Madness of Flowers

by Jay Lake

  "Where are we going?" he asked in a low voice.

  "No talk," she whispered. "Only look."

  Eventually he realized they were heading out to sea, at the west end of Port Defiance. They passed the warehouses and traders' offices of the Loska District. Silver rowed better than Boudin, with swift, quiet dips of the oars.

  "See toward the middle," she said as she turned the boat to scull east. "Front of Barlowe's Finger."

  He looked. There was sufficient light to make out the rock half a mile away.

  Something dangled from the seaward face. Two somethings, in fact. He started to ask, then closed his mouth.

  She rowed on, letting the tide carry them back in toward the city at an angle with respect to the Finger. There were at least half a dozen other boats out here. Most drifted as they did, but two backed water to keep a consistent station near the rock.

  People, he thought. They've chained two people beneath the high tide line.

  "Not go close," she muttered.

  They were youths, or women. Not large enough for grown full-men. He was glad that neither was a dwarf.

  The sun cleared the horizon. A rich golden glare showed the pale faces of Big Sister and Boudin, already chest deep in the incoming tide. Swells slapped against the rock, covering them a moment before withdrawing.

  A youth and a woman.

  "By my dead gods," Onesiphorous whispered. This was no simple hanging, but a slow death by cold, malicious torture.

  She dug in with the oars. "We go now."

  The other boats were also moving away with the daylight, all but the two keeping close to the rock. Not meant to chase away watchers, Onesiphorous realized, but to discourage a rescue.

  All he could do was watch the water take them again and again. He tried to imagine the cold hand slapping his chin, sending stinging spray up his nose and down his throat over and over. Would he swallow enough to drown quickly, or would he slowly choke on the encroaching saltwater?

  Onesiphorous vomited over the side, his stomach heaving as tears streamed down his face and terror weakened his arms and legs.

  Silver said nothing. Instead she rowed silently into the shadows of the city's islands.

  Out on the estuary in the full light of morning, well away from Port Defiance, Onesiphorous finally found his voice. "Is that a corsair execution?"

  "No," she said shortly. "Your people make that. You never see it before?"

  "I never knew it before." Both had died for him, in truth. The execution was a message to him. The Tribade would avenge Big Sister, he knew, but no one would raise a hand for Boudin. The swamp people hadn't lived this long by striking out against injustice.

  They died for him, and for the City Imperishable. He felt ill, far more than he ever had during last autumn's fighting back home.

  "When we retake Port Defiance," he said, "that will end forever."

  "Good plan, Oarsman." She made another long pull. "Now you got to win war."

  They finally glided into the treed shadows. Silver looked at him. "Now we do what?"

  "No oars here," he said. "Use the paddle. Too many vines, and the water's slow and close."

  "You got land? Or you climb tree like monkey?"

  "Go in as far as you can and still find your way out."

  "Hmm." She took up the paddle and worked the boat like a canoe. When the long, sinuous fin appeared, Silver gave him a hard look. "I hope you know what you doing, Oarsman. Don't want lose my letters."

  "Don't let them chain you up," he told her.

  They eventually bumped into a hummock large enough to have actual dirt. Silver looked distressed. "No more. This bad place. You sure you not sail with me? We both go Bas Gronegrim, I buy you short woman lick you all night long."

  "As attractive as that sounds, no. I need to find the swamp people, and through them the plantations. Those are City men and dwarfs out there, for all that they've gone to seed. Miners, too. If I can raise an army in small boats, perhaps I can rescue my dwarfs."

  "Your dwarfs dig own grave."

  "Not all of them, Silver, not all of them."

  He steadied the boat and grabbed a vine dangling from one of the knob-kneed trees. Once Onesiphorous was ashore, Silver turned her hull stem to stern, then blew him a kiss. "You find way back, we have drink fine wine together, laugh some, yes?"

  "A much better invitation," he said. "Smooth sailing to you."

  "Walk safe."

  He watched her slip into the green shadows, headed back toward sunlight. The long fin circled three times then vanished without pursuing her.

  It had been following him.

  Onesiphorous explored his little piece of land. It was scarcely larger than his office in Port Defiance. Curiously, several pieces of dressed stone protruded above the mounded soil. He wondered what he would have uncovered if he'd had the energy to dig.

  Instead he settled down and waited to be found. He had a death to tell them of, though he imagined the old woman already knew Boudin's fate. Then he needed to persuade them to action. These people would never fight, but they could help in other ways.

  He glanced over his shoulder one more time. Silver was long gone, but looking after her was still better than staring ever deeper into the swamps, waiting from something woman-shaped to spring from beneath the surface.

  Imago

  He approached his office door a dozen times, wanting to head below and bid Bijaz farewell. Instead he kept delaying until hooves echoed loud on the cobbles below his window. Then he stared down at the river until a whistle shrieked and the steamer sloshed its way out into the current.

  Imago continued to stare until the morning bell rang, startling and deafening him at the same time.

  "By Dorgau's cherry tit," the Lord Mayor shouted. It was time to eat something, and bid Enero farewell.

  Everyone was leaving him.

  Kalliope met him downstairs. "Come. I want to sit in a café and hear the birds."

  They walked into the morning air. The bailiffs who had been dogging the Rugmaker's Cupola for weeks were gone. That meant the Limerock Palace knew Bijaz had taken ship.

  Enero's men were gone. No one insisted he ride in the enclosed fiacre. It was good to walk, as if he were just another city dweller.

  They wandered down Filigree Avenue toward the river. Several cafés near the Spice Market catered to traders and immigrants. People from far beyond the old Empire's writ lived here at the end of a long caravan trail bringing sweet peppers and a dozen exotic seasonings from their countrymen. Jewelry, small metalwork, and hot spices from the Sunward Sea were sent home in return.

  He followed Kalliope as she ducked into a little place smelling of steam and kava. They used cinnamon from the south and Rose Downs cream to flavor it here, he knew. Other varieties were available, made with far western spices, that only foreigners drank.

  Kalliope negotiated for two mugs and a narrow twist of bread with strands of herbs baked in. They sat in silence awhile.

  The drink was rich and dark and pleasantly bitter. Imago studied the habitués of the café—mostly westerners. They were short, broad and stocky, with muted gold skin and eyes darkly red as pomegranates. Their tongue, spoken with quiet ease, sounded to him like the gabble of geese.

  "Did you ever wonder how many different peoples there are in the world?" he asked Kalliope.

  "As many as there are grains of sand in the desert." She took a sip. "That's what the Tokhari say, and they've made war with a hundred tribes and nations. Might as well ask how wide the world is."

  "North to south, or east to west?" He smiled over the rim of his mug, trying to appreciate this drink.

  "Heh. You play the fool poorly. One only need watch the sun and moon to know that question is falsely stated."

  There was an infinite east, and an infinite west, though north and south were bounded by ice and stars. Everyone knew this. A few had even gone and looked. No one had ever proven the world to be otherwise.

  He thought of the
Alates with their wings. "We are not all children of the same gods."

  "How could we be? No god is wide enough for the endless whole of the world."

  Imago knew enough gods personally to be glad of that. They were bad enough lurking in the sewers beneath his city. Bijaz was all right, but he could see in his friend the seeds of a god much like the Wolf or the Little Man—the dwarf could easily grow to an ancient, terrible presence without ever understanding why he was hated.

  "Now what?" he asked. A far larger question than the conversation which had gone before, they both knew.

  "You're the Lord Mayor. That's for you to decide."

  "I have a blockade to the south. I pray that the Northern Expedition never returns, though I still must count the cost of whatever their enthusiasm raised yesterday. Everyone I care for is departed or dead." He looked uncomfortable. "But for you, of course."

  She laughed. "I am scarcely of your inner circle. A season ago we were set on killing one another." Kalliope set down her mug to lean forward over the untouched bread. "But hear this now, Lord Mayor Imago of Lockwood. Find me my brother again, bring him back from whatever hole you sent him down, and I will stand beside you until these affairs are settled, both north and south. Continue to keep him from me and I will dog your dreams like a wolf on winter sheep."

  "Ah, Jason." He sipped again. "I have a friend who knows where your brother has been recently. He's safe beneath the streets."

  She pointedly looked downward. Imago took her meaning. He'd lost almost two feet of height and much of his mortal soul beneath these same streets.

  "No," he said, "the Old Gods will not trouble him. He follows a different path. I sent him to someone in great distress. Someone I have need of again. I asked Jason to heal her."

  "That dwarfess who worked in your offices? Marelle?"

  "Yes, her. She is old."

  Kalliope's brow wrinkled. "Old? Everyone grows old. Lost youth is lamentable, but scarcely something to be healed."

  "No. Old. She has lived centuries."

  "Oh. That sort of old. Is she an immortal?"

  Imago shrugged. "After four or five centuries, who knows? She gave us those archives. The City needs her memory."

  "Be careful. She may be a failed goddess. Like Bijaz, but in long decline."

  "Bijaz was in decline before he became a god."

  "As may be. So now, where is my brother?"

  He pushed his kava aside. "I shall take you to the Water Captain. He has a dwarf named Saltfingers you need to meet. Stranger than a hen with three beaks, but he found Jason's trail."

  "And you?" she asked softly.

  "I will go plan a war I cannot fight, as I have no troops or ships."

  "Money. Coin wins many battles."

  Imago sighed. "Only if I have someone to pay for serving under my banner."

  "It could be worse." She rose, smiling. "You could have gone north. Or south. Now show me this Saltfingers."

  "You may be sorry," Imago warned her.

  "Me? Sorry on account of some happening in the City Imperishable? This place has been cream and roses to me since my birth."

  He laughed, then was grateful that she had been able to make him do so.

  Outside the sun was warm and the Spice Market in full cry. Down here, he could almost pretend things were normal.

  He already knew that it was going to be a long, hard summer. Here spring was barely settling in.

  II: GERMINATION

  Bijaz

  When he awoke from his doze, Slackwater Princess was passing among low, wooded banks. He could see occasional great stumps or the long hump of a massive, rotted log. There had once been lumbering here. Towns, too, for they passed stands of wooden pilings dotting the current like old soldiers drowned at their posts.

  North of the City the land was mostly empty. The northbound road ran close to the river, sometimes bending further east to pass a bluff or cross a swampy tributary.

  The steamship made very good time, which became apparent as he watched a group of riders work their horses to match Princess' speed. Occasionally the mounted men cut overland to beat the river's slow curves.

  Hirelings, he supposed. He didn't see the point of raiding the boat, not with a hundred armed men aboard her.

  Bijaz stayed on the main deck that first day, sitting among his bales and watching the river go by. Electricks were strung along the ceiling, but in the bright sunlight the crew had not bothered to turn them on. He shared the space with several dozen men lounging about, talking, smoking, and maintaining weapons; as well as bales, baskets, chests, and every kind of supply.

  Back at the City Imperishable, this had all been numbers in a ledger, goods to be accounted for and taxes to be levied. Out here, it was life.

  As for Ashkoliiz, Bijaz figured the mountebank knew exactly where he was. She would send for him in time. Based on the scale of the great table map back at the Rugmaker's Cupola, he reckoned a thousand river miles from the City Imperishable to the remains of the cliff cities where the Saltus made its closest approach to the Silver Ridges. Perhaps seven hundred as the pigeon flew. Their pace was abut fifteen miles in an hour even against the current, which meant that running dawn to dusk, they'd make close to two hundred river miles on their best days.

  Around the noon hour, the signal gun fired. The loungers made no show of jumping up, so he assumed the shot was a greeting.

  Nothing was ashore except limestone bluffs topped by grasses. Bijaz's curiosity got the best of him. He turned to a man polishing the barrel of a rifled musket.

  "What was the gun, sir?" he asked politely.

  "Signed on in the City, eh?" The musket polisher grinned to reveal a mouth sadly bereft of teeth. "When she makes better'n twenty river miles in an hour, they fires off the gun. Herself has promised the boat a bonus for every fast hour."

  "Ah." Ashkoliiz was in a hurry. Had she fled Port Defiance ahead of some retribution?

  "Didn't know they was taking on dwarfs," the gun polisher added. "You's not much to look at."

  "Little but useless, that's me." Bijaz settled back into his bales and pretended to sleep.

  He woke as the movement of the ship changed. They turned across the current. Had something happened?

  The deck loungers again did not seem concerned. Bijaz looked to see what the ship was headed for.

  A crude wooden pier stuck out from a shingle beach. At the head of the pier was a very large stack of cut wood. Fuel for the boilers. The City Imperishable burned a great deal of coal, but out here on the river that commodity would be almost impossible to procure. Though there seemed to be no one on the beach, or indeed, anywhere near the wood.

  The ship made for the pier, angling upstream so the current nudged her into place. Sailors leapt from the bow with hawsers, while chain rattled as a drag anchor was dropped.

  At that the waiting men stirred themselves.

  "Load 'em up," bellowed a red-faced officer.

  A line formed quickly enough, though some hung back. Bijaz fell in just as a blue-capped sailor caught up to him. This fellow was little more than a boy, with skin so dark it was almost black.

  "You're wanted abovedecks," he said in a voice that echoed far more of the Sudgate than it did of the Sunward Sea.

  "Thank you." Bijaz found his way aft, looking for stairs. Behind him the human chain groaned and chanted its way through taking on the great load of firewood.

  Ashkoliiz had not been shy about having Slackwater Princess well-provisioned down in Port Defiance. She sat in a lounge on the third deck, beneath the pilothouse and the hurricane deck—the one nautical term he'd picked up so far. Beautiful Tokhari rugs covered the floor. The interior walls were paneled in wood the color of old whiskey. Tall, narrow glass windows made up the forward wall, through which the mountebank could watch her men swarm over the wood.

  She wore white linen trousers and jacket, her clouded gem at her throat. A tray with several decanters of wine was laid next to her, along with bowls of
bright southern fruit. A curl of smoke betrayed a cigar—a vice he had never pursued.

  The bear was not present.

  "I have noted something interesting." She leaned forward to pour a fresh glass of fluid the color of cranberries. Her blue-eyed gaze pierced him like a bat on a hook. "This landing is normally the end of a day's run out of the City Imperishable."