City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  He opens his mouth. She isn’t interested in what he has to say. She puts the blade into it. It’s hard to do with her busted arms, but she makes the effort.

  19

  And They All Lived Happily Ever After

  Knull

  Knull wants to punch someone. He wants to scream.

  He’s back here again. Every time he swears he’ll never be back—he’s back here again.

  Bee looks at the house before them. He looks at Knull. “This place?”

  “No.” Knull hides behind a sneer. “I brought you here just because I like the ambiance so much.”

  Bee pinches his upper lip. With the other hand he fingers a pistol. “I wish I still had the machine gun,” he says.

  “Wish I had a gun,” Knull says back.

  Bee puts wide eyes on him. “Wait. You don’t?”

  Knull meets his gaze. “I’m an entrepreneur, not a thug.”

  Bee is still staring. “But… you’re… you’re a drug dealer.”

  “Notice how that’s different from assassin?”

  “But how are we…?”

  Knull shrugs. “He’s one kobold. One gun seems like enough.”

  Bee lets out a sound that is not exactly a laugh or a sob. “The half-sidhe with him, Sil. I’ve seen what she can do. And I don’t know if he’s done something to her, or if she just has no conscience at all, but I do not think that one gun is going to be enough.”

  Knull’s sneer quivers. He tries to keep his breath steady. “You know,” he manages, “back when you talked me into this it seemed like you had a spine.”

  Bee shakes his head. “We can’t stop him if she’s skewered us both.”

  Knull licks dry lips. The scream is just behind them. He almost can’t get the words around the dry lump in his throat. “He sent her away,” he says hoarsely.

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Knull’s voice is decidedly unsteady.

  Bee hesitates over that, but he doesn’t push it. It’s the most Knull’s liked him all night.

  Instead, Bee looks down at his pistol. “You’re sure you don’t have a gun?”

  “If I did, I would shoot you right now.”

  Bee chews his lip.

  Knull can feel his control skipping. Everything is boiling inside him. He keeps seeing Edwyll lying on the floor. He keeps seeing the blood. He wants to run. He wants to scream. Instead he turns to Bee. “We can’t just fucking stand here,” he says. “We can’t. We have to…” He rubs at his temples.

  “I know,” Bee says. “You’re right. The only thing worse than doing this is not doing it.”

  And that’s stupid, and nonsensical, and exactly how Knull feels too. So, they cross the street and approach the house. Knull feels exposed. He’s waiting for a shout, a shot. He’s waiting for the idiocy of all this to be laid bare.

  There’s an odd pressure in the air as they get closer. Knull’s ears pop. His eyes water. He can taste something metallic in the back of his throat. Like iron. Like blood.

  Bee wipes his nose, blinks hard. “What is that?”

  “How should I know?”

  But they both know it’s Skart. They both know that it’s his plan that they feel compelled to stop. They both know that somehow they have staked themselves and their survival on ending it, whatever it is. So, they keep moving toward the front door and no one shouts, and no one shoots them.

  The door is open just a crack. Maybe Knull left it that way when he stormed out. Bee leans in, cocks an ear.

  “I hear something,” he says. “A voice.”

  Knull swallows. He lets Bee push the door open. It’s stiff, still blocked by piles of useless crap, but he opens it enough for them to wedge themselves through. Just not wide enough for them to be confident of a quick exit.

  All the lights in the hall of Knull’s parents’ house are out. Everything is shadows and black gaping doorways. The only light comes from the living room at the end of the hall. It is not, Knull notes, the blue-white flicker of the TV screen. It is not the failing glow of a single bare bulb strung from a mold-spattered ceiling. Rather, it is something otherworldly. It is something like daylight filtered through a scrim of blood.

  He can hear birds as he approaches. Hawks screaming, shrill and savage. He can hear something roaring. A wind howling. He can smell something raw and feral. A scent of fur and meat.

  They step forward. Bee has his gun held out in front of him. His hands are shaking. Knull’s whole life feels like a funnel drawing him inexorably to this point. If he is ever going to be anything other than his father, he has to do this.

  They stalk down the hallway. Past Edwyll’s room. Past his own. Past the kitchen. The living room is five yards away. Then three. Then two. Slowly they see more and more of what is happening. Of what they face.

  It is as if two realities have been superimposed upon each other. One of them is a filthy, shit-strewn room. The collapsing furniture has been shoved up against walls covered by peeling wallpaper and spreading mold. There is a couch with a female brownie and male pixie collapsed on it. They may be sleeping. They may be dead. There is a curled-up figure at the foot of the couch…

  The other image is something Knull can hardly place. It is something he has seen only in pictures and dreams. It is something he has seen dull reflections of when visiting his most addled customers. It is an image of a lost past.

  Trees seem to rise all around him, towering high above the room’s translucent ceiling. Their bark is black and twisted. Gnarls and knots writhe up their surface. Branches claw back down toward the dead brown leaves that blow across the floor. He can hear their desiccated rustling. The sky overhead is the color of drying blood. Birds wheel and scream. Bruised clouds twist in spiraling winds.

  Skart is in a clearing at the center of the room. He is bent over, slowly tracing a circle on the ground, scratching at it with a tarry black branch. He marks symbols with sharp flicks of his wrist. He doesn’t look up.

  In the center of the clearing lies the brick of Dust. Knull’s eyes linger on it only for a second, though. Then they go back to the body at the foot of the couch.

  They go back to Edwyll.

  The wind starts to howl.

  Bee holds up the gun. His hand is shaking like one of the leaves caught in the winds above.

  “Give me the gun.”

  Bee looks questioningly at Knull. Knull can feel resolve tightening in his gut like a fist.

  “Give me the gun,” he whispers.

  Bee hesitates, but after a moment he gives Knull the gun. Maybe he knows that Knull needs to do this more than he does. Maybe he’s just a coward. Knull doesn’t really care.

  The gun feels heavy and cold in his hands. He’s never fired one before, but there is a certainty in him now as he raises it. As he closes one eye and looks down the barrel. This is right. This has to be. This is the one piece of magic the Iron City owes him.

  He lines the sights up on the back of Skart’s skull.

  Skart

  It’s coming closer. It’s approaching faster and faster. Skart can feel it, it’s implacable inevitability. He can feel the weight of it, crushing every obstacle before it: the future.

  He is the future’s midwife. He is delivering a new golden age. Everything great again.

  He takes the Dust pinch by pinch, letting its power build inside of him. He lets each high take him deeper in. He feels magic crackling on his breath, writhing beneath his fingernails.

  He takes another pinch of Dust. When he pulls his fingers away, they’re bloody. His sinuses feel raw and aching. His eyes are dry as stones.

  He scratches more runes on the ground, more sigils. He breathes more words of power. He weaves the ritual, binds the magic tighter. Without it, he’d be dead already, lying on the floor choking on his own blood.

  He takes another pinch of Dust.

  As he works, he starts to feel a pressure in the back of his head. Dull at first, it sharpens, resolves, becomes something mor
e definite. He focuses. He can feel two fae back there. He can sense a shared intent. Something red and malign clawing toward him…

  He throws up a hand just as the gun goes off. A great screaming wind howls upward, a wall of air that the bullet cannot penetrate. The trees around him groan under the force of it. Leaves storm in hurricane-induced fury. He can hardly see through them. But he sees enough.

  Knull. Bee. The pair of them staring, wide-eyed with alarm from around the barrel of a gun.

  He sweeps an arm toward them. He barely even needs to focus his power to do it. He is so stuffed with magic it’s almost indistinguishable from his own will. The wind screams towards them. A cyclone of torn leaves and snapped branches. The doorway they’re using as cover detonates under its impact. Cheap plasterboard and rotting wood fly in ragged chunks as the pair are bowled away, head over ass.

  The blow is more than the tottering house can stand. The whole ceiling starts to slump, bricks and timber crashing down. Dust billows. Skart barely pays it any attention. He is only half here now. He is lost in his vision, in his summoning, in what is about to be. Ghostly bricks tumble through him, roll away, become nothing more than clumps of sticks and moss.

  He advances toward the devastation slowly. He forces another pinch of Dust into his nose. It feels like ramming a power cord into his face. His body jerks and his smile is a rictus. He is starting to have to concentrate on keeping himself whole. He is binding the magic to his body, to his cells. It stitches him together. When he releases it all, there will be nothing left of him. He will be atomized. He is looking forward to it. He is looking forward to being incorporated into everything the world becomes. An indelible stain.

  He sweeps his arm again. The rubble rips aside. The wounded house moans. He sees the pair lying on the floor, bloody and bruised. Knull clutches at his ankle, face contorted.

  Skart takes more Dust. His tongue feels like a wound.

  “You,” he says. His words feel like they have substance. Black-red mist gusts from his mouth. A blackbird flies out from between his teeth.

  “You are the reason this is necessary.”

  The walls of the corridor are crawling with thorns and roaches. Black flowers bloom. “You refuse to learn,” he says.

  Mushrooms rise and fall as if the place is respiring.

  “And so, I must teach you.”

  He raises an arm. His skin shimmers like a heat haze. Insects swarm off him. Bee makes some guttural noise.

  And then, before he can bring the hand down, before the lesson can be learned, the wall to Skart’s left disintegrates in a hail of .50 caliber shells.

  Granny Spregg

  Granny Spregg and her troops had been staring at a bloodbath in a factory basement when they’d felt it. She’d snapped her head around without fully understanding why she was doing it. She’d stared into nothing. There had been a pressure behind her eyes, a tingling in her sinuses. There had been the smell of rotting vegetation in the air, and the taste of soil on her tongue.

  The last dregs of the Dust in her system had sung to her then. They had sung a song of blood and wild growth. They had sung to her of hunger and glory.

  She had cocked her head to one side, walked past the hacked-up bodies, and heaved herself back up the stairs to the factory entrance, the others following. The mystery of what had happened at Skart’s last known whereabouts suddenly forgotten. What was happening out there had been much more urgent, much more pressing.

  Bruised clouds had twisted overhead. Their epicenter was just half a mile away.

  “Get in the trucks,” she’d said. The soldiers were standing around her, also staring with a mix of horror and wonder. One had been weeping blood.

  “What’s happening?” Callart had asked her.

  “He’s using the Dust.”

  Now, the APCs scream through the streets. Their massive tires bounce and chew at the road. Heavy chassis shake and thunder. Goblin troops work at their weapons with worried hands. Sweat collects on Granny Spregg’s upper lip.

  Her chest hurts more than ever now. Her breath is short and ragged. There is a tremor in her left hand she can’t stop. She’s not totally sure she can see out of one eye.

  But she’s close, too. She’s so close she can literally taste it. Flesh and dirt and sweet-sour berries at the back of her throat. It is so close to being hers: the future; the chance to be returned to what she once was, to reset the clock, to be glorious again.

  The APC hurtles around a corner. She staggers, tries to catch herself, and then a soldier does it for her. It feels like her whole body almost snaps around his arm. She grunts and spits blood. The young soldier tries hard to mask his look of disgust.

  Soon he will beg to have her.

  The APC makes another lumbering charge down a street, then its brakes scream. Granny Spregg feels nauseous as it slews to a stop. She takes unsteady steps toward the rear doors, almost falls into the street. Another soldier is supporting her. She doesn’t even have the strength to shake him off. This is bullshit.

  They are in front of a squalid house in a squalid street. So far, the night’s violence hasn’t spread here, but it’s not as if things could get much worse. Roofs of corrugated iron hang askew. Windows are covered by plastic sheets and scraps of moldering cardboard. Some houses are even missing doors.

  But it’s the house in front of her that feels like it’s trying to dig her eyeballs out of her skull. It’s the house in front of her that throbs in her blood like a second heartbeat. It’s the house in front of her that has clouds spiraling directly above its dilapidated roof.

  She takes a step toward it. Then, from inside, there is a sound like an explosion. One wall slumps. The roof sags. There isn’t time.

  Her eyes fly back to the large machine gun mounted on the APC’s back. She turns to the soldier holding her.

  “Get me up there.”

  “Ma’am?”

  She’d slap him if she wasn’t worried it would break her wrist. “It’s hardly a marriage proposal,” she snaps at him. “You don’t have to think it over.”

  He hoists her aloft. She grips the gun’s controls.

  “It’s got a kick,” he warns her. Other soldiers are moving to take cover. Callart looks nervous.

  “Don’t worry,” she tells the soldier. “So do I.”

  She opens fire. The heavy machine gun bellows in joy, vomits flame and shells. The wall of the house tremors and crumbles as she hangs onto the bucking gun. It feels as if it is shaking her apart, as if she is on the edge of disintegrating. Her heart skips and jitters, but she hangs on. Glass shatters. Fist-sized holes smash through the wall. Architecture groans, gives way in a rush.

  If only she had known lovers like this gun.

  The troops are spreading out around her now, rifles pressed tight to shoulders. Callart is trying to roar louder than the gun. Everything is obscured by smoke.

  Granny Spregg finally stops firing. It feels like everything in her body is broken. She hasn’t felt this alive in years.

  “Hold!” Callart is yelling. “Hold!”

  She doesn’t want to hold. It’s in there. The Dust. Her Dust. She scrambles down the side of the APC, falls, lands hard. A soldier bends to pick her up.

  A blast lifts him off his feet, sends him flying across the street. He hits a wall with enough force to dent it. Blood halos his slumping body.

  Then, the kobold comes out of the smoke and dust, charging, his eyes wild. There is a ragged wound in his right arm, and everything below the bicep hangs by ragged threads. There is no blood, though. Instead, vines and creepers burst from the wound, something furry that ends with a ragged claw. She sees something with legs and teeth drop from it, scamper away.

  The kobold comes on and with each step he takes, the asphalt cracks. Roots emerge, reach blindly. Insects and rodents crawl up from the depths.

  The kobold sweeps his good left arm. Another soldier flies away, lands on a rooftop with a sickening crack.

  “Fire!” Cal
lart roars and the soldiers pull their triggers. Bullets pepper the kobold’s body. Leaves and brambles burst from exit wounds. Birds and moths fly from him. He marches on. There is a roaring in Granny Spregg’s ears. One of the soldiers disappears beneath a massive ball of rats that seems to come from nowhere.

  Next to Granny Spregg, another soldier falls. Ugly white plants burst from his mouth and eyes. She seizes his gun, opens fire. Her mind is chattering as loudly as the weapon, screaming at her to run, but the Dust is so close. The future is so close.

  All that stands in her way is this kobold. But the kobold comes on, and he brings rage and horror with him at every step.

  Bee

  Inside the house, Bee breathes through blood. He stares at a world-wheeling madcap. He thinks he’s going to throw up.

  There’s a narrow beam of wood on his chest, pinning him to the floor. He pushes it off with one hand, grunts. He rolls over, heaves himself to all fours. As soon as he’s up on his feet, though, his left knee buckles. He staggers, reaches for a wall that isn’t there, goes down again.

  Back on all fours, wheezing pain, he tries to get his bearings. He is in a half-collapsed corridor. He can hear thunder. No. He can hear gunfire.

  He tries to put the moments back together. The story of then and now. Knull took the shot at Skart. Skart somehow deflected the bullet, attacked them. Then, the story loses joint. There is a blurry impression of falling over and over, of pain. It’s not clear. Then Skart was standing over them. His mouth was full of hatred but Bee can’t remember the words. And then… then…

  Then gunfire. He looks through a haze of smoke and dust. He can see shapes moving, muzzle flashes flaring. He can hear screams.

  He gets to his feet again, bends over, breathing hard. He spits nauseous streams of saliva onto the floor.

  He starts to look for Knull. The drug dealer must be nearby. But then a bullet buzzes past his head and smacks dully into the wall behind him, and he looks up in time to see Skart advancing on a goblin with a gun. The kobold raises an arm that has somehow gone wrong at the elbow. Skart’s arm spasms and something like a tree bursts from it. Its trunk spears the soldier; branches, still growing, burrow in then tear the goblin apart. He’s screaming as he dies—a high-pitched, animal sound.