City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  It is funny, Granny Spregg thinks, how similar fae and goblins are once you get inside them. All the differences that they fight over, and yet so many are only skin deep.

  “Thacker,” she says, not taking the proffered item yet. “Go find us an ice box.”

  She smokes a cigarette while they wait, and feels a crawling nausea in her stomach as she does so. She examines the stab wound in her hand. Thacker washed and bound it, but still… is that a small purple line snaking away from the bandage and toward her wrist? It’s hard to tell amongst the mess that her veins have become. She thinks she took the antidote in time. But did it smother the chemical’s fire completely? Only time will tell, and she has less and less of it.

  Thacker returns. The heart is placed in a nest of ice. Thacker closes the box with a little click, holds it like it’s about to detonate.

  “You,” Granny Spregg says to the scout. “Let me tell you the new truth of this heart. It is a goblin heart. You brought it back with you. The fae cut it from one of your fellows.” She nods. Yes, this is what she’ll do.

  “Now,” she says, “for the next step: take this to General Callart, and as you do, think about which of your fellow soldiers you like the least. Tell Callart that this heart belongs to that soldier. That done, get back out there and hunt. Find me my Dust.”

  “But if you do not—” She leans in close. “—and the sun rises before this plan is finished, then I will need to cover our tracks. That means, if we plan to live to see another nightfall, you will need to kill whichever of your compatriots you have told Callart this heart belongs to. So pick the name carefully. We have tonight and tonight alone.”

  She turns to Thacker, ignoring the scout’s salute. “Seal this room. Get someone we trust to clean it up.” She looks at the ice box. “Tell them that, if this works, they will be richly rewarded.”

  A glance back at the scout. “Everyone will be.”

  Thacker and the scout nod. But they know, and Granny Spregg knows, that everything hinges on that one statement: if this works. And without the Dust, and with only an ice box and a sidhe heart to her name, that if is thin hope indeed.

  Edwyll

  Edwyll thinks his hands have stopped shaking.

  Again, he thinks. Again in front of his eyes. The violence of the Iron City erupting right in front of him like a skull hit by a bullet.

  Is it bad luck? Is it an omen? Is it just the way life is—the poverty, the oppression, the constant hatred of the goblins pressing down? Is this the obvious and natural reaction, as predictable as the ticking of a clock? Should any of this surprise him?

  He doesn’t know. All he knows is that it horrifies him. Sickens him. Terrifies him. Leaves him sitting here with shaking hands and a slideshow of grindhouse gore ready to play every time his eyes close.

  Use it.

  Lila’s advice sounds heartless now. Sitting here in the wake of yet more death. A cold, calculating way to look at the world.

  But if I want to do something to change it, he thinks, maybe I need to be cold. Or if not cold, just… harder to hurt. Thicker skinned.

  Or is thick-skinned just what cold fae call themselves to justify their callousness?

  And yet he would change this. Sitting there, fighting through the aftershocks of adrenaline, that certainty takes hold of Edwyll with a sudden fierceness. Fear sublimating to anger like steam to snow in the sky above, ready to plunge down and transform the landscape utterly.

  Another blink of his eyes. Another glimpse of blood and bone detonating, everything coming undone.

  He would change this. And he has one way to do so. His weapon of choice.

  He reaches into his messenger bag for a spray can of paint. And finds something else. A reclaimed treasure.

  He pulls out his parents’ White Tree. The symbol of the fae become useless, become self-defeating.

  Use it. Change it.

  He wants to put this city back together. He wants to reassemble it as something new and beautiful. He wants all the fae to feel the way he feels when he sees the beauty that still lives within them. Not the same as it was. Transformed. Sublimated like steam to snow.

  He looks at the cheap china tree, its inelegant branches clumsy and blunt. He looks at the walls of the building he’s hiding in. A squat currently abandoned. Filth on the floor. Empty cardboard cartoons of old rice and moldering moss patties. The scent of urine. A few lazily scrawled tags in among obscenities. Such a typical space for the Fae Districts. Such a predictable space.

  Change it.

  He reaches into the messenger bag again. His fingers on a spray can feel like touching hope. Feel like the filling of his chest when he’s at Lila and Jallow’s, and the collective there is talking about seeing more than the Iron City immediately before their eyes. A way of still seeing beauty.

  He pulls the paint can out, feels the weight of it. He shakes it back and forth and the clack of metal pea against aluminum walls settles him.

  Green. He’s taken the green can. He can do something with green.

  The first strokes are broad, sour-neon splashes that mean nothing more than his hand is still shaking. He works with that, though. He thinks of the music he heard earlier, the angry buzz-saw rattle of its basslines, the violent thunder of its drums, and the pixie’s vocals floating over that chaos. Beauty emerging from darkness. Yes, he can work with that.

  He finds browns, bloody reds, bruised purples. A nest of vines and thorns appears. He thinks of the sound of gunfire. He thinks of bodies falling. The thorns grow higher.

  He is, he thinks, creating something monstrous.

  Or is something monstrous creating him, he wonders? Is the Iron City—polluted, perverted, corrupted—reaching out? He sketches bodies caught in the briars, limbs pushing through from shadow. His hands are still shaking.

  Yellow streetlight splashes through his hideout’s broken windows. His artwork looms through shadow, towers over him.

  This is so much darker than anything he has made before. Even as he shifts to a paint brush, every stroke seems brutal. But he looks at the White Tree again and thinks, There has to be contrast; there has to be darkness. In the end, he feels, you need that for a glimmer of hope to shine.

  Sil

  At first, it is so dark, Sil cannot know for sure if her eyes are open or not. Perhaps, she thinks, her eyes no longer work. So much of her feels broken right now.

  A great weight is pressing down on her, like the thumb of some ineluctable god. She can hardly move her arms or legs. She has been buried alive.

  She does not panic at this revelation. Weapons do not panic, after all. Rather, she simply slows her breathing, presses her shoulders back and down, clenches and unclenches the muscles in her thighs and calves, going through the exercises without thought.

  When done, she unfurls her fingers, and tries to get a sense for what entombs her. Knowledge is power after all, albeit not much power down here in the dark.

  She feels a cold surface, rough, interrupted by sharp fractured angles. She cannot place it. She pushes harder, then harder still.

  Something grinds, gives way. Light and dust drift into her limited world. She chokes and squints.

  She cannot remember exactly what happened. She was with Jag… She was climbing… Memory billows around her, elusive as smoke.

  She begins to move in whatever small ways she can. She bends a swollen knee, rolls a bruised wrist. Every motion hurts, but her prison starts to buckle. Air brushes against a bloody graze. She works her whole arm free.

  She picks and pulls now at the things crushing her. Then she recognizes them in a sudden rush. Bricks. Layers of them covering her entire body. She is not buried deep, though. She works her other hand free, pulls blocks of baked clay away from her face.

  She sits up in the ruin of the paper mill, stares into a world of drifting smoke. She coughs and tries to put her memories back together piece by piece.

  The fae, she recalls. The attack. The fire escape. She remembers steel shr
ieking, and then diving through the mill’s rotting shutters. Then prowling, getting ready for an attack, hearing the mob come in through the door downstairs, hearing them approaching. Then…

  Then a shout, an explosion. A detonation. She doesn’t know what set it off. She was flung through the air, skidded beneath old machinery. Bricks rained down like bullets, clanging and clattering off the old iron. Then something had collapsed. Something fundamental. She had felt the whole world tilt beneath her. She had been poured down into oblivion, rolling out of her hiding place, bricks grinding against her like millstones.

  And then… nothing. And then… now.

  Jag. The thought is like a lightning strike. She left Jag outside.

  Keep my daughter alive or I shall visit upon you a thousand plagues of pain. She sees Osmondo Red once more, sitting on his throne, his whole body hunched around his distended stomach, snarling, a goblet of wine in his hand like some parody of a golden age king.

  She must find Jag. This is the imperative tattooed into her psyche. I think therefore I must find Jag.

  She stands. Her whole body screams at her. Her left knee almost gives way. She grunts, casts around, grabs a spar of broken wood to use as a crutch. Two paces later, she goes back to collect her sword. It lies on the base of her abandoned brick coffin. The cloth wrapping on the hilt that protects her from the iron’s dull throb is torn, but still serviceable. The blade is dusty but not bent. At least that makes one of them.

  Hands full, she hobbles through drifting brown clouds, searching for the street, and for a sense of the city she has temporarily misplaced.

  When she finds it, it lunges back into clarity. Figures mill about: fae staring at the collapsed factory. Too many. Jag, she thinks, is not safe.

  The fae register her emergence from the ruin. They point. Their attention matters little to Sil, though. They are civilians, after all—collateral damage waiting to happen.

  “Jag!” she tries to shout, but dust and pain clog her bruised throat. “Jag!” she calls again, a dry bark of a sound, but Jag doesn’t come forward.

  Rather, someone else approaches from the crowd, a hand outstretched—whether in kindness or aggression, she doesn’t have time to judge. She whips out the scabbarded sword, cracks the length of its blade across their forehead and sends them reeling away.

  The crowd shrieks, scatters like startled birds. Twenty seconds later she is alone in the street. Jag is still not there.

  “Jag!” she barks again, waiting for her to come crawling out of whatever hiding spot she’s found.

  She does not come.

  “Jag!”

  Sil’s pulse comes quicker now. When she calls Jag’s name, she feels a tightness in her throat.

  “Jag!”

  And Jag is not there. And she is not. And she is not. The absence of her draws out, becomes undeniable. And Sil cannot think it, but now she must.

  She has lost Jag.

  And now, here, standing alone in an empty street, Sil starts to panic.

  Granny Spregg

  “What are the fae?”

  Granny Spregg stands in House Spriggan’s library. Her family has joined her. Privett is there, still smarting from their earlier encounter, hunched on a small leather pouf, sending sullen looks at the fireplace that crackles and smokes behind his mother. He is, no doubt, thinking about the possibilities of shoving her into it.

  Her daughters are there as well: Nattle and Brethelda. Nattle sprawls on a chaise longue, mountainous dresses dribbling onto the floor, cigarette smoke billowing above her. Brethelda sits straight-backed in a leather chair, wearing a gentleman’s morning suit, the rod still clearly rammed irretrievably up her ass.

  These three are the children Spregg: the de facto rulers of House Spriggan, one of the five great houses to rule the Iron City. Her offspring. The despots she has deposited into the world.

  General Callart has joined them as well. And Thacker too, of course, fidgeting and shuffling.

  Now, Granny Spregg waits for their answers. What are the fae indeed?

  “Nothing,” Privett mutters.

  “Peasants,” Nattle says, fishing in her petticoats for a fresh smoke. She is always smoking. Even through the pregnancies that gave Granny Spregg her unwanted moniker.

  Brethelda stays silent. Because she is the smartest of all Granny Spregg’s children.

  “Fuel,” says Granny Spregg. “The fae are fuel. Without them, the engine of our wealth runs dry. Their labor drives us forward. We need them.”

  “I am overwhelmed with gratitude,” Privett mutters.

  “That,” Granny Spregg snaps at him, “is because you will forever be a petulant child. They do not deserve gratitude. They lost the Iron War. We won. It is the privilege of victory for us to do with them as we please, to revisit upon them the ignominies they visited upon us for so many generations. It is our pleasure to throw their children on the fire and watch them burn.”

  “Do you have a point, Mother?” Brethelda looks bored. And she, in the end, is the one Granny Spregg must sway. She is the one the others will follow. Scoring cheap points off Privett will only get Granny Spregg so far with her.

  “Remember this,” she says to her eldest daughter. “When you were born, we had no fae healers kneeling at our feet. We were still in the North, and a midwife had to stitch my cunny back together with thread. So, at least do me the service of listening from time to time.”

  Granny Spregg knows she has never been very good at pandering to her audience.

  But Brethelda quirks her lips, and Nattle guffaws out loud. Privett, though, still looks like someone who’s just got done fellating a lemon.

  “Fuel.” Granny Spregg heads back to her main point. “Fuel spilled—” She pauses for a significant look. Brethelda, she knows, likes pomp and high-handedness. “—can burn a house down.”

  She lets it sink in.

  “Do you remember that literature teacher Mummy got us?” Nattle says suddenly. “He loved metaphors like that. What was his name again?”

  Granny Spregg has seen Nattle throttle a brownie to death with a violin string. The air-headed heiress act does not deceive her for a moment.

  Granny Spregg signals to Thacker, and he scuttles forward, puts the ice box down on a small coffee table.

  “The fae,” Granny Spregg says as he opens the ice box, “have forgotten their place.”

  They all look at the heart. And all Granny Spregg can hope is that the anatomy teachers she hired did not do such a good job that the infinitesimal differences between a goblin heart and a fae heart are visible here. Because this, right here, is her moment of drama.

  “One of ours?” Brethelda asks.

  Granny Spregg notes with satisfaction that it is hard for Nattle to look so sanguine now.

  “No,” she spits at Brethelda. “I cut it from a calf in the kitchens and brought it here to waste your time.”

  She is glad Thacker is standing behind the rest of them. His poker face is shit.

  Brethelda turns to General Callart and arches an eyebrow.

  “We sent a scouting troop into the Fae Districts tonight,” Callart says. “A scout brought back this. He told me it belonged to a private third class called Jibberts.”

  The scout has done his work well. Callart has bought the story. His conviction adds strength to her deceit.

  “Well hopefully he died before he passed that awful name onto any children,” Nattle says.

  “And why did we send a scouting troop into the Fae Districts?” Brethelda asks. Even as a child, neither candies nor casual violence would ever tempt her away from her obsessions. Granny Spregg wonders if she would be proud of Brethelda if her daughter wasn’t such a bitch.

  “Are you concerned that the fae might be justified?” Granny Spregg drips with disdain. Hopefully it doesn’t look as rehearsed as it really is.

  “I am concerned that poor management may have provoked the fae and led to house assets becoming endangered.” Brethelda looks her dead in th
e eye.

  “Don’t you manage the troops, Privett?” Nattle says, staring at the ceiling.

  “I didn’t fucking send them,” Privett snaps, because he’s still an idiot.

  “So, you don’t manage the troops?” Nattle feigns confusion. “Are you dressed up like that just for playing toy soldier?”

  Brethelda’s dry smirk is back.

  “She…” Privett froths, and gesticulates at his mother. “… interfered.”

  Brethelda’s transition from impolite amusement to polite curiosity is smooth as a well-oiled mechanism.

  Granny Spregg wants to roll her sleeves up for this one, but it is General Callart who speaks next.

  “Our venture was minimal in scope,” he says. “Madame Spregg knows what she is doing. This is an act of unwarranted aggression by fae who have forgotten their place.”

  Granny Spregg tries to judge Callart’s motives. Why defend her? She has amused him tonight, she knows, but his loyalty is not so easily bought. She doesn’t hold it against him. He did what was necessary to hold onto his position after her children deposed her.

  Rather, she realizes, there is a shivering note of anger to his voice. His soldier has been killed. He is outraged.

  She has an ally.

  At least, she does as long as her lies hold.

  “The fuel,” she says, capitalizing on the moment, “threatens to burn. We need to remind the fae who they work for.”

  “A show of force, then?” Brethelda asks. And she is not just asking about the troops. Brethelda always speaks in layers.

  “I’m here asking, aren’t I?” Granny Spregg says, more petulant than she would like. She forgives herself, though. Because she doesn’t have the Dust yet—just an ice box and a heart of questionable provenance. Because she cannot challenge Brethelda yet. Because no matter what the House troops do in the streets, her show of force here and now, in this room, is minimal.

  Brethelda finally lets her smile spread over her whole face. “You are, aren’t you?”

  Nattle giggles. Even Privett smirks, though Granny Spregg cannot say for certain that he knows what he’s laughing at.