The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  Mary yanked the pistol out of her smock. She was only planning to wave it around in a manner purposeful enough to stop everyone in their tracks, maybe fire it into the ceiling if necessary, but as she turned around a tall, scrawny stranger in tattered clothes came lurching up the aisle of the tavern, his eyes and mouth stretched wide with terror or pain. She lowered the pistol, confused. The newcomer staggered moaning toward the goblin and Orian Thornapple, his hands pressed against his ears as though someone had laid the grandfather of headache-curses upon him. The Flower lordling let go of the goblin, sizing up this bizarre new threat with a smirk that suggested he didn't think it amounted to much.

  "Some kind of goblin-lover, eh?" Thornapple asked, lifting his long knife. "Stop!" the apparition shouted at him. "Leave him alone! Stop all your voices! Get out of my head!" His voice rose to a shriek and something exploded with a krrrooom! like indoor thunder, turning all the world into pure white brilliance followed by utter blackness.

  For a single mad instant Mary thought she had pulled the trigger of her gun by mistake, but even a Cuckoo automatic didn't make a bang like that, and after the echo died down to a painful ringing in her ears she was still sightless, down on her knees and scrabbling absently with her hands for something she couldn't even imagine. People were screaming. A lot of people were screaming.

  "Who turned out the bloody lights?" Someone grabbed her leg. "Who's that?"

  "Juniper? The lights are off? You mean I'm not blind?"

  "The bloody power blew out."

  "Thank the Grove for that. I thought I lost my eyes." The power came back on a few minutes later. Surprisingly, almost no one had left. Orian Thornapple certainly hadn't. He was lying on his back beside his table with his throat ripped out, surrounded by an extremely wide puddle of blood and beer. The hand that had held the goblin's witchlight no longer existed: the arm now ended at the wrist, a scorched stump.

  The corpse looked quite surprised.

  "Bad," Mary told Juniper. "This is very, very bad."

  The goblin and the scrawny fellow were gone, of course.

  ————— The bad stuff started slowly, although Mary Mosspink had no doubt it would pick up speed soon enough. The leading Councillor's son had been murdered on her premises, even if no one quite understood all that had happened. The mere fact that she was completely innocent and that the young idiot had brought it on himself would be of little account when the wheels of officialdom began to turn. But the detective constable who interviewed her did not seem unduly vengeful and she allowed herself a little hope. When Mary told him what she remembered about the goblin, he quirked his mouth in a sour smile.

  "But you know his name, if he didn't lie," she said. "People always say goblins never lie."

  "Everyone lies," the constable said. "I don't care what they say about goblins. But it doesn't matter." He explained to her that there were some twenty or thirty thousand members of the Button clan in the city, and that at least half of them had been called "Mud" at some point in their lives. It was a bit like saying someone was named "Hey, you."

  The constables extracted statements from all the employees and customers before leaving Mary and old Juniper to clean up the mess. It wasn't until hours after young Thornapple's body had been taken away that she realized that despite what must have been a fairly pressing need to escape in the darkness, the goblin had not only taken the time to finish off Orian Thornapple, he had also remembered to take the stew and the bottle of ale he had earned with him.

  12 THE HOLLYHOCK CHEST

  As consciousness sluggishly returned, all Theo could remember at first was what seemed an odd dream in which he had been a sack of potatoes. No, a sack of wet potatoes, and a sack being handled rather roughly, at that.

  He kept his eyes closed and tried to figure out where he was. The bed was big and soft, so it wasn't the cabin. But he didn't live with Cat and her quilts-on-top-of-quilts fetish any more, unless the breakup had also only been a dream, like the potato-sack nightmare . . .

  Wait a second. He had been a wet potato sack carried by a two-legged elephant. And there had been a bumblebee flying around his head, talking to him in a funny little buzzy voice. All of which meant . . .

  . . . Absolutely nothing. Except that it had obviously been a really weird dream . . .

  Hold on. Buzzing. Flying. Fairy. Fairyland. Applecore! The whole grotesque adventure came flooding back as Theo's eyes popped open. A huge white comforter was draped over his legs, and beyond that was the footboard of a large wooden bed. Good so far. But beyond the footboard sat a gray, lumpy person the size of an industrial refrigerator.

  Theo gasped and yanked the comforter over his head. A voice like someone dragging a manhole cover down a cobblestone street bellowed, "Hoy, Ted! Tell the boss he's awake."

  It was comforting not being able to see, because the large gray person he had been looking at just before he had made the swift decision to pull the covers over his head and pray it would go away had not been a comforting thing to observe.

  "You can come out, Pinkie." The voice was so deep and rough that just being in the same room with it made his kidneys hurt. "I'm a vegetarian." "No, you're impossible," said Theo, but without much conviction. The thing laughed. "Funny Pinkie. Come on out. The boss'll be seeing you in a moment. You might want to leak out some fluids or whatever you lot do after you wake up."

  Just because I look at it doesn't mean I have to believe in it, Theo reassured himself. He slowly inched down the covers until the top halves of both his eyes were exposed. The commitment made, he did his best not to squeak with fear: the thing next to the bed gave the old playground expression "butt-ugly" a whole new meaning.

  Is this what my life's going to be like from now on? Just one horrible, weird thing after another? That sucks for days. The predominant color of the thing's bumpy, wrinkled skin was indeed gray, but not a simple gray: it held a complicated array of hues with strange undertones, like the exterior of an anciently decrepit concrete building left to weather and collapse, a gray that suggested the kind of walls where graffiti had been painted over and then re-graffito'd in a continuous cycle for about a thousand years. The thing's face, however, made the rest of its gnarled hide look positively kissable. Its eyes were just tiny little points of red light deep under brows so heavy someone could have tended bar from behind one of them. Between them was a formless gob of lumpy, crusty gray stuff that could only be called a nose because it had nostrils, and because it was more or less in the center of the thing's face. The mouth was open, displaying a grin so jagged and horrifying that Theo's fingers involuntarily tightened on the quilt again. The bald, gray, gruesomely massive thing was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bed, but even so its head was at least five feet above the ground. It must, he guessed frantically, weigh as much as a medium-sized car.

  "Hello," it grated, and leaned toward him, batting eyelids like folk-art saucers. Its breath was what might more properly have been expected out of the southern end of a triceratops. "My name's Dolly. You know, you're kind of cute for a pink boy."

  ————— He was fanned awake the second time by the wind from tiny wings. Whoever was standing on his chin was saying angrily, "It's not funny, you bloody ogre. If I'd been here, I'd have flown up your nose and gone on a three-month search for your brain, just so I could kick it back out your nostril."

  "Oh, mulch," the deep voice said grumpily. "It was just a joke. They're such frail things."

  "He's been through a lot." The fanning stopped. "Come on, boyo. Wake up."

  Theo opened his eyes. "And don't look up my skirt, you rude shite." With a flick she flew up from his chin and back a yard, forcing him to sit up, groaning, so he could see her. The massive gray thing was still sitting on the floor but it looked a little chastened. It was no wonder he'd mistaken it for an upright elephant in his first dream . . .

  "Hold on," he said. "How did I get here? Did . . . you carry me?" He paused. "And is your name really Dolly?" "Close
as you'll get to saying . . ." and she belched out a gnashing, grinding noise that made Theo's kidneys ache again. "So it might as well be 'Dolly,' yeah. I carried you. My brother Teddybear took a turn, too."

  "Teddybear . . . ?" "That's how ogres name themselves," Applecore told him. "They get their names as kids, called after their favorite toys. But before you get all sentimental, her brother's teddy bear was a full-grown live bear that he eventually squeezed to death by accident. And Dolly . . . well, boyo, you don't even want to know what she used for a doll."

  "No. No, I don't." He looked around, as much as anything else to avoid looking at gigantic gray Dolly, who was grinning again. Except for his leather jacket, reassuringly draped over one bedpost, everything around him was a bit odd and unfamiliar. It was a good-sized room, full of tasteful little details of the kind that might be found in an upscale bed-andbreakfast. (Theo and Cat had stayed in one in Monterey once, and Theo had been amazed how much money you could charge to let someone sleep in your spare room if you had a vase of cheese straws on the mantelpiece and a needlepoint of an otter on the wall.) This room had soft, shimmering cloth hangings on the wall and very little ornamentation except for an upright wood-and-glass-object on the bedside table. He guessed it was a clock radio even though its face was triangular and there seemed to be more unreadable symbols on it than the numbers on a standard clock. But unlike the Monterey bed-and-breakfast, or in fact most rooms that fell into the category of "guest room" as opposed to "cell," this room had one door and no windows or vents of any kind, although something that looked a bit like an air conditioner with a covering screen made of silk was sunk into the stones of one wall. Air conditioners in Fairyland. He couldn't wrap his head around it at all. "Where am I, exactly?" he asked. "What happened?"

  "You jumped into the river," she said. "And you didn't even ask first." "Ask? What do you mean, ask? You told me to do it! There were people chasing after me!" But they hadn't been people, of course, he remembered, they had been angry fairies. That was part of the problem.

  "Not ask me. You don't go jumping into someone's river without getting permission," Applecore said sternly. "Ignorance is no excuse. Look at your arm. No, the other one."

  He stared. Tied around the base of his left wrist was a single strand of wet green grass. He tried to slide it off but it wouldn't move. He couldn't unpick the knot, either, and the grass was as unbreakable as some kind of space-age carbon fiber.

  "It's not going to come off. You should be grateful you got away so lightly, boyo. That's a nymph-binding, and it means you owe a powerful favor. I had to work hard to bargain that, so they didn't just drown you, or worse."

  "Worse . . . ?" "No more questions. I'll explain later. Just be glad that the Delphinion and Daisy commune people got together a while back and chased all the Jenny Greenteeths out of that river, or you'd be . . . well, best not dwelt on. Your Jenny doesn't haggle like the nymphs do, she just starts chewing. Now get up."

  He looked from the band of preternaturally strong river-grass to the hovering fairy. It was plain that as long as he was in this damned Fairyland, he'd never, ever get the kind of answers he wanted to anything. He'd just have to try to catch up on the run.

  "I still don't know where we are." Applecore snorted. "The only place you could be without being dead, right about now," she said. "This is Tansy's house in the Daisy family compound — the Sun's Gaze Commune. I told you we were coming here."

  "Bit mad is our boss," Dolly said. "Tansy likes lost causes and whatnot. Oddities and so on. Mortals."

  "I wouldn't go so far as to say he likes 'em," said Applecore. "But he wanted this one, so we're off now." Dolly shrugged. "You can take him. I made sure he wasn't carrying anything he shouldn't before I put him to bed." She gifted Theo with another leeringly jagged smile, and for the first time he realized he wasn't wearing his jeans and shirt any more, but instead something halfway between pajamas and a martial-arts costume made of slithery grayish silk. "You're smooth all over, aren't you?" said Dolly. "I like that. Novelty, I call it."

  Theo was still shuddering as he followed Applecore out into a broad, carpeted corridor. He pulled on his leather jacket, which he had snatched off the bedpost on the way out. It looked strange with the silk ninja pajamas, but at least it was something familiar. In truth, though, not everything seemed as strange as he had expected: the soft, fur-lined boots that had been thoughtfully placed by his bed felt quite pleasantly ordinary, the walls on either side of him seemed nothing more exotic than pale, sandy stucco and although the light fixtures set at intervals along the passage were intricately ornamented, the lights themselves seemed to be . . . "Electric bulbs?" he asked Applecore. "Is there really electricity here in Fairyland?"

  "I can't say I ever could make sense out of electricity when anyone tried to explain it. But, no, these lights are scientific. They work by magic." Theo still felt like his brain wasn't entirely connected, but he couldn't help wondering why his uncle's book had described a kind of gaslight or even oil-lantern version of Fairyland — something like Victorian London: instead, from what he could see of the quite modern decor and appliances, Eamonn Dowd seemed to have gotten the similarities wrong by a good hundred years or more.

  I'm tired of weird stuff , he realized. I just want to go home. I'll go along and meet this old Tansy fellow, the one who likes mortals, and I'll answer some questions. Maybe he wants Uncle Eamonn's book? In a sudden panic that it might be lost he groped at his jacket pocket, but however intrusive the rest of Dolly's search might have been, she had at least left him his great-uncle's journal.

  So I'll meet this Tansy guy, give him the book if he wants it — it's not worth staying here to keep it, that's for sure — and then I'll get him to send me home. For a moment he could even imagine that things would be different for him now, after such experiences. I'll change. I'll get my life together. Maybe I'll even write a novel and get famous — use Great-Uncle Eamonn's ideas, and what I've seen myself . . . how hard can it be to write one of those fantasy books, anyway . . . ?

  Theo was interrupted in these creative musings when another large, heartattack-inducing figure stepped out of the shadows at the end of the hall. The floor gave a little under its weight. "Hello, Gnat," it rumbled.

  "Don't get cute, you massive shower of gray shite," said Applecore, but almost fondly. "We're here to see your boss." Teddybear, who was even less attractive than his sister (if such a thing were possible), nodded his huge head. "He's expecting you. Go right in." He looked at Theo. "And don't do anything stupid, Pink Boy. I took you out of the river and I can put you back in. From here."

  Theo hastened after Applecore into a sparsely furnished antechamber, something that looked like it might have been designed by an unusually artistic Trappist monk. He looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone before asking, "Are all ogres like those two?"

  "No, not really." Applecore settled onto his shoulder. "The big ones you don't even want to have in the house. Really dreadful, they are." She reached over and pinched his earlobe. "You know, I think Dolly's a bit fond of you."

  "Shut up. Just . . . shut up." A stranger walked into the room, a tall, slender man apparently in his thirties with a long white lab coat and a long white ponytail. He looked Theo up and down coolly, then turned away. "Come along," he called over his shoulder.

  "Who the hell is that?" Theo whispered to Applecore, who still rode his shoulder.

  "Count Tansy, 'course. You'd best get on with it." "But . . . but he's not . . . !" What had he been expecting? Old? Kindly looking? Just because Applecore had once referred to him as some kind of doctor . . . ?

  Tansy led them out of the formality of the antechamber and into something much more chaotic. To Theo's first, startled glance it looked like the early days of computing, of that time which he knew only from photos and magazine articles when people had mounted their first generation PCs in handmade wooden boxes, before such things had been replaced by mass-produced plastic cases. On second glance, the
technology seemed more sophisticated than that, with unrecognizable machines stacked on every surface in the room, although there did seem to be rather an emphasis on attractive wooden cases, not to mention controls of fluted glass instead of workaday buttons and switches.

  Tansy stopped at one of the tables and picked up a pair of spectacles which he donned before turning around to inspect Theo again. The lenses made the fairy's violet eyes seem larger, but did not make him seem any more like a kindly old inventor; rather they gave him the look of some kind of trendy European conceptual artist, which was in keeping with the techno-minimalist decor. The clothes he wore under the white lab coat — and now that Theo looked at it, it seemed a bit stylish for a lab coat — were also white. In his hawkfaced way, he was quite handsome — even beautiful.

  He looks like the angel that tells you you're not getting into heaven because you didn't make a reservation, Theo decided. He extended his hand, feeling awkward. "Hi, I'm Theo Vilmos . . ."

  "Yes, you are." Tansy nodded once and ignored the hand until Theo curled it away again. He turned to Applecore, who had sprung from Theo's shoulder and settled on one of the polished wooden surfaces, legs dangling. "You are a week late, sprite. What happened?"

  A week late? Theo looked down at his grass-bound wrist. Jesus, was I unconscious that long? No, couldn't have been. Did it take Applecore an extra long time to reach me in the first place?