The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  He glanced up at a bit of sky peeping in through the skylight. It felt like it should be late afternoon, and certainly the oblong of blue overhead looked like that was about right.

  Maybe I should leave a trail of crumbs or something, he thought. Which reminded him that he hadn't eaten anything since he'd been in Faerie, nor had he drunk anything except river water, and most of that by accident. There's a destination, then, he decided. I'll hunt for the kitchen.

  Of course, it wound up being a lot more difficult than it looked. The house, most of which seemed to carry on the spare white-stucco-andcolor-accents look of the parts he'd seen so far, seemed not just large but oddly unintuitive in the way it was laid out. Every time he thought he'd figured out how it worked and expected to turn a corner and find himself back in a main corridor like the one outside his room, he found himself standing instead at the edge of some kind of sunken living room with a pond and live trees growing through carefully laid-out gaps in the floorboards, or at the door of a walk-in pantry whose shelves were lined with sacks and canisters. Some or even all of these might very well have contained food, but enough of them were jiggling by themselves on the shelf or even making little squeaking noises that he had no interest in closer investigation.

  What was even more odd was how some of the rooms disappeared right in front of him, or seemed to, especially those that had windows to the outside world. He would spot a wash of sky peeking through at the far end of a series of linked, open rooms, but when he got to the last room he would find himself looking into another corridor with no window or in fact anything remotely sky-colored in sight. Once he found a sort of parlor room with big, low couches that had a picture window covering one entire wall — he could see an expanse of forested green hill, its crest just touched by the last slanting rays of sunlight, the clouds beginning to turn salmon-pink above it. But when he stepped into the room, the entire window was gone, replaced by a slab of polished black stone. Thinking it might be some kind of polarization trick, he stepped back to the entranceway of the room again, but although the light now gleamed very attractively off the polished surface, it was still opaque black.

  Are they trying to keep me from seeing out? Or someone else from seeing me? He could often hear people talking but could never find any of them. Once he even thought he heard Applecore's clear, high-pitched voice behind a cloth hanging, as though she were in a room just on the other side, but when he swept it back he found nothing but a wall of pale tiles. He heard voices that sounded like the slow, harsh cadences of the ogres, and others stranger still, but they all seemed to float to him from no discernible direction. A few times he wondered if there might be some airconditioning ducts hidden in the wide wooden roof beams, piping not just air but sound from one part of the house to the other, but if such things did exist, they were hidden beyond his capacity to spot them.

  When the lights suddenly dimmed and then went out, Theo had a moment of pure terror. He stopped, as rigid as a mouse when the cat door pops open. The darkness surrounded him like something tangible, something thick, but the abrupt, total silence was even thicker — no whispers, no dull, barely audible humming, just the silence of premature burial. He was suddenly all too aware that he was a stranger in a completely alien place.

  Do they have regular blackouts here? He didn't dare move. Or does it mean something worse? A picture from one of his childhood books came to him, Theseus in the dark labyrinth, unaware of the brute Minotaur looming behind him.

  He had no idea how long it took until the lights in the hallway came up again, but it was longer than he would have liked: the renewal of the phantom voices was as comforting as hearing the kindly neighbors in the next apartment come home.

  The return of light and noise did not solve his other problems. He wandered on through rooms that would thrill the editors of Architectural Digest while confounding any actual architects, found singing showerfountains in bathrooms made of what seemed like living but unbarked wood, discovered carpets so thick that they seemed to cling to his feet as if unwilling to let him leave and chattered to him in soft voices he could not quite make out, but still could not find a kitchen, or his own room again, or in fact any other living souls that he could recognize as such.

  Panicked into a desperation beyond any fear of embarrassment, he stopped and began to shout: "Applecore? Applecore!" If that truly had been the sprite's voice he had heard earlier through a solid tile wall, why shouldn't his own travel the same way? "Applecore? Where are you? Hello! Anyone?"

  "What do you want?" asked a feminine voice, cool and collected as a stewardess reciting safety information to a planeload of bored commuters. Theo looked around, but except for a table with an ornamental tree in a rectangular vase, he was alone in the hallway.

  "Where are you?" he asked the tree, just in case.

  "In the house." As far as he could tell, the calm voice came out of thin air. "Do you need help?"

  "Yes, yes I think I do. Who are you?"

  "I am the hob," the voice said. "I live in the house. You are one of Count Tansy's guests. How can I help you?"

  Jesus, was that all it took? I wish I'd thought of this earlier. "Can you help me find my way? Like, back to my room, if I wanted?"

  "Certainly." It seemed unimpressed, as though it were not quite worth its disembodied time to handle such simple requests.

  "How about outside?"

  "Outside the house?" Now the dainty voice sounded a bit irritated. "I'm sorry, you can't leave the house without Count Tansy." "Oh." Well, that told him something, anyway. Maybe a bit more than he wanted to know. "How about the kitchen? Can you give me directions to the kitchen?"

  "You wish to walk there?"

  Theo frowned. "What are my alternatives — rocket skates? Light rail? Yeah, if it's close, I'll walk."

  "I could bring it to you if you prefer."

  That just plain sounded weird. "No, that's okay, I'll walk."

  "Very well. Go forward until you reach the end of this hallway. Turn right, then turn right again immediately."

  "Cool. Thanks."

  "Enjoy your visit." He hadn't sensed her arriving, if that was what she'd done, but he did sense her going. It was an odd departure, something barely perceived, like a light going out in a building he'd been watching while thinking of something else.

  It's all magic, he thought. This whole world works on magic. And I don't understand any of it. Man, I'm in trouble here.

  ————— Even with the directions, he had to retrace his steps three times before he found the kitchen, because he did not at first realize that turn right at the end of the corridor, then turn right again immediately meant just that. After he had gone up and down the close-ended corridor several times looking for a place to make the second right when there clearly was no such place, he tried to be a bit more literal. He went back to the ornamental tree, then walked to the end of the hall again. As soon as he had made the right turn into the corridor he immediately turned right once more, bracing against the smack in the nose he expected when he hit the wall. But suddenly there was no wall there.

  The kitchen was a high room of pale stone and dark floor tiles, huge and warm, agleam with hanging brass pots and pans. At the far end a small bristly figure on a stool was leaning over a huge shiny stovetop, alternating between shouting up into the rafters and doing something that looked like conducting opera. Nearer stood a long refectory table. There were only a few people sitting at it, less than a dozen, but it looked like a lot more because two of them were ogres.

  "Hoy! Pinkie!" shouted Dolly. Her voice made the crockery vibrate in the hutches.

  "There goes the neighborhood," rumbled Teddybear. As Theo stood warily in the doorway the ogres' companions turned and examined him with interest. They were the size of small children, roundfaced and more or less human, dressed in matching gray uniforms that gave the scene the air of break time at some Munchkinland fast food restaurant. The little people had long, curling eyebrows and the males — Th
eo thought he was on fairly solid ground here — sported wide, fluffy beards.

  "Can . . . can I come in?" he asked.

  "Course you can," said Dolly cheerfully. "We were just telling the others about you."

  "You were." Teddybear belched, a drawn-out noise like a garbage truck hefting a Dumpster. "I was eatin'."

  "The lights went out." It was strange to be relieved to see anything as ugly as the ogre siblings. "Or did that happen only where I was?" "Happens all the time these days," said Teddybear. "Power plant workers having a little holiday or something. Somebody needs to grind a few of those lazy bastards into jelly."

  "You hungry?" Dolly asked Theo.

  "Not for jelly," he said. "Not now." "Come join us." She gestured for him to sit next to her and pulled a basket full of bread closer to the edge of the table. She elbowed her brother to move over, leaving a tiny sliver of bench between the massive gray bodies. The little people watched avidly as Theo wiggled into the space.

  It's like taking my bike in between two semis , he thought. If either one of 'em twitches, I'll be nothing but a smear. He settled in gingerly. "Yeah, actually I am sort of hungry."

  "Are you allowed to eat?" the ogress asked as the little people whispered among themselves. "Allowed?" "Isn't there something about mortals eating our food and then their heads blow up or something?"

  "What?" Teddybear shook his head. "Gah, Doll, you talk a load of old fewmets sometimes. Their heads don't blow up — that's silly. They turn purple all over and die. And it's not just from eating — it happens even if they just put some stone in their mouth or even just jump over some branches. Mortals can die from doing just about anything here."

  Theo, who had been reaching for a piece of bread, pulled back his hand. "What are you talking about? Is this a joke?" One of the little people on the far side of the table stood up on the bench so his head was on the same level as Theo's. "They're giving you a bad time, Stepstool." He sounded like he'd just won the helium-breathing finals. "Mortals don't die from eating our food, they just can't go back to Mortalia again."

  "Mortalia?" one of the others asked.

  "Where mortals come from," the first little man explained smugly. "What the hell does a brownie know?" demanded Teddybear. He sounded angry, but considering that he could have stuffed half a dozen of the little people into his mouth at one time, they didn't seem very alarmed. "You're all idiots. Our mum told us the story. All about this mortal boy named Percy Faun, and how he covered himself with grease so he could slip through the door to here from . . . from the mortal place. He ate some pommy granite and died."

  "Mortals don't eat rocks, sodskull." Dolly rolled her eyes. "Do they, Pinkie? You don't eat rocks, do you?" Theo's hands were now in his lap. Despite the cramping of his empty stomach, he didn't want to touch anything that might be food. His head blowing up might be a fitting end to a very difficult day, but although he doubted that would really happen, he didn't feel like taking any chances — especially with the possibility of not being able to go home. "No," he said. "No, we don't eat rocks."

  "All right, it wasn't granite then," said Teddybear. "Miss Clever. But it was something like that. He ate it, then he tried to go home but he fell over some sticks and died."

  "You said they turned purple," Dolly pointed out. "Mortals, I mean."

  "Fell over some sticks, turned purple, then died."

  Theo could only sit and listen to his stomach rumble while they argued over the top of him. The brownies seemed to think it was all very funny.

  13 A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

  "Of course you can bloody well eat," Applecore informed him as she led him down the hall from the kitchen toward Tansy's lab. "What else are you going to do, ya thick, live on air?"

  "But . . . but the ogres said . . ." "Ogres!" She buzzed across the antechamber so briskly he almost had to run to keep up. "There's a reason Tansy didn't send one of them after you, you know. Even Dolly, and she's a bleedin' genius by ogre standards, couldn't find her arse with both hands and a treasure map. And our Teddy can't count to eleven without unbuttoning his trousers." She gave him a tiny shove toward the door into the lab. Inside his host stood waiting, arms crossed on his chest. "He hasn't eaten anything since he's been here, sir," Applecore announced, "because the ogres have been giving him some old shite about how it will keep him from getting home again."

  "What?" Tansy appeared startled, as if he had been miles away. "Oh, he hasn't eaten?" He spoke to the air. "Fetch in some food for Master Vilmos."

  "Certainly, Count Tansy," said the sweetly reasonable hob-voice. "I'm very sorry," Tansy told Theo. "When you first arrived, I was quite . . . absorbed. I should have asked you if you had eaten. Terrible way to treat a guest. My apologies."

  Theo could not help staring. A few hours earlier the fairy had looked at him like he was a bug. Now he was treating him like a real guest. What the hell was that about? "I . . . I just . . ." It took a moment to shake off his surprise. "Dolly and her brother, they told me that if I eat here, I can't go back. It's some old story, apparently."

  Tansy nodded. "It's just that, I'm afraid — an old story. I have no doubt it has some basis in truth, mind you. I would guess that in the old days, when there was little to inhibit travel between your lands and ours, it was easier for a mortal to dally here and forget to cross back, so that by the time he returned the slippage would have meant a terrible dislocation on his return."

  "Slippage?" "Yes, the differences between our two worlds. The passage of time is perhaps the most obvious symptom, but not the only one. But eating or not eating has nothing to do with whether or not a traveler may return, then or now. I suspect it was a sort of ploy devised by wise mortals to keep your kind from staying here too long. If they left without eating, and hence only stayed as long as they could last on an empty stomach, the disruption would not be too great."

  "Disruption?" A female brownie had walked silently into the room wheeling a cart with a tray on it — at least, Theo assumed she'd walked, although he hadn't actually seen her enter. She was plump and rosy-cheeked and quite ordinary in her proportions, as though someone had simply shrunk a slightly short-legged young woman to about three and a half feet high. "Where, sir?" she asked.

  Tansy nodded toward a low table. The brownie put the tray of fruit and bread on a table, dropped a curtsy, then pushed her cart back out of the room. The fairy-lord gestured for Theo to take the leather-cushioned chair next to the table, which had a casual elegance that suggested it was Tansy's own. Theo seated himself, a little apprehensively. Applecore squatted down beside the plate, sniffing. "Ooh, eglantine honey," she said. "That's nice, but."

  "Help yourself." He turned back to Tansy. "So it's really all right if I eat?" He didn't want to be stubborn, but it was hard to believe the cool-eyed creature of a few hours earlier was suddenly itching to be his buddy-oldpal. "I'll still be able to go back home?"

  "Eating this or any other wholesome food will have no effect on whether or not you can go back," Tansy said. "I swear by the Oldest Trees." Theo looked to Applecore for a clue as to what was going on, but she didn't seem worried for him. In fact, she was scooping huge dollops of butter and honey off his bread with her hands and licking them off, so the food certainly wasn't poisoned or anything that crude.

  "What did he call you, a sprite?" Theo asked her. "Is the definition by any chance, 'Mouth like a sailor, manners like a tiny flying pig'?"

  She grinned behind a smear of honey. "Shut up and eat, you great big waster." He broke off a corner of bread and picked a fruit that looked like a salmon-colored cherry. The bread tasted like bread (only much better) but the fruit was like nothing else he'd ever had, the bold sweetness undercut by a certain perfumed tang — a wonderful, exotic flavor. He was reminded again that he was starvingly hungry and he scooped up a whole handful.

  "As I said, I'm very sorry for my earlier . . . abruptness," Tansy proclaimed. "I was preoccupied. But I have given the matter more thought and realized that it is still
important for my principals to meet you, and also that you should not be left to fend for yourself in what must be a very disconcerting new world."

  Theo still didn't trust the situation. Tansy was fairly convincing as a nice guy but it was hard to ignore the earlier behavior; Theo couldn't help wondering what might have happened during the course of the day to change things. Or was that just what these Flowers were like, these highpowered fairy-folk — able to shut off or turn on simulated emotions at will, like real-world sociopaths? It wasn't the most comfortable thought.

  Either I'm paranoid or they're totally freaky. Two great choices. "Could you just send me back instead?" he asked. "I mean, no offense, but I didn't want to come here in the first place. I really don't need to meet anyone . . ."

  "Ah, but you do." Tansy smiled brightly. Theo thought for a disturbing moment that the ascetic, white-haired creature was going to walk over and chummily thump him on the back. "Surely you haven't forgotten about the spirit who found you in your home and attacked you."

  "Not much chance of that." "That sort of entity will not be long thrown off your scent, and could not be avoided forever even if you could cross back and forth between your world and ours every day. As it is, once you have settled back down into your normal life again it will easily find you. And next time you will not have Mistress Applecore to help you, or a door through which to escape."

  Theo remembered the thing's raw face and oozing eyes; he suddenly felt clammy under the arms. "So what are you saying? That it's just going . . . going to get me someday? No matter what?"

  "We hope not. But it will take a more cunning mind than mine, or a better equipped laboratory, to find exactly what the thing is and remove it or placate it. That is another reason why you should go to my friends in the City. They are better connected than I am, closer to the seats of power . . . and that means all sorts of power. I have chosen the life of a poor country philosopher and scientist, you see."