The Iron Dragon's Daughter

by Michael Swanwick

  "What—what are you going to do to me?"

  "That's what I've been trying to explain to you, small lack-wit. I'm thinking of destroying your gross body and incarnating you in the flesh of a thrush or a wren. With your own wicker cage." She began rummaging through the cupboards. "Or better yet a little pink pig. Incolore could lead you about on a ribbon." She glanced up briefly. "Oh, don't look so! You'd have ever so much more pleasant a life as a pig than a wren. You could be potty-trained, for one thing." Bottles clanked and clattered. "Sit in the chair but don't stare into the window. You wouldn't like what it might choose to show you."

  Jane had no choice but to obey, though she did risk one quick glance anyway. The window looked upon an empty room with a lone pair of work boots resting to one side of center. They cast a pale shadow. One lay on its side. Mud clung to its sole. Its laces were filthy. For the life of her, she could not imagine why the window should focus on such a thing. And yet her captor was right. For some indefinable reason, the sight of it filled her with an irrational terror.

  "There are two windows in the chancel; one looks upon lies and one on truth. Not even Lesya Incolore knows which is which." Jouissante tipped over a chest. She kicked its spilled contents across the room. "Not here either! Where in the name of Maga Argea can it be?"

  Something in the chair or possibly the room itself was conducive to lethargy. Jane stared down at her lap, unable to stand.

  "Aha!" Fata Jouissante held up a cordless phone in triumph. Numbers booped. She waited, then said, "This is Fata Incolore. I would like you to send up a pig. Yes. No, the creature must be personable. Sweet, yes. Its disposition is very important to me. No, female."

  Listening, Jane knew she ought to be upset. But it was hard to care. The apathy that held her to the chair was spreading through her body. If she didn't do something right away, she'd never do anything again.

  In a detached way, Jane's fingers meandered to her hair and combed from it the daisy that Rocket had given her earlier. She looked down at the blossom and closed her fingers about it. Crushing the petals.

  "How soon can you have it here? Oh, and a satin pillow too!"

  Staring down at her hands, Jane concentrated on Rocket's true name and performed a summoning. She had never tried so powerful a spell before, but she knew the theoretics inside out. Tetigistus, she whispered in the Arctic stillnesses of her hindbrain. Come to me.

  Jouissante whirled, phone in hand. "What have you done?" she cried. "You've done something! What have you done?"

  Jane smiled vaguely up at her. The summoning had burned up the last of her volition. She was entirely passive now. She lacked even the will to speak.

  There was a step on the stair. The door opened and Rocket entered.

  He was masterful. Rocket took in the situation at a glance. He acted without hesitation. Striding forward, almost too fast to follow, he struck the telephone from Jouissante's hand. With a cry of dismay, she flew at him, raking her nails across his face, reaching for his eyes. Deftly, though, he seized her wrists, forcing her arms back. She thrust her body forward, striving to reach his jugular with her teeth. This was what he had been waiting for. Briefly, her ear was alongside Rocket's mouth.

  "Kunosoura," he murmured in a voice so low that under ordinary conditions Jane could not possibly have heard him. But Jane knew his true name and with it had summoned him. His whispered word went right through her.

  Kunosoura. It meant dog's tail.

  It was Lesya Incolore's true name.

  At the sound, the delusion of Fata Jouissante's persona fled from her face. Features melted one into another, some hardening, others softening, yet others growing sharp and keen. When they were done shifting, Incolore had stabilized as herself once more. Her eyes closed and her limbs went limp. Rocket hoisted her slumping body in his arms.

  He gestured with his chin. "Open that door, please."

  With the return of Fata Incolore, whatever force had held Jane passive was gone. She sprang from the chair and opened the small door he had indicated.

  It took them to a room whose walls were lined with carnival masks. There were no windows. Rocket eased his sister down on a couch. "There's a medicine chest in that cabinet," he said. "When she comes to, we'll give her two of the white pills. That'll be enough."

  Jane straightened from checking to see that Incolore was comfortable.

  They looked at each other shyly.

  "Well," Rocket said at last. "Lucky thing I dropped by."

  "Yeah," Jane said. "Lucky."

  "I apologize for forcing my presence on you twice in one day, madam. I realize that you don't like me—"

  "Look, I like you, okay? I like you fine."

  Rocket took a step forward and Jane took a step back. He stopped, looking puzzled. "Then why? If you do indeed like me, why then do you behave as you do? Why do you so consistently seek to put me out of countenance?"

  "I don't want you to get caught up in all this shit," Jane said. "That's all. There's stuff going on, and I don't want to hurt you."

  "Hurt me." Rocket was the stiffest, most sincere thing she had ever seen. "So long as my honor is unsullied, you may do as you wish with me. Treat me badly if that's what makes you happy. It can't be any worse than the pain of your disregard."

  This was getting out of hand. To rein things in, Jane said, in as chill a tone as she could muster, "Your sister's political games have run completely amok, sir. She was going to turn me into a pig." Suddenly the ludicrous nature of it all struck her and she giggled with alarm. "A pig!"

  "That was Fata Jouissante," Rocket reminded her. "But you are right to be angry, and if I cannot make amends, I can at least make explanations." He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "The eyes of the chancel are delicate mechanisms. Performing a major transformation beneath one would—what is the word I'm seeking?—distort? no, obsess the eye, rendering it unwilling to look at anything but the act itself, over and over. It would diminish Lesya's power incalculably. But many a strange deed is performed under the banner of love."

  "Love! For who?"

  "Why, Lesya, of course. Poor Jouissante! She lives in dread of that day—and it is coming—when Lesya is raised to the invisible college and becomes a guardian. To be made a guardian is a terrible scandal and as great an honor as one may aspire to. Its prospect arouses everyone involved to extremes of emotion." He shrugged. "Even under the best of conditions, powers play such messy games when they sport at love."

  Jane pondered this in long silence. At last she asked, "Is that what the Baldwynn is—a guardian?"

  All of Rocket's warmth blew away like mist before a wind. "How do you know of the Baldwynn?" he demanded sternly. "He is one of the Eight. Nobody is supposed to know of the Baldwynn."

  Jane touched Rocket's doublet. She undid the top two buttons and slid her hand within. Her fingers stroked his chest. It confused Rocket, addled and silenced him. "Where do you live?" she asked. "I mean the full address."

  "Caer Arianrod. North 9743-A Plaza Court D."

  She invoked his true name a second time. "Go there," she said. "Forget all that has happened here tonight."

  Reluctantly she withdrew her hand.

  And Rocket went away.

  Fata Incolore shuddered as the pills took hold. Color returned to her face. "It seems I'm in your debt."

  "I don't want your gratitude!"

  "Yes, so I gather." Long fingernails tapped against the top of the medicine kit, as if it were a small drum. "I suppose if I told you I could arrange for a certain stalwart young dragon pilot to materialize, naked and cooperative, in your bed one of these nights, you'd simply snarl at me again."

  Jane folded her arms and said nothing.

  "You really are the most amazingly perverse thing. I don't believe I've ever met anybody like you." Lesya laughed lightly. "Well, let's change the subject. Have I ever showed you my collection?" A negligent wave of one hand indicated the masks on the wall. Stern faces looked down on Jane, blank, assured, al
luringly soulless.

  "No."

  "They're quite valuable. And useful as well. What I like about them, though, is that for all the sorcery that went into their making, they're not brute enchantments. They're instruments, dependent on the training and natural talent of whoever wears them."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Take this one, for example." She lifted a feathered demimask from the wall. The mask swooped up from the eyes in mock wings, covered the brow and nose, and left the mouth free. "Three bullocks were sacrificed just to activate it. Yet most of its power lies in the skill with which it's applied."

  Jane shook her head slightly, involuntarily.

  "The glamour of the mask is strong enough to confound identification so long as you do not speak. Such a mask can be, and often is, employed for a casual sexual fling, to protect one's reputation. But its true purpose is to be used on someone forbidden to you whom you yet strongly desire.

  "You must want him greatly, so passionately that when you couple the extremity of your desire will be obvious to him. You must be shameless in your heart; you must do things you thought you would never do, and you must enjoy them. You must strive to shock your beloved. You must drive him to the limits of his endurance—so that when you rise from his body at the first weak light of dawn, he will not be able to raise a hand to stay your going, though he will want to do so.

  "All the time you make love, he will stare into your eyes, whose color, because of the decognitive powers of the mask, he will not be able to remember, and see the fierce love of him burning there. They will be mirrors of his inner self, and they will show him in a far more flattering light than he has ever seen himself, as if he were a being composed of flame.

  "He will want to know who you are—you must not speak. When he asks do you love him, smile and look aside. He will study the color and proportions of your nipples and try to size your breasts by how well they fill his hands, how much of each he can fit in his mouth. He will memorize your sighs and groans, and tickle you to learn the music of your laughter. He will store in his heart the smell and taste of your every part, the gentle hollow below your neck, the warm spot at the innermost top of your thighs, the flavors of your cunt herself and how they change with each stage of your arousal.

  "It is only natural to wonder at the identity of one who so obviously loves you. And thus your intended is left with what at first may only be a mild curiosity. Perhaps he has a few surmises as to who you might be. Casually—at first—he begins to look for you.

  "Of course, the only sure evidence of your identity can only be obtained by making love. You must arrange not to be one of the many he takes with him to bed. You will be jealous of them each and all, agonizingly so, but also needlessly. For every time he beds one, he will taste her sweat, lick the back of her knees and the downy line leading from the small of her back to the cleft between her cheeks, and he will be thinking: No. It is not she."

  Lesya hung the mask back on the wall, her hands as graceful as butterflies. "What begins as mere curiosity soon burns out of control. Months pass. He is obsessed. Those rivals you had best reason to fear are one by one insulted and driven away by his behavior—for what woman cannot tell when the man she is abed with is thinking of someone else? You remain elusive. Your beloved engages in wild and aberrant behavior. He is ruled by love and desire alone.

  "That is your opening gambit."

  It was late and if Jane were ever to get back in Corinde's good graces, she needed to be bright and rested in the morning. She would gladly have left then, but Incolore was still wired from whatever was in the pills she had taken and kept her talking for an hour more. They discussed Lord Corvo's difficulties with his inamoratas and Fata Jouissante's chances at the senatorial cape. They talked about the war. They debated the merits of ermine viscera as a catalyst for skin-moisturizing spells and whether the increased efficiency justified the extra expense.

  At last, Jane rose to leave. At the door she paused and, as if struck by a sudden notion, said, "That mask—may I borrow it?"

  "My dear. Why do you think I showed it to you?"

  * * *

  Jane meant to go straight home. But somehow her feet took her directly away from Termagant, toward Caer Arianrod. I won't go in, she thought on the way up in the Plaza Court D elevator. I'll just go up to his floor and then straight back down. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out onto the carpet. I'll walk by his door. I won't knock.

  She knocked. Fata Incolore's mask was still in her hand, dangling from its cord. Impatiently she stuffed it into her purse.

  Rocket opened the door. "Jayne," he said flatly.

  "Can I come in?"

  — 22 —

  JANE AWOKE AT DAWN. GENTLY SHE DISENTANGLED HERSELF from the sheets and Rocket's arms.

  She dressed quickly, stuffing her underwear into her purse, being careful to collect Incolore's unneeded mask. Rocket snored lightly. She looked down at his sleeping face. His mouth hung open, giving him a distinctly loutish appearance which she found well-nigh irresistible. She would have kissed him, but she was afraid he'd waken and she wanted to slip out without any fuss.

  The streets were almost empty. The air was crisp and cool, and the City was awash in early morning light. Jane walked quickly, almost running, swinging her arms to keep warm. After a while she started to sing an old pop song:

  "Did you miss me? Come and kiss me.

  Never mind my bruises…"

  A raptor girl heard her singing, laughed, leaped into the sky, and was gone, lost amid the golden dazzle of dawn bouncing from a million plate glass windows. Jane shook her hair and raised her voice:

  "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

  Squeezed from—" Her voice bounced from the building sides and mellow brick walls. Oh, she felt fine!

  It was a beautiful morning, a perfect morning. Her mood held all the way home to Termagant.

  * * *

  Black smoke poured from the heights of the building. Soot covered its sides in great streaks. The street was choked with evacuees from Termagant. Nixies, orends, and Teggish lawyers milled about in an agitated confusion, while fashion models, powries, and leshiye argued with each other, gesturing wildly upward. Three candymen had brought out a great bell and were tolling the alarum with slow, steady strokes.

  She stared. Far above there was a flash of light, followed by a distant rumbling like thunder. Jane felt as if she'd been kicked in the stomach. All joy collapsed within her. It was over. Everything was over.

  A Greencoatie rode up, forcing the crowd away from the building with the metal breast of his destrier. "Stand back!" he commanded Jane.

  "But I've got to get inside!"

  "Nobody gets inside. This is a police matter!" He raised his lance against her, and she was forced to retreat. More Greencoaties moved into place, cordoning off the building.

  Something shifted in that dark part of her brain that the dragon had vacated the night before. Melanchthon was back, a wordless and compelling presence. A cold sense of urgency filled Jane. She had to get past the police lines. She pulled out Incolore's mask and critically examined its interior. The outlines of its workings were clear enough to her. She was sure she could jigger up a spell of invisibility with it if she could only get hold of some sal ammoniac, tincture of Redness, and an elder leaf. It would burn out in five minutes, but five minutes would be enough.

  There was a pharmacy on the corner. She ran.

  * * *

  The passenger elevators had all been drawn by the heat to the burning floors like moths to a candle. But the freight elevators were simpler creatures, operated manually. Jane commandeered one.

  Three times on the shudderingly slow climb to the seventy-third floor there were explosions. At each, she halted the car and waited lest the machinery be injured or the shaft thrown out of true. Jane feared the fire might block her way but her own floor, when she arrived at it, had only a light haze of smoke. It was suddenly silent. She tasted burnt plastic and char
red wood at the back of her mouth.

  Jane stepped into the canted hallway. Her mask turned hot and she ripped it from her face. Blistered and crisped, it fell to the floor and burst into flame. She left it burning behind her.

  The door to 7332 fell off at her touch.

  Her apartment had been leveled. Its furnishings were reduced to rubble. The interior walls were all gone. Splays of lathing fanned down here and there from the ceiling. The dragon was exposed, a cliff of black iron.

  Ferret was in the center of the room, a short double-edged sword by his side. It was an athalme—Jane recognized it by the black handle and the almost imperceptible tug of its magnetized blade.

  He was dead.

  Wee bodies littered the floor, black and shriveled. They formed drifts by the walls. The meryons had died here by the thousands. Now at last, their nation was extinct. Loathsome little fascists though they were, Jane found their annihilation affected her horribly.

  Without any conscious intent, she knelt by Ferret's side and stroked his short, silvery hair. It was soft, so soft. In death, his face was open, guileless, innocent. Too late, she regretted never having cultivated him. What a friend he could have been! And now he was gone.

  "Who would have thought there was so much power in him?" she murmured.

  "Not all the destruction was his," Melanchthon growled. "Less than half."

  She looked at him.

  "Your Master Ferret was a fool. He wanted the pleasure of taking me by himself. But he was not so much of a fool as not to have left word behind him. Others will be here soon, and they will not be fools at all. I would there had been another month to prepare. But we've power enough and more for our needs. It is time to leave. It is time for us to pass through Hell Gate and make our assault on Spiral Castle."

  Jane raised her head.

  She should have felt devastated. Ferret was dead, the meryons were dead, and there were surely others, caught in the flux of Melanchthon's battle with Ferret, who had died as well. When they blasted free of Termagant, everyone in the street outside would be caught in the building's collapse. And that would be only the beginning of the general slaughter. They were embarked on a quest of destruction, going up against the greatest Enemy of all, to die and in death seek the obliteration of history. It was the end of all things.