City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  He staggers. He stumbles. He aches. And Skart’s body lies slumped over his shoulder like a sack of skin and leaden bones.

  How has one old kobold gotten so heavy?

  Every part of Knull hurts. His ankle pulses fire up to his knee. Life-debt or no, Knull is about to dump the bastard and run when finally Steel Avenue comes into sight. The factory’s smokestacks puncture the skyline a few hundred yards away.

  Just a little further…

  He doesn’t make it.

  “Hold still, friend.”

  The voice sidles out of an alleyway. A lithe-looking pixie follows. He looks about as friendly as he sounds.

  “Street’s off limits.” The pixie is all tattoos and lazy confidence. “And my friend on the roof over there has iron sights set on your skull if you want to argue the point.”

  Knull is too tired, and too hurt, and too covered in someone else’s blood to take much offence.

  “Just returning lost property.” He dumps Skart onto the street.

  A little of the pixie’s laconic cool escapes him. “Is that…?” he asks.

  “Probably.” Knull turns away. He’s done with this bullshit.

  Behind him, a pistol is cocked. When Knull turns back around, the pixie holds something small, snub-nosed, and aggressive. “Oh no,” the pixie says. “No, you’re coming with me. Now, pick him up.”

  Knull doesn’t even have the energy to object. He hauls Skart up and starts hobbling down the street to the factory. Another unfriendly pixie lets them all inside without a word. He eyes Skart draped bloodily over Knull’s shoulder.

  The stairs down to the basement nearly break Knull. He almost loses his footing three times. Ahead of him, the pixie bustles self-importantly. “We’ve got Skart!” he announces as they emerge from the stairwell. “Make way! He’s hurt.”

  No one makes way. No one looks up. The scene is pure chaos. Fae hurtle back and forth, shouting as they go. Bleeding fae nurse injuries everywhere. Old schoolroom blackboards fill the spaces between them. Maps half-obscured by red marker scrawl peel from the boards and pile in drifts. A huge dryad stands at the center of this scrum, gesticulating wildly. No one seems to be paying her any attention.

  “Werzel, get me a report on Thoroughgood Avenue! Where are the supply runners now? What the fuck is happening in the Slacks?”

  A thin sidhe bundles down the stairs past them, her long hair flapping in her wake. “More reports of goblin activity in the Iron Elbow,” she shouts to no one in particular. “We’ve lost five. Wounded incoming.”

  It’s more babble thrown into the maelstrom of sound. The pixie keeps pushing Knull towards the massive dryad. He keeps calling out, “We’ve got Skart!”

  The dryad almost tramples them, stumbling to a stop barely a foot from Knull. She stares at the group, puzzled. The pixie repeats his message again. “We’ve got Skart.”

  The dryad looks electrified.

  Knull drops the body. He almost drops down right beside it, just manages to turn his collapse into the act of sitting down. He’s just going to watch the rest of this play out from the floor. He’s too tired to be anything but a spectator.

  The dryad screams for healers and two more pixies come running. Their eyes are glazed, pupils dilated. The sound of birdsong seems to echo from somewhere behind their heads. Their aprons are stained red and brown.

  “I think he’s been shot,” the dryad says. She looks at Knull. “Has he been shot?”

  “Uh,” is about as articulate as Knull can make himself.

  The healers kneel. One reaches into a pocket, pulls out a pinch of Dust, snorts it. The sound of birdsong intensifies in Knull’s ears. He sees grass sprout through the concrete beneath her feet. Her hands pulse with yellow light. She sets them on Skart’s abdomen.

  Skart’s eyes fly open. He writhes. The second healer has positioned herself at his shoulders. She holds on tight. There is a wet sucking noise. A small leaden ball flies up and out of Skart’s guts. The dryad catches it in one gnarled fist.

  Beneath her, Skart collapses. Dried blood flakes off his body. The damp stuff runs thickly back into the slowly closing hole in his abdomen.

  The healer lets out a long breath. Butterflies flutter from her mouth, evaporate into nothingness. Beneath Skart, the grass wilts, curls up, drifts back into the ether, leaving untarnished concrete behind. These side effects of Dust use are usually temporary, and no one here looks likely to take the life-threatening volumes of the drug that lead to more permanent forms of this spill-over magic.

  The healer stands. “Give him a minute.” She and her assistant head back into the crowd. Knull notices a small trickle of blood running from her ear. How much Dust has she taken tonight? he wonders. How much more can she take before she’s lying on the floor next to the fae she’s trying to heal?

  And for what, he wants to know. What is being achieved out there? Because from the state of this factory basement, Skart’s uprising is in a bloody shambles.

  And now the old kobold is waking up just in time for Knull to tell him, I told you so.

  Skart stirs, opens his eyes. Slowly, he sits up.

  “Praise be.” The big dryad reaches down to help him. Skart stands, but as he does so, his eyes settle on Knull. He nods. There’s gratitude in it.

  Knull shrugs. He doesn’t know how he feels about any of this. Except tired.

  “Skart,” the dryad is carrying on. “What happened?”

  Skart’s eyes leave Knull, flick up to the dryad, to the chaos in the room.

  “No,” he says. “You tell me. What happened here?”

  The dryad seems to deflate, her courage collapsing beneath her skin. “They knew,” she said. “Everywhere we went, there were goblins. They were waiting in the factories. They waylaid our fae in the streets. They ambushed our propaganda teams.”

  She puts her head close to Skart’s, speaks so Knull can only just catch the words. “I wasn’t prepared for this.”

  Skart puts a red hand on her gray cheek. “It’s OK,” he says. “I’m here now.”

  About them, fae have started to notice Skart. They’re starting to stare. A hush falls. Knull watches as Skart plays it for everything it’s worth.

  “So,” he finally says, when all eyes are on him. “So, it’s a fight we’re in. Well—” He looks around. “—that’s what we wanted, isn’t it? We didn’t come here to throw the goblins a fucking tea party.”

  The room is surly, though. They’ve gotten more than their knuckles bloody tonight. Skart keeps pushing.

  “It’s hard. I know that. It hurts. I get it. We had a plan. It failed. Someone sold us out. Now, you want to turn tail, to run and hide, and hope they don’t find us when the purges come. I get it. I do. I do.”

  He pauses again, but this time he looks at Knull. “Because that’s a familiar story, right? It’s the same story we’ve told so many times before. We rise up, we fail, the reprises come. History repeats over and over again.” He looks up once more. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of that story.”

  There’s a stirring in the crowd now. They’re interested. They want to be convinced that they haven’t just made everything worse.

  “We hoped for the element of surprise,” Skart says. “The goblins stole it from us. Perhaps we should be used to that. It’s hardly the first thing they’ve taken from us.” He gets a dry chuckle from some parts of his audience. “But surprise isn’t the end of the fight,” Skart says. “That’s the opening three seconds. Momentum can change. I was in the Iron War. I know.”

  “They have us outgunned!” someone shouts from the safety of the crowd.

  “Outgunned.” Skart nods again. “With bullets and steel, right? Well, those help, yes, but they’re not what wins a fight. Hearts and minds. Will and courage. That’s what wins. And that’s what we have. The goblins think they have broken us, but we are here—in this room, out in those streets—because we refuse to be broken. We have been forged, hardened, and baptized by oppression. W
e have a will they cannot match and we will fight on long after their spirit is spent.

  “We,” he says, “have magic in our hearts. You say they outgun us. I say they never could in a thousand years.” And then he pauses, and he looks down, and he stares Knull right in the eye. “We have Dust. We can change the very world.”

  Then he looks away. Looks back to the crowd. His voice rises to a shout. “They tried to take our magic, our spirit, and our soul from us, but we are the fae. We hold on. We will not be denied. And our magic will rend the flesh from their bones!”

  Now, the room cheers. Now, the room loses it for this deranged old kobold, with his deranged old dreams. Knull, though, isn’t cheering. He’s not on his feet and stamping. He’s sitting there and he’s breathing hard. Because the bastard is putting this on him. A whole revolution that he doesn’t want. Every injured fae in this room.

  Skart just told everyone that this revolution depends on him giving up his brick of Dust.

  Jag

  The Iron City, Jag thinks, has gone septic. All the tainted wonder and dirty beauty of the Fae Districts has fled, just like its citizens have fled from their beds out into the streets in their threadbare robes and cheap polyester pajamas. Some clutch small plastic radios. Others have chosen handguns. They all know something is happening. They all know it’s bad. There’s thunder on the horizon after all. Except it’s not thunder, it’s bomb blasts and gunfire.

  Edwyll has led Jag from the squat, out onto these crowded, confused streets. Now they veer away from these clusters of concerned citizens, aim for emptier streets where Jag’s sharp features are less likely to give her away. Then they realize that the only others using the emptier streets are armed gangs.

  They’re halfway down one street when shots ring out overhead, two groups, one on either side of the rooftops, gunning each other down, cursing and screaming. Jag and Edwyll hurtle around a corner, crash into another crowd.

  Some call out the old refrain—“What’s happening?”—but more scream and burst into a miniature stampede. Jag and Edwyll are bustled and bundled along.

  An old brownie catches Jag by the arm, holds her against the battering tide of bodies. “What’s going on?” he demands, while Jag desperately ducks her head. “What’s causing this?” He sounds furious.

  Edwyll wrenches Jag free. They run on.

  They take refuge in a small alleyway between a bakery and a grocer’s. It smells of bleach and rotting cabbage.

  The crowd rumbles and grumbles past them, drifting in search of news and safety.

  “Come on.” Edwyll pushes away and she follows. Increasingly, Edwyll seems almost mythical to her—some creature stepped out of a story, or a painting. She goes back again in her mind to the mural he painted. He had spoken about it so dismissively, as if it was nothing, and yet to her… that vision of the White Tree rising up and out of the misery and the violence, the vision of something beautiful emerging from the chaos, reaching up, aspiring, uplifting, hopeful… It was what the city could be if it just tried. Or… it was the city she had always wanted to see. And Edwyll had put it right there in front of her.

  Now, Edwyll leads her through that city’s streets. Leads her to safety.

  Or…

  “We’re heading away from the Houses,” she says, an ember of suspicion flaring in her.

  “I can’t get you there tonight,” he says. “But I can keep you safe until this chaos dies down.”

  She smothers the ember. She has to trust him. There’s no one else left.

  He takes her further and further away from the burning lights of the Houses at the city’s heart. Occasionally a car burrs past them, travelling too fast for the street’s tight confines. They pass a crowd of fae who seem to be having a street party. The Iron Wall looms a little larger. It is the circumference of her whole world. She’s never been permitted to see what lies beyond it, and it has gained a sense of mystery and wonder for her. She came out here to a fae poetry reading once, and the pixie on stage called it “the world that was”, and that is how she has thought of it ever since.

  Then, finally, Edwyll comes to a stop. He’s in front of a wooden door that’s been painted red, blue, and green, fractured shards of color defying the eye’s attempt to find a pattern.

  “I have friends here,” he tells her.

  She nods, and it strikes her suddenly that she is behaving with him just as she would with Sil. Old patterns are taking over. She is letting him take charge because there is danger about. But she hardly knows him. She has no guarantee that he is not leading her to greater danger.

  She needs, she thinks, to stop thinking like the privileged heir of Osmondo Red and start thinking more like Sil. She needs to take charge of her destiny. She just needs to work out how.

  Before she can, though, Edwyll has knocked and a female voice has answered from the far side of the door. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me.” Edwyll puts his lips to the edge of the doorframe, calls as quietly as he can. “Edwyll.”

  The door swings open, revealing a matronly-looking pixie in dirty overalls wielding a bat with three nails driven through it. Jag steps back, alarmed.

  The pixie looks at the bat, seems surprised to find it there. “Sorry,” she says, lowering it. “Talluck made it for me. He’s calling it ‘the last recourse of discourse’ and telling everyone that he wants to use it in a performance piece.”

  This is all unintelligible to Jag, but Edwyll laughs. There has been a change in him, Jag can see, in the few seconds since he knocked at the door. He seems suddenly lighter on his feet, the tension on his face gone. “Is Talluck here?” he asks.

  The pixie nods. “We all are. Me, Talluck, Threm, Jallow. Keeping our heads down.” She nods in Jag’s direction. “You brought a friend, I—”

  And then she really sees Jag and her mouth falls open a little. Jag turtles into her dress shirt’s collar.

  “Oh,” the pixie says.

  “We need to get off the streets,” Edwyll tells her. “We need somewhere safe.”

  The pixie keeps on staring at Jag. “We?”

  “She’s OK,” Edwyll says, and the tension has stepped back into his throat. “She’s not a threat, I promise. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  The pixie finally wrenches her eyes from Jag. “OK,” she says, a little breathless. “Well, then. You better come in.”

  Granny Spregg

  Finally, Granny Spregg allows herself to relax. The ballgown she has changed into only permits the slightest slackening in her spine, but it is not the least comfortable armor she’s worn. And it is better suited for the fight she’s heading into than a steel breastplate or a Kevlar flak jacket. But for now, she tells herself, things are in hand. Nothing, she reiterates, can be done from within the plush confines of the limousine. Anxiety will only speed up the poison working in her veins.

  Up in the driver’s seat, Thacker is faking confidence and slowly navigating their departure through House Spriggan’s many and complex defenses. They pass through iron gates and over drawbridges. Snipers aim guns at their vehicle as they go by. Dour goblin soldiers inspect their identities.

  This level of security is standard for all the Houses. The peace between them is uneasy, after all. In her day, Granny Spregg always preferred something more ostentatiously offensive. Now, though, Brethelda has ensured everything at House Spriggan is sleek and modern. Uniformed guards stand to attention, devoid of nuance and humor. A mile away, House Troll’s brutish barricades far outshine them when it comes to unsubtle savagery.

  You can tell a lot about the Houses, Granny Spregg thinks, by looking at their defenses. House Hobgob has hidden itself behind a maze of machines, each one devious and sharp-bladed. House Bogle has its labyrinth. And, of course, there is House Red Cap, its face utterly inscrutable, a blank cube of concrete and steel, devoid of windows and doors. Its method of entrance is one of the Iron City’s most closely guarded secrets. Despite the efforts of Granny Spregg’s best torturers.


  Now, as the gates of House Spriggan finally close behind her, Granny Spregg can see these other Houses gathered about her, raised like the fingers of a clawing hand, each one desperate to tighten its grip on the city’s heart. Tonight, she thinks, House Spriggan will finally achieve that goal. Thanks to her. As soon as she has secured her prize.

  The drive to their destination takes all of five minutes. The Opera House sits equidistant from all the Houses, a place made neutral because every partisan pull on it cancels the other out. It sits at the true heart of the city, a central hub, and the Iron City’s entire political and social scene revolves around this axle—in its ballrooms, and its quiet speak-easy bars slipped like blades between corridors and conference rooms, and in its vaulted chambers where societies meet to scream slogans and drink themselves into a stupor. Any singing done here is almost an afterthought—an aping of sidhe customs designed more to rub the fae’s noses in their defeat than to entertain the ear.

  It is also as safe a place as the Iron City has to offer. The Houses have not agreed to abstain from assassination attempts here, exactly. It is merely obvious to everyone involved that—given how unavoidable this location is—six months after the first trigger is squeezed, they will all be dead.

  Outside, Thacker pulls the car to a velvet-smooth stop. He opens Granny Spregg’s door with exaggerated elegance. He has always been good at the pomp and circumstance. It’s a shame, Granny Spregg thinks, about everything else.

  The splay of cars already parked indicates that Granny Spregg is the last House head to arrive. The others, she is sure, wanted to array themselves in aesthetically overwhelming displeasure, in order to maximize how much Brethelda would have to crawl.

  “Alright, Thacker,” she says. “Showtime.” She grips the door handle.

  “But, Madame Spregg,” Thacker whines, “having the Dust at this juncture was somewhat vital—”

  She hauls herself up and out of the car and he finally deflates into silence.

  Granny Spregg will never crawl, but neither can she sweep into the Opera House’s entrance hall. Rather, she stalks in as best as she is able, stabbing the ground with her cane.