The Iron Dragon’s Mother

by Michael Swanwick

  A flurry of confusion and a desperate leap into the unknown later, Helen found herself nestled safe within the skull of a young dragon pilot, as snug as a maggot in an acorn. A lot of what she saw made very little sense to her. So she kept her head down, her eyes open, and her mouth shut.

  The pilot’s name was Caitlin. The dragon she flew was an abomination. She had a symbiotic relationship with it. Neither could fly without the other. Dragons and their pilots, while they prepared for war, which was their common purpose, were occasionally sent out on missions to steal the souls of children. Helen had been accidentally snatched up on Caitlin’s first mission.

  Caitlin thought she was a good person.

  She was wrong.

  Secretly, Helen watched and learned. That child-souls looked like eggs of light. That such eggs were taken to the House of Glass to be implanted in bodies born without souls of their own. That in time those bodies were impregnated by high-elven lords. That the offspring resulting from this miscegenation were valuable tools of the Governance. That by treaty only half mortals were allowed to fly the dragons on which so much of the power of Babylon depended.

  It was an ugly way to run a world. But who was Helen to judge? Her own world had its problems too. Also, she didn’t know what might happen to her if she were to be discovered. She was enjoying her second life and would not cherish losing it.

  There were, however, wheels within wheels. Caitlin was being framed for a crime she had not committed. When it was made clear to her that she would not receive an honest trial, she bolted and ran. Exactly as her enemies intended.

  To save the lives of them both, Helen revealed her existence to Caitlin. Who, savage creature that she was, promptly murdered her dragon and, amid much destruction, eluded her pursuers.

  They became fugitives.

  Caitlin changed her name to Cat. She lived off the generosity of others, abandoning them as it became necessary. Helen tried to convince her to make a new life for herself. But Cat was determined to regain the privilege that had been taken from her. Somewhere in Europa, alongside a field of rye, the locomotive Olympia prophesied for her. Cat did not understand her words. Helen did. But knowing what use Cat would make of the knowledge, Helen chose not to share her understanding.

  “I…” Helen shook her head and returned to her narration.

  In Carcassonne, Lord Pleiades told Cat that the purpose of the Conspiracy was to plunge Faerie into an age of unending war. Because it was not her world, Helen did not feel the need to act or to advise Cat on what actions she should take.

  “I … I think…”

  In Avernus, Queenie revealed the hatred the underclass felt for the descendants of their conquerors. Because it was not her society, Helen said and did nothing. In Brocielande Station, she witnessed the death of hundreds and her chief concern was for her own survival. When her host suffered a crisis of conscience, she did nothing to console her. Again, she did not feel obliged to do anything about the Conspiracy’s plans to foment war. Everywhere they went, she tried to keep Cat out of trouble not out of concern for her but because that was the safest course for … for …

  “I … I’ve been terribly, terribly selfish.” Helen broke down in tears. “I should have helped the girl. I should have been her conscience. I…”

  Thousands of eyes stared at her. No one spoke.

  Dahut, speaking for Gradlon, said, “Do you acknowledge your guilt?”

  “Yes.”

  Then the voice of King Gradlon passed again to Fingolfinrhod. “All are guilty by their own admissions. Here is my judgment. For crimes of commission by Prince Benthos and Dahut merc’h Gradlon: death, followed by demotion to the lower reaches of the Wheel of Being. Dahut, you will surrender the Horn of Holmdel to Prince Benthos, who knows what his last duty must be. For crimes of omission, which is to say failure to guide my much-beloved daughter toward the melioration of her crimes, by Fingolfinrhod of House Sans Merci: death, followed by demotion to the middle reaches of the Wheel of Being.

  “For crimes of omission and the sin of cowardice, Helen of Aerth, you will be set free and admonished to think long and hard on your failings.

  “Finally, for outliving its natural span and for serving the ignoble purposes of the Secret Masters of the Three Worlds, to wit, harnessing the natural forces of Creation for worldly purposes contrary to the will of the Goddess, the City and Commonwealth of Ys is condemned to oblivion and the rebirth of its population into new lands and new eras.”

  The king’s eyes began slowly to close. Before they could, entirely, Cat found herself in possession of her body again. Helen’s tears were still coursing down her cheeks. Ignoring them, impulsively, Cat shouted, “Hey! What about me?”

  Through mere slits, King Gradlon contemplated Cat. Then, with insulting indifference, the eyes closed.

  * * *

  The trial was over and the sentences were passed. There remained only one act more to be endured. Silent as owls and as unblinking, the citizenry of Ys watched as Dahut snapped open her purse and removed from it the Horn of Holmdel. It glowed gently in her hands. She presented the artifact to Fingolfinrhod, who in turn presented it to Prince Benthos.

  Prince Benthos stared down at the Horn, his face a mask. Then he lifted it to his lips and threw back his head.

  He blew.

  Much later, Cat would try to recapture the memory of what music the prince played on the Horn of Holmdel and how it sounded. It shook her and stunned her, that much she knew. But not a note of it remained in her head a second after it fell to silence. She could only remember its effects.

  All the world swam in Cat’s eyes. Dazed as she was by the Horn, it took her a second to realize that this was real and not subjective. Skyscrapers swayed and the ground danced underfoot. A tremendous unending groan, as of continental plates rubbing against one another, rose up out of nowhere. A balcony broke free of its moorings and drifted downward toward the street, tumbling and scattering its occupants as it did. Tiles went flying. Windows shattered and shards of glass fell like snow on those below. Everything happened with eerie slowness: The curtain wall of a high-rise disintegrating. Fish scattering madly in all directions. The roof-sitters and ledge-perchers being blown from their roosts by wild currents and tumbling overhead like so many autumn leaves.

  Then the water boiled black. Storms of bubbles sped outward, blinding Cat to what came next. She could only hear the sounds of destruction: metal being ripped asunder, stone shattering, buildings collapsing, and—faintly, faintly!—the cries of the dying. Until all the groaning and crashing and shattering combined into a single enormous roar and the ocean screamed.

  Terrified, unable to see, lashed by the currents, Cat clung to one of King Gradlon’s legs, hoping against hope that she would not be torn away. There was a sick feeling in her stomach as if all the city were a gigantic elevator rushing upward at tremendous and ever-increasing speeds. Then, as the black, bubbling waters churned about her, she passed out.

  An Agon, or contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy must be tragic, must have its pathos, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die.

  —Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

  Even when all you have ever loved is gone, life goes on. Or so Cat discovered when she woke up the next morning on the sandy beach between the choppy waters of the Bay of Dreams and the city of Ys, newly restored to land. The ocean was a hard gray and carried on it a single ship, small with distance. Perhaps that ship was steaming her way to investigate the sudden appearance of a city on this previously uninhabited stretch of coast. Perhaps not. There was no way of knowing. Turning her back on the ocean, Cat saw for the first time the destructive work of centuries which time, denied entry for so long by the strength of mighty spells, had visited upon Dahut’s port nation, on its return.

  In a stupor, she stumbled down debris-covered avenues between roofless buildings and the rusted, hal
f-melted I-beam frames of skyscrapers whose curtain walls had fallen away. Ys smelled of land decay, sea growth, and rot. Death was everywhere in the form of fish, seaweed, and other marine life carried up with the city into a medium where they could not thrive. But for a mercy, the citizens of the city had apparently been caught up in the rush of deferred destruction and their remains were as one with the dust of ages.

  All was gray. Everything stank.

  A vast melancholy filled Cat. Ruins were only romantic when you didn’t remember what they had looked like whole and how their inhabitants had once lived. Yesterday’s city had been a sleepwalker. Today’s was a cadaver. “I fail to see how this is in any way an improvement over the undersea city.”

  “It was not a question of making things better, but only of justice,” Helen replied. “One reason I never seriously considered becoming a lawyer.”

  An uncanny silence shrouded the city. There was no wind and no birds sang. There was only the sound of the surf and the tense reverberation of spent magic lingering over the ruined buildings and toppled towers like the after-sound of a great bell that has faded to inaudibility but still vibrates to the touch. When the stillness wore off, the creatures of the land and air would return and tourists come to gawk and marvel. But for now all this belonged only to Cat and Helen.

  Following streets whose names and destinations Cat knew only too well, they came to Gradlon Square. All that remained of the king after whom it was named were the bottom of his granite throne and two truncated stone legs. On the paving before the throne lay the bleached skeleton of a sea serpent coiled protectively about two bipedal skeletons with their arms wrapped around each other.

  Benthos, Prince of Oceanus, cadet son of Lyr, of the line of Pontus.

  Dahut merc’h Gradlon, hereditary ruler, traitor, and protector of Ys.

  And Fingolfinrhod.

  Cat sank to her knees, but only because she knew that was what she ought to do. Strangely, she found that she felt no grief at all. What kind of monster am I, she wondered, to lose a brother and experience nothing? Then something inside her burst and nothing turned to everything. All the sorrow in the world crashed over her and she threw back her head and howled. A hole had been torn in reality and she doubted the damage would ever be unmade.

  When enough time had passed that she was capable of speech again, Cat declared, “All the joy in me has died. I will never laugh again.”

  Helen, wisely, said nothing.

  “We’ll have to do something about the remains. I could build a cairn, I suppose. There’s stone enough for one, Goddess knows, but I’m thinking it would look awfully punk here.” Cat visualized a mound of bricks, ceramic tiles, and broken frieze-work, loomed over by the Piranesian tombstones that its destruction had made of Ys. “So that leaves a bonfire.”

  “What about the Horn?” Helen asked. In her grief, Cat had not noticed it. But the Horn of Holmdel lay among the bones, golden on the outside, cream and pink within, untouched by the destruction it had called down upon the city. “Don’t you want it?”

  “That thing? I wouldn’t—”

  “I have lit three candles and snuffed two,” said someone standing behind her. “Now I snuff out the third.” This time Cat was fully awake and recognized the voice. So when she twisted about and saw Saoirse standing in the center of the square, though she had not been there a breath earlier, Cat was not in the least surprised. The dragon pilot had an equipment bag slung over her shoulder and a bandage over one eye.

  “Not now,” Cat said, quietly and without emotion. “I have serious matters to take care of first.”

  Bitter laughter bounced from the walls. “Who are you to dictate where and when you will die?”

  “Fine.” Cat rose to her feet. Bleak. Empty. Without hope. “Great. Suit yourself. We’ll have it out down by the sea. That way whoever dies, the other won’t have to worry about what to do with the body.”

  * * *

  The sun was bright and the surf low. Cat felt half asleep with grief. She sat down on a fallen pillar with Atlantean fluting. “Okay, let’s talk.”

  Standing over her, blocking the sun, one eye a glint of light, the black silhouette of her pursuer said, “I didn’t come to talk but to unsheathe a sword.”

  “Oh, don’t be melodramatic.” Cat patted the pillar beside her. “Sit.”

  Saoirse hesitated, then sat.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  A brief flash of teeth split Saoirse’s face in what might be either a smile or a grimace. One hand rose to touch the bandage. “Nothing is free. I traded it for wisdom.”

  Cat felt the ghost of astonishment. “Really?”

  “It might have been vengeance. I have a hard time telling the two apart anymore.”

  “Ah. That would have been the price of the three-candles trick. I won’t ask who you bought it from. You run with a louche crowd.” Then, not because she thought it would do any good but because she was sure she should at least try, Cat said, “We don’t have to do this, you know. We don’t have to be this. We have so much in common, you and I. Not just the Academy. Not just our commissions. You broke out of Glass Mountain and I have no doubt whatsoever that you left it burning behind you. I came to Ys and look at it now. You follow your duty as I once did mine. We are reflections of each other. When I raise my left hand, you raise your right. We are sisters, the two of us. Look at my face! Think of yours. We came from the same womb. My admiration of you blinded me to that fact. Don’t let your hatred of me trick you into the same mistake.”

  Saoirse’s eye blazed with anger. The fire spread until her whole face burned like molten copper. “You are a vicious little shit, you know that? Once, I believed in justice. You disabused me of that delusion. Then I sought revenge. You screwed that up for me too. At last, I came to accept that power is all that matters in this world. And where could I find power? Within myself. I called upon my dragon, and it told me where I could cut a deal.” She stood, glowing with internal dragon-fire. It shone dazzlingly from her good eye and more subtly from beneath her skin. She unzipped her equipment bag, removed its contents, threw it aside.

  Two crowbars clanged to the sand. “Choose your weapon.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I failed in my attempt to bring you to justice because I acted unjustly. I failed in my quest for vengeance because I offered you no chance to visit vengeance upon me. Now I’m giving you what you asked for: single combat. A fair fight. Even odds.”

  Cat shook her head. Even though she could see Saoirse rejecting her every word as she spoke it, she said, “I’ve been through a lot since Carcassonne. I’ve learned something, I think. I’m not going to fight you.”

  Saoirse’s expression took on a triumphant cast and—

  “The hell you’re not,” Helen said and, snatching up a crowbar, invoked 7708’s true name: “Zmeya-Gorynchna, of the line of Zmeya-Goryschena, of the line of Gorgon, get your fucking ass up here!”

  “Stop. What are you doing?”

  “Keeping you alive, you idiot.”

  The leaden doors of perception swung ponderously open, hinges screeching, as Cat’s mind was turned inside out, giving control to the creature that had been patiently waiting within her all along.

  Her dragon took over her body as easily as Cat might have slipped on a blouse. It flipped the crowbar in the air and, without looking, caught it in its other hand. Then it swung the black iron bar down upon a brick, exploding it into orange dust. It laughed. “Oh, but it feels grand to live again! Even in a body as pitiful as this one.”

  Cat’s body took up position facing Saoirse. Her vision, filtered through the dragon’s sensorium, reversed all colors, so that the sea was a milky white with black-tipped waves, the ruins like ivory, and the sky overhead a dull red with dark brown clouds. Each of them raised their crowbars before their faces and then slashed them down and to the side in salute.

  A dark, gloating hatred for all things coursed through Cat’s mind and flesh. It was
every bit as seductive as her instructors had warned her it would be. She enjoyed it even more than she had feared she might. It wrapped itself around her like a cloak. She could have lived within it forever.

  Then she had taken the crowbar by one end in a double-handed grip and assumed the horse stance. So had Saoirse. Dragon-Cat raised her crowbar up and to one side. Dragon-Saoirse’s motions were the mirror image of her own. They faced each other, two dragon-women perfectly at home in bodies that raged with emotions they had fought all their lives to suppress. For the first time ever, Cat gave in wholeheartedly to the anger, hatred, and resentment she had carried within herself, seemingly, all her life.

  Why hadn’t she done this long ago?

  “Learn well from this experience,” her dragon said. “This fight will end in death—yours or your opponent’s, I honestly don’t care which. But should you chance to survive, I want you to remember how good and right this feels—and then live your life in my image.”

  Slowly, Dragon-Cat’s crowbar began to move. She felt her muscles bulging. With more-than-human strength, she drove the weapon down and inward. Her perception had amped up to dragon speeds: the crowbar barely moved in her vision. Dragon-Saoirse, face contorted with rage, matched her slow-seeming actions exactly.

  Minutes inched by.

  A larger than usual wave came in from the sea and slowly climbed Dragon-Cat’s leg all the way to her knee. She felt her body shifting so it would not unbalance. The crowbars were now halfway toward each other. She saw the sweat steaming from Dragon-Saoirse’s shining face, the gleaming drops of water thrown into the air by that same wave crashing into her opponent, the motion, slow as the hour hand on a clock, of their weapons. Somewhere in the back of her head, she registered Helen’s irrelevant observation that the seawater had surely ruined her shoes. Meanwhile, she concentrated on unclenching her jaw, lest the dragon-strength shatter her teeth.