City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  He can feel it from here. All of the fae can. All of the time. The deep bone stab of that much cold iron is always known to them. A constant stamp on their hearts and their souls: you lost, we won.

  Kobolds and gnomes used to try to burrow under it, but the goblins have given it roots, salting the earth below with iron filings that send them scrambling away choking up their lungs in bloody chunks. Pixies high on Dust used to try to fly over it. Knull’s grandmother died that way. The relentless metallic pulse of it stealing the strength from gossamer-thin skin, sending her crashing down. Not all who had tried to escape the city that way in the early days had died, but his grandmother had impaled herself on a spike of metal on the wall itself, and the iron had burned right through her.

  Even those who don’t try to defy the wall die from it. They die from it all the time. Black tumors clogging their arteries, their lungs. They cough up specks of its infection. They choke on them. And no healing magic can touch the damage that iron inflicts. Even the fae who used to live for centuries—the dryads and the sidhe—are now lucky to make it far past sixty. Now the goblins are the ones who live on into their eighties and beyond, and their most common cause of death is self-indulgence. Still, sometimes Knull thinks the fae who die of iron poisoning are the lucky ones. They at least survived long enough that time could kill them. There are many worse ways to die in the Iron City.

  Iron affects fae in other ways too. It has sunk into their genes, eroded their heritage. Despite his father’s pixie blood, Knull has no dragonfly wings to take him to the skies. Two ugly knubs of bone and skin on his shoulder blades are all he’s got. And so he’s left here, trudging up the fire escape.

  He mounts the final step. Cotter’s penthouse is before him. It is uncommonly quiet. Cotter enjoys the industrial beats of Trollcore and the staccato rhythms of Splatterstep. There is always a party at Cotter’s place. Except, apparently, for tonight.

  Knull grows cautious. He slides along the outside of the penthouse suite, peering around the edges of the blackout blinds. He sees nothing, hears only the same unnerving quiet.

  He grips the knob of the door that leads in from the small penthouse deck. The wood is cold. Goosebumps stitch his arm.

  He turns the handle. Hinges sigh. The door is unlocked.

  Wronger and wronger.

  Knull checks over both shoulders. He’s not looking for danger this time. He’s searching for escape routes. There are, after all, many ways to die in the Iron City.

  Money, though, he knows, is the best way to survive, and Cotter is the most direct route to coin Knull knows. He pushes the door open. He steps in.

  The abattoir smell hits him immediately. His lizard brain knows what he’s going to see before he uses his small pen light to illuminate the scene: bodies and blood.

  Every drug deal is a fuck-up waiting to happen. Whatever happened here was deeply fucked up indeed.

  Cotter is the centerpiece of the tableau. He’s on the couch, two small holes drilled into his forehead, his brain making one very large mess on the wall behind him. His bare arms are mottled with bruising. His silk shirt and leather pants are crisscrossed with cuts. Someone, Knull thinks with a numb mind, was here asking questions that Cotter didn’t want to answer.

  There are other bodies scattered around Cotter. Two bodyguards from House Troll over by the door—a fae protected by two lumbering goblins is as ostentatious a way to protect oneself as Knull can imagine, but in the end it’s done his supplier no good. Something has caved in their chests, leaving concavities of blood and gore.

  There are a few dancers too—pixies and sidhe and mixes of the two trying to parlay their bodies into a few coins, a few grams of Dust. Now their nudity serves only as a canvas to highlight the damage done: bold red strokes against backdrops of blue, purple, and pink skin.

  Knull wants to leave. He knows he should leave. His legs aren’t listening to him, though. The part of his mind that engages the gears is stuttering in shock.

  And part of him is thinking: No one is guarding Cotter’s stash.

  But of course, this was a robbery. It must have been. Cotter must have been cleaned out.

  And yet… what if he was not?

  Knull balances on the knife blade of risk and reward. He attempts to walk that thinnest of lines. There is a chance he knows what Cotter’s assailants didn’t.

  He goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge. He holds his breath. Nectar beers. Half-full take-out containers leaking ivy noodles. A breadcrumb-speckled block of squirrel’s butter. All where you would expect them. All undisturbed.

  His heart is pounding. He moves the butter aside. The milk carton behind goes too. He fishes against the back wall. He doesn’t precisely know the trick.

  Flat plastic meets his fingers. No seam. No pressure plate. Nothing at all.

  Which means that Knull knows exactly what the trick is.

  Knull shudders. He doesn’t take Dust. He’s seen what it does to lives up close. And he was born after the Iron Wall went up anyway. He has no magic to miss. He has no lost past to wallow in. He is of the world that is here and now in front of him.

  His finger is shaking as he dips it into the small baggy of pure Dust hidden his pocket. He rubs the ground resin against his gums.

  Doors open within him. Parts of him unfurl. He hates this. He sees sights he doesn’t want to see—possibilities in a world that has never held any for him—and he shouts at himself that they are lies, they have always been lies, but he is so hard to believe right now.

  He turns to the fridge again. His finger trails along a countertop. Daisies and buttercups bloom from cold linoleum. Moss spreads. Grass grows, glowing with life.

  He opens the fridge door, and when he lets go of the handle it is no longer plastic but a branch of living wood, leaves unfurling.

  He strokes the smooth plastic at the back of the fridge, and the panel opens at once, the world springing to obey his every whim. And there isn’t even a code to go deeper. There’s just another handle.

  The Dust high drains out of him as he heaves on the second handle, pivots the whole fridge out, taking the wall with it. He is left blinking, and hollow, and wondering where all the beauty went as he stares into Cotter’s vault. On the countertop beside him, petals curl. Anemic grass withers.

  He is not sure what to expect inside the vault. He has only glimpsed its opening once before. Cotter was out of his gourd, his defenses lowered.

  Knull’s first impression is that of a work room. He sees a wooden desk, a tool kit, knives and grinders for working with the resin. A set of scales. There are shelves holding baggies. Some are full. There is even some raw resin. A few ounces, maybe more if he scrapes all the nuggets and curls that are scattered in the desk’s deep grain. Enough to make him rich in a poor world. Not enough to get him to Low Spires, maybe, but more than he could otherwise gather in a year of hustling. This is a score.

  Except Knull has eyes for none of it. Because Knull now knows exactly why Cotter was killed.

  Sitting on Cotter’s desk is a bundle wrapped in clear plastic and masking tape. It is perhaps a foot square at the end, maybe a little more. It is perhaps two feet long, maybe a little less.

  It is the largest bag of Dust Knull has ever seen.

  It is a fortune even if it isn’t pure, but if Cotter is lying dead and tortured on his couch then this thing, Knull knows, is pure.

  He tries to do the math. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five pounds of pure, uncut Dust. It is everything he has ever dreamed of. It is the future he has always known he deserves. It is precisely why this apartment smells like a slaughterhouse.

  Risk and reward.

  Knull hesitates, but then steps forward. Because how could he not? He lifts the massive brick, grunts under its weight. It’s even heavier than he anticipated. And he doesn’t have to take even a single grain of it to see a world of magical possibilities opening up before him.

  4

  Rebels with Causes

  Bee
>
  “This is about more than your goddamn proletariat rage, Bee. This is about ensuring enduring sociopolitical equality for everyone in this city!”

  “Well,” Bee replies, “while I love the sort of mental masturbation that simply results in us peacefully arriving at a more equitable society, I am engaged in a more practical conversation.”

  These are the sorts of arguments Bee gets into.

  “I,” Bee goes on, “am engaged in a conversation that takes into consideration the practical necessities of actually achieving such a goal. Revolution is a necessary part of any change.”

  Across the room, Harretta, a blue-skinned sidhe, opens her mouth to jump in. Bee holds up a hand, forestalls disagreement. “And while not all revolutions need be violent—yes, I have read my fucking Minax, thank you—in a city so rife with stasis, I argue that such a change must by necessity be explosive.”

  “Bullshit,” says Tharn, Bee’s sparring partner in this particular disagreement. “You just want to stomp heads.”

  Bee considers this. “Not ‘just,’” he says. “I want to do both.”

  They are in the building that very specifically isn’t the Miners’ Guild Hall. They are in a room—should any goblins ask—that is very specifically not a meeting room. The fae are not permitted the right of assembly, after all. Should a large group of fae from the Miners’ Guild happen to be here at the same time twice a week then that is surely just strange coincidence, Mr Spriggan Security Officer, sir. And should money have changed hands and a verbal agreement been made so that Bee and the rest of the Fae Liberation Front can coincidentally happen to all be here at the same time so they can discuss sedition… well, yes, that would be harder to explain.

  There are twenty-four of them in the room, with its low ceiling and peeling wood paneling, and unvarnished wooden floor. The youth of the fae underground. Or… one faction of the youth of the fae underground. There are always factions. There are always competing philosophies. That’s part of what Bee loves about it: that the conversations are as violent intellectually as the means by which they’ll achieve their goals are physically.

  They sit with their chairs pulled into a circle—and there is not a pure pixie or kobold, gnome or sidhe among them. A room of half-sidhe, half-dryad, quarter-kobold, one-eighth gnome on his mother’s side fae. All the old divisions of race are dissolving away. That feels symbolic to Bee, the same way the circle is symbolic. There are no leaders in the Fae Liberation Front. They are a collective. All voices are welcome. But some voices are louder than others.

  “If we are to achieve a society in which fae and goblins are equal, rather than one in which we simply replace the goblins as the oppressor—” Tharn starts.

  “We are in agreement about the end goal, Tharn,” Bee cuts him off. “It’s just about how we get there.”

  “But that’s my exact point!” Tharn is an energetic young krowbold—a brownie on his father’s side, a kobold on his mother’s—who works as a runner between the goblin offices and the mine’s shift leaders. He’s dressed in a suit and his jacket billows around him, his arms flying as he talks, his flaming red hair wild. “Tonight’s uprising,” he insists, “does not have our goals in mind. It is an old-guard revolution, upholding old-guard ideals. It would lead us back to the way things were before. It would recreate the conditions that culminated in the Iron War. The cycle would perpetuate.”

  “Whatever stops we make later down the road,” Bee makes his counterpoint, “both our journey and theirs start the same way.” With a dryad mother and brownie father, he is larger, slower, and more solid than Tharn. So, he thinks, is his argument. He wears his ore-stained work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, drums his points against his thick thigh. “Better to at least travel with them,” he says, “so we have a chance of arriving at an endpoint we can quibble over.”

  “Quibble?” Tharn is red-faced.

  There’s some laughter. Tharn is a very sober young man, and while Bee loves him like a brother, he has yet to realize the importance of humor to serious matters.

  “It is not quibbling,” Tharn says, utterly earnest. “It is the very foundation of the revolution. If we participate in tonight’s activities, we are endorsing a journey to the wrong destination from the very first step.”

  “And if we don’t participate,” Bee responds, “then we miss the opportunity to even have a seat at the table when the endpoint is discussed.” He looks around, catches every eye.

  “Skart’s uprising is happening tonight with or without us,” he says. “It is broad and coordinated, and it stands a chance to result in true change. We can be a part of that change or we can be bystanders.” He grins. “Plus, if we take part, we get to stomp some gobbo heads.”

  More laughter.

  Bee looks at Tharn. “A vote?” he asks.

  Tharn chews his tongue. He knows he’s lost, but he’s out of counterarguments.

  “All in favor of participation?” Bee asks. The hands go up, Harretta’s first of all. In the end, it’s fifteen to nine. Bee will take that level of consensus any day of the week.

  He stands, he smiles. Tharn shakes his head, then shrugs and smiles. “So be it,” he says. “Let us go and kick goblins in the nuts in the name of a more equitable future.”

  Jag

  Across the Fae Districts, Jag is not focused on the future, equitable or otherwise. She is focused on the discomforts of the present, no matter that she is nestled within the leather embrace of a limousine.

  She lights another cigarette. Her hands are shaking. The Fae Districts flicker past. Dilapidated houses sag into abandoned storefronts, which slump into crumpled tenements. Litter billows as Sil drives with no heed for corners, road conditions, or pedestrians.

  “Slow down,” Jag says, after Sil’s recklessness sends another fae mother diving for the gutter. “We’re safe now. These fae aren’t trying to hurt us.”

  The car eases to a leisurely stroll. The potholes in the road stop attempting to dislocate Jag’s spine.

  She sits back, tries to breathe. There’s a decanter in the car door, and she pours herself a healthy shot. Afternotes of smoke and earth slow her beating heart.

  I’m safe, she tells herself.

  The thought causes her anger to spike again, though. That she should need to think it. That her father has created a city in which fae and goblins must flee from each other to feel safe. That old race enmities have been perpetuated for so long.

  She forces herself to breathe. To unclench her fists.

  “Are you OK?” she asks Sil. “Did they hurt you?” She knows it should have been the first thing she said.

  Sil just makes a slight scoffing sound in response. That should be reassuring, but it’s not.

  “I’ve explained why I want us to come out here, haven’t I? We’ve gone over this.” She puffs harder on her cigarette. “You’re from here.” She gesticulates with her tumbler. “This should be as much a part of you as I am. As much as our father is. This is as much your heritage as House Red, and all its obscenities. There is still beauty to be found among the ashes. And I thought—I dared to believe—that showing you these bits of it might unlock a little piece of your heart for you.”

  She might as well be talking to an empty car seat.

  Things have been done to Sil, Jag knows. She is not sure of the specifics. There are depths that she is unwilling to plumb. It is enough that she is aware that there is horror down there. And she is expected to not care. She is an heir to House Red, after all. Horrors are theirs to inflict as they want.

  But Jag does not want. She does not want to think of Sil as an object—no matter what she has been taught—but as her half-sister. She wants Sil to think of herself that way too, but Sil stubbornly refuses. Or is incapable. Whatever the answer, Jag knows her frustration shouldn’t be directed at Sil, but there aren’t many targets within the limousine, no matter how luxuriously appointed it is.

  “We’ve created an unnecessary dichotomy,” she half-shouts at
Sil. “Us and them. Binary thinking. We’ve all got to pick a side. And to even challenge that idea is insanity. To suggest that perhaps I am not so different from a fae, to suggest that perhaps your mixed heritage is an advantage, is a radical notion. I must be joking to think such a thing, mustn’t I?”

  Sil doesn’t look back. Doesn’t nod. Just keeps her eyes on the road, hands at ten and two.

  Jag remembers what happened in the bar. What those hands did.

  “Look,” she says. “I know… some of what you were taught to do. What you’ve been… programmed to think you need to do. But what happened in the bar… that shouldn’t—you shouldn’t—”

  What are the words for this, she wonders?

  “I know the fae weren’t blameless.” Jag keeps going. “They played into the dynamic of hatred goblins have created. They helped instigate. But you escalated, Sil. And if we respond we just validate the system that subjugates them. That subjugates you.”

  These aren’t the words.

  “I just… What do you think, Sil?” she says. “What is your opinion? Do you hate what you did? Were you glad? Would you change the world? Would you tear down all the old race hatred so you could build something better? Would you shore up all the systems of control with more bodies? What would you do, Sil? What would you do if you wanted to go and listen to some music? Do you even like music? What music do you like?”

  Sil doesn’t turn around, doesn’t say a word. Buildings thrum past them steady as a metronome.

  “Answer me!” she shrieks. All the stress of the bar is crashing down on her now. “I command you to—”

  Abruptly Sil pulls the car to the side of the road. Jag’s seatbelt constricts around her chest. Words coagulate in her throat. Her palms are abruptly very sweaty.

  Sil turns around. Jag swallows.

  “There’s something wrong with the engine,” Sil says calmly. “This is not a good part of town. Stay inside the car.”