City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  Tharn shakes his head. “I will never do anything but love you, Bee,” he says, “but you are a prideful piece of shit. Practice what you preach. Give in to the collective.”

  Bee chews his tongue. From someone else, he’s not sure he would take that kind of talk, but Tharn isn’t trying to wound him or score cheap points. So, perhaps he’s right.

  Tharn turns to the others. “Do we wish to kick goblin ass tonight?” he shouts.

  They cheer. Of course they do. And Bee loves them for it.

  “Alright,” he says. “It’s on.”

  Skart

  Skart makes sure he gives the young bryad his orders personally: a smelting factory near both the edge of the Fae Districts and the Iron Wall itself. He claps the lad on his hefty shoulder.

  “I appreciate your spirit,” he says. “Even if we talk at cross purposes, don’t think I don’t.” He smiles. “The revolution is a dialog.” An old adage.

  The bryad looks at him, and Skart can still feel the resistance in him.

  “What’s your name?” He tries a different approach.

  “Bee.”

  One of Bee’s friends leans in. “And he’s naturally an ornery bastard.”

  “Excellent.” Skart laughs. “Ornery bastards are exactly what this world needs.”

  Bee gives a grudging smile. Skart clasps his hand hard, gives it a firm shake.

  “We’ll see this factory done,” Bee tells Skart, and Skart nods.

  Skart watches the bryad walk away. He is under no illusions that this Bee trusts him. But he trusts him enough, Skart thinks, to stick to the plan tonight. And—as long as every other plan Skart has goes well—that should be enough.

  All the other assignments have been handed out. The delicately orchestrated plan of occupation, vandalism, and destruction is in place. Every rebel in the Iron City is ready to rise up and tear it all down.

  Skart stands on the stage once more. A grace note, he thinks. A final word to send them on their way.

  “Tonight,” he tells them, “all our futures change. Tonight, we redefine everything we can be. So go. Fight. Struggle. Succeed. Make the world a better place for all of us.”

  That’s it. The fuse is lit. They cheer and he raises his arm. He brings it down. And in the Iron City, a rebellion begins.

  6

  Knull and Void

  Knull

  “No. I’m never dealing with you again, you piece of shit.” “Yeah, I would do a deal with you, but I’m busy sticking a scorpion down my briefs.”

  “Are you addled as a pixie? Is this a cry for help? Are you having a breakdown? Why would you call me? Why?”

  “I don’t buy from you, Knull. I sell to you. You’re doing this backwards.”

  And, also: “Go fuck yourself.” Knull hears that one a lot. A track glitching over and over on the far end of the payphone. He is wedged into the narrow confines of the booth, fumbling copper teeth into a narrow slot. He tries to find a way to take the weight off his foot. He tries to not drop the Dust.

  Another number tapped in. Some understanding soul has put masking tape over all the metal numbers, so his fingers aren’t completely burned.

  The phone rings. And rings. And rings. And then, as he’s about to give up hope, a click, and a voice. “Yo.”

  “Hey!” Knull says, trying to get warmth into his voice, although all he can manage by this point is the output of a low-wattage space heater. “Kloffa, dude. Long time.”

  “Who this?”

  “It’s me, bro.” Knull tries to pretend he has hope. “It’s Knull.”

  “Knull? Who the fuck is Knull?”

  “Knull! Your best dealer. Your number-one customer. The brixie who turns Dust into coin faster than anyone you know. Come on, Kloffa. I know you’re playing with me.”

  A fumbling of the receiver on the far end, and muffled, “Do we know any motherfuckers named Knull?”

  Knull sighs. “Knulleridge Ethelred.” His goddamn parents. How long, he wonders, did it take them to come up with the most embarrassing name possible for their first-born son?

  “Oh,” says Kloffa on the other end of the line. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, dude!” Knull says, with cheer he found when rummaging down in the basement of his soul—lint-covered and tacky.

  “Where you at?” Kloffa asks.

  “Me, oh I’m at—” And then Knull hesitates. “Why?” he asks.

  “So I can send my crew round to fuck you up!” Kloffa screams. “You owe me money, asshole! You owe me my goddamn money!”

  Knull hangs up while Kloffa is still yelling. Knull regards the sack of Dust. He regards his mental list of numbers to call.

  It is time for plan B.

  Edwyll

  Home. It’s where the heart is. Edwyll knows this. Except, he also knows that that particular adage doesn’t stop home from also being a half-collapsed shithole.

  Still, he feels a dull glow of reassurance as he shoulders his way into the house, barging the warped wooden door through the piles of crap that always seem to accumulate in his parents’ hallway. He has no idea where they come from. His parents hardly ever leave the couch. When do they find the time to collect all this junk? Who gives it to them? Why?

  He has no answers, but he does find a distorted form of comfort in these familiar questions, in the familiar scenes this house contains. All its hurts and edges are blunted by the knowledge that he has survived them in the past. He can survive them again.

  He has come here with purpose. He has come to claim his parents’ small sculpture of the White Tree. It is the classic symbol of the fae. It is the sigil that adorned the banner they all fought beneath when they marched against Mab’s swarming hordes. It is the icon of the gone-away world, rendered in three clumsy dimensions and perched upon the mantelpiece of every fae home Edwyll can think of.

  He has been trying to do something with the White Tree for a year now, playing with ways to reclaim the symbol, reformat it for a new generation. He wants to make it meaningful again, dreams of using it to unite the fae once more, help them rediscover the possibilities of life instead of wallowing in what they’ve lost.

  It’s not gone well so far, but events in the bar and talking to Lila have helped the project feel urgent again, vital even. Someone has to change the trajectory the fae are on. And Edwyll is not proud enough to assume it will be him, but also feels compelled to try. Reclaiming the kitsch china sculpture from this house will be the first step in his latest attempt.

  He walks down the hall, past his old bedroom and his brother’s, past the fetid stench of the kitchen. The living room is at the end of the hall, and he finds his parents where he expects them to be, draped on the couch like laundry waiting to be folded. His mother is out cold. A whittled stick of a woman, all the round jollity of brownie myth leached out of her by time and poverty. His father—all his pixie brightness bleached away—rolls his eyes in his direction.

  “Hey,” he mumbles.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He tries to sit up, upsets a bowl of cold chili balanced on his chest, spilling mushrooms and beetle wings down his shirt, then collapses back. “Hey,” he says again.

  Edwyll sighs. He tries to keep all the anger and fear of the evening down inside him, instead of spewing it out all over his father. It’s not like the old pixie is truly capable of understanding him anyway. Not in this state. After a few breaths he says, “I’ll clean that up.”

  He does the best he can, wiping his father down, carrying the bowl through to the wreckage of the kitchen. He stares at the devastation of plates, takeout containers, and mold, sighs again, and rolls up his sleeves.

  His dad’s still in the same place when he re-enters the living room. “Hot water’s off again.”

  His father blinks at him, uncomprehending. For him, Edwyll knows, this information is like a message from beyond the Iron Wall: news about a world he can barely conceive any more.

  “You’re a good son,” his dad says eventually.


  It would almost be easier, Edwyll thinks, if the manipulation was purposeful. If it was obviously designed to put barbs into his skin. Then he could tear them out with a sense of defiance. But instead, they come at him with genuine love, floundering through life to give it to him, and he is left with this sense of obligation to clear their path a little.

  “When did you last eat, Dad?”

  His dad is getting it together a little, starting to find a way to be defensive through the haze of the Dust in him. “Chili,” he manages. “Was gonna have it. You took it away.”

  “You spilled it, Dad.”

  “Yeah.” A pause, then, “Yeah.”

  “You need to eat, Dad.”

  He nods. “I know. Something in the fridge.” He flaps a hand thin as a bird’s wing. “Make it later.”

  Edwyll wonders how much mold someone will have to scrape off whatever is lurking in the fridge to make it edible. He wonders if there’s any way that sucker isn’t him.

  His brother just left. Turned his back and walked out on it all. And on the bad days, Edwyll genuinely thinks that looks like strength: the ability to turn his back on this pair. To abandon pity. And when he was in the kitchen washing someone else’s blood off the back of his hands, yes, it felt like a bad day. And he does want to just grab the cheap china tree and run.

  But if he’s to take Lila’s message to heart, if he’s to turn his fear into strength, today is a not a day when he can abandon hope. Today is a day to be better than his brother. And if he’s going to try to save the fae, shouldn’t he start here?

  “You’re a good son,” his dad says again, and Edwyll can hear the breath rattling in the cage of the old pixie’s chest.

  “Yeah, Dad,” he says as he heads back to the kitchen. “Better than you deserve.”

  Granny Spregg

  Waiting, Granny Spregg thinks, is the worst part. She has always been bad at waiting. Back when she still loved her husband, he called her “a restless spirit.” That, of course, was before she discovered his own ambitions only included her as a stepping stone, and before she’d wrestled him to the floor and throttled the life from his sinewy neck. Still… a restless spirit. She remembers that phrase fondly enough, and she has ascribed much of her life’s success to it. When others look for a moment’s respite, she keeps pushing, out-thinking and out-maneuvering, and by the time her enemies lift their heads, she’s often already won.

  Except she’s never beaten age. The sand in the hourglass has kept pace with her, year after year. And waiting has become harder and harder with each grain that falls.

  She sits, now, in a chair, tapping her cane angrily. Thacker picks up on her mood. He moves around her in fretful circles, straightening already straight things, wittering in a birdsong of whimpers and grunts as he attempts to fill the room with something that isn’t a sense of impending disaster, too afraid to simply ask her what exactly it is that they’re waiting for.

  Then it comes: two light taps on the door, quiet and respectful.

  Inside the room’s charged atmosphere the sound might as well be gunshots. Thacker squeals, drops a jeweled hairbrush. Granny Spregg finds she has—without thinking about it—stood straight up from where she was balanced on the edge of her chair. If this is to go well, she reprimands herself, she will need to be in far better control than this.

  “Well?” She looks at Thacker. “See who it is.”

  Thacker looks like he wants to tell her to shove that idea elbow deep into her own asshole. Still, he moves across the room, puts a shaking hand on the door handle. He pauses, looks at her again. She sets her jaw. Thacker closes his eyes, opens the door.

  One of the House’s goblin servants stands there, dressed in tails and a pressed white shirt. House Spriggan does employ fae servants, of course, but they are not allowed in this inner sanctum where she and her children reside. This one has the slight swagger of a senior attendant, someone who cherishes the scrap of power he’s been allowed to laud over others. Tattoos are just visible peeking out from his collar. A few iron studs have been punched through his long, pointed ears. He bears a silver tray. On the tray is a single glass of port.

  “From your son, Privett,” the servant says. “He tells me to tell you that it is a peace offering.”

  Granny Spregg tries hard not to roll her eyes. Privett couldn’t be more obvious if he tried.

  “Come on, then,” she tells the servant. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Madame?” The servant’s brow furrows.

  She sighs. “Was it ‘rest in peace’?” she asks. “Or…” She thinks a moment. “‘This way she’ll finally know peace’?” She shakes her head. “He laughed when he said it, didn’t he?”

  Thacker looks like he wants to ask what it is they’re talking about.

  The servant looks regretful. “Ah.” He looks at the glass of port. “I believe what he actually said was: ‘This way, I’ll finally have some peace.’”

  Granny Spregg legitimately groans out loud. The fruit of her own loins. She had always thought better of them.

  “Always thinking about himself,” she says.

  The servant shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Erm?” Thacker manages.

  “So,” Granny Spregg says again, “as I said, let’s get it over with.”

  The servant bows. “As you wish.”

  Then he hurls the silver tray at her, a flashing discus of thin metal.

  It’s an obvious gambit: distract her, close the distance. And when Granny Spregg was younger, she would have just taken the blow, and met him head on with her teeth bared. But now she is old, and her skin is thin, and she cannot afford such bravado anymore.

  She lifts her cane to parry the tray, except her old bones betray her, and her reaction times would be laughable if they weren’t the only thing keeping her from taking a flying tray to the tits.

  The cane only makes it half the distance it needs to travel. Then the tray slams into her, and she crashes to the floor, agony blooming from her damaged ribs.

  “Shit,” is about all she really manages before the assassin has burst past the shrieking Thacker and is upon her.

  The cane is good for something at least. She drives its point—the dryad’s old shoulder bone—into the assassin’s throat. He gawks and the first slice of his dagger goes wide. It’s a short, curving blade, designed for gouging and ripping, for creating wounds that won’t close easily. It’s more than she warrants, if she’s being honest.

  Still, she sees, as the assassin reels back, trying to recover, to get the blade up for a two-handed strike into her heart, he really has gone for overkill: the edge of his blade glints purple.

  Stumbling into view, Thacker brings a vase down on top of the assassin’s head. It shatters. The vase, unfortunately, not the assassin’s head. The vase, Granny Spregg reflects, once belonged to a sidhe princess. It was considered one of the most beautiful examples of fae porcelain in existence. Granny Spregg has been pissing in it for years.

  The assassin collapses in a shower of yellow fluid. He’s not out—his bellowing rage is testament to that—but Granny Spregg takes the opportunity to wrestle her legs free and kick her heels into his chest, beating him back. Thacker stares wildly, searching for more improvised weaponry.

  The assassin frees himself from the tangle of thrashing limbs, is up in a single smooth motion. He backhands Thacker across the face, sends the gangly goblin reeling into a writing table. Ink and pens fly. Thacker sags. The assassin whirls back to face Granny Spregg.

  “A fucking eighty-year-old,” he spits. Much of his deference is gone. That, though, Granny Spregg concedes, is likely to be the case when your hair is soaked with your opponent’s stale piss.

  Her own ascent to standing is slower. She levers herself up on her cane. The assassin kicks it out from under her. She sprawls face first into the carpet. He delivers a hammer blow to the back of her head. Black spots swim in front of her eyes.

  She’s still gasping in pain when
he rolls her over onto her back.

  He squats over her, legs astride her chest. “I must be losing my edge,” he tells her. “You really shouldn’t be this much work.”

  He brings the knife up.

  This is a familiar sensation, Granny Spregg thinks. Overpowered. Outmatched. Death waiting to strike at her.

  Sometimes, though, she knows, you don’t win a fight because you’re stronger, or faster, or because you’re more skilled. Sometimes you just win because you’re willing to do things that your opponent isn’t. Sometimes you win because your will to live is stronger.

  The knife comes down.

  Granny Spregg’s hand comes up.

  The blade skewers her through the palm. The assassin grunts at the unexpected impact. Granny Spregg twists with all her wizened strength, biting back on the scream billowing inside her mouth.

  The assassin wrenches back on the knife. She claws at its handle with blood-slick fingers, twisting her wrist back and forth, her old bones threatening to crack and shatter.

  The assassin is so much stronger than her, it’s like wrestling with a statue. To even the playing field, she punches him in the balls.

  He squeals, finally relinquishes the knife.

  “Thacker!” Granny Spregg shrieks. “My perfumes! The purple bottle! Quickly!”

  Thacker is still pulling himself from the writing desk. He stares at her dazedly.

  “Now!” she screams.

  The assassin is recovering, snarling.

  She dives at him, the blade still buried in her palm. She waves her arm wildly, backhanding at him with the protruding blade. He skips out of range.

  “Bitch.”

  She’s never liked that word. Her husband called her that. Look what happened to him.

  She comes at him again. “You’re already dead,” he says.

  She pauses, licks the blood from her dripping hand, grins at him with stained teeth.

  “Other goblins,” she says, “have been telling me that for the longest time, and yet—” She spits the blood at him, and he flinches back.

  She dives for his throat, then. He ducks out of the way, sweeping out his leg, slamming his calf into her ankles with savage force. She falls, a spectacular pratfall, arms pinwheeling. Yet as she falls, she feels the blade catch him. Feels it scrape down his cheek. Then the floor rises up and knocks the breath from her.