Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  "Your City Imperishable, ssardali. Vile. Like water monitor raised in barrel, eat her children."

  "Ssardali? What happened to 'everybody pay price'?"

  "Everyone still complain about cost. Is to be human, eh?"

  "Yes, I suppose." He stared at the water. The last embers of the debris had drifted out of his line of sight. "That racket, a little while ago. Did we run down a snag?"

  She chuckled. "Log raft. Gunnery section take target practice on what we hit. Everybody get chance to do some hot work, everybody happy."

  It must be nice, Onesiphorous thought, to carry arms under your city's flag. Fight who you're told, stand down when you're done, and never worry about the consequences.

  Somehow he couldn't square that little fantasy with Enero, who took everything with a deadly, detailed seriousness, yet always seemed amused.

  "I believe I'll just sit here," he told Silver. "Thank you."

  "As you wish. Maybe fight tomorrow, maybe die tomorrow. Better on good night's sleep."

  "Everything is."

  She touched his shoulder. "Sleep well."

  The night wind cramped his legs. Jason's sloop only depressed him further. Onesiphorous picked himself up, stretched, then went to join the other dwarfs.

  Most of them were sleeping under blankets given them by the ship's crew. A few sat talking quietly. The guard was down to one bored-looking sailor next to a table of food.

  He wandered over there first. Maybe eating wasn't such a bad idea. The offerings were fish and bread, with bread and fish as an alternative. He tugged a couple of pieces free and went to sit with his fellow dwarfs.

  The whispering fell silent at his approach. Six dwarfs, three dwarfesses. In the shadows he couldn't see their faces as anything but pale ovals.

  "If it isn't mister high and mighty City dwarf," one finally said. "Come to visit the prisoners?"

  "Hardly. I see free dwarfs of the City Imperishable enjoying a ride home at someone else's expense."

  "You wander the deck while we are forced to huddle here," a dwarfess told him.

  "I wander nowhere," Onesiphorous said. "I have charge of a dying man on the boat in tow. He's too ill to come aboard, and I cannot join him there, so I watch him from the stern rail." Almost true, as far as it went.

  "The tree man," another dwarfess said sympathetically. "And you're the one who raised the fleet."

  "Both fleets." Bitterness slipped free, though he didn't mean to share it here. "Otherwise you'd still be knifed on the walkways and the corsairs would still be drinking the Harbormaster's wine. Good men and women died to free you." His anger began to boil again. "Then I find dwarfs, dwarfs, killing one another in the Flag Towers."

  Enough, he told himself. Let go, or they will not heed you.

  "Collaboration," said the dwarf who'd first challenged him. "And shame. You don't know what it was like."

  "I know that I saw people chained to drown for helping me escape. I know that I crawled through the swamps of Angoulême for weeks on weeks to raise a fleet to save you. A good friend died beside me in that battle. On that boat behind us her brother sinks into a fate I wouldn't curse my worst enemy with. While you people fight over the best way to end our race."

  "What race?" asked another. "We are a made folk, not born. I am who I am, but my children could walk tall and never know a day's misery."

  "All we have to do is let go," the sympathetic dwarfess said.

  "And then what?" Tears stung Onesiphorous' eyes. "A thousand years of our history drifts in the wind? Even if the answer is to smash the boxes, that should be decided in peaceful debate. Not by bluecoats breaking down doors and casting children out."

  "There have been many wrongs," another told him. "Wrongs built on wrongs as we were pushed out of the City Imperishable, persecuted and taxed and cursed, only to be sent to the Jade Coast—"

  "Some of us by you," someone else whispered.

  "—where we were treated as freaks and interlopers, wanted only for our money."

  "If you'd kept your wits," Onesiphorous said, "in a generation your fortunes would have bought you seats at the Harbormaster's council table. But you were fighting even before the corsairs came."

  "Some of us allowed ourselves to be used," said a voice bitterly.

  Onesiphorous looked around to see many of the sleepers had awoken. A larger circle had drawn close.

  "I have said too much already," he told them. "And perhaps certain wounds will not heal. But we must do this thing together. If not in agreement, at least in amity. If the boxes are to be broken, let us be sure we know what we do and why. If not, let us understand that as well. I am tired of the politics. Let us be dwarfs together."

  They argued much farther into the night, in the manner of dwarfs. Onesiphorous finally fell asleep under the food table, next to the snoring sailor.

  Imago

  Dawn brought light to a city under siege. Wasps covered the City Imperishable in great clouds. Messages had stopped coming, as it had become too dangerous to brave the streets even with the poppies.

  His skin itched.

  Now Imago looked out his window toward the Limerock Palace. The small wasps were gathered in low places like dark, glittering fog. The giants flew higher up, with an occasional struggling figure in their mandibles. People had tried to combat them with fire, and entire blocks now burned out of control. It was a war they had not meant to fight.

  Marelle came into his office. "I know more," she said. "But it's not making sense yet."

  "Another day or two of this and nothing will matter," Imago told her. "There's not a tree left standing in the City. They've begun to go after wooden structures. What the wasps do not destroy, people have set fire to in their panic."

  "The insects burn and die, as well."

  "In their numbers, it does not matter." He had to change the subject before he drove himself to despair. "What have you learned?"

  She took a deep breath. "The Numbers Men told Bijaz that he is the City's luck. Luck runs both ways. In a sense, it can be said to balance as an account book should. You sent him away—" Marelle held out her hand, forestalling his interruption. "You were not wrong. The Northern Expedition was a great challenge. From what Bijaz has said, none of them would have made it back but for him."

  "Fair enough." Imago did not feel very fair at all. Something exploded down by the docks. He watched flames climb as she continued to speak.

  "As I was saying, you sent him away. Think of that as a roll of the dice, casting your bet northward. He unleashed something in the North that the Imperator Terminus apparently went to great pains to bind there, very far away from his beloved City Imperishable. The Eater of Forests."

  "How is this our luck?" He leaned his head against the window frame. "Unless we are just the fleas on the stone dog that is the City Imperishable. What is a city, without people?"

  "Maybe this is the City's luck."

  "How?" Imago whirled, stomping across what little open floor remained in his office. "I am out of men, out of time, out of ideas. That toad Wedgeburr still sits in the Burgesses plotting my ruin. The City is being killed around me, stripped and burned like a bull carcass at a harvest festival to leave nothing but ash and empty, blackened streets."

  She gave him a level look. "We are a long way from defeat."

  "Then this is a war," Imago grumbled. "Killing my folk. I do not know who to fight or how, except to waste bullets shooting at wasps."

  "We have more than war here," she told him. "We have history. The Alates claim to be part of that. I don't know what they mean, but, think, Imago. Even I am history. A librarian who's lived as long as I have? I've spent centuries hiding in alleys and ladling stew from potshop fires just to get by. Yet when the City needed me, here I was. With my archives at the ready all those years in the Footsoldiers' Guild Hall. Is this simple happenstance?"

  "You are history," Imago said slowly. "This city saved you, just like it saved Bijaz. Against future need." He jammed his ha
nds into his armpits at a wave of remembered pain. "I know how that works. The City saved me once, too, and made me its own. I have my hard-won expertise." He chased the idea. "So if Bijaz is war, the luck of the blade and bullet, and you are history, the mother of law and justice, then Jason with his greening of sewers and the fir tree amid the Bridge of Chances was just the thing the City needed to fight the Eater of Forests.

  "And I sent him away!"

  He could have cried for sheer frustration. The wrong moves, the guesses, the harassment from the Limerock Palace which distracted him over and over and over. "I sent him away," he said slowly. "Our fertility god, the one who could restore the green and growing things of our City and stand firmly against the intramothers."

  "Perhaps," she said. "Or perhaps the wasps don't need to be stood firm against."

  He continued to stare out the window. The mix of smoky haze and glittering lines of wasps was almost pretty.

  Were they searching for something? Even through the glass of his window, he could hear the buzzing of the billion wings that now controlled his streets.

  It was time to go down to the Old Gods. Finish his sacrifice. They were the soul of the City Imperishable.

  His scars flared at the thought, so that he stumbled. "I am going to send for Saltfingers. In case you are wrong."

  "If you wake them, they will take you," she warned.

  They both already knew that. Imago leaned close, kissed the pale dwarfess. "Live more," he said. "Whether or not I come back."

  "Imago." Her voice was pleading. "Not yet. Please."

  Something else burst into flames outside, close enough for them to hear a whoosh. "I cannot wait." His mind was made up in full. Sometimes the king was a sacrifice, blood in the soil to raise up another generation. "Send a runner after me if the situation improves."

  They both knew that was a hollow order. No one would be able to find him in this chaos.

  Toiling slowly down the stairs, Imago asked himself why he'd dismissed the Card King's plan to address their problems with another staging of a krewe trial. Here he was setting out to try the same thing twice over.

  Perhaps he was just too tired to learn anything new.

  The base of the tower was crowded with sweating, bloody men and horses. Women, dwarfs, and children were packed in as well, and the rugmakers had opened their doors to the refugees.

  The wasps would be here soon enough.

  Imago pushed his way through until he found Stockwell clinging to a little podium and trying to take a headcount.

  "I need Saltfingers." Imago shouted to be heard above the racket.

  Stockwell shook his head. He leaned close and cupped his hands to Imago's ear. "Long since departed, sir. There's no one to send, unless you wish me to go after him."

  "No, no." Where could he find his way down? The sewers were everywhere, but Imago didn't know the entrances except for the few he'd been shown. None of which were in the immediate vicinity of the Rugmaker's Cupola. He nodded to Stockwell and turned back for the stairs, with the intention of finding a quiet place to plan. Four of the Lord Mayor's Own blocked the way, to keep the refugees from flowing upward.

  Stockwell plucked hard at his sleeve. "You can go down through the rugmakers' kitchens," he yelled. "Have one of the Tokhari take you. You want the midden, behind the butchery."

  Imago marveled at how his nervous, sweating clerk had grown so much. Anything he could think on, to keep his mind away from the Old Gods.

  Bijaz

  He was back in the wheat field. This time the reaper man was nowhere to be seen. The wheat was different, though it still followed a strange oneiric logic. Tiny flowers pushing through the golden grains clustered at the head of each stalk. They looked like poppies, waxy and pale, with a dot of blood welling at the base of each petal.

  Bijaz walked among the rows, seeing them differently, too. He was taller. The cowl kept flopping over his eyes, so he pushed it aside, only to find he was carrying a scythe.

  Something rippled across the flowering grain. People, he realized, tiny dwarfs and full-men side by side, running from him. He stepped after them, legs long as pine trees now, eating the yards and miles as easily as any wind out of the North, reaching to claim the vermin.

  Everything was easier now. He felt stronger this morning. The light was inside his skin, much as when the Numbers Men had first changed everything. Bijaz slid from beneath his blanket and stood.

  His legs swayed slightly at first, but otherwise he seemed steady. He was naked. Ribs stood out like ladderwork. His limbs were thin and rope-muscled, all the fat leached away. All his hairs were snow white, from the long hanks down his shoulder to the curled wisps on his arms to the thick thatch around his cock.

  Bijaz was youthfully strong again. His shoulders ached and his mouth was dry, but otherwise he felt fit. Not the gleaming, wired health the Numbers Men had visited upon him, but something more honest, earned in a thousand miles of trekking and a season spent under the sun.

  Going to the window, he pulled back the drape. The City Imperishable burned. Wasps circled overhead, big as ships. There was not a tree in sight.

  He was ready to tear the wings off every wasp in the City. He gathered the blanket around him and found his way into the hall.

  A great racket rose from below. Bijaz leaned over the rail. A crowd flowed through the base of the Rugmaker's Cupola and into the complex beyond. It was a controlled movement, people helping people.

  He flexed his hand, light stabbing from between his fingers, and followed the curve of the balcony to Imago's office.

  The Lord Mayor was not within, but Marelle was. She'd surrounded herself with brown paper, written all over in a dozen inks and colors. It was a map, he realized. A map of her mind. Or the mind of the City Imperishable, if there was a difference.

  The only open surface was the window, which showed no more hope than his had.

  Marelle looked up. "You're back," she exclaimed, then stopped. "Bijaz?"

  "Yes." His voice was thick with the timbre of youth. His hand still glowed. A sword would have fit well in his grip. "Where is the Lord Mayor?"

  "He has gone . . . " Her voice trailed off.

  Bijaz could see the light within her, too. "Do not worry about what you see, Marelle. Worry about what you are."

  "I am a dwarfess," she said. "A woman. A librarian."

  He looked around the room, drawing her gaze with him. "You have written out the thoughts of centuries, mistress. You are discovering history's light within yourself."

  Holding out his glowing hand, Bijaz stepped toward her. Marelle reached for him, not even noticing the light which began to stream from her own fingertips.

  Outside, cannon fire rippled. The reaper man within him noted it, but Bijaz was too close to the Mistress of History to hear the present.

  Onesiphorous

  They steamed past the winch tower. Fires burned across the skyline. Enormous wasps cruised above the City Imperishable, vultures over a kill. Princeps Olivo had been on alert since spotting the rising smoke, but ever more whistles shrilled now as sailors pounded the deck.

  Onesiphorous was at the stern rail once more. The sloop was down to the rails now, bulging like a sack of rotten grain. Whips of lithe wood grew out of holes in the hull, winding around the little vessel or trailing in the water.

  The blue jade shard within his shirt felt hot and heavy. He tugged it out, wondering if the stone would perform some ancient magick now.

  A wasp buzzed close overhead. Onesiphorous looked up to see a screaming human face embedded in its chest. His spine shivered. Warning? Greeting? Or nothing more than the twitch of a dying dog's feet?

  Gunfire erupted from an upper deck. The wasp dipped, staggered in the air, then headed toward the west bank to escape its tormentor. Once the insect had gained distance from Princeps Olivo, the cannon opened up.

  The wasp vanished in a flash of smoke and pale guts.

  A cheer rose from the sailors, but that died of
f as people tried to count those still circling above the City.

  This was the purpose of the journey, right here. Jason had come so far, through such torment. They could not fight the wasps except through whatever purpose he carried in his metastasizing heart.

  Onesiphorous turned. "Get him ashore!" he shouted. "Get the sloop ashore, now!"

  An officer ran toward him, head low, hands covering his neck. "Princess say you need boat to go to shore." His accent was almost too thick to understand. "You go down on boat, eh?"

  "Me?" He would rather have cut off his hand than go near whatever Jason had become.