Cold Iron

by Michael Swanwick

  Jane marched them, some—the littlest ones—still hacking and coughing, back to Building 5. There were quiet sobs and sniffs, and those were all right, but when Skizzlecraw threw back her head and began to wail, Jane whacked her a good one right on the ear. That shut her up.

  At the dormitory stairs, Jane stepped inside and hustled them before her with snarls and shoves. As the last—it was Creep, of course—went by, she snagged the first-aid kit from its hook just outside Blugg’s door.

  The first order of business was bandaging up wounds. Fortunately, few of the children had been injured by the explosion; the trauma was mostly from shock. When she came to clean up Dimity’s face, the shifter broke out of her frozen apathy and cried, “My face! What am I going to look like?”

  “A freak,” Jane said, “if I don’t tweeze these things out. Shut up and let me work.”

  She did as good a job as she could manage with the tools at hand. There were still a few black specks under Dimity’s skin when she was done, but most likely they were nothing serious. She dosed the more hysterical of the children with morphine, and then she sent them all to bed.

  Jane was their leader now.

  But not, if she could help it, for long.

  When the children were all at last asleep, Jane climbed up to the roof to watch over the unfolding events. Smoke and sparks belched from the smokestacks, and rescue machines prowled restlessly about the grounds. The death of so important a figure as the inspector general had roused all the plant to action, whether productive or not.

  Slowly, order reasserted itself. Thaumaturges emerged from the labs and walked through the grounds in orange environmental suits, scattering particulate radioisotopes from thuribles and censers and muttering incantations that stiffened the air with dread. In their wake, the ground was crisscrossed with ley lines glowing blue and red and yellow, like a wiring diagram gone mad, all overlapping circles and straight lines meeting at unlikely angles, then separating again. It was impossible to see how they could expect to untangle the readings of magickal influence, and apparently they could not, for none of the lines was tracked back to Number 7332.

  Jane watched for half the night from the rooftop, fearful the dragon would be unmasked. She was a small and pale pip on the black expanse of tar, and if anyone saw her, they must’ve taken her for a warehouse tutelary about her legitimate business.

  When the moon had sunk low in the sky, 7332 finally called for her.

  Calmly, Jane climbed down from the roof, gathered up grimoire, crystal and nugget, and dressed. She let herself out of the dormitory with Blugg’s key, stepping outside without a glance to either side, and headed for her dragon. She walked straight across the grounds, making no attempt to avoid detection. She was no longer afraid of the plant’s security forces. That was 7332’s job, not hers.

  When she came to the marshalling yard, the great dragons crawled aside to let her pass. They were too proud to look directly, but more than one glanced sidelong at her, their expressions haughty and unreadable. Their navigation lights were bright strings of red, green and white tracing the contours of their flanks.

  Jane reached Number 7332 and climbed its side. She felt invisible.

  Soft lights came on as she stepped into the cab. There would be no protective camouflage tonight. The door clanged shut behind her.

  “You killed him,” she said.

  From the lightless depths of the machinery came a voice, superficially calm but with undertones of anticipation. “I had to distract the security forces from their normal business long enough to complete my preparations. You needn’t mourn the spilling of a little elf blood.”

  For a second the response made no sense. Then Jane realized that 7332 thought she was talking about the inspector general. “I meant Rooster! You used him. You burned him out and threw him away.”

  “The little one?” 7332 sounded puzzled. “There’s nothing special about him. I can get you as many of his kind as you like.” Gently, it urged her, “Sit. It’s time we left this prison for freedom and the sky.”

  Numbly, Jane sat down in the chair, and let the servomechanisms wrap themselves around her. She clutched the black handgrips and gave the left-hand one a quarter-turn. Twin needles slid into her wrist. Vision swam and transformed, and she was looking through the dragon’s eyes, feeling the cool winter breeze on its iron hide through its nervous system. She was no longer entirely Jane, but part of something much bigger than she alone could ever be. It felt good.

  “Power up engine systems,” she said.

  “That’s the spirit!” Fuel gurgled as electrical motors pumped it to the turbines. A high-pitched whine grew and grew until it filled the universe. If it hadn’t been for the padded headphones, Jane would have been deafened.

  “We’re ready. Now insert the keys,” 7332 said.

  Jane flicked a line of switches off and on, checking that the navigational systems were operative. “That’s not necessary,” the dragon said testily. “All you need do is insert the keys.”

  Suddenly an inhuman voice howled. A second voice joined the first, and then a third as alarms went off all across the plant. Lesser, but more piercing voices bayed and yelped. The cyborg hounds. That could only mean that they had been discovered. With the turbines powered up, the tangled lines of force and influence leading back to source must be lit up like so many neon tubes. “Quickly!” 7332 said. “We’ve been discovered.”

  The ruby crystal and the walnut were both in Jane’s hip pocket; she was uncomfortably half-sitting on them. But she didn’t move to take them out. “Tell me your name.”

  A troll from plant security appeared at the far end of the yard, flames in his eyes. He was followed by several more of his kind, black forms against a cold sky. They each held five or six cyborg hounds straining against titanium leashes.

  “They’re coming. We must leave now, or not at all.”

  “Your name,” she insisted.

  The cyborg hounds were released. They sped, baying, at the dragon. The first of them bounced against its side with a loud clang and sank diamond teeth into its side. Submerged as she was in 7332’s sensorium, Jane felt the fangs in her own flesh. She cried out loud with pain.

  Desperation finally entered 7332’s voice. “If we don’t leave now, they’ll have us!” It kicked at the hound, sending it flying. But more were arriving, hot on its heels.

  “That they will.”

  The hounds were leaping into the air to seize the dragon. 7332 twisted around to face them, almost throwing Jane out of her chair. Its turbines were screaming, and still it could not configure for flight. Shouts of anger and fierce commands came from the trollish warriors. 7332 damped down the circuits carrying sensation from its skin; Jane felt herself go numb all over in sympathetic identification. Still, the hounds were starting to do real damage. “The keys!”

  Jane waited. Half submerged into the dragon as she was, and uncertain of her identity around the edges, of where she ended and it began, she was sure it must know that she was not bluffing. That without a name, without the control it would give her, they were going nowhere.

  “Melanchthon, of the line of Melchesiach, of the line of Moloch!” the dragon cried. Its anguish rose about Jane like phantom flame. She felt her eyelashes singeing in his wrath, and knew down to her very core that it spoke the truth.

  She flipped open the grimoire, riffled through the pages to the command codes and began to read: “Recurvor. Recusadora. Recusamor.” The engines roared and shuddered. “Recussus. Redaccendo. Redactamos.” Jane slapped the crystal into place. “Redadim. Redambules. Redam-navit.” The dragon trembled with repressed power. She fitted the brass nugget into its receptor niche, and rotated the right-hand grip a quarter-turn forward. Now the needles were deep within both her wrists. “Now fly!”

  “You’ll burn in Hell for this humiliation!” 7332 promised. Remembered war atrocities flashed at the back of Jane’s skull. “I’ll feed you to the Teind with my own claws.”

 
“Shut up and fly!”

  They were moving. The tarmac grumbled under their weight as they picked up speed. The dragon’s wings raised, deployed, caught at the air. Hounds fell away. Jane was laughing hysterically and so, to her surprise, was 7332.

  He lifted.

  Shuddering, they took flight. The factory walls moved toward them slowly, then quickly, and then flashed by underneath, alarmingly close. They were free of the plant altogether. Slowly, they gained height.

  The last of the hellhounds lost its grip, and fell yapping to its death. A calm, unaccented elven voice spoke over the radio, from some faraway control tower: You are violating industrial airspace. Surrender all autonomous functions immediately.

  Now Melanchthon screamed his battle-cry over all frequencies, scrambling communications, jamming radar, scratching an ionized line high up into the stratosphere. Far below them, civil defense forces scrambled, flights of war-hardened creatures eager for another taste of combat clawing at the air, but too late.

  Jane was laughing so hard now she was crying. She couldn’t stop thinking of Rooster, couldn’t drive the sight of his small, still body from her mind. Her emotions were so extreme, so chaotic, she could not tell which were hers and which the dragon’s. It did not matter. What 7332 felt could be no more intense than what was happening inside her now. She was burning with joy.

  They soared.