The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  No! I won't let them do it! But it was pointless. They were doing it, tapping into the sleeping power of the king and queen so that Hellebore and his bonsai demon could open a door into some unimaginably dark place. And even as he thought this, Theo felt the block or barrier finally give way and the thing inside began to stream out of him like water from a wrung cloth.

  Hellebore nodded, satisfied, then let go of Theo's hands, turned his back and walked away, leaving Theo to sink slowly to his knees as life ebbed slowly but steadily out of him and into his gleeful twin, the Terrible Child.

  The low gleam of red and amber light had flared high now, a huge bonfire of something less substantial than flame, but although it continued to billow upward in an unstable column whose top was invisible in the clouds, the color of it had cooled to a sort of shifting lavender-blue only distinguishable from the twilight sky because it gave off its own light. The Terrible Child stood before it, small hands spread wide, and pulses of a brighter glow jumped and throbbed at the child's nearness. The Terrible Child was chanting something, a spell, a manipulation of the universe, just as Hellebore had done, but the boy was using a language that barely sounded like words, shouting it joyfully, and where Hellebore had hurried through his own invocation like a man trying to get off the phone, the Terrible Child was immersed in his, riding it through some unimaginable experience, laughing, squealing with pleasure, moving toward some hideous climax.

  That's it. Theo looked sadly at Cumber Sedge, but his friend was slumped between his guards, head down. Theo hoped he had only been stunned by a punitive blow to the head, not killed, although it didn't seem to matter much now. That's it. We lose. Button loses. I lose. Hellebore wins. He could feel the last dregs of whatever made up the magical Violet part of the key leaking out of him and into the child, along with his own vitality, as though he were a sack with a hole ripped in it. The escaping essence was running out swiftly and smoothly, synchronized with the tempo of the child's slow, exultant chant.

  No, not just running smoothly, he realized as his head nodded forward and his weary eyes closed. He was falling into something deep and dark, endlessly dark, a slow-motion plummet at right angles from his own self. The outward flow of the key was the only strong thing left now, and impossible to ignore. It didn't just run, it pulsed, and there was a rhythm to it, something as remorselessly steady as a cosmic heartbeat.

  Ba-bump. Ba-bump. It might have been his own heart slowly pumping. Ba-bump. Ba-bump. The connection between himself and the child pulsed like Tansy's slashed artery, gushing out life. He felt it, floated in it for a long moment. Always a musician, a dying part of him thought, distantly amused. The end of the world has a backbeat . . .

  The remorseless pulse was dragging him ever deeper toward sleep and final darkness, but he did not want to sleep yet. He thought suddenly of the goblin music, its gloriously disordered yet organized tangle, the elliptical rhythms that would tug a plodding beat like this to pieces. Goblin sounds. He tried to summon them up, but they seemed as distant as the waking world is from the center of a nightmare. Then a drift, a hint, a fragment of memory came back to him. Goblins make shapes like . . . like this. He remembered them, or maybe only imagined them, but they felt right, a sprung rhythm that ran out-of-kilter circles around the slow pulse. Just that crazy bit off. Yeah, like that. Astonishingly, he discovered a sort of strength in the memory. For a moment he thought it was only a fleeting relief, the way a candle might flare one last instant in air from the breath that extinguished it, but then the larger pulse quieted. Suddenly he felt an impatient swallowing suction from the child, demanding what Theo was holding back.

  Without conscious thought, he felt even more intently for the alternate rhythm. He wasn't really certain now it had anything to do with goblins, but it was a counter-pattern, and one that he could hold. He grabbed it, worked the changes with slippery mental fingers that threatened at any moment to fumble away the complicated cadence. I should have worked harder at this stuff, he thought dizzily, desperately, from a perch on the edge of a black hole, one mistake away from a plunge into unbeing. I was always shit at real jazz.

  Let go . The words that came to him from the child were not mockery, but a command. You are too weak to stop me. And Theo knew it was true — he was too weak. But he also knew that if the child and Hellebore were to have their victory, he would make them crawl scratched and bleeding through his coils of barbed-wire polyrhythms to get it.

  The pull grew more intense as the angry child fought harder, and pain suddenly seemed to turn Theo inside out so that for a moment he lost everything, but he grabbed at the memory of the goblin song — not just the beat itself, or even the music, but the feeling of connection and belonging that it had given him — and pulled himself back up to his perch above the internal abyss. Not yet, he told the child, and despite the certain knowledge that eventually he would lose, it was Theo who did the taunting now. Not that easy. First we're going to make some music, little brother.

  He gave it all he had left, pulling the plodding beat to pieces and throwing those pieces around, reassembling them into something that went twice as far sideways at any given timeless instant as it went forward. He sang, even if it was only in his own head, and the dark, cold child could only grab at him without catching him, surround him without caging him. He sang about the spaces between beats, of the beats between spaces, about the sounds that came after quiet and even the sounds that were in quiet itself. He was aware as he did so, and even a little amused, that it was the greatest performance he would ever give — could ever give — but not only would it be his last, it was utterly, entirely silent.

  The rage of the child built and built, but it was coupled with a growing worry that the peak opportunity would pass — a worry that was so tangible Theo could almost see it in his mind's eye, and for a brief moment could almost believe he might actually thwart the Terrible Child. As the child worked harder to encircle his resistance and beat him down, Theo not only glimpsed the child's unprotected and innermost feelings but could even sense for the first time what was on the other side of their complicated transaction — both the endlessly complex energies of the waiting world that Theo had known and something that was both bigger and smaller, a shadow as nebulous as smoke and as real as death.

  Old Night. The sudden touch of it surprised him and shocked him to the core of himself — even just this merest hint of it nearly killed him. He faltered at the suggestion of that mad emptiness, fell for a moment into a blank, complete terror, and lost his grip on that thing in him which had been resisting. With a surge of freezing triumph the child drained away all that Theo had been holding back: one moment it was still there and active inside him, the next moment it was gone. Suddenly Theo's eyes were open and the hilltop was around him once more, but he was no longer the center of anything.

  Time to die , he thought, but it no longer seemed like such a dreadful thing as it once had. It was almost comfortable lying on the ground, comfortable to know you had done all you could and that nothing else was expected from you, even at the end of the world — especially at the end of the world. The others around the rim of the pit were still locked into life, looking on in apprehension and expectation as the Terrible Child's invocation rose to new heights of fervor as it neared the finish, every one of the faces afire with the purplish light, all of them rigidly still, as though they were more afraid of being noticed than of anything else. Nothing moved but the light.

  No, that was not quite true: Theo had spotted another hint of motion in the near distance, in the water near the island's shore. It was hard to make out — at first he thought it must be a trick of the mists and the light seething above the low hilltop — but after a moment he was certain: something was coming out the lake. At first it was only a head, but as the neck and shoulders came smoothly, slowly up he realized that whatever it was had not been swimming but walking. It was the thing he had seen go into the water on the far side, and it had walked all the way to the island a
cross the bottom of the lake.

  Even before he could make out the empty eye sockets, the ragged, rotting shreds of what had been a constable's uniform, he knew what was coming. Even as a small, dark part of himself felt reassured by this proof that the universe was really as shitty as it seemed, that even after the worst thing imaginable had happened there was still more bad stuff to come, Theo was trying desperately to move, all illusion of comfort gone now, but although he could manage a twitch, even a small shuffling of his feet in place, Hellebore's command and the exhaustion of his struggle with the child still held him.

  Eyes fixed on the pit and the Terrible Child, Hellebore and the others had not seen the interloper yet. The irrha, Dowd's summoning, breasted the water and made its clumsy way up onto the bottom of the low slope; then, despite the black holes where the dead eyes had once been, it began to lurch up the hill directly toward the spot where Theo lay, its clenched teeth and withered gums like a horrid cartoon of determination.

  "Theo!" Astonishingly, it was Applecore's voice at the center of a fierce whirring of wings a few yards away — she looked as though she was trying to fly into a windstorm. "Oh, Theo, get up, Hellebore's charm won't let me get any closer to you. It's that dead thing, coming for you! Run, by the Trees, run!"

  He wept as he forced out the words. "Hellebore's . . . too . . . strong . . ." Oh, why didn't you get out of here when you had the chance, you brave, stupid woman . . . !

  The sprite did not hesitate, but flew away, speeding low across the grass. She headed for Lord Hellebore where he stood behind the Terrible Child, watching with the closest thing to fatherly approval Theo could imagine him showing as the child began to twist the glow of the royal fires into bizarre shapes. The air was thickening around the island — Theo could feel it in his ears, on his skin, a tightening as though all of reality were about to burst like a balloon.

  Hellebore suddenly shrieked in surprise and put a hand up to his face. A moment later a line of blood appeared between his fingers as though drawn by some magical, slow-appearing paint. A blur slid around his head and then something poked at his eye. He reeled back, waving angrily at the invisible something. Applecore slowed and hovered for a moment and Theo could see a glint in her arms, the long sliver of Cathedral glass she had snatched up from the ground. Then, as if she had suddenly remembered the greater danger, she turned and flew at the Terrible Child, but skidded off him and his blanket of purple light like water off a hot griddle. Undeterred, she buzzed back toward Hellebore. The master of Hellebore House swung his hand at her and she dodged, even managing to jab his finger with the bright shard. He drew the hand back in pain, then suddenly seemed to realize his error and snapped the hand back out. Yards away, the hovering sprite suddenly became a tiny knot of flame.

  "No!" Theo shrieked, and with a surge of strength he could not have guessed he had, struggled to his feet. He had no time to mourn Applecore's sacrifice: the irrha was most of the way up the slope, still headed right for him. Even Hellebore had noticed it now. One of the constables turned and set his hornet-gun against his shoulder, then fired. The whining roar of the gun sawed across the hillside. The undead thing's arm whipped back and then fluttered forward, rags of it now stripped away, but it kept trudging grimly upward.

  "It wants only the one it was summoned for," shouted Hellebore. He wiped at the blood on his cheek, smearing it across his snow-pale skin. He turned and saw to his satisfaction that the Terrible Child was still actively immersed in the storm of lavender light, still singing and laughing obliviously, still climbing toward conclusion. "Let it have him," Hellebore directed the guards. "They are hard to kill, those things."

  You're thick, Vilmos, you really are! Plunged back into reality again, Theo was full of desperation and shame. Just like she always said! Applecore had sacrificed her life for this moment, for his freedom, and it was vanishing. He threw himself against the rigid resistance of his own sinews, fighting to move away from the spot where he was held. Hellebore was distracted, still dabbing at his cheek and staring at the thing coming up the slope, but the fairy lord was no longer fighting: Theo could feel the power of Hellebore's will stretch but hold, keeping Theo's feet planted, leaving him helpless.

  The irrha opened its arms, one of them green-brown with putrefaction, the other wet and tattered, shredded to ribbons by the constable's gun — an embrace without human feeling, only hunger to complete its task. Theo turned away from the relentless horror, not wanting to see that face as it closed on him. His hand climbed to the chain around his neck, Poppy's chain, and clutched it. So many had given so much, risked so much, for him, but in the end it had not been enough. He looked out to the lake, the water dark now, only silvered a little by the light from the island's center. All ending now.

  The water . . . He had no more than a few seconds left to act. With an effort that felt as though it tore every nerve in his body loose from its sheath, he tried one last time to throw himself sideways, away from the advancing creature. Scalding pain splashed through him, made him scream until it felt like his lungs were going to come out of his throat, but it was not enough to move his feet.

  It was enough, however — just barely enough — to tip him sideways. For a moment Theo felt the supremely weird sensation of his overmatched muscles trying independently of his own will to do the impossible, to keep his body upright when it was already falling, then he thumped onto his side and began to roll down the sloping hillside toward the lake. He reached the bottom and teetered there for a moment on a low hummock at the water's edge, everything depending on the minutiae of balance, then his legs went over and the rest of him was tugged behind them, sliding him into the cold gray water.

  He bobbed up to the surface, in control of his own exhausted body once more. The water was so shallow that even on his knees he was still only half-submerged.

  "Ha!" said Lord Hellebore. "You are stronger than I suspected. But it was pointless, wasn't it? Better to give in gracefully — I do not think a cubit of water is going to keep you out of the hands of your nemesis."

  Everything seemed to pause — the Terrible Child still busy in the center of his glow, almost hidden now by its stunning brightness, Hellebore and the others watching the confrontation between Theo and the dead thing. Even the irrha itself seemed surprised into immobility for a few seconds. Then it simply turned and came lurching down the slope toward him, as though someone had switched it back on.

  Theo felt something vast and cold touch him. He looked down and saw two arms pale almost to the point of translucence encircle him like bars of iron, felt himself pulled back against wet fabric and a hard, flat breast as chill as ice.

  "No, nothing else will have him. He is mine." The voice resounded in his ear, ancient, slow. "He wears our shackle on his arm. He was freed to ransom himself but I smell no gold, no bright jewels for my hair, so now he is reclaimed."

  Theo could only crouch in the belly-high water, held in her unbreakable, clammy grip. Her wet hair lay across his shoulders like seaweed. He did not turn, knew that if he looked into her eyes that would be the last thing he saw. "Please," he said. "Not yet. Just a few moments more."

  "You have no right of plea or pardon," the ancient water-nymph told him, but not harshly.

  "I know. But I want to see . . . if I was right . . ." He could feel cold radiating from her, filling him where he lay cradled against her freezing belly, could feel her slow, slow heartbeat. "A moment, then," she said.

  And as he watched the irrha halted and stood motionless on the hillside, just yards from Theo but suddenly as blind to him as if he had ceased to exist. It slowly pivoted its ruined head from side to side, then turned to the place where Hellebore and his monstrous stepchild stood. It took a hesitant step toward them, then another.

  Hellebore watched with wide eyes. "Stop, you idiot thing, stop!" he shouted, but the irrha did not stop. Hellebore moved out of its way, waving his arms, screaming, "Shoot it! Destroy it!" Several of the constables began to fire; their guns h
issed and snapped and the bronze hornets leaped toward the thing and through it. Gobbets of rotting flesh flew into the air. Much of the irrha's stolen face vanished in a spray of dead tissue, leaving hanging bone and a few teeth, but still it trudged up the hill. Only then did Hellebore realize that the thing was not after him. With Theo now the rightful possession of the ancient water-spirit and out of the irrha's circle of perception, it headed inexorably toward the only thing like him, his almost-twin, the small boy luxuriating in the lavender glow of pure power at the lip of the hill.

  Hellebore screamed in rage as he dashed after the irrha and was almost shot by his own guards before they saw him and stopped firing. The ogres sprang after their master, but too late: Hellebore leaped and caught the creature's leg even as it stretched out its arms toward the oblivious child. Rotted fabric tore away in Hellebore's fingers, and so did a long strip of putrid flesh. He lost his grip and tumbled backward.

  The dead thing waded into the purple gleam and wrapped its arms around the child, who began to writhe and murmur like someone shaken out a beautiful dream. Simultaneously, the light changed color, blooming scarlet and orange, or so it appeared at first; it was a moment before Theo, watching from the nymph's cold embrace, could be certain of what had happened. The irrha had opened a gateway like the one that had brought Theo to Faerie, but this gateway led straight into a raging inferno — the blaze that had been the warehouse of the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles.

  "It is compelled to do only one thing," Eamonn Dowd had told him as they had stood in that place, "— to seize you and bring you here." Dowd was gone, but it seemed the irrha's compulsion was not.