City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  Knull

  Knull is still staggering under the weight of the brick of Dust when he hears it. It is a small sound in the scale of things. He is largely focused on trying to avoid stepping in the blood on the floor of Cotter’s apartment. Broken glass from where someone’s head has slammed through a mirrored coffee table crunches beneath his foot. And so, he almost misses the click of the front door latch coming undone.

  In the Iron City, “almost” is the difference between having a future and being the past tense. It is the difference between “breathing” and “breathed.”

  Knull runs. There is no hesitation, no question. He has no qualms about his cowardice. Bravery, in his opinion, is just stupidity that happens to benefit others, and he is firmly focused on self-interest right now.

  He skids through the back door, out onto the deck, still clutching the brick of Dust. He hears voices. It is not a small crowd that has come to visit Cotter’s corpse.

  He slows his escape, tries to be quieter as he scuttles toward the fire escape. They’ll be looking for him soon, he knows. Even if they didn’t hear his flight, with his hands full of Dust he didn’t close the door to Cotter’s workshop.

  He gets to the fire escape before the newcomers start shouting. Old ironwork creaks beneath his feet, and Knull winces at more than the pain of the metal’s proximity. Is it more dangerous to be slow or loud? He doesn’t know. He descends in stuttering bursts of speed. The Dust makes him clumsy, sends him bouncing off railings.

  Then the shout from inside. Adrenaline screams in Knull’s ears that slow is no longer an option. He has to run. He has to run now.

  The fire escape sings with the sound of his crashing footsteps, louder even than the band in the bar earlier. Then there are shadows above, the flares of flashlights. Then there are ricochets, and sparks, and the increasing danger of Knull shitting his pants.

  He wants to drop the Dust. It is heavy. It is slowing him. Its plastic wrapping is slipping beneath his sweaty palms. But he cannot, of course. He is running to secure his future, after all, and this brick is his future. Dropping it would be the same as turning round and asking his pursuers to put their barrels to his temple.

  He leaves the fire escape at speed, leaping, still a story up from his intended destination. He twists, lands on his back, cradling the Dust like an infant. Bullets play a staccato beat as roof tiles crack and slither away beneath him. He scrabbles to his feet, runs as fast as he can, bent over by the Dust, weaving between water towers and air-handling units. He wishes he could pray to Mab, but she’s probably on the other team’s side.

  Shouts follow him. There are footsteps on the fire escape. Knull leaps between buildings. He has miscalculated his increased weight. Gravity reaches greedy fingers for the brick of Dust. He hits the far roof with his waist. The brick flies free from his grip, and Knull’s desperation finds a higher gear. He claws for fingerholds, swings his legs up. He rolls, finding no time to stand. There are more gunshots. He doesn’t know if they come close to hitting him. He doesn’t care. Then he’s at the Dust. And somehow the brick is still whole. He could kiss it. There’s no time. He heaves it up to his chest, clutches it tight as a lover.

  He runs on, legs burning, lungs heaving. The brick of Dust slaps at his thighs and slips in his grip. He runs on. A flare lights the night above him. There are more shouts. He runs on.

  He is staggering when he comes to the townhouse. He has plotted this course long before. Knull collects escape routes like a gutter collects trash. He knows the townhouse is undergoing construction. He knows it is some goblin manager’s weekday crashpad being upgraded for new creature comforts. Except if he’s buying in this neighborhood, Knull also knows that goblin isn’t impressing anyone.

  Still, the socioeconomic woes of some underperforming goblin are not precisely a priority for Knull at this moment. What is absorbing far more of his attention is the chute that the fae workers are using to funnel rubble from the building’s roof into the dumpster below.

  He has enough presence of mind to realize that going down it head first is not necessarily a good idea. Then he is plunging feet first through yellow plastic tubing far faster than he expected. And then, he finds, that the ground is coming at him without mercy or concern.

  Edwyll

  Three streets away from the bloodbath in the bar, Edwyll stops to throw up for the fourth time.

  Beauty, he thinks. I went in there wanting to create beauty.

  He closes his eyes, sees the crimson-spattered scene again, hears the screams, smells the copper tang of—

  Another dry heave wracks him. When it’s over, he sits down hard, legs pointing heedlessly out into the street. His hands are shaking. A few crows flit by overhead. Behind him kobold digging tunes emerge out-of-key from a subterranean bar. The nighttime pedestrian traffic eddies around him.

  He’s seen violence before. Of course he has. This whole street has. They all grew up here. But this… this was close enough that it spattered his face.

  He wipes at his cheeks, desperate to clear off any last remnant of the night that might be staining his skin. He’s trying not to look at the blood-stained fabric of his shoes.

  He needs to call Lila. He needs to touch base, to ground himself in who he is and what he’s doing here, and he feels that most when he talks to her. He pulls himself up, stumbles to a payphone, pushes copper teeth into it with trembling fingers. Listens to it ring.

  “Hello?”

  Lila is a miniaturist. They met at the first gallery show Edwyll ever went to, and he almost hadn’t noticed the pixie with purple skin and turquoise hair when she started talking to him because he was so lost in these ripples of color she had worked across a broken tile. That had been back at the beginning of what he now thinks of as his “awakening.” When art had revealed to him that beauty was still possible in the world. That everything wasn’t just shit and depredation. Back at his rediscovery of hope.

  At first he’d tried to get rid of Lila, not knowing who she was, just wanting to lose himself in the art. But then he’d finally heard what she was saying, and realized she was the artist, and he’d been utterly mortified.

  She lives with her partner Jallow, a gnome who is one of the few truly successful fae artists in the Iron City. In recent years the goblin youth have shown an increasingly rebellious interest in fae art, and Jallow is one of the lucky few to have found a patron—some minor noble within House Spriggan. He uses the profits to run a collective, where Edwyll finds employment and lodging whenever he can. He washes paintbrushes, runs errands, cooks food, whatever it takes to hang around them. And if the beds and couches aren’t full of Lila and Jallow’s artist friends then he’ll crash there rather than returning to what passes for his home.

  Lila has, despite the awkwardness of their first meeting, rather taken him under her wing. She’d seen him staring at the other artists as they worked and asked him about his own ambitions. She’s the one who has encouraged him to always carry his art supplies with him. The oils he was using in the bar. Sticks of charcoal and graphite. And always as broad a selection of spray paint cans as he can manage. His murals are feeble still, he knows, but under her tutelage, he believes he is finding his confidence.

  He needs her help finding that or something similar now.

  “Lila,” he says. “Lila, I need help.”

  “Edwyll?”

  He tells her about the bar. The story pours out of him like blood from a wound.

  “Breathe, Edwyll. Breathe,” she tells him.

  “What do I do?” he asks her, not sure if that’s the question he really wants to ask but unable to think of any other way to put it.

  “You poor thing.” A pause. “I don’t know, Edwyll. I don’t think there is a thing you do when you see horror like that. I just… if it was me, I think I’d come back here, and I’d get as drunk as I could. And then, when I’d stopped waking up because of the awfulness of it all, when I could look it in the eye, I’d use it. I’d make it art. I’
d turn it upon itself. I’d make it beautiful, something that cancels itself out at least as much as you can ever cancel something like that out. That’s what I’d do.”

  Use it.

  “I can’t, Lila. I can’t…” He can’t even imagine it. The idea of turning it over. Of doing something with… that. He shakes his head, no matter that she can’t see him.

  “What do you want to do with your art?” she asks him.

  He can’t see the relevance of the question, but she asks it again, more insistently this time.

  “I want…” He takes a breath, steadies himself. “I want the fae to find their hope again. I want them to know that even though our magic is gone, we can create a new kind of magic. I want them to stop looking back and look forward. I want to change the world.”

  “Yes,” Lila says. “The world is what it is now, but it doesn’t have to be. What happened in the bar happened, but you can either let it define you, or you can define it. You can change what it means. It doesn’t only have to be a tragedy.”

  He tries to hold onto that. The idea of himself in the future. The idea of himself making the Fae Districts a place where goblins can’t bring their assassins and butcher pixies or brownies or kobolds in the street. He finds some of the strength he was looking for.

  “I don’t want you crashing at some squat tonight,” Lila says. “Come to the collective. I’ll talk to Jallow, find a couch for you to sleep on or something. We’ve got wine.”

  “Yes,” Edwyll says. “Yes.” And then, finally, he remembers the reason he came out tonight. The object he wanted to take from his parents’ house. The art he wanted to create with it. The art that could do exactly what he and Lila are talking about.

  “Yes,” he says again. “I just have to stop at one place along the way.”

  Sil

  A quiet street. Streetlamps failing. The pungent smell of the weedkiller goblin patrols have used to keep all greenery in check. And limited escape routes. More of the latter than perhaps most would see, though. Sil judges she could make the leap to the fire escape in a pinch. She could go through a store window if necessary. She has options.

  Next, she listens. Silence. Is there too much? She doesn’t know this part of town well enough to judge. But she doesn’t think she needs an escape route yet.

  Yet.

  She goes to the engine, pops the hood, pauses, pretends to take it in. Instead she listens again. There is still silence.

  The tension in her fingers would give her away to anyone with skill. She knows it would. She’s been taught to be better. But something about this is putting her on edge. She controls her breathing.

  “What’s happened?”

  Jag is talking as she exits the car. She has not listened to Sil. This is not unexpected. Still, she has to suppress the reflex to draw her sword.

  Instead, she remains examining the engine. And something about having her suspicions confirmed takes the edge off.

  “Get back in the car,” she says.

  “What’s wrong?” As if Jag hasn’t heard her.

  Sil pauses. She hears something now. Scuffing. A slight metallic tap. A creak.

  “Somebody purposefully weakened the fan belt so it would fail,” she says.

  “What?”

  There are no other cars on this street. Nobody else walking past.

  She moves towards Jag, steers her toward the car door. “You should get inside,” she tells her.

  “Why?”

  Did Jag have more to drink than Sil thought? Normally she needs two or three more before she becomes belligerent. It must have been Bazzack’s presence, Sil thinks. She will need to take that into account next time.

  Next time. Only if she plays this right.

  “The tear in the belt,” she says, “is only frayed along half its length.”

  Jag knits her brows.

  “That means someone cut through the other half.” She watches the shock wash over Jag’s face. She seems to experience things so slowly compared to Sil. Her emotions impede her path to a plan at every turn.

  “Whoever it was did not bother to hide their handiwork,” she goes on. “Which means two more things. First, our saboteur does not expect us to report this sabotage.”

  Jag goes very still. This, Sil thinks, is good. She is becoming pliable. Though it is a little late for that. Sil is, she is sure, speaking for an audience now.

  “Second,” she says to the street, “they did not know exactly when the belt would break. So you must be being tailed.” Jag’s head whips back and forth searching the shadows.

  “I do not believe I was supposed to be with you tonight,” Sil says. “I was sent away. I am only here because you sought me out. I believe that someone is moving against you and your father tonight. Someone has plans.

  “Still, if I am correct, and we have been observed, then our assailants must have had time to recalculate. They must have had time to bring in reinforcements. They must believe they finally have enough that they can win.”

  She smiles into Jag’s dawning terror.

  And then they come.

  5

  Dusted

  Skart

  The prospective participants in the night’s rebellion meet in the basement of a factory where Skart has bought off all the security guards that he hasn’t recruited. He has spent weeks clearing out goods, shipping in the equipment they will need. There are tables covered with maps and ranks of phones. Wires trail like rivers across the floor. A couple of chunky computer monitors glow with green light, their cathode rays crackling.

  The crowd is large and growing larger. To the younger fae, the event has the feel of a concert—a buzz of anticipation that’s not just in the air, but in their bones and blood. Its thrum takes the grinding edge off the bite of the Iron Wall. Now, they want to be told to detonate. Now, they want to explode.

  The older fae are reminded of something else. Of older times. There aren’t many of them now. Most who fought in the Iron Wars, and the Red Rebellion that came after, have passed away, taken by old injuries and new tumors. A few remain, some strengthened by old magic that dies hard. Some just clinging more tenaciously to life. But even for them, fighting is a young fae’s game. Still, a few of the old guard retain their fighting spirit. and now they stand with Skart near the head of the room. This group remembers more than music, and the limited communion with the sublime that the goblins permit.

  Skart remembers trees. He remembers skies the color of lapis. He remembers the call and cry of birds, and the bay and bark of forest life. He remembers running like a river. He remembers a world that bent to allow him to flow through it. He remembers being one with something larger than himself.

  The feeling in the room now is a pale imitation of that communion in the end. It is far from unity with a whole world. It is not even the high of Dust slicing through the pain and numbness of the Iron Wall. But it is something. And unlike a Dust high, to Skart it feels real.

  He looks to the other veterans. These are the ones with whom he first shared his plans.

  “Ready?” Skart asks them.

  Brumble grunts. She is a thickset old dryad almost a head taller than Skart, vines standing out clear in her thinning hair, skin on her arms gray and cracked. “No,” she says. “I don’t think we ever can be. But when no time is good for a rebellion, all are equally good.” She shrugs. “We just have to do it.”

  A few smiles. A few chuckles. A lot of agreement. They are, Skart thinks, as nervous as virgins on their wedding night.

  They have made something like a stage at the front of the hall. Wooden pallets are piled upon each other. Skart steps onto it; he raises one hand, takes the microphone in the other.

  “Fae of the Iron City!” His voice through the speakers is massive. Every head turns. “Two years of planning. Two years of holding our hearts in our hands, and of fearing discovery every day. Two years of discovering setbacks. Two years of thinking tonight was not possible.”

  He looks at them al
l. He smiles.

  “You proved me wrong,” he says. “We’re here. We’re living in this moment. This night. Our night.” He raises a fist. “Tonight, we take back our city. Tonight, we tear down the Iron Wall!”

  It is a good speech, he knows. He has practiced it many times. He has pared it down to its essence, until it is short and sharp as a knife blade.

  He sees heads nodding. He sees fists raised with his own. There are some whoops and cheers. Brumble is stamping her heavy feet.

  If only it was as easy as that. But, Skart knows, the rebels are a fractious lot.

  “What about tomorrow?” someone shouts.

  Skart peers into the crowd. A young fae—a mix of brownie and dryad blood from the looks of him. Skart is old enough that he finds the increase in mixed blood among the youth of the day strange and slightly distasteful, but he bites back the thought. He has to treat all of them as equals if they are all to take equal part. He cocks one large ear in the young bryad’s direction.

  “What comes next?” his interlocutor shouts. He is standing on a chair, dressed in ore-stained work clothes. Badly scrawled tattoos cover his bare arms. His nose has been broken several times. Skart knows his type.

  Skart smiles. He doesn’t want to, but he knows leaders don’t badger and belittle their followers.

  “You don’t think we have enough to be going on with for now?” he says.

  “I think that if I’m going to walk a thousand miles with you,” the bryad calls, still stubborn as a House Troll goblin, “then I want to know that my first step is pointed in the right direction.”

  Skart suppresses a sigh. The night is still young, but he already knows it will be long. He looks at the expectant faces.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asks them. “You want me to tell you we’ll all be living in a changed world tomorrow? That they’ll be halcyon days? Do you want me to say that every goblin will be in a grave? Or that none of them will be and we’ll all be sitting together eating bread and honey? What do you want?”

  He looks at them all. “I don’t know what tomorrow will be like. We all want different things. We all have our own visions. Tomorrow could be a thousand things. So, all I know is this: tomorrow will be different from today. And for me, after fifty years of every day being the fucking same, after fifty years of being ground into the dirt by goblin heels, yeah, different is enough.”