The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  "The cave trolls are not such bunglers as you make out. And what is the purpose of being rich if you cannot employ multiple weapons against that which stands in your way? I would rather be paying a second assassin to stab the corpse than have an enemy slip away."

  "But the task here is more delicate than a murder, my lord. That is why you hired me in the first place. Do you know the expression about cooks and broth? Would you choose to have several chirurgeons wrestling each other for pride of place while you lay ill on an operating table, or would you rather have only one, the best man at the craft, standing over you?"

  Hellebore made a quiet noise of irritation. "When you have brought me this mortal, then you can gloat. If you succeed, I will make you official tame monstrosity to the Parliament of Blooms."

  After an almost invisible flinch, the Remover said quietly, "But I am not tame, my lord." "Enough of this." Hellebore stood, unfolding gracefully from behind the desk like an exquisitely crafted machine. "I have another with whom I would consult — I think you know who I mean. I would like you to come, too. You have not actually met him, have you?"

  "Just the once, my lord."

  "Ah, of course. I had forgotten." Hellebore waved his hand and a door opened in the side of the office. "You don't object to meeting him again, then?"

  "On the contrary, my lord, I will find it most interesting."

  ————— They had been walking for only a few minutes, but already the temperature was noticeably warmer. "He likes his rooms heated," said Hellebore. "That won't cause any problems for your . . . condition, will it?"

  "Only minor inconvenience."

  "Lady Hellebore calls this part of the tower 'the Hothouse.' "

  "And how is your wife?" Hellebore gave him a strange look. The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles was not generally known for making polite small talk. "She is well. She spends little time in the City these days, though. She has taken the younger children out to Festival Hill, our place in Birch. She is afraid there will be a war."

  "But of course there will be a war. You are seeing to that."

  "That is why I have not talked her out of staying at Festival Hill." They reached another waiting room. Seated at the desk in this one was not a secretary but a man in a white cloak with a single band of white silk knotted about his dark hair. He looked up at their approach, then rose. "Ah, Lord Hellebore." His eyes slid to Hellebore's guest, stopped for a moment, then rapidly returned to his patron. "Have you come to see him?"

  "Yes, but I'd like to hear any news, first." "He is well — quite healthy. His appetite is uneven, but that is common in a child his age — some days nothing, other days we are calling down to the comb over and over." He looked worriedly for a moment at the Remover, clearly hesitating.

  "Go on," said Hellebore. "He had another seizure a few weeks ago, but otherwise has responded well to the medicaments. Interestingly, though, he is a bit allergic to both moly and the most quotidian sleep-charms . . ."

  "Yes," said Hellebore. "Thank you, Doctor . . . Doctor . . ."

  "Iris. Well, weft-Iris. But how could you be expected to remember, my lord? You have so many important things on your mind."

  "Open the door, please." "Of course!" Doctor weft-Iris sprang back to the desk and waved his hand above it, murmured something. A door appeared in the wall where there had been no sign of it before. Lord Hellebore stepped toward it, then paused and gestured for his guest to go in first.

  As he did, he heard the doctor quietly ask Hellebore, "Is that . . . ?" "Yes, it is." Then the door closed and Hellebore and the Remover were alone in a short, steam-dampened hallway. "You are a celebrity of sorts," Hellebore said with a cold smile.

  "To the medical craft. And to a few other crafts as well." When the door to the larger chamber opened, it was at first very hard to see anything through the swirl of warm fog. When the air currents caused by the door had abated a little, the huddle of white-clad bodies on the far side of the white room became clearer.

  The two nurses stepped to the side as Hellebore approached, so quickly it almost seemed they must be guilty of something, clutching the towels they had been employing to the bosoms of their uniforms, their faces heavy with the look of foreboding common to the staff of that household. But their master apparently was in no mood to find a reason to punish anyone today. He simply waved them off, and, gratefully, they went.

  "Hello, Stepfather," said the small figure in the thick white bathrobe. The boy's voice had a strange throatiness, as though it came from a full-grown woman imitating a child's way of speaking. The skin visible on his bare feet, hands, and slightly round face was quite pink, perhaps with the heat of the bath he had just left. His curly light brown hair fell in loose, wet ringlets to just above his eyes. "You can come forward — I'm really quite clean."

  "So I see," said Hellebore, but did not move. "I came to talk to you. I've brought someone. This is . . ." "I know who it is," the boy said with a grin. Even the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles, no stranger to disturbing sights, could not help noticing that the child's smile went his stepfather's grimaces one better: it did not touch his eyes or warm the rest of his face in any way, a grin like someone pulling up the corners of a corpse's mouth. "We're old friends, he and I."

  "Ah. Yes. In any case, I wanted to ask you a few questions. Get your advice about something."

  "About Theo Vilmos."

  It was surprising in itself to see Hellebore surprised. "Yes."

  "He's still free."

  "How did you know?" "Oh, come, Stepfather, that doesn't require any great art. What else would bring the two of you here? Your esteemed guest scarcely ever leaves his house in the waterfront district. And if you had managed to get your hands on this Vilmos, this . . . mortal," he gave the word an unusual, even poisonous emphasis, "then why would you be asking me for advice?" The boy stretched, then beckoned to one of the nurses. She came, shamefacedly sneaking glances at Lord Hellebore to see if he objected. The boy shrugged off his robe and stood, rosily and plumply naked. "Dry me. I wish to be dressed now."

  As the nurse began to rub him with a towel, Lord Hellebore sent one of the other nurses for chairs. He sat, stretching out his long legs. "Well, then. Tell me why we have not succeeded."

  "Because this is not a runaway servant or a spy from one of the other Houses you seek. Success will not come so easily."

  "Are you suggesting that somehow this creature is outwitting us?" Where another child might have rolled his eyes or snorted, the boy only became more still. Even as his outside was being briskly rubbed, he seemed to retreat into some quiet place within himself, barely within shouting distance. "No," he said at last. "I am saying that things like this — things of which this Vilmos person is a part — are never simple. He is an attractant of sorts, especially now that he is in our world, and so he will draw unexpected forces, cause unforeseen accidents, spawn unlikely coincidences. Look at the things that have happened around him already, consider the momentous events of which he has unwittingly been a part. Is a fish powerful? But throw one into a quiet pool where cranes and crocodiles are sleeping and things begin to change." The boy turned his exotic, brown-eyed stare on the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles. "You should know that."

  "I do. But you put it nicely."

  "Thank you. My stepfather has sacrificed much so that I might have a good education."

  The Remover nodded. "Let's hope he has not sacrificed too much." Silence fell. Hellebore did not break it, but rose and gestured. The other nurse came forward, her arms full of soft pale clothing, and the two servants began to dress the boy. "Come," the lord said to the Remover. "I have kept the car waiting for you."

  "Give my love to Stepmother," said the boy, smiling again.

  Hellebore grunted as if he were too distracted to reply. He did not look back, and did not speak again until he and his guest were out of the steamy room and moving down the corridor, the air cooling with every step.

  "Everything that was ever written about crea
ting a Terrible Child is true," said Hellebore thoughtfully. "He is an abomination."

  The Remover nodded. "Then you got what you wanted, my lord, didn't you?"

  18 SIDEWALKS OF NEW EREWHON

  "You have to tell her, Theo. You know you have to." He didn't want to do anything of the sort. He much preferred looking out the window at the nighttime streets. It was a place strange beyond all imagining, this city of muted bronze and jade and shiny black glass, even here on its outskirts with most of the sky-clawing towers still miles away.

  Johnny Battistini had gone to Japan once as a replacement drummer for a metal band past its prime — "They made me wear a wig, Theo, no shit. I looked like Phyllis Diller!" — a one-shot gig that he had talked about for years afterward. At the time Theo had been frustrated by Johnny's inability to describe Tokyo and why it had made such an impression on him. Although he spoke about it frequently, summoning up the memory without warning from a haze of post-practice weed smoke, he could never explain his fascination more clearly than: "It was just . . . weird. It's like a regular city, but then it's all different and shit. But to them, it's not different. And that's the really weird part!"

  I finally get where you were coming from, John-boy. Theo felt a sharp, sharp pang of homesickness, as though a less substantial version of the knife that had killed Tansy's nephew had sliced him open and left him helpless against the strangeness of this new place. For the first time in his life, he truly missed Johnny B. The drummer would have reduced the whole of the experience to, "Wow, this place is crazy!" and by doing so made it palatable.

  Other than the bizarre variety of creatures going about their lives just as though they were normal people in Theo's normal world, it was hard to say what about the City was so alien. The buildings, although a bit strange in shape and decoration compared to those back home, were still within the bounds of comprehension — no matter how gossamer-thin the walkways between buildings or shimmeringly translucent the stone facades, general engineering seemed at least similar to the mortal world: sprites and other fairies might fly, but the buildings largely resisted such notions. The nature of the City's artificial lights was different, of course, but he had seen that from a distance — he was just seeing it more closely now. The limousine had come out of a long stretch of darkened industrial warehouses on the outer rim of the City and was rolling through a lively network of streets lined with stores and theaters and clubs and restaurants, many decorated with stylized moons and apples, apparently for the harvest holiday, all with signs ablaze, but these arrangements of glowing tubes and bulbs had a spectral, twilight quality, as though even the fiercest, hottest spotlights were draped with shrouds of pale green and silver and gray. They weren't, of course: it was the light itself that was unusual, the otherworldly radiance of Faerie, a spectral glow beneath which mortals first lost their way and then lost their souls . . .

  "Theo!" Applecore's whisper was so loud it hardly qualified as a whisper anymore; it felt like she'd stuck her head all the way into the hole of his ear. "You have to tell her."

  "Why can't she just let us off somewhere near where this Foxglove guy lives . . . ?" She shushed him with surprising force. It felt like she'd stuck a bicycle pump in his eustachian tube. Jesus, she sure has a loud voice for a tiny person, he thought, wincing. A friggin' six-inch-tall drill sergeant.

  "We're not goin' anywhere near that shower!" she hissed. "I told you, I don't trust Foxglove. And don't mention any names, anyway!" Theo shot a glance toward Poppy, who was sitting with her head tilted back against the seat, listening to the music with her eyes closed and a little smile on her face. She was holding Theo's hand quite tightly. "Okay, but why can't she drop us off near wherever it is we really are going?"

  "Because the more she knows, the more dangerous it is for us — and for her, if for some reason you're suicidal and my life doesn't mean much to you. We don't want her able to tell anyone anything except she dropped us in the Deepshade District."

  He started to raise an argument, but he knew Applecore was right. "So when do we get out?"

  "Now. We can get a bus anywhere around here."

  "A bus? My God, trains are weird enough. There are buses in Fairyland, too?" "Shut it, you! Do you want to give yourself away completely? Now tell her. And don't go looking to me to fix it, or to make you look like a nice fella." She lifted off his shoulder and flew over to sit on the door handle at the far side of the car, fitting her back into the curve of the padded handle with her wings on either side. "Go on," she said loudly.

  Poppy opened her eyes. "Sorry," she said. "This is just so much nicer than that old train. Father's factor will have a fit, of course — he's one of those old-school hobbanies who acts like every penny you spend is a hair plucked out of his own backside." She giggled. "My, Theo, you must think I'm a foulmouthed creature."

  "Poppy . . ." Theo hated being a bad guy. He tried to think of a half-truth, but could not ignore the fierce attention of Applecore, watching him from the door handle with her arms folded across her chest. "Poppy, we can't go all the way into the middle of the City with you. You have to let us out here."

  "What do you mean?" She looked from him to Applecore; the sprite shrugged. "Where are you going?"

  "We . . . we have lots of places to go. You're in danger now just for knowing us, for helping us. We don't want to make it any worse."

  "But . . . but I thought . . ." Her expression hardened. "You used me."

  "No! No, Poppy, I swear . . ." "You don't really care about me at all. You just acted that way so you could get a ride into the City. I should have let the constables take you away." In the dim light of the backseat, she seemed to have gone chalky white except for her staring eyes and the dark line of her mouth, which quivered. "You probably are murderers. No, that would at least mean you were really desperate. You're probably just thieves, just petty, nasty little thieves." She pounded on the partition that separated them from the driver. "Stop the coach!"

  "Pardon, Mistress?" asked the doonie's disembodied voice.

  "Stop the coach. These people are getting out." The car pulled smoothly out of the slow traffic and over to the curb. The door swung open without a sound, Applecore still clinging to the handle. Outside, a sign advertising some kind of gambling parlor splashed shuddering blue-gray light all over the pavement.

  "Look, Poppy, we're very grateful — I'm very grateful," Theo began, "— and I really do like you. I think you're . . ."

  "You think I'm stupid. You think I'm a stupid child. Get out. Go to the Well, for all I care." Applecore, ever the pragmatist, was already out and hovering above the sidewalk. A trio of husky young ogres slowed down to peer inside the limousine.

  "Hello, seedling!" one of them said to Poppy, bending his immense form almost double to get his huge head into the open car door. He had fists like Virginia hams and he smelled like something sluiced out of factories in big pipes. "Looking for fun? Come down from the pollen palaces for a little of the gray stuff?"

  "If you touch my coach," Poppy snarled at him, "— if you even breathe on the windows, I won't bother to have you killed, I'll have your family killed instead. Every one of them." The young ogre blinked at her. "Then you can explain to the neighbors that Mumsy and Daddy and your brothers and sisters are all dead because you were thinking with your knob when you should have been minding your own business. Now, consider the whole thing carefully before you decide, Gray Stuff — do you really want to fuck around with Thornapple House?"

  The ogre had time only for one more dumbfounded blink, then his two companions grabbed him by the arms and pulled him away with a force that would have easily yanked a normal-sized person into pieces.

  "Wow," Theo said as he watched them hurry away. "You're tough . . ."

  "Get out of my coach!" He turned. There were tears in her eyes, which made him feel like one of the lowest life-forms imaginable, but there was also something in her face that made him shut his mouth again without the protest of regret and innocence that w
as halfway up his throat and rising. Instead he turned and scrambled out onto the sidewalk. The door scraped his ankle as it slammed closed. A second later the limousine pulled back into traffic, which parted for it as though it were a dynamite wagon.

  "You certainly can pick 'em," Applecore observed. "Shut up." He didn't really want to alienate the sprite as well, his only friend, but he was too full of boiling misery to keep his mouth shut. It didn't matter, though: he couldn't think of anything else to say.

  ————— He followed Applecore down the sidewalk in a daze, trying to sort out his feelings, all but oblivious now to even the strangest surroundings and most unusual life-forms, glad only that the night skies were clear so he didn't have to add wading through puddles in a driving rain to his list of miseries.

  The thing was, he felt bad because he hated being misunderstood, but there was more to it than that: he had genuinely liked Poppy Thornapple. In the midst of all that had happened, it had been lovely to have a few hours of nearly innocent flirtation, the cheerful companionship of an attractive young woman who also liked him. And there had been something about her, a what-the-hell quality, that he had found fascinating. "What did I do wrong?"

  Applecore, who was doing her best to find the right sort of bus stop, ignored him until he asked again. "What do you mean, wrong?" she said.

  "I didn't lie to her. I didn't promise her anything!" Applecore shook her head. "We don't really have time to talk about this now, Vilmos. And you probably don't want to hear what I have to say, anyway."

  "But I don't get it. I was really careful . . ." The sprite dropped onto his shoulder, grabbed his earlobe, and leaned out in front of his face. "By the Trees, fella, have you ever actually had a girlfriend?"

  "What the hell does that mean? Lots." "Then you must have worked really hard not to learn anything about women. Is that why you had so many? Easier just to dump 'em when they started making sense?" She snorted and sat down on his shoulder.