Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  Bijaz turned from his view of the next ascent. Here at the top, he could see the whole operation in a way that had never been obvious while beetling up a stone face.

  They had six of the frames going. Some hauled men, some hauled supplies. It hadn't been the random climb-and-pray he'd thought from below. Even so, given that they'd covered a thousand feet of altitude, he would have thought to send scouts to set the frames, then haul everyone up directly and at less risk.

  Ashkoliiz had her reasons. The men had bonded on the ascent, already much closer than the rowdy, mismatched toughs who'd debarked from Slackwater Princess. Whatever strategic mistake it might have been, tactically speaking, blowing the riverboat was brilliant. In one move, she had made it clear there was no way home except to follow her. Otherwise many of the men would have sat on the docks and waited for the vessel's return, rather than climb the cliffs or ride off with those dreadful camels.

  Even in her eccentricities, she would have made a frightening general. She would have been even more frightening had she been born to rule.

  Ashkoliiz came over the edge soon after, up a different rope line. She was followed by Wee Pollister and her picked bodyguards. He saw no sign of the bear.

  Bijaz approached her. "I was wrong, lady," he said. Flattery was an old skill, and he judged that her pride would never refuse a polishing. "You are a smith, forging a weapon. Spinning your blade from dross in which I might never have found faith." He bowed. "I learn ever more from you."

  "And I from you," she replied. "For one, you have a novel approach to pest control." She returned his bow, her smile pure mockery.

  He felt a flash of hot, hard anger. Bijaz took a deep breath. She was working him, too, annealing his nature in the forge of his own anger. He might not know what her goal was yet, but he knew her methods.

  Knowing them did little to bank the fire within.

  He turned away and studied the sky, looking out over the miles on miles on miles of land stretching to the south. One advantage of his age, Bijaz reminded himself, was that he need not be enslaved to his passions.

  Still, her eyes bored into him even when he could not see them. They left smoldering holes in his soul.

  Onesiphorous

  The tunnel wound upward. It crossed two shafts where chains had been hammered into the wall for grab-ons, and several side-tunnels. Beaulise moved with a purpose, delivering no more narration. Just climbing.

  Onesiphorous was beginning to wonder exactly how tall the thumb was when Beaulise stopped. "Cover your eyes," she told him. "I'm going to open a hatch. The sunlight will hurt if it strikes you in the face before you are prepared."

  He turned his head and raised his hand to shield himself.

  She had not exaggerated. When the trap slammed open, light flooded like an explosion. Onesiphorous closed his eyes and watched the blood-warm glow of his lids for a moment.

  Beaulise grunted, then called, "Come on up."

  He opened his eyes, lids narrowed to a tight squint, and climbed a short wooden ladder.

  They were atop the thumb. This was akin to being atop Barlowe's Finger, except that the thumb stood larger, and the sea surrounding it was a deep texture of treetops that swayed with the wind instead of the tide.

  He looked at Angoulême from above. The knob-kneed trees with their deep shadows and unquiet waters seemed a different world up here. Bright birds screamed and fluttered like flowers on the wing. Clouds of butterflies moved through the dark green valleys where the canopies dipped and met. Even the open channel next to the mine was nothing more than a vein of silver-black in this high green sea.

  Rocky thumbs stood as far as his eye could follow east to west. They resembled the remains of an ancient fortified wall defending this whole coast.

  If the Angoumois lived up here, he thought, they would honor very different gods.

  "Look north," said Beaulise. "You can see hills rising up thirty miles further inland. That's where the water runs out and it all becomes dry soil and stone. If you look south, you see the Sunward Sea—those silver depths beneath the distant clouds. We're here between the land and water, plucking riches from the bones of the world. A jade miner sees the margins, friend Onesiphorous, whether he acknowledges it or not."

  "They call it Angoulême," he said. "Those who live beneath the trees are a more ancient and proud people than any of us. They live in the margins. You merely dig for bright sparks within their shadows."

  Her tone grew hard. "You presume we come to dig out our riches and leave."

  "You would prefer it here all your life?"

  "Have you been to the City Imperishable? It's a giant sewer, filled with plotters and counterplotters and superstitious fools all too willing to fight one another for coin or glory. Too many people in too small a space, playing a game for stakes which dried to dust centuries ago."

  "I would not think of it that way." His feet missed the cobbles, his taste buds missed the cook shops. "The plots are politics. No different from what Ikaré was playing at belowstairs. Just writ larger."

  "Ikaré." She gave him a shrewd glance. "He and I were lovers awhile. I think he fears hours spent with me almost as much as he fears hours spent away from me. You, being a dwarf, have inflamed his jealousy beyond reason."

  "And you stay in a hole in the ground with this madman? Picks and axes close to hand, no less."

  "He is not mad, just jealous. There is a difference."

  "Perhaps," said Onesiphorous. "My point still holds. Right here you have plots and counterplots and at least one fool willing to fight. It only takes one."

  She sighed. "In any case, I hoped you would see what I see when I come up here."

  "Beauty?" he asked. "Certainly. The shape of the world? Yes. Something worth fighting for? That is up to you. As for me, I fight for the City Imperishable, which will complete its centuries-long withering if Port Defiance remains in unfriendly hands."

  "Then we understand each other without agreement."

  Onesiphorous had to admire the irony of that. "Much the same relationship I had with your father for a number of years, actually."

  "Blood will tell." She clasped his arm a moment. "Unless you have a deep interest in mining technique, let us go back down and plan your little war."

  He was sorry to step away from the god's eye view of the jungles of Angoulême, but duty called.

  Ikaré packed away his resentments for the discussion. Onesiphorous did not care for the unpleasant little buggerer, but the dwarf was sharp enough.

  "The big claims," Ikaré said, "have twenty-five or thirty working them at the most. The smaller claims like ours number ten or twelve. Much less than that and you can't keep a decent watch."

  "Jade pirates," said one of the pale Sunwarders.

  "People steal your haul?" To Onesiphorous that implied armed men in boats, both of which were in short supply.

  The Sunwarder shook his head. "They are being raiders. Maybe miners who are to be losing everything."

  "Not a big problem," Beaulise added. "But one reason we don't just load up a dory and row for Port Defiance. Also why we don't let the jade pile up here if the shipments aren't going out."

  Ikaré continued. "Over one hundred active claims in a fifty-mile stretch of coast. Average fifteen men per claim. That's a good sized recruiting pool."

  "If we had boats, and weapons, and a workable plan." Onesiphorous wasn't trying to argue against his own goals, but he saw no point in pretense.

  "Oh, there's plenty of boats along the Jade Coast," said the other dwarf. "They just mostly don't belong to us. The plantations have barges and lighters in great strings."

  Onesiphorous knew perfectly well how the plantation men felt about the miners. The South Coast plantations had been the refuge for generations of disgraced families from the City Imperishable. Even many of those at the height of their power maintained winter residences here, as income producing properties and private resorts. "They've got the old money, the servants and field hands
, and the better real estate in Port Defiance. But they've never had any interest in working with your lot."

  The miners all chuckled. "I am to say not," said the dark Sunwarder. "I am to say they think us thieves and foulers of water."

  "Doesn't stop them buying nice pieces off the dock at cutthroat prices," Beaulise added.

  Onesiphorous shrugged. "Doesn't matter how much moss they've got in their hair. The plantation families are still City men. Most with their money managed by City dwarfs."

  "Lord Mayor's mother and brother live up along the Eeljaw," said Ikaré.

  Interesting, thought Onesiphorous. Imago had never mentioned that. He wondered if the Harbormaster or the corsairs knew. "May they stay there," he said. "Tell me, do the plantationers have a legitimate problem with the mines, or just sheer snobbery?"

  Ikaré drew lines on the table with his finger, as if marking a map. "They live deeper in, where the swamp's more of a marsh. Grow indigo, water cotton, tobacco, turkweed, hemp, and rice, mostly. Depends on the drainage, I believe. The thumbs don't stand that far back. We're in a belt near the open ocean."

  Onesiphorous nodded. He'd seen that in the view from above.

  "But . . . " Ikaré made a shorter line cutting across his long lines. "Everything they load and ship out comes past the mines. Most of the thumbs stand in or very near open channels. And the other way around as well."

  The problem remained opaque to Onesiphorous. "So? You're inside, chipping away, waiting for the assay boat from Port Defiance. Their straw bosses pole by outside with a load of indigo. Who even notices?"

  "Plantation men claim we stir up the water rats. Swampers didn't used to attack the barges. Not back in the old days. Since the Jade Rush, they do."

  "Too many people wandering around Angoulême?"

  "Especially the latecomers," said Beaulise. "They go dragging through the swamps looking for smaller hills or islands to dig into. In case there's jadeite down there."

  "Is there?" Onesiphorous asked, thinking of the hints of buildings he'd seen deep inside the shelter of the trees.

  "Who knows? I don't fancy catching a few swamper darts in my neck and dreaming poison frog dreams for the last few hours of my life. Plenty here for us."

  "But not for the people who keep coming."

  "The thumbs go on for a dozens of leagues," said Ikaré. "Most of the way to the Yellow Mountains, actually. We could open a hundred more mines without digging up the swamps. Newcomers with foresight and sense make their way further down the coast."

  "Further from Port Defiance, and with fewer neighbors." Onesiphorous nodded. "I can see why some might get lazy about that."

  Beaulise gestured across Ikaré's imaginary map. "It all fits together."

  Onesiphorous reminded himself that most of the people who'd moved down for the Jade Rush were educated, accomplished citizens looking for better luck. The migration hadn't been a surge of disaffected laborers and peasant farmers at all. Quite the opposite.

  Listening to these people explain their situation to themselves and to him was something of an education in its own right.

  The next morning he stood on the little dock with Beaulise and Ikaré and looked out across the water. Great dark trees loomed perhaps thirty yards to the east.

  "The tide is up?" Onesiphorous asked.

  "Yes," said Ikaré, "though the swamp mostly absorbs it."

  "What's this channel called?"

  "The Honeywood River."

  He had to laugh. "There's water everywhere. How does anyone know this is a river?"

  "No trees in the middle," said Beaulise. "And it's got a current."

  "Fair enough."

  "What it hasn't got," said Ikaré pointedly, "is a boat."

  "Yes." Onesiphorous stared into the shadows. He was certain she would have eyes on him. He couldn't just wave his arms and shout. Beaulise and Ikaré would think him a fool.

  So how to signal for help?

  "I must build a fire here," he said solemnly. It was bunkum, of course, she had asked him for no such thing. But a fire would give them something to do.

  Ikaré snorted. "It's a wooden dock."

  "You've got a mountain of rock back there. Surely we can lay out a hearth. Are you doing anything else today?"

  Imago

  Kalliope burst into his office before the morning bell, awakening the Lord Mayor from a dream of being chased by women with knives where their breasts should be.

  "He is a mad fool!" she shouted, then let off a long string of profanity in Tokhari.

  "He is not the only one," Imago muttered, still webbed in sleep. "Of whom are we speaking?"

  "My brother."

  "Jason. Of course."

  She sat on the edge of the divan and patted his arm. "I am sorry. This place makes me crazed. Too much stone, too much rain, too much coolth. I long for my desert."

  He blinked away sleep. "And so you want to go to the swamps of the Jade Coast? That is hardly an improvement."

  "I want to walk once more among the empty streets of the Red Cities. I am called to follow my crazed brother, who would probably go to every brass hell if you asked him to."

  "I need kava if I am going to have this conversation so early."

  "Oh, I sent the night clerk out," she snapped. Then, more softly: "There's a bakery on Filigree that never closes. Doesn't even have a door anymore. I think they made it into a table. He should be back shortly."

  "For a wild woman of the distant deserts, you are most assuredly a City dweller."

  "Mmm." The intense energy of her entrance seemed to have spent itself.

  "Have you slept at all?" he asked.

  "No. I've been following Jason around the Potter's Field all night."

  "What is he doing?"

  Her voice hitched. "A-asking the dead if they've seen our father."

  "Ah, me. I'm sorry."

  "That's the foolish part," she said. "The mad part is he gets answers. Not the ones he wants, but they talk back."

  "Is he another Bijaz?" Imago asked.

  "No. He's not a miracle worker. More like the consequences of a miracle."

  "Most people would consider forcing a two-hundred-foot fir up through pavement to be a miracle."

  She shrugged. "He is the Green Man of spring. A creature of your time and place. Beyond the Redrock River, we have the jinn. Spirits of the dust and sand, with a hot malevolence. They are the land out of balance. My brother is your land out of balance."

  "But why?"

  "I do not mean the balance of men and their worship, as we fought over last winter. This is the balance of seasons and time, water rising to the sky to fall as rain, the dead being plowed under to fertilize the living. Something is out of place here, badly so."

  "Is that mystical sandwalker wisdom?"

  She found a smile for him. "Actually, yes. Though any noumenal operator could tell you something similar. Including your krewe kings."

  Imago knew something of the balance of force. "Is Jason the cause of imbalance, or an effect of it?"

  "That would be a very, very good question to know the answer to," she said.

  "Perhaps I should not send him away."

  "No." Kalliope pursed her lips, thoughtfully. "Best he go, and I with him. The genius of this place will draw him back if it needs him."

  The door creaked open. The night clerk, a thin man with a balding scalp and a limp, slipped in with two tall, lidded mugs and a steaming basket covered with black cloth.

  "Thank you," said Imago.

  "Lord Mayor." The night clerk bobbed through a half-bow intermittently aimed at both of them. "Ma'am."

  He withdrew. Imago followed the odor of cinnamon. "If you are going downriver," he said, "you'd best be on the South Quay at the morning bell tomorrow. The Tribade has some secret ship, but they are willing to take you two."

  "Do they know it's him?"

  "I do not think that will matter. I have never seen Biggest Sister so upset. I rather imagine she will look a
t his strangenesses as one more plague to visit upon Port Defiance."

  "And several problems solved for you," Kalliope said. "If I were a man, there would have been much more said about me staying on after my army departed. Having a losing general around can't be the simplest thing."

  "Losing general, Tokhari sorceress, and killer of a war hero." Imago watched her eyes.