Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  They soon arrived at the vast edifice of the Rugmaker's Cupola. The distinctive spiral-striped tower had been built long ago of red and yellow desert sandstone as an outpost of the Tokhari when they came to render tribute to the Imperators of the City Imperishable. The Worshipful Guild of Rugmakers who now controlled it had given their tower over to Imago when the Lord Mayor's accession had been in dispute.

  Malvo unceremoniously dumped Bijaz at the entrance. "Not to be climbing too fast," he said with a laugh.

  Bijaz flicked a handful of flax seed at the freerider. "Give my regards to your wives."

  He turned to make the long ascent to Imago's office, only to find the Lord Mayor standing in the doorway with a grim expression on his face.

  Imago eschewed the winding stairs and instead headed down a back hall Bijaz had never before used. He realized that it must connect to the larger complex next door. The smells were different, too, dominated by the spicy pungency of Tokhari cooking.

  Then they were in a room with an enormous rectangular table topped by wooden panels. The chamber had the air of long disuse—threadbare wall hangings, cobwebs in the chair legs. Three narrow windows let in a bit of light. Enero waited, along with the pale, crook-backed little dwarfess who worked for Imago. Marelle, that was her name.

  "Why here?" Bijaz asked.

  "Rumor control." Imago's tone was clipped. "And a map, if we need one."

  "You have maps in your office."

  "There are being maps and there are being maps," said Enero, with a glance at the table.

  It was a very big table, Bijaz realized. "If you want to start a rumor, having me dragged through the streets is a good way to do it. Besides, I'm hungry." He slapped the wood, leaving a tracery of dark, glistening fluid in the pattern of his palm.

  "Marelle," said Imago.

  She slipped out the door. Enero sniffed at the handprint. "Lamp oil," he said. "That is being a useful trick if you are controlling it."

  "Hardly."

  Marelle swiftly returned with a bowl of mashed chickpeas, a small plate of olives, and several fingers of a strong, salty cheese the color of a drowned man's belly. The food was accompanied by four warm rounds of Tokhari flatbread. "Thank you," Bijaz said before he popped an olive in his mouth.

  He realized the three of them were staring at him.

  "Talk," he mumbled as he chewed. "My ears are not eating."

  "A woman has come to town," Imago began.

  "Marvelous." Bijaz broke off a piece of the cheese. "I understand there has been a shortage lately."

  "Not—" The Lord Mayor broke off. "We have a problem. She claims to have found the tomb of the Imperator Terminus. With much of his treasure still within."

  Bijaz choked on a sliver of flatbread. "That's insane."

  "If it is being true, it is being bad for your city," Enero said.

  "We just got rid of one Imperator," Marelle added. "We don't want another. Even if he has been dead for centuries."

  "The last one was dead, too," Bijaz said, "and he didn't work out so well. Imperator Terminus marched over the horizon six hundred years ago and never came back. Took a rotting lot of gods and priests and bureaucrats with him, I believe." Archer would have known, he thought, then put the godmonger's memory right out of his head. Archer's kind had virtually vanished from the streets since the battle of Terminus Plaza, another minor mystery in the ongoing existence of the City Imperishable.

  A pity, too. How much that poor dwarf could have helped him now. Bijaz flexed a fist, willing that no raisins or pebbles dribble out of it.

  "It doesn't matter whether it's true," Imago said. "It matters whether people believe her."

  Enero nodded. "She was to be making speeches in the Spice Market. With a dancing bear. The people of the City Imperishable were to be cheering."

  "She's a mountebank. The Temple District is full of them. I should know, I am a god."

  Silence followed that statement.

  "And . . . ?" he finally said.

  "Her dancing bear threw me this." Imago tossed something small and bright onto the table. It jangled as it rolled.

  Bijaz picked the thing up. Round, like a little harness bell. There was a slit at the bottom, and a smaller bit of metal within. Something stamped along the edge, the words too worn for him to read.

  "Civitas est," said Marelle. "The city is. Our words. That's a bell from a herald's cloak, six or seven centuries old. There's several on display down at the Limerock Palace."

  "We checked," Imago added.

  Bijaz rang it next to his ear. "A dancing bear threw you a six-hundred-year-old bell from one of our own uniforms. And you think that it doesn't matter if her claim is true."

  "It doesn't matter." Imago began to walk the boundaries of the great table. "True or not, she's a liar and a cheat, out for gain very much at our expense. A sensible explorer would have come to me." He paused, a sour look on his face. "Me or the Assemblage of Burgesses. Not made a public show of it, like some traveling fair."

  Bijaz laughed. "And a sensible Lord Mayor might well have shipped that explorer off to the Sunward Sea at the bottom of a crate of pickled melons. There are truths too dangerous to set into the world."

  "Perhaps." At that moment Imago looked capable of sending a full dozen explorers to their untimely deaths.

  "The people are scarcely over their disarray from the recent unpleasantness," Marelle said. "This sort of thing will only incite new unrest."

  "Absolutely," said Bijaz. "And if she produces the very body of the late Imperator Terminus, whose face is on every coin, we have a crisis of government. I believe we just resolved one of those."

  "A problem for the Burgesses." Imago snorted. "I am Lord Mayor. A parade of Imperators will not change that. No, if she produces the very body of the late Imperator Terminus, we will have disruption on a grand scale. Almost half the City dwarfs are still hiding down in Port Defiance. Many may never come home. Do you know what wages for a skilled clerk are these days? Factors and trading houses are cutting back for a lack of them. That puts laborers on the street without pay. We thought the end of the Ignatius business would set things to rights, but the dwarfs had been pushed too far.

  "Worse, there are almost no families with children in boxes. In five years' time, a skilled clerk will command tenfold even today's inflated wage. If there is anyone left to hire him."

  "Or her," said Marelle.

  Imago glared sidelong at the dwarfess.

  "You don't want people haring off after some tomb," said Bijaz. "Fair enough."

  "Not just that." Imago's voice was quiet, now drained of its frustrated passion. "I don't want people believing in that tomb. The dwarfs need to come home. I've sent Onesiphorous down to the Jade Coast to try to bring that about. Without them, our city will see such change as to bankrupt us all. With them, we can resume trading half the goods in this corner of the world."

  "Yet you cannot kill her now, or run her out in dark of night. If she has raised a crowd in the Spice Market, too many already know of her."

  "And she did excellently well." Imago sat down in one of the chairs. "There are few who could speak against her and be believed."

  "No," said Bijaz, as understanding dawned. "I'm not taking to the streets against this mountebank. Let her raise some money, leave town. It's nothing to do with me."

  Enero stepped to the table, collected Bijaz's plate and bowl. "You are being the City's little god." He set them on a chair. "You are being loved by many. Listened to, even. Other gods are being dead, or freaks. You are being special." He grabbed the edge of the table and began to pick up the first of the panels.

  It was map beneath, Bijaz realized. The tabletop was little more than a thin wooden screen covering a map twenty feet long and half as tall.

  "Even if I go shout her down in the market," he said, "so what?"

  "So this." Imago looked at the map. "Somewhere in the North lies the Imperator Terminus' remains. This woman may have found the tomb. She had
the bell, after all. We need to know where."

  "You just told me it doesn't matter if it's true."

  "You cannot be affording to think otherwise," Enero answered.

  Bijaz shrugged. A crust of snow clung to each open palm. "North, you say?"

  Onesiphorous

  He paid a boy to row him out to Barlowe's Finger. The tide was slack, which meant two or three hours before he would be forced to head back. Even then, they'd be moving with the water, not against it.

  Barlowe's Finger was more a rock than an island. It struck skyward sixty feet at low tide, rising stark from the foaming sea and making no compromise for its waterline. The Finger crooked slightly as if to beckon. A tiny stone dock jutted from the base. Generations of visitors had worn an upward path.

  He hadn't been out here before, though various locals and City dwarfs had commended a visit to him. "You'll never get the spirit of Port Defiance 'til you've climbed the Finger," he was told over and over.

  With rebellion in the air, Onesiphorous very much wished he did have the spirit of the place in the palm of his hand.

  "Putting in," said the boy. A full-man youth, his name was Boudin. Pretty boy, too. Onesiphorous would wager on some beautiful sisters. "Mind the step," Boudin added.

  Onesiphorous stood unsteady in the front of the little boat. The dock towered above him at this turn of the tide. An iron ladder was slimed with seaweed and moss. He timed the rise and fall of the boat to lean forward and grasp the rungs. As he put his weight on the ladder, barnacles cut sorely into his palms, but there was no helping it. The boat had already slipped away.

  Resolving not to curse, he climbed.

  The path followed vagaries of rock and weather, with no accounting for the shortness of dwarfs. As he inched his way around the Finger, Onesiphorous wondered whether any of his helpful recommenders had made this climb themselves.

  The path was sometimes no wider than one of his feet. There was very little vegetation. Onesiphorous had a selection of slick rock and tiny vines with which to brace himself. Everything smelled of gulls and the sea.

  Sixty feet didn't sound like so much until one had to climb it in an erratic, rising spiral. Three times around the Finger he stretched himself, reaching and pulling and stepping, before he found the top: a roughly flat area that covered fissured stone, gravel, and scraggly grass. Some helpful soul had affixed a brass marker in the middle.

  The plate was small and round, with an arrow pointing inland, the words PORT DEFIANCE around the edge.

  Onesiphorous lowered himself to a tailor's seat, legs folded together. The sea seemed so very close all around him, patterns of foam racing over the bottle-green swells. It made him feel as if Barlowe's Finger were moving.

  He looked up instead at Port Defiance.

  From the ocean side it was a different city.

  Barlowe's Finger was the rock most distant from shore. A few jags further out came and went with the tide, but they scarcely counted. This was the beginning of Port Defiance, and the end of the City Imperishable's writ.

  The Sunward Sea stretched southward behind him. The Southern Ocean lay beyond it. Port Defiance occupied the mouth of the River Saltus, an indifferent river delta blending with the forested swamps of the Jade Coast. Due to the lack of stable land along the shoreline, the city had been built on a collection of islets, rocks, and gravel bars standing off from the river's debouchment, wherever buildings could be raised high enough to withstand the occasional storm surges. These rocky outcroppings were part of the same irregular scattering of stone which dotted the Jade Coast for a hundred miles, some hosting the rich veins which had given the region its name. Bridges connected close-standing portions of the city, along with a network of ferries for wider channels.

  Nearest to him, just north of Barlowe's Finger, were the Gaterocks—curved pillars facing one another, each tall as his current perch. They were bare of construction. He had been told they'd once supported a great arch. Onesiphorous fancied he could see the lines of caryatids weathered into the curves of stone.

  He tried to imagine standing above the tide for half a lifetime to carve your goddess—or perhaps your queen—in the face of storm and sun and sea.

  The city spread out past the Gaterocks. Clusters and groupings of the outcroppings were analogous to districts back in the City Imperishable. To the west he could see the low, blocky warehouses of Loska. Almost directly north, through the Gaterocks, were the Fairwinds. Beyond them loomed the Ivories, including his own Axos and Lentas. Borold Sevenships held court in the Ivories, too, in the Flag Towers, a keep that leapt across five or six foundation rocks with the sea ever churning beneath its arches.

  The city ran on, marbled mansions side by side with the meanest driftwood shacks. Height meant wealth—further from the rage of the waters, when the worst came.

  So many flags, so many boats bobbing, so many people toiling at the marge of the ocean.

  So many dwarfs unwilling to go home. Here was an entire city unboxed, opened to the sea and the land, riding the tongue of the river. Port Defiance was so different from the City Imperishable crouched behind its walls, a withered shadow of what had once been a great empire. The City was a dwarf. This place was so many stone ships already on the ocean.

  He might not have seen it so, had he not made the trip out here.

  Boudin would be another hour coming back to fetch him. Onesiphorous spent his time watching the play of light on water, and trying to frame a letter to Imago which would make sense of what was happening here. Boxers and Openers. Dwarfs, changing as they had not in half a thousand years. The legacy of the Trial of Flowers stretched onward in unexpected ways.

  Watching Boudin pull in from the city, Onesiphorous was startled by a shadow passing overhead. It was large enough to block the late sun. An Alate spilled air from its wings and dropped to share his pillar.

  The flyers had circled the City Imperishable during the past autumn, eventually fighting on behalf of Enero in the winter battle that had overthrown the Imperator Restored. Onesiphorous had never understood their loyalties. Or indeed, whether they were a strange species of men or just creatures with intelligent faces and sharp weapons.

  Up close the Alate seemed less human than from a distance. It was unclothed but for a harness which held three darts and a slim-bladed sword close to its body, exposing its slate-gray skin to the elements. The face was sculpted for wind. The features were almost manlike, except the yellow eyes with no dot of a pupil. The body was less familiar—the Alate had an enormous chest through which very narrow ribs showed, a thin waist, exaggerated hips with a featureless groin, arms and legs that seemed permanently bent. The wings were spread wide, balancing the Alate on the wind—feathered, with long, bright pinions contrasting with the skin. It smelled like a bird's nest.

  Though he did not suppose his life was at risk, Onesiphorous lost several breaths to the racing of his heart. Why was the creature here? What did it want?

  It opened one fist and extended a hand, palm upward.

  Onesiphorous took what the Alate offered.

  A silver bell. Something from a dog's harness, or a child's toy. He jingled it, feeling foolish as he wondered if some snow demon or Tokhari jinn would appear. "Thank you."

  "Some debts are never forgiven," the Alate replied in a voice that piped like a child's.

  He had not known they could talk.

  The Alate nodded once, stepped back, and fell from the top of the rock. Its wings snapped to catch the wind before it skimmed off close to the surface of the water.

  Onesiphorous tucked the bell into an inner pocket of his tunic and began the laborious process of climbing down. He had to focus on the footholds and handholds, but still he wondered what the encounter had meant.

  A bell.

  Why?

  Even if it was pure silver, the thing was too small to hold much value. And the creatures had never come near him during the struggle. Jason had believed they might have been Ignatius' kidnappers, s
piriting the Second Counselor away before he had returned to such disastrous effect as the Imperator Restored.

  These Alates were no one's friends, in other words. Except possibly Enero's. The freerider gave good counsel but kept his own thoughts close as his skin.

  Perhaps the southern mercenary would understand the bell.

  Onesiphorous raised his eyes from the rock to see if Boudin was close. In doing so he lost his balance and tumbled into open air.

  Where was that damned dock? Too late, he thought, arms and legs flailing though there was nothing to catch except the chilly water below.