City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  She can taste the sweetness of the sugar at the back of her throat even with this thin scraping. But then the Dust hits and all sweetness is forgotten.

  —vines rising like chains—thorns thrashing through her mind—an eclipse, the sun in full retreat—night stretching fingers across the world, raking the earth with jagged fingernails—buildings falling—bodies splayed in the limbs of trees—the screaming of birds wheeling in the sky—a hawk with its beak in the entrails of a stoat—an animal’s head twisted in pain—a great black tree rising—

  She emerges from the visions gasping. Her skin feels tight and brittle. Power is bulging within her, threatening to spill out. She can feel it splitting the skin around her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Dust is not meant for goblins. She grits her teeth, and it feels like the lightning is on her tongue.

  She extends one gnarled finger toward Osmondo Red’s wide-eyed face, and as she does so, the years drop from the digit. Her finger is suddenly slender, and elegant, and straight for the first time in over a decade. And as she points, a black-leafed vine unfurls from beneath her fingernail, extends out to brush Osmondo’s cheek and circle his skull, and curl around his throat.

  “Do you believe me now, Osmondo?” she asks him, and her words are a red mist between them. “Or am I still a liar?”

  He opens his mouth. She doesn’t know if he has the words to answer. She doesn’t care. The vine tightens, crushing, constricting. His eyes bulge. He gurgles.

  She tries to push back on the poison in her veins as he stares at her. Tries to use the spare power sparking and juddering through her system to buy just a little more life, a few more hours to do what she must. She doesn’t have healing knowledge, though, and the Dust is burning away, fizzing off her incompatible physiology, scouring her veins as much as she pushes back at the pollution in her blood.

  And then it’s gone. The dizzying power rushing out of her. The ecstatic sense that she can do anything. To anyone. And all she’s left with is the desperate trembling pain, and the feel of the blood oozing out all over her.

  She takes a shuddering breath. She feels the poison rushing into the spaces that the magic has left. She feels her heart skipping, trying to keep up with her ambition, staggering. And through it all she still meets Osmondo’s eyes, and she bares her teeth, and she says, her voice rasping, “So tell me, Osmondo. Who the fuck is going to raze who from the earth tonight?”

  She manages to stay upright just long enough to see him turn tail and run from the room.

  Bee

  “I’m sorry,” Bee says to Sil, “but you know how to kill who?”

  The strange, drunk, deadly half-fae is weaving back and forth in the street. She’s tapping the side of her head.

  “Osmondo Red,” she says. “I can get to him. I can get in and out of House Red Cap. I can slide up right beside him.”

  Except, of course, no one can do that. House Red Cap is the most impenetrable House in the Iron City. While others rely on armed guards, traps, and labyrinths, House Red Cap is simply a blank box of concrete and steel with no way in or out. The location of its door is the most heavily guarded secret in all of the Iron City. Bee knows that from time to time resistance forces have captured House Red Cap members. Some have been tortured. None have ever given up the location of that door.

  Could she really be Osmondo Red’s bastard? He doubts it. The story is almost certainly a myth told to warm some poor half-fae child in the dark. But… what if? What if everything she’s saying is true?

  He turns to ask the others, to start the debate, to give them some purpose, but as he does so they round a corner, and everything stops.

  The parts of the city they have been walking through have been relatively untouched by the night’s upheaval. Until now, the Fae Liberation Front’s troubles have felt confined to empty lots and lobbies. That ends here.

  The street before them is full of fire and rubble. A factory has collapsed, spilling into the road in a great slouching mass of bricks and steel struts. Flames gutter from the blackened windows of the houses stacked up around it. There are bodies half obscured by wreckage and smoke.

  They step into the street silently. All thoughts of purpose have fled from Bee’s head. There is only shocked reaction. A stumbling forward into the moment, horrified and appalled. They check the bodies, searching for signs of life. An old brownie stirs, and they haul him free from a pile of snapped wooden beams. They prop him up at the side of the street, and blood oozes from a gash in his forehead. No one else seems to know what to do after that. They leave him there, half-conscious.

  They go on. They have to go on, don’t they? They don’t debate it, just seem to fall into it. A shocked probing of the wound they have found in their city. A wordless, horrified desire to understand the extent of the damage.

  In the next street, all the ground-floor windows have been smashed. Bullet holes riddle the stonework, and the doors have all been perforated by the violence. A pair of female sidhe lie in the center of the road, their torsos almost cut in two.

  The next street is a charnel scene. Bodies piled haphazardly, set on fire.

  The next street is quiet. They all walk down it, waiting for a horror that doesn’t come.

  The street after that is covered with broken bottles, bricks, and shell casings. Blood spatters the walls and the floor, but all the bodies are gone.

  From the next junction, they can see goblin security vehicles. Flashing lights blink malevolently through the drifting smoke. Hulking APCs trudge back and forth between smaller vehicles, machine gunners poised at their summits.

  The next street is strewn with more wreckage. It looks like grenades have been fired into the upper stories and onto the roofs. Rooms stare blindly up onto the night sky.

  “What the fuck?” Tharn breathes. He’s the first one of them to speak in minutes.

  No one has an answer.

  There have been uprisings before, of course. There have been reprisals before. There was one fifteen years ago that went on for days. But Bee was four years old then and barely remembers the few days he spent in his aunt’s basement complaining about how bored he was, while his parents huddled together and prayed. He has read of what happened—they all have—but those are words on a page. They are not the red horror of it before his eyes. They are not the scent of it in his nose. None of them have ever felt it quite like this. The anger they know, but the fear is new.

  Motion draws Bee’s eyes. Harretta has collapsed to her knees. Tears stream down her face. Others bury their faces in their hands. Of them all, it’s Tharn who rushes to Harretta’s side and puts an arm around her.

  “The bodies…” she manages between sobs. “All… All those fae…”

  Bee swallows. Would it have been better if he sided with Tharn back when they first found the goblins? Could he have changed this?

  More movement. This time it’s to his left. He spins around, drawing his gun. Sil has her sword pointed in the same direction.

  A small fae face appears from a doorway—a pixie, her face pale in the blackened brickwork.

  “Are they gone?” the pixie asks.

  Bee looks back. He can still see splashes of light from the security vehicles a few streets away. He shakes his head. The pixie darts back into cover.

  One question reminds him of another. He was talking to Sil before they entered this hell of smoke and ruin. She was telling him something miraculous. Is it true?

  He turns to her now. “How?” he asks. “How do we get to Osmondo Red?”

  She turns to him. She doesn’t seem as drunk as she was, but she doesn’t seem shocked by the horror they have just walked into either. She surveys it clinically. He remembers again that first impression he had of her, of something deadly, of something antagonistic to his existence at a primal level.

  “When you want to enter House Red,” she says, “you must go to a certain building. The exact one changes every day. It may be an apartment above a bakery. It may be a penthouse suite.” Th
ere is an odd affectless tone to the way she speaks now, as if she is reciting a lesson well learned. “There a goblin will greet you. You will only ever see him in one of these rooms. He is blind, deaf, and has had his tongue cut out. You must tap on his arm in a certain sequence or he will attack you. He is very skilled.

  “Once you have won his trust, this goblin will show you to a chair. You will sit, and he will put cotton in your ears. He will blindfold you. He will take you down to the basement and into a car. Someone will drive you to another location. That location will also change every day. There you will be led downstairs into a tunnel. When the blindfold and cotton are removed, you will be inside House Red.”

  This is already more than Bee has ever heard, but he still doesn’t see how it helps.

  “The secret,” Sil says, “is that there is no door. House Red is as featureless as it looks. The second room you are taken to, the room you never see—not Osmondo’s wife, not his daughter, not even his own troops—is full of fae. They are chained, their wrists fastened to their ankles, behind their backs. They spend their lives on their knees. Their tongues have also been removed. Iron bands blindfold them and will never be removed. When you wish to enter or leave House Red, they are given Dust. They open the walls. They close them behind you. This is all they will know for the rest of their lives.”

  Bee stares at her. “No,” he says. Around him, fires burn, and revolutionaries sob. He shakes his head. “No,” he says again. Because that is not a door. It is too pointlessly cruel. Too cartoonishly monstrous. “You said everyone who goes there is blindfolded,” he says. “How could you know that?” He needs to poke holes in her story.

  “I was taken there as part of my education. I was taken there so I would understand my place.” She is starting to shudder, Bee sees, something violent that seems to originate in her spine. “Osmondo Red has a fae who works for him. He would take me there and tell me that I should never forget that my mother was fae, that I was no better than these ‘hinges.’ If I failed, if I did not obey, that is where they would put me.”

  She swallows several times. “The lucky ones,” she says, “die of starvation.”

  She does not meet his eye for a while. Then she says, “There are twelve rooms that the fae hinges can be taken to. I know all of them. I know their pattern. I am the bodyguard of Princess Jaggered, the heir of House Red. I was told these things in case the first line of defense falls. I was told these things because I have been made to be perfectly loyal. I was told these things because I have had disobedience and rebellion torn from my head.”

  She looks back at him and her smile is utterly mirthless. “I am interested in educating my tutors on the errors they have made in this process.”

  She makes a little curtsy, smooth and perfect, her sweep of white hair bobbing. Behind her, a building collapses just a little more. Smoke drifts from a window. “Would you like to join me?” she asks him.

  Bee feels a little breathless. Everyone else, he realizes, is listening too. All the survivors. All of them who are not lying dead in the lobby of an anonymous apartment building, or on a dirty rooftop or cold factory floor. All of his friends who haven’t been killed yet.

  Someone touches his arm. Bee jumps, but it’s Tharn. “I know,” Tharn says. “I know how repetitive this is going to sound, but we have to tell everyone else what she’s telling us.” He grabs Bee’s arm. “This really could change everything.”

  Bee doesn’t disagree. When he looks to Harretta, she doesn’t either. All the heads he can see are nodding.

  “OK,” Bee says. “All those in favor of taking this knowledge to the leaders of the rebellion?”

  “Aye,” Tharn says.

  “Aye,” Harretta says.

  “Aye,” Bee and Sil say in unison.

  Edwyll

  Edwyll leads Jag back to the living room in the collective’s well-decorated home. They enter side by side, and for the first time their partnership feels not like a lie he has made up and forced upon this goblin, but like something true. They enter the room united by common purpose and vision.

  He sees the banner still taped to the wall, the ragged violence of the White Tree that he crafted. The twisted snarl of its roots tangled in blacks and purples. And it is something, he thinks. It could be something. Together he and Jag could make it a message that lasts.

  As they step back into the room, he sees that Threm and Lila are back, sitting on the couch. The drinks are poured. The tension is still there. Talluck is staring daggers at Threm. Threm studies his drink.

  Jallow grins at them despite the obvious tension. “A manifesto!” he booms. “That’s what we really need. To get the principles and aims down on paper. Something we can put on flyers to make the idea concrete in fae’s—”

  Threm is already rolling his eyes when a sharp crack from the hallway interrupts Jallow. All eyes turn. Edwyll tries to place the noise. Then there’s another, a flat, harsh noise. There’s the sound of something cracking.

  “What—” Threm starts.

  And then the cracks come in a sharp stutter-shout. Glass shatters. The doorframe to the hallway splinters and shreds. The sheet with the tree painted on it jerks and flaps. A hole appears in the wall. A glass shatters where it sits on top of one of Jallow’s rehabilitated coffee tables.

  “The floor!” Jallow shouts. “Get on the floor!”

  And it’s only as the musty scent of a rug hits Edwyll’s nose, and its wiry threads hit his chin, that he realizes that the riots have reached the street outside, that someone is firing indiscriminately, the bullets ripping through the house’s cheap fabrication materials.

  Stuffing erupts from the couch in short white bursts and then everything goes still.

  Edwyll lies there, heart smashing against his ribs, trying to punch through his chest and the floor in one desperate attempt to bury itself in the dirt below.

  A soft, heavy “whump” of sound from out on the street. Threm lets out a whimper.

  They lie there waiting. After a minute Edwyll picks up his head. The others are there too, prone on the floor, trying to look around.

  “Is it…” he starts. “Is it safe?”

  “I think maybe…” Jallow starts.

  “No!” Threm erupts. He jerks up from the floor, is there on all fours, stabs a finger out at Jallow. “No, it’s not safe! This city is tearing itself inside out.”

  “This is why we need the sign. The manifesto.” Talluck rolls back onto his haunches. “This is why a signal of hope is more important than ever.”

  “A manifesto?” Threm is virtually spitting. “You think a manifesto is going to save us? Do you understand what’s happening out there? What’s always happening out there?” His stabbing finger lances out at Jag. “Do you even know who that is? Do you know what will happen if goblins come in here and find us with her?”

  Edwyll blinks. He tries to understand. “That’s Jag,” he says. He looks at her. And then from her face he sees that she is not just Jag.

  “That,” Threm says, “is Princess Jaggered Red, daughter of Osmondo Red, and heir to House Red Cap. That is the favored child of the House of Oppression and Hate.”

  “Jag?” He stares at her, but she won’t meet his eyes.

  “Ask Lila,” Threm says. “She knows. She actually pays attention to what happens out there in the city. She’s had her eyes open enough to see her photo in the goblin broadsheets.”

  Edwyll looks to Lila. The pixie smiles apologetically. “I thought you must know.”

  “Jag?” Edwyll says again.

  “Everything I told you about my intentions is true,” Jag says. She doesn’t look at any of them as she talks. She speaks to the floor. “I am not my father.”

  “Maybe,” Threm says. “Maybe not. But the ransom your father would pay for you might still be our only safe passage out of this firestorm tonight.”

  Edwyll blinks, tries to process. Suddenly everything is happening too fast.

  “What?” Talluck rumbles
, so at least Edwyll doesn’t feel like he’s the only one left behind.

  “You think this is as bad as it’s going to get?” Threm is almost shouting. “You think a few rogue shots through the door is the apex of the horror we’re all plunging into? This city is a barrel of dry leaves and oil cans and tonight someone lit a match. Reprisals are coming like Mab’s Kiss and I for one have never had any interest in martyrdom.”

  “Be quiet,” Talluck growls. “You’re scared and you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Has the wood rot set in already then?” Threm sneers. “First you think a painting of a tree can save the city. Now you think hoping the goblins go away can get us through the night. You need to wake up to reality. You need to wake up to the fact that that goblin is our only ticket to tomorrow.”

  Jag is shaking her head, watching Threm, watching the fear in his eyes. Edwyll feels something rising in him, feels his own fear curdling, coagulating, becoming something brutal and ragged.

  “You fucking coward.” He hears himself say it, but he can’t quite believe it. He is saying this to Threm. The gnome whose work inspired a whole generation of photojournalists, whose monographs he has pored over at night. But he can’t not say it. Not now. “You turncoat, selfish piece of shit.” The profanity is burning out of him. He wants to grab his paint cans. He wants to spray them into Threm’s face.

  “She wants better for this city,” he shouts. “She’s here with us, doing something about it. And all you care about… all you can do…” He is up off the floor. He is marching on the alarmed-looking little gnome, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets to him—he feels out of control, freefalling—but he is half-excited, half-terrified to find out when he gets there.

  But before he does, there is the unmistakable sound of someone kicking down the front door.

  16

  And Then It All Goes to Shit

  Granny Spregg

  Granny Spregg is trying to not slump out of her chair and onto the floor when Brethelda finally comes to find her. Her lungs feel as though they are full of thorns. Her breath comes in sharp, shallow bursts.