Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  He led Jason up the steps. Together they pulled open the great, ancient door, and followed the winding path through the wall of debris within.

  Jason radiated warmth and a faint light in the darkness. "You are like a little sun," Imago said. "Hardly powerless."

  "Perhaps I am growing fast."

  "Perhaps."

  The door to the certamentarium was shut. Imago tried the latch, but it was made fast from the inside.

  She was there. Or at any rate someone was.

  "Her name is Marelle." Imago wondered whether to knock.

  Jason set his hand upon the latch. It remained obdurate. He ran the fingers of his other hand over the surface of the door, skimming the little spy holes. Back and forth. Like listening, Imago thought, but with his skin.

  "I do not know what lies within," Jason said. "Too many whispering words, too many old wounds." His hand stilled a moment. "My father was right, you know. About the soul bottles."

  "Really?" Imago vaguely recalled that tale, told one late night over wine and oysters.

  "It's more than that, and less. The soul can flee the body through any cut or rupture. As breath, as blood, as tears. The trick is keeping it in place." His hand began sweeping again. "My sister bound my soul. Bijaz freed it again, but it still inhabits me. I am my own bottle, containing myself."

  Imago didn't know what to say. Instead he laid his hand on the door next to Jason's, ashamed that he was afraid to touch his friend.

  "This is a room five times the size of my office," the Lord Mayor said. "Filled with the archives of four great universities, piled higher than ladders. They sit upon a floor where soldiers once trained to kill."

  "A woman cries in the darkness at the center." Jason's voice was distant again. "Power resides within those things which are encoded. When we arrange the world, we make it something it had not been before our minds touched upon it. She is trapped in a web of arrangement."

  Imago realized he meant the library beads in their dangling catalogs. "What of the door," he asked softly. Surely there were battering implements aplenty about this place.

  "Wood, like any other wood." Jason grinned, his old self briefly surfacing. "There are advantages to being the Green Man."

  At that he pulled the door open easily. The bar slithered out, nothing but a collection of leafy twigs smelling of spring's deepest bloom. Even in the dim light of the abandoned guildhall, Imago could see tiny pale flowers, so many eyes peering up from viridian shadows.

  "Leave me," Jason said. "I shall find my own way back."

  "And Marelle?"

  "Only she can choose what she will be."

  "Help her choose well." He found the courage once more to shake Jason's hand, but the moment was gone.

  Imago picked his way out. He wondered what he might discover if he set a team to clean this place out. Somewhere within, springtime might come to a woman who dwelled inside the desperation of centuries.

  Bijaz

  Jason did not return that day from whatever errand Imago had set him on. Which might have explained the Lord Mayor's irritation. It certainly hadn't done much for Kalliope's mood.

  She glared at Bijaz over a small meal of poached fish and plump, purple olives. Tokhari food always contained olives, somewhere, somehow. Living in the map room had not widened the culinary options he shared with Kalliope.

  They'd made love on his cot when Jason went with Imago, confident of the future for the first time in months. Then Imago had returned alone, tight-lipped and distant. The mood between Bijaz and Kalliope had rapidly disintegrated to something much akin to despair. That Two-Thumbs had been coming to the Rugmaker's Cupola every day seeking audience with Bijaz was only making things worse.

  Still, the uncertain bond kept him and Kalliope close. Waiting for news together seemed better than waiting alone.

  Kalliope put down her fork. "He should never have stayed in this world," she said bitterly. "Hiding in that filthy hole, sucking the meat off the bones of dogs. The sula ma-jieni na-dja is a sending, not a whole new creation."

  Bijaz felt his heart shift. "You and I have known him longer than anyone. He was an angry child, then an angry man. Being dead did not improve him. But when we brought him back, he bloomed." He'd seized on that memory of Jason's eerie calm, the detached intensity, the tiny bits of green which had sprung from him.

  "So for a day he was better than he'd ever been alive? Then Imago dropped him down some secret hole somewhere. He was my brother. He deserved more from me."

  "He might as well have been my son." Bijaz recalled hot, sweating nights where he'd caressed Jason while rejoicing in the boy's pain. "He deserved far more from me."

  "So if—when!—he returns, let us give him more."

  Bijaz picked at an olive. "We already have, I'm afraid."

  That afternoon he sat in Onesiphorous' office and studied the latest writ from the Assemblage. Despite Marelle's efforts, that idiot attorney Fidelo had been busy. Cases were open before three separate benches.

  The money seemed to be flowing from syndics intent on undermining the Lord Mayor's regime, which they blamed for the current crisis in skilled labor. The old guard conveniently ignored the fact that the trouble had been created by the Burgesses themselves, and that the Lord Mayor was the only person who stood a candle's chance of bringing the dwarfs back from Port Defiance in any numbers.

  Bijaz definitely couldn't leave the Rugmaker's Cupola now. Bailiffs were posted outside at all hours. "For protection," they'd been told by Provost Selsmark. The First Counselor had apologized privately to the Lord Mayor, but he could only affect events, not direct them. The fate of a single annoying dwarf was not high on Zaharias' list of priorities.

  The good news was that since the recent episode of raising Jason, Bijaz hadn't gone back to farting butterflies or dripping sand from his fingertips. He still felt the power of the Numbers Men coursing in his veins, but that had settled to something manageable. Kalliope assured him this was because he'd found a path. The wheat field, it seemed, lay within him now.

  He had no idea where that path would lead, but he carefully minded her admonishment that power was means rather than an end. Bijaz wished he could have used some of it on Roncelvas Fidelo and this damned writ.

  Sworn before the judges of the bench dolus malus, having jurisdiction over fraud and usury, this day twenty Mars, anno 618 Imperator Terminus, a complaint against one Bijaz, a dwarf formerly of Fireside Street, now residing as an apparent ward of the Lord Mayor in his temporary chambers at the Rugmaker's Cupola on Cork Street, for the cause of misrepresenting himself as a figure of divinity and worship and thereby gaining divers valuable considerations in a fraudulent manner from the religious persons of the City Imperishable. In detail—

  He balled the writ up and tossed it toward the window. The paper bounced off the glass. Where the Lord Mayor's view looked south and west, his faced north of sunset. Bijaz could only see the Sudgate by opening the casement and leaning out far enough to stir incipient vertigo. On the other hand he could readily overlook the River Gate and the road which led north.

  All roads seemed to lead north of late. Or North. The place, rather than the direction.

  Cannon echoed down on the water. A frequent sound, since the Portmaster had required ships' captains to engage in gunnery practice. Imago had several times revisited the idea of appropriating some of the vessels in port, but had not managed to convince anyone of the plan's sensibility.

  Meanwhile, corsairs lay at anchor in Port Defiance, while little word came back up the river. So far they were still letting some vessels through, after an inspection and a markedly dubious fee assessment. No one in the City Imperishable doubted the fragility of that arrangement.

  Another thing the syndics blamed on the Lord Mayor. As if centuries of mismanagement by the Burgesses were somehow the fault of Imago, in office a mere half-year.

  The worst was not hearing from Onesiphorous. "He is captured or dead," Bijaz had told Imago.

/>   "I will not hear of it," the Lord Mayor said. "Enero must mount a rescue."

  "With horsemen?" Bijaz had been incredulous. "He's to swim against corsairs and whatever forces that idiot Sevenships still commands?"

  "No, no, I know." Imago had begun to cry then, tears leaking out tight-shut eyes. "I had no notion I would be the death of him."

  Slashed, Sewn—what had once been a matter of nearly fatal interest now seemed to pale.

  Bijaz drew his fingers across the little map he'd been making on his desk. No triumph of cartography, it was more a diagram of forces than anything.

  Like all rivers, the River Saltus flowed to the sea. Port Defiance, having lowered the flag of the City Imperishable, now controlled the outlet. Imago and the Burgesses were forced to treat with the new rulers of the port, or see the syndics of the City lose all foreign trade.

  The bankers were in a panic, as were the manufacturers. First they'd lost their managers and accountants, now they'd lost access to their natural markets. The City Imperishable could sell only so much to itself, and there was no one upstream to sell to. Commodities were collapsing as well. The lumbermen brawled over the short wages they were paid when their log loads sold poorly at auctions. No one had the courage, or ready cash, to buy up the wood at full price, nor ores nor any other feedstocks of industry.

  In consideration of these forces acting on the City Imperishable, his map was arrows pointing south, with a tiny horseman for Enero, crossed out as the freerider prepared to leave overland via the Rose Downs and roads east—avoiding whatever fighting might break out along the river. Another tiny man for the bailiffs, of questionable loyalty at best. Kalliope could perhaps field a hundred Tokhari, but they had no reason to ride at the City's behest. Besides which, mounted Tokhari could no more assault the rebels at Port Defiance than could Enero's men.

  The only consolation was that neither the corsairs nor the old guard within Port Defiance had any means to conduct their own assault upriver. This was almost certainly a game of starvation rather than swords.

  Bijaz wished he were still sleeping in the doorways of the Temple District. That had been a simpler life, even with meaningless miracles trailing behind him.

  Kalliope leaned through his door. "Can you come to the rooftop?"

  "Only if we're down again before the evening bells." The great iron carillon atop the Rugmaker's Cupola that rang the morning and evening hour was loud enough to wake the dead.

  "Come on, it's only the middle of the afternoon. Imago wants us for something important."

  "Everything's important now." What else could he do? If he left the tower, there'd be a royal brawl trying to keep him from being arrested.

  He followed Kalliope up the ladder to the roof hatch. It was already flung back. They climbed out onto the flat top of the tower—slate tiles over wooden flooring and beams, nearly sixty feet across. The carillon was an impressive tower in its own right, almost three stories tall.

  Imago faced southwest, watching the river where it flowed toward Port Defiance and the Jade Coast. He was slightly slumped, his linen shirt gathered in sweaty folds about his back.

  Bijaz approached and touched his elbow. "Something will change."

  "I know," said the Lord Mayor. "I think it already has. I just don't know what that means." He pointed.

  The River Saltus flowed almost due south as it passed the City Imperishable, which sat on the east bank. The water made a gentle bend to the west at Dragoman Point just beyond the winch tower on the Sudgate jetty. There it entered the scrubby softwood forest, which in turn eventually gave way to the glossy-leaved hardwood jungles of the Jade Coast.

  This high up, atop the tallest tower atop the tallest hill in town, the horizon was a distant blur. The river disappeared among the trees, but made occasional showings of silver light further south as it coiled through that low, wooded country.

  A large steamer worked its way upstream. The plume was visible even over the treetops. It was one of the wide-beamed, shallow-draft vessels that ordinarily plied their way high up the Saltus, trading at farming towns and markets amid the ruins of greater cities. Those trade routes stretched almost all the way to the Yellow Mountains.

  "We've seen no inland river traffic in almost twenty days," said Bijaz. "Not since they struck the colors down in Port Defiance. Only the few ocean-going ships the corsairs allowed through."

  "Right," said Imago. "Whether this ship will be full of angry corsairs, dead dwarfs, or just a sharply worded letter remains to be seen."

  Kalliope laughed sourly. "We might hope for better."

  "We might," Imago said. "However, I'm not sure why we would trouble to do so."

  The steamer fired her signal gun when she passed the marker buoy a mile downstream from Dragoman Point. Three sharp reports, for important news. It meant clear the channel and open a berth immediately.

  Imago turned. "We're going to the docks."

  Bijaz shook his head. "Not me. The bailiffs will take me the instant I walk out the door."

  "No," the Lord Mayor said darkly, "they won't."

  Enero waited at the base of the tower, already kitted for his long ride south. "We are to be leaving at dawn," he told them. "I am riding you to the waterfront for my own curiosity. It is being one last courtesy."

  "Thank you," said Imago. Bijaz nodded. Kalliope, having fought both against and beside Enero's Winter Boys, appeared more ambivalent.

  Freeriders walked the horses in from the street so they could mount up within the flagged hallway at the base of the tower. "For the confounding of bailiffs, yes?" one of the southerners said with a grin.

  They slipped oilskins over both Imago and Bijaz, making them small, shapeless figures. Each was seated before a freerider. Kalliope was given her own mount—the Winter Boys had a healthy respect for her horsewomanship. They formed up with Enero and four escorts. The doors were thrown back and the column charged outward.

  Bijaz would have loved to spit on the waiting bailiffs, but the redcoats wisely scrambled back across Cork Street. They did not even bother to raise a hue and cry.

  "What's the point of a grand gesture," he demanded, "if they won't play the game?"

  "To being patient," said the freerider behind him. "The redbacks will be having time to try to be taking you at the docks."

  They clattered down Filigree Avenue, heading for Water Street. Unless the Portmaster had an unusual plan in mind, an urgent ship would be landing at Old Lighter Quay, just south of the Water Street Bridge.

  The horsemen arrived before the steamer, though judging from the activity on the docks they were ahead by only minutes. At Enero's signal they all remained mounted.

  The incoming ship hove to around the winch tower moments later. The vessel was strung with banners, streamers, and bunting fit to celebrate a coronation. Most of the colors were an unfortunately familiar ice blue. A great, white paper bear's head hung between the twin smokestacks. Its eyes glowed even in daylight, some tricks of lanterns and lenses.

  The steamer reached the docks. With a shriek of her whistle, she backed water. The center-mounted paddles threw great plumes of spray. She was making for the Old Lighter Quay.

  Standing on the hurricane deck was Ashkoliiz's ice bear. Twice the height of a man, it stared down at the docks of the City Imperishable as if waiting to be crowned. The mountebank waited next to the ice bear, dressed in a shift and cloak of her same blue silk. She waved to the people on Water Street and along the docks. A band played somewhere below her, festival tunes which set an air of merriment that spread quickly.

  "By Dorgau's infected nostril," Imago shouted, "this woman will not cease deviling us. Did she arrange the coup in Port Defiance just so she could return?"

  Bijaz tried to reach toward Imago. Their horses were too far apart, spaced for battle. "Lord Mayor. I beg of you, use tact."

  The whistle wailed again.

  "People of the City Imperishable!" Ashkoliiz's voice boomed out over the water with a squeal that me
ant electricks were being used. A voice projector, Bijaz thought, as a round of riotous cheering broke out. The City was ready for something engaging, uplifting. That she used the magick of artifice to make her great as the power of any god only made her all the more a welcome change.

  She had a confidence artist's command of human behavior.

  When the cheering died down, Ashkoliiz continued. "I bring you most excellent news!"

  Another round of cheering.

  "Your friends among the émigré dwarfs of Port Defiance have sponsored me on an expedition. I now journey to recover the remains and treasures of the Imperator Terminus. Great days will soon come again!"

  Imago began cursing furiously. Bijaz just stared at the ship, decks lined with full-men, and wondered how many corsairs one could persuade onto a steamer.