Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  "I have seen that in him," Imago admitted. "If you do not like my course, how would you have me set myself?"

  "Birth is painful. Even the gods cry out. But you must go to the Limerock Palace and stop them."

  "The last time I went there, they murdered my train and imprisoned me," he said. "How shall I stop them, and from what?"

  "Go, there is no more time." Archer stood and tugged open a door Imago would have passed by without seeing. "You will know."

  "Archer," Imago began, but the godmonger had vanished like a blown candle. The door still stood open.

  This was the tunnel which had been dug by Prothro and his cohorts to reach the shattered temples buried beneath the New Hill, Imago realized. Now he followed the route of old conspiracy to stop something new.

  What, Imago did not know.

  He climbed. This had not been made for the flow of water, so it was narrow. Twenty minutes passed before he came to a ladder. Above him was a trap door set within a wooden floor.

  Imago set his helmet down, leaving the little carbide lamp flickering, and climbed. He did not like having the tiny flame behind him, but wearing a dunny diver's helmet into the palace was foolish. Cloaked and booted, he might be just another clerk. With the flame still there, he could see his escape route.

  Pushing at the trap, Imago found that something above resisted him. He climbed one more rung to set his shoulder to the effort while still clinging to the ladder. He took a deep breath and pressed again.

  It opened far enough for him to see that the door was beneath a rug. He shoved harder, then wriggled his way through. A button popped off his shirt, and he took a nasty scrape across his back.

  He struggled free of the rug to a blank-walled room where a few electricks burned over an array of tables. Great vats stood on them, each over a little electrick fire. Bottles stood ranked before every vat. A sick sweetness hung in the air.

  Imago grabbed a bottle, opened the door and stepped out confidently. Skulking was an admission of guilt, and the bottle would make it seem as if he had an errand.

  The room beyond was a garage. The floor was clear except for a large wagon. Several men in gutta-percha aprons and coated boots used a pump to fill a huge tank on the wagon's back. Two more stood atop the tank to check the fittings on a great nozzle like the water cannon from a fire apparatus. A second wagon waited nearby, a steam engine mounted on it.

  He sniffed. More of the same smell. They must be working at poison for the wasps. How to stop it?

  Imago turned back and nearly ran into a bailiff.

  "My pardons," he said, stepping aside.

  It was Imre, his arms full of more coated boots.

  "You—" the bailiff began loudly. Imago reached up to touch his finger to the big man's lips.

  "This way," he hissed.

  Imre followed him into the side chamber.

  "What are you doing here?" the bailiff growled.

  "Stopping a disaster."

  "Don't you have people to do that for you?"

  "Not today." He had no time for a decent lie, so he tried the improbable truth. "I was seeking the Old Gods when they told me to come here and stop the Burgesses."

  "We've a plan to drive off the wasps," Imre said proudly. "Burgess Norwalk conceived it. We will spray them with a chemical caustic to insects that is also flammable. Once they've begun to flee, we will set them afire."

  Imago was aghast. "You'll burn the City down!"

  "No, it flares and is gone. Like gunpowder."

  "What if the spray falls across roofs or people?"

  "The City is already dying, sir."

  Imago hated being lectured about his own obsessions. "I know. But we need to leave the wasps alone."

  "You're cracked," Imre said. "Come with me now and I won't turn my staff against you."

  "You haven't got your staff with you. Even if you did, the last time I was here Wedgeburr tried to have me killed by two squads of your fellow bailiffs."

  Imre looked pained. "I'm sorry. He was voted out."

  "Voted out? He murdered bailiffs and a fellow Burgess. Why isn't he hanging from the rafters?"

  "Because too many would lose their position. He has files that will ruin others."

  "For that you let him go free?" Imago let the disgust into his voice, hamming it up. Once more he was arguing for life, before a very difficult bench of one slightly slow-witted bailiff. "Listen, Imre. They lie here. They lie to you. They lie to me. They lie to the City Imperishable. They lie to themselves. I don't want to overthrow the Burgesses—what comes next might be worse. But I want them to stop making decisions they don't understand. Starting now. The wasps need to be left alone."

  "They've killed hundreds. Including two Burgesses."

  "You didn't burn Wedgeburr out when he killed a Burgess."

  That stopped Imre. He set the boots down on the floor, taking care to arrange them in pairs. "I have an oath, you know."

  Imago exulted. He'd won the argument. Imre only needed the rationalization. "Yes," he said, stealing freely from Saltfingers, "and your oath is to the City Imperishable. Not to one set of greedy men or another, but to the stones and soul of this city. They've lied to you every day. I've never lied to you. Who do you trust to best serve the City's interests?"

  He might have aimed over the bailiff's head, but it was the best he could do. The only alternative was to bash Imre with the glass beaker, but Imago did not have much faith in that solution.

  "What will you do?" Imre asked.

  "I think all we need is to spill their tank. After that, this will end soon one way or the other. The wasps are the near the conclusion of their purpose." He wished he were as confident as he sounded.

  Imre's brow furrowed. "I thought you said that—"

  "Nothing is certain," Imago added smoothly. "Let's go spill their tank."

  "No killing," Imre warned.

  "I don't even want to hurt anyone," Imago promised him. Except Wedgeburr.

  Together they walked toward the wagon with the tank. The men in the gutta-percha coats were putting away their pumps. A groom harnessed a pair of draft horses into place.

  Imago hurried to match the bailiff's stride. One of the coated men strode to meet them. "Stop him," said Imago, and pulled himself up onto the wagon board. A large lever served as a handbrake. He released it. A spring groaned somewhere below him.

  "Hey," the groom shouted, as Imre turned to the coated man. Imago slapped the reins and pulled the draft horses to the right, intending to make for the outside doors.

  Unfortunately another groom was alert and began rolling them shut. Imago slapped the reins harder and circled toward the back of the garage. A hallway led out, too small for the wagon. He glanced over his shoulder. A pair of men struggled with Imre, while five or six more chased the wagon.

  He had seconds at best.

  No choice but to spill it, Imago thought. He urged the horses toward the hallway. They were not having it, and began to turn once more.

  Imago leaned on the brake. The wagon shuddered, its altered momentum challenging the strength of the horses until the traces snapped.

  The horses screamed, one tangled in the harness while the other broke free. Imago tried to jump away from the swaying wagon, but the top-heavy weight of the tank took it sideways and him with it.

  He smacked hard into the wall but avoided being crushed. The tank burst, spraying Imago with a flood of stinking wasp killer. Most surged the other way, through the open door into the workroom where he'd come up.

  Where there was a trapdoor in the floor, with a lit carbide lamp beneath.

  Imago began scrambling backward, mouthing a meaningless jumble of oath, prayer, and terminal panic.

  Bijaz

  Someone on the river was firing cannon at the tree. The trunk swayed as great sprays of splinters erupted. The eyes blinked away tears of blood. Circling wasps dove on the wounds, then streamed back toward the river.

  "Now what?" Bijaz screamed at Marelle
. Whatever he had been, minutes before—War?—was gone. He was once more a frightened, angry dwarf.

  She cupped her hands to his ear. "If you are War, and I am History, then he is the blooming spring which feeds the City! Fertility."

  Ulliaa's memories leapt unbidden to Bijaz's mind. This had been the ice bear's game all along, that the Northmen had followed along with in hopes of controlling. Iistaa had aimed to bring about the death shout of a city.

  And the birth cry, perhaps unknowing.

  For good or ill, the die was cast. Bijaz tugged at Marelle to follow as he began to run toward the erupting trunk.

  Another cannon volley whistled overhead, several shells striking close by to shower them with sap, blood, and splinters. Bijaz climbed up a gnarled knee next to a blinking, weeping eye.

  It focused on Marelle as she clambered up beside him. "We are here," he whispered.

  The eye blinked again. A steam whistle shrieked out on the river, the noise rising higher and higher. Bijaz realized that whatever ship had been firing must have a ruptured boiler.

  The sky lit with a yellow-white glare as an explosion erupted to the south, sound rolling past them like thunder. It had barely died when the shrieking boiler blew. Bijaz turned to see a ship lifting from the water, back broken. Another blast ripped it apart while still in the air.

  Gunpowder? he wondered, distracted from the moment. Flaming shards began to fall from two directions.

  Onesiphorous

  He vaulted up onto the bridge to see two dwarfs clinging to the swaying tree. It had become sky-tall, branches spreading out to cover most of the City, leaves like green hands each the size of a garden. Eyes blinked in their thousand from the ramified, hairy trunk as burning bits fell in a rain of fire.

  He scrambled up to the dwarfs. "By the gods!" Onesiphorous shouted when he realized who he was seeing, "You're alive!"

  "You're dead," Marelle told him, reaching to swat out a fire in his hair.

  Bijaz just smiled, benevolent and divine.

  Onesiphorous brandished the blue jade in his fist. It was a key. Angoulême had shown him that. He slipped the lump of rock between two of the rippled tendons of Jason's trunk.

  The wood parted like flesh, opening a familiar, hairy passage. "Go," Onesiphorous shouted.

  Marelle passed within.

  Bijaz looked at Onesiphorous a moment, then said, "Every beginning is an end, every end is a beginning." He followed her into darkness. The tunnel snapped shut before Onesiphorous could take his own step forward.

  A long, quiet moment stretched, then the City Imperishable shook as if in the grip of an earthquake. The impossibly high tree began to sway. Winged creatures circled it—giant wasps, mountain teratornis, Alates, bats, clouds of the small wasps—all darting in and out of the shivering foliage.

  Onesiphorous stumbled back to sit down heavily on the pavement of Water Street. The bridge was gone, swallowed by the massive trunk. A city block to the south was missing as well, while roots extended into the river.

  When the tree fell, it came down not like a forest giant, but the way the queen of Angoulême had swallowed herself. The trunk folded like a sleeve being rolled from within, sucking itself into the stones. Most of the fliers were trapped in the clutching branches. Onesiphorous clung to the post of a gas lamp, trying to keep himself from being pulled down as well.

  Behind him, the City Imperishable shouted.

  There was no other word for it.

  Buildings hurled upwards in a silent explosion, people and animals and furnishings and an entire burning forge shooting into the sky. The tree vanished in that moment.

  A gossamer bubble rose from the shout, barely more visible than the air around it. Onesiphorous' thoughts slowed to sludge. Within were mists, the ghosts of streets and buildings and bridges, all the cities he'd passed through to return from Angoulême, and none of them. It was the dream of a city, the idea of a city, the ghost of a city.

  The egg of a city, he finally realized.

  The City Imperishable had given birth. Its progeny would ride the wind, he supposed, until it found a promising riverbend in the river or verdant forest, and settle there to wait for history to begin anew.

  The casualties of that birth plummeted to the earth. Onesiphorous rolled into the gutter and tucked himself tight, covering his neck until the shattering stopped.

  When he sat up again, an Alate stood beside him.

  "History," it said in a strange voice, narrow and thin. "Your gift out of the North, though they sought to slay you in the giving. Your gods have defended their own. Most of you will forget, but the City will remember."

  He reached out a hand, intending to offer it his shard of blue jade, but the key was gone. Bijaz or Marelle must have taken it into Jason.

  "I think we have fifteen Old Gods now instead of twelve," he told the Alate.

  "Be more careful next time." The bird-man leapt into the air.

  The sun was out. The wasps were gone, though fires still raged across the City Imperishable. There were dead to be counted.

  At least he understood, a little. This was a cycle of life writ across centuries and leagues. He wondered if the whole affair of the Imperator Restored had been an abortive attempt at blossoming.

  Trial of Flowers, indeed.

  Someone climbed up the rubble of the Water Street Bridge toward him. They'd come out of the Little Bull, skin soot-black and burn-pink, tattered clothing soaked with Saltus mud.

  "Oarsman," she said. He realized this was Silver. "I am here. Where is Enero?"

  Imago

  He didn't recognize the hand which reached through the stones for him, but he took it. Imago fell down a narrow hole even as his boots were singed.

  "You not worth it, ah," said a crabby old woman in a very old dress, "but he love you. He not so bad for a little City man." Then she pushed him again, until he found himself staring up at Saltfingers.

  "Changed our mind, did we, your worship?"

  Imago noticed that the other dwarf had gotten a new helmet.

  "It seems so," he said. "What just happened to me?"

  "I'm not one to be speaking overmuch on the business of others, but there's tunnels and then there's tunnels, if you takes my meaning."

  "No." Imago sat up and rubbed the soot from his face. "Actually, I don't."

  "Then that's too bad, I'm supposing. Just remember that all cities are one and you'll be well." Saltfingers cocked his head to the sound of a clanging pipe. "And it appears that some fool has blown a great big hole in the Limerock Palace, as well as tearing up our streets something fierce."

  "The wasps—" Imago began.

  "What's done is gone. I'd say you played your part, your worship. I'll just have Wet Hernan nip you back over to the Rugmaker's Cupola now. I expect your work is finished here."

  "Saltfingers." He tried to frame his next thought. "If you see Archer . . . "

  "That'n's dead and lost to us." Saltfingers' face closed tight as the stones of his underground kingdom. "Let him rest. But if I sees him, I'll give him whatever comfort is mine to offer."

  "That's all I can ask," Imago said.

  "Go tend to your duties, and I'll tend to mine." Saltfingers gave him a gentle shove. "Now away with you."

  IV: HARVEST

  Imago

  "They've found a dead bear, sir."

  He looked up from a letter sent by a very angry dwarf in Port Defiance, named Ikaré. "What? Where?"

  The new clerk filling in for the injured Stockwell bobbed up and down, excited. "A great huge dead bear, washed up against the wreckage of that Gronegrii ship." He handed Imago an envelope. "These were in his mouth."

  "Thank you." Imago had grown accustomed to Stockwell, by the nine brass hells. The man should be back soon enough according to the Tribade doctor.

  Imago tore open the envelope. Three bells, fire blackened and deformed, dropped into his hand. He laid them out with the intent to crush them, then swept them into his desk drawer instead. />
  Onesiphorous was back on the job, but seemed to be suffering from permanent distraction. That pestilential female Sunward naval officer was nursing DeNardo the freerider night and day. She alternated between threats of execution and elevation to Gronegrii lordship against anyone who tried to help her. Biggest Sister continued to think the man would recover.

  Worse, the Sunward woman had demanded to open graves at the Potter's Field until she'd found Enero for herself. Only Onesiphorous had been able to talk her out of that. The two of them continued to make long visits to speak with the dirt.