The Iron Dragon’s Mother

by Michael Swanwick

  Cat felt her lips go thin and hard. Without saying a word, she drew up the holey stone on its chain and held it to one eye. Seen through the stone, Narcisse’s body was everywhere falling in upon itself. But lines of shimmering, multicolored light ran through her flesh like a sacred serpent, throwing off small, jewel-like suns in her brain and lungs and uterus. “It’s so beautiful!” Cat said. For some reason, this made her angry. “Why is it so fucking beautiful?”

  She did not need to ask why Narcisse’s body, unglamoured, looked so ugly.

  The bone-white, starveling-thin creature on the bed looked up at her from the blackened hollows of her eyes. “Memento mori,” Narcisse murmured. “It means ‘remember to die.’ It’s on the list of things you have to do at least once. It comes last on the list, admittedly. But if you haven’t died, then you haven’t led a rich, full life yet.” She had no hair, not even eyelashes. Her skin was mottled and blotched.

  “Narcisse…”

  “I’m being profound, darling. Don’t step on my lines. I’ve led a very rich, very full life—I’ve had lovers and broken hearts and had my heart broken in turn. Nor have I been a stranger to hate. I killed someone who deserved it and another who didn’t. Once I fought a duel and when my opponent had made her shot, fired into the air, sneering elegantly. I’ve smuggled drugs and I’ve saved lives. I’ve gambled everything I had on a single throw of the rune sticks. I was a spy for a time—but I can’t tell you about that! Last and best of all, I found my passion in service to the railroad and now I’m dying in the proud knowledge that I did my duty by it. The only thing I lacked was a little sister … and the Goddess provided me with you just in the nick of time.”

  “Well, it’s still a cruel trick for the Goddess to play on my heart.”

  “Mine as well, sweetness. Mine as well. But where do we go to complain?” Gray lips twisted in pain. “I … have something to ask you. But … right now, I think I need some painkiller.”

  Fata Narcisse began to weep. Looking away, Cat dropped her stone monocle back under her blouse.

  * * *

  When Narcisse had fallen into a drugged sleep, Cat left her in Josie’s care and sought out Queenie. “I recognized your voice last night at the Blinded Cockatrice.”

  “We all have things that keep us going, ma’am. Once a week, I put on a mask and get up on stage and speak the truth. It’s a harmless enough vice. Nobody takes it seriously.”

  “You talked about killing Esme in her sleep!”

  “She has very little to fear. My list is long and she’s not exactly high up on it. Anyway, who’s to say the uprising will happen in our lifetimes? Not I. There are days I fear it will never come.”

  Queenie faded away.

  * * *

  Cat was half drowsing in a chair by Narcisse’s bedside when Grimalka entered the room with a rush and a sudden stop. Nodding toward the sleeping elf-lady, she said, “How is she?”

  “They tell me she’s on her final decline.”

  “The idiots! I should have been called immediately. Have the soul surgeons arrived yet?”

  “I didn’t know they’d been summoned.”

  “I sent for them myself.”

  Rodolphe produced a chair and placed it near the bed, facing Cat’s. Grimalka sat. “Has she told you what she wants from you yet?”

  “I don’t think she wants anything.”

  “I was abandoned in a scrapyard as an infant and raised by machines,” Grimalka said. “As a result, I neither appreciate nor understand people the way I do mechanisms. The one exception is Narcisse, because she is cold and rational and predictable.”

  “To me, she seems the exact opposite of that.”

  “That is because you don’t know her as I do. Even dying, Fata Narcisse wants something from you.”

  They were both silent for a time. Then Grimalka said, “You look awful. Go outside and get some air. We’ll take turns sitting by her.”

  * * *

  Loitering by a small stand of birches, thinking, Cat saw Queenie hurry by and disappear behind a boulder taller than herself. Curious, Cat followed a garden path around the boulder and discovered a door in its side. The door was unlocked, so she opened it. A stairway, carved into the stone and the bedrock beneath, wound down into darkness illuminated only occasionally by bare incandescent bulbs.

  Closing the door behind her, Cat descended.

  There was a landing every time the spiral came full circle and empty, shadow-filled corridors leading out to either side. But Cat could hear Queenie’s footsteps tap-tap-tapping downward, so she continued on. Several gyres deeper, the stairway abruptly ended and Cat came stumbling to a halt at the sight of five haints, arms crossed and eyes hard. Queenie stood at the center of the line with Rodolphe beside her. Cat didn’t recognize the others.

  In imitation of those confronting her, Cat crossed her arms. “All right. You caught my attention and then popped into a doorway rather than simply disappearing the way you guys usually do. The door was unlatched and the lights left on so I could find my way. And you’re here waiting for me. Obviously, this is something I was meant to do. So, you tell me: Why?”

  “Arrogant above and insolent below. You don’t get to ask questions here, girl.” Queenie turned her back. “This way.”

  Cat followed her down a dim corridor. The other haints walked alongside and behind her—as if an honor guard, though more likely to make sure she didn’t bolt.

  The hallway was dry, cool, and carved from solid stone. Its walls had been painted institutional green. There were doors at regular intervals. As they walked, Queenie said, “Do you know who first owned Avernus? Fire spirits. They built the city from molten rock. It had a different name then, one you could not pronounce. But with the waning of the Age of Fire, they retreated to the Empyrean, leaving what was renamed Mjibilandege, which means City Without Birds, to the smoke spirits—the haints, as you call us. Being surface creatures, we abandoned the undercity and constructed the buildings above. For a long time, all was well. Then the fey came with their armies to destroy our temples and kill nine-tenths of all who lived here, enslaving the rest. They gave the city its current name and today we are servants in what was rightly our home.

  “That’s eight thousand years of history condensed and put into a soup bowl for you. The truth is a little more complicated and a lot more horrific. Believe me, there’s atrocity enough in the long version to justify anything we might do when the opportunity arises.” Queenie stopped before a door. A haint unlocked it and flicked a switch to flood the interior with light.

  Inside was a storeroom with neat piles of linens arranged on wood shelves, enough to serve the entire compound. The lower shelves on one wall had been removed to make room for what looked to be a coffin. Two of the haints removed the lid, and the smell of rose petals ascended from the interior. Cat saw that the coffin held a fresh-looking corpse in the browned and brittled remains of a white lace gown. The corpse had long red hair and cheeks that were ever so faintly blushed. So vital was the face that its eyes appeared to be ready to flutter open from the lightest of sleeps.

  Save for the hair, it looked exactly like Narcisse.

  “This is Echloë, Narcisse’s twin sister and by right of six minutes’ primogeniture the Syrinx of House Syrinx. Which honor and title, of course, have since passed to her younger sister.”

  “Six minutes!” Cat had known many primary and secondary heirs to great houses in her youth and seen the hatred and scorn they bore one another. “I don’t have to ask what that did to their relationship.”

  “It would do you no good if you did,” Queenie said. “We are bound by oaths of confidentiality never to reveal any details of the personal lives of our employers.”

  “There’s no need to be so starchy,” Rodolphe admonished her. “Courtesy costs us nothing.” Then, to Cat, “Forgive her. She speaks for no one but herself. The issue at hand, however, is that we were ordered to place Echloë’s body where it would be safe and never touch i
t again. Now it must be removed. You can see the quandary this puts us in. We require your assistance in carrying Echloë to the surface.”

  “This is so not in my line of command,” Cat said. “Anyway, there must be commercial services for this sort of thing.”

  Queenie’s face was hard and cold. “No service repairs a broken oath. Here’s the deal. You have Narcisse’s true name—don’t ask how I know; those with servants have no secrets. It will work on Echloë. Use it to speak to her. If, afterward, you agree that what you have learned was worth the price, carry the corpse to the surface and leave it in the potting shed near the boulder.”

  Cat mulled over the offer. The price was high. But did she dare turn it down? “If I don’t think it’s worth it, I don’t have to do a thing?”

  “No. You’ll be on your honor, however.”

  “What should I ask her?”

  “We can’t tell you that,” Rodolphe said. “Just talk.”

  Controlling her revulsion, Cat knelt beside the coffin and took a hand that was neither cold nor particularly warm in her own. In her thoughts she said, “Aerugo. Rust, dear. Speak to me.”

  A voice buzzed in her mind, too small and distant for Cat to make out the words.

  “Can you speak louder? You sound awfully far away.”

  Again the voice sounded, right on the threshold of coherence. Cat closed her eyes and strove with all her might to make out the words.

  The ground lurched beneath her.

  Opening her eyes, Cat stood. She was no longer in the linen closet but, instead, in an airy pavilion with floor-to-ceiling windows to the front and curving cement walls to either side. Gray, wintry rain slanted down outside and lashed against the glass. Before her was the most oddly composed crowd Cat had ever seen. They took selfies and snapshots of each other in front of a cracked bronze bell hung so that it overtopped them all. There was not a single fey, dwarf, or haint or, indeed, any other ethnicity save only mortals.

  “I know this place!” Helen cried. “This is in my world. I’ve been here.”

  “It is where I have been anchored and imprisoned,” a flat, uninflected voice very much like that of sleepwalker said behind her. “As a joke, I suppose.”

  Cat turned. Half visible, like flesh turned to shadow, stood Echloë. Her face, so expressive on her corpse, was here lifeless, her expression drear. “I don’t understand. Is this a temple? Are those people worshiping a bell?”

  “That’s the Liberty Bell,” Helen said. “See the crack? It’s a symbol of freedom throughout the world. When I was a child, I came here on a school trip. It … Oh, wait. I see. I get the joke now. Whoever chained her here must be real jerks.”

  “Yes,” Echloë said. It did not escape Cat’s attention that she could hear Helen.

  Just then, a little girl went skittering out of the crowd, laughing and pursued by her mother. She ran full tilt through Echloë and should have slammed into Cat but kept on going until brought up short by a maternal hand clamped tight on her wrist. The mother bent low to scold her child in a fierce whisper, shaking her for emphasis.

  “I’m not really here,” Cat said, “am I?”

  “No.”

  “I was told I should talk with you.”

  “Then talk.”

  Cripes, Cat thought. This wasn’t going to be easy. “All right, tell me. Are you dead? Or living?”

  “Dead but barred from rebirth.”

  “Oh,” Cat said.

  They were both silent for a long minute. Then Cat tried again. “Your sister is dying.”

  “What does she say about me?”

  Cat tried to lie, discovered she could not. “She … never mentions you.”

  “Ah. She feels guilty, then. Good.”

  “Guilty? What for? Did she murder you?”

  “Just the opposite. On my last day alive, she stopped me from killing myself.”

  “Okay,” Cat said. “I didn’t see that coming. Why don’t you just tell me the whole story?”

  “As you will,” Echloë said.

  “I woke up that morning filled with happiness because during my sleep I had found the solution to all my problems. I put on my best summer dress and had the most wonderful breakfast: fresh strawberries; a medley of blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and currants; ripe mulberries in cream; clementines, mangoes, and apricots; a gooseberry torte; cloudberries and whipped cream rolled up in crepes; durian custard; slices of apple and quince dipped in honey; pomegranate seeds by the handful; baked Jonagolds and roasted Anjous; tangerine and peach smoothies; stewed rhubarb, grapefruit, and plum; dried and sweetened cranberries dusted with powdered sugar; thin slices of muskmelon, watermelon, cantaloupe, Crenshaw melon, honeydew, sprite melon, winter melon, autumn sweet … Oh, I ate like a pig! It felt so wonderful not to have to think of my weight. Then, after a quick purge, a washup, and a fresh dress, I went singing to the cherry orchard. It was spring and the trees were all in blossom. My favorite location and my favorite season. What better time and place to cut my wrists?

  “I found a soft spot in the shade and plumped myself down. There was an inchworm on the ground by me. I let it climb onto the knife I had brought and, holding it up before my eyes, watched it measure out the length of the blade. And then, with surprising difficulty, I cut my wrist.

  “Death by exsanguination is slower and messier than anyone warns you about beforehand. There is so much blood in the body, and it drains so very slowly. I was half mad with boredom by the time I drowsed off. Had I known, I would have brought along a book. Not one of my favorites, obviously, the blood would have ruined it. A paperback. At last, however, I slept. I remember thinking: Well, that’s that.

  “Only it was not. By slow degrees I became aware of a sharp, repeated noise, then that it was the sound of one hand slapping somebody’s face, then that the person being slapped was me, and finally that the person slapping me was Narcisse. When she saw that I was conscious, she laughed for joy and kissed me on the lips, saying, ‘You cannot escape. We are too alike, you and I, and I knew that you would try something like this.’

  “Then, over her shoulder, she said, ‘Do with her as you wish.’ And the soul surgeons and an official from the railroad lifted me up and carried me off to the operating theater. I was as weak as a puppy from loss of blood. There was nothing I could do to resist them.”

  “Wait. Stop. Now I’m really confused,” Cat said. “How did the soul surgeons get involved in this? Much less the railroad?”

  “You honestly don’t know? Then I must explain. In ancient times, you will recall, a sacrifice was buried alive under the foundations of a bridge or stone building to ensure that it would not collapse. Reinforced concrete and I-beam construction made this unnecessary for all but the largest projects. Even there, it’s a redundant safety measure—‘belt and suspenders,’ as the engineers say.

  “But the railroad maintains bridges between the three sister realms—Faerie, Aerth, and the Empyrean—and the space between worlds is so great as to render the strongest materials so much gossamer and moonlight. For these to hold up, sacrifices are required—and those sacrifices must be periodically replenished. It is the curse of House Syrinx that each lord or lady must be on call to be sacrificed as required.”

  “How did House Syrinx come to be cursed?” Cat asked.

  “By right of honest purchase. We were a minor house looking to increase our standing. The railroad offered us wealth enough to do so—if we submitted to the curse.”

  “I see.”

  “One night, a vision came to me in the shape of a martlet, that footless bird that can never perch nor land. By this, I knew my doom was upon me as it had come before, first to my father and then to my mother. There was no evading it. But neither could I embrace its necessity. For three days, I struggled with this dilemma. Then I realized that if I died before the curse could be enforced, the title would pass to Narcisse, and not I but she would be sacrificed. I would cross the River Lethe and be reborn. She, meanwhile, w
ould have her name, shadow, and self flensed from her flesh and anchored in one world while her body and its spark remained in the other.

  “But she outwitted me. The surgeons did their work. The body that had been prepared for me in the forges of the flesh was, presumably, born without a soul and sent to the House of Glass. And here I am. Now you know all there is to tell.”

  “Your story is sad and moving and it gives me much to reflect upon,” Cat said. “But why would Narcisse’s servants have thought I needed to hear it?”

  Echloë told her.

  * * *

  “I see by your face that you have learned what is requisite,” Rodolphe said. “We trust you to be true to your honor.”

  He and three of the remaining haints faded away, leaving only Queenie behind. She waited in silence while Cat wrestled Echloë’s corpse from the coffin and onto her back, then said, “You can see the potting shed from the boulder. The door’s never locked. I emptied out a shelf. Place the body there.”

  Cat staggered into the hall. Queenie followed, locked the door, and faded away.

  The lights went out.

  “Oh, you bitch,” Cat muttered.

  It was a long and wearying way to the stairs and up them to the surface and Cat cursed Queenie under her breath with every step of it.

  * * *

  When the chore was done, Cat went to her rooms to change into clean clothes. Then she returned to the timelessness of Narcisse’s deathwatch.

  A mort of soul surgeons was waiting outside the door. They were thin and albino-pale, and they all, male and female alike, wore white suits, white gloves, white top hats, and milk-glass spectacles. One by one—pop! pop! pop! pop!—they doffed hats to her, as if they were so many mechanical toys.

  Cat swept past them without so much as a glance their way, recognizing her own rudeness but unable to resist giving in to it. When she entered the sickroom, Narcisse was saying, “—don’t understand why you’re being so obtuse. What I want from you, Grimalka, is simplicity itself: my name inscribed on the Wall of Martyrs. What’s so difficult to understand about that?”