Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  Would they climb this, too?

  Bijaz looked south. Somewhere beyond the mountain and prairies lay the City Imperishable, Port Defiance, and the Sunward Sea.

  He wondered how things stood with Onesiphorous. Hopefully his old rival was even now arguing his way through gatherings of the plantation landholders.

  The Northern Expedition formed their usual line, except the vanguard and rearguards were more spread. Bijaz walked with Ashkoliiz, Iistaa the ice bear, Pierce, and one of the Northmen. The men had grown less fearful, but he felt safer among the dangers he knew.

  They cut across the slope toward a darker patch of rock where the pillars in the cliff face bent aside. As they approached, what had initially seemed little more than a shadow resolved to a black plug, then back to shadow.

  A cave.

  Bijaz looked up. He was no judge of mountains, but thousands of feet loomed above. This cavern could not possibly pass completely beneath the peaks.

  Ashkoliiz had mentioned the Imperator Paucius nickel mines.

  Bijaz wished he'd come to trust her more.

  Onesiphorous

  They set a fire using scrap wood, piling vines and leaves to make it smoke. Onesiphorous let the flames burn freely for about an hour before smoldering down to a bed of coals. "I don't know when the Angoumois will come," he told them. "But they will be here." He tried to sound confident.

  He spent the rest of the day sitting watch in the shadows of the entrance where he'd first encountered Beaulise. The Honeywood River brought nothing but the occasional branch. There was no sign of the Angoumois.

  Near dusk the miners came outside to share a few pots of ale. They set their lines as the evening's insects summoned fish to the surface. Ikaré stirred the ashes. Pale plumes rose on the night breeze.

  "Call up any swampers?" he asked with false pleasantry. "Or did all your boats burn upon their beaches?"

  Onesiphorous let that pass. He worried that she wouldn't bother to send someone for him. He worried that he wouldn't find his way upriver to the plantations. He worried that his efforts at fomenting uprising had already reached their peak.

  Most of all he worried that this angry crumb of a dwarf would poison his work. Back home, Bijaz had been the one who tried to find the good in everyone. As far as Onesiphorous was concerned, destructive little buggerers like Ikaré could drown in their own piss.

  Except for the lack of any sign from darkest Angoulême, it would have been a pleasant evening. Beaulise sat on the end of the dock with her knees drawn up, smoking her long clay pipe. The miners rebuilt Onesiphorous' signal fire to cook the sinuous fish they'd pulled from the river. Onesiphorous wouldn't have eaten them, just from their pallid look, but they smelled good.

  The last of sunset stained the west a pale azure. He watched the stars. Even with the fire's glow, little light competed with the diamond brightness above.

  "Quiet," Beaulise said.

  The miners ceased their chatter, except for Ikaré, who drew a breath to protest.

  "Say it and I'll cut your lips off," Onesiphorous hissed.

  Ikaré shot him a dirty look, but held his tongue.

  The sound of rowing echoed off the river. With the noise, they were enveloped in mist.

  Onesiphorous could see little except an orange glow from their fire. Beaulise wasn't even a shape to him. Only Ikaré was close enough to make anything of.

  Another dip of oars. Someone was rowing out in the current. A slow series of scrapes echoed as the miners reached for their weapons.

  "Wait." Onesiphorous barely whispered. "She sends aid to us."

  "Could be corsairs," growled Ikaré.

  The spark of Beaulise's pipe flared. "Icky, I'll hold you while he cuts if you don't shut the hells up."

  Another dip of the oars, closer now.

  "Hello the dock," said a voice. It spoke with the accent of the City Imperishable, rather than the Angoumois that Onesiphorous had been expecting.

  The mist shifted again to open a line of sight onto water shimmering with reflected stars. One of the narrow Angoumois boats glided close. Someone stood in the bow wrapped in a cloak. The pale oval of a face showed in the darkness. "Onesiphorous, old friend."

  The boat slid next to the dock and Jason the Factor stepped up in one smooth motion.

  You're dead, Onesiphorous thought. The man had been a miserable, dried-up walking corpse when last seen.

  This Jason almost glowed. A green fire danced in his eyes. He stood tall.

  He wasn't dead.

  "Jason—" Onesiphorous tried for more, but words seemed to be failing him.

  "Who's your friend?" Ikaré asked nastily.

  A spare woman in leathers climbed out of the boat, graceful enough but not so deft as Jason had been. "He's my brother," she told the dwarf. "Sula ma-jieni na-dja. If you don't know what that means, I suggest you find out before you pick a fight." She glanced around the dock. "Hello, Onesiphorous. You're looking well."

  "Hello, Kalliope." He glanced down at the boat, worried that he would see drowned Boudin with a paddle in his hand.

  Clement stared back with ethereal calm. The swamp-mother was riding behind the Angoumois' eyes.

  "Ma'am," Onesiphorous added. "My thanks."

  The Angoumois nodded, unsmiling, then backed water and paddled into the mists.

  "More mouths," Ikaré said, "but no more boats, I see."

  Jason walked over to the obstreperous dwarf and took his chin in both hands. "Silence is like a garden," he said pleasantly. "Let it grow and you will harvest endless bounty."

  In a moment Ikaré's mouth was filled with a tangle of leaves. Panic flooded his eyes.

  Someone snorted with half-suppressed laughter.

  "It's been a difficult trip," Kalliope said. "I smell fish. May we beg something to eat?"

  With that, the night became normal again. Ikaré noisily spat out the leaves then stamped off into the darkness. The miners made way around the fire, Sidero the dark-skinned Sunwarder reaching up with a wooden plank on which pieces of fish steamed.

  "Here is being some," he said pleasantly. "But you are please to be paying with a story?"

  Licking the last of the fish from her fingers, Kalliope told of the coming and going of the Northern Expedition, and how the Lord Mayor had sent her and Jason south to seek out Onesiphorous and lend aid to the effort of unseating the corsairs in Port Defiance.

  That the Northern Expedition had apparently departed the City Imperishable in both high style and good order was news to Onesiphorous. He couldn't imagine what Imago was about, letting such dangerous foolery pass.

  "In Imperatrix Park?" he asked. "Truly?"

  "With fireworks," said Kalliope.

  "And what happened when the mountebank left?"

  Kalliope shrugged. "She loaded a riverboat full of men and supplies and headed north. Nothing more has been heard. Enero and Imago were quite relieved that the woman took the last of the Tokhari and Yellow Mountain tribesmen with her."

  "Good riddance."

  "Not exactly." She looked uncomfortable. "Imago sent Bijaz on the boat."

  That gave Onesiphorous long pause. What could Bijaz do in the North? He was surprised to find an intense sadness welling up within. "I don't suppose we'll see him again. The North has swallowed armies. A boatload of men following a confidence trickster are scarcely going to prosper."

  Beaulise snapped her clay pipe in half and tossed it in the river. "My father is an old, tired dwarf with delusions of divinity. It was cruelty to send him on such a farce."

  "He is more than you know," said Jason kindly.

  Onesiphorous looked closely at the dead man. "I wager you have come to understand much. What has happened to you?"

  "Bijaz happened to me." Jason extended a hand toward Beaulise. "Believe me when I tell you that your father is growing."

  "He was still better off as an old, tired dwarf," she grumbled.

  "No." Onesiphorous felt the need to defend his former enemy. "I
found him rotting in an alley near the Green Market. He was not better off then. Whatever else the Numbers Men did to Bijaz, they gave him back his spirit." He glanced around at the eager audience of miners. "And I believe we have spoken enough of that worthy dwarf. How did you get down the river and across the swamps of Angoulême to us?"

  "The Tribade sent their turtle," said Jason. "Biggest Sister meant to have her women come to Port Defiance in darkness, sailing beneath the waves. Imago believed that if you yet lived you must not be in port anymore, so we saw no purpose in following their plan. They discharged us at Sandy Banks. We'd planned to walk west over the hills above the swamp country and come down to the plantations from the north."

  "What's a turtle?" asked Sidero. Onesiphorous had been wondering the same thing. Big Sister would have known, before the tide had stolen away her life in corsair chains.

  "A ship which travels on the bottom of the river."

  "They also call it an intramarine," Kalliope added.

  That was an unfortunate thought, given Big Sister's fate. Onesiphorous tried to work out how such a ship could be. "Doesn't it flood?"

  "And so you see why they call it a turtle," said Jason. "It has a shell above and below, with steam screws where the flippers might be."

  "Another wonder of the modern age." Onesiphorous wished he'd had one that morning in Port Defiance. A secret way into the city had a distinct appeal. Especially if he succeeded in raising a broader resistance.

  "Indeed," said Kalliope. "It was a bloody-eyed bunch of women that went down to the port, at any rate. They're looking for one of their own gone missing."

  "Big Sister is not missing, she's dead." Onesiphorous' old misery surged. "I saw her chained to a rock and taken by the tide for the crime of helping me."

  "Ah, my friend," said Jason. "I am sorry."

  "A boy died with her. Nephew of your boatman. For the same crime, though he didn't understand the chances he took."

  "I also am sorry, my friend," Kalliope told him. "The Tribade will doubtless make every effort to foster their regrets. Perhaps that is a measure of consolation."

  "I too plan to foster as many regrets as I can." Onesiphorous' heart was leaden.

  "The boatman was strange." Jason looked thoughtful. "Almost noumenal."

  Onesiphorous nodded. "He was a horse. For her, the mother-queen of Angoulême."

  "In the deserts we call that eyes-of-the-sand," Kalliope said quietly. "So the genius of the world can see within each soul."

  Onesiphorous wondered if Clement was just a horse, or if some deeper geas had been laid upon the man in punishment. The Angoumois had certainly expected to meet his doom at her hands.

  "You didn't walk west," he said, prompting a return to their tale.

  "No. A mute boy met us as we climbed the banks." Kalliope stared at her hands in the light of the rising moon. "He was soaking wet, though he came down from above. A sword cut gaped on his shoulder, untreated. He gave me a gold obol, freshly struck from the mint at the City Imperishable. It was wrapped in seaweed."

  "I am something of an expert on being dead." Jason didn't even look at his sister-murderess. "This boy was not with the living. His wound was neither healed nor corrupted."

  "Boudin," Onesiphorous told him. "The drowned boy. I paid his fare to the Sea King to buy him back from drowning."

  "On purpose?" Kalliope asked.

  "No. Not at all." He added miserably: "I know better, believe me."

  "He did not seem in torment." She reached toward Onesiphorous, then dropped her arm as he made no response. "The boy led us by quiet paths to a little bay. A narrow boat was there. He took us into the swamps, where he slid over the side." She paused. "He did not come up again."

  "No," said Onesiphorous. "I don't expect he would."

  "We paddled on, though neither of us had the trick of it. After a while we met that big man who brought us here. It was a night and a day through the swamp, but he never stopped. We saw many fires, but did not approach them. Our boatman said not a word to us the entire journey."

  "No wonder you were starved," Beaulise said. "Two days with the rats and their magicks, and no food."

  "Angoumois," said Onesiphorous. "They are Angoumois and their swamps are called Angoulême." She was owed respect.

  Jason nodded. "The bones of a proud and ancient kingdom lie beneath those spreading shadows. They were rulers of wave and water long ago, when the City Imperishable was nothing but a shepherd's hut near the river."

  "Rats, Angoumois. It makes me no matter at all." The dwarfess waved off their objections. "They can sit amid their proud history and dream of better times for all I care. But they've burned our boats and attacked mines. They're trouble."

  "Listen." Onesiphorous' anger rose. "You can wish us all to Dorgau's brass hells. And when everything is settled, I'll pay the bar tab and stand to take your blows. But now . . . " His voice dropped to a growl. "Now we need to take on the corsairs, throw down the Harbormaster, restore trade between the City Imperishable and Port Defiance, restart the assay boat runs, and put the world back in order. If we fail at that, everyone loses. The mines, the plantations, the swamps, the City Imperishable. Dwarfs everywhere lose.

  "Ikaré can keep his anger, I want his clever tongue. You can hide forever from your father, but I want your sensible thinking.

  "Every last one of you needs to pull together, or we'll all wither and die. Some chained to rocks, some broke and starving, some old and regretful in distant ports. But we're done if we don't find common cause."

  He stopped, out of breath and out of purpose. Anger drained as suddenly as it had risen.

  Ikaré walked out of the deeper shadows, clapping slowly. "You should have been a politician. No, wait, you were. Or at least a rabble rouser." The dwarf turned to his fellow miners. "Consider this rabble of one to have been roused. When it's all over, I'll be pleased to take my swing at mister City dwarf here. But we haven't seen an assay boat in weeks. Even if they start anew, I can't think that them now running Port Defiance will show any more kindness toward us than they have to anyone else that's crossed their path."

  He turned again, stepping past the coals to jab Onesiphorous in the chest. "So I won't like you, dwarf. But I'll heed you when it's sensible, and challenge you when I think you're wrong. Follow you, no. But I'll go where you're going, 'til the cause is lost or I can finally take that swing at you."

  Onesiphorous grabbed Ikaré's finger. "You can take me on, then, dwarf, but only if you hold to your word."

  "Fair enough."

  They glared at each other, two wrestlers just stepped back from a bout of shoving.

  "Then get my friends here fed and bedded down," Onesiphorous said. "Tomorrow we'll plan our moves. Clement will be back. The Angoumois can take us over the water wherever we decide to go."

  The miners headed within. Sidero dipped a bucket and poured more water on the hearth.

  Onesiphorous looked up to see a spray of shooting stars. Ice, it was said, fell from the heavens. He wished Bijaz a sound journey in the North, though he had little reason to hope for such a thing.

  He was the last man in. One of the miners waited with an iron rod to bar the door. "Good night, bull baiter."

  "They call me the Oarsman," Onesiphorous replied with a smile.

  Imago

  Marelle returned with a new set of despatches. "Would it be wrong of me to have someone killed so that I could keep my office?" he asked her.

  "That Fidelo fellow? Enero says he's hiding in the Limerock Palace. They're putting it about that you've sworn to finish the job you started yesterday."

  Ah, thought Imago. "So you've checked."

  "Of course."

  "You have a lot of experience," he said cautiously. "What's your interpretation?"

  "The Assemblage can amend its own prior acts. By extension in its role as the collective proxy for Imperator Terminus, it can also amend prior acts of Imperators past. I don't think you have a basis of formal challenge, though
it is probably worth your effort to pursue that route as a form of negotiation."

  "Were you ever an attorney?"

  "An archivist," she said. "And stop treating me like I'm old."

  "But you . . . " Imago's voice trailed off.

  "No." Marelle's tone was dangerous. "I've lived a long time. I'm not old. Do I look old?"