Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  "Not at all," Imago said quickly. "Frankly, I'd expected you to come back changed." If you came back at all.

  "Jason was persuasive."

  "I certainly hope so. I've sent him south with his sister to look into Onesiphorous' fate."

  "Not so wise." She bit her lip. "He is of this place, you know."

  "I am of this place," snapped Imago. He paced. "Irrevocably. And if this place wants him, it will bloody well call him back. The City Imperishable has a way of doing that."

  "My life, in a word," Marelle said. "And I believe the City Imperishable wants you in charge. If the Assemblage of Burgesses were capable of running things, they'd still be doing so. If the City wants you as Lord Mayor, you'll stay Lord Mayor."

  "You speak as if the City were a very large dog. It doesn't have thoughts or dreams."

  Marelle smiled again, wicked this time. "What are the gods sleeping beneath the streets, but the dreams of the City? What are you and Bijaz, but thoughts molded to their purpose and set back into the world?"

  "Jason, too," Imago muttered.

  "Jason, too." She patted his arm. "You will still be here when the Limerock Palace has been razed to a grassy field."

  "What of you? The City Imperishable has kept you around for a very long time."

  "If you are one of its ideas," she said, "I am part of its memory. Both more and less than the sum of myself."

  He wanted to comfort her, but that road was already closed. Imago fell back on business. "So you think I should ignore the Burgesses?"

  "No. You must argue them out of this foolishness. How long will we have before things go badly wrong?"

  "Around the end of the spring the economy will give out," Imago admitted. "Trading houses and banks already keep short hours, or shutter on certain days. Without the ships from the Sunward Sea, the river trade is drying off. The lumber trade won't make the trip if there's no market to sell at. Soon we will be reduced to eating our own crops and buying our own goods. That is not enough. The only bright spot of the moment is our shortage of skilled clerks has eased, due to a decline in work for them."

  She shook her head. "So you have solved the unemployment problem for any dwarfs from Port Defiance. Everything else is in abeyance."

  Imago spread his hands in helplessness. "I asked Bijaz to head north and Onesiphorous to investigate the south. The letters I send to Port Defiance go unanswered, my couriers do not return. I cannot tell if the corsairs mean to starve us out or mount an attack in our weakness. Without forces of my own, or the means to hire them, I am stuck waiting for an offer."

  "And what have the Burgesses done?" she asked.

  "Passed an election reform act aimed at unseating me."

  "Then don your chain of office and go rally them. Offer to resign if they fail to respond."

  "I can't resign," he said. "We'll call the Old Gods back again if we let the Lime-rock Palace take command. That was the lesson of Prothro. At the same time I have to find an answer which does not raise me too high."

  "Maybe you're asking the wrong questions." Marelle's voice was patient. "Have you gone to see the Card King? Remember what we are? He does."

  Dwarfs. Priests, once, to the gods that Imperator Terminus had carried away. Those days had been lost even to memory, that the suffering of the dwarfing box was a sacrifice to the City Imperishable and its blood-drenched stones. Imago had rediscovered this beneath the flint knife of the Little Man when he tried to battle the Imperator Restored.

  "Go," she said gently. "You are nothing sitting in your office. You are everything walking the streets."

  Everything, he thought, including a target for that buggerer Wedgeburr.

  Still, he stood and took up his chain of office, donned the cleaner of his jackets, and thanked her. "I shall go walk a bit," he said, "as I once did. The City will speak to me."

  "And its paperwork will speak to me." She kissed him on the nose. "Now go."

  He forced his guards to follow on foot at a discreet distance. Imago wanted to make his own way through the streets just as he had when he was nothing more than a citizen, hard on his luck and working for his next obol.

  The Rugmaker's Cupola was something of a prison, he realized. Comfortable, distracting, but always with walls around him.

  First he walked north, to Filigree Street, then along to the Root Market. Imago avoided the streetcars. They seemed to be running behind anyway. No surprise that, as an unusual number of large carts were in the road.

  No edge of panic hung in the air. This end of the City Imperishable was never as crowded as the Sudgate districts or the area around Terminus Plaza, so Imago did not have to push his way along. Instead he walked slowly and just watched. Jason had once talked of listening to the City—Imago tried to see with his ears as well as with his eyes.

  Three boys playing cock-a-hoop, chasing an iron wheelband off a small cart. Each had a stick. "Bijaz, Bijaz, dead as a nail," they chanted. "Raised up my sister by his long shirt tail."

  A Northern woman, carrying a tray of cardamom buns from some southern bakery, hawking them for three chalkies each.

  A double handful of drovers with their morning beer, dicing against the lip of a stone horse trough. "Double the dwarf," one shouted as Imago passed, but they were not looking at him. "Three says he'll never climb," another answered. They laughed as the dice clicked again.

  Passing a little fruit stand redolent with the odor of early berries and a few melons, a tired woman's voice saying, " . . . fool ran away on that steamboat. Her bear will eat them all, mark my . . . "

  The City was being itself. The financial difficulties of the syndics and the factors and the waterfront did not mean so much in this part of the City Imperishable. These people would begin to suffer when the manufactories shut down for lack of contracts for finished goods. Then there would be less money for rolls and fruit and sidewalk games.

  He passed into the Root Market. Great piles of potatoes were in from winter storage. Imago wondered if that was panic selling or good business.

  There were rutabagas as well, reeking of soil and stacked twice as high as he was—had been. Kitchen carts from all over the City Imperishable threaded through the pyramids of tan and brown and gold. This was his city. He'd loved it as a man, and he loved it as Lord Mayor.

  Imago sat on an overturned half-butt. He'd seen no one reading broadsheets here—a pursuit of dockside idlers and the self-important.

  "You buying or trying?" asked a gruff voice.

  Imago looked around to find a squat man in a dirt-stained apron. The moon face was a City-born classic. This man's family had probably been selling potatoes here when the legendary Imperator Osric had first declared himself.

  "Resting weary feet," Imago said. "My pardons." He gave a slight nod to the two Winter Boys trying to appear casual near a stack of something long and purplish-white.

  "Mine, too." The potato seller puffed out a great breath. "I figured you dwarfs was always busy."

  "Sometimes a man needs a minute." Imago smiled. "I'd buy, but I'm not sure what I'd do with a potato or two."

  The man laughed. "As I sells by the twentyweight, you'd have to do it with a lot more than two." He reached under his apron. "You smokes?"

  "No. Never found that habit."

  "Filthy, it is," the man agreed. He struck a lucifer match against his shoe and lit a fat, hand-rolled cigarette. The odor was sweet and light, not the tobacco Imago was used to in bars. "'M Gordon Huxford," the potato seller said around his cigarette.

  "Imago."

  "Same as him that's Lord Mayor?"

  "Yes. Or was." Imago couldn't help but try his luck. "I heard the Burgesses cast him out."

  "Eh, they's all the same. Takes your money and sends around a boy to shill for sewer cleaning and it's always too long to fix the cobbles."

  "You won't miss him?" Imago was vaguely disappointed.

  "He does well enough, I reckon, but so will the next fellow."

  Imago rose, half-bowed.
"Thank you for your time."

  Gordon tossed something at him. Imago barely caught it. His reflexes had never recovered from what the Old Gods had done to him.

  It was a potato.

  "You don't look like a man in need of twentyweight," Gordon told him, "but anyone can throw one of them in a fire and get some decent eating."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Walking away, he wished he had mayoral kitchens so he could send the man business. A citizen untroubled enough to think anyone in charge might do a decent job was what the City Imperishable needed more of.

  Bijaz

  They stopped before a cavern shaped like an inverted vee. The base was thirty yards wide. The stone showed the marks of tools and blasting.

  "Behold the lower entrance to the mines," Ashkoliiz said quietly.

  Bijaz thought that over. "So we climb up through a passage within the guts of the mountain, lady? Forage will be scarce." He didn't fancy miles in the dark, either.

  "There is a lift, godling. Though you perhaps could fly up the shaft like a thistledown."

  The others laughed. Bijaz resolved once more to keep his own counsel.

  Darkness was not so bad, marching with a hundred jostling men. Ashkoliiz had forbidden torches, for the sake of the bad air, but they carried lanterns.

  Soon their tunnel broke out into a great bubble beneath the mountains. The lower ends of the mining operation were here.

  Wooden beams broader than Wee Pollister's shoulders gleamed black. Thick metal braces showed the patina of age. The lift was a platform about six yards square, large enough to accommodate three dozen men with supplies. It was secured by great chains to a set of metal cables threading up into the darkness.

  He could not identify the power source. This place was centuries old. No steam engine would have survived down here unmaintained.

  "I require a volunteer from the men," Ashkoliiz said quietly. "To climb to the base of the shaft and throw open a great valve there. It is controlled by a bronze handle wrapped in rotten leather."

  "And this will make the lift go?" asked Pierce.

  "Yes. The engineers of the old empire diverted an underground river to power the platform. The control links are long gone, except below at the source."

  "How will he get up?" Bijaz asked. "Can the valve be set in place?"

  "That is why I require a volunteer." Her voice was patience itself. "One who is none too thoughtful, or perhaps pines for a life of solitude in the high country. We will not likely be returning to the City Imperishable by this path."

  Bijaz had a brief, crazed notion to set himself to the task.

  He went up with the first party to secure the top of the shaft. Wee Pollister commanded the platform, along with two dozen of his heavies, a scattering of the light troops and one of the Northmen.

  Ashkoliiz stayed below. This was a machine which had spent the last four centuries rotting in the dark, after all.

  Arcus and Orcus had volunteered to go down the shaft and hold open the hydraulic valve. Ashkoliiz had been almost resentful, as if she was somehow being cheated by them, but acquiesced when faced with a lack of competing volunteers. Bijaz hoped that the twins could make their way back down the mountain again to the River Saltus and home.

  The platform swayed and shuddered as it rose. The men stood with weapons ready. Bijaz was far more practical, sitting down at the center.

  He wondered how far they would ascend. Possibly a mile, from what had been discussed. Even though they had lanterns with them the shaft walls were nothing but glittering darkness.

  Oddly, while the lift rose within a squared frame, the shaft itself was roughly hexagonal in cross-section. That seemed less than logical as an engineering decision. He was unsure what natural process would create something so regular and deep.

  The platform groaned, a deep noise accompanied by a popping twang from the cables. Bijaz became aware of a pattering sound.

  He stuck out his hand.

  Something small and pale wafted into his palm.

  Snow? he thought. In here? He looked at the little flake closely.

  It was raining tiny bits of paper.

  Bijaz stared up the shaft. The lanterns vaguely lit a descending flurry of shreds. Some seemed brown or black or gray.

  Paper, in a hexagonal shaft. He had a sudden, horrible vision of being trapped inside a hive with bees the size of ships.

  "We have to get back down, right now," he told Wee Pollister in a low whisper.

  The big man stared at Bijaz as his jaw worked in gelatinous thought. That millstone voice rumbled into motion. "No way back."

  A paper chunk the size of Bijaz's chest landed next to him. It was brown and shiny.

  "Then draw your swords, by Dorgau's cherry nipple!" the dwarf shrieked. "Flame and blade up high. We're about to meet something very, very bad."

  The lantern light began to reveal a shiny mass blocking the shaft above them. The platform continued to shake, moving upward far too fast.

  They were going to be crushed.

  "To arms," Wee Pollister shouted. "And fire a volley so's them below knows there's trouble!"

  The platform crashed into the paper wall with the inevitability of a toppling building. Bijaz pressed himself flat, face buried in the crook of his arm to trap some air. The paper pushed down tightly against him as the curses around him were muffled. The platform bucked hard.

  Everything stank of rot and acid and a smell like old crab legs, a nose-wrecking reek, bad as a urine vat behind a papermaker's shop

  Bijaz kept his face hidden and sobbed his fear. He should have stayed below and worked the valve. He could have walked home, or at least died in the open air. He could have done anything besides be crushed by this—

  They broke through with a great tearing noise. All lights had been snuffed. Though the lift continued to rise, the advance party was in absolute darkness now.

  There were no gleaming eyes. There was no heavy strain of wet breath. But he could hear faint clicking. A woman's heels on distant cobbles. Or a carnie counting the rubes. Anything, that clicking could be anything at all.

  "Little god," said Wee Pollister in a slow and heavy voice. His millstones seemed nearly ground to dust. "Do you live?"

  "Yes?" Bijaz whispered.

  "Do something, little god."

  The Northman hissed in his sliding, strange language—a prayer or a spell.

  "Wh-what would you have of me?" Bijaz asked.

  The clicking grew louder.

  "Light, for the love of all the hells," wailed a different voice, before breaking into a shriek that quickly ended in a muffled thump.

  The clicking stopped at that outburst. The only sound was the chains clanking. A breeze stuttered, that might have been made by the fanning of great wings.

  "Are you sure you want light?" Bijaz asked.

  His only answer was a whimper.

  The clicking resumed. Bijaz withdrew to the wheat field. The golden light there had dimmed to gray. The reaper stood close by, scythe on one shoulder, dark cloak billowing.

  Bijaz found himself using fingertalk. is the apple tree ready to fall? Meaning: Is it my turn to be harvested?

  The reaper reached into the clouds and broke off a fragment of the sun. He handed Bijaz a brilliant jewel that smoked and burned. The dwarf turned it in his closed hand.

  His fist glowed a faint red, like a candle held behind an arras. When he started to open it, white light streamed between his fingers. The shapes around him caught his breath flat, so Bijaz tightened his grip once more.

  Bijaz wondered once again what price he paid for the visits to the wheat field. Kalliope might have been able to tell him, but he hadn't thought to ask.

  The air was even closer and more stale. The acrid paper smell sharpened. Bijaz cupped his hands and gazed up. Armor clinked as every man on the platform looked with him.

  Another wall, combed and dripping. Great pale shapes the size of cattle were tucked close within gigantic hexagons. T
heir guide cables ran into scabbed orifices at the comb boundaries.

  The lift was about to drive them into a wall of grubs.

  "To arms once more," shouted Wee Pollister. "Make a flame, little god!"

  Bijaz opened his hand wide and tried to recall exactly how the reaper had broken off a piece of the sun.