Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  Onesiphorous

  One of the corsair ships exploded with a blinding white light. Onesiphorous clutched his board as air pressure slapped him hard. A surge of water was close behind, followed by a burning rain of splinters and shards.

  Even as he was swamped in the resulting chop, his vision returned sufficiently to see that the blast had left two other black ships afire. Now would be an excellent time for his little fleet to attack the Flag Towers. Unfortunately, in the sinking of the Xanthippe D., he'd lost his control of the battle.

  A rowboat pulled up next to him. "Ahoy," said Pottle, reaching down to help Onesiphorous over the side.

  The dwarf landed heavily. "Where are those steamships?"

  "About a hundred yards behind us," Pottle said grimly. "They're holding fire, giving the black ships a chance to surrender."

  "And Kalliope?" He felt a surge of panic. "She was right here with me in the water."

  "I don't know." Pottle sounded pained. "All of mine are accounted for, including the three killed in the fight." He gave Onesiphorous a long look. "That'd be Ben Boals, Ghibli the Brown, and Cornelio Rensi. They died for you today, dwarf."

  "For me, for Port Defiance, and for the City Imperishable. Now let's find my general."

  They circled the black water. "Don't be calling out," Pottle warned in a low voice. "The sound will carry. Someone might decide to investigate with a bullet."

  Xanthippe D. hadn't gone down yet, but she was turned turtle. Water around her hissed as the boiler lost its final head.

  Pottle's oarsmen stayed wide of the hull, everyone scanning carefully for a bobbing head or a floating body. Light gleamed from Port Defiance as windows opened and walkways became crowded.

  "Where is she?" Onesiphorous felt a tightness in his chest. She'd been right beside him.

  "I don't know." Pottle had forgotten his own injunction to silence. "And if they start shooting again, we're pulling right smartly for a dock. I won't stay out here under another barrage."

  Three long whistle blasts echoed from one of the victorious steamships. The new vessels began closing without more firing. Signal bells rang from the corsairs. They were answered in turn by a more complex sequence of whistles.

  "They're using night code," Pottle said.

  "Do you understand it?" Onesiphorous asked.

  "No." Despite his words, Pottle cocked his head to listen. "Never needed it on Xanthippe D. It's a habit of them who sail the Sunward Sea."

  Of course the steamers were from one of the Sunward navies, Onesiphorous realized. They had to be, if they were truly Silver's. He focused himself on the trouble at hand. "Could someone else have picked up Kalliope? What about the turtle?"

  "Who would have? Either she got swept further away than you, or she's joined my three." Pottle sighed. "Good thing you paid the fare. Davey, Banco, get us to a dock."

  Onesiphorous watched the dark water as they rowed away from the ever-settling Xanthippe D. Kalliope was in the water there somewhere. He just didn't know what else to do.

  The steamships cruised past at dead slow, approaching their prizes. The rowboat was far enough away to avoid being swamped by their wake, but one of the steel prows tore through the assay boat.

  "She was a good little vessel," said Pottle quietly.

  He had nothing to offer the captain.

  The ships continued their negotiations by whistle and bell, until the steamers had closed on their quarry. The vessel with the treed mast had survived, Onesiphorous noted. Let them make sense of that.

  "They's someone on the dock, sir," whispered one of the sailors.

  Kalliope! he thought.

  But it was an old woman in a rocking chair, knitting. A glistening white trunk extended from her back and over the dock's edge into the waters. It was covered with tiny, questing hairs that rippled like grass in the wind.

  One of the oarsmen threw up over the side.

  "She's a friend of mine," Onesiphorous told them. "Queen of Angoulême."

  The old woman laughed, her voice clear even from a distance. "He means I'm the swamp-mother, but he's too smitten to say it of me. Land me my dwarf, boys, then scuttle off if it please you."

  They rowed slowly toward the dock again. "You are not from the Sea King?" Pottle's voice quavered.

  "That old goatfish? No, he and I was done back when your people still be picking lice from your hairy backs." She put down her needles. "Though you done made him good offerings this night."

  The captain sat a little prouder. "Three men, a woman, and my ship."

  So he believed Kalliope was lost. Onesiphorous found himself close to tears.

  "You got no idea what you fight for, ah?"

  "This dwarf of yours," Pottle replied. "The port. And the City Imperishable." The rowboat bumped up against the dock.

  She cackled. "You smarter than you look. But I not so sure you take your own meaning."

  Pottle boosted Onesiphorous up the ladder. The dwarf was surprised to discover how stiff his joints were. Atop the dock he looked down. "You coming?"

  "With her? All respects, madam, but I must rejoin the rest of my crew."

  "Good cess and fine sail to you, Captain." She winked. "You got my gratitude for to return my dwarf unharmed."

  Pottle urged his men away. Onesiphorous watched them go. "So I'm your dwarf, now? I belong to the City Imperishable, you know."

  "I know more than you 'bout that," she snapped. "My laying claim to you don't hurt you none in these parts. It don't matter up the river so far from Angoulême."

  "Where is Kalliope?"

  "I took her scent one time," the queen said absently. "That mean I should always find her again. Her brother, he be on that sloop, fat with sap and growing into the boards of the hull. You with me, wishing you anywhere else. Your woman . . . I do not know, little City man."

  "So she's dead?"

  "Oh, usually I got no trouble sniffing out the dead." The needles started up again. "Plenty of 'em in the Flag Towers tonight. Shouldn't ought to have chained my grandson to rock, they shouldn't."

  "The fire dancers," Onesiphorous said.

  "I have servants aplenty, they both steadfast and true. You don't pass through so many years like me without loyalty growing deeper than blood."

  Onesiphorous figured that was all the answer he was going to get. His practical side was reawakening. "I'm here now. What would you of me? Otherwise I shall go and search further for Kalliope."

  The swamp-mother gave him another long, slow look. "If I cannot smell her, you cannot find her. Trust in me."

  "Then what is on your mind?"

  "Your City need you," she said. "Need you now. The intramothers be arriving. People will be fools in they panic. Take that tree man back up the river quick as you can."

  "Jason? You said he's in the sloop."

  "Yes. Someone must tow him, ah. No sailor would press canvas on that boat now."

  "Has he become a monster?"

  "Become?" She cackled again. "All men are monsters born and bred. He has become what he could be, that all." She paused thoughtfully. Then: "Go. Now. While there still be time."

  With that she folded again. Her face went slack, body, dress, and rocking chair absorbed into a huge fleshy flower which slid backward off the dock.

  Someone leaned from a balcony. "Are you that City dwarf?"

  He looked up, baffled by far too much, and fell back on an old formulation. "Onesiphorous of the City Imperishable, Chamberlain to the Lord Mayor Imago of Lockwood, come to rally the dwarf refugees."

  "You'd best go quick. The short-butts are killing each other in the Flag Towers."

  Imago

  He and Marelle had finished cross-referencing what they knew. Their notes were a mess, and no less cryptic than what they'd thought before.

  Stockwell burst in, sweating with excitement. "The roof is under attack!"

  Imago stepped into the hall. A cluster of Winter Boys and the Lord Mayor's Own were packed around the narrow stair to the
rooftop. They had pistols and rifles. Someone was yelling down from above.

  A freerider spotted him across the open well of the tower and shouted, "Bijaz is being here!"

  Marelle broke into a run around the circumference of the balcony. Imago stumped along close behind. The defenders opened a path for them. Imago trembled with excitement as he scrambled up the ladder.

  He burst onto the roof to see a flight of large birds spiraling away, pursued by sparrows. No, he realized, those sparrows were Alates, and the birds were bigger than anything he'd ever seen fly. Even the giant wasps.

  Imago trotted past a pile of smoldering metal toward a knot of men. "I think he's dead, too," someone said.

  The Lord Mayor pushed in. They surrounded a small, dark-complected man—one of the Northerners.

  "Where's Bijaz?" he demanded.

  "Near the edge."

  Imago ran to the old dwarf's side and dropped painfully to his knees.

  Bijaz was emaciated, his face sun-scarred. His right hand seemed to have been burned. Leather pads were roped to his shoulders over ragged clothing bleached by heat and ill-use.

  "Was he left in the desert to die?" Imago asked.

  "Don't know," said one of the men. "Some damned big birds dropped them all here." He met the Lord Mayor's eye a moment. "They bounced."

  Imago turned to Marelle. "Have Stockwell send for that Tribade doctor." His fingers brushed Bijaz's face. "Who else was returned to us?'

  "Just being four," Astaro answered. "DeNardo, Bijaz, one of the Northmen, and that woman Ashkoliiz."

  "Are they all like this?"

  Astaro shrugged. "They are being too long without food or water, I am thinking. We are working to save DeNardo."

  Of course they are. Imago suppressed a hot surge of anger. Some scrap of wisdom kept his mouth shut.

  He checked the others. Ashkoliiz seemed to be asleep. DeNardo had cracked his head on the stone. Someone brought blankets from below to wrap the injured. Imago sat on the carillon's platform, waiting in silence until the Tribade doctor appeared. The woman had Biggest Sister at her side.

  Even they carried poppies. Somehow he hadn't expected the Tribade to need the flowers.

  "Clear them all off," the doctor growled. "Except his worship."

  With a glare from Biggest Sister, the Lord Mayor's Own found business inside the tower. Imago beckoned Astaro and Marelle to stay with him.

  The doctor flipped back each set of blankets. After she finished examining Bijaz, her last patient, she looked up at Imago. "What in the hells have you done to these people? If I move them, they will die." The doctor shook her head. "I need thick-walled tents, good furnaces within, and a great deal of water.

  "Biggest Sister, please send for my large battle bag, and have Willa come with at least two of the Red Sisters." She stopped, thought for a minute. "You realize, your worship, that the return of these people is no more a secret than this morning's sunrise?"

  Imago took her point. "Rumors are not our worry now. I'll keep the leeches away."

  "You do that," she said harshly. "As you value their lives, get what I need, now!"

  Back inside the tower, Stockwell had a broadsheet. "See here, sir." His voice trembled as he thrust the paper at Imago.

  Imperishable Information, a masthead he hadn't seen before. The headline was new, too. Lord Mayor Fidelo Declares Amnesty. No printer's bug indicated where it had been run up. The broadsheets had been shut down since his arrest.

  The story was breathless.

  It is the right pleasure of Lord Mayor Fidelo, elevated by grace of the Burgs.s, to offer an amnesty to all who supported the Pretender Lockwood in the late unpleasantness, viz. the survivors of the Krewe of Faces, any clerks who served in the Pretender's attempt at governance, Tokharee or dwarffs misguided by their tribal leaders, or others who have stood in unlawful opposition to the Burgs.s and their rightful appointees in the governance of the C. Imperishable and all its citizens, residents, and subjects.

  The LM Fidelo further condemns the Pretender for his criminal negligence in summoning the recentmost plague of gigantic insects and their raptors upon the C. Imperishable, and enjoins the felon from further such acts on pain of trial for his life. Neither dwarf nor man, the Pretender is a salacious and venal fellow whose ways with words have misguided the affairs of our Citizens.

  It is the opinion of this Editor that the Pretender should be brought to justice for his crimes to date. Should a committee of citizens spontaneously assemble for this purpose, Imperishable Information would be pleased to donate the rope.

  Glory to the City! Glory to the Lord Mayor Fidelo! Glory to the Burgs.s!

  "Well, that was wonderful," Imago said. "I believe I shan't visit the Limerock Palace any time soon."

  "There was no mention of First Counselor Wedgeburr," Stockwell offered.

  "No matter. This is an effort to incite riot against me. No one outside the Limerock Palace would have the nerve."

  A bailiff barged through the door. No, Imago corrected himself, one of the Lord Mayor's Own. They'd found silk poppies to wear as badges.

  "Lord Mayor! There's a steamship come up the river from Port Defiance. They are docking at the Old Lighter Quay."

  Imago called for Astaro, then remembered the freerider was up on the roof. "Round up a mount for me, and a guard," he told Stockwell. "I must speak to that captain personally."

  The fast steam packet had already tied up when they made the river. A squad of bailiffs was there, several Burgesses in their midst, trapped by a shoving crowd. People thrust money toward the crew in a desperate attempt to garner news of loved ones.

  Imago was pleased that the crowd opened a lane for him. He waved to the bailiffs as his little pony picked its way among shouting faces.

  A pudgy officer with a walrus moustache waited at the rail with a pistol in each hand. Clearly no one had yet come on or off his ship.

  The officer spotted Imago. "Are you the Lord Mayor?"

  "Yes!" Imago realized one of the men with the bailiffs had been Fidelo. Thank Dorgau he'd gotten through first. "Is the blockade lifted?"

  "I don't know." The officer signaled to someone behind him, then covered his ears. Taking the hint, Imago covered his own just as the steam whistle shrieked like the damned.

  In the stunned silence which followed, the officer leaned over the rail to speak quickly. "A naval battle was joined between the corsairs and a fleet of small boats. Captain Fairmond cast off and drove us up the Saltus overspeed. Last we heard was a new set of guns as a third fleet entered the battle."

  "Who was fighting?" Imago shouted as the babble around him resumed.

  "We don't know!"

  Imago nodded and pulled his pony back. The officer began selling tickets for a run back to Port Defiance, at ten times the pre-blockade price. Unguaranteed return fares went for ten times that.

  Imago nodded to his men, then pointed at the advancing bailiffs. The horsemen bulled through the crowd and into the line of redcoats.

  Fallen Arch was with them, looking rather drawn. The rat Fidelo rode alongside, and another man Imago did not know.

  "I see you have brought your pretender with you," Imago said.

  Fallen Arch nodded, disgust upon his face. Fidelo yelled over the crowd noise: "We are the Right Honorable Lord Mayor."

  "Run back to the palace and play with Wedgeburr. He likes to torture Lords Mayor."

  Fallen Arch grimaced. "The recent First Counselor is, so to speak, recent. I have that honor once more." Faced with an increasingly hostile crowd, the bailiffs began hustling their charges away.

  Wedgeburr's support in the Burgesses must have collapsed, Imago realized. Imago would not have expected the man to survive a shift in power, not with all the trouble he had caused.

  Bijaz

  He'd never before been this far from the reaper man. The wheat field was as long as the hills of the Saltus basin. The sky was dull, day-bright but innocent of sun or cloud.

  The reaper
man walked the far end of the field, scythe rising and falling. Bijaz watched awhile before realizing he saw a pattern. The wheat had been cut to form a giant, rounded hex.