City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  But then the door had swung open, and there were fae there.

  And her.

  And her.

  She has always been beautiful to him, although he has never told her this. She has always been a source of wonder. And although they have been more intimate than many lovers, he supposes he never will.

  “Imposter,” she says. Her hands fumble at the sword in her belt. She shouldn’t be here. That was never part of the plan. Jag was meant to come into the Iron City alone tonight. Sil’s presence, even without Jag, means that the missing Dust is far from the only thing to have gone wrong tonight.

  “Betrayer,” she says, and her voice is shaking. She has her sword out. Around her, fae are falling back, are shouting, are fumbling for weapons, but none of them can stop her. Of that Skart is very, very sure.

  He has seconds to decide what to do, he knows, seconds to decide what he can still recover from these ashes. But he supposes, in the end, there is no choice for him. Ever since he found the bodies in Cotter’s apartment, he has suspected that everything has been narrowing down to this moment.

  “He is Osmondo Red’s fae!” she yells.

  Skart looks Sil in the eye. And there is regret in this moment. She must have achieved so much to get this far. But she, he knows, has no choices either anymore.

  Quietly he says to her, “Mnemosyne.”

  Sil

  Sil doesn’t remember her mother. She used to know her name, her face, the sound of her voice as she invoked the barrow rites that all sidhe children learn, but these things were taken from her. She cannot remember exactly how or when, but she knows that it was her tutors who were responsible.

  She remembers her tutors. Those that Osmondo sent to train her to be the perfect bodyguard for his daughter. She remembers that they were all cruel. That they all hurt her. That they all taught her things she did not want to know.

  One of them, though, stands out the sharpest in her memory. A mental image with edges sharp enough to cut.

  He had dead eyes. That was the first thing she noticed about him. Some of her tutors had eyes that would sparkle when she did well. Some had eyes that sparkled when they hurt her. Some eyes were as thin as sheets of glass—the only things between her and unfathomable rage. But his eyes were always dead. There was nothing behind them to see. No joy. No cruelty. No desire at all.

  He was not a goblin. That too was different. All her other tutors were like her father: sharp-featured, short, with mouths full of teeth like knives. But this one was soft, and tall, not quite like the sidhe, but more like her mother than anyone she’d seen in a long time. At first, she thought that would make him kinder, would mean that he would sympathize with her, and resent the cruelty of all the goblins who said they were trying to beat the fae out of her. That mistake was one of the very first lessons he taught her.

  There are things he did to her that she still cannot think about. Things with knives, and drills, and saws. Things with dogs, and beetles, and worms. Things with his hands.

  “It is important to know,” he said to her once, “just how much damage can be done to you. That way you will always know whether or not you are broken. On this journey, you will think you are broken many times, but know now there is always so much worse I can do to you.”

  She has run on broken ankles. And every time she fell, he did worse to her.

  She has served tea while holding her guts in with one hand. And for every drop she spilled, he did worse to her.

  She has searched for a dropped needle in a room writhing with hungry rats. And for every minute longer than he thought it should take, he did worse to her.

  There were always ways he could do so much worse to her. This was the lesson he taught her best.

  His lessons have always been there in her mind. His face has always been there in the darkness behind her eyelids. Now, he stands before her. Now, he is held up to her as the architect of the fae’s rebellion, and she knows immediately this is another breaking. It is not of her this time, and that is both better and worse. Because this, she is sure, is the breaking of the fae. Of Bee and the rest of the rebels. This kobold—this tutor—is teaching them all a lesson.

  And she knows, as surely as she knows all these other things—purely and without the hesitation of doubt—that she has to warn them. She has to stop him.

  “Imposter,” she gasps. “Betrayer.”

  The others stare at her as she fights to make herself clear.

  “He is Osmondo Red’s fae!” she yells, and they keep on staring.

  And there is no time. Only time to act. She draws her sword and—

  “Mnemosyne.”

  And then there is no time left at all.

  All the color in the world drains away. All the noise fades. Every voice screaming at her to act, to do something, to do what she wants to do, what she has always wanted to do. It all goes away.

  “Osmondo’s fae? What?”

  A fae’s voice. The fae called Bee. She takes stock of where he stands, the angle of his feet, how he holds his weight. A blade to the throat, she thinks. Quick and fast.

  She mentally walks through each of their deaths then, plotting each blow, extrapolating scenarios for parrying their most predictable responses. She knows how she will cut off their attempts at retreat. She knows how many will be dead before Bee’s body hits the floor.

  And all the time, a voice is screaming inside of her, is screaming that she was free, that she was out, that they tried to fucking kill her.

  Quietly, and without much thought, Sil kicks the knees out from beneath that voice, and grabs it by the hair, and drags it off to shut it behind the bars that suffuse her mind. It will not bother her much from there, she knows.

  “Are you present and correct, asset Sil?” Skart says.

  Sil bows her head.

  “Asset Sil?” Bee echoes. “What the fuck?”

  “I am exiting the building,” Skart instructs her. “Minimize the witnesses.”

  Sil raises her sword, and as she does so, she thinks again that Skart has always had such dead eyes.

  Knull

  Knull sees it all come undone. He’s looking right at Skart’s eyes when the door opens, when Skart turns and sees the white-haired half-fae trying to pull her sword. He’s looking right at those eyes when she calls Skart Osmondo’s fae.

  Knull has been caught in lies more than most. He is intimate with that moment when you must capitulate to the inevitable revelation. He knows what he’s seeing, and he knows that he has heard the white-haired half-fae speak the truth. He knows he’s finally starting to see Skart’s angle.

  The location of the Dust had been on the tip of his tongue. He’d been about to give it up. For a moment, the momentum of that decision nearly carries the words over the precipice of his lips so he almost blurts it into this pregnant moment, this harbinger of harm to come.

  He bites down hard on his tongue.

  “I am exiting the building,” Skart says. “Minimize the witnesses.” His voice holds no more emotion than if he were reciting a list of purchase orders. And Knull sees all the fear, and anger, and guilt flee from Skart’s face, washed away by an expressionless mask.

  Skart takes a step toward the office door. A sidhe with pale blue skin who is standing beside the white-haired half-fae raises a hand, says, “Wait,” but the half-fae brings her sword down, and suddenly the sidhe has half the regular number of hands.

  Knull shrieks. The sidhe screams. The amputated hand flops obscenely on the floor.

  And Knull sees it all come undone.

  The half-fae pivots and spirals. Her blade and her hair are twin flashes of white. The air is suddenly full of spraying blood.

  Skart’s arm jabs out. He seizes Knull by the collar and drags him almost off his feet. Knull struggles to be free, but the old kobold’s arm seems to be made exclusively of muscle and steel beams.

  The half-fae hacks and slashes, carving a path through the rebels. Bodies and blood spill across the floor. There
is an awful smell of sweat and copper in the air. A gun goes off so close it feels as if it must have been pressed to Knull’s head.

  Then they’re through the thicket of violence. More gunfire detonates behind them. Fae are screaming. Knull sees every eye in the basement fixed on them. He has his feet beneath him now. He starts to fight Skart’s efforts full force.

  Skart turns and buries his fist in Knull’s throat. Knull’s legs go out from under him. The world blurs and he sees it in gasping, tear-stained snatches: the half-fae running past them, her white hair spattered with red; a brownie running up to Skart, her mouth full of questions; Skart slashing a blade, and the brownie’s mouth filling with blood.

  Someone is driven into Skart in the tumult, and—twisting and writhing—Knull tears free. He stumbles a few steps, still gasping, then something snags his bad ankle and he sprawls forward, smashing his mouth against the basement’s concrete floor.

  More shots ring out. More screams. The floor trembles with the stampede of fleeing fae.

  Knull twists, sees that Skart has him by his injured ankle. The kobold heaves and starts to drag him across the floor. Knull bellows, starts kicking at the kobold’s hand with his free foot, half-blinded by pain. He strikes knuckles, and Skart howls. Another strike, and the kobold’s hand springs open. Knull scrambles away across the floor. He glances back. Skart is snarling, advancing. His knife is out. Behind him, the white-haired half-fae is butchering rebels with savage abandon.

  Then, with a massive howl, a huge dryad slams into Skart and the pair of them go flying. The dryad is yelling something into Skart’s face, but Knull can’t hear the words over the volume of his own panic. This is the only opening he is likely to get and it is narrow as a gnat’s asshole.

  He scrambles forward on all fours, finds his feet beneath him, and then he’s up and running. He sees the stairs, the exit. He pounds toward them. He hears a gunshot, waits for pain, but then he’s in the doorway, then he’s on the stairs, taking them three at a time, his ankle screaming, not caring, not daring to slow, simply fleeing that basement, and its blood, and its murder, and all Skart’s terrible, echoing lies.

  Bee

  What the fuck? What the actual ever-living—

  Harretta is on the floor screaming. She is holding the spraying stump of her hand and screaming. Bee can see her hand on the floor. He wants to throw up.

  Outside the small office room, Sil is still moving. She has her sword raised and through the throat of some staring half-pixie. Has her foot extended and is kicking a gnome in the temple. Is ripping the sword through flesh and muscle to bury it in the abdomen of an advancing sidhe.

  His friends are on the floor. So many of them on the floor, dead, and dying, and screaming, and breathing out their last ragged breaths.

  A shot rings out, someone firing in Sil’s direction. The boom is massive and echoing. The shot goes wild. Wood explodes near Bee’s head.

  “Get down!” Someone grabs him around the waist, drives him to the floor. He grunts, eating concrete. He kicks and punches, realizes through the haze of terror he has Tharn by the throat.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” Tharn hisses.

  More gunshots. They whine and scream overhead. Bee looks up, looks out at the factory basement. Sil has kicked the knees out from beneath a demi-dryad, is sawing his skull from his neck.

  “We’ve got to try to—” Bee doesn’t know the end of that sentence. Save Sil? But he needs to be saved from her. He doesn’t know what’s happened. Was it all a long con? Did she fool him? Was something done to her?

  He doesn’t know. He knows Tharn is right. They have to get out of here.

  He grabs Harretta by her remaining hand, hauls her to her feet. She has her stump pressed to her stomach, is staining herself with blood.

  Tharn pulls a pistol, opens fire. They run. The three of them. Maybe all that is left of the Fae Liberation Front. Bee doesn’t know. He can’t tell amid the chaos, among the fleeing, fighting bodies. In the debris of the whirlwind that is Sil hacking and slashing and gutting and executing her way through the room.

  They had laughed together.

  Tables are being overturned. Piles of crates collapsing as herd mentality swirls through the basement like a fever. Gunfire explodes around them, Sil dancing through the chaos with ballerina grace. Fae hit by stray shots go down, collapsing. Tharn fires off shots wildly, aiming too high. Bee drags Harretta left then right, trying to dodge obstacles, just trying to cross the hundred yards of space that will take them to the stairs.

  Sil is ahead of them. Between them and the stairs. Their momentum falters.

  “Give me the gun.”

  Bee turns. Tharn turns. Harretta wrenches her hand out of Bee’s grip. She holds it out to Tharn. “I’m a better shot than you.”

  “But—”

  She grabs it from him. Sets her sights. Her hand is shaking, Bee can tell, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Payback, you—”

  Harretta fires. And it is so close to being decisive. So close to putting a stop to this.

  The shot spins off Sil’s blade, nicks the edge. Sil turns. Sees them.

  “Run!” Bee screams.

  But she is between them and the door. And they run, but she is there to meet them.

  Harretta is firing the pistol over and over and Sil is spinning, putting bodies between her and them. And Harretta is roaring. And then Sil leaps over a collapsing pixie, her sword still in its back, and she lands among them like a thunderbolt.

  Bee throws a punch and it is like punching air. She just isn’t there, pirouetting around him, driving the heel of her palm into Tharn’s face.

  And then Harretta is on Sil, driving her bloody stump into the half-fae’s face, smearing gore into her eyes, howling. Bee falls back. Tharn gasps, but Harretta presses on, bearing Sil down to the floor with her weight, and her anger, and her pain.

  The path to the stairs is open. Bee sees it.

  “No!” Tharn flings himself at Sil and Harretta, and then Bee sees that Sil’s collapse has not been a pratfall, or a mistake. She has thrown herself backward, has thrown herself within reach of her sword still protruding from the back of the fallen pixie, has grabbed it as she fell.

  Tharn hits Sil’s sword arm, pins it.

  The gun. Bee can see Tharn’s gun on the floor. His pistol. He scrambles toward it. Hears a cry, looks up. Sil has somehow jacknifed her body, has thrown Harretta up and off, piling her into Tharn. Sil’s sword arm is still pinned, but she is slamming her free hand into the side of Harretta’s skull over and over. Harretta moans.

  The gun. Bee grabs the gun.

  Tharn is between Bee and Sil. Has wrestled his way up, is trying to pull Harretta clear. Harretta reeling, blood spilling down her skull. And Bee screams at them, “No!” because Sil’s sword arm is free—this is what she wanted. But it’s too late, as Sil is on her feet fast as quicksilver, and her blade flashes forward.

  Harretta convulses. Tharn stumbles back. Sil growls. Her blade protrudes from Harretta’s back.

  The path to the stairs is free.

  Sil advances. Bee holds out his gun. Harretta’s body is between him and Sil.

  Tharn is staggering.

  The path to the stairs is free.

  He turns, he grabs Tharn’s hand, and they run.

  Skart

  Brumble’s phlegm is spraying into Skart’s face. “You—” she brays. “You killed—”

  “Yes.” Skart doesn’t see any more point in denying it. Sil is here. One way or another, his double life is over. It is only a question of how long he can drag things out, and the night is too far gone, and too far from all his carefully laid out plans to afford him any more delays.

  “Why?” The pain in her face has nothing to do with his attempts to free himself. She has him fully pinned, splayed and immobile, her massive weight advantage rendering resistance an absurdity. So, why not tell her? Why not be done with it once and for all?

  “Because
this rebellion will fail,” he says through gritted teeth. “They will all fail, and they will always fail, and the reprisals will always come. The cycle will repeat over and over, but I can finally end it. I can save the fae. From you. From all of you who just won’t go quietly into the future. I can pull all of you out into the light to be crushed and forgotten. And finally, the rest of us will be left in peace. Because you will all be dead.”

  She gapes at him dumbly. “But,” she manages. “But you…”

  Skart doesn’t feel much anymore. Scar tissue, tumors, and ruin aren’t sensitive to any but the sharpest emotions. But now, the little of him that’s left enjoys watching the shock roll through Brumble’s broad, bovine face.

  “Once,” he says. Behind them, he can hear Sil still at work, the thudding meaty thwacks of her blade biting flesh. “Once, when I was still as stupid as you, before I was cured, that stupidity took the lives of my wife, and my children, and my friends. It tore through lives like a whirlwind of knives. And I almost died before I saw things true. That’s what the rebellions cost me. What they cost all the fae. That is who your stupidity kills.”

  It was after the Red Rebellion that he saw things for how they truly are. It was the first of the major uprisings after the Iron War. And he had already lost so much. But he had also been so sure that they would win. He had been so sure that he could bring the goblins’ rule to an end.

  But he hadn’t. He’d failed. And so many had died. And so much had been lost. And he’d lain in House Red’s jail and learned about all the things that were so much worse than death. And finally, six months too late, what little was left of him had seen the truth of it: the fae’s time was done. It was the goblins’ time now. It was Osmondo Red’s time.

  He’d done many things for Osmondo Red since then. He’d done what he could to make things better for the fae along the way. Once he would have been ashamed of everything he’s done. Now, he finds he doesn’t really care.

  He and Osmondo came up with the plan for tonight together. They decided they needed to do it. It was necessary because despite everything Skart had done to save the fae from pain they still insisted on bringing it down upon their own heads. The rebels and troublemakers still picked at the same old wounds. So, he and Osmondo had devised a way to gather them all up, to send them all out to where House Red Cap’s troops were waiting, and finally remove them as a problem.