Madness of Flowers Read online

  Madness of Flowers

  by

  Joseph E. Lake

  Table of Contents

  MADNESS OF FLOWERS

  A Novel of the City Imperishable

  Jay Lake

  Madness of Flowers © 2008 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

  This edition of Madness of Flowers © 2009 by Night Shade Books

  Cover art by David Palumbo

  Map by Richard Pellegrino

  Cover design by Rich Szeto

  Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN-13 978-1-59780-098-3

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  Other books by Jay Lake include:

  Novels

  Rocket Science

  Trial of Flowers

  Mainspring

  Escapement

  Green (forthcoming)

  Collections

  Greetings from Lake Wu

  Green Grow the Rushes-Oh

  American Sorrows

  Dogs in the Moonlight

  The River Knows Its Own

  Edited Works

  Polyphony, Volumes 1-6 (with Deborah Layne)

  All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (with David Moles)

  TEL : Stories

  Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Nick Mamatas)

  This is for everyone who loved Bijaz,

  and all the more for the people who found him dreadful.

  Acknowledgment:

  This book only exists because of the kind assistance of many people too numerous to fully list here. With apologies to whomever I manage to omit from my thank yous, I would like to offer gratitude to Kelly Buehler and Daniel Spector, Sarah Bryant, Michael Curry, Anna Hawley, Shannon Page, Ken Scholes, Jeremy Tolbert, Amber Eyes, and of course my entire blogging community in all their fractured magnificence. There are many others I have neglected to name: the fault is my memory, not your contributions.

  I also want to recognize the Brooklyn Post Office here in Portland, Oregon, as well as the Fireside Coffee Lodge and Lowell's Print-Inn for all their help and support. Special thanks go to Jennifer Jackson, Night Shade Books, and Marty Halpern. As ever, errors and omissions are entirely my own responsibility.

  I: POLLINATION

  Bijaz

  He had quickly tired of divinity. There was a soul-satisfying warmth in opening his empty hand to find a flax seed or gaming chip. The trick never failed to amuse at dinners. But he had not been prepared for the expectation of spiritual purpose that accrued around him like flies on a street drunk.

  Bijaz had always taken pride in being his own dwarf. Now he seemed to belong to everyone in the City Imperishable. Especially the Numbers Men, those strange gods who had gifted him with these powers and since remained obstinately absent from his life and his dreams.

  "It's not so bad," he told his drinking glass. Bijaz sat in a café on the lower slopes of Heliograph Hill. The place smelled of steam and the mild spices of Rose Downs cooking. The chair was comfortable, perhaps too much so. The vintage, a straw-colored wine from beyond the Sunward Sea, tasted of dusk and romance and the warmth of distant shores.

  Idly, he opened his left hand to dribble pale sand to the floor. The flow sparkled as it fell, catching the late afternoon sunlight.

  "Building castles, are we?"

  Kalliope. Tokhari war mistress, with spirals tattooed upon her cheeks and teeth stained blue from some ritual drug. Once she had been a child in the household he had managed. Sister to Jason the Factor, the dead man of winter who was now in hiding. Kalliope was a sandwalker, a desert mage, more than a month's ride from the edge of her domain.

  And a friend to him, of sorts.

  These days they were both strange, in a stranger land. Her camel riders had gone home, save for a lingering rearguard and a few would-be immigrants.

  She, like Bijaz, had been touched by the noumenal. Also like him, she had been left wanting.

  "Is this your desert I have grasped?" he asked politely.

  She sat in the velvet chair next to his, reached to draw her fingers across the pale spray on the polished wooden floor. "No. Our sand is yellow as a coward's liver, harder than the flat of a sword. This was made for dancing or lovemaking, not fighting."

  "I should hope." He signaled for more wine. He had paid for nothing in months. Somehow that was bothersome, too. "Drink?" he asked, as the waiter approached, stiff in his formal whites.

  "Water," Kalliope said. "Filtered through cork and silk. Nothing from the river." She looked back at Bijaz. "No wine. It brings dreams."

  He let that pass. Far too many people asked him to interpret their dreams.

  Will my number be lucky now?

  Why does the elephant stalk my sleep?

  My grandmother won't quit shrieking.

  The answers were always too easy. He had no idea if they were true, but people seemed satisfied. Then, once or twice a week, someone brought him a dream which lit white fire in his head.

  That was when he cursed the Numbers Men. He might have died peacefully if not for their meddling.

  Another wine was set before him, a tall blue goblet in front of Kalliope. The latening sun made the entire table glow. Drops beading off her glass were tiny diamonds, each a swelling reflection of the room. His wine swirled with motes from a distant harvest. Dampened, the table wood discharged the memory of forests.

  "Trees," said Kalliope, stepping into his thoughts. "They walk. Not two-legged, like bark-clad men, but scrabbling on a thousand woody toes. Masts sliding with purpose through the soil."

  "You dream of the timber harvest," Bijaz said almost automatically. He stared at the water-spattered tabletop. "The wealth of softwood come down the river from the Pilean Hills, the hardwoods carved out of the swamps along the Jade Coast."

  "No." Palms flat on the table, disturbing the tiny droplet worlds, she leaned forward. "I am a sandwalker. My dreams are borne on the wind. I do not spend my sleeping hours considering economics, or the petty anxieties of foresters."

  He looked up. Kalliope's eyes were storm gray, exactly the shade her brother Jason's had been before she'd killed him and brought him back. The same as their father, torn apart by a mob so many years before. Lenses, doors, opening in succession across the years. If he just stared hard enough into the black pool at the center of her gaze, he could see—

  "You're glowing," she said.

  Bijaz gripped the table's edge so hard his fingers ached. "I hate this."

  "You would have died, otherwise."

  "That was the idea. I only lacked the courage to do it all at once."

  Her fingers brushed his, desert brown on city pale. "It takes more courage to live."

  "Perhaps." He looked at the water droplets. Forests stood in each tiny lens, rippling like wheat in a summer field. "I know your dreams are real."

  "You know too much."

  "Yes." He released his hold on the past and took up the wine. The vintage seemed sour now. "We all gave too much."

  They followed little streets and alleys toward the Limerock Palace. With the Imperator Restored cast down, being a wanderer was more-or-less safe again. No more monsters in the dark, sniffers or water fetches—the noumenal world had returned to the interplay of night and shadow.

  The City Imperishable's usual run of beggars, pickpockets, footpads, and drunks abounded. They were as inevitable as head lice on a dockside whore.

  "I've been wondering," Bijaz said. White rose petals fluttered from his fingertips toward the cobblestones, so many pale butterflies in evening's encroaching shade.

  "Yes?"

  Kalliope st
ill moved with the bandy lope of an old Tokhari. She wasn't tall, for a full-woman, but Bijaz was still very conscious that his head barely came to the level of her breasts.

  Almost six decades a dwarf in the City Imperishable and he still measured himself against those around him. Enough, he thought, though his gaze lingered on her body a moment longer.

  "The last of your camel riders left the Sunrise Gate this past week. Yet you remain in the City Imperishable."

  "My rearguard abides." He could hear the smile bending her voice. "I am not convinced they will ever leave."

  It was a small force, but Bijaz knew that Lord Mayor Imago had his concerns. For example, the possibility of a more substantial Tokhari force lurking in the Rose Downs so long as their sandwalker remained in the City Imperishable. "And yourself?"

  "The sand calls me back," she admitted.

  They found themselves on Roncelvas Way. Downhill, the pale bulk of the Limerock Palace shone almost orange with the last of the daylight. Wind off the River Saltus carried the scent of spring from the Pilean Gardens within the palace walls.

  "Do you wait for Jason?" asked Bijaz.

  Kalliope had wrought a terrible sandwalker rite on her brother during the abortive Tokhari invasion of the City Imperishable, at the time of the Trial of Flowers. Between her death magick and the power of the Numbers Men, Jason had become sula ma-jieni na-dja, the dead man of winter. Since the overthrow of the Imperator Restored, he had gone into hiding.

  "No, not him. I would see Jason again, but that is not need enough to keep me away from the sand."

  "What then?" They passed two men pinned to the trunk of a linden tree in passionate embrace.

  "We are not an order. Not like the philosophick doctors with their sworn convocations and bone-swallowing. Each sandwalker answers only to the spirits of her desert."

  "Mmm?" A fig dropped from Bijaz's fingers. It glistened with dew from some distant morning. He snatched the fruit before it hit the ground, and sniffed. Rich, almost meaty. Riper than anything ever come in an oil-packed barrel.

  He offered the fruit to Kalliope, who took it with an absent-minded murmur of thanks. She had become accustomed to his strange little miracles, unwanted and uncontrolled.

  "The City Imperishable . . . " Her voice trailed off.

  "She eats her children," said Bijaz softly, "this city of ours; eats them and spits them out again."

  "I am Tokhari, skin and sweat." Kalliope sighed. "I have ridden the seven trials. I have seen three buried sunrises. I have prayed in each of the Red Cities. The sand took my spirit, and the sand gave it back to me."

  She broke her stride. "I can do this." Kalliope closed her eyes and tightened her fist around the fig. She swayed slightly, focusing on some inward point. With a sizzling, crackling noise, a green tendril shot from each side of her hand.

  The fig was sprouting. The cobbles at her feet smoked.

  Bijaz was surprised. The magicks of the priests and petty arbogasters had always seemed mere sleights. His own experience of the Numbers Men had convinced Bijaz of the deep and abiding power of the noumenal, but that power did not lie in the hands of men. Or women.

  He took the sprouted fig from her trembling grip. "I'd always thought sandwalkers a sort of tribal elder."

  "And so we are." Kalliope resumed walking, with only a slight stumble. "But our deserts stretch a greater distance than a man can ride in a lifetime. Some are interrupted by oceans or forests or blackland farms, but there is always more desert. Between sky and sand, there is little room to mistake what one sees for what one wishes."

  Bijaz laughed. "A man who walks far enough will find anything." That proverb was chiseled above the entrance to the old Messengers' Guild Hall.

  She gave him a sidelong glance, her face almost puckish in the guttering of a corner gas light. "You of all people should understand the price and purpose of power."

  "I maintain a firm hope in the segregation of the noumenal from the ordinary."

  Kalliope laid a hand on his muscled forearm. He felt a crackle where she touched him, though her fingers were cool. Bijaz wondered when the tiny hairs curling across his skin had silvered.

  "Power follows its own paths, my friend," she said. "The sand bids me stay awhile."

  How long had it been since he'd simply made love? Perversions and miseries loomed in recent memory, but years had passed since Bijaz had laid his head upon his wife's breasts.

  This woman could have been his granddaughter.

  "I feel it, too," she told him. "I need it, too." She dropped her hand away. "But I fear the power more than I feel the need."

  Bijaz felt regret mixed with relief. "I fear your dreams of trees, sandwalker."

  "You should."

  They walked on, sharing nothing more than each other's company.

  Onesiphorous

  Big Sister paced his office. The floor creaked with her step. Onesiphorous had barely gotten used to the space himself—a wooden structure slung from the bottom of an arched stone bridge connecting two of the myriad islands that made up Port Defiance. Axos and Lentas, in this case. The interior plastering and door-high coastal-style windows made the room seem normal until a strong wind or a heavy step disturbed the balance. Then it felt like a giant cradle.

  His cradle was being rocked by a woman as iron-gray as any senior Tribade, but rather more plump than normal for the sisterhood. Not so much maternal, which would have been strange enough, but matronly. Yet it was she who Biggest Sister had sent with him to Port Defiance.

  Bells rang outside, a complex code concerning the harbor traffic. She stopped, cocked her head. "Sails sighted, inbound from the Sunward Sea, not a local flag."

  The dwarf was amazed that Big Sister had picked it up so quickly. They'd arrived on the same riverboat nine days ago. He'd brought gold and commissions and official seals. She had brought a knife. Each of them was sent to step into the dissent fermenting beneath a thin crust of despatches wending up and down the Saltus.

  To a dwarf from the City Imperishable, Port Defiance was as alien as the moon. To the south the sea climbed toward a horizon which could never quite be discerned for haze and the long slope of the world. North across the muddy waters of the Saltus delta lay the jungles of the Jade Coast, a viridian wall where moss-green monkeys and parrots brighter than the tears of demons shrieked. East and west, the coast was an endless maze of swamps and jungles occasionally punctuated by the weathered stone outcrops on which the Jade Rush had been founded. Plantations rotted there as well, in water meadows or on cleared land.

  Port Defiance was quite strange, with its close-crowded islands and rope bridges and stands of swamp-bound hardwoods. Too many city dwarfs lived here, most sent by Onesiphorous himself when things had been different in the City Imperishable. Too many disaffected scions of fallen houses, younger sons of Burgesses and trade factors brought by the Jade Rush half a generation past and now settled into louche disarray. Too many local families, stiff with contempt for the naïve parvenus disrupting their ancient prerogatives.

  Worst of all were the fights. Not between settlers and locals, but amongst the dwarfs themselves. Demagoguery and sheer incitement mixed dangerously with the hardest question to come to his people in half a thousand years.

  "You have a better ear than I," Onesiphorous admitted.

  She quirked him a smile as she spun on her heel for another pass across his office. "Men never learn to listen."

  "I'm listening now."

  "No you're not. You're thinking. You're wondering, What's she want today? Why has she come into my office with that look in her eye? That's not listening, little man, that's looking ahead."

  "And what would listening be?"

  She stopped, the smile lingering a bit this time. "A listener might use his eyes as well as his ears. Have you ever seen me walk with a limp? Where is the copper butterfly I wear in my hair? Why is my right boot stained brown? What would bring me here in such haste, yet be so difficult to discuss that I would comm
ent on the bells rather than simply arrive at the point?"

  "You and I listen differently."

  "We learned in different schools," she said. "You'd best lesson yourself in my ways if you plan to survive here."

  "As I am a fool, please do me the courtesy of enlightenment."

  "I came to report one thing, but on the way found cause for my loss of courage. There are two dwarfs floating out to sea right now who tried to permanently interrupt my trip."

  "You were attacked." He managed to make it a statement rather than a question.