Tad Williams - The War of the Flowers (retail) (pdf)

by Tad Williams

  "I hear you're feeling a bit under the weather this morning, eh?" Dogwood smiled to show he was not that other kind of foreman, the Barberry kind. "Out with some of the other young fellows, eh? A little trip to Madame Gentian's, perhaps, and a bit too much to drink? I've been there, lad. I wasn't always what you see now, with responsibility and all." Dogwood paused, narrowing his eyes. The boy was not responding as well as he'd hoped, which was a bit irksome. "Come now, lad, you know you can't stay in bed all day, right? We've a job to do, a very important job. The City needs us — all of Faerie needs us."

  The boy stared at him, not aggressively, but as though he was having trouble focusing. "I . . . I don't feel well." It was a mumble, and the rustic Hazel accent made it almost unintelligible. "I think I should . . ." His sweaty, pale face became sweatier still as he realized he had almost made an unsolicited suggestion to a foreman.

  "You'd be surprised how much better you'll feel if you just get up and do your job, lad. What are you? Bulk storage? Is this the storage dormitory?" The vast sleeping rooms all looked just the same, after all, which was as it should be. Wouldn't do to have rivalries inside the machinery.

  "Capacitor, sir." A whisper. The boy really was extraordinarily pale, but some of the outland fellows were like that. There were other forests besides the ancient one that surrounded the City and in which this power plant nested, and some of the country lads hadn't ever been out of the trees and into the sun properly before they came to town.

  "Ah, a capacitor! So you're a bit of a specialist, eh?" Findus Dogwood laughed encouragingly at his own joke, but the boy was too dense or distracted to join in. Dogwood frowned. "Come, now, you don't want to let your mates down, do you? If we're short a capacitor, there'll be just that much more work for the others."

  The boy groaned. "But . . . truly I'm sorry, sir, but . . ." "Here, do you know how much time I've spent with you already, son?" Supervisor Dogwood leaned close. It was time to show the boy a bit of hardwood. "A capacitor? There are others out there who'd spin sunwise twice and widdershins thrice to have your job, you know. And you'd still have to work off your indenture on the power line. Or perhaps you'd rather wind up laboring in Lord Thornapple's sewage filtration plant instead?"

  The boy actually sat up, although he had to struggle to do so; for the first time his oversized wings uncurled behind him — they were big as sails! Dogwood looked away. No wonder his parents had been in a hurry to get rid of him. "But . . . that's a nixie job, sir . . . !" the young fellow began to protest, but a cough interrupted him. It continued for some time.

  "You'd be surprised, Myrtle." He hesitated — the name didn't sound quite right — but the boy was still wheezing and hadn't heard him. "You'd be surprised what kind of work can be found for someone who's failed at a perfectly good position like this one." It was time to give him another flick of the thorns. A boy like this could go one way or the other, and Dogwood prided himself on having saved a number of young fellows from their own worst instincts. "Or what kind of treatment someone earns when they try to back out on their indenture. I'm going to head back to my office, now. When I get there, I expect to get a call from your foreman telling me that you're on the line. You tell him I said so. And if I don't . . . well, there are even worse places than the filtration plant, Myrtle. Lord Thornapple's quicksilver mines get a bit close, I'm told. Not the best place for someone with a cough like that."

  He turned and strode out of the room with back straight and head high, as always. As he expected, the foreman called him soon after he returned, saying the boy had staggered out to take his place on the line. Findus Dogwood enjoyed a quiet moment's pleasure at this further proof that his velvet glove had again proved more efficacious than the old-fashioned, heavy-handed approach.

  He had just started sketching out the short article on friendly discipline he had decided to write for the Darkwood Generation LPB management newsletter when he got another call from the same foreman. Then the lights went out.

  ————— Foxfire lanterns had been kindled everywhere, but they cast only a thin light and smelled like rotting wood, which didn't improve Dogwood's temper. He had begged upper management for the newer, cleaner emergency witchlights, but had they done anything about it? Without the huge overhead lighting fixtures, the floor of the station looked like a willo'-the-wisp's Midsummer dance. In the flickering near-darkness Dogwood barked his knee on a wiring stool that someone had left in the middle of an aisle, and by the time he reached the site of the accident he was in an even fouler state of mind, if such a thing were possible.

  "Why haven't we gone to backup power?" he shouted. "Why are all these workers standing about?"

  "We'll be back on line in a moment, sir." Saltgrass turned and slapped a resistor, who was standing over the body with wide eyes and gaping mouth. "Get out of here, you — back to your group! We don't feed you and house you so you can stand around gawking."

  The other line workers now began to drift back to their own spots, some shaking their heads. Certain that they were all in some absurd way holding him responsible, Dogwood did his best not to let it bother him. "What happened?"

  "Hard to say, sir." Saltgrass was heavier and more muscular than most of his kind, which suggested there might be more than a bit of human blood in him somewhere — a "mayfly in the hive," as one crude phrase had it. "We powered up and took over for Unit Three. Everything was right where it was supposed to be, then all of a sudden the impedance went wild. It was Nettle, sir. I've never seen anything quite like it. For a moment, he looked like he'd taken fire — all green and blue, sparks flying around, like that. Then he just fell down. We hauled him out and I called you. That should have been the end of it — fourteen other capacitors just in this section, and they were all working fine — but a few minutes later all the circuit breakers tripped and Ob's your uncle, everything shuts down!"

  Dogwood suppressed a scowl. Bloody Saltgrass seemed awfully cheerful about all this, as if the whole thing were no more than a schoolboy lark, the excuse for an afternoon off. Instead, there would be messages flying about this for weeks, and not a few of them would be coming right through Findus Dogwood's office like hornets.

  Barberry. Why couldn't this have happened on that cursed Barberry's shift? The supervisor looked down at young Streedy Nettle. The boy's limbs were still jerking, but they had slowed a little. His eyes were open, his strawlike hair curled tight to his head by the force of the generative magics that had briefly been contained within him, like a dammed river. Nettle's once-huge wings had curled and shriveled against his back like melted glass.

  "What happened?" Dogwood asked him. "What did you do, you fool?"

  The boy stared at him, eyelids fluttering, teeth chattering.

  "He can't talk, sir," Saltgrass pointed out. "I've seen 'em taken like this. Lucky he wasn't turned into a cinder, or a frog, or worse." One of the company doctors, a Bitterroot who had once been in private practice but had for some reason fallen on hard times, crouched down beside the boy and dangled a pendulum above his paper-white brow. "Not good," the doctor said, shaking his head. "I think we'll have to tell his parents to prepare themselves."

  Dogwood grunted. The cursed boy had not only brought down the whole line, but now he was apparently going to die and thus create hours of tedious paperwork as well. "Get him out of here. And somebody find out why we're not back on line yet!"

  ————— It was three hours before the power was restored, and many if not most of Lord Thornapple's customers were affected. Offices went dark all over the Gloaming and Eventide districts. The trolleys did not run. Factories shut down. Delicate silk-spinning spiders died by the thousands when the heating charms in their artificial grottoes failed. It was fortunate, as it turned out, that the lord himself had not been visiting, as Dogwood had half-hoped that morning, but was instead far away on a hunting holiday in Birch. There would be time enough to blur the facts before he returned, and all of middle management would work at that assiduously. It was
n't as if there hadn't been other outages lately, for reasons having nothing to do with the power plant's native functions: they could make this incident look like another of those. With luck, no foremen or supervisors would be executed this time.

  Still, Findus Dogwood no longer felt the moment was propitious for his planned article, and in fact the week might have gone down as one of his worst since he had accepted the supervisorial badge from Lord Thornapple's factor, but he was a little cheered the day after the failure when the block captain Snowbell informed him through the foreman Saltgrass that not only had the Nettle boy apparently survived the night, but he had recovered enough to run away. At first Dogwood suspected that the foremen themselves had arranged the disappearance — Saltgrass' lightheartedness had faded during the extra hours they were all forced to work by the blackout — but a little questioning convinced the supervisor that Saltgrass and his comrades were just as puzzled by Nettle's departure as everyone else.

  The paperwork was much easier for Indentured Worker, Escape Of than for Indentured Worker, Death Of, and no crusading society matrons or charity organizations would be asking difficult questions, either. Instead of dealing with all the rigamarole of a fact-finding emissary from New Mound House, affixing blame and computing compensation before sending Saddened Letter #4 to the family, he could turn everything over to Lord Constable Monkshood's Runaways Office and let them deal with the problem.

  Enlightened management styles certainly had their place, Dogwood decided as things finally began to return to normal around the plant, but next time he had a shirker on the line he thought he might just let Saltgrass beat the creature bloody and save his own precious time for more useful and elevated pursuits.

  9 VISITORS

  It was a beautiful day outside, sunlight streaming down through the redwoods and pooling on the ground, but the peace Theo had begun to find here had suddenly dissolved. He had awakened several times in the silent mountain night, once from the now-familiar dream of being a helpless prisoner in his own body, another time from an equally terrible dream of being chased across a muddy sea floor by some relentless thing like a huge lamprey, all idiot mouth and muscular tail. His sheets and underwear had been so sweat-soaked that for a shameful moment he thought the nightmare had made him piss himself.

  Now, as he nursed a cup of coffee in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the weathered wooden folding chair he had found in his mother's garage which now served as his de facto porch, Theo still felt exposed, almost hunted. The deaths in his mother's house had somehow corrupted everything. He had planned to spend the day working on some songs, playing the guitar, but that didn't seem even slightly appealing now. He had to get out, that was all there was to it. He had been wanting to go down to the flats and use the library, look some things up. That would certainly be better than sitting by himself all day, jumping at noises.

  He found his wallet and keys, then pulled on his leather jacket and checked to make sure the windows were latched. As he stood in the doorway, something seemed to flare just above the sink, a tiny point of light like a miniature nova. Theo stared, but it was already gone. He walked back into the cabin to make sure there wasn't an electrical fire starting, but all seemed normal.

  Light coming through the glass and bouncing off the faucet or something. Like what those pilots used to see and thought were UFOs. Sundog, that's what it's called, right?

  He shook his head and climbed onto his motorcycle. It took a couple of kicks to get the cold engine to rattle into life.

  At the bottom of Mariposa, just before turning onto the main road, he saw something move in the undergrowth — not the velvet-brown of a deer, but something green, like a military duffel coat. He slowed a little but was already past it. When he looked back he couldn't see anything except branches and dappled light.

  A hunter? But they wear orange, don't they? In any case, he didn't imagine that you were allowed to hunt around here, not legally. Maybe it was some kind of paramilitary weirdo, some antitax crusader stalking the hills in his fantasy uniform. There might even be a whole platoon of them in the area, out on maneuvers. The Santa Cruz Mountains were home to all kinds of odd sorts, folks who had come up in the Seventies to take a lot of acid and live with nature and had never found their way back down, folks who just didn't like cities, not to mention people who had scarily legitimate reasons not to be too high profile. Who could say — there were probably several generations of different kinds of weirdo living up here by now . . .

  Come on, man. All this because you saw what? Some green? In the middle of the forest? You're losing it, baby. He was lonely, he realized. There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not.

  ————— The woman working behind the reference counter was pretty in a quiet, glasses-on-a-cord kind of way. She smiled at his nervous jokes while she showed him where the back issues of the Chronicle were, and how to work the microfiche machine. It was all he could do not to ask her out on the spot.

  Why not try it? The worst she can say is no. But it seemed for some reason as though it would be very difficult to be turned down today. Maybe he could come back later in the week, let her see that he was a quiet, serious sort of guy, then ask her. Still, he felt better just for being interested, for having something like that to think about. He wanted to do some research on his great-uncle, but found himself drawn first to the murders at his mother's house. It wasn't hard to find information in the San Francisco Chronicle, since it was a scary and so far inexplicable murder in a quiet neighborhood. It had even made the front page the first day, although only a couple of paragraphs actually showed up below the fold, with most of the article buried deep in the front section.

  The pictures of the unfortunate Marsh couple jogged his memory. They were younger than he had remembered, in their late twenties. She had been the pretty one with the short skirt, and now he remembered her husband, too, although the man hadn't said much, had mostly checked messages on his cell phone while the agent led them around. In fact, the only thing he really remembered anyone saying was the real estate agent talking about what a lovely "starter house" it would be. And apparently they had agreed, since he had their money in the bank right now.

  Starter house. Ending house. He pushed away the unpleasant thought, suddenly struck by something else. Was there some way the deal could be rescinded, by their parents or something? Who would own it now? They couldn't make him pay the money back, could they? It was a petty thought, perhaps, but the two hundred thousand wasn't petty to him, and it was already less than that because he'd put down the first and last on the cabin, not to mention other living expenses.

  Nothing he could do now. Maybe he'd call the real estate company later, check with them. The articles talked a lot about what the neighbors thought — Mrs. Kraley was even quoted as saying, "This neighborhood is going downhill. You just don't know what kind of people are around," which Theo took with a sort of sour pride as referring almost as much to himself as to the actual murderers. Of the killings themselves very little was said, except that they were characterized as "brutal" and "senseless." Mrs. Kraley, with a keen eye for what was really important, also complained that the murderer had apparently thrown garbage all over the lawn and front porch. The police had not offered any possible motive beyond robbery, but it didn't say in the article if anything had been stolen.

  The newspapers had nothing more to offer, and Theo was beginning to feel like a bit of a ghoul. He moved over to the microfiche machine and decided he might as well see if they had anything about his great-uncle.

  He found two newspaper articles, which was more success than he'd really expected. One seemed to be a character piece from the Examiner, written in the early Seventies, the other was Dowd's obituary. As Theo browsed through the longer piece, struggling a bit with the machine's white-onblack text, he was surprised by how sad he was to
know that Eamonn Dowd was really dead. It would have been very surprising if he hadn't been — the article confirmed his earlier guess that Dowd had been born at the end of the nineteenth century, so he would have been over a hundred by now — but in the past weeks Theo had come to feel very closely connected to him. The article, which seemed to be little more than one of those interesting-local-old-person puff pieces, was accompanied by a picture of his great-uncle in what the caption called his "study," but because of the microfiche it was essentially a photographic negative and Theo could make little of it. Eamonn Dowd seemed to have been slender and dapper at the time the picture was taken, and perhaps a bit youngerlooking than his seventy years of age would have suggested, but it was impossible to be sure about any of it.

  The obituary had no photograph — Great-Uncle Eamonn hadn't been important enough for that. It was also terse. Theo wondered who'd written it, and why. Had it been a kind of guilt-gesture from his mother after receiving the money? She was mentioned.

  Eamonn A. Dowd, 76

  adventurer and world traveler Eamonn Albert Dowd, who spent much of his early life traveling the world, and much of his later life sharing his stories with others, died April 30th at his home in San Francisco. He was 76.

  Mr. Dowd, who contributed to travel magazines and the travel section of this newspaper, and also spoke at libraries and schools, first went to sea at age 15 and never lost his love of exotic places.

  The obituary continued with an abbreviated version of what Great-Uncle Eamonn had described in the notebook, and ended with the information that he was survived by "his niece Anna Dowd Vilmos of San Francisco, and other family in the Chicago area."

  Theo sat back, staring at the screen without really seeing it any more. "Anna Dowd Vilmos of San Francisco" — it made his mother sound like someone from a famous family, like one of the old Nob Hill socialite crowd or something.