Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  Kalliope surfaced beside him. "I must be the only Tokhari who can swim," she said, laughing as another fusillade of cannon fire passed overhead.

  "I'm a dwarf who can barely swim," he said. Then: "Why aren't we dead yet?"

  Imago

  This close to him, the Alate did not seem so manlike, but more of a very large bat with feathered wings, barrel-chested and narrow-hipped. It wore only a weapons harness over skin that was shadow-dark in the starlight. The face was narrow, almost human except for eyes like yellow fires with no darkness in their center. The great wings moved like a butterfly's, balancing it as it stood. The Alate reeked of wet bird.

  "Your city is ready," it said in that strange voice. "Let her rise."

  More laughter echoed from the street below.

  "We are beset," Imago said. "Blockaded from the south, our politics turned fatal again, and now monsters come out of the North."

  The Alate considered that. "They are not as you or I."

  A classic political answer. Completely true and utterly useless. Imago knew he must turn around his line of argument or he was lost. "You came to the sound of my bell, yes?"

  "I heard the sound of a score of scores of summers lost."

  He'd take that as a 'yes.' "What did that tell you?"

  No judge sat to accuse him of leading a witness. Of course, Imago didn't know where he was leading this witness.

  The Alate seemed amused. "That you are ready to reach again for what was taken away so long ago."

  "Imperator Terminus took giant wasps?" Surely someone would have made a note of that.

  "They are intramothers. Because you do not understand something does not make it wrong."

  "Destroying people is wrong!"

  That drew a long, slow, yellow-eyed stare. "You wash your cattle before you slaughter them."

  "I wouldn't know." Imago was feeling less and less in control of this conversation. "I've never killed a cow. But I suppose someone must, since I've rarely found mud or fleas in my meat."

  "The fleas might think it wrong. The mud might resent the wash. The cattle most certainly regret the slaughter."

  The Alate's logic was leading to an unfortunate place. "The City Imperishable is ours," he said. "We will defend our home."

  "You have made one error of thought," the Alate replied. "The City Imperishable belongs to itself. You merely live upon its back."

  Imago didn't like that thought either. "The wasps are here to help the City?"

  The Alate nodded.

  "What of you?"

  "We are history," it said, then leapt into the sky.

  Both thoughtful and disappointed, Imago tucked the bell into his coat and went downstairs to see what was becoming of his people.

  The lower hall of the Rugmaker's Cupola was crowded with men and horses. The men, at least, spilled up the stairs, seated or standing on the double spiral. Imago reckoned there must be sixty or seventy people down there.

  The Lord made his way down without announcing himself. Still, they saw him coming. Someone shouted his name, then they took up the old cheer. "Im–a–go . . . Im–a–go . . . Im–a–go . . . "

  Inside the tower, the words rang loud.

  Imago stopped at the first-floor landing and raised his hands for silence. He looked down at the faces peering upward. Dwarfs and full-men, Winter Boys and bailiffs, longshoremen and clerks, Sunwarders and Tokhari and the pale blond City-born—all waiting.

  "Why are you here?" he asked. "This is a night as terrible as any we have known."

  "Because it is a terrible night, your worship," called someone.

  "Yeah, we liked your walls better'n ours," another man added. They all laughed, even Imago.

  One of the bailiffs spoke. "You're the only one who's tried to do right by the City Imperishable. For the sake of the City, nothing more. And you are right, Lord Mayor. This is a terrible night. So we've come to help."

  "I suppose you want to hear my plan," Imago said.

  "By my sweet pickle we do," shouted an anonymous wit.

  "I don't have one . . . " He pointed at them. " . . . yet. There's more here than meets the thought. This is not a noumenal crisis arising from the Limerock Palace, may Dorgau bless the Burgesses with milk from his cherry tit."

  They laughed again. Good, Imago thought. Keep it moving. "I have need of knowing more. Every person with a poppy can venture out on the streets. I need certain things done."

  He held a hand up and tucked down his index finger. "First, I need good men to watch over the Potter's Field. We cannot afford to have some fool burn out the poppies, or cut them down. That will only require a handful of you, but you will need to stand watch in shifts."

  Middle finger. "Second, I need a good count of how many wasp attacks happened today. Also, whether any were outside Terminus Plaza. Ask people, but look at the trees as well. They destroyed the Winter Grove. Chances are good they'd do the same elsewhere. That will take as many as can be spared to canvass the City."

  Ring finger. "Third, I need to know whether there truly are giant wasps somewhere in the City." They murmured at that. "You will need a stout heart and a small imagination for this job, believe me. I thought I saw one, and nearly soiled myself in my fear. They are the size of houses. Did I see but a hallucination? Or is there a nest of them in some empty factory? Perhaps you can make that search as you look for the small wasps."

  Pinkie finger. He was running out. "Last, I need two or three men of discretion to search for my chamberlain, the dwarfess Marelle. I do not think she perished in the attack at the plaza." Hope against hope, he thought. "She may be on Heliograph Hill, in or around the abandoned Footsoldiers' Guild Hall. She may be elsewhere. She has access to ancient records which can show us how best to carry this struggle forward."

  Imago spread his hands wide again. "I name you the Lord Mayor's Own. Every man here tonight will forever be in the first rolls of my company, a name in honor. Now arrange yourselves into squads." He pointed at random. "You, you, you, and you are the leaders," he said, making sure to pick both a dwarf and a bailiff among them.

  The crowd dissolved into excited chatter, comparing weapons and gear and talking of this one's knowledge of certain districts and that one's skill at finding high places to look from.

  Astaro slipped close. "That was being well done, Lord Mayor. Enero would to be proud."

  "Thank you, my friend," Imago replied. "Perhaps I have learned something from your late captain."

  During the small hours of the night men began to trickle back with their reports. A watch was set on the Potter's Field. They used a tumbledown mansion as their post because it had no trees around it. No one was willing to stand outside for any length of time.

  Though rumors were rampant, every wasp attack they'd sought out seemed to have been one or two streets away. No other shattered trees had been found thus far. The City Imperishable was a big place, with many alleys and back gardens, so anything was possible.

  Likewise the giant wasps. Several claimed to have seen them, but it was impossible to set a number or location on the monsters. Imago reckoned if they were in the City Imperishable they were in the Sudgate—he didn't know where else you'd hide something that big that wouldn't be immediately noticed. He decided to hold off on dispatching his new force there.

  One important success came a bit before dawn. A bailiff and two dwarfs, one of whom Imago was certain hadn't been here earlier, arrived with Marelle.

  She looked tired, but not angry. That meant they had not snatched her from some private pursuit. She was also clutching a poppy.

  "I was afraid to go out," Marelle said to Imago. "After I made my way back to the archives. Your men persuaded me to safety."

  "Give your names to Stockwell," he told the three. "I will find you later to commend my special thanks."

  They bowed and scuttled away in an excited little knot.

  "And you?" Imago had not moved from this step in hours. He wasn't sure his knees would let him up just
now.

  "We should retire to your office and speak privately," Marelle said. "There is much to discuss."

  "Good enough." Imago tried to think through what was needed. "I'll tell Stockwell to send men for the papers there. Can you draw a list of what you need? I won't have you on the streets again and again."

  "Yes," she said. "Now come."

  He needed help standing, and it was minutes of agony to climb four flights of stairs, but up they went. Short of wasps at his window, Imago figured they were as safe there as anywhere above the stones. He wasn't quite ready to begin governing from the sewers.

  After a long and somewhat painful pause in the garderobe, he stumbled into his office. Marelle was on his little daybed. Her shirt was open. She wore nothing else, so that he could see the pale hairs of her cunny.

  "Come to bed, you fool," she said.

  He felt silly. "I am afraid I shall fail you badly."

  "I don't mean that. Just for comfort. We can whisper in the dark."

  He undressed and settled in beside her. Imago set his face on her breast and breathed across the pert, pale nipple. His will to speak drained away with the closing of his eyes.

  They made love with day's first light. Not heaving at one another as they had in the costume racks at the Faces krewe house, but rather a tender touching by the dimness, fingers and tongues and the slow crawl of bodies. Marelle held Imago close and crooned to him, then spread so he could lap at her awhile. He did the same, slipping into her mouth, where he came despite his resolve to save himself for more.

  That did not matter. They went on, hoarding morning's first hours for themselves. "Thank you," Imago finally said, his hair plastered to his head. His thighs were slick with both their juices.

  "No, thank you."

  He toyed with her pale hair, touching the crooked scars on her neck. "I thought the wasps had felled you."

  "I ran," she said. "They did not follow, I think because I am of the City. That's what the poppies mean. They see them somehow, as how bees know which flowers have given up their pollen and which have not."

  "But what are these wasps? Where did they come from?"

  "I might have found something," she told him slowly. "I spent my evening in the archives reading on the mysteries of the past."

  "And?"

  "Records are so strange. When people wish to write about a tax assessment, they say something simple. Perhaps the Imperator Loghead declared a fee of one silver obol on all white dogs. Twelve hundred and three assessments were made, and seven imprisoned for resisting the edict. The monies were used to build a new wing on the Imperator's brothel.

  "When people wish to write about something noumenal, outside the realm of edicts and treasures, they seem incapable of using plain language. 'The Imperator Loghead dreamed of a three-headed fish and awoke to find that he had dropsy,' or something of the sort."

  "So what you're saying is when they wrote about giant wasps, the archives don't simply say, 'on seven Octobres, six wasps the size of boats were seen above the City Imperishable.'"

  "Exactly. Instead there's a bunch of jumble about winged history and stone dogs and intramothers."

  Imago felt a chill settle on him. It was as if she were quoting his conversation with the Alate.

  "Listen." He drew her close. "There's something you need to know. That cryptic language of the noumenal may not be so cryptic after all."

  Bijaz

  He backed away, astonished. The Alate looked as he remembered—thin and strange, like a man with the wings of an angel and an advanced case of the crab disease.

  "My pardons," Bijaz told his visitor. "I did not mean to call you down."

  "Yet you did," the Alate replied in a creaking voice made of wind. "The intramothers arrive. The game is near to ending. You must be on the board."

  DeNardo stepped forward, a knife loose in his hand. "This is being a friend of yours, Bijaz?"

  "I believe our new arrival has come to give us all a faster way home," Bijaz said.

  "They are not of the game." The Alate was almost querulous.

  "They are of mine," Bijaz answered. "These three accompany me, or I stay with them."

  Yellow eyes stared impassively. "Dawn," the Alate announced, and leapt into the sky with heavy, slow wing beats.

  "That gets us away from the bear," Bijaz said in the silence which followed. "Unless you would rather walk."

  "Not to be walking," said DeNardo. "Not when there are being other possibilities."

  Amalii grunted agreement. Ashkoliiz just glared at Bijaz.

  He smiled. "You wanted me to summon something, I summoned something."

  DeNardo's teeth gleamed in the darkness. "A boat was being more to the point."

  "You do better." Bijaz lay down and tried to work through how Ulliaa's death shout had been done.

  Dawn brought four Alates. Four huge birds circled above them, hawks on a scale with the giant wasps.

  "We cannot carry you," his visitor from the night before said. "We have brought servants. They may give you fright."

  Another Alate dropped a pile of leather. "Put these to your shoulders. They will carry you as they can."

  "Like a fish in an osprey's talons?" Bijaz asked. He took up pieces of the leather and set them on his shoulders. They hung over the front and back. He wrapped thongs to secure them, then cut them to length with the little knife he'd been given so long ago. DeNardo helped him tie off the thin strips before picking up pads for himself. Amalii followed suit.

  Soon Ashkoliiz stood alone. "I'm not going to do that."

  Not petulant this time, Bijaz realized. Panicked. "Then you will walk home by yourself. And you had best hope no sailors find you, or you'll be swimming home tied to an anchor."

  She snatched up another set of pads and laid them on her shoulders. Before anyone could help her with ties, the birds descended.

  "Mountain teratornis." DeNardo's voice was awed.

  The birds' wingspans were at least forty feet. Their pinions were longer than the height of a man. Dark eyes brimmed with cruel intelligence. Somehow the scimitar-sized claws set to his shoulder did not crush him like so much meat.

  With two great beats of its wings, the teratornis was aloft again. Bijaz dangled. The river beneath him became a silver thread amid a rumpled blanket of brown and green.

  His stomach finally rebelled, spew trailing in a thin, bitter stream.

  They flew all day and into the night. Terror became boring, then numbing. Eventually the birds angled away from the river to cut across the sweeping arc of the River Saltus' course. At some point the joints in his shoulder began to exhibit a remarkable pain. At least that kept his mind off the terrible thirst which had turned his mouth to dry cotton. His eyes were old prunes, and his tongue had become a stiff strip of leather.

  Midmorning the next day, Bijaz glimpsed the River Saltus again. When he realized that the jumbled terrain at a bend in the river's silver-black thread was the City Imperishable, he burst into dry, heaving sobs.

  The teratornis circled downward, escorted by two Alates. He tried to see if the City was intact. People were on the streets. Something had happened to the Winter Grove in Terminus Plaza.

  The Eater of Forests.

  Fear gripped his heart until Bijaz realized that the streets would not be so busy if a plague of monsters had already stripped the City Imperishable.

  He resisted the impulse to wave. The teratornis made for the Rugmaker's Cupola, which was fine with him. After circling the tower, it released him to tumble too far to the rooftop.

  The impact knocked all the wind from Bijaz. His vision bloomed red. He tried to move, then lay quivering, wondering if the Alates and their bird-servants had slain him.

  The three other teratornis circled close. Each was guided by two Alates. A door slammed open. A dozen men with rifled muskets raced across the roof, shouting. They looked to be a mix of Winter Boys and City Men.

  Imago's, surely.

  Bijaz tried to stand. H
e tried to shout "no." They were intent on the sky, raising their weapons for a volley. Bijaz managed to flop like a gaffed mudshark, crawling across the stones, willing the men not to shoot.

  Their freerider leader bawled out, "Ready!"

  He would not get their attention soon enough.

  Bijaz remembered himself and opened his hand to let out a bit of the fire of the sun. Weapon stocks burst into flame. Men cursed as they dropped their muskets. The leader drew a pistol, then stopped with an astonished expression. He opened his mouth to say something when DeNardo fell out of the air between them, the freerider landing flat on his back with a gut-wrenching thump of his head on stone.