by J. P. Oakes
Then he’s underneath the commando, a gun barrel pressed into his opponent’s kidneys. His other arm is around the commando’s windpipe. The commando’s fingers dig into the ropey sinews of his arm. It hurts, but at least Skart knows where the goblin’s hands are.
He’s panting so hard, it takes him a moment before he can tell the last goblin, “Let my friend go.”
“Fuck you,” the commando he’s holding onto tells him. “Fuck you both.”
The Spriggan he’s actually talking to hesitates, however.
If the goblin goes for a shoulder shot, Skart knows he’s fucked. His captive has no body armor there; the bullet will go straight through and take out Skart’s gun arm. It will force him to let go. The goblin will be injured too, but he will recover. Skart will never be allowed to do so.
It takes a certain amount of willpower to shoot your friend, though. Skart is banking on the idea that this goblin doesn’t have it.
“Let my friend go,” Skart says again. “You do that, and everyone walks away.”
“Cap that fae shit now,” Skart’s captive says. Apparently, he is far more suicidal than Skart had hoped. Skart digs the barrel of the gun deeper into the commando’s kidneys, but all he earns himself is another, “Fuck you.”
Behind all this, Knull is slowly clambering to his feet, inching his way up the alley wall. His eyes are wide. Skart can’t be sure how much of all this he’s taking in. This pair really put the panic in him.
“It’s OK, Knull,” he says. “I’ve got this.”
He needs Knull to understand what’s happening. He needs him to know Skart is saving his life.
Knull makes some non-committal grunts.
“You shut your hole,” the free commando says, although it’s unclear which of them he’s talking to.
Then, finally the goblin does the obvious thing and puts his gun to Knull’s head.
It’s not the smart thing to do, but it is obvious.
“Put the gun down,” the standing Spriggan says, “or your friend dies.”
“Sure,” Skart says as reasonably as he can. “But he’s the only one who knows where the Dust actually is.”
And that gets the goblin’s attention.
“Let me get up,” Skart tells them.
This is perhaps the hardest part. Because the commando whose kidney he’s violating wants to kill him so very badly, he will take the smallest opening. So Skart keeps the gun pressed deep, keeps it far from prying hands, keeps his own free arm pressed to the commando’s neck. And he keeps on praying.
Skart wasn’t afraid of death for a long time. For a long time, he didn’t care if he lived or died. Not once the first set of uprisings after the Iron War—the so-called Red Rebellion—went south. After so many of his friends died. For a long time, it didn’t seem like there was much left to live for.
Now, though, now he feels each of these seconds ticking past.
“OK,” he says once they’re up. “Now we can talk in a civilized way.”
“I’m going to find your family and put them in the ground,” his captive tells him, although he is very late to that particular party.
“Well,” Skart says, “not all of us are civilized.”
“You’re a dead fae talking.”
Honestly, Skart would like to indulge in a little more banter, and get his breath back a little more, but tonight time is of the essence.
He shoots his captive. He feels the body jerk, the spasm of it pulling him off balance. He goes with it, shoving straight toward the last, stunned Spriggan.
It’s all just shock in the end. Nothing more than that. It’s all just doing what your enemy won’t expect you to do. Hitting them in their blindspots.
And for all this, he gets at most half a second to save Knull’s life.
He throws the dying commando into the living one’s gun arm. The shot rings out, as the commando fires reflexively. The bullet ricochets off the wall behind Knull’s head. Knull screams. Skart yanks the flopping goblin’s body back and slams it into his opponent again. He uses the body like a battering ram. The shot goblin is bleeding out, but he struggles weakly, makes everything a little bit harder. Skart’s muscles scream as loudly as Knull. He can’t keep this up.
Skart slams the goblin forward one more time, lets him go, because he has to. The full weight of the goblin tumbles into the last commando. The living and the dying goblin both collapse to the ground.
This, of course, is the moment when Skart should press his advantage. He should end it here.
He glances back at Knull. And Skart doesn’t just need the drug dealer alive. He needs him grateful. And he really doesn’t know, with someone as self-interested as Knull, if he’s there yet.
This, he thinks, is going to suck. But there are no choices anymore.
The goblin commando kicks his now-dead partner off himself, stands up.
“You fucking—” he manages before the rage just takes over and he levels his gun at Skart’s head.
Skart backs up fast and hard. Knull is right there under his feet. They fall, limbs tangling.
The commando looks down at Skart and Knull lying in the dirt.
“Get up,” he tells Skart. He’s still pointing the gun.
Skart gets up. Knull doesn’t move at all.
“Drop the pistol.”
Skart drops it.
The Spriggan pushes the barrel of his gun into Skart’s face. Then, after a moment, he moves it right, moves it down. He points it at Knull. He keeps his eyes on Skart, though. “I don’t think I believe your friend is the only one who knows where this Dust is,” he says. “I think you’re a liar, just like all the fae. I think I’m going to kill your friend and then beat the truth out of you.”
There is no question. This is going to suck.
“No!” Skart flings himself forward. He puts himself right in front of the barrel. Right as the gun goes off.
It is like being at the center of an explosion. Like coming apart. The pain is massive. He lies there gasping. There is a hole in his guts, and it is full of fire. He’s trying to scream but the pain is too big to get out through something as small as his throat.
The goblin looms over him.
“I only need one of you alive,” he says. “And I am going to enjoy this.”
It costs Skart a lot to get the words out, but it’s worth it.
“You talk too much,” he says.
And then Knull fires the gun. He fires the gun that Skart dropped right into his lap. He points it directly at the Spriggan’s skull, and he blows the bastard’s brains across the wall.
Skart smiles. Just for a moment. And that done, he closes his eyes, and decides to simply bleed for a bit.
Granny Spregg
The waiting, Granny Spregg thinks, is going to kill her. There is some irony to that considering that from some angles most of her life looks like just passing the time in between assassination attempts. Still, she’s never considered before that passing the time itself might actually be what finally finishes her.
She perches on her chaise-longue, flanked by black leather armchairs posed like bodyguards. Thacker approaches with a silver tray. “Would you like some tea?”
“I’d like you to go screw yourself.”
Her breath is coming fast. The night is cool but she feels hot and the air is close. Maybe Privett has tried to kill her by breaking her room’s thermostat. It’s stupid enough for him, although probably too imaginative.
In the end, she can’t take it anymore. She stands. “We are going to the command center.”
“But—” Thacker still struggles with his tray. “—they said they’d send a runner. They said that as soon as a scout reports back from the Fae Districts they’d—”
“Do you need me to clean your ears with a poker, Thacker?”
“Let me get the door for you.”
Thacker is about to put hand to handle when the knock comes. Granny Spregg’s heart gives a spasm. She and Thacker exchange a look.
“Well?”
Thacker swallows, hesitates. “Right,” he says. He opens the door.
Thacker does not then welcome in a runner, though. He does not surreptitiously usher in a commando scout. Thacker simply stops and gawps.
“Brethelda,” Granny Spregg says, as if her daughter is the only possible creature who could ever come to her chamber door. “Do come in.”
Brethelda stalks forward slowly. “Mother,” she says as she looks around the room.
“Let me guess,” Granny Spregg says, settling back down on her chaise. “You need advice on dealing with the opposite sex?”
Brethelda cocks her head for a moment, then nods. “Of a sort.”
The problem with teaching your children to hide their motives, Granny Spregg thinks, is that then they can hide them from you.
“Well—” Granny Spregg beckons Brethelda to a chair. “—tell Mother everything.”
Brethelda comes forward but does not sit. She stands stiffly. She has always done things stiffly. Granny Spregg had a doctor look into it once. Apparently, it’s caused by Brethelda being a tight-assholed bitch from birth.
“Now, who’s bothering you?” Granny Spregg asks.
“Osmondo Red,” Brethelda says.
“He’s a little old for you, isn’t he?”
Osmondo Red is of Granny Spregg’s vintage—a relic of the world gone away; a veteran of the Iron War. He is also a goblin bent almost as much by his hatred of everyone and everything as he is by age. And what’s more—what’s so much worse—he has held onto power. Granny Spregg would rather like to throttle him with his own intestines.
“It’s not just Osmondo, Mother. The heads of House Bogle, Hobgob, and Troll would also all like to know why I just marched to war on the Fae Districts. They are worried about their factories, their supply chains, their investments. They are worried, Mother, that you are not just declaring war on the fae, but on them. And given your past actions, we can perhaps both understand their perspective.”
Granny Spregg permits herself a smile. “Do I worry you, Brethelda? Have I put a shiver in your shins?”
Brethelda walks to her mother’s writing desk, grabs the chair, pulls it over to sit opposite her. She perches on its edge. Granny Spregg has a greasy, uneasy feeling in her gut.
“Do not mistake me, Mother,” Brethelda says, “for someone other than who I am. I tolerate you because you are my mother, and because from time to time you amuse me, and because sometimes I find it pleasant to look upon you and know how far I have caused you to fall.”
Her tongue appears between her teeth for just a second—an almost lizard-like licking of the air.
“I know the fae forgot nothing,” she continues. “I know they were provoked. And I know that you provoked them. The fact that I have not asked how or why you did this is not because you have somehow tricked me. It is not because you are my tragic blindspot. It is simply because you are now so far beneath me that I do not give a fuck what you do. It is meaningless.
“Now, though, the other Houses are riled, and someone needs to go and eat shit. And I find, Mother, that I have no appetite for shit. I am all full up after listening to you and your petty machinations in the library. So now, I am telling you to go and make nice. See how well you can lie to them.
“Now, do you understand me, Mother, or should I have Thacker write it down for you?”
Granny Spregg chews through several ripostes. “I should have douched,” is where she settles.
Brethelda smiles. “I’m glad we understand each other.” She stands. Thacker twitches. “Don’t worry,” Brethelda tells him. “I’ll see myself out.”
Granny Spregg waits a full ten seconds before she meets Thacker’s eye. “And you thought I’d have to beg to be allowed to go.”
Thacker swallows. “I stand corrected.”
“You slouch-like-a-winded-boar corrected, Thacker.”
“As you say.”
Granny Spregg stands, checks the clock on the wall. The wait was shorter than she thought. She still feels sweaty and short of breath, but she has purpose again. She starts to move across the room. She’ll need her necklace if she’s to see Osmondo Red. The one of dried fae ears strung tog—
The room suddenly lurches sideways. Granny Spregg staggers a step. Then she finds that the room has tilted around her, has reached up and smashed her in one ancient cheek.
She lies, breath hitching in and out. Her vision spirals, contracts, and Thacker is only a blur as he comes rushing towards her.
Edwyll
In the filth-strewn main room of a squat many miles away, Edwyll stands very still.
“They’ve gone,” he says.
The goblin staring at his mural flinches, spins around. She looks at him, as if trying to remember where she is. Then she steps forward, holding out her hands as if to take his. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you. You saved my life.”
Edwyll finds himself nodding.
“I’m Edwyll,” he says.
“Jag.”
“From the bar.” He is not sure why he says it. He’s not sure what to say. How does one turn the topic of conversation to payment in the form of lifetime sponsorship?
Not this way. Jag’s face fills with shock, then fear. She shies away from him. “No,” she gasps. “You were there? I didn’t—” Then she recognizes him, he sees. She shakes her head violently. “That wasn’t.” Her eyes are large, imploring. “Please,” she says.
For a minute he doesn’t understand. And when he does it’s with a sense of shock. Forgiveness, he thinks. She’s asking for forgiveness. From me.
That is not the sort of thing a goblin asks for from a fae. The butcher doesn’t ask forgiveness from a cow. And yet here they both are.
He tries to see it from her eyes. Does he seem like a threat? He doesn’t feel like a threat. He just saved her life. He doesn’t think she can be telling him this to try and fend him off. It feels… genuine.
“I didn’t want what happened in the bar,” she says. She’s not looking at him. She’s looking at his mural again, he realizes. “I came here because…” She looks down at the floor for a moment, then up again, and her eyes glance off him and go back to the painting. “Because there’s still so much beauty here. There’s so much good. And so many goblins either refuse to see it, or pretend they can’t see it. But I just wanted… I wanted to try… Sil… with the sword, she’s my sister. My half-sister. And terrible things have been done to her. She’s been made into something so cold. So, I wanted her to see everything that I see here. I wanted her to feel what I feel when I come here. But everything I wanted was the opposite of what happened. And I was stupid, and naïve, I see that… But I didn’t want what happened. I swear.”
She reaches up, brushes at an eye.
He believes her. It’s almost against his will but he does. Her earnestness convinces him.
“Thank you,” she says again. “If you saw what happened in there… I didn’t deserve kindness from you.”
He shrugs, awkward now. All his thoughts of demanding patronage as payment feel clumsy and demeaning now.
“I just want to get out of the Fae Districts and stop causing trouble,” Jag says. “I just… I need a way home.”
“A cab,” Edwyll says.
She looks at him. “Do you know a driver you can trust to take me home safely? To House Red?”
No, he does not. He looks out at the burning, shouting city. “Not tonight,” he says.
They stand there in awkward silence. Could she hide here, he wonders? Just sit in the shadows and hope no one else comes here with the same idea? Hope those sidhe don’t come back to make sure they didn’t miss something?
She’s turned away from him, is looking at the mural again. “This,” she says. “This is why I came here. Because things like this exist here.”
“Thank you,” he says.
She looks at him. “You really did this?”
He shrugs again. Nods. “Yeah.”
“It’s…” she trails off for long seconds. “Wow.”
He opens his mouth. Clumsy, and awkward, and mercenary. But she is a House goblin. When else will he get this opportunity?
“With patronage,” he says carefully, “I could create more.” It feels crass as soon as it’s out of his mouth. It feels as if he is trying to buy himself success for the price of a dozen bloody bodies left in a bar.
She blinks at him. He opens his mouth to take it back. And then she says:
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Well…” She looks around them. “I am miles from home, and everyone in between here and there seems to want to kill me. And the Fae Districts are on fire. And I don’t know what’s happening. But I do love your art. And if you can get me home, if you can keep me safe, then yes.”
And in among all of that, the only word that was really clear to Edwyll was Yes.
He wants to laugh. Because there is a path forward. A way to change things, to make things better.
“Come with me,” he says. “I know what we can do.”
Knull
Skart is bleeding all over Knull’s shoes. He is, in fact, bleeding over quite a lot of the alleyway. Although, Knull supposes, it is quite hard to tell where Skart’s blood ends and the Spriggans’ begins.
Knull gets up. It takes longer than usual. His body pulses with agony. His ankle screams. One of his eyes won’t open. Tears leak down his cheeks.
They were going to kill him.
The dangers of the Iron City have, of course, always been known to Knull. No fae grows up here without knowing how close they walk to the precipice of a goblin’s displeasure each day. But, for Knull, that danger has always been something that happens to others. The careless and the foolish.
Except then he was up against a wall with a gun in his mouth and a fist in his crotch. Then, the danger was all around him, inside him. He was sodden with terror. And then, it left him here, gasping and trembling, like someone half-drowned in his own fear.