Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  "No." Onesiphorous wondered what new strangeness she was referring to in the City. "When last I saw your father he was well enough, considering the facts of his condition."

  Her smile crooked. "If it's not strange when your Da gets elevated to godhood, I don't know what is."

  "Perhaps. Nonetheless, I am here. I must ask, do you have any way of communicating with the City?"

  "No. Everything always went by boat to Port Defiance and up the river from there. With the port in unfriendly hands and the river closed to traffic, we're lost as dwarfs in a desert."

  Onesiphorous still couldn't figure where her sympathies lay. "I am hoping for shelter," he said slowly, watching to see how she reacted. "And help, perhaps. Either in moving on . . . "

  After a moment, she said, "Every 'either' has an 'or,' Sir Slashed."

  "Yes, well." He took the plunge. "Either help moving on, or help mounting a restoration movement to strike the corsair colors."

  "Hmm," she said. "Well, shelter, and maybe a bowl of whatever watery gruel we still have. I believe the boys are playing Beggar's Chance over there if you'd care to lose a fortune or two."

  "I am not your father," he said, thinking of Bijaz's uncanny skill at gamesmanship since the old dwarf's transformation.

  "Something we should all be thankful for," she muttered darkly, her first real reaction to anything thus far.

  Beaulise had not been joking about watery gruel. It was a thin soup of oats, onions, and dried apples, with too much salt. The Angoumois made feasts of what grew all around this mine, but these were still City folk, for all that they were hundreds of miles from home sweating for treasure in a hole in the ground.

  Onesiphorous sipped and looked at the other miners. Eight full-men in total, plus the two dwarfs. They were a motley lot, to be sure. Two were pale-haired Sunward men who could have come from whatever clan or family had birthed Enero, though they dressed the same as any ordinary laborers from the City Imperishable, in canvas trousers and cotton shirts. Another was a dark-skinned fellow with the look of someone from much further down the Sunward Sea, wearing wrapped muslin grubby with sweat and rock dust. The other five seemed men of the City to him, the typical disaffected younger sons and bankrupt clerks who'd moved south in waves since the eruption of the Jade Rush.

  It was the dwarf he could not figure out. He was young, glitter-eyed and red-faced, with pale blond hair over a pale complexion. While the others chattered softly of their card games over gruel and hard biscuits, the dwarf miner remained silent. He cast occasional resentful glances at Onesiphorous.

  Time to sip politely and say little. These were bored, angry men who were running out of food while being cut off from their livelihood and dreams of avarice. Not to mention whatever pleasures didn't fit in the palms of their hands.

  "All right, boys," said Beaulise as they finished eating the terrible little meal. "We got us a real celebrity here. Ikaré here already knows Onesiphorous, I believe. As for the rest of you, he's been a mighty big dwarf back in the City Imperishable. Used to be a genuine revolutionary before the new government made him a minister."

  "I'm hardly—" Onesiphorous began, but she cut him off.

  "This is a shareholders' meeting of the Lost Receiver Mine. You're a guest, here on sufferance. When it's time for your testimony, you'll be told."

  He wasn't sure what that implied. Even working as the Lord Mayor's chamberlain he'd had little to do with the jade mines, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Assemblage of Burgesses.

  But shareholders? He'd never worked as an accountant, at least not until becoming Imago's man, but still, Onesiphorous was fairly certain that shareholders were wealthy men smoking in their clubs on Heliograph Hill, not grubby pick-and-shovel types.

  "I'll go last," muttered Ikaré, still glaring at Onesiphorous.

  Beaulise nodded. "Ikaré has invoked privilege. I shall grant it unless someone objects."

  As far as Onesiphorous could tell, none of the rest cared.

  "Do I hear any other testimony?" she asked.

  One of the pale Sunwarders leaned forward. "I am to be wondering if this mighty dwarf is to be restoring our contracts."

  "I don't know." Beaulise glanced at Onesiphorous. "The witness may address the question."

  "Um . . . " Onesiphorous had no prepared answer. His wits caught up with his lips. "If I am successful, with or without your help, your contracts will be back in force. If I am successful with your help, there will also be recognition and remuneration from the Lord Mayor's office."

  It was hardly the most stirring speech he could have delivered.

  A City man wiped a bit of soup from his mouth. "You got anything to offer besides your hard-working self, dwarf?"

  Ikaré stirred at that, but said nothing. Onesiphorous thought he was seeing the lay of things. "No. Just my word. But it's my word as chamberlain to Lord Mayor Imago of Lockwood. Not just my word as a hard-working dwarf."

  "Hot air's no contract," said the City man, but he settled back in his chair.

  "Anyone else?" Beaulise asked after a moment. The dark-skinned Sunwarder grinned, but that was the only reaction the dwarfess received.

  These aren't desperate men, Onesiphorous thought. These are defeated men.

  "Ikaré, you may have your privilege now."

  "I say toss him in the river and let him walk home," the other dwarf snapped. "His little ruckus back in the City Imperishable this past winter killed my parents and one of my sisters. This one and his precious Lord Mayor both are no better than the damned Burgesses, and probably a sight worse."

  "So you wish to eject him from the Lost Receiver Mine?" Beaulise asked softly. "Is that a formal proposal?"

  "No, of course not." Ikaré kept his temper barely reined in. "I'm no fool. Anything's better than sitting here waiting to starve. Since Malcolm took the boat, we couldn't leave on our own if we tried. Nothing but leeches and snapjawed eels out there in that black water. So this little prince of the City arrives with promises and a beggar's hand of cards, he's still more than we had before. At least he's got a boat."

  "Ah . . . " Onesiphorous began, then shut his mouth.

  Beaulise shot him a look that suggested he keep that mouth firmly shut. She slapped the table. "You have used your privilege, Ikaré. I will not entertain your proposal unless another shareholder advances it." She looked around the table. They were all sober-faced now, but no one responded.

  "May I speak now?" Onesiphorous asked, keeping his voice calm and quiet. "I wish to address this good dwarf."

  "The witness is granted privilege." She obviously thought him a total idiot.

  "Ikaré." He wasn't sure what to say, but he could not let that kind of anger smolder here at the heart of whatever effort might be built to unseat the corsairs in Port Defiance. "I worked very hard over the years before the Trial of Flowers to spare as many dwarf lives as possible. There are hundreds of dwarfs and dwarf families in Port Defiance because of my urging, my cajoling, my lobbying of the Inner Chamber, and my endless arguments with almost everyone in the City Imperishable.

  "I regret beyond measure what happened to your family. But please, believe me. People were already dying in the most horrible ways from noumenal attacks. The Inner Chamber was stirring terror against the City dwarfs to distract from their own plottings and failings. If we had not risen, if we had not fought in Terminus Plaza, many more would have died."

  He thought of Boudin with a curdled feeling in the bottom of his gut. "I know they are dead all the same, and the reasons do nothing to ease your anger. But the City Imperishable is not your enemy. I am not your enemy. We hung the old Inner Chamber from the walls at the Riverward Gate of the Limerock Palace that day. Your enemies died that day. I can give you no more solace than that."

  Ikaré turned his seat aside, so he didn't have to look at Onesiphorous. "I got nothing to say to you. I'll say to the chair that we'll do what we must, and I'll not fight it nor make trouble for the Lost Receiver Mine, but t
hat's the whole of it. Unless you can bring back my dead, you are nothing to me."

  "I've seen what happens to the dead when they're brought back," Onesiphorous said, his voice low. "You don't want that."

  "No, we don't." Beaulise's voice was bright, almost forced. "What we want is to return to our work, and get back to what's ours. I propose that the mine's company place its resources at the disposal of Onesiphorous and through him the Lord Mayor of the City Imperishable." She turned to him. "In return for lending our attention and our good name, we will expect full reimbursement for expenses, as well as additional consideration."

  "Propose the same," said the City man who'd spoken before.

  They all muttered "aye" except Ikaré.

  "Are there any nays?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "Nothing. I got nothing."

  "That's nine for, none against, one abstained, and four not present. A majority of the shares of the Lost Receiver Mine have voted to carry the proposal." She slapped the table again. "This meeting is adjourned."

  Onesiphorous looked around the table. He saw Ikaré's back and shoulders, and a tired but triumphant expression on Beaulise's face. It was the hopeful look in the eyes of the rest of them that worried him most.

  "First of all," he said, "thank you. Second of all, there's a problem with the idea of a boat."

  "What idea?" snapped Ikaré. "It's wood, it sits in the water, it floats. Not much thinking there, is it?"

  Onesiphorous felt himself flush. "I'll need to call it back."

  "How'd you get here, then?" asked one of the City men.

  "An Angoumois rowed me here."

  "An angry moth?"

  "One of the swamp men. It's what they call themselves."

  Everyone in the mine stared at him. "You passed through the water rats?" Beaulise finally asked. "And survived?"

  This was as bad as the way some people treated the City dwarfs. He let his exasperation into his voice. "They're just people."

  "They're snake-eating, food-stealing, boat-sinking, half-lizard bastards," the City man said with venomous conviction. "You go into the shadows, you don't come out."

  Onesiphorous stood firm. "I did." Though he had to admit that he'd seen enough in those shadows to understand how a rational man might take fright.

  "And what does that make you?" whispered Ikaré.

  They drifted away, muttering, but no one, not even the obstreperous dwarf, seemed interested in reopening the business meeting. They were growing desperate, and he was the only hope that had presented itself.

  Beaulise took him on a tour. "This is nothing like the mines of the Silver Ridges," she called down to Onesiphorous as they climbed one of the ladders at the back of the main gallery. "Up there, the name of the game is volume. They move a ton of ore to realize less than ten pounds of silver. That's in a good seam. Similar ratio for gold. Copper's easier, so's nickel, but it's still bleeding great masses of stone."

  They stepped off the ladder into a tunnel so small anyone much larger than a dwarf would have been required to stoop. Beaulise raised her gas lantern to show him how the cut curled upward.

  "Jade's a precious stone." She corrected herself: "Semiprecious. But valuable enough, especially for the Sunward trade. They carry it from there on out into the endless oceans of the world, where a good piece can be worth more than its weight in gold." She laughed. "Not here at the mine, of course, but we do well enough when the shipping is running right.

  "In any case, these mines are small because the seams are small. Every few years a mine brings out a good boulder, but almost everything that is traded away could be carried by a small man."

  They advanced slowly up the narrow passage. Even Onesiphorous felt pressured, closed in by the narrow rock.

  "These rock outcroppings are called 'thumbs.'" Her voice echoed in the enclosed space. "Cores of old hills maybe. The thumbs rise up out of the swamps. They're veined with jadeite. We dig out the veins. Simple, eh?"

  Onesiphorous ran his fingers across the chopped-out wall of the tunnel. It had been done by hand—who would blast in here? One stroke at a time. "Simple enough, I suppose. If you've got time and tools and the skill to delve. How many people get rich enough off this to bother?"

  "You'd be surprised," she said. "Are you a jade collector?"

  He snorted. "Until six months ago, I was lucky to eat decently every day. Since then I've been far too busy for hobbies. I've never had the luxury of, well, luxury. It's shiny and green, that's what I know. People carve beads and little gods out of it."

  "They call it kingstone down along the Sunward Sea." Her voice drifted a little, almost meditative. "The princes there are buried in suits of it. Armor, though you wouldn't care to stop a blow with the stuff. There's a lot of green jade. A fair amount of white jade. Those are your nickel and your copper, really. Enough to make a living, but it won't buy you a villa."

  People had always been his business. Still, Onesiphorous had to admit this was interesting. "So what's the jade equivalent of gold? Or diamonds?"

  "Red. Orange. Jadeite comes in many colors, but white and green make up most of it. The rest is far more valuable. Now—" She stopped.

  Beaulise was obvious weighing the significance of sharing some secret. Onesiphorous waited her out.

  "Blue," she finally said. "Blue jade is the diamond strike."

  "Where is it found?"

  She sighed. "In shards, among the tailings of jade works from long ago. The water rats, or someone else, worked the thumbs in the distant past. They didn't have steel tools or much engineering, so they didn't get far. We think they broke out accessible portions of the seams with fire, then hauled the rubble away from the thumbs to be sorted. Their scrap piles are on little islands up and down this coast rather than at the mine sites. People have found chips and slivers of blue jade. They mined it somewhere. That means some of it's still here."

  Beaulise gave him a long look. "His Serenity, the Anchor Prince of Bas Engarin, has offered his own weight in gold for a piece of blue jade the size of a grown man's thumb." She laughed. "And His Serenity is said to be an individual of extremely generous proportions."

  "Dreams," he said. "It's all dreams."

  She seemed intrigued. "All commerce is dreams. Dreams of profit, dreams of success. No one sets out in their youth intending to end their life as a third clerk in a shipping office. Down here, our hands are closer to the dream. That's the difference. Labor and value, in one transaction."

  He was surprised at that final comment. "You're an economist?"

  Her tone was scornful. "I am my father's daughter. He was one of the better business managers in the City Imperishable for many years before he took up politics."

  "And so here you are in the swamps, chipping away rocks looking for the blue vein."

  "Here I am. I was chipping away happily enough until my father's politics interrupted us." She pushed forward, worming her way up a sharply angled rise in the tunnel. "Follow me," she said, her voice muffled.

  He followed.

  Imago

  He found his way out of the South Doors of the Limerock Palace to discover a rally in progress. Someone he didn't recognize addressed a crowd of clerks, bailiffs, and servants. Zaharias of Fallen Arch stood in the shadows of a pillar just by the door.

  "First Counselor," said Imago politely.

  Zaharias jumped as if he'd seen a fetch. "What are you doing here?"

  "An appointment with one of the judges-financial," Imago replied blandly. He had not checked his clothing carefully and itched to pat himself down.

  "When I am Lord Mayor," the speaker began.

  "Ah," Imago said. "Fidelo."

  " . . . ensure public order takes a firm priority."

  The crowd gave a dull cheer.

  Imago stepped out of the shadows behind Fidelo and grabbed his sleeve. The young attorney looked around. Imago slugged him in the chin, then tripped the full-man, kicked him again in the side of the head. He stepped onto Fidelo's ba
ck to address the crowd.

  "I still retain the office of Lord Mayor," Imago shouted. "If the Assemblage desires elections, we shall have elections. But not now, and not with this moronic popinjay conspiring in secret."

  The muttering turned to scattered laughter.

  "Would you want to be led by a man who could be so easily dropped by a dwarf?" Imago stepped off, leaned close to Fidelo's ear, and whispered, "Cease sending those ridiculous writs, or I'll have you flogged for a pederast and hanged from Lame Burgess Bridge."

  The people made way for Imago. He stepped between two bailiffs at the Costard Gate to find Enero and Kalliope on horses, backed by several dozen Winter Boys.