The Poison Gardener

This week, Marie Brennan’s gardener, and his poisons, are just here to help…

~ Julian and Fran, February 23, 2025

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport features stories by Jennifer Hudak, John Chu, Carrie Vaughn, and Marie Brennan. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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The Poison Gardener

by Marie Brennan

Not everything in the Poison Garden of Kos Rakhin will kill you on the spot.

The Spherarch and her hieroi nobility certainly like people to think so. It enhances their ominous reputation in the other spheres, to say there is a garden on Kos Rakhin that only a few can enter in safety. That merely to breathe the air of that place is fatal, and so its beauty must be admired from afar.

Visitors to their sphere get a different story. Their host strolls through the imposing angles of the gate and, arms spread wide, declares that initiates know where it is safe to step. But do not touch the leaves of that one or your heart will stop within three beats, and do not peer too deeply into the beds; hidden in the shadows of the bushes are ferns the mere sight of which is lethal. The visitors’ laughter is tinged with an edge of nerves. Nonsense, surely, at least that last part . . . but better, surely, not to test it.

Some decline the honor of visiting the poison garden. Others, driven by politics or pride, step across the threshold of that geometric gate and accept the tour.

Almost all depart afterward in perfect health.

***

The gardener doesn’t like periods of alignment.

Although the poison garden is not so deadly as rumor makes it out to be, access is still tightly controlled, which means the gardener spends most of his time there alone. He prefers it that way: his domain, and the ordinary gardens that surround it, form a green oasis amid the soaring spikes of the capital’s towers. There are no air-trails to carry guests at speed over the dells of waving grasses, beneath the glossy darkness of the trees and towering ferns. Aeros are not even permitted to overfly this place. The banishment of machines leaves the garden quiet, which leaves the gardener time to think.

But there is no purpose in having a poison garden and never using it to intimidate anyone. When the slow drifting of the spheres brings two close enough together for easy passage, then the hieroi of Kos Rakhin like to show off their most famous site. And that means the gardener must contend with visitors.

The Spherarch has never ordered him not to be seen. In truth, his presence adds a certain mystique to the garden. “Altered with secret tekhne to be proof against all poisons,” many hosts like to tell their guests, gesturing at the figure glimpsed between the luxuriant blooms of the garden. As if anyone would waste such effort on a mere laborer of the kratoi caste, a man who can so easily be replaced. The current gardener came to his position under exactly the circumstances the hosts claim are impossible, after his predecessor died here.

But it is not entirely false to say he is proof against poison. He has brushed up against the leaves of many bushes that, while they will not stop your heart within three beats, certainly do it no good. And the air of others can indeed be bad, if breathed for too long. The Spherarchs of past ages sometimes assassinated dignitaries of others spheres in such fashion, by placing lovely bouquets of spear-flowers or garlands of scarlets within their guest quarters. But such is the reputation now of the Poison Garden of Kos Rakhin that few dignitaries are still foolish enough to permit greenery anywhere near them during their visits.

It is, in a sense, their loss. The spear-flowers and scarlets and other blossoms of the garden are crafted to be as beautiful as they are deadly. Why go to such effort if it will not also be worth looking at? The gardener has worked here for a long time, but he has never tired of the beauty. As for the deadliness . . .

Other hosts like to say, “Be careful not to touch him. Poison has seeped into his very skin and bone; anyone who touches him dies on the spot.”

Those words come closer to the mark.

***

There are visitors in the garden right now, circling the central dell in which the spear-flowers and other vibrant cousins bloom, laid out in angular beds whose points seem sharp enough to wound. There are three of them, two women whose knee-length tunics announce they are not from Kos Rakhin and an emaha whose long white hair, bleached of all color through tekhne, marks them as being of the Rakhinite hieroi. The breeze carries their lecture to the gardener’s ears, though he wishes it wouldn’t: they are telling their visitors that the garden has grown more lethal over the cycles, as the presence of so many poisonous plants in so small an area intensifies their effect. The gardener cannot tell if the women believe the emaha’s ridiculous lie, and he does not particularly care.

It is true the garden has become more lethal, but not through the plants feeding each other’s strength. It is far more deliberate than that. Nothing in the garden is natural in origin; everything is a product of tekhne, crafted by sophoi scientists working under the guidance of the hieroi. They have breathed in aether and exhaled it again in toxic form, then studied their own creation: its appearance, its growth, its effect on the unfortunate subjects chosen for their tests. To make a thing, you must understand it, and to make it more potent, you must understand it intimately.