nonsense is that? I have done my best to help you, you rude, ungrateful creature . . ." Tansy paused. "Look, Hellebore has arrived."
Theo's eyes flicked to the mirror, but everything looked much the same — one side of the vast conference table crowded, the other side empty. Lady Aemilia was suggesting that there was much to be discussed even without all the six leading families represented, and her words distracted Theo for what was almost a fatal second. He saw movement from the corner of his eye and turned just as Tansy tried to clamp a piece of cloth across his mouth. One smell of it, an acrid, moldy scent like something that had been growing a long time under dark wet ground, was enough to make him fling himself backward. Tansy had not had a chance to get his other arm around Theo's neck. He managed to break free and tumble off the chair and onto the floor, but it felt like some of the fumes were inside his body now, turning his muscles to rubber.
Idiot! He scrabbled away from the table, trying to get control of his limbs so he could stand. I'm an idiot for not seeing it coming! He sent Walter away! He sold me out and now he's here to finish the job!
Tansy was on him in a moment, grabbing him with slender but still astonishingly strong arms. As if in alliance with his attacker, the voices from the conference room grew louder in Theo's head as he struggled to keep Tansy's cloth away from his face.
"We are being treated outrageously. You know I do not like leaving my mountain for anything except the most important business, especially on a sacred day that should be spent with my family and folk . . ."
"Please, be patient, Garvan." "I have been patient, Lady Aemilia. My meditations have been disrupted, I have been forced to travel out of season through all the field of Holly Crown trying to find a station, and now this!"
"You have every right to be upset, my good Lily . . ." "And that is enough from you, Hollyhock. You are only a pup, and if you think I will stay here and be insulted by that Hellebore and his jumped-up set simply to further your political ambitions . . ."
"Wait! I am being given a message . . ."
"What is it, Brother?"
"Just a moment, Aemilia, the hob is saying . . . it makes no sense . . ." Theo's battle, in terrible counterpoint, was almost completely silent. He rolled toward the table with his enemy straddling him, hoping to knock the fairy's head against the furniture and dislodge him, but Tansy saw his plan and managed to get one foot against the table leg as he again forced the cloth into Theo's face. Theo held his breath, but he was already exhausted and needed air: he knew he could not last much longer. He tried to remember the fights he'd been in, but the only things he could recall were either getting hurt or making a run for it at the first distraction.
The slender, pale hand was pushing the cloth do
wn on him despite his strongest efforts to keep it away. In another moment he wouldn't be able to get any air at all and the struggle would be over. Theo hesitated, knowing he would only get one chance, then forced himself to stop resisting and go limp. He had managed to take only a small breath before surrendering and prayed that the cloth wasn't something magical, that it only worked if you inhaled the fumes. He made himself lie still and hold that tiny, insufficient breath against the screaming of his instincts as the reeking fabric closed over his mouth and nose.
"I have him," Tansy announced, apparently to the air. "I will be out of this place in moments. You may proceed."
Under the cloth, Theo's eyes were stinging so badly he thought he might be blinded, but that was the least of his worries. He had to wait, lungs burning until his every fiber shrieked at him to fight for breath no matter what, and then wait seconds longer, until he felt Tansy's hand loosen the pressure and the fairy's weight shift a little on Theo's chest. As soon as the rag came off he twisted his head and got his teeth into the side of Tansy's hand, then bit down as hard as he could. The fairy shrieked in startled pain and the cloth dropped from his fingers. Theo yanked back his head, gasped in air, and heaved himself upward with what felt like his dying strength, lifting Tansy off the ground with him before throwing himself backward into an explosion of blackness.
The blackness did not go away swiftly. For a long time, minutes and minutes, Theo could only lie helplessly on the floor of the office, wondering whether he had hit his own head while smashing Tansy against the table, or if the poison on Tansy's cloth really had made him blind. At least he couldn't hear anything else moving, either: Tansy had not scrambled up to finish him, although Theo could feel the weight of the count's arm across his chest. When vision and control over his limbs finally returned, Theo shook the fairy off, turned over, and stared blearily down at him.
Tansy was not dead, but he had hit his head very hard and his eyes were rolled back under their lids. He quivered like a rabbit Theo had once seen, shot by a friend's pellet gun. Theo crawled across the floor and picked up the cloth, then brought it back and shoved it against Tansy's bloody face. The fairy's trembling became less, then stopped.
I hope he's fucking dead, Theo thought, but he doubted the drugged cloth was meant to work that way. It was a lot of trouble for everyone to go through just to kill him, like on the train. Kidnapping seemed a more likely intent.
He got the upper half of his body onto a chair, then managed to pull himself up until he was standing, swaying beside the table. The voices in his head had grown quieter again, but he could still see the people in the huge meeting room. He wondered who he could call. He had to tell someone — Hollyhock needed to know what was going on. "Hob?" he called up toward the ceiling. Nobody answered.
"I am afraid I must stand with Lord Lily," Daffodil was saying angrily. "This is more than irregular — sending this mandragorum is a calculated slap."
The Hellebore side of the conference table was no longer empty. A single figure dressed in a black robe now stood there, facing Daffodil and the others. What Theo could see of the face was so pale that at first he thought it was one of the hollow-men. When it pulled back its hood, he saw that the features were bizarrely unformed, two completely dead eyes, a lump of nose, a slit of a mouth, the whole thing as lifeless as an uncooked gingerbread man. It reached into its robe and guards leaped forward from all around the room; in an instant the barrels of several dozen weapons were pointed at the unfinished thing, but it continued in its slow, clumsily deliberate way.
Theo could only stare at the mirror and watch it all unfold, brainsick, exhausted, and confused. "Don't fire," Lord Daffodil said loudly. "No weapons known to science could have gotten past our detection charms. The mandragorum went through five checkpoints before it was allowed in here."
The pulpy white hands emerged, each holding a golden rod. Despite Lord Daffodil's words there was a flurry of humming and clicking noises as those guards who had not already cocked their weapons did so, but the pale thing only spread its two arms, holding the rods out vertically at the extent of its reach. A flicker of light passed between them, then the space between the rods was filled with the image of a coldly handsome, darkbearded face.
" Hellebore!" said Daffodil in outrage. "What are these mummer's tricks? Why are you not here? Why do you send this poor manufactured creature in your place, this . . . walking root? Are you afraid to meet with your equals?"
A smile spread across the face in the shining image. "My equals are here with me." The image stayed the same size, but the field of view widened until the men sitting on either side of him could be seen, one dark as Hellebore, but with white eyebrows, the other with fair hair and beard. "You know Thornapple and Foxglove, I think." Thornapple only smiled — and except for the eyebrows and that unpleasant smile, Theo realized, he was disturbingly like his daughter Poppy — but the other fairy lord's mouth was a tight line. Even through the ache in his head, Theo thought Lord Foxglove looked ashamed and maybe a little frightened.
What the hell am I doing watching this? It's not a damn TV show — they just tried to kill me! I have to get out of here, tell someone . . . But it was all he could do at the moment to stand upright and stare. Hellebore was dominating the picture again, his pale, amused face so handsome as to verge on pretty were it not for something horrifying about his eyes: even through the medium of the screen and the mirror through which he was watching from a distance, the man's coal-black stare held Theo like a candle flame in a dark room.
"So is this it?" Hollyhock was asking. He alone seemed to have grasped what was going on. Daffodil and Lily and many others were still bellowing outrage at this breach of protocol. "Do you no longer feel yourself safe in our houses, despite all our ages-old traditions of guesting? Does that mean it is to be war?"
Hellebore laughed. "Let us say that I would not feel safe in that house, no. As to war, yes, my young lord, it is. And more than that. The game has not merely begun, it is over."
Despite Hellebore's face on its magic screen in the middle of the mirror, Theo felt his attention drawn upward, to the transparent wall that ran all across the side of the conference center meeting room. Others in the great room had seen it too: a small shape coming through the sky toward Daffodil House, moving very fast, a black, wide-winged silhouette swooping down out of the sun.
Lord Daffodil was up on his feet, shaking his fist, but his face was as bloodless as the inhuman thing that held out Hellebore's screen — the face of a man who sees his own death on the wind. "But it cannot be! You could not have made such a flying device! All our laws forbid it! We would have known if you had worked the science to build such a thing . . . !"
The thing was coming straight toward them like a kite being reeled in. Now Theo could see its shape, the scalloped wings, the thread of whiplike tail. People in the meeting room were shrieking, fighting with each other, stumbling over chairs, falling.
"You're right, my lord," said Hellebore. "So we have returned to an earlier science, one our people had almost forgotten. Why build something that flies and flames and kills . . . when we had only to wake one up?"
It was over the center of the city. Theo gaped. It was huge — he had not realized how fast it was moving because he had not dreamed how big it was, long as a football field from snarling mouth to the tip of its snakelike tail.
Lord Lily was staggering, held up by two of his acolytes. "You have wakened a dragon? Then you are cursed! Cursed!"
A high-pitched hob-voice began to shriek, both in the Audience Chamber and in Theo's head: "Danger! Attack! Danger! Attack! Danger!"
"Cursed? Perhaps," said Hellebore evenly. "But you are dead. Which fate would you prefer?" The black shadow covered the window, plunging the room for a timeless second into something deeper than twilight. Light smoldered in every crevice of the vast shape, the black scales surrounded by glowing red like stones floating in molten lava. Then the mouth gaped open in a hellish flare of incandescenc
e and a six hundred foot span of wings spread wide to slow the thing as the great serpentine neck snapped forward, vomiting fire.
The huge window of the meeting room blew inward, an explosion of burning liquid glass — for an instant Theo could see the inhabitants flung before the spray, withering to black bone and ash — then the mirror went dark. The entire building spasmed beneath his feet and a blast of thunder like God's own hammerblow threw him to the floor and smashed the ceiling in above his head, raining pieces down on him like the stones of shattered Jericho.
Part Three FLOWER WAR
24 THE BUS STOP ON PENTACLE STREET
Streedy Nettle looked very carefully at the street sign to make sure it still said the same thing. He didn't think that streets usually changed names from one block to another, but he wasn't absolutely certain. In fact, he wasn't absolutely certain about very much, except that he was quite certain he wanted to get on the right bus and get home. He could only take shallow breaths because he was so nervous his chest hurt. This was the first time he had been out on his own since his new friends had found him, and although a part of him was proud to be doing something to help instead of just eating their food and taking up space, he didn't like standing in the middle of the sidewalk by himself under these gray afternoon skies. Still, it was an important errand. They had told him so. They had also told him that only he could do it — no one else! That had really made him wonder. But that didn't make being on the streets alone any easier. He wondered why . . . why . . . he struggled to remember the quiet, serious fairy's name . . . why Caradenus hadn't met him like he was supposed to do.
Sometimes he had to stop walking just to think, to make himself remember what he was supposed to do next, but when he did people often looked at him with anger on their faces as they stepped or flew around him. That frightened him. He thought that any moment they might suddenly point and say, "Look, it's the fellow who ran away from the power plant!" Then the constables would take him away and he would never get to see his friends again.