by J. P. Oakes
Granny Spregg’s heart sinks. Thacker lets out a sound that could generously be called a groan, or accurately called a whimper.
This, Granny Spregg knows, will now have to be done the hard way.
Skart
The Iron City, of course, is not just mansions and bars. It is also squalor and squats. It is also high-rise pillars of steel and glass. It is also shops and stalls. Indeed, the Iron City has almost as many facets as it has ways to take your money and leave you lying in a gutter.
The Iron City also has factories in abundance. They churn, and belch. These are the truest monsters of the modern world, smoke pouring from their mouths, their wealth hoarded far away from the fae they subjugate.
In such a place sits Skart. He is a kobold, skin colored as if by sunburn, red hair sprouting from him in wild abundance, his face folded and puggish. He is in his office, hunched over a desk and an ancient typewriter, the chiaroscuro of a bare lamp bulb rendering him a partially glimpsed figure of light and shadow. A clock chirps. He looks up. Finally, it is shift’s end, and he is anxious to leave.
Then: a sound at his door. A creak of hinges. A scuffing of feet. He looks up, and sees a face peeking around the doorframe. One last thing left to deal with.
It is Bertyl, one of the tailors. A pixie like most of her coworkers, the bright yellow of her hair and skin are fading to cream as the years encroach. Skart smiles at her. Everyone, he believes, has a purpose they can achieve if you give them an opportunity. Bertyl has been struggling to find her purpose, but Skart believes he has an opportunity to give her.
“How can I help you, Bertyl?” he asks.
She shuffles towards him, looks back at the door. “Hello, Mr Skart, sir,” she says.
Then she runs out of steam.
“You’re here late,” Skart prompts as amiably as he can.
“Yes, sir.” Bertyl looks at her feet.
Skart knows he has to play this carefully.
“While I always appreciate company, Bertyl,” he says, “is there anything specific you want?”
Skart is a fae with one of the rarest possessions in the Iron City—a sliver of authority. He is a shift leader within a garment factory. He is not even a sidhe, and his success over the old-school network of nepotism that still persists in the Iron City in and of itself suggests either profound skill or unnatural ruthlessness. Evidence supports the former. He is a kindly boss. He helps organize and coordinate the efforts of tailors and machinists. He sets schedules and hears petty woes. It is not a position of great stature, but it is one that allows Skart to make his workers’ lives minimally easier. Bertyl, for some reason, seems hesitant to give him that opportunity.
“Well, Mr Skart,” Bertyl says, not meeting his eye. “I mean, of late I think, perhaps, you’ve been pretty complimentary about some of my dresses. And it’s been long hours, see. And, well, I’ve been here twenty years now, and so, well…” And there she seems to run out of nerve. She pants slightly.
Skart smiles. “This is about pay, isn’t it, Bertyl?” he says.
She gulps. “I’m sorry, Mr Skart, sir, and I wouldn’t ask… It’s only that my husband, Hasp, you know? He’s laid up near two months now with his leg, and things are… well they’re a bit tight, Mr Skart, sir.”
Things are tight. The song of the Fae Districts. Bertyl’s husband was badly injured when he was buried under a half-dozen massive bolts of undyed cloth after a fraying clasp on a delivery truck gave way. Skart is well aware that Hasp has been unable to work for almost two months now. Once, Skart thinks, the story would have filled him with rage. But not tonight. Tonight he will finally do something to stop any more harm coming to the fae.
Just… not yet.
“I understand,” Skart says. Bertyl sighs audibly. “And you have worked hard. And you deserve more.”
She glances at his eyes, just for a moment. He smiles again.
“But for you to have more, Bertyl, someone else will have to have less. There’s not more money. You know that. The goblins always give me the same amount every month. So, I have to share it out. And I have to be fair. So, I ask you, Bertyl, who should I give less to?”
Bertyl swallows. It’s a question she can’t answer. Others could. Others come to Skart and expound on the subject for hours. But it is a cruel question to ask Bertyl, and he knows it. He feels bad. But on the other hand, he was lying when he was complimentary about her sewing.
“I’ll tell you what, Bertyl,” he says, ending her agony. “You go home. I’ll stay here and look at the spreadsheets. Maybe there’s a corner I can cut somewhere, save a few copper teeth here and there. Maybe I can slip them your way. I know how badly Hasp was hurt.”
“Oh! Mr Skart…” She almost detonates with gratitude.
“It’s no worry,” he says. And here he comes to the crux. “I’ll be here a few more hours anyway.”
She stares at him. He could ask anything of her now. Except, it turns out, to leave quickly. It takes ten more minutes of stumbling thank-yous for Bertyl to depart. But Skart’s alibi is established. If anyone comes asking for him, Bertyl will swear to her grave that he is here. Hopefully it won’t come to that, though. Hopefully, Skart thinks, that isn’t her purpose.
He sits for a moment longer, bracing himself. He rolls up his sleeve, looks at the black marks beneath the skin. He has lived longer than most, he reminds himself. He has made it this far. He can make it just a little further.
He takes a breath. Rolls the sleeve back down. Stands up. Lets himself feel the rest of it. The excitement. The hope. His hands are trembling, he notices. Perhaps, though, he shouldn’t be surprised.
After fifty years, Skart is going back to war.
Granny Spregg
“Privett,” Granny Spregg says.
“Mother,” he replies.
In all honesty, Granny Spregg cannot be entirely sure who Privett’s father is. She knows who she said it was at the time, but given his size and disposition, there is very much a chance that there is some House Troll blood in him.
“Is there something you need, Mother?” he asks. He sounds, she thinks, like a sanctimonious asshole. Probably because that’s exactly what he is. She should have hired better nannies.
“I believe General Callart has my request well in hand.” This is the dance they must do. Because House Spriggan is the House she made it to be. She made the rules, and now she must live with them. She just never imagined she would get so old; that the mistakes of the past would mount so high that she wouldn’t even be in charge of her own idiot son.
“I am taking a personal interest, Mother,” Privett says. He exposes his teeth in something that could be called but is not a smile.
Privett. The middle child. All the insecurities so transparent in him. Hiding away with the real soldiers so he can feel like less of an irrelevance. Meanwhile, it was his eldest sister who orchestrated the coup that dethroned her.
Still, he was an accomplice, and Granny Spregg does not forgive him. Not for an instant.
“I would not wish to tax you with even a simple request,” she says. “I know how overwhelmed you get.”
The advantage of motherhood, she thinks, is that it lets you know exactly which pressure points are most painful.
“I am more than capable of determining the merit of your request, Mother.” There is a little color in his cheeks now.
She looks to Callart, a question in her eyes. She lets Privett see exactly who she thinks is in charge here.
Callart doesn’t take the bait, but Privett, she knows, is blind to any answer Callart gives. He is only capable of seeing his authority questioned. So, as she knew he would, he steps before her. He froths.
“Our operations have evolved since your day, Mother. You probably wouldn’t understand the delicate tapestry. I know how the years weigh on you.”
Granny Spregg needs to get her blows in while she can. She smiles thinly. “At least your sisters’ barbs have some wit to them,” she says.
He hulks over her. A
nd she has become so frail, she thinks, he could probably kill her with a single blow. He might.
But, “Out!” he barks instead. “Your request is denied, Mother. I cannot have you upsetting operations you have no hope of understanding.”
Operations, Granny Spregg is well aware, is a word Privett is using to make himself feel better about the day-to-day housekeeping duties that occupy most of House Spriggan’s military: guarding factories and warehouses, ensuring none of the other Houses are making threatening moves, making sure that the fae are keeping their heads down.
“If Callart was capable of explaining these… operations to you, I’m sure he could explain them to me.”
And Callart does smile at that. Just a flash, just for her. But she lets Privett see that she has seen it. A shared grin in Callart’s direction. A look of quiet triumph even as she is defeated.
“Out!” Privett is purple and quaking.
And of course she must leave. No matter what barbs she plants here, her authority is gone, lost along with her youth.
She turns, hobbles. “Sorry,” she says, as he fumes at her. “I don’t move as fast as I once did.”
Finally, the door slams behind her. Thacker, still beside her, is breathing hard. “Well,” he says, “it was always a long shot. Perhaps it’s better that it’s over so soon.”
Granny Spregg turns to look at him. “Over?” She smiles. “Oh no, Thacker. This is just the start.”
3
Enter the McGuffin
Knull
In the alley behind the bar, a fox digs through garbage, and rats chitter back and forth. Among such peers, Knull checks over his shoulder. Junkies twitch, he thinks, and dealers check over their shoulders. Still, at least his paranoia isn’t delusional. He needs to get out of here before the two gnomes take the Dust he sold them.
Though the sale has left him feeling flush with cash, it has almost cleaned out the final dregs of his supply. Plus, his regular clients will require more potent mixtures than the ones he’s holding if they are to remain regular. It is time to restock. It is time to visit Cotter.
Cotter lives over in The Bends, which is either a cab ride or a half-hour schlepp away. In the end the math is simple: sore feet cannot stop Knull from running away from this ass-end of the Iron City, a lack of funds can. Cabs cost money.
Money. In the Iron City, it always comes back to money. Here, the days are not measured by the ticks of clocks but by the clinks of coins. Knull is glad he is not half-dryad, trying to put away coins that will last the length of a tree’s slow trudge through life, because he has his eyes on riches that will buy him a more vertical sort of mobility than a cab offers.
“I’m not stopping,” he’d told his younger brother when he’d left home for good. “Not even the Guild Districts, that’s not good enough. Not for me.”
He’d looked at the accumulated tides of shit—papers, books, dirt, and trash washed up by his parents’ neglect, by the pressure of poverty, by despair, by too many days with too many missed meals, by his parents’ guilt over it all, and by their desperate need to escape. He’d looked at his brother.
“You should come too.”
His brother had curled his lips. “You’re selling selfish bullshit as well as Dust these days?”
Knull had wanted to keep his temper, but his brother always made it hard. “It’s not selfish when the only reason they’re incapable of caring for themselves is that they keep shoveling Dust into their veins.”
“You sell Dust!” His brother’s hands were up in the air. “Do you hear yourself? Do you understand how hypocritical you sound?”
For a moment, fists were balled, for a moment this was going to go the way these conversations always went. And Knull hadn’t wanted to leave like that.
“I’m going all the way, this time,” he’d said. “I’m going straight to Low Spires. Musthaven maybe. I’m going as high as any fae can go in this city. There’ll be me, and rich goblin kids slumming it, and there could be you too. I can bring you with me. We’ll watch them blow out their sinuses on Dust, and we’ll laugh at the blood. Life could be so good. Come on. We can do it. You and me. We’re strong enough.”
But Edwyll hadn’t been. And Knull had left him behind. He’d glimpsed Edwyll in the bar tonight, just for a moment. And they’d nodded at each other, but that was all.
Because I’m strong, he reminds himself. Because I can make a commitment to a cause. I can take the risks and survive the odds.
So, he goes deeper into the alley at the back of the bar, past a scrawled mural of the White Tree, half-obscured behind a red spray where a goblin patrol threw a can of paint at it, and he grabs a lead drainpipe, and he climbs up towards the rooftops and the stars.
Sil
Back in the bar, blood drips from the blade of Sil’s sword. Crimson beads are stark against silvery steel. The crowd is backing away as the aura of the iron alloy—free from its scabbard—starts to sting. The blade is still, not a quiver in it.
The same is not true of the brownie who is currently at fifty percent of his usual number of hands. He quivers, alright. He flails. He screams as the iron-inflicted wound continues to burn and sizzle. Blood sprays from his stump even as he clutches the wound. It bursts between his fingers. He points it like a pistol, hoses Bazzack down, then the staring crowd.
Sil knows the kobold drummer is going to react before he does. He lurches forward and finds her blade going through his neck. With only the slightest pressure she threads the needle between his second and third vertebrae. The only noise as he drops comes from his crackling flesh.
More red on her blade.
She checks Jag. Osmondo’s heir is still standing there. She is still staring. So many are still staring.
The front door is closest. She will take that path.
She grabs Jag by the arm.
“No,” Jag says. But she is speaking to a moment that’s already passed.
I want you to come with me to the Fae Districts, Jag had said. I want to show you something. Something of your mother’s people. She’d been smiling as she said it, but in Sil’s ear it had been a command. Had been a statement that Jag was heading into danger.
On the day Sil had first met her father, Osmondo had said, Keep my daughter alive or I shall visit upon you a thousand plagues of pain. He was not joking. He does not have a sense of humor.
And so Sil came. No matter that her handlers had told her to leave Jag alone that night. No matter that she had been given tasks to perform patrolling a perimeter gate. Osmondo’s old directive superseded their new ones.
So now, she pulls Jag by the arm. Jag comes with her toward the staring onlookers. Sil shoves her forward then, holding onto her wrist, spinning her like they are dancing at a ball. Jag crashes into the crowd like a goblin-sized morning star. Only Sil’s grip on her wrist keeps her upright.
Bazzack screams after them, but Jag was right—Sil is not his bodyguard.
She charts the progress of stools, fae, glasses. She leaps, dances over a tabletop, ducks below a beam. She slashes with her sword, drives open a bloody wedge. She grabs Jag’s hand once more, heaves. Jag stumbles into the gap Sil has opened.
A bottle is thrown. Sil catches it, brings it down on the next obstacle’s head, steps over his slumping form. She glances back. Jag is still alive. Osmondo is still obeyed.
Quickly and efficiently, Sil cuts an exit out of the bar.
Jag
Jag is a somnambulist in a waking nightmare. She stumbles and trips while fae are paraded before her, each one clutching a grizzlier wound than the one before. She can hear Sil grunting. She can hear the smack of a blade against meat.
Then she’s outside. Pigeons billow up into the sky. A glitching neon sign advertising sparrow-nest omelets and acorn coffee to the late-shift crowd. Somehow all that has happened to her is that her shirt is untucked, and her jacket needs to be straightened, while behind her there are screams and rage.
Sil has put her signature upon the
bar.
“Bazzack!” she has just enough breath to say as Sil slams her into the side of their car.
Sil shakes her head. And Jag knows. No one ever gave Sil any orders about Bazzack. And Jag’s lost the opportunity to give new ones. Sil is in charge now.
Sil opens the car door. And somehow, even as the fuse on the bar’s violence burns down, and the detonation of bodies that will come chasing after them thrums, she still finds the time to offer Jag her seat with a bow.
Jag dives into leather and lingering cigar smoke. She slams the door shut behind her.
Through darkened glass she tracks the shadow of the first fae exiting the bar. She sees Sil glide around it, her body twisting. Something wet splatters against the window, starts to drip.
Sil slides across the hood of the car, gets in with almost balletic grace. When she pounds her foot against the accelerator, there is a body in front of them. Jag watches as the fae rolls over the windshield, hears the thump as he hits asphalt behind them.
It is time for Jag to go home. Her quiet night on the town is most definitely over.
Knull
Halfway across town, Knull reaches Cotter’s building. Even starting on a neighboring rooftop, it takes him a decent chunk of time just to climb the fire escape all the way to the penthouse. As he ascends, the Iron City splays itself below him, eager as any salesman to peddle its wares. He looks down and sees lights to mirror the stars: the spires of the five Goblin Houses punching out from the city’s heart, blazing.
Around the Houses, fingers of influence are sketched out in light: great avenues bursting with theaters, museums, pleasure houses, temples of commerce, and temples to Mab built on the barrows of the sidhe who now clean their hallways and empty their trashcans. The avenues’ glow withers as the city sprawls, turns septic. The white purity of the towers becomes amber, becomes guttering yellow. The outskirts of the city look jaundiced. There, factories raise their hulking heads, architectural bullies that cause the buildings around them to slouch in fear.
And then he is high enough to see beyond even that, to see the Iron Wall itself. The city’s great border. Twenty yards tall, and ten yards thick. The limits of his world and his experience.
