City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

“You’re saying—” he starts.

  “I am saying,” she says, cutting him off because she truly does not have the time, “that you know something is happening tonight, but not what. That you know Brethelda is not in full control of it. And I know deep down what you care about most in the world is House Spriggan. That you want to watch the other Houses burn. And in that we are, and always have been, kindred spirits.”

  That might be laying it on a bit thick, but the time for subtlety is long gone. She leans in, manufactures a little intimacy, implies a conspiracy. “I’m telling you that if you trust me, I can make that dream come true. So, tell me—” She smiles again. “—what have you heard about my fucking Dust?”

  Callart bites his lip, stares off down the smoke-choked streets for a moment. Then he nods. “I don’t have it,” he says.

  “I know,” she says. “If you had, you would have let these soldiers shoot me.”

  He smiles for a moment. “I always liked you more than Brethelda,” he says. Then he puts the soldier façade back into place. “We haven’t seen anything like what you’ve been talking about. If the fae have significant magical firepower, they’re not deploying it. All I can say is that they’ve been unusually tenacious. Honestly, it’s more like the bastards have a death wish.” He pauses. “Or whoever is sending them out here does.”

  And Granny Spregg is bruised, battered, bereft, and possibly mid-heart-attack, but now she smiles.

  “Yes. The one sending them out,” she says. “That’s the bastard I want.”

  Callart nods slowly. “Well, we only have a rough location.” He rubs his chin. “There’s talk of a factory.”

  “A name.”

  So, he tells her. And then he and Granny Spregg prepare to bring the whole might of the Spriggan armed forces down upon the head of a kobold called Skart.

  Jag

  Jag hits the back seat of the car hard. Her head rattles. Her kidneys ache. The car door slams and Sil heads to the driver’s seat, jimmies the door open with her sword. In the back seat, Jag picks herself up dazedly. She tries the doors. They don’t open. Sil fiddles with wires beneath the dash. When the engine coughs to life, she hits the gas.

  “Sil,” Jag says. “Sil. You have to listen to me.”

  Sil doesn’t.

  She tries the windows. Sil’s de-activated the controls. She throws an elbow against the glass. She damages herself more than she damages it.

  “Sil, please,” she says. “I have to get back there.” Edwyll is back there. Edwyll is bleeding on the floor. And she is not sure what he means to her, or why she needs to get back there, but with Edwyll there was the promise of a future she has never glimpsed before, and she felt as if finally she had a place in the world, and a direction, and that there might be something she could achieve one day that she could be proud of.

  She cannot achieve anything in this car.

  “Sil!” she yells. Sil doesn’t turn around. Sil doesn’t even flinch.

  Jag launches herself at Sil, but Sil’s elbow comes out of nowhere and collides with Jag’s jaw, and suddenly she’s faceplanting into a headrest, and bouncing off the floormat.

  She doesn’t give up. She can’t. So, she grabs at Sil again, but Sil has seized her finger and there is so much pain that Jag screams.

  When Sil releases her, Jag collapses back, nursing her hand.

  “Sil, please.” Jag tries again—desperately, urgently. “Just talk to me. Just tell me what’s going on. We can’t go back to House Red Cap. I can’t. Not anymore. Please.”

  But she does. She can’t stop Sil. Sil either can’t or won’t respond, and every attempt to grab at her, at the handbrake, at her seatbelt—it all ends in failure and pain.

  Eventually, Sil steers them down into a parking lot beneath an apartment block. She leaves Jag there. Everything is locked. Jag fiddles with the wires Sil has eviscerated from beneath the dash. The engine doesn’t even cough. She’s still trying to dig her way out through the back seat when a blind, deaf, mute goblin leads a blindfolded Sil back down. He steps unerringly to the car, and uses a long-bladed knife to jimmy the car door. Jag lunges forward, desperate to get past, but he grabs her with his free hand, holds her without much strain. Then, with his fingers still wrapped around the knife hilt, he punches Jag, princess of the city, hard in the mouth. Sil stands by impassively as Jag’s head bounces off the car’s roof and stars explode before her eyes.

  When Jag comes to, she is in the back seat of another car. She has been blindfolded just like Sil, and cotton has been stuffed in her ears. This is the way one returns to House Red Cap, the way she always returns, but she still panics. She gropes about blindly. Her fingers close on someone’s hand.

  “Sil?”

  There’s no response. Jag gropes at the door, the windows. She can find no escape. There is nothing she can do. She struggles anyway.

  Eventually the car stops. Strong hands pull her out and down long corridors far beyond where the standard House Red Cap reception rooms lie. Normally she knows every twist and turn of this House—its hallways, and chambers, and hiding spots have been her home since she was born—but tonight it feels like foreign terrain. She is lost and hyperventilating, and then without any warning the blindfold is yanked from her head and light rushes in.

  Details filter through the glare slowly. Sil’s silhouette stands beside her. Light comes from above. Space echoes around her.

  Someone, she sees, has taken Sil’s sword from her. Sil is not permitted it in Osmondo’s presence. Few weapons are. Her half-sister looks somehow diminished without it.

  She is, she realizes, in the grand hall. It is her father’s parody of some old fae king’s castle. The tapestries on the walls depict war crimes and pornography. Where fairy tales might cause one to imagine paintings and delicate windows, her father has instead selected scrawled curse words and blood-stained weaponry. Osmondo Red loves to bring the nobility of other Houses here. It is a place for them to squirm. Jag is almost certain she’s been brought here for the same reason.

  Osmondo Red sits at the head of the room upon a cast-iron throne, its austerity undercut by the cushions his age demands. He is dressed in absurd urban camouflage, a beret perched on his craggy head, and medals he earned a lifetime ago stitched across his sunken chest. He peers at Jag with evident dissatisfaction.

  “Hmm,” he grunts. “You survived.”

  It is, Jag supposes, only a degree or two colder than most greetings from her father.

  “I hope that’s not too disappointing.” Jag makes no attempt to hide her bile. This moment exists on a continuum of fights. The fact that this one feels more urgent doesn’t incline her to pull her punches. “Now that you have so kindly checked in on my well-being,” she says, “perhaps I could be excused?”

  Osmondo seems oddly distracted, though. It takes him a while to rise to the bait, staring instead into the echoing space of the hall. Only a few soldiers line its walls today, and devoid of its typical squalls of nobles and hangers-on, the place feels more than a little desolate.

  “Sil was not supposed to go into the Fae Districts with you tonight,” Osmondo says. He doesn’t look at Jag. “You were meant to go alone. You were meant to die.”

  Jag blinks at her father, approaches the absurd throne almost against her will. “I was what?”

  Her father focuses finally. “You were in the thick of it—” He sneers. “—and you still understand nothing. It’s shit like this that makes you disposable in the first place.”

  Such is the parental advice of Osmondo Red.

  “Your existence as my seed,” Osmondo says, “is a mistake. It shows a lack of faith in my own longevity. And you have continued to compound the error by not even having the fucking gumption to make yourself into a worthwhile rival. You’re just a pampered dilettante without even the decency to have good taste. Of course you’re disposable. You accepted the life of an empty symbol that was handed to you. Because the only thing you ever took from our history were the glasses
of champagne it earned you. So, fuck you and your injured pride. You are a failed experiment, and I am tired of having that failure rubbed in my face every day.

  “We are cleansing the city tonight, my daughter. My blind, dumb seed. We are getting rid of all the filth and washing it clean. And you were to be swept into the gutter along with it. A poor unfortunate casualty.” He smiles at her.

  And suddenly Jag realizes that the sabotaged car, the mercenary fae attacking her were not hired by usurping lordlings within House Red. They were hired by her own father. Fae mercenaries, because then fae could be blamed. Her father wouldn’t even have to explain himself.

  Except…

  Except Sil saved her. Even when ordered away, she had come as soon as Jag asked her. She had been there by Jag’s side. An act that could almost be called sisterly.

  Osmondo has never liked that bond between them. Has never wanted Jag to see Sil that way. And thinking on that, Jag realizes that not everything Osmondo is saying reflects reality. No matter how much he might want it to.

  “You say it’s House Red cleansing the Fae Districts,” she says. “But it’s House Spriggan out there in the streets.”

  Osmondo nods, and his attention appears to be wandering again. His face sours as he speaks, and Jag has to step closer to catch everything. “Yes.” He rubs his chin. “The bitch outplayed me. You are not the only part of this night to go awry.” He looks up and almost through Jag. “Sil saved you.”

  Abruptly he snaps back to the present and squints at Sil, standing almost lifeless back at the entrance to the hall. “What’s wrong with her?” he demands.

  Jag stares. Because fuck her father’s questions. Fuck the old goblin who just told her he wanted her dead. This mass-murdering, amoral, psychotic parody of a parent.

  Except… perhaps in the answer to this question there is a clue to how she can salvage things. So, after a moment’s hesitation, she bites down on her bile and says, “I don’t know. She won’t listen to me anymore. She would only do what some kobold was telling her.”

  Osmondo licks his teeth. “Ah. Mnemosyne,” he says. “A shame.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “She’s lost to you.” Osmondo’s voice has found its strength again. “Her mind is locked away. She’s spent. Used up. You can keep her as a pet, or you can dispose of her. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “A pet?” Jag has rarely wanted a weapon more. “She’s my sister. She’s your daughter. What the fuck is wrong with you, you sick old—”

  “What is wrong with you?” Osmondo suddenly roars. “You are a goblin! You are the child of warriors! You are the heir to all that this House represents. It is placed in your hands and you are incapable of taking it. What sort of empty fuck-up are you? How could you have spilled from my balls?”

  He shakes his head with violence this time. “We are at war!” he shouts. “And even if you are an empty figurehead you are still my figurehead. You are going to war. You will march at the head of an army, not because you are deserving but because the plebs like a little pomp to die for. So, you will provide it whether you want to or not. And if you die out there, all the better. My days of pretending your will matters are done.”

  Osmondo slumps down into his throne. He is red-faced, almost deranged-looking.

  “The bitch has not taken the city yet,” he says. “So, if we go down we shall take it with us. We will leave her and the generations she spawns with nothing but a rotting corpse to rule.”

  Osmondo signals his guards. “Take her away. If you can’t actually make her useful, at least make her look that way.”

  Jag doesn’t resist. She doesn’t want to be in this empty, echoing hall full of her father’s rantings any longer. She will take any exit she can get. Sil follows after them, silent, affectless, staring off into nothing.

  They reach a room, gray and windowless, some place dedicated to the utilitarian soullessness of daily House life. A uniform hangs there beside a bare porcelain sink.

  “Clean yourself up,” says the older of the guards. She thinks she recognizes him, but she has spent most of the past ten years trying to avoid her father, and the goblins he surrounds himself with. She can’t be sure. Despite their lack of contact, however, the guard sounds as if he’s almost as much a fan of Jag’s as Osmondo Red. “Get dressed.” He shoves Sil into the room after Jag. “We’ll be back for you soon.”

  It is only for a moment, so fast it is possible she is mistaken, but Jag thinks she sees a look of purest hatred flash across Sil’s slack features. Then it’s gone, and the door swings shut behind them.

  Jag, though, does not put on the uniform. She approaches Sil. She leans in, inches from her skin. “Sil,” she says. “Sil, are you in there? Can you hear me?”

  It is only the slightest convulsion around the eyes, but she rather thinks Sil can. And to Jag, for the first time since they were reunited, that feels like hope.

  Knull

  Knull is untethered. He is waiting and he is floating. An end is coming. He’s sure of it. Until then, smoke bears him aloft down city streets, bouncing him off building walls. Until then, he is trying to endure. Until then, he is being mastered by currents he cannot understand.

  It seems to him that he can see his whole life laid out below him. The whole pointless struggle of it all is mapped onto the asphalt beneath his feet. Here is where his mother shat him out into the world. Here is where she bought Dust to smother the pain of motherhood. Here is where he learned to hate her, and right here beside it, his father. And here is where Knull first tried Dust himself, in a moment of youthful experimentation, and despair, and self-immolation.

  Here. Right here. He sees it clearly. Lying semi-conscious and aching on Cotter’s couch, after the first hit he’d ever done. This is where the addiction really sunk its claws deep. Not to Dust. And the fact that it wasn’t Dust made him feel so smart. But it was also the moment when he decided to believe the whole fucked-up promise of the Iron City. This is where he’d bought in to the idea that if he just hustled enough, just sacrificed enough, just screwed over enough fae, that he’d get out. That he’d be happy. Be rewarded. That happiness would become a sun burning inside of him. And once he’d swallowed that lie, then it had been so much easier to believe all the others he’d told himself.

  But now all the lies are ending. Now, the whole system is exposed like guts to the sky, and the sun is coming to burn it all away. That distant unreachable star.

  A noise brings him back to earth, crash-landing out of his own thoughts. He looks around bewildered. The present seems shockingly tangible compared to the mists of the past.

  He doesn’t know the street he’s in. Not as it is now. Not with half the windows shattered, and a building front half-smashed. Not with a barricade of trashcans and sandbags blocking the road, and a fire burning in a pawnshop.

  He tries to find it—the thing that pulled him out of his reverie. Then he freezes as part of the barricade gives way. Bricks grind against each other. There is someone there. And yet… if it is a goblin with a gun… that’s an ending, isn’t it? That’s what he’s waiting for. Isn’t it?

  He closes his eyes.

  When he opens them again, a pair of eyes are looking right at him from over the edge of the barricade. “You,” the mouth beneath them says. “You were in that office with Skart.”

  Knull blinks. And suddenly he realizes that he does know this street. He is barely a block from the factory that Skart brought him to—as if it is a lodestone and he is the world’s most fucked-up magnet. And he does, he also realizes, recognize the fae staring at him. He has seen him in bars and on streets. He has a big mouth, and a bigger swagger. He has a group…

  Had.

  The word hits him hard. The scene from the factory basement flashes in front of his eyes—a kaleidoscopic flare of gore and horror. And Knull knows bone-deep that whoever this guy counted as a friend now exists very much in the past tense.

  Like Edwyll.

  A
s the thought hits, reality seems to shudder around him. His knees almost give out. He staggers to the barricade, leans on it, breathing hard.

  “You okay?” the fae asks, which, given the sheet of blood covering half his own face is more than a little absurd.

  A name comes to Knull. “Bee, right?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  They look at each other in the flicker of the flaming pawnshop. And Knull doesn’t know where to go from here. What does one say to someone else at the end of the world? And how do you walk away? After everything? After finally learning what that costs?

  “You…” He falters, reaching for words. “You seen any goblins about?” It’s easier, he thinks, to focus on the immediate now rather than on what has happened and where it will lead.

  Bee shakes his head. “Just trying to take some shelter. Tharn couldn’t get much further. He…” He can’t quite finish. He gestures with his hand.

  Confused, Knull peers over the barrier. He blanches. A krowbold he also slightly recognizes lies beside Bee, his usually ruddy skin pale as a ghost’s, right up until it’s not. At his midriff he becomes almost hallucinatory with color: bright reds, and vivid yellows, and septic, ghastly greens.

  “Hey.” Tharn raises a ghostly hand. Knull feels his gorge rising. He has no idea how the krowbold is still alive.

  “Sorry,” Tharn says weakly, “but this seems destined to be a pretty short get-to-know-you.”

  Bee

  Bee isn’t exactly certain how they got this far. He isn’t exactly sure when he realized Tharn was trying to hold his guts in with his hand. He doesn’t know exactly when he realized that Tharn was failing.

  Somehow, they ended up here. Perhaps, he thinks, they’re hiding. Perhaps they just collapsed at the most convenient spot. It all happened too fast for him to be sure. Pieces of the past are missing, and the present doesn’t quite add up to something coherent.

  He has seen so much death tonight. He has seen so many left behind and betrayed. It keeps playing out behind his eyes. The horrific past intruding relentlessly into the horrific present. So, now, he’s not sure if he can quite believe that this fae standing in front of him is real. He wonders if perhaps he’s losing his mind. Maybe, he thinks, it would be easier if he did.