City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  She doesn’t say anything, though, just waits, back as unbowed as age and osteoporosis will allow.

  Brethelda looks away, takes a breath, makes sure everybody knows this is her decision.

  It is all posturing.

  “No matter how we provoked them, and I’m sure you two did screw this up somehow,” she says, looking from Granny Spregg to an outraged Privett, “Mother is correct. We cannot let this stand. We must show decisive action.”

  She steps over to Callart, places a hand on his shoulder. “A battalion, you think?” she says to him.

  She angles her back just a little toward her mother. Cuts her out of the conversation in little ways. But, Granny Spregg simply waits while the details are hashed out. And Brethelda tries to spoil it, and take the joy from it all, but in the end, the truth is that Granny Spregg has gotten her way. The moment may have ugly wrapping paper, but it is still a beautiful gift. And when they all have left, she looks to Thacker, and she smiles.

  Edwyll

  Edwyll steps back, looks at what he has created. The mural towers over the room, massive, foreboding, reaching for something better, desperate. And looking at it, there is a moment of pleasure before the doubts set in, before the flaws start to stand out brighter than the splashes of neon paint he’s sprayed. For a moment he thinks he might be close to saying something meaningful.

  Then he shakes his head, steps away. Close, but… it’s still not right. Not quite. It’s still lesser than the idea in his head.

  He goes to the window, looks out at the Iron City just visible through the smears and stains on the cracked glass. The city he would save one painting at a time if he could. Is it safe out there now? Or… safe enough, because it cannot ever be wholly free of threat. He wants desperately to get back to Lila and Jallow’s. But he doesn’t want to become part of the night’s body count trying to get there.

  The street outside is a long one, running several hundred yards in either direction, only cut off to the east by the crest of a slight hill, the slope running down in a long decline to where he can just make out a distant T-junction to the west. It’s hard to see much of it. And there is smoke rising behind the buildings opposite, but the glow of the fire is on the horizon, not here, not now and in his face. And sometimes that is as safe as the city can seem.

  Slowly, carefully, Edwyll opens the squat’s door, peers out onto the street. It’s quiet its whole length. He licks his lips. This is about as good as it’s going to get.

  And then a figure appears at the crest of the distant hill, and he freezes, staring, trying to assess the peril. The figure, he realizes, is running. But is it pursuer or pursued? He can see no quarry for the figure to be hunting, so the question becomes what is chasing after it? Edwyll shrinks back into the doorway’s shadows, ready to dart away into relative safety.

  The figure has made it almost halfway to Edwyll before its pursuers appear. Edwyll is almost on the verge of writing the runner off as a lone lunatic, running from phantoms. It’s not as if mental illness is uncommon here in the Fae Districts. But then the pack of silhouettes comes jostling and jogging over the rise. They’re too far away for Edwyll to really make them out but from the fearful glances the runner casts over their shoulder, the relationship is clear.

  What did the runner do? Edwyll wonders. How much innocence can they claim?

  He looks at them more closely, trying to see what clues their appearance can give, how much he can ascertain about his own state of danger from their arrival.

  And then, the shock like plunging his face into ice water, he realizes he knows them. Knows her.

  The goblin from the bar. The goblin with the bodyguard who turned a night out into a bloodbath. The goblin whose appearance seemed to herald the night’s descent into horror and shit.

  Edwyll flinches away just from the sight of her. His eyes are desperate, searching for the swordswoman, searching for the danger. He does not want to die.

  Then, slowly, logic catches up. If the goblin is running then her bodyguard cannot be here. If the goblin is running, then her sins have caught up with her.

  He shouldn’t care, he thinks. He should be full up with images of the bodies in the bar. She is the oppressor, and he is the oppressed.

  But that has never been the world Edwyll wants to create. And as the goblin draws closer, the panic is too raw in her eyes for him to be heartless. Her breathing too ragged. The pack of fae pursuing her are shouting and catcalling. He does not want them to do whatever it is they intend to do.

  He can imagine Knull screaming at him. Because what sort of weak, pitiably soft-hearted fool would save one of the oppressors when the chance to exact revenge—to see revenge exacted—is so close?

  She has a good lead on her pursuers, over two hundred yards at least, but she can’t shake them, not on this long, faceless street. There is no one here to save her.

  Except him.

  He stays there, watching her draw inexorably closer, dragging her fate behind her as surely as if it was tied to her ankle.

  “Yo, bitch!” he hears from the crowd behind her.

  “Gonna fuck you up!”

  Why would I save her?

  A patron. The thought rises out of the churn of his mind. That was what he thought when he first saw her. That’s why he approached her back at the bar. Because a patron would give his art a platform, would give his voice and his message a loudspeaker. Would give him a chance to change things.

  From a few streets away there is the sound of gunfire, a low whoomph. The pursuing fae cheer. The goblin lets out a terrified shriek. Several raccoons burst from the cover of nearby garbage cans and go running for cover.

  Edwyll looks at the gaggle of fae. How far away are they? How clearly can they make him out? How big of a risk would it be to…

  “Over here!” he hisses. He hasn’t thought it through, and the goblin is almost past him, but he can’t watch this. He can’t. Not again. He doesn’t want the Iron City to be this way. He doesn’t want the fae to be this way. He wants to change things. Maybe this is something he can change.

  The goblin looks at him wildly. She is caked in dust, almost white with it, except for where tears and sweat have left little rivers of green down her cheeks.

  “Come on!” he says, risking a little more volume. “I’ll hide you.”

  She hesitates a moment longer, the fae drawing closer, and closer, then suddenly darts towards him, and the doorway, shoving past him with a desperation that precludes gratitude. Edwyll shuts it behind her but can still hear the calls of the fae.

  “You can hide, little rabbit,” one yells, “but we’ll still find you.”

  How close are they? Edwyll wonders, heart still pounding. Surely still too far away to pick out a precise door. Surely.

  “In the shadows,” he says urgently, glancing back at the goblin. She is standing in the middle of the room, staring around. No wonder she ended up being chased by some mob. He wonders if she is touched in the head.

  He goes back to the doorway, holding the rough door closed, trying to plan out what he can say. To these fae. To the goblin. When it’s over. How he can make her see that she owes him.

  He hears a hand hammering against a door a few buildings away. His heart hammers right back.

  “Come out, little gobbo!” another fae yells from the street outside. Rats scuttle in the far corners of the squat.

  “Hide,” Edwyll hisses, all his attention on the door, focused on the inevitable—

  Thump. Thump. Thump. A hand thundering against the wood. The door rattling in the frame. Only Edwyll’s foot keeping it closed.

  An inarticulate shout of excitement from the fae outside. Someone shoves on the door harder, unbalances Edwyll, and he only just manages to catch it in time, so it only opens a sliver, doesn’t fly open, doesn’t reveal everything.

  A sidhe face leers through the gap, eyes wide with victory, and then almost immediately on its heels is confusion. Edwyll is decidedly not their prey. Edwyll and
the sidhe stare at each other.

  “Where is she?” The sidhe is perhaps twenty years old, wearing a heavy wooden chain and with flint studs in his ears. Tattoos crawl over his neck, and Edwyll can smell the whiskey on his breath.

  “Who?” is all Edwyll can manage.

  “My little rabbit.”

  “What?” Edwyll’s throat is constricting. This is stupidity. He is risking too much for too small a hope. Who is to say that this is even a rich goblin he’s hiding?

  More fae are jockeying behind the one who banged on the door, trying to peer in.

  “We saw her go in this door,” the lead sidhe says.

  “It’s just me in here,” Edwyll says, and he tries to make it sound confident, but it emerges as a whisper. It would be so easy for them to push him aside.

  He sees anger curdle in the sidhe’s face. His nerve fails, and he opens his mouth to blurt out that she is here, right here, but then the sidhe turns away, throws up his arms. “Must have been another house,” he says. “Keep looking. We’ll find her.”

  Edwyll’s breath rattles out of him as the pack spills back out into the street. He needs to close the door, but the glare of danger’s headlights has not faded from his retinas. He stands, still watching, still recovering, as the fae move down the street, kicking and knocking on other doors. Then one bursts open and suddenly there are three angry demi-dryads—half kobold judging by their wild red manes of hair—in the street, wild-eyed and tangle-bearded. They wave broken bottles at the pack, and shriek, and fall over each other, and then the pack of fae are all laughing and running away. And still Edwyll clings to the door like it’s a raft in the night.

  And then they’re gone—the pack. But the goblin is not. She is still right here with him.

  One more breath. One moment to close his eyes and compose himself. To remind himself that he did this for a reason, that his future hinges on this.

  He opens his eyes. He turns around.

  The goblin is standing just where he left her, only three paces from the door. If it had been pushed open just an inch more, the fae would have seen her. As if she never really cared about his survival at all.

  “I—” he starts.

  “What is that?” The goblin cuts him off. She is pointing at the back wall of the house.

  Edwyll’s mural is vast and sprawling, lit only by the spill of streetlamps and moonlight coming in through the still open doorway and dirty windows. The dark thorn bushes sprawl about the ruins of the room in angry streaks of neon green and crimson, curling darkly over bodies and limbs. Desperate eyes stare out from stark shadows. And then, in the center of it all, arching up over everything—dominating, defiant, renewed—is the White Tree. Its bark is silver in the moonlight. Its leaves are gold. And to Edwyll, even in his own rendering of it, it is beautiful. It is shelter. It is the promise of a world that has shed the shackles of its past and embraced what is here, and now, and precious in a living world. It’s what the fae of the Iron City could see if only they would raise their heads. If only they would hope.

  At least, that is what it is to him, or was meant to be.

  “Just a mural,” he says.

  “Who painted it?” the goblin asks.

  “I did.”

  Finally, the goblin turns and looks at him. She stares, those yellow eyes gleaming bright as torches in her skull.

  “You?”

  “It’s rough,” he says automatically. “More an idea than—”

  “It’s beautiful.” She cuts him off. She turns back to it again, as if drawn to it. “Your painting. You’ve made something beautiful.”

  11

  Making It Worse

  Knull

  “Shut up,” Skart says.

  Knull—who hasn’t said a word for a while now—closes his mouth.

  Knull isn’t entirely sure how he got into this situation. He had been on the move, making plans, setting things in motion. And then, when Skart appeared, it had felt as if—after years of struggle, after years of choosing short-term pain for the distant hope of a long-term payoff—life was finally doing the right thing by him. Sure, Skart was a stuck-up hippie gone moldy around the edges, but he had gold and he wanted to spend it. What’s more, he wanted to spend it on Knull’s Dust.

  But then it had all soured. Then there had been House Spriggan goblins in the street. And then there had been running, and scurrying, and hiding. And now Knull is here, pressed up against a wall in a dark alley, and Skart is telling him to shut up.

  “We should split up,” Knull whispers. Better to cut his losses now, he thinks. Because there is no way a deal can be done if they’re both chained up in a House Spriggan cell.

  Skart seizes his arm with a strength surprising for his scrawny limbs. “We stick together.” And then, because Knull’s face must be telegraphing his alarm, he adds, “I can keep you safe.”

  Skart, Knull thinks, must be seriously jonesing for some Dust. Which is decreasingly convenient as he hears sounds at the end of the alleyway.

  “Down,” Skart hisses, and forces Knull behind a pile of rotting garbage.

  Knull is about to open his mouth to bitch about this bullshit treatment, when a beam of light stabs into the space above his head. He watches as it works its way methodically back and forth across the alleyway’s walls.

  “One… two…” Skart counts steady as a metronome while the flashlight beam oscillates.

  He reaches fifteen and the beam clicks off. Knull looks at him, sighs in relief, and goes to stand. Skart’s grip on his arm tightens. The kobold is still counting.

  When he gets to twenty the flashlight beam comes back on, sweeps back and forth one more time. Then it clicks off again.

  This time, Knull stays right where he is.

  When Skart reaches forty, he lets go of Knull’s arm and stands up. He looks down at Knull. “How,” he asks, “have you lived this long?”

  And that is some serious bullshit as far as Knull is concerned, but he’s still waiting to see if someone caps Skart in the back of the head so he stays quiet.

  Skart moves to the far end of the alley. “If we are to take control of the Iron City,” he says to Knull, “we have to know it. We have to make it ours in our minds.” He reaches up to a small, wire-reinforced window, half-obscured by paint and mold. There are iron strands in the glass, but the old kobold doesn’t even flinch. Perhaps, Knull thinks, he is tougher than he looks. “Knowing it that way also helps when you need an escape route,” he says. He slips out a knife and ten seconds later, he swings the window open. “Come on.”

  Knull still hesitates. He’s been shot at enough tonight.

  Skart sighs. “A twenty-five-second examination is the basic search pattern for goblin special forces. Any longer and they risk having their prey get too far ahead of them. They’ve moved on for now. When they can’t find us, though, they’ll come back and search more thoroughly, and then it will take more than a few garbage bags to save us.”

  And how exactly, Knull wonders, does Skart know the basic search patterns for goblin special forces? But, on the other hand, Knull doesn’t want to be sitting here trying to figure that out when another goblin with a gun comes poking down the alleyway.

  Knull is beginning to think that tonight might not be his lucky night after all.

  Sil

  Sil’s fear is a rat inside her skull, clawing and raging against the walls of her self-control. Her handlers took time and care to build those walls, but they can’t last forever. Not when it feels like her lungs have been torn from her body, not when she must find them before they’re gone forever.

  Keep my daughter alive or I shall visit upon you a thousand plagues of pain. Osmondo Red was not joking. He has no sense of humor.

  Streets flash past her. Fires cast the smoke clouds in shades of malevolent orange. Some fae try to drag a stiff coil of woven hawthorn strands across a road, its barbs reflecting the streetlights dully. Even in that paltry light her skin is green enough for them to pull weapons
as she approaches, and when she’s done their task is left half-finished, the barricade ending in a pool of blood and hewn body parts.

  Jag is not there, though. Sil does not rescue her. She does not save herself. She runs on.

  Keep my daughter alive. There will be nowhere Sil can hide.

  And yet somehow, there is a hiding place for Jag. As much as Sil runs, as much as she searches, Jag eludes her—a rich goblin’s gemstone, lost in the gutter. And no matter how much Sil cuts at the fae who get in her way, they do not tell her where to find Jag. And with every drop of blood that spills, Sil’s panic rises.

  Bee

  Bee’s breathing is sharp and shallow. His heart trips and taps against his ribcage. Below him, a once-empty lot has been filled with foreboding. House Red Cap commandos mill and organize. They arm themselves.

  “We have to take them out.” Harretta is at Bee’s elbow, peering down.

  Crouched at the roof’s edge, fingers white-knuckled on the gutter, Bee glances at her face. He’s not sure what he expects. Something bloodthirsty, he thinks. Her expression, though, is studious, as if she’s working on a particularly difficult math problem.

  “Are you crazy?” Tharn—crouched behind them both—gives voice to Bee’s inner monologue. “They’re commandos. We have to get back to the rebellion’s leadership, tell them what’s going on.”

  Bee would really like it if Tharn were right.

  “By then,” Harretta says, “these goblins will have left. And they’re not going out there to hand out chocolates and roses. The blood they spill will be on our hands.”

  Bee really wants Harretta to be wrong.

  “We’re outgunned, outnumbered, and outmatched.” Tharn doesn’t back down. “If we attack now, we’ll be killed. Then everyone else you’re worrying about will be too. This is our chance to get out a warning, to organize. A thoughtful retreat saves more lives than blindly rushing in.”

  “We split up,” Bee says. It’s the obvious middle path. “We send some back to report.”

  “They already have four soldiers to every one of us,” Tharn whispers. “You want to make those odds worse? We have to get out of here.”