Tad Williams - The War of the Flowers (retail) (pdf)

by Tad Williams

  "Where are my wings?" he shrieked. "Gone! Cut off! Because my mother wanted me to be like you! But I wish I had them still! Do you hear me? Because a fairy without wings is . . . is nothing! A flightless abomination!"

  Zirus tugged the ferisher roughly off the table and wrapped his shirt back around him before shoving him toward the door. Theo followed closely, Applecore hunched down and riding his shoulder like a jockey. The Jonquil heir stopped in the doorway and bowed to the crowd, most of whom seemed more amused than anything else.

  "Well," Zirus shouted above the music, "another exciting evening at Christmas, hey? But I think we'll get this fellow home now."

  "Someday all their houses will burn down," Cumber Sedge murmured, "and I'll be one of the ones cheering." Only Theo heard him.

  In the elevator down, Zirus was still cheerful. "Hidden depths, eh, Sedge?" "None of you ever liked me," Cumber said quietly. "The whole time we were in school together, you ignored me. You didn't even bother to pretend."

  For a moment Zirus Jonquil's face revealed something startlingly cool and hard. "Oh, stop blubbering, Sedge. What did you expect? You're only a ferisher, after all."

  21 IN THORNAPPLE HOUSE

  The big coach slid past the gates and down the long driveway lined with poplars. The lower part of the tower stood mostly dark, as was to be expected — it was halfway between midnight and dawn, after all, and even the most powerful families had to be seen conserving energy — but there was a cluster of lit windows on one of the top floors.

  Father, up working late, she thought. As she stepped from the car she could just hear the quiet moaning of the tree-nymphs in their restless sleep. The spells on them were powerful, but even so they could not be entirely silenced. "They're mourning all the other trees gone here in the middle of the City, all their kin killed or dispossessed," one of her childhood nurses had told her. "A terrible thing that was done here, terrible." That nurse had not lasted long, but her words had stayed with Poppy. In the small hours there was no traffic to hide the nymphs' lament and it left her shivering.

  Malander Foxglove slid out behind her, pulled her back toward him. He twined his long arms around her and searched for her lips. His mouth smelled of myrtle pastilles, which he sucked to cover the faintly corrupt scent of pixie dust. "Shall I come in, fair Poppaea? Shall we have a little Mabon Eve drink?"

  "I'm tired, Lander." He raised an eyebrow, then leaned back against the side of the huge coach. "You've been strange all night, Pops. Not your normal entertaining self at all." He rubbed up a bit of elemental fire between his fingertips and lit his cigarette in its long holder, then blew a twining snake of smoke. "I hope this won't be an all-the-time thing, little one. That would get boring."

  She hated it when he called her "little one." It was the kind of name her father used on those long-ago and extremely rare occasions when he had tried to be affectionate — the kind of nonspecific endearment that Poppy suspected allowed Lord Thornapple not to have to remember which of his seven daughters he was talking to. And it also reminded her of something else she would rather have forgotten, namely that she was half a head shorter than any of her friends. She stiffened in his arms. "I'm sorry to offend you, Master Foxglove."

  His eyebrow lifted again at her tone. "Black iron, what crawled into you and died?" He let go of her and stretched lazily. "That's my ancient father's bodyguard Gummy waiting there at the door, so the old fellow must be here discussing affairs of the realm with your daddums. Surely you don't mind if I come in and see whether he wants to catch a ride home with me?"

  "Your father must have his own coach." "Not if he came with Lord Hellebore, which he probably did — the three of them are close as the Unseelie Host these days." He sniffed. "They seem to think that if they stopped interfering with everything, the whole place would turn back into the Wildwood again."

  "I told you, Malander — I'm tired." "No one wants to get under your petticoats that badly, Pops, least of all me. There are a million fish in Ys, so don't be so full of yourself. All I'm doing is coming in to see if my father wants a ride home."

  "You hate your father."

  "Yes, but only to keep things interesting." She shrugged, too tired to argue, but the idea of having to talk to anyone, let alone having to fight that person off, made her feel almost ill. She was growing weary of Malander Foxglove. In fact, the entire night had been a mistake. After the terrible funeral for her brother, the oppressive stillness of the Grove, the weight of tradition around her like a thick fog, then the relatives and friends at the wake talking about Orian Thornapple as though he had been some kind of young Rose instead of what he was — a rotten little shit — she had thought it would do her good to go out with her friends somewhere loud and dark. But the fact was, she had to admit she didn't really like most of her friends. And seeing Theo hadn't helped. She had all but begged him to call her. What kind of way was that for a young woman of her class and connections to behave? He was probably laughing at her right now with his lowlife friends, especially that snippy little sprite.

  Malander gave the large gray person a mock-salute. "What's the good word, Gummy?"

  "Overtime," grunted the bodyguard. Poppy dropped her black spiderweb cloak behind the front door. It was worth thousands, but she half-hoped someone would steal it, or at least step on it so she'd have an excuse to go out shopping to get another. She didn't want to be home. She hated this place. Then again, she didn't particularly want to be back at school either.

  "By the way, who was that fellow you were talking with downstairs at the bar?" young Foxglove asked suddenly. "A bit heavyset, strange haircut? I didn't recognize him."

  "What were you doing — spying on me?" He blew a smoke ring. "I was on my way to the gents, as it happens. My, we are self-absorbed tonight, aren't we? And a little tense. Why, is he some new flame of yours . . . ?"

  The question, and the hopelessness she felt even trying to answer that question in her own mind, still hung over her like the smoke ring when the lights in the hallway suddenly flickered once, then went out.

  "Another cursed blackout." Malander Foxglove's sharp features flicked up like a red ghost as he drew on his cigarette. "You can't get those bloodyminded power plant workers to do a decent day's work. They need culling. There hasn't been a real crackdown in years." He curled an arm around Poppy. "Don't worry — I'll make a little light."

  As fire sputtered silently between his fingers, she ducked out of his grasp. "I don't need your help, thank you."

  "You're being very strange tonight, Pops. Come on, give me a kiss and let's make up."

  For a moment she hesitated. She didn't know what she wanted, not really, and it would be nice to be held. Lander wasn't the worst boy in the world, even though he was irritating her a bit just now. But as he moved toward her, finger and thumb curled, elemental fire dancing between them, she saw something repellently acquisitive in his face, as though the foxfire revealed something that had been hidden. He was his father, or would be very soon. In fact, he was her own father, or as near as made no difference — just another in the legion of privileged lordlings who passed the world back and forth between them as though it were an object of little interest, and handled the lives of their women and servants with the same blithe unconcern.

  The queen wouldn't put up with it. It was a startling thought because it was so unexpected. All those lessons learned in childhood that she thought she'd long since forgotten, all those famous old stories that she and the other girls used to ridicule after Young Blossoms meetings — they hadn't gone away at all. And whether they were true stories or not, what did it matter, really? The ideas were right. When the king made the queen angry, she didn't just bow her head and take it. She left him whenever the mood struck her. She took lovers, showed him up for a fool. She was Titania the Glorious, and if they irritated her, she would have burned up my father and Foxglove and all this lot like sawdust.

  "Leave me alone, Malander," she said, and turned and walked across the dark e
ntry hall.

  But he would not leave her alone — she heard his footsteps behind her. "Ah. So we want to be chased, do we?" She could call the guards. One word, even one strong thought, and the hob would have half a dozen brawny creatures down on him in seconds. She wasn't some servant girl to be trifled with, even if he was the son of one of the leading families. She was a Thornapple — her father was First Councillor. But if he didn't go quietly, if there was a ruckus and a public scene, Daddy would be so tiresome about it . . .

  She reached deep into her memory for a charm. It was something she hadn't used in years, since the days of sneaking out of the residence hall with Calpurnia and Julia, the Woodbine sisters, and coming back late to find Miss Stonecrop waiting for them, Old Stony so angry her spectacles were heat-fogged. Poppy whispered the words under her breath, felt for the thought in the way her tutors had showed her — it was a wriggling thing, small, shiny, and hard to grasp as a fish in muddy water — and caught it.

  "Poppy? Iron and blood, where did you go? Poppy?" Suppressing a giggle, which would give her away to Malander Foxglove's sharp senses no matter what the charm did, she turned and went right past his outstretched hand, retaining the memory of his stunned, irritated face in the glow of the elemental light to enjoy later. He was sharp, though — he felt the faint breeze of her passage and lunged at her, but missed. She hurried toward the stairwell. She would take an elevator from the next floor up.

  ————— The irritating thing about elevators, she told herself as she trudged onto what by her count must be the twenty-fifth floor landing, was that they didn't work in power blackouts. These more and more frequent outages were becoming very annoying, and this one was certainly inconvenient. She could muster enough force on her own to run one or two small appliances — she might not have applied herself much during her tutoring, but she had natural ability — however the elevators were all slaved onto one main circuit. To make one work, she'd have to be able to make them all work, and even her father with all his years and experience didn't have the power to do that on his own.

  We've made ourselves prisoners in our own houses, she thought, although she had to admit that might be a touch overdramatic. "I am attempting to engage auxiliary energies," the hob said into her ear — and into the ear of everyone else in the building. "I will return the house to normal as soon as possible."

  Poppy had passed a few servants and family functionaries on the stairs, some of them groping blindly, some of them carrying their own little lights they had made; if she had not been used to the deference of underlings she might have thought it strange that they did not look at her, and even more so that many of them almost bumped into her and did not stop even to sketch a bow or a quick curtsy. But climbing more than two dozen floors at the end of a long, confusing, and ultimately rather dreadful night made her less observant than she might have been, and she had also underestimated the strength of her own conjuring: it did not occur to her that they could not see her or sense her at all — that the charm was still in place.

  Even without the inarguable darkness, she would have known the power in the building was off by the effortless way the door swung open at the lightest push. The entrances to the family's private section of the Thornapple tower were all so crisscrossed with charms that ordinarily a large coach would have bounced off it, should such a thing be found in the twenty-fifth floor lobby in the first place. But now, and without her even having to breathe her own secret house-name, it opened for her like a lover's arms. In the green flicker of the emergency witchlights she could see the corridor stretch before her but little else. Something was strange, but of course everything was strange in a blackout, and she was still thinking about the door.

  No, we're not just prisoners, we're slaves to our own assumptions. Because with the power off, anyone could just walk in here and do anything. The arrogance of our strength! she thought. Not even a bolt on the door.

  It was only when she was halfway down the corridor and the startlingly tall figure of Lord Hellebore stepped out in front of her, glowing with witchlight of his own manufacturing, that she understood her mistake. She was on the office floor, not the residence. She swallowed a squeak of surprise at seeing him, dark-haired and glowering, his skin corpselike in the nimbus of sickly fire, and then had to suppress another gasp when he walked past her.

  I'm still wearing the charm! He stopped and hesitated, thin face lifted as though he scented something, and she knew she should speak up — it was rude to be invisible, even in your own house — but something in his hard face choked off the admission as thoroughly as a hand around her throat. Nidrus Hellebore shook his head once, not so much a movement of confusion as a refocusing of feral attentions, then strode to the window at the end of the passageway. As he turned and came back, Poppy shrank against the wall and held her breath, although she still couldn't have quite said why. Even if he caught her, the worst that could happen was a scolding, certainly. She was in her own house. She hadn't done it on purpose.

  "What is it?" Now Lord Foxglove, Lander's father, had come out into the corridor. "Are we attacked?" The contempt in Hellebore's voice was quite impressive. "If so, then someone has attacked a third of the city. No, you bloody fool, it's another power breakdown."

  Foxglove's own halo of witchlight shrank a little, as though he had been slapped. "It's just . . . the matter we're talking about . . . it makes me . . ." "If you're going to say it makes you act like a coward, don't bother. I noticed." Hellebore stopped again, turning his head from side to side. "But it does feel like there's been someone here. And not too long ago."

  Foxglove did not appear to be listening. "It's just . . . I don't think . . . there must be another way . . ."

  "What are you two doing out there?" called another voice — Poppy's father. "Come in here and close the door. The hob will sort it out." "On our way, Aulus." Hellebore said it in a loud, cheerful voice; an instant later he turned back to Lord Foxglove like a viper. "You are a bloody fool," he said, just loud enough for Poppy to hear a few feet away. "I should have brought in Monkshood instead of you. He may be mad, but at least he has some grit. Who needs your ridiculous Coextensive faction, anyway? It will all be meaningless soon. Look out there! Miles of black. No power. It's all coming apart and you know very well it's not going to get better. The question is, are you with us or not? This is the time for great decisions and, yes, taking risks. Even more important, we've risked everything, Thornapple and I. If you think you can just back out now . . . well, I'm sure you remember what happened to Violet."

  "But I just . . . is there no other way . . . ?" "If you think that, you're living in a magical world, Foxglove. You might as well be a mortal and go fly to the moon. I asked, do you remember what happened to Violet?"

  "Of course, but . . ." "And think about Violet House. Think about the empty lot in the middle of Eventide where it used to be. Black, burnt trees. The ground sown with salt."

  "But . . . !" "Just think about it from time to time. Now come — our host is waiting." Hellebore took Foxglove's arm — for a moment their halos of light blended, shimmered. Then they went through the door into her father's office and the corridor was dark again.

  "I am attempting to engage auxiliary energies," said the hob, and this time, with her nerves pulled tight as lute strings, Poppy did indeed let out a little squeak of surprise. "I will return the house to normal as soon as possible."

  She hurried back toward the stairwell, hoping now that the charm would last long enough to get her onto the right floor, past the servants and into her bed. She didn't care if it was in the dark. She just wanted to be able to pull up the covers and make the world go away for a while.

  It's none of my business, she told herself. Whatever they're doing, it's none of my business.

  I hate this house.

  22 STATUS QUO ANTE

  It was not easy to fall asleep after an evening like that, but he managed at last. He probably would have been better off staying awake. The old, fam
iliar bad dream came back for the first time since he left his own world, although in truth he had felt its presence all evening, from his first view of the bony, angular heights of Hellebore House.

  In many ways the dream seemed the same as before, Theo imprisoned in his own body, sharing it with an alien presence. As with the other nightmares, he stared out through a surrounding murk, but in this version it wasn't mist that encircled him but smoke: he was looking down from the top of a tall building, the stars hugely bright and close, the air sour with the smell of burning. The City below him looked like a lava field, with dozens of patches of bright red glow, each signifying an entire neighborhood in flames, providing the only light in the dark city. Screams drifted up to his high perch, as thin with distance as the mewing of kittens, but what was worse than the suffering going on below him was that he could feel himself enjoying it, savoring the terror that ran wild in the shadowy streets. The alien presence was completely in control. Every shriek gave him a jolt of pleasure. It was like sex. It was better than sex, because he, or rather the thing that wore his body like a suit of clothing, was having his way with an entire world.

  Theo woke up sweating and whimpering, and was helplessly grateful to find himself in his room in Daffodil House. He asked for the time and the hob-voice told him in a desultory way that it was after midnight. Fairies didn't seem very specific about time, he had learned, and their houses followed that pattern.

  He knew he was not going to be falling asleep again any time soon, not while his heart was still rattling in his chest. He asked to have the lights on, then went into the bathroom and got himself a glass of water, marveling anew at how bizarrely ordinary a place this could seem, as though he were spending the night in a decent but not overwhelming hotel instead of in the heart of magical Fairyland. The tap turned, the water came out. Experimentally, he flushed the toilet. The water went around and around — not even backward, the way some people claimed it did in Australia. He could only be thankful it didn't have a little paper strip across it reading "Sanitized for your Protection."