City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  8

  Fight Night

  Bee

  The ache of the Iron Wall grows stronger as Bee approaches the smelting factory. It growls in his gut and creaks in his bones. The ringing in his ears is intensifying by the minute, and he knows it will last for days after this.

  Next to him, Tharn rubs his jaw. “Always gets me in my back teeth.”

  “This is a shit assignment,” someone says.

  “Because Bee couldn’t keep his mouth shut,” Tharn agrees.

  Next to Bee, Harretta rolls her eyes. “Because the Fae Liberation Front is all about following orders without question now, is it?”

  No one picks the fight, though. They’re all feeling the Wall. They’re all feeling the rising tension of their goal as it comes closer.

  It’s a simple enough assignment, of course. Occupy the factory. Deny access. And rig the place so that if they are forced to retreat, the means of production are blown to kingdom come.

  What’s more, they’ve been given a good, defensible position. In fact, Bee is forced to concede, it’s a good, defensible plan: hold the city hostage; stop the machinery from turning; dam the flow of gold in and out of goblin pockets.

  But he, the Fae Liberation Front, and the other front-line assault forces are only part of this plan. While they hold the factories, provocateurs will slip into the streets and ensure that the goblins don’t keep their cool or set up drawn-out sieges. Instead, these agents will drive spurs into the goblins’ flanks and send them hurtling heedless towards these good, defensible factories. And from them, Bee and others like him will defend for as long as it takes. Because although they know that they will suffer countless casualties, they also know that their losses will be nothing compared to the damage they are going to inflict on the attacking goblins. And that, of course, is the breaking point: that slaughter. Because it is seeing the goblins fall that will break the shackles of fear holding the city’s masses placid. And liberated from their terror, the fae will rise up with their brothers and sisters, and the Iron City will fall, and this jewel in Mab’s crown will be shattered to pieces forever.

  At least, that’s the plan.

  So for now, Bee sees, it will be days spent close to the Iron Wall, its rusty saw blade cutting into all that is natural and magical within him, polluting him.

  And all because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  But it’s not a fight worth picking. It’s not a fight that matters. It’s the cause that matters. It’s the liberation of the fae. And that is what they are doing here in the end. Fractious goals or no, all of the Iron City’s rebels are united by that cause. They are finally doing something. So they hold their bickering, and they creep ever closer to the factory.

  They cover the last thirty yards at a flat run. They pile up on either side of the big wooden gates. Green paint peels from them in long curls.

  Another of the Liberation Front, Jerrell, has been given the bolt cutters. The chain holding the gates shut snaps with one bite of their heavy jaws. They push the gates open—each one large enough to admit even House Troll’s tallest members—and brandish their weapons, but the courtyard beyond is unlit and silent. Shadowy mountains of ore loom. A flatbed truck, parked on a diagonal, bisects the space. Wheelbarrows are lined up like impatient workers waiting for their shift to begin.

  Tharn signals and they spread out wide. Bee has been given a pistol and a length of aluminum chain to defend himself. He shouldn’t need any of it. The factory should be dead and cold tonight. But they have to be prepared. He has been told to be ready to use the pistol only as a weapon of last resort. They cannot afford its noise tonight. The fewer who know of their presence inside the factory at this point, the better. He wraps the chain tight around his fist now, and lets a length of it trail beside his thigh.

  The courtyard is clear. Bee points at a door leading into the main body of the factory. They swarm toward it.

  Inside, everything is shadow. Everything smells of rock, and dust, and metal. The furnaces lie dead and cold. Massive machinery crowds in on them. The surrounding steel deepens the ache in Bee’s bones.

  They move at a crawl. Almost no light makes it into the factory’s monolithic interior, and Bee is virtually blind. Nearby, Harretta smacks her knee against something, then curses, mostly because she’s a sidhe, and of all of them, except perhaps the half-kobolds, she should be the best in the dark. Still, she is faring better than many. The whole group clank off obstacles as they go. Muttering and disagreements flicker in and out of existence. Adrenaline is going cold and fear is edging in.

  “Can we risk some light?” Tharn whispers.

  “Yes,” Bee replies quietly. At this point, he honestly thinks it would be the less obtrusive option. He pulls out a lighter, flicks it on. The flame is paltry, though. If anything, it makes the darkness seem bigger.

  Someone else pulls out a flashlight. It’s Jerrell again, Bee sees, he of bolt-cutting fame.

  “Well,” Bee says as the beam of light slices through the darkness, “that’s the element of surprise gone and fucked, isn’t it?”

  Jerrell gives him the finger. The shadows retreat. Everyone laughs in a space become suddenly mundane.

  And then the first shots ring out, and Jerrell’s head explodes like an overripe melon.

  Skart

  Across the Fae Districts, now far from the factory that recently birthed his rebellion, Skart is rising through the air. The elevator surrounding him rattles and shakes like a grandfather gyrating to the songs of his youth. Skart curses it at length, but the oblivious machinery moves no faster. He looks at his watch. Despite the threats and money he hurled at his cab driver, he has already been gone from the rebellion’s headquarters for almost half an hour. That is too long.

  Finally, the elevator shudders to a halt. Skart heaves the folding steel door open, not bothering to wrap his fingers in his sleeves to protect them from the metal’s bite—his skin is already scarred, his body already riddled with small black tumors; caution is a long way behind him now. A dryad—spirit to some cedar tree stump somewhere, all burls and brawn—blocks his exit. A machine gun is slung idly across her chest.

  “I’m here to see Merrick,” Skart snaps, trying to push past the broad fae.

  The dryad’s massive hand holds him steady.

  “Merrick!” Skart shouts. “Let him go.” Merrick speaks from beyond the dryad’s bulk. The mercenary has regained much of her confidence since her phone call with Skart. Here, surrounded by her team, she feels safe.

  Released, Skart straightens his shirt as he crosses to the open penthouse apartment door. Merrick stands at the center of the slaughterhouse scene beyond. She sneers at him, the perfect stereotype of smug sidhe superiority. A massive goblin bodyguard lies at her feet, one of House Troll’s lesser sons, his chest caved in by a shotgun blast. The apartment’s gnome owner, Cotter, is slumped on the couch, mutilated, his brains upon the wall.

  Skart balls his fists.

  “What?” Merrick asks. “You didn’t hire me for my subtlety.”

  “I hired you,” Skart says, “for results, but I don’t see any evidence of those either.”

  Merrick’s swagger sours. “And they’ll come even slower with you here, getting in my way.”

  “Tell me what happened.” Skart is eager to take the most direct route from Merrick talking shit to eating it.

  Merrick doesn’t even have the decency to appear abashed as she tells the tale. “Cotter wouldn’t give up where he keeps his stash,” she says. “I got bored asking, figured we could get the answers quicker on our own. We didn’t find anything in the apartment, so I expanded the search area. While we were out of the apartment, someone snuck up the fire escape. They knew right where to go.”

  “Show me.”

  Merrick’s expression doesn’t get any friendlier. “Gerretta,” she calls to the dryad in the hallway. “Show Mr Skart—”

  “No,” Skart interrupts. “You.”

  Merrick arches an e
yebrow. “You really sure you want to piss me off?”

  Skart keeps his voice under control. “Are you sure you want to get paid? Because if I’m either disappointed in you or a corpse that doesn’t happen.”

  He meets Merrick’s gaze head on and doesn’t blink. As much as it would shock Merrick to hear it, he has seen far worse than she has to offer.

  Finally, Merrick grunts. “The kitchen,” she says, and leads the way.

  Skart sees how it was done right away. A magical lock in the back of the fridge. Dust required to get Dust. It makes him wish he’d had the funds to deal with Cotter directly rather than through Merrick. He thinks he might have preferred the drug dealer to this self-important thug.

  He pushes through the narrow opening in the back of the fridge, views the hidden room where the Dust was prepared. He picks up a small baggie, weighs it in his hand.

  “And you have no leads,” he says. It is not a question.

  Merrick lurks back in the entranceway, casting shade. “We’ll have them soon.”

  “No.” Skart shakes his head. “You won’t. You are a blunt instrument and now this needs a scalpel.”

  Merrick puffs up like a bullfrog, but Skart holds up a hand. “You will still be paid. I’ll see to that. But your work is done.”

  Merrick works her jaw. She doesn’t like the insult, but the cash will take the sting out of it. She slouches away, grumbling.

  Skart waits until the apartment is quiet. He opens the baggie, regards the pure white powder within. A hunger wakes in him.

  He tips the baggie and pours its contents into his mouth.

  The power burns in him. It tears a hole. It shatters the shackles the Iron Wall has put on his soul and suddenly all the majesty, all the beauty, all the magic of the world comes bursting back to him. It breaks him down, and it makes him something primal. His skin splits, and power steams from the rips. It scalds the flesh around his eyes, his nostrils, his ears. When he exhales, it boils on his breath.

  And it is so beautiful to be this way. It is so very good to burn. He would take more, and more, and more of the Dust if he could. He would open up his heart and give birth once again to the world gone away. A light—golden and green—is glowing inside him. He can hear birdsong. He can hear the river’s chuckle. He can smell the flowers in bloom.

  But then he pulls himself back from that brink. He wrestles with the power and its siren song of pyrrhic immolation. He brings it to heel.

  Skart grabs ahold of his senses, hauls them roughly to the fore. Abruptly, the stink of blood and bowel is almost overpowering. The glare of the kitchen’s single bulb makes him shield his eyes.

  But suddenly so much more is apparent to him as well. Not just the moment he lives in, but the lingering remains of what has happened before. He learned this long ago, back before Mab’s army marched, back when the kobolds’ underground cities were a wonder to behold, lit by bioluminescence and torchlight, halls full of songs and joy. He learned this as a hunter with brothers now long dead. He learned this when he could only imagine innocent uses for it. Not many know such hunting magic now. Merrick certainly doesn’t. Skart still remembers, though. He has made sure to hold onto the old ways.

  Now, he sniffs the air with senses magically enhanced. He can track the scent trails of Merrick’s team as they came in and out, stained with blood and gun oil. Then, as he heads back into Cotter’s hidden room, he picks out one more scent. One that’s younger, cleaner, more loaded with fear.

  This, he knows, is the trail of whoever took the brick of Dust. The weapon with which he plans to remake this city.

  Skart follows it into the living room, out onto the balcony, towards the fire escape, down. After a few floors, he sees where the thief jumped onto the roofs beyond.

  And Skart knows, standing out in the cold night air, all is not lost. Not yet.

  Sil

  Sil’s speed is failing her. Too much stamina has been beaten out of her tonight. The exhaustion is going to kill her.

  Not directly, of course. That will be the yelling rabble of fae chasing her and Jag down the street.

  She does the math. If she cannot outpace this mob before she runs out of energy, how much energy will it take to stop them? And, knowing that, can she find optimal fighting ground before she no longer has that energy?

  But then, of course, all her planning, all of her training blows up beneath her feet.

  Jag trips, sprawls to the ground. She lifts her head up, panting hard. She’s drawn a bloody scrape along her chin. She doesn’t get up. Sil doesn’t even bother to tell her to do so. This is Sil’s battleground now.

  She spins. There’s a low row of shops on one side of the street—a mix of cheap restaurants and delis. On the other side is the source of those shops’ income: a paper mill, its windows shuttered and dark. She scans for a fire escape, spots one.

  Then the mob arrive.

  “Well, well.” One pixie steps forward. “What we got here?”

  He’s playing for time, trying to get his breath back. Sil doesn’t mind. She is too.

  “Couple of gobbos come to play tourist, is it?” the fae asks his friends.

  With her hair obscuring her features, and so many young goblins dying their green locks less natural shades, and with the chartreuse tint to her skin, Sil often reads as goblin. There is nothing to be gained from correcting anyone now. Being only half-goblin doesn’t make fae any friendlier, and they lose a lot of their deference.

  “Having a nice night out, are you?” the talkative pixie asks. A circlet of white ash swings around his neck. “Want to send a postcard home? Maybe we can help you. Wish you weren’t here.” He laughs at his own joke. A couple of others in the mob do too.

  Sil nods. “Comedian,” she says. She starts to walk forward. “I know a joke.”

  “Cocky little fucker, aren’t you?”

  “What’s ten inches shorter than you and red all over?”

  “Why don’t you go—” the pixie starts, but never finishes. Sil’s blade comes out, sends his head toppling to the floor.

  Everything is very quiet as the corpse pumps blood into the street.

  Then it begins.

  The mob roars its outrage and fear. And they’re too amped up, too committed to this path to back away. They can’t give in to the urge to flee. Not with all their friends there. So, they come at her as one, fists raised, clubs held high, lengths of aluminum chain swinging.

  They are not warriors but there are twenty of them. The fight smothers her. Bodies smash into her with dead weight, driving her back, driving her down.

  This is not the first time she has been here, though. These were always the worst of her lessons. They would bring prisoners to her by the busload—demi-dryads, old kobold miners, prisoners from House Troll—put them in a courtyard, and tell those big, bruised inmates that they could walk free if only they could take this small half-fae down. Those were ugly days, spent under a screaming, clawing pile of frantic fae, proving that she could be more animal than them, biting and gouging, blood filling her mouth until she retched.

  But it was necessary. It was what she had to do to obey. And failing to obey would have been so much worse than fighting forty desperate fae with hands and teeth. That had been drilled into her. You learn a lot about what can be worse than other terrible things, she knows now, when you’re tied to a chair in a room with a tutor armed with a drill and no conscience.

  Here, now—she breaks free of the mob, tears out of their grasp, goes for the fire escape, for higher ground. She leaps, catches the bottom rung of the ladder, hauls herself up hand over hand while the mob bays at this retreat, leaping and grabbing for her. Someone scrabbles at her foot, trying to pry off her heavy combat boot, but their grip gives up before her laces do. Then she’s up, still climbing rung over rung onto the old iron structure. It’s awkward with the sword, but awkward is infinitely preferable to dead, and the iron will hurt her pursuers more than it stings her, her father’s goblin heritage offering
a buffer, reducing the iron’s stab to a barely noticeable throb.

  She catches her breath on the first landing. Below her, the mob is jumping like hungry fish. Fingers scrape the bottom rung. Then finally, someone climbs on someone else’s back. Then they’re all doing it—transformed from fish to ants—piling up on each other, swarming upward.

  The fire escape shudders under this assault. Sil retreats another flight higher. More and more of the fae are crowding onto the stairs, clinging to the metal cage that contains them. A few are on the underside of the steps, trying to pull themselves up bodily despite the iron that must be burning their fingertips.

  The metal shivers again. There is a cracking, popping noise from above.

  Sil realizes what is happening.

  She dives for one of the windows as the whole fire escape gives way beneath the weight of the mob. Ancient metal scrapes against one arm, stinging like fire, skewing her flight, but then she collides with the rotten wood of one pair of shutters and they crash around her, slamming into the ancient window beneath. Wood and glass burst. Outside metal and brick are screaming. Fae are screaming.

  Sil lands in a ragged pile on the dirt-spattered floor of the factory. She lies there panting, listening to the sounds of destruction echoing from outside. Clouds of dust billow up. Shakily she gets to her feet.

  It is only when she’s at the window, gazing down at the chaos and ruin, that she realizes she has left Jag down in the heart of it.

  Bee

  In another factory not so far away, a furnace rings like a gong as a bullet smashes into it. Bee flinches as sparks fly, only three inches from his head.

  “Shit!”

  Tharn crouches next to Bee, sweating, swearing, holding a heavy machine gun with two shaking hands. “Where did they come from?”

  Bee doesn’t know. He doesn’t have time to point out that he doesn’t know; that he’s just as ambushed as everybody else here; that, yes, the question does need to be answered, but not right now. Right now, all he has time to do is move.