City of Iron and Dust

by J. P. Oakes

  And Skart thinks he would be happy to explain all this to Brumble, to pick the scales of idiocy from her eyes, but abruptly there is no more time. Brumble’s eyes go wide and wider still. She gasps. Blood joins the phlegm she has sprayed onto his chest.

  Sil pulls her sword from Brumble’s back. She kicks the heavy dryad aside and helps Skart to his feet.

  “You took your time.”

  Around them, limbs and offal are spread like hay on a stable floor. Sil is soaked with red. She doesn’t say anything. Skart doesn’t expect her to. “Mnemosyne” was always a failsafe, a trigger buried deep in her psyche only to be pulled out as a last resort. It leaves her with only a little higher cognition.

  He sighs. A lot of hard work wasted on all fronts. Still, the chance to put everything to rights remains within reach. The whole night can still be worthwhile. All he has to do is relocate Knull, and then beat the Dust’s location from his bones.

  Granny Spregg

  Granny Spregg tries bribery. She tries flaunting her few remaining feminine charms. She even tries threats to life, limb, and offspring. But the guards Brethelda has posted at her door prove disappointingly, albeit predictably, resilient to all these approaches. She is most effectively imprisoned.

  She stands in her bedroom. Her rugs smell of wet-vac chemicals and Thacker’s blood stains have been erased. His body is missing. His presence annulled. She thinks about how she would have connived to evict him from her rooms, how he would have brought her own loyal forces to bear, and how she would have listened to the ensuing gunfight in the hall.

  None of this is to be now. In the empty space of his absence.

  She wipes irritatedly at one eye. When she examines the dampness on her finger, she finds it stained with red.

  She doesn’t have long now, she knows. The poison is clawing deeper and deeper into her system. The Dust has weakened her. Her only co-conspirator is dead. She has very few options left.

  But she does still have some.

  She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small twist of plastic wrap. Brethelda really should have known better than to leave her alone in a room with the House’s supply of Dust.

  She hesitates before she takes it. She is not entirely sure she can survive it. It will make everything so much worse at the very least. But it is the only path left open to her, her only opportunity to stop the endless march of the future.

  She buries her nose in the Dust. She grimaces. She inhales.

  —a beast growling in a cave; blood splattered on rocks; a fire ravaging dead, dry wood; birds’ bodies impaled on a thorn bush; red—

  She grunts, comes back through the visions to her chambers. Magic and pain beat twin drums in her chest while her heart races to keep up. She sucks in an icy, scorching lungful of air and blood dribbles down her chin.

  Her chambers are on the forty-eighth floor of House Spriggan, looking down on the Iron City. She goes to her window now. Fires are burning in the Fae Districts, creating a false dawn. She smiles and more blood leaks free. That is her work being done out there. Now she will finish it.

  She reaches out a hand and twists the world. Where there was a window, there is now a ragged hole lined with black thorns. She steps though it, out into empty air.

  She falls. Black wings bloom from her back, wing tips stained as red as the rain that falls from her body onto the streets below. She glides down and away from House Spriggan and Brethelda’s clawing attempt to contain her. The wind rustles her newborn feathers, its cold pulsing against her crackling, cracking skin.

  The magic leaves her five feet above street level. She gasps as reality crashes back, as she crashes down to cold blacktop. She lies there. When she breathes, her lungs are full of glass shards. When she moves, her bones are iron brands.

  She cannot afford to be broken. She cannot stop. With raw palms, she slowly pushes herself up. Starbursts of pain radiate from her chest, claw down her arm. Her breath is quick and shallow.

  She ignores it. She cannot afford to be broken. She takes a step forward. Her will is not broken. She takes a step forward. Her will is going to carry her on despite her failing flesh. She takes a step forward. Her will is carrying her now.

  Step by step, she moves toward the Fae Districts, toward the Dust she needs to make all her dreams come true, and toward the end of any future but her own.

  17

  Life is Always Fatal

  Knull

  It is not so far, in the end, from the fae rebels’ blood-spattered basement to the house Knull once called home. His screaming ankle makes it feel like miles, but in reality, it doesn’t take him long to arrive back where this all started—this life, this obsessive need to escape his past.

  Last time he was here, he was hesitant. Now, he crashes into the door full force, barreling through boxes, and flyers, and old take-out containers. He stomps down the filthy hallway, barking in pain with every step. At its far end—seeming distant as another planet—the living room is cast in the twitching glow of the TV’s dead-channel static. Surely comatose, his parents offer him no welcome.

  Before he gets to that scene, he’s at the door to his old bedroom. He punches it open, reveals the same old scene beyond: rumpled bed, aging posters, stained desk. He feels the same old disgust at the sight of this abandoned prison. He thought he had escaped it years ago, shed its weight and fled to make what he could of his life. In the wake of tonight’s events that ambition feels like the shallowest self-deception.

  Now, he wants out utterly and totally. Tonight, he wants out of everything. Tonight, he is leaving the Fae Districts body and soul. The fact that he is penniless and prospectless are no longer relevant excuses. Anything is better than staying in this mire.

  “Jag?”

  The voice comes from behind him as he stomps deeper into the room. He spins around, grunts as he has to steady himself with his bad foot. Edwyll stands in the doorway, face pale, eyes red and raw. He looks, Knull thinks in that first fleeting moment, bereaved.

  “Edwyll?” It’s a question but he doesn’t know exactly what he’s asking. He doesn’t know anything anymore.

  “What are you doing?” Edwyll asks, and it’s such a mundane question it seems out of place in the chaos of this night.

  He’s about to answer when a face appears over Edwyll’s shoulder. It’s dirt-stained, disheveled, and narrow, with an unmistakably slender nose and undeniably sharp teeth.

  Goblin. The word screams through his brain. He jumps back, grabs for a weapon and ends up with an ancient poster tube in his hands. He brandishes the cardboard wildly.

  “Get away from him!” he yells.

  “No, Knull! No!” Edwyll steps forward, the goblin back. Edwyll reaches his hands out, the goblin spreads hers wide.

  “She’s with me,” Edwyll says.

  Knull stares from one to the other. “Why?”

  “I—” the goblin says.

  “She’s my patron.”

  “What?” None of this makes any sense to Knull.

  Edwyll hesitates. The goblin puts a hand on his shoulder. Knull can’t tell if it’s meant to be comforting or proprietary.

  “The city has to change, Knull.” It’s almost a sob when Edwyll says it. His whole body seems racked by the sentiment. “I have to change it. But I can’t do it on my own. So she’s helping me. We’re going to change the city. We’re going to unite the fae. Because we have to. We have to bring them together—”

  He’s babbling, the words spilling out of him. The same old bullshit.

  “—under a banner of the White Tree,” Edwyll is saying. He’s sketching something in midair. “Redefined. Reimagined. Freed from bullshit, and hypocrisy, and lies, and betrayal—”

  “Shut up!” Knull yells the words. Hurls them into Edwyll’s face. The goblin steps back, looks offended, looks appalled, but Knull’s fists are balled and ready. He looks into Edwyll’s eyes and sees the tears there, spilling down his face. He says more gently now, “Just shut up, Edwyll.”
<
br />   “I have to change it.” A plea.

  “You can’t.” Knull doesn’t like saying it, but he needs Edwyll to hear it, finally this time, for it to get through. “You can’t change it. It’s too big. No one can. And art definitely can’t. You can only pull yourself free of its sucking awfulness. And no picture of no fucking White Tree, no matter how you redesign it, is going to do that. You need money. And I can get money. I have the Dust. I just need a buyer. Come with me. Please.” And somehow he has found his way to begging himself. “Please don’t let this absurd dream drag you down. We can get out of the Fae Districts. I can get us out. I can.”

  He has to be able to.

  Edwyll shakes his head. “That doesn’t change anything, Knull. It can’t.”

  “Neither can you.”

  All the distance they’ve gone, and they’ve travelled nowhere. They’re still here at this impasse.

  But then Edwyll steps forward and hugs him and says, “I do wish you luck, Knull. I do. I wish you were right, even though I know you’re not.”

  They break free after a moment, and Knull wants to say something to Edwyll, at the last, some final expression of brotherly affection, of how much hope he once had for Edwyll and his art, and how much that helped him on the nights when he felt utterly alone.

  He can’t, though. The words stick in his throat, and so he turns away from him and gets down on his knees. He starts to scrabble under his bed, desperately searching for the brick of Dust to which he has pinned all his hopes.

  Skart

  “Get me some Dust,” Skart says. “One of the corpses will have some.” He looks at Sil. “Then we shall run our quarry to ground.”

  Skart steps back then. He doesn’t cajole Sil or offer her encouragement. She is little more than a machine now anyway, and he has set her mechanism.

  If only, he thinks, all machines ran so smoothly. Out there in the Iron City, the clockwork of his plan is scattered in tatters about the burning streets.

  And yet, he thinks, perhaps it is not too late. There are still bits and pieces of the plan that can be gathered up and made into something whole. Many of the rebels are already dead. Far more than after a usual uprising. He has achieved that much at least. And perhaps the revelation of his own betrayal will help break the fae more deeply than is typical.

  Sil kneels beside a body. A sidhe. She can’t be older than eighteen or nineteen. In the old days she wouldn’t have been considered an adult. Sil eviscerated her neatly in the melee, and her intestines are spread out broadly. Sil kneels in them unflinching, rifling through pockets without a flicker of emotion on her face.

  The real problem, Skart reflects, is hope. Has he killed hope? He doubts it. No matter how many times the rebellions are beaten down, no matter how often the weeds are torn up, the rebels grow back. And every set of reprisals just seeds fresh hatred, fresh rebellion, fresh hope. None of it ever truly salts the earth.

  Empty-handed, Sil stands, goes to pick the pockets of an old gnome whose throat she had cut.

  When Skart had first suggested the plan, Osmondo had balked at bringing so much Dust into the Iron City. The risk of exposure was monumental. Skart, though, had worked on him, had done his best to highlight the reward that balanced such risk. And Osmondo has always been ambitious. That, in the end, Skart believes, is why the future belongs to him: he will never sit upon his laurels the way the fae did.

  It would have been easier if Osmondo had been willing to pay Cotter outright for the Dust. He could afford to. It was simple mean-spirited obstinateness that prevented it. Osmondo’s unwillingness to see that much of his coin in the hands of a fae. Many of tonight’s mishaps could have been avoided if Osmondo was just a little less miserly. But Skart had caved on that point, and in the end, only one objection remained—whoever created the future would never get to enjoy it. To use the volume of Dust Skart wanted was suicide.

  If Skart was younger, or could be useful for longer, or if his loyalty was in any way in question then Osmondo would never have agreed. But Skart has had only his cause to live for for so long. Osmondo knows this. Osmondo caused this. He has heard Skart thank him for it many times. And so, finally, Osmondo Red had agreed. This is how Skart would die: saving the fae.

  Sil straightens. She comes toward him. In her hand she holds a small bag of Dust.

  Skart smiles and offers out his open palm.

  “How,” Osmondo had asked him, “does one kill hope?”

  Skart had leaned forward. He had shown his teeth. “With enough Dust you can kill anything. Mab used Dust to smash three cities and break the spirit of the fae. But where Mab used a hammer, I will use a scalpel.

  “Another rebellion,” he had said, and Osmondo had gone to interrupt, but Skart held up a hand to forestall him. “One different from the others. One that you and I and your best tacticians plan out. What would hurt us the most? What has the greatest chance to be successful? What would be our worst nightmare?”

  Osmondo’s eyes had narrowed.

  “I will work with the fae,” Skart had said. “I will bring the rebellion into being. I will cultivate their hope. I will make them believe that this time they have a chance.”

  “But they don’t,” Osmondo had hissed.

  “No.” Skart had twisted his face into a smile he didn’t feel. “No, they never will. We will have orchestrated everything. We will know everything. And we will know how to shatter the rebellion at every turn, how to transform hope into despair.”

  Osmondo had leaned back, sneered. “That’s it? Your grand plan is just an increase in the magnitude of our victory?” He waved a dismissive hand.

  “No,” Skart had said, and his smile had become truer, more honest. “It is different because it will never end. That is what I will use the Dust for. To trap their failure in time. To make it repeat over and over.

  “I will use the Dust,” he said, “to snip the rebels who gather in that warehouse that night from time. Twelve hours, from sundown to the sunrise they’ll never see. Just them. Not the city. Not the whole of the fae. Just those who dared raise a hand against you.

  “Every night the Dust will summon them from their graves, reconstitute their flesh and bones, just as they were in their homes, in the bars, in the factories. Every night they will be born as they were at the beginning of that one night. Full of ambition. Full of desperation. Full of dreams. Every night they will march through the streets of the Fae Districts, not seeing the world as it was, not listening to their loved ones who plead with them to do it differently this time, to not go, to stay, to live. Blind to the modern world. Trapped in that piece of the past I have crystallized and looped.

  “They will march through the streets again, they will go to the warehouse again, they will leave and once more march off to their death. Again. Hundreds of fae. Doomed to be cut down. Doomed to have their dreams shattered. And their bodies will lie in the streets, and on the factory floors. And then the sun will come, and the magic will wash them away, will give a brief reprieve. And then when the next night comes, the Dust will summon them once more, will put them back once more, to do it all over again, and again, and again.

  “It will be,” he said, licking his lips, “a living monument. A testament in blood and shattered bone. A reminder to the fae of the futility of rebellion. Of the inevitable end of their dreams. It will force them to wake to the new reality of the world.”

  Osmondo had blinked. “New rebels every night?”

  Skart had shaken his head. “The same ones. Reborn only to die. Imagine sitting in your dining room, and your dead son manifests out of dust and dirt. Imagine the pixie you have mourned nods at something you said three years ago, even as you scream at him not to do it, not to go this one time, even though you know he will. Imagine trailing him through the streets, grabbing at his arm, trying to haul him back. But you can’t, because he moves with the inevitability of a clock’s hand. He drags you along, unseeing, uncaring, unhearing. Imagine following him to a factory, and seeing bull
ets rip through him, tear him apart, spill his blood. Every night. Until the sun comes once more. And imagine in that light knowing that it’s all going to happen all over again. Forever.

  “That,” he had said to Osmondo Red, “is how you kill hope.”

  Osmondo had thought about that for a long time. And then he’d started to laugh.

  And now, Skart thinks, it’s not all lost. There are enough pieces of the plan left. He can still pull it all back. He can still save the fae from this futile cycle. He can stop the reprisals. He can stop the endless repetitions of torture and death.

  He just needs to find Knull.

  So, he takes the Dust Sil has found him, and he feels the magic spring to life in him once more, this overture to the much greater magic to come. And he uses it to heighten his senses, to pick apart the hidden trails that lead up the stairs and up and away from the factory. He uses it to find the path of a fae with a half-broken ankle and a limp.

  He follows the trail through the increasingly filthy streets, Sil beside him, faithful as a hound. He follows it past the burned-out buildings, and the bodies strung up from streetlamps. He follows without batting an eyelid. The birth of the future was always going to be painful.

  Finally, he comes to one dirty, decaying, wedged-open door. He pauses there and checks his watch. There is not much of this night left, but there’s still time for the dawn to usher in a new day. So, Skart heads into the moldering hallway, and toward the sound of voices, and he goes to end it all.

  Sil

  Skart enters the house. She follows. Skart marches forward down the hall. Sil smells the dank air, listens, and assesses the terrain, the inhabitants, and the threat. She can hear three distinct voices ahead of them. There is emotion in their words, but she can no longer be sure what it is. Not a threat is all she knows for certain.