The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  "There are some application machines down there," Cumber whispered, pointing to a spot along the wall between a pair of marble birch trees. "That's the shortest line I see."

  "But aren't we supposed to wait for Coathook . . . ?" "We're supposed to be ready when he gets here, and who knows how long it will take us to get to the front of the line?" Cumber indicated the huge sundial which, against all common sense, hung flat against the wall, out of any direct sunlight, and yet displayed a prominent wedge of shadow that had crept up the face until it was standing almost straight up. "He'll be here at noon. Come on."

  They got into line behind some kind of possum-woman who had what looked like a couple of dozen children draped all over her, in her pockets and on her shoulders and one even sitting in her grocery bag, which she rested on the floor after each shuffling step forward. The possum-fairy child in the bag stared at Theo with round brown eyes as it licked the remains of something sticky off its pointed muzzle.

  They reached the front at last. Streedy had his eyes closed again and was talking to himself, fingers twitching as though he conducted an invisible orchestra. Cumber Sedge stepped up to the machine. Theo would never have known it was a machine if Cumber hadn't told him: it had the shape of a large, very realistic rock, tall as a Neolithic standing stone, with a large chunk broken out of it about chest high to reveal a crystalline interior like a geode.

  Cumber put his hands on the stone and leaned in toward the glittering, faceted opening. "Entry permit application," he said.

  "Purpose?" the rock asked him in a calm tenor voice.

  "Visitor and livestock."

  "Number of livestock?"

  "One."

  "Number of visitors?"

  "One."

  "Originating field of visitor . . . ?" While Cumber answered questions, Theo looked around. The time must be drawing near when they would have to finish their business and let the next person in line use the machine, and the sundial on the wall was definitely reading noon, but he saw no sign of Coathook. He wished he knew what exactly it was that Button planned.

  "By the Elder Trees," someone shrieked, "what's wrong with him?" Terrified that Streedy had done something bizarre, Theo whirled around, but the tall, shaggy-haired fairy was still leaning against the wall beside the application machine. Everybody else had turned to look at something in the middle of the vast room. Theo turned too, and saw a group of different kinds of fairies beginning to crowd around a brown figure twitching on the floor. It took him only a moment to grasp what was going on.

  While the other folk in line were facing away from the permit machine, watching the thrashing goblin and the excited throng around him, Cumber grabbed Streedy and pulled him forward to stand in front of the glittering geode-machine. The damaged fairy let himself be shoved closer, until his palms touched the stone, then the hair on Streedy's head began to stir as if in an unseen breeze — no, more slowly, Theo realized, as languorously as seaweed in the clutch of the tide. The fairy leaned forward until it seemed he might kiss the exposed crystalline interior. The geode glowed and Streedy's head became, for a moment, no more than a shock-haired silhouette.

  Cumber leaned toward Theo. "This will take him a few moments at least," he whispered. "Go help keep people's attention over there." Theo had a moment of pure panic as he ran toward the spot where Coathook was still snapping and moaning on the green tile floor. Several fairy-folk seemed to be considering helping him, but none of them appeared willing to get very close to his sharp yellow teeth.

  "Someone help him!" Theo shouted. "Someone get a doctor!" A few bystanders turned to stare at him blankly. Shit, Theo remembered, that's not the word for a regular doctor here. What did Applecore and the others call them again? "A chirurgeon!"

  He kneeled close to Coathook and put his hands on the apparent victim's shoulders to make sure he wouldn't get cut accidentally by the goblin's long nails. "Just a little longer," he whispered. "We're almost done, I think." He straightened up and announced, "I think he's starting to come out of it!"

  The fat security guard had finally worked up the courage to approach. He kneeled, not without effort, keeping Theo between himself and the stilltwitching Coathook. "What is it?" he asked breathlessly. "Is he dying?"

  "No!" Coathook gasped. He really did look and sound dreadful. "Just . . . a goblin fit."

  "Drunk, most likely," the guard said quietly to Theo. "They're like fish in Ys, always wet."

  "I need water," Coathook panted. "No, not you, him. Bring water!" he rasped at Theo. "I'll be right back," he told the guard reassuringly as he got up. "See, he's getting better already." And indeed Coathook was beginning to twitch more slowly.

  He pushed his way through the crowd gathered around the goblin and almost ran directly into Cumber and Streedy Nettle coming from the other direction. Streedy could barely stand and looked as though he'd been badly beaten. At any other time the tall, staggering fairy would have caught the attention of many of the people in Elysium House, but at the moment they were all far more absorbed watching Coathook trying to climb back onto his feet, using the fat security guard as his crutch before tumbling them both down onto the floor. People were laughing now and Theo could even imagine that Coathook would manage to walk out of the building again without being handed over to the constables.

  "Did it all get done?" he asked. Cumber nodded his head in reply, but he was too busy keeping Streedy upright to talk. They went out the massive front doors, down the stairs, and headed along Hedgerow Avenue toward the bus stop, but had only gone a few steps when Cumber abruptly stopped. "Theo, look!"

  Theo's first response to Cumber's despairing tone was to glance back at the doors, expecting to see a crowd of angry fairies chasing them, but Cumber was pointing in another direction entirely. Theo turned to look at the shop window where they had stopped before entering Elysium House.

  The rows of display mirrorcases all showed the same face. Theo's.

  "Jesus! Shit, that's me!" His face — a startled, candid image he'd never seen before, but which was still quite recognizably him — looked back at him for only a moment longer, then was replaced all across the window by the replicated faces of Lord Nidrus Hellebore — but Hellebore's image was not still. He was talking.

  As Theo and Cumber dragged Streedy Nettle forward, half-hoping to block the display from the other people on the street, the viewpoint pulled back to show Hellebore sitting at a vast black desk that was empty but for two objects, a crystal vase with a single pallid flower, and a bell-shaped bottle, almost more like a specimen jar than anything else. It was hard to see what was inside, but it appeared to be moving.

  "What's he saying? I wish I could hear the sound," Theo said. "Do you really need to?" said Cumber miserably. "It's almost certainly something to the effect of, 'We want this fellow. Bring him to us and we'll make you rich. Help him and we'll have your skin off.'" Cumber turned away from the shop window, eyes already roving up and down the street. "We have to get out of here fast, Theo! We have to get back to the bridge before someone recognizes you."

  But despite the chill of terror that had raced through him at the sight of his own face being broadcast across the city, the knowledge that he was not only a fugitive now but a famous fugitive, Theo could not move from the spot. The camera, or whatever medium brought the picture to the ranked mirrorcases, had finally managed to bring the bottle on Lord Hellebore's desk into sharp enough focus that Theo could recognize what was huddled inside it, wings beating weakly on the inside of the glass.

  "Oh, Cumber, that's . . . that's Applecore. He has Applecore."

  32 TRENDY FUNGUS

  All the way back he felt certain everyone on the Warstones-Dockyards bus was staring at him, a few only trying to decide why he looked familiar, but others no doubt whispering into their shellphones, alerting some parliamentary tactical squad that they had spotted a wanted criminal. Or maybe Hellebore and the others wouldn't bother with anything so subtle as a troop of constables. Maybe they'd just s
end another dragon swooping down out of the sky to roast the whole bus like a canned ham in a blast furnace, meat and bone and fairy-metals fused together into one grotesque mass . . . No, Hellebore and Thornapple tried to capture me before, he told himself, fighting panic. They sent Tansy. So they probably won't just kill me. He was shivering and almost sick to his stomach.

  Of course, the idea that instead of being killed in a flaming second he might wind up in some soundproofed modern dungeon in Hellebore House did not provide much solace, especially since he still had not the slightest idea of what they wanted from him.

  And they have Applecore. She's alive, but they have her. Knowing that was worse in some ways than being a fugitive himself. She was bait for a trap, of course. Theo had seen it in enough second-rate action movies: get the hero's sidekick as a hostage, force him to enter the Evil Villain Lair. It would have been ludicrous if it weren't so horrible when it was really happening.

  Besides, what makes anyone think I'm the hero? No, if I'm smart, I won't do anything. Because I'm not some guy in a movie. I couldn't even buy groceries and make change here, let alone pull some big Die Hard rescue. But that seemed too terrible to think about — how could he just leave Applecore to be . . . what? Tortured? Maybe with help I could do something . . . He looked over to Cumber, who had not lost the shocked look on his face in the half hour or so since they had seen Hellebore's broadcast. Look at him — he really cares about her and she didn't even save his bacon twenty times like she did with me. I bet he'd risk his life for her in a heartbeat. But what could either of them do? Cumber was a lab assistant, not a master spy or an ex-soldier. And Theo was . . . a musician, basically. Look out, evildoers! He felt weak and miserable. TestTube Boy and The Man Who Sometimes Plays the Tambourine are coming for you!

  No, it was pretty clearly hopeless. But did that mean that he should avoid trying? Even though he would probably wind up being razored into pieces by Hellebore and some crazy fairy-doctors because they thought he knew something that would help them conquer the fairy universe? And what the hell is it they think I know, anyway? Something about Eamonn Dowd? Or something he wrote about? But I have his actual notebook and nobody's been interested in it so far except people like Cumber. If the bad guys wanted it, they could have had a maid steal it out of Daffodil House easily enough.

  Still, it couldn't just be a coincidence that his great-uncle had lived in Faerie and that now Theo had been dragged here too, could it? But maybe it wasn't anything to do with the book. It certainly hadn't led him here — he had still thought it was a novel when all hell came shambling after him. Maybe there was something about Theo himself . . .

  Theo felt someone's eyes on him. A male brownie with a package on his lap was watching him suspiciously; for a moment he felt certain he was about to be denounced. Then he realized he had probably been squirming and mumbling to himself. He tried to give the brownie a reassuring smile. Jesus, he thought, I'm turning into Streedy.

  The fairy into whom he was turning sprawled at the end of the seat as though someone had folded him up and then he had come violently unfolded again. Streedy Nettle was so exhausted by whatever effort he had put out at Elysium House that he wasn't even talking to himself: he stared out the window with the stunned look of a combat survivor. So this is how it is, Theo reflected. I'm a fugitive but I don't know why. I'm working for a goblin, promoting a revolution I don't understand. My best friend here is stuck in a bottle on the desk of the most evil bastard in this world. What else can happen?

  Something made a loud popping noise and the bus swerved violently. Theo threw himself onto his belly in the aisle and lay there, waiting for whoever was shooting out the windows to get on with their job, but the bus rolled to a bumpy stop and the windows stayed where they were. Theo peered up from the middle of the aisle to discover most of the nearby passengers staring down at him in surprise. He hastily climbed back into the seat.

  "What are you doing?" Cumber whispered. "Everyone's staring!"

  "I thought someone was shooting at us. At me."

  Cumber shook his head. "A ruptured tire, that's all. Try to look a little more normal, will you?"

  "Oh, sure. No problem." The bus driver, an old gray doonie with a receding mane and a straw cap perched between his ears, climbed back onto the bus after a few minutes, shaking his head and clicking his huge flat teeth in disgust. "We'll have to wait a bit," he announced. "They'll send another bus along for you while we get this fixed."

  "How long until the new bus gets here?" asked a harried-looking gnome woman with two small but extremely active children. As the driver began explaining some complicated formulation that seemed to add up to "I have no idea," Theo began to panic again. The idea of sitting by the roadside under the casual scrutiny of every jeep full of constables that passed was more than he could stand. "How far back to the bridge?" he asked Cumber.

  "It would take us a couple of hours to walk." "Do you think Streedy can make it without us carrying him?" Taking off on foot felt at least as dangerous as staying, especially when that undead thing was almost certainly still looking for him, but they'd be getting closer to sanctuary with every step instead of waiting to be recognized and arrested. "Yeah? Then let's go."

  ————— Theo's terror eased a little as they escaped the center of town, leaving only a dull ache in his stomach. Although several convoys of armed constables drove by them, he and his companions were part of an entire throng of goblins and short-legged dobbies and other poor fairies making their way back to the outskirts of the City ahead of the curfew. None of the troops seemed to give them more than a cursory glance. It was, however, a long, hard walk; by the time they left the crowds behind and had climbed to the highest of the hilly streets along the border between the Sunset and Twilight districts and were on their way down the other side toward the fenlands, Theo was so exhausted and footsore that even the prospect of being captured by Hellebore's minions didn't seem quite so dreadful. At least they'd probably drive me somewhere before they started torturing me — I'd get to sit down for a while. Jesus, I'm in terrible shape. You never see one of those action-hero guys wheezing before he's even started climbing up elevator shafts and all that.

  As they trudged down a winding street into the glare of the late-afternoon sun, seemingly alone in the neighborhood but for furtive movements at the round, curtained windows as the local gnomes and boggarts peered out at them, Cumber squinted toward the coppery line of the river stretching below them and particularly at the dark mass of people and tents sprawled along the banks beyond the Old Fayfort Bridge. "There are a lot of coaches and trucks parked beside the camp," he announced.

  "Do you think it's Hellebore's soldiers?" Button had said something about an inspection, a spying mission by the Parliament of Blooms, but it had blown out of Theo's head in the confusion of the afternoon. Were they going to have to spend all night hiding in the weeds?

  Cumber shaded his eyes. "I don't know — there are more trucks than coaches, but they don't really look like the kind of thing that constables would be driving. Still, we'd probably better go carefully."

  At the bottom of the hill they picked a more indirect path across the hilly waste ground between the edge of the City and the fens, and were fortunate enough to meet up with a party of goblins who were passing around a bottle of something as they returned to the bridge after having spent the day looking for work in the City. At first the goblins looked at Theo and the two fairies with distrust, and they did not seem to recognize Coathook's name when Cumber tried to use him as a reference, but when Theo asked them if they knew the musician Bottlecap, and demonstrated a little snatch of the song he had sung with the goblin musicians his first night in camp, they began to smile. One of them even recognized him then, laughing and calling him "the petalhead throathonker" in an almost friendly way — which Theo assumed meant something like "the fairy who thinks he can sing"— then offered him the bottle full of brackish liquid. Courtesy dictated he try some. It tasted like it was
made out of tree-moss and had a kick that made his eyes water. The goblins enjoyed his expression and noises very much.

  They continued toward the bridge together, Theo and his friends now at least with the dubious camouflage of the returning laborers — dubious because Theo and even Cumber were obviously too big to be goblins themselves, let alone Streedy, who was nearly a yard taller than any of their new companions.

  "I don't see any constables," Cumber said as they neared the bridge, "although I see quite a few civilian bodyguards around. In fact, it looks like other than the bodyguards, most of the ones I don't recognize are women — Flower-folk, by the look of them, or at least they're dressed too nicely to be people from the camps. I think they're giving away food. And clothing." He squinted again and shaded his eyes. "And stuffed toys."

  "Oh, man, I keep forgetting we're living in a refugee camp. Button did say something about a charity thing." Theo shook his head. "I knew my life was screwed up, but I never thought I'd end up on the wrong end of a bunch of rich ladies doing good. Can we avoid this entirely?"

  "Well, if we keep circling around to the riverbank instead of going straight in past the bridge, we can probably get down into the camp without attracting too much attention." Cumber frowned. "But there are a lot of people at this end of the camp. They are giving away free food, after all."

  The goblins had also figured out what was going on and were heading toward the bridge to investigate. Theo didn't want to go near enough to risk being recognized by any of the outsiders. In fact, all he really wanted to do was get back to the tent as fast as possible, lie down, then pull whichever blanket was the least filthy over his face for a while and just be hopeless and pathetic.