City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  Bee staggers back, trips over something, sits down hard. He’s on the floor for a third time. If this was a fairytale, he’d stay down now.

  This is so much more than he has imagined. All the death he’s seen tonight and none of it has prepared him for this. The air pulses with magic. It sloughs off Skart in waves, burning Bee’s sinuses, pushing back the dull, eternal sting of the Iron Wall. The goblins can in no way cope with the fecundity of Skart’s murderous power.

  “We’ve got to carry on the fight.”

  Outside, Skart’s arm has become a buzzing, boiling ball of insects. He plunges a goblin into its depths and the soldier dies shrieking.

  “We’ve got to carry on the fight.” Bee says it again, says it louder, so he can hear himself. He stands up once more, his lesson unlearned. His knee almost goes out but he braces himself. He doesn’t have a gun anymore. He just has his will. He just has his refusal to stop in the face of all that is rational.

  He stumbles out of the ruins of the building. The remaining goblins are still fighting, are still shooting at Skart. The kobold seems to grow under their assault. He seems to come undone a little, unspooling into snarls of brambles and knots of wood, unraveling into churning balls of fur and feet. He spawns antlers and horns, branches and vines. He towers and totters. He flickers in and out of focus. He exists both here and somewhere else, both now and in the future he is forcing into existence.

  Bee bends down, picks up a stave of wood. He holds it out in front of himself like a sword. Like it’s capable of achieving something.

  “We’ve got to carry on the fight.”

  It’s a good mantra, he thinks as he advances across the street, heading into the tiger’s maw. It keeps his feet moving. It keeps him focused on things other than his pulse beating hard in his throat, other than the writhing mass that used to be a kobold, other than the bullets still ripping past his head, other than the only weapon in his hands being an overgrown twig.

  Skart has his back to him for now. That’s his only hope: that Skart is focused on the remaining goblins. They’re falling back. One of them is scrambling up the side of their APC, trying to get to the machine gun mounted on top. The thing that is Skart or was Skart reaches out with a bramble hand. Creepers shred the soldier like razor wire.

  One of the goblins made it to the APC, though, has found more significant artillery. He dives out of the back of the vehicle, holding something squat with a barrel as broad as an orange. He’s older than the other troops. He lands heavily, takes aim. There’s something determined and terrified on his lined face. The squat gun lets out a choked cough and something fat and sleek races through the air.

  The RPG detonates against Skart’s side. He reels away drunkenly. The street is suddenly full of swirling bats and butterflies. Flowers bloom in a great ragged burst. A fox breaks free of the kobold’s form, flees. The goblin desperately breaks the breech of his gun, fumbles in another grenade.

  The swollen mass of Skart rounds on him.

  The goblin fires again. This time, the grenade hits Skart in the middle of his amorphous mass. He seems to balloon under the impact, reeling, swelling. Then something appears to rupture in him, and a great swarm of creatures burst forth, breaking through his branches, and leaves, and vines, and thorns. There is an impossible number of them—rats and stoats, pine martens and mice, ferrets and weasels. They bear down on the goblin as he cracks open his gun a third time. He disappears beneath the swarm before he gets a chance to reload.

  The remaining goblins are running. Skart lumbers a few steps after them. Bee cannot imagine the look on his face. He cannot wholly imagine that Skart still has a face. So little of what Skart is now looks like a fae. He seems to have so many limbs, and so few of them seem to resemble anything like flesh.

  And then Skart turns around, and Bee’s one hope is stolen from him. He is just two yards behind the kobold now. He has the stave of wood raised above his head, but he can’t tell exactly where to strike. He can’t tell exactly what will hurt the swollen morass of foliage before him.

  Then something leers out of the tangle. Eyes are visible behind bars of thorns. Teeth glisten from behind purple leaves. There is an impression of a bright red tongue.

  “Why?” Skart asks in a voice raw and ragged. “Why do you persist?”

  Bee opens his mouth to answer but only a scream comes out. Suddenly something is gripping him, piercing him, hauling him skyward. He feels stabbing pain, white hot in his arms, his legs, his chest.

  A tree has burst forth, whether from the ground or from the mass of Skart himself Bee cannot tell. Its branches pin, and splay, and puncture him. They hold him aloft. He twitches. He gasps.

  “You make this necessary,” Skart says. His voice sounds guttural, wet, like something rising out of rot. “Fae like you are why I must do this.”

  A branch has pierced Bee’s shoulder, bursts out just below his collarbone. Three more pin his left arm. There are two more jutting through the meat of his right thigh.

  “I’ve got to carry on the fight.” Something bubbles at the back of Bee’s throat when he talks.

  “No,” Skart says, so quietly that Bee can hardly hear him above the pain shouting in his head. “No, you don’t.”

  The tree holding Bee pulses. The branch in his right bicep rips up through the muscle. His arm sags. He fights to keep his grip on the wooden stave.

  “What you have to do,” Skart says, his voice rising like a tide, “is shut up and listen.”

  But Bee isn’t listening. He’s beyond that. Right now, all he’s focused on is the fact that Skart is ignoring his right hand.

  “You ignorant fucking—” Skart starts. And then Bee shouts to drown him out. And Skart roars. And then Bee drives the wooden stave hard into Skart’s face. He screams as he does it. Blood bursts from the savage tear in his arm. His fingers spasm and his body shudders. But he holds on. He keeps up the fight. The only thing worse than attacking Skart is doing nothing at all.

  The wooden pole enters into the mass of foliage. It plunges at the eyes, the mouth, the tongue. There is a moment of startled brightness in the pupils and then there is a moment of resistance, a moment when Bee thinks his strength has failed. Then something gives—in him, in Skart, in the world that was, and is, and will be, in the magic clogging the air between them. Something snaps and breaks. Bee screams. Skart screams. The wooden stave plunges in deeper and deeper, swallowing Bee’s arm to the wrist, and Skart’s bright eyes suddenly go dull.

  Skart

  Skart is barely there. He feels threadbare and insubstantial. The goblins have taken so much of him away, have spread so much of him across the streets. The meat and muscle of him is run through with holes.

  He has stitched himself back together with magic as best he can. He has kept himself as whole as possible. But he is burning through the Dust so fast. It has required so much magic to end them all, to keep himself together. And every gunshot has accelerated his decay. If the magic gives out, he knows, so will he.

  But he still has enough Dust left. He still has supplies aplenty back in the house. He still has time.

  But then this. Then that bryad drives a wooden stave into his face. And there is so little of him left. There is so little skin and skull to resist the force of it. There is so little magic left to spare. And so, the stave spears through what remains of his skull.

  It kills him. It is the final blow, the one he cannot take. So, here, he dies. Now, he dies. But Skart is no longer mostly here or mostly now. He is more than half in the future. He is less than half flesh and bone. The magic is still there, still burning, still carrying him forward.

  Still, he is at least half dead. He has a thick pole of wood through his head and through his mind. It kills him.

  Just not enough.

  Skart drops Bee. He doesn’t care about Bee anymore. The magic is a wildfire in his soul. It is burning and burning, desperately trying to hold him together. And there is so little Dust left for it to burn through.
He needs to get back to the house, to his supplies. He needs to plunge himself into their depths, to inhale and ingest. If he can get back there, he has enough to sustain him, to keep him whole long enough to finish the ritual, to finish the creation of the future.

  He is just no longer sure there is enough left in him to get back there.

  He is on the ground. He reaches out with what appendages are left to him. Desperately, he hauls himself up and begins to stumble forward.

  Granny Spregg

  Not now. Not now.

  Granny Spregg clutches at her chest.

  Not now.

  She has crawled through the dead and the dying. She has wormed face-first through the dirt. She has lain hidden and still in the blood of others as Death walked past her, flinging spells in a mindless march toward violent suicide. She has let rodents and vermin crawl over her. She has crept and crawled while her soldiers have sacrificed themselves at Skart’s Dust-addled feet, and she has come so close to seizing victory, she can taste it.

  She can see it before her. The sack of Dust sitting in the center of a filthy room. Sitting in the center of a forest clearing. Sitting in both. In two worlds colliding. But she can see it. She can get to it. She can make it her own. She can fix the future. She can amend all the missteps of the past.

  And then her chest spasms like a grenade has detonated between her ribs, and she keels to the ground gasping. She claws at her chest, at her stutter-skipping heart.

  Not now. Not now.

  She is drenched in sweat. The pain is a lance impaling her from sternum to spine. Her left arm is paralyzed. Her chest is being crushed. The world seems hazed with purple light. She thinks she can hear her son’s laughter in her ears.

  But she refuses to give in. She has done so much. She has been born into a filthy hovel in the desolate North. She has loved and murdered a goblin who would block her path to power. She has marched into war at Mab’s side. She has founded a city of iron. She has raised and been betrayed by three children. She has schemed and clawed and murdered. She has gotten all this way. She will not give in now just because her flesh is weak. Just because she is dying.

  Not now. Not yet.

  She puts one foot in front of the other. She takes a step. The world spins. And then she bites the dirt, as all around her the whole world comes crashing down.

  Edwyll

  Edwyll opens his eyes. He must have passed out. He wants to pass out again. His stomach is on fire. His fingers are numb. All his heat is being sucked into his guts and spilled out over the floor.

  He lies there, eyes closed, just breathing. Breathing is all he can do. Even that hurts. Each inhalation. Every exhalation.

  There is so much noise, he thinks. There is a sound like a war. The ground seems to shake. He thinks this might be worse than when Skart was talking.

  He wonders if the kobold has done what he set out to do yet. Is that why he’s quiet? Is the city already ruined?

  Ruined. He turns that over in his head. Already ruined. Could Skart really ruin the Iron City any more than it already is?

  He feels something rising within him as he lies there. He feels something unfurling into the space where his blood used to be.

  He has always wanted so much better for this city. He has fought so hard for it. And he knows that his efforts were imperfect, but if just once—just one single time—this city had tried to meet him halfway. If it had just once looked at him with something like kindness. If it had looked at him like Jag looked at his art. But instead, it took the one spark of hope and kindness he found within its streets and it ripped her away.

  He wants to see it one last time. This city. This place that betrayed his dreams. This place that has finally, totally, irrevocably broken his hope. He wants to see it in the grip of Skart’s victory. He wants to laugh at them all. He wants to die laughing.

  He opens his eyes. He’s facing the couch, old and filthy. He is, inexplicably, lying on a bed of leaves. Wind is pulling at his clothes. He can see nothing, can understand even less about what he’s feeling.

  It is an act of will to roll over. The physical effort is almost negligible. But it is the pain he must prepare for, that he must decide he can take.

  He does so. It is worse than he imagined it would be. His blood has soaked through the leaves and stuck him to the floor. When he’s done, he lies there panting, eyes screwed shut tight against the pain of each breath.

  Finally, he opens his eyes again. Finally, he sees.

  He sees a clearing of tall dark trees surrounded by the fallen walls of his parents’ home. He sees ruin and flame. He sees smoke drifting listlessly. A bruised, red sky churning overhead. Animals running, snarling and witless. Bodies strewn in a dirty street.

  It makes no sense. It makes as much sense as the dry leaves beneath his cheek. It is as confused and terrible as this city has always been, has always insisted on being. It is just, he thinks, that now the horror of it all is right at the surface, boiling up for all to see.

  This is what we created, he thinks. Together, this is what we all achieved.

  And he knows it isn’t his fault. He fought against this with every pencil line, and every brush stroke, and every sweep of his paint can. He tried to change the tide. It isn’t even his fault that he failed.

  He wants to scream now, at the last. He wants to yell at everyone standing by tonight that this is their fault. That all they had to do was listen, was engage, was do anything but silently accept the world as it was. But it’s too late to scream. He’s screamed a lot tonight and it hasn’t achieved a thing.

  He wishes Jag was here. He wishes he had someone to help him see it all a little better, a little clearer, someone to help him find some good in it all. He wishes she was here to help him feel just a little bit better about everything ending this way. Because this is an ending, he has no doubt about that.

  And then, as he stares at the mess of it all, he sees something his eyes had missed at first. A package lying in the center of the clearing of trees, unguarded, untended. Just a few yards from him. A bundle of white plastic cut open. A package of Dust.

  It is not, to him, a promise. It is not even an exit. It is not a solution or a weapon. He does not know the magic to heal himself. Rather, it is a paintbrush. To Edwyll, the source of all the night’s chaos and heartbreak is a way to make a final statement, and to have one last go at changing the world.

  And so, he decides to make it his.

  Knull

  Knull’s whole world has been reduced to the size of his ankle. Its ragged drumbeat of pain is the only thing he can hear. The copper scent of its blood is the only thing he can smell. Its heat floods his senses. He lies on the floor, mouth open wide and eyes clenched tight as he squeezes at his own skin.

  Finally, he has to look. He doesn’t want to know, but he has to. He has to understand how bad it is, how fucked the shape of his life has become. He opens his eyes, and sees the unnatural angle, the white of the bone. Then everything is obscured by the rising tide of nausea.

  He doesn’t know how he’s going to stand. He knows he has to stand. He knows he has to escape.

  He knows too that he shouldn’t want to escape. His parents are here somewhere. Edwyll. He should want to see if he can save them. Even if he is pretty certain that they’re dead. He should want to make sure. He knows, too, what he promised to Bee, and all the things he said about having to do this, and about not doing it being the worst thing of all. Shit, he even meant it. He believed it. Skart should be stopped. He deserves to be stopped. He deserves to have his head snapped off and have someone piss on the stump. But there is a long distance, Knull sees now, between should and shall. Maybe with Bee beside him he had the spine to bridge that gap, but there is no sign of Bee now. There is only his traumatically snapped ankle. There is only the certainty of failure and pain. And he is not a fighter. He is not a rebel. He is just a brixie looking for a way out of a room with no doors.

  His world expands by inches. He drags himsel
f down the ruined front hallway of his parents’ house. The external wall has collapsed. A lot of the ceiling is on the floor. He finds a column of pipes and wires and plaster that is still mostly standing. He hauls himself upward hand over hand. Every time his ankle bumps against the floor he lets out a grunt or squeal of pain. Tears leak down his face.

  When he’s upright he takes stock. Things have progressed since Skart deflected his bullet, and tore apart a doorway and Knull’s ankle. The ruins of an armored vehicle are on fire. Bushes like thorny fists, spawning great tuberous roots, have cracked the concrete. Bodies are caught in their branches, are scattered on the blacktop around them.

  Knull looks back at where the living room used to be, back at the source of all this mess. He inhales sharply.

  The brick of Dust is untended. It’s just sitting there in the middle of the room. All its promise, all its potential, just a few yards away.

  Knull recoils from the sight so hard he almost falls down. Balanced on one leg he clings to the column of pipes and plaster like a shipwrecked soul staring from a spar of wood at a circling shark.

  Everything wrong with the Iron City, every lie it ever told him, every wrong decision he ever made, every fae he screwed over—it’s all contained within that plastic wrapping. Everything that led him to this point is there. It wants him to take it now. He knows it. It wants him to keep trying to sell it, to work himself deeper and deeper into its tar pit of false promises and broken hope. It wants him to drag others in with him.

  Like he already has.

  Like Edwyll.

  He looks away, almost afraid to take his eyes off it, almost convinced that when he looks back it will be closer to him, silently advancing. But he is looking for a path out, a way to navigate the wasteland beyond. There are things still moving out there. The wounded crawling. Vermin scattered and skittering over rubble and bodies. He looks for Bee but can’t pick him out of the carnage that fills the torn-up street. Birds and bats wheel overhead. A mess of thorns and vines still sprawls and spreads, the last dregs of magic in it giving it the impression of intent, as if it is crawling toward the house. He shudders.