Solo The Summer Garden

[Alses]

Timestamp: 14th Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
Location: The Towers Respite Gardens

The smooth pebbles were warm beneath her feet, despite the rather unsettled nature of the weather, when Alses stepped out from the small pavilion that was still her exclusive domain in the Respite. Overhead, clouds swirled in a continual, careful ballet, a tense dance that could at any time escalate into full-scale hostilities.

For now, though, the air was clear of flashing thunderbolts and driving rain; there was the odd, unsettled atmosphere that came before a storm, the few mountain breezes seeming confused and contradictory, dazed and fitful and blowing hither and yon as though perpetually late for an appointment they couldn't quite remember how to get to.

None of that mattered, however; plants continued to grow and flourish (or not) whether the weather was fine or foul, and that meant the gardener was expected to be outside in all weathers, keeping the grounds immaculate, or at least close to it.

Alses had changed back into her old red dress for this; it was comfortable and familiar and not nearly so fine as her instructor's robes, thus making it perfect for pottering around in the garden.

Deadheading, that was one of the constant summer tasks, snipping away at the dead and dying blooms with a pair of industrially-reinforced scissors to encourage yet greater profusions of blooms, to maintain the great banks of roses that lined the sloping terraces and scented the air with a promise sweeter than all of summer.

She'd been perplexed at first as to why deadheading worked, but Martin's explanation had made a sort of sense. Flowers, it seemed, weren't produced for the delight of people at all, rather to attract bees and other insects to further the interests of the plant (in what way, he hadn't specified), and once their purpose had been completed, flowers lost their lustrous petals and turned their energies towards fruit and seed production. By deadheading, one was in effect forcing the plant to go through the whole process again, producing more flowers for the delight of the gardener and, in consequence, fewer seeds.

Snip, snip, snip.' Spent flowers tumbled to the ground, the occasional thorn pricking her skin and drawing tiny spots of thick bronze blood as she worked, teasing aside the leaves and stems, lifting lolling, softly-senescing flowerheads to separate them from the main plant with a flash of steely scissors.

A soft smile was on Alses' face as she worked, despite the occasional needling pain and the unsettled nature of the sky overhead. Today was a break, a chance to recharge her batteries. No magic, nor even the thought of using it beyond the usual passive Sight, just pure mundane reconnection with the mudball of Mizahar.

Heat lay like a suffocating blanket over the city, sapping strength in the sticky humidity and stifling all but the Synaborn of the city, but magnificently indifferent to it she continued about her duties with methodical grace.

The greenery was calming, the crunch of stones under her boots a soothing, natural sound as she paced along the flowerbeds and skyglass terraces, deadheading and gently pruning where necessary, a benevolent caretaker attending her charges.

Fire-opal fingers pressed into the soil, ravelling the rich blackness of the topsoil against her sensitive finger-pads, judging with a frown on her face the texture, the dampness of it – or rather, the lack.

The sandy subsoil - the result of slow erosion of the peaks Lhavit was built on - drained freely, meaning that litre upon litre of rainwater, once it percolated down through the rich topsoil, simply flooded away. Summer, then, was an absolute trial for a Lhavitian gardener, trying to keep enough moisture locked into the soil to allow the plants to thrive.

Alses cast a gaze up at the unsettled sky, trying to discern whether rain would pour down in the next few bells or if it would, perversely, hold off and simply try its level best to smother the city in heat and oppressive humidity.

Watering – she'd decided the weather would be perverse – was a simple, repetitive task out in the garden and therefore enjoyable; she didn't have to think about djed iterations or aura baffles as she filled the watering can – a cumbersome iron construction – from the pump and bent low amidst the leaves and the gunship-drone of the bees.

Water from below, that had been one of the many sage pieces of advice imparted about the seemingly-mundane, innocuous task of gardening. Martin had opened the door – in a metaphorical sense – to a different world, one of peach leaf curl and verticillium wilt, of soil balance and mulches, manure and philtres of vigour and stimulation, of sunscorch and leafmould, of slugs and snails and aphids and all the other problems a gardener faced and conquered on a daily basis.

So. Watering had to be done from the base of a plant, or else in the shade. Martin had told her – and empirical evidence bore this out – that watering in full sunlight left droplets on the leaves, which magnified Syna's rays, scorching the delicate living tissue a dull, crispy brown instead of verdant green, bursting with life.

Crystal-clear liquid ran over the chipping mulch – mostly made from stripped-off bark, easily obtained from any sawmill as offcuts and waste – and Alses could almost feel the sigh of relief as the water sank into the parched soil, the plants all around greedily drinking it in as fast as she could supply it, roots fighting a continual battle for every last scrap of moisture raining down from on high.

The earthy smell of the soil mixed and mingled with the indefinable scent of green and growing things pressed close around her, blurring her outline in a camouflage canopy of leaves as she forced closer to the trunks of the shrubs on the lowest terrace of the gardens, watering-can clutched in her hands. The closer, the better – or at least until it became madness to press further into rhododendron thickets.

Bursting out into the sunlight – such as it was – was a blessed relief, lungs expanding gloriously now they were out of the hot, still confines of the bushes, Alses stretching with a crackle of bone to survey her dominion.

Normally, she'd be surrounded in short order by the gunship-drone of honeybees – her fire-opal skin blazed in the abundant light of the mountain days and evidently turned her, in the senses of the bees, into the biggest flower ever. Today, though, there were only a few stragglers, taking off from the flowers blooming all around and heading back to hives all across Lhavit and the Misty Peaks surrounding the Diamond of Kalea, evidently wary of the oncoming wild weather that the oppressive calm doubtless heralded.

The bees had the right of it, Alses knew, but the rain had yet to arrive and the heat didn't bother her, not one who exulted in the flamethrower-sun of Eyktol's deserts, and the burning heat of the hottest of days. There was simply so much to do in a summer garden – everything grew like wildfire, bursting with life – especially the weeds, with their live-fast-and-die approach to existence, threatening to strangle her careful borders of decorative plants and invade the gleaming smoothness of her pebble paths with creeping fingers of taka moss and tufts of grass just begging for a good dousing of weedkiller.

[Alses]

Weedkiller could wait until later, though – there were many other jobs needing doing in the garden – the trellises that clambered up the skyglass side of the Respite needed attention, for one; the interleaving tendrils of jasmine and clematis had not been kind to the wooden supports over the last few seasons and she needed to assess the damage.

There was also – as ever – the weeding to consider; she couldn't douse the perfidious plants in her borders and pots with the vicious stuff, or else most everything in the garden would become brown and dead and ugly in very short order. That part of her duties, there was no easy, simple shortcut; physical labour, pulling the nasty weeds – dandelions, daisies where they weren't wanted, and most especially the invasive whip-thin tendrils of jasao weed, a real problem in the gardens as of late – was the only way.

Her old system for dividing up the garden into lots, to make the whole daunting task easier, rose to the forefront of her mind as she contemplated the tasks that lay ahead , and with that memory there came the recollection of her vendetta against the dwarf primroses that had colonised many of the neat and tidy flowerbeds of today, covering them in great mats of fleshy, out-of-control leaves.

Enthusiastic rather than skilled, she'd laid into the poor, defenceless greenery with a will and absolutely no horticultural experience whatsoever, using a rake more suited for collecting leaves to rip out primroses en-masse until vast expanses of dark earth were exposed to the sky and what plants had survived the slow invasion were blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight.

These days, the few surviving dwarf primroses were securely trapped in pots and watched with a wary eye, not allowed to spill out into the main flowerbeds as Alses' predecessor had permitted. No, the primroses were well-contained and not a problem these days; they'd learned their lesson when she'd tipped vast quantities of them over the edge and into the abyss.

Alses' main vegetative concerns, then, were the ailing irises around the Respite's pond – into which she'd lobbed clusters of hefty zujin pod-seeds, on Martin's advice – and the infestation of jasao plants that seemed to be resisting her best efforts to evict them fiercely.

Jasao needed work as a matter of some urgency; the vine grew quickly, its tendrils continually latching onto and wrapping around other, more welcome plants, using them as supports in its race for the sun. That in itself was bad enough, but the true devilment of the deceptively-pretty vine went on underground and in the underbrush, far from the unfettered light of the sun.

Down here, amidst the leafmould and topsoil, the jasao planned and plotted its revenge against all gardeners who tore it out root and branch – or thought they did, at any rate. Whilst the majority of the weed sprouted skywards, hungry for the sun and clambering over most others, those of a more sedate, stable nature, in the rush for energy, for food to fuel yet more explosive growth and their defiant flowering, at ground-level the jasao implemented a contingency plan.

Simple, but effective, the plant cast out long runners through the leafmould and dirt, scurrying whipcord-thin strands of itself that burrowed into the earth every few metres and developed into a sort of fleshy, bulbous thing – 'rhizome' was the technical term, for no rhyme or reason Alses could discern. These sacs could survive when the main plant was chopped down, incinerated, poisoned or otherwise destroyed, and scant days after the original infestation had been cleared, wavy tendrils would sprout from the rhizomes, latching onto other plants and dragging the new vine higher and higher even as fresh roots sank into the earth and yet more runners shot through the undergrowth, pre-empting any retaliation.

The real challenge, therefore, was to get on your hands and knees – crown-of-horns catching in the supple branches of shrubs and small saplings in Alses' case, making it that much more difficult and ripping pieces out. While her horns were indestructible – as far as anyone knew, at least – the rest of her wasn't, so she normally ended up with a joyful profusion of scratches, cuts, bumps and bruises from ferreting around down there, too.

Perfect healing was such a blessing, really, otherwise she'd have been covered in a weltering patchwork of small scars and the occasional pockmark from a particularly stubborn briar.

“There you are,” hissed Alses, crouched down between the arching sprays of two rhododendron bushes that flanked a particularly splendid kariino tree – one whose gnarled old trunk and weeping branches were marred by the creeping mint-green tendrils of a jasao vine, rising up in ever-tightening spirals to strangulate its host in the mindless vegetative rush for light.

She could understand that, in a way, but the plant was unwanted in a garden, and sympathy had no place in the vegetative war that many people considered peaceful and serene, blissfully unaware of the vicious chemicals pumping out underground, the stop-motion war of roots and branches as they fought for light and to overshadow their neighbours and much else besides.

In a garden, though, the gardener was king, and a capricious monarch at that – at least, to the plants; healing one and hurting another without obvious rhyme or reason. This one is good and that one is bad...decided at some random whim on the caprice of the moment.

But of course, there were reasons, as with everything, and this was why Alses was now bent almost entirely backwards, pulling furiously on a whippy runner and its stubborn, rooted rhizomes that were fighting for every millimetre of soil they gave.

Under her grasping fingers, the jasao runner's surface wrinkled and split; pungent sap poured out, quickly coating her hands in the slippery liquid and causing her grip to weaken, the vine run through her fingers and the rhizomes settle back into the dampened earth with smug little sighs of released tension.

Flat on her back in the leafmould, hands covered in pale-green, milkily translucent sap, Alses idly contemplated the tiny dancing points of light that filtered down through the dappled shade of the rhododendrons, crown-of-horns dug deep into the yielding earth and holding her head some way off the ground.

“That...did not go as planned,” she admitted to the humming, insect-dashed air, then gathered herself and sat up on her haunches, a brief wrench seeing her head freed and clods of earth tumbling back as she (slightly dizzily) turned to contemplate the smug vine that had so defeated her.

A futile victory, a winning of the battle and not the war. Alses squared resolutely up to the runner – as much as she could whilst on her knees, anyway, wrapped her hands around a hitherto-undamaged part of it and hauled with all her not-inconsiderable might.

The plant resisted valiantly for a long moment, but in the end it snapped taut with a sharp report and reluctantly, rhizome after rhizome shook itself free of the cradling embrace of the earth and hung balefully from the woody runner that had spawned them, trailing a boil of tentacle-like roots. Alses eyed these warily; it was only a blessing they didn't writhe and move on their own.

[Alses]

Diligent hunting in the vegetative debris found four more runners, all of them extending as far as they could away from the main plant and hiding as best they were able. Alses' hands were stained green by jasao sap when she finished, and all around there was evidence of the struggle – disturbed earth, scattered and snapped runners and the rhizomes themselves, lying drunkenly on the earth and forlornly trailing off-white roots. With a sigh, Alses pushed her way out of the embrace of the rhododendrons and stretched happily in the free air, enjoying the cool rush of a mountain breeze across her sweat-slicked, grubby skin and the feel of faint sunbeams shining down.

Vertebrae cracked out a fusillade as she stretched, absently running her fingers along her crown-of-horns and clearing off any vestiges of earth still clinging to them. 'Spade time,' she thought, padding across grass and pebbles, running along the raised skyglass borders of the flowerbeds and flashing through the small copse of trees that sheltered the gardener's pavilion.

There was something awfully satisfying about taking a day away from magic now and then – well, as much as an aurist could, at any rate. The wooden haft of the spade – varnished to a high sheen last winter by her own hands – felt warm and slightly rough in her hands as she carried it, the metal blade reassuringly weighty as it dug into the yielding earth time and again, scooping up leafmould and jasao pieces with clockwork regularity, piling them high to be tipped over the side and down into the endless depths of the Unforgiving.

There was, now, a compost-box in the gardens, but jasao was something of a special case, since its rhizomes would simply grow and spread again if left to its own devices in the rich decomposing mess that eventually turned into compost – and that couldn't be allowed.

Thus, over the side it would go, where it could trouble the primeval forests of the Misty Peaks for all she cared.

She collected the few blue flowers that tumbled down, though – jasao flowers were pretty, after all, and they lasted a long time, making them a preferred hair decoration for some of the students. She'd leave them in a bowl of water at reception – that way anyone who wanted one could have one; a supremely equable method of doling them out, and, best of all, one that required no effort on Alses' part.

She rarely wore flowers in her own hair – when she did, they were always roses – and her intricate crown-of-horns lent itself better to rings and bracelets in any case, but jasao flowers were popular with others.

There were several other places around the gardens where jasao had taken hold along with the more mundane weeds, and sorting out each one was rather a trial, it had to be admitted, ferreting around in the damp earth for gobbets of hiding, sneaky weed whilst the day grew hotter and more humid and the clouds built up ever higher – they were surely in for a colossal rain-storm in the near future.

But not now, it seemed. The air was almost still, filled only with the drone of various insects that defied the heat, laden with summer perfumes from the opening flowers all around. All over the city, Alses knew, gardeners were taking advantage of what time they had left to do just a little more work – every weed ripped out strengthened the welcomed plants, every fresh application of mulch made it easier for them to capture moisture from the spectacular – though rare – cloudbursts that Summer brought to the mountain city.

Wiping the pearly sheen of perspiration from her forehead with one hand, Alses squinted at her domain, her gaze proprietary. It drifted idly over the scalloped pathways – marred with creeping green at the edges, still crying out for weedkiller – touched on the stands of ornamental trees, the tall pots with their elegant standard roses and a few dwarf primroses coming to the end of their bloom, danced across the busy flowerbeds bedecked with bright blue keokina and alighted on the still, limpid pond, its surface quiet and calm, dotted only by ripples from insects landing to drink and the occasional water-lily pad.

The pond itself, that was not the problem, a quiet and contemplative focal point for one section of the garden, all tumbled rocks and small alpine plants falling down to a near-perfect circle of water and a sudden carpet of lawn, a microcosm of locations further out in the Misty Peaks, recreated in miniature form by some enterprising gardener Syna alone knew how many years ago.

The banks of the pond were lined with rough slate for approximately half the perimeter and then petered out into great stands of irises, their bright yellow flowers a cheery shout against the tumbled backdrop of grey rock. As of late, though, several of the deeper, more enterprising stands had begun to wither and wilt, their once proud green stems bending, shrivelling, warping and turning an unsettling brown colour – and with the older ones, blotches of rot stippling the entire plant. Flower-heads senesced on the plant, unopened buds fell like rain, and all in all they looked entirely unhappy.

What was strange was that the outer ranks of the irises were absolutely fine, glowing green and yellow and positively bursting with health, completely happy with their position, their vegetative situation in Mizahar a contented and productive one.

The solution, as Alses saw it, therefore, was to get stuck in with the spade and dig up the ailing plants. They surely weren't over-watered – these particular irises, the yellow ones, were aquatic, for Caiyha's sake, continually drenched in liquid. Martin had said they liked it like that, well-able to tolerate poisoned soil and water and air-starved soil all at once, whereas other plants failed miserably dealing with even one such adverse condition.

This was perhaps why they flourished so well on the pond-bank, mostly immersed in water, where all other plants just sort of stopped, and until recently that had been fine. Not so much now, with that odd rotting-as-they-grew phenomenon occurring – to which the only solution Alses could see was a good ferret around in the squelchy mud they'd been planted in, to find the root – literally – of the problem.

Anoxic mud gurgled and slopped around the spade as she jammed it under the water, the crystal-clear liquid (thanks to the zujin, now free from creeping duckweed and algae) suddenly becoming opaque thanks to blooming clouds of sediment thrown up by her action. The blade hit something hard, scraped along a rock or some other obstruction with a vibration that tingled right up to her teeth and then bit in once more with renewed vigour.

The dying irises trembled, and a few more flowers fell with dull splashes into the water. From her awkward position on the edge of the pond, as close as she could get to the ailing vegetation without wading through dense thickets of healthy irises or plunging into the pond – that last was something she decidedly did not favour as anything other than a Konti.

Still, the spade had a good purchase under the nearest thicket... Alses paused for a moment, assessing the situation and taking a breather. The dead humidity still lay like a suffocating blanket over Lhavit; her skin was slick with sweat stubbornly still present, the moisture-rich air preventing timely evaporation despite the heat. Even a celestial Ethaefal could be glad of a breather, now and then.

[Alses]

It was difficult to get a good purchase, Alses found to her annoyance; rather than supporting the flat of her blade and allowing her to exert her not-inconsiderable strength against the irises, the mud simply gave under the shovel's pressure and sank with a sucking slap into the waters of the pond proper, leaving Alses right back at square one and mildly annoyed.

She shifted her position on the skyglass minutely, and prepared to have another go, sizing up the problem with fresh eyes. Alses adjusted her grip on the shovel, fine strands of golden-blonde hair catching on the moistness of her lips as a playful breeze whistled through her intricate crown-of-horns, and drew it back to try again.

No, no, it'd be no good. Worse luck; she'd have to take a step or two into the pond itself to be sure of making any real progress.

Off came the red dress – Alses wasn't one for modesty when she was on her own, and, screened by greenery on three sides and a sheer drop into the mists on a fourth, it was highly unlikely anyone would actually see her.

Gingerly, she dipped one toe into the dark water, hissing through her teeth at the chill of it striking through fire-opal skin and the liquid beading her flesh. A slow roll of goosebumps rolled up her leg, spread across her torso and sent a convulsive shiver racing across her arms and shoulders before she steeled herself and plunged in, wading carefully through the pond and doing her utmost not to think about the ooze squidging through her toes.

Carefully, she skirted the zujin clusters deeper in the pool, mindful of the sharp underbelly of the leaves and the viciously-spiked stems, not wanting to have to forcibly dig them out and then pack the resulting pockmarks with antiseptic ointments galore. Pain was never high on her list of things to experience – just for a moment, her free hand went to her neck in unconscious remembrance of Hayani's death-grip that had so nearly done for her a season or so back.

Nearly waist-deep in cold water, feet dug deep into the yielding mud at the bottom of the pond and dragging the unwieldy spade after her, she found a reasonable spot and scowled across the slowly-stilling expanse of water, still choppy from the ripples of her entry but calming as she remained still, cursing the chill on sun-warmed flesh. Below the first inch or so of pleasantly-warm water, the pond was cold.

This time, she had a much better angle and the blade bit in without complaint, sinking deep into the yielding mud and letting her lever a large stand of ailing irises out of the water and more-or-less onto the grassy banks, anoxic mud slopping off the edges of the blade. A foul smell rose, too – her nostrils thinned and she redoubled her efforts, wanting to be out of the water as soon as possible.

It was therefore a wet and dripping Alses who hauled herself back out of the pond, fastidiously washing every speck of mud from her feet and leaving them as pristine as she could manage.

Turning her attention to the stricken irises so cruelly plucked from their moorings, she approached slowly, shovel held low to scoop the wilting plants from a distance, hopefully preserving her nose from the smell for a little while longer.

The pavilion, hidden behind its own little copse of trees and with its rainbowed opaque skyglass walls, had done sterling duty as a changing-room, and now it would serve her admirably as an impromptu examination room. She slid the rot-speckled irises onto one of the clear benches and bent over the stricken plants in earnest, brow furrowed as she examined the poor things for...well, anything, really, any clue as to why they were ailing when all around them, the gardens and even the other iris banks were positively bursting with health.

Squinting down at the mess wasn't helping very much – there was too much mud and foliage in the way for her to be sure of, well, anything, really, and the smell wasn't helping.

A quick trip to the pump soon helped with that, though, a wave of crystal-clear water drawn up from far below stripping away clinging mud in the cleansing flood, pouring over the battle-scarred table and running away into drains set into the pavilion's floor. A few swift slices with the secateurs – in actuality just a pair of industrially-reinforced scissors, if Alses was honest about it – got rid of most of the ailing foliage, too, letting her get, literally, to the root of the problem.

"What have we here?" she murmured, puzzled as she studied what was laid bare before her, stripped of its protective, obscuring muddy covering.

It was indeed the roots that were the problem. Irises grew from bulbous, fleshy growths deep underground, where they were protected by the anoxic mud from predators, and they were normally hardy things that were easy to split and divide. These ones, though, they'd been put through the wringer. Some were more hole than flesh, something having burrowed through them time and again, but the worst were one or two that, when a cautious finger prodded them or rolled them over, broke apart to expose a stinking, glistening interior chock-full with black spores that drifted in a foul cloud from where she'd disturbed them.

The stench was horrible; Alses gagged and fought not to breathe in as the black spores drifted lazily through the air and stuck stubbornly onto her skin. She spluttered, trying in vain to keep the tiny things away from her lips, her nose, but to no avail; they landed and stuck, tickling her nose and sensitive mouth.

Water was the answer – and lots of it, sluicing over her head, her neck, her arms, making her sneeze explosively when drops of it flooded in, forcing out the little black spores and leaving her, at the end of it, pristine and clean and very, very wet.

She glared at the sopping wet and rotten rhizomes on her workbench. If there was any justice in the world – or had she known reimancy, to be honest – they'd have burned up in an instant from the heat of her gaze. As it was, they just lay soggily there, deliquescing and becoming just a little more rotten and disgusting with every passing tick.

Hmm.

Perhaps it was time to bring in someone with a little more experience than she? That meant a trip up to the Dusk Tower, of course, but whatever had rotted the irises was entirely out of her experience and she needed expert advice on what to do – digging the whole lot out willy-nilly might cause many, many more problems than it solved in the long run, after all.

And besides, there might be a simple solution that didn't involve destroying plants. Some philtre or poison she could use, or perhaps even some biological control mechanism – some insect or animal that would see them hale and healthy again in no time.

Buoyed by this cautiously optimistic thought, Alses turned and turned gently, brushing water off herself and letting the oppressive heat – that was helping build some truly impressive thunderheads in the distance – dry most of the rest.

Donning her comfortable, familiar red dress, she let herself out of the verdant grounds of the Towers Respite and began to make her way resolutely through the shining, near-deserted streets towards the pearly finger of the Dusk Tower that soared proudly up into the heavens on its distant tier.

[Alses]

Martin, her go-to gardener for any problems of a vegetative nature, had been in the potting shed of the Dusk Tower when she'd found him, tipped back in the rickety chair and surrounded by vertiginous piles of compost and teetering towers of ceramic pots, taking a little break from the rigours of the day.

She'd been a little wary of disturbing him, in truth, of disrupting his precious rest bell and taking advantage of the esteem in which Lhavit held the Ethaefal, but his craggy features had creased into a smile as soon as he'd seen her and he'd waved off her apologies with a pleasantly dismissive air and a gruff: “Nonsense. Good t'see you still keepin' up yer interest. We'll take a stroll down to yon gardens an' see what's what firsthand. Diagnosis on someone else's findin's ain't the most reliable, 'specially not – no offence – when they's a bumblin' novice o' a gardener.”

Sprightly and spry, with a jaunty spring in his step, he led the way at quite a clip out of the Tower gardens, making use of all the semi-secret little shortcuts known only to the gardeners and the most regular visitors, and Alses hurried after him.

“Keepin' well?” Martin asked as they marched rapidly along the skyglass span of the small, private bridge that linked the Tower to the Respite. Perspiration poured freely down his suntanned skin, collected and channelled by a lifetime of wrinkles and a few scars, percolating through his stubble to drip from his chin, though he seemed oblivious – or at the least, uncaring.

“Very well, thank you,” Alses beamed. “I enjoy teaching, in the main, and best of all we were able to exercise our craft once more recently.”

“Your craft?” Martin echoed, eyebrows quirked in a puzzlement that quickly cleared. “Oh aye, I remember ye sayin'. Magecraft, wasn't it? Difficult an' persnickety, ye said, but ye've always looked so happy when a commission's come your way.”

Alses smiled. “Yes, well. We enjoy the challenge of it.”

“And the money?” Martin added, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

“And that, yes,” she admitted. “Although we did have to deal with Lady Lariat on the way; the Patriarch was – or perhaps still is, I've not checked – using the Tower laboratory for some sort of experiment.”

Martin blinked in surprise. “You actually saw her? Famous recluse, y'know. What was she like – if y'don't mind me askin'?”

Alses pulled a face. “Yes, we know. And Elena Lariat is...” she pondered it for several moments as they crested the apex of the bridge and began the graceful arc down to the Respite itself, hazily blue in the distance but coming more into focus with every step.

“Shameless.”

Martin waited, and then when nothing further seemed to be forthcoming, he prompted: “Shameless? Is that all ye noticed about her?”

Alses flashed him a wry smile. “Well, what else would you like to know? She's small, she likes wearing silk and she adores sweets. Food in general, actually.”

'And she likes the Ethaefal, oh, doesn't she just,' Alses very emphatically did not add – it would only cause problems down the line.

Shaking his head, Martin let the conversation lapse and continued down the bridge in companionable silence, casting the occasional glance skywards to the slow dance of the gathering clouds. Once under the marginally cooler shade of some of the fadeong trees that were common throughout the gardens of the Respite, he sighed with relief and mopped his brow with a loud checked handkerchief he produced from some unimaginable recess, one of the many many pockets in his outfit. There was a trail of rich black earth staining the lower edge of it she tactfully didn't mention – he was a busy man who took pride in his work as a gardener, and that meant getting messy.

The day she recoiled from soil would be a black day indeed.

“Don't know how you stand it,” Martin puffed, still industriously mopping. “Th' heat, I mean. And the humidity. Where're we headed?”

“The pavilion, and perhaps the pond,” Alses replied, gliding assuredly through the trees – in short order, both she and Martin were inside the arcing dome of the gardener's little pavilion and looking down at the sorry mess of irises – or rather, what had once been irises – on the workbench. Work-roughened fingers slid over close-cropped white stubble as Martin listened, eyeing the sorry remnants of the irises presented slightly nervously for his inspection.

“Caiyha, what a smell," he observed. "Well, ye've got a problem, right enough,” he pronounced with a sigh, stubby fingers reaching out to gingerly poke at one of the rotting rhizomes that had once sprouted healthy irises. “Actually, ye've two.”

Peremptorily, he shoved his black-smeared finger under Alses' nose, causing her to go momentarily cross-eyed as she tried to see whatever it was he was trying to show her. “See th' black? Spores, off'f a tiny mushroom what loves t'munch on irises. Us gardeners call it ink disease – this is a bad case, normally ye don't see th'entire rhizome rotted like this. Normally get it on the foliage first, black blotches an' such. Been a bad time for it, what will all the Spring rains, an' the heat of Summer. Makes it easy to spread, 'specially with all the damn moths.”

Alses nodded, intelligently (or so she hoped). “How do we fix it?”

Martin pursed his lips and rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. “Prolly th' best thing ye can do with an advanced case, like this, is rip 'em all out and get rid of them completely. Then ye'll need t'rest the soil fer a year or two, so's all the dormant spores in the mud die off, afore ye can plant again.” A pause, and then he continued: “Ye said ye've still got some healthy ones? Best t'keep a close eye on 'em, too – if they start lookin' peaky, yank 'em out as a preventative measure. Don't want to lose the lot, do ye?”

Alses blanched, dismayed – Martin must have seen, for he flashed her a bracing smile and added: “It's not the end o'the world, ye know. Happens to gardeners the world over – ye just have t'work through it with a smile.”

Slightly gloomily nonetheless, Alses nodded. “And the other problem?” she prompted, wanting to get all the bad news in one go.

[Alses]

“Yer other concern is what I think might've made th' ink disease so bad t'start with.” He beckoned Alses over to some of the less-damaged rhizomes and pointed at their pitted, slimy surfaces with one stubby finger, lightly tracing a trackwork through them.

“See those holes? Not normal – think they's the result o' a moth. Drab little thing, called an iris borer, 'case that's what the little devil does. Its larvae munch through leaf an' rhizome alike. Damagin' in and of themselves, o'course, but the big problem is they let diseases in. Normally the outer skin o' a rhizome's pretty tough, but them borers chomp right through and let all sorts of nasties get at th' nutrients and developin' plant.”

Alses nodded, intelligently. “And how do we deal with those?” she asked, dreading the same answer as before – wholesale destruction.

“Couple o' ways,” Martin replied, offhand, casting about for the bucket of water. “Aside from expensive murder philtres, the best method is t' drop yer rhizome in water. Jus' a few chimes'll do 'er, the larvae don't swim too good, see. Ye fill their bore-holes full o' water and the buggers drown afore they can do any more damage. After that...” Martin tailed off as he drew his gleaming belt-knife with a practised flourish, setting it against the rhizome and making ready to cut.

“Second part is t' cut away th' manky, damaged tissues. Only worth doin' on the less-damaged rhizomes, o'course, like the drownin'; no sense in savin' a rotten hulk that'll never grow. Ye just chop it away, let the rhizome dry out, replant it an' pray. Simple, and effective. That said...” he squinted dubiously down at the sorry bulbs laid before him, evidently assessing their viability in the long run. “That said, I think these 'uns are a write-off,” he pronounced. “Best just to chuck 'em; they're chock-full o' disease or else they won't survive th' surgery. Better haul out th' rest o' them if they's as bad as this sharpish, too – else you'll lose all them pretty irises.”

He nodded at the spade now leaning up against the pavilion wall. “Got another spade?” he asked, looking around before noticing, hung neatly on two pegs and labelled in Alses' hand, another example of the breed that he unhooked with eager ease and slung over his shoulder in one practiced movement.

“Two spades is better'n one,” he said, eyes twinkling, in response to her quizzical look. “Many hands make light work. Lead on, m'girl!” He gestured grandly to the door and, with a mildly confused sigh – it was his time, after all, and entirely his choice if he chose to spend it helping her haul out dying irises – Alses led the way to the troublesome water feature, the water rippled with wavelets from the rising wind.

Martin looked at the sky with a scowl. “Wind's changing,” he observed shortly, “An' the clouds will be rollin' in soon enough. Best get t'work, 'less you wants to be out here soaked to th' skin?”

Alses shuddered. “No, thank you,” she replied, already thinking longingly of the hot baths – or maybe even Kinell once more, of letting the tumbling cascade of hot water pound the tensions and headaches and cares away, of relaxing completely in mineral-rich water and serenaded by the choir-like chorus of the kingfishers that lived in the phosphorescent foliage.

Martin whistled, long and low, when the ailing patch came into sight. “As clear-cut a case as I ever did see,” he remarked, hefting the spade from his shoulder and into the ready position, advancing with grim determination more befitting a soldier on the defenceless clump, waving forlornly in the breeze.

“How d'ye want t'do this?” he asked, pausing at the edge of the pool and looking at her, expectant.

Alses paused for a tick or two, slightly behind him, considering trajectories and angles and what would be the most efficient way of doing things. A slightly cruel smile curved her lips for an instant – he was closest to the pond, so into it he'd go.

“If you can lift from the water I can slide my spade in under the rising bulbs and scoop them over the side,” she suggested, gesturing to the glimmering skyglass rail that protected the gardens from the vertiginous fall into the Misty Peaks and the Unforgiving beyond, wreathed in mist as usual with only the mountain peaks breaching the sea of cloud. “It's too far to lever effectively from the shore,” she added, speaking from earlier experience.

Martin grimaced. “Serve me right fer rushin' on ahead, I s'pose,” he murmured ruefully, preparing to wade into the water even as Alses made her way carefully around the pond's circumference, taking up position close to an enormous stand of pampas grass.

“Caiyha, that's cold!” Martin hissed as he gingerly lowered himself into the water, moving with exaggerated care through it until he was finally in position, signalling her with a broad overarm wave to be ready.

Old or not, soaking or not, Martin was still strong; a lifetime of labour in the fields and gardens of the celestial city had left him wiry and corded with lithe muscle that rippled beneath sun-bronzed skin.

He went at it with a will, digging the shining blade of the spade deep into the yielding mud, much as she herself had – the irises trembled with the force of the blow and dying flowers fell like rain into the pool. Martin gritted his teeth and shifted his position for better purchase as he levered at the spade handle, stuck like a javelin into the bank.

With a sucking slurp, a gust of a smell that was nose-cakingly bad and a triumphal cry from Martin, a large section of the remaining diseased irises tore free from their moorings. Alses swooped in with the second spade, locking it in under the rising bulbs and, by virtue of her more stable position levered them up and in one smooth movement, exploiting the physics of Mizahar, catapulted the stinking, rotting cargo off the celestial city.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Working together, they repeated the process several times, until the last of the diseased irises tumbled despairingly into thin air and Martin was able to haul himself, dripping, out of the pond. “Good job well done,” he observed. “Now, 'm goin' t'your pavilion to change, unless ye need m'help with something else?”

In reply, Alses simply smiled, arching her back and stretching luxuriously. “Not at all, Martin,” she called. “Thank you for all the help.”

“Anytime,” came the offhand reply as the gardener squelched off to the pavilion to dry and change, leaving Alses a precious few chimes to admire the vista of mountain peaks and rolling cloud before the thunderstorm's vanguard hit the celestial city full-force.

END

[Elysium]

Alses

Experience
Observation +2
Gardening +5
Body Building +2
Botany +2
Rhetoric +1

Lore
Gardening: Deadheading
Botany: Rhizome
Gardening: How to Remove Jasao Weed
Rhetoric: A Tactful Explanation
Botany: Ink Disease
Gardening: Iris Borer (Moth)
Gardening: Purging the Pond

Notes
As always, sterling work m'dear! I was very amused at how you defined Elena - hence, the rhetoric lore. I always find your solo threads richly cinematic and I never have any trouble visualizing Alses as she goes about her day. Thus, I sense a great deal of the nuanced humor, especially in her speaking with others. If I missed anything, please be sure to shoot me a message!