Тэд Уильямс - The War of the Flowers

DAW Books, Inc.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1225.

Microsoft LIT edition ISBN: 0-7420-9316-6

Adobe PDF edition ISBN: 0-7420-9318-2

Palm PDB edition ISBN: 0-7420-9319-0

MobiPocket edition ISBN: 0-7420-9317-

This book is dedicated with great love to my wife, Deborah Beale, who makes my life worth living in more ways than I can count, let alone list here.

A good marriage and a loving family may not be the easiest things in the world to create, but I find it hard to believe there is anything more worth the effort. It is a Great Adventure, and I share mine with a wonderful woman.

Deb, you are my personal fairy-tale ending.

This book didn't have quite as many midwives as some of my others, but it still wouldn't have made it into the world without a lot of help.

I have again received support and useful feedback in too many ways to list from my wonderful agent Matt Bialer and my British editor Tim Holman, and my German editor Ulrike Killler. My brilliant wife Deborah Beale as always provided words of wisdom at many stages, both as a reader full of useful comments and because of her literary and publishing acumen. My thanks to all of them — I'm a very lucky writer. And of course, profound gratitude to my most excellent American publishers (and primary editors of this book) Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert, along with all the folks at DAW Books, for helping me to see another wild idea from conception to its emergence into the world, and for their constant exercise of creative patience. I couldn't do it without them.

Blessings on you all.

Readers may notice a certain uncomfortable resonance in parts of this book to events around the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., of September 11, 2001. The part of the story that most closely parallels things that happened on that horrible day was actually part of the planned book since the beginning — while preparing to write this note I found it mentioned prominently in an outline written in January of 2000.

I have modified those sections slightly so that they echo the real events a little less closely, but it was too central an event in the story to take out entirely. I hope anyone disturbed by the similarity will accept my apology for discomfort caused, and understand that this was a case of leaving in something already planned and important to the story rather than adding something after the fact to try to gain some cheap thrills out of a tragedy that was international in scope but also personal for very many people.

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part One

GOODNIGHT NOBODY

Clouds

2 The Silent Primrose Maiden

3 Descent

4 The Hungry Thing

5 Book

6 A Corruption of Moonlight

7 Woods

8 Runaway Capacitor

9 Visitors

Part Two

LAST EXIT TO FAIRYLAND

Larkspur's Land

11 A Disturbance in The Forcing Shed

12 The Hollyhock Chest

13 A Change in the Weather

14 Penumbra Station

15 The Plains of Great Rowan

16 Poppy

17 The Hothouse

18 Sidewalks of New Erewhon

19 A Holiday Visit

20 Among the Creepers

21 In Thornapple House

22 Status Quo Ante

23 The Shadow on the Tower

Part Three

FLOWER WAR

The Bus Stop on Pentacle Street

25 A Million Sparks

26 Losing a Friend

27 Button's Bridge

28 Goblin Jazz Bandwagon

29 The Hole in the Story

30 Family Matters

31 In the Bloom Years

32 Trendy Fungus

33 The Last Breath They Took

Part Four

THE LOST CHILD

Interlude with Van Gogh Stars

35 A Sort of Reunion

36 Changelings

37 The Ebony Box

38 The Broken Stick

39 Stepchild

40 Strawflower Square

41 The Cathedral

Part Five

FAIRYTALE ENDING

Farewell Feast

43 The Limits of Magic

Index of People, Places, and Things

A single flower, a hellebore, stood in a vase of volcanic glass in the middle of the huge desk, glowing almost radioactively white in the pool of a small, artful spotlight. In other great houses the image of such a deceptively fragile-looking bloom would have been embroidered on a banner covering most of the wall behind the seat of power, but there was no need for such things here. No one could reach the innermost chambers of this monstrous bone-colored building and not know where they were and who ruled in this place.

In the mortal world the hellebore is sometimes called the Christmas Rose because of an old tale that says it sprouted where a little girl who had no gift for the Christ Child wept into the snow outside the stable in Bethlehem. Both snow and the flower itself were unlikely to have been found in the Holy Land in those days, but that has never hurt the story's popularity.

In Greece of the old myths, Melampus of Pylos used hellebore to save the daughters of the king of Argos from a Dionysian madness that had set them running naked through the city, weeping and screaming and laughing.

There are many stories about hellebore. Most of them have tears in them.

The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles was no stranger to silence — in fact, he swam in it like a fish. He stared at the spotlit flower, letting his thoughts wander down some of the darker tracks of his labyrinthine mind, and waited, patient as stone, for the figure behind the desk to speak. The pause was a long one.

The person on the other side of the desk, who had apparently been pursuing some internal quarry of his own, stirred at last. Slowly, almost lazily, he extended an arm to touch the flower on his desk. His spidersilk suit whispered so faintly only a bat or the creature sitting across from him could hear. His long finger, only a little less white than the flower, touched a petal and made it quiver.

There were no windows here in the heart of the building, but the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles knew that it was raining hard outside, the drops spattering and hissing on the pavement, coach tires spitting. Here the air was as still as if he and his host sat inside a velvet-lined jewel casket.

The shape in the beautiful, shimmering blue-black suit gently prodded the flower again. "War is coming," he said at last. His voice was deep and musical. Mortal women who had only heard him speak, waking to discover him warm and invisible in their rooms in the middle of the night, had fallen so deeply in love with that voice that they had foresworn all human suitors, giving up the chance of sunlit happiness forever in the futile hope he would return to them, would let them live again that one delirious midnight hour.

"War is coming," agreed the Remover.

"The child of whom we spoke before. It must not live."

A long breath — was it a sigh? "It will not."

"You will receive the usual fee."

The Remover nodded, distracted by his own thoughts. He had very little fear that anyone, even this most powerful personage, would neglect to pay him. With war coming they would need him again. He was the specialist of specialists, totally discreet and terrifyingly effective. He also made a very bad enemy.

"Now?" he asked.

"As soon as you can. If you wait too long, someone might notice. Also we don't want the risk. The Clover Effect is still not perfectly understood. You might not get a second chance."

The Remover stood. "I have never yet needed such a thing."

He was gone from the inner room so quickly he might have been a shadow flitting across the dark walls. The master of the House of Hellebore could see much that others could not, but even he had trouble marking the exact progress of the Remover's self-deletion.