The Iron Dragon’s Mother

by Michael Swanwick

  “Bingo!” Helen cried. At the end of the hall was a door with a card swipe lock and a sign reading:

  MEDICAL AND THAUMATURGICAL

  PERSONNEL ONLY

  BEYOND THIS POINT

  Cat jiggled the handle. To no avail.

  “Shoot out the lock,” Helen suggested.

  “Too great a likelihood for shrapnel or a ricochet. This calls for a more subtle approach.” Cat reversed the rifle and smashed the wood beside the lock. On the third blow, the door flew open, revealing the main factory floor. Row upon row upon row of glass coffins stretched into the distance, too many to count. Inside each coffin was a woman covered by a cheap white blanket so that only her head and toes were exposed.

  “Remind me again of the prophecy that Olympia made for me.”

  “She said: In a glass coffin/Your mother lies imprisoned/Wake her with a kiss. Her exact words.”

  “She didn’t by any chance provide some clue as to which specific coffin my mother would be in?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not.” Cat had met many prophets in her time; the Dowager had a penchant for them. Always, they withheld crucial information, to provide incentive for the customer to buy into the premium upgrade.

  Cat advanced onto the factory floor. The coffins rested on concrete piers. She touched one and the glass was so cold it stung her fingertips. Inside was a round-faced woman. Her eyes were closed and her skin was a soft, warm brown like Cat’s. She looked to be asleep. Staring down at her, Cat became more and more convinced that even though she did not breathe, she was alive.

  Was this her mother? Her biological mother? Her true mother? The face within wavered in her vision as if she were viewing it from underwater. Mother, Cat thought. Talk to me. Please.

  Did the woman stir? Or was that just Cat’s own reflection in the glass?

  “Any of them could be your mother,” Helen said. “Keep moving. Gather information. Think seriously about what you’ve learned. That’s what you did in Ys, right?”

  Cat lingered, however, by the side of the frozen woman. “I wonder. When my father came here, did they wake her? Did they take her out of the coffin and place her in a room for privacy? Or did they just open the lid and let him have at her right here?”

  “Don’t go there.”

  “This woman could be my mother! And if she is, the Dowager stole that title from her and Father stole the daughter that was meant to be hers.”

  “The odds are against this particular woman being her. Keep looking.”

  Cat continued onward, all nerves and vigilance, weaving a way between the lanes and aisles at random, peering down at the faces of the imprisoned changelings. She paused before a coffin holding a woman who was obviously pregnant. This time the glass was warm to the touch. Leaning her rifle against a neighboring pier, she lifted the lid. She placed a hand on the woman’s belly and felt the baby within her womb kick.

  “Exactly what do you think you’re doing?”

  “The kiss, remember?” Cat leaned forward and kissed the changeling’s cheek. The head shifted slightly. Eyelids twitched. But the woman did not awaken. One down. Hundreds to go. Cat eased the coffin lid back.

  “All right,” Helen said. “I thought it would be best to let you figure this out for yourself. But I can see that’s not going to happen. So—”

  Cat held up a hand. “Wait. Something is coming. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach.”

  There was a low rumbling like cannon fire somewhere over the horizon. It grew louder. A tank passing by the building? Or a convoy of them? It might be a giant headed their way. A big one. The floor was trembling now. A storm! Winds shook the loading dock doors at the far end of the factory. Rain rattled across the roof. Lightning struck and struck and struck again, followed almost immediately by the booming laughter of the gods. Then, as one, the doors all blew open, ripped free, and tumbled away. Into the building, crackling with witch-fire, strode—

  “Barquentine?” Cat said. It was indeed Lord Pleiades, only slightly altered from when she had clocked him with a hairbrush in Carcassonne. She had snatched up the rifle but now she lowered it. “What’s with the eye? Is this yet another memo I didn’t get? Are eye patches the new black? Is everybody going to be laughing at me when I show up at cotillion with unimpaired vision?”

  Behind Barquentine, the storm died to nothing. He giggled in a high-pitched, unsettling way. “The Year Eater likes eyes. Om nom nom, can’t get enough of them.” The eye patch only intensified his roguish good looks. But now not even Helen found him attractive. His mouth was too skewed, his gait too loose, as if he were a marionette being operated by a distant puppeteer. There was madness in his eye. “But we can both do without the Kate Gallowglass persona, Ms. Sans Merci. I know better and so do you.”

  “The Year Eater is one of the Seven. What would a minor Teggish lord like you be doing hobnobbing with Entropy Personified?” Cat scoffed. She didn’t drop Kate’s manner. It was the only way she knew to deal with Lord Pleiades. “Also, if you want to stay alive, you’ll stop where you are.” He was twenty feet away. That was close enough.

  With a shrug, Barquentine stopped. He awkwardly drew up one foot and then the other, so that he was sitting cross-legged in the air. It seemed he had acquired impressive new powers during their separation. “A rifle. How amusing. Not the weapon I would have chosen in your situation but chacun à son goût. Foot disease for everyone! But seriously … have you ever been in a coma? Have you wandered the lands of unending pain?”

  “No.”

  “I have. I know every inch of them. Time doesn’t exist there. Only fever and misery. And bees.” He clapped his hands three times sharply, then touched his head, his lips, his heart, and his sex.

  Barquentine lay comatose in the Hôpital Maîtresse de la Miséricorde (Lord Pleiades said), though he wasn’t aware of that fact. It was Caitlin of House Sans Merci who put him there—but that’s another thing he didn’t know. All he knew was that he had to keep walking. There were stony hills and he climbed them. There were rocky valleys and he descended into their lightless depths. He did not stop. He did not rest. The very concept of rest was alien to him.

  Sometimes he heard voices saying things like “I’m not at all happy with these numbers,” or “Levitate this patient so I can change the sheets, will you?” or “We’re probably going to lose that eye.” These were random dialogue from the hospital but he didn’t know that either. Only that if ever he stopped walking the bees would sting him over and over again until he shambled and then ran, screaming, from them and that they would then pursue him for miles before falling away at last.

  Was the bird with Barquentine from the beginning of his ordeal? The question was meaningless. The ordeal had neither beginning nor end. Nevertheless, he became aware that there was a bird hovering by his ear, speaking to him.

  “I have been sent by the Conspiracy,” the blind and black-feathered fowl said or was saying or possibly had always said, “to offer you freedom in exchange for—”

  “Anything!” Barquentine sank to the ground, not caring if he were stung, weeping tears of gratitude.

  Thus it was that Barquentine, poor fool that he was, came to the Tower of Seventeen Eyes. You’ve seen its baleful glare in religious icons. Possibly, at a low point in your life, you’ve stood before it in a sleeting rain at midnight, shivering with dread at the thought of what lay within. Even if you’d had the courage to try the door, you would have found it locked against you. But he, Barquentine, found it open. He was expected. He went inside.

  He saw the Year Eater.

  How to describe the indescribable? Imagine a traffic light in the middle of a trackless desert. Imagine a horse’s head afloat in a vacuum. A single perfect rose growing from the back of your hand. Three plover’s eggs on a sheet of vellum resting atop an Erlking XIV escritoire in a burning house. A whisper that can smash worlds. A raindrop larger than the Motel 6 it is about to inundate. Hold all these things in your mind at on
ce and picture something looking exactly like all of them simultaneously and you will have taken the first faltering step toward visualizing the Year Eater.

  If he hadn’t been insane already, the sight would have driven Barquentine mad.

  You may thank the Goddess that you were not privy to the conversation that ensued. They came to terms. Or rather, Barquentine learned that it was too late to alter the terms the Conspiracy had already negotiated for him. The Year Eater will give you anything you want. For a price. But that price is always greater than the value of what you’ll get. Everybody does that, of course, whenever you sign a contract—it’s just the nature of Capitalism. However, when the Year Eater gives you the short end of the stick … Well. Suffice it to say, the eye was the least of the many things that Barquentine lost.

  One of those things was his memory.

  When he returned from the Tower, representatives from the Conspiracy told Barquentine that you hated him and had good reason for doing so. That you were the source of all his miseries. That since your assault on the House of Glass had been decreed by some dread Power greater than them, they dared not approach you directly. They needed a messenger. That messenger was to be Barquentine. He was told what to say and how to make sure you would listen. He came to the House of Glass. He stands before you now and is about to say:

  “The end,” Barquentine said with a mad little flash of teeth. He unfolded his legs and lowered them to the ground. “Wasn’t that a delightful little fable? Would you like to hear the Conspiracy’s message now?”

  Reluctantly, Cat nodded.

  “Then know this to be true: The Conspiracy has authorized me to make you an offer. In exchange for your gouging out an eye and going away quietly, they will reveal which of these women is your mother. You can take her with you, if you wish. They’ll even throw in the blanket. But wait! There’s more! For one eye and an irrevocable oath of obedience, they will also restore your commission in the Dragon Corps. You won’t be able to fly, naturally, but you’ll get an honorable discharge, all criminal actions against you dropped, and a clean record.

  “Not convinced yet? Well, hang on to your hat! For both eyes and the oath of obedience—well, we can’t give you your brother back. Nobody can. The universe has rules that even the Goddess won’t break. Fingolfinrhod’s gone forever. But the Conspiracy will throw into the pot something almost as good! Absolutely free! Totally naked! Obedient to your ugliest whim! You can have—Ned!” Barquentine drew a circle in the air with his forefinger and a vision appeared within it of the slave boy, no longer in those ridiculous green shorts, weeping tears of blood from what once were eyes. “Waddaya say?”

  “Are you quite finished?” Cat asked.

  “In more ways than one,” Barquentine said jauntily.

  Cat looked at his hands. “You’re still wearing that opal ring you showed me during the Plague Carnival, I see. As long as it’s touching your flesh you can’t lie. So: Are you really Barquentine or is he just a puppet for something too big to interact with me any other way? Just how deep does this thing go?”

  “Only the smallest fraction of me is Barquentine. Most of him has been flensed from this body.” That high-pitched unnerving giggle again. “As for deep? He’s being manipulated, you’re being manipulated, it’s puppets all the way down.”

  “I thought it would be something like that. This next question is for Barquentine alone. Whatever remains of him, I mean. Barkers? What is it that you want? Not the Conspiracy. Just you personally.”

  Barquentine closed his eyes and in the weariest voice imaginable said, “Oblivion.”

  “It’s yours.” Cat raised the rifle and put three rounds through his heart.

  * * *

  The cement floor around Lord Pleiades’s corpse was bright with blood. He was the first person Cat had ever killed. She hoped he would be the last. But she refused to regret doing it.

  “Stop staring at the body,” Helen said. “Some of us are more squeamish about such things than you are.” Then, when Cat had complied, “All right, now it’s time I paid the rent. There are things you need to hear.”

  “Oh yes. You were just about to tell me something when Barquentine made his grand entrance. What was it?”

  “I’ll get to that. But first, you need to understand that Lord Pleiades was just a distraction. The Conspiracy couldn’t possibly have thought you’d take them up on those ridiculous offers. Barquentine was sent here to push your buttons and, by golly, he did a bang-up job of it, didn’t he? He was meant to get you so worked up you couldn’t think straight. They wanted you to go chasing up and down the aisles, kissing cheeks, until at last you despaired and went away.”

  Cat considered. “That sounds … plausible,” she said at last.

  “The second thing you need to hear—and forgive me for saying this, dear, but I must—is that this is not all about you. You want to wake up your mother so you two can hug and sob over each other and say loving things, right? Not gonna happen. Look at it from her point of view. She was a sick and probably frightened child in a hospital when the dragons came and stole her soul. Maybe she was dreaming at the time. She woke into a nightmare. After being implanted in a new body, she was indentured to a factory where she performed manual labor until reaching puberty. At which time she was placed in a glass coffin and removed only for impregnation and childbirth. All her memories are evil ones. Does she love you? Sweetie, she doesn’t even know you. At best, she got a glimpse when you were removed from her body. Plus, mentally, she’s still a child. Whatever solace you want from her, she can’t provide it.”

  “Then why the fuck have I gone through everything I have? What’s the gods-be-damned point?” Cat’s fists were balled. She was within a sliver of punching herself in the face, over and over, simply because that was as close as she could ever come to physically hurting Helen.

  “Deep breath, dear. Calm yourself. I know this is a lot of bad news to take in all at once, but I have reason for it. Okay?”

  “I … Oh, all right.”

  “The truth is that there has been a great injustice done but not just to you. Not just to your mother. Every sleeping woman in every coffin in this factory is a victim of the system you yourself were once a part of. They all need to be rescued. And once you think about it in those terms, it’ll be obvious what you have to do.”

  * * *

  In the hands of one who knew how to use it, the Horn of Holmdel was capable of shaking the universe. Cat didn’t want to go that far. But she had memorized the tunes from Istledown’s chapbook, and one of them, surely, would accomplish what she needed done. “What should I play?”

  “Do you know the bugle call for Awakening?” Helen asked.

  “Yes.” Cat ran through the tune in her head.

  “That’s the one. In my world it’s called Reveille. I saw it in the songbook. I’m guessing that if it’s the same in both our worlds, it’s in the calls of every world of existence. It’s probably hardwired into the stuff of Creation.”

  Cat’s hands were sweaty on the Horn of Holmdel. She looked down and the Horn made them look insubstantial, like mayflies alighting briefly on a boulder just before a wind swept them away forever.

  “Can you do this?” Helen asked.

  “I can do this.” Cat lifted the Horn to her lips. She knew how to play the thing, of course. She’d done it before. Anyway, conch shells were easy. She took a deep breath and then pursed her lips, as if in a kiss.

  She blew the first note: Long, unchanging, pure, and piercing, it seemed to hang in the air forever.

  All the coffins exploded at once.

  “Daughter of Misery!” Cat clapped her hands over her ears. She saw the Horn of Holmdel go bouncing across the factory floor.

  Crystals of snow puffed outward from shattered coffin after shattered coffin, chilling the room and turning everything white. Indistinct forms sat up on the concrete piers, looked about themselves vaguely, and then, floating up into the air, were lost to vision in the mi
st.

  And that one! That one! That one there! was Cat’s mother. Cat knew it for a certainty. She ran to the coffin in time to see the woman raise herself from the shards, glance incuriously at Cat without the least trace of recognition on her face, and, raising her arms, lift up into the mist and dissolve.

  She was gone.

  Tiny specks of glass had flown into Cat’s face and when she tried to brush them off, her hand came away red with blood.

  * * *

  As Cat stood, unmoving, over the remains of her mother’s coffin, she heard an electronic chirp as a door opened and closed. Footsteps clattered toward her. Numbly, she turned to face the newcomers. Hardly caring, she noted that they were both lawyers and that she knew each of them.

  “You can kill me now,” Cat said. “Or imprison me for eternity. Whatever you came to do, I don’t care. I’m ready to accept my punishment. I did what was right, no matter what the Law or the Goddess thinks.”

  With a tug at her trousers, Lieutenant Anthea knelt down before Cat. Counselor Edderkopp did not. But he reared himself up and, tucking a stick under one armpit, laid a hand upon Cat’s head and said, “You have my blessing, child, and that is something I do not give out lightly.”

  “Why are you doing that? Stop it.” Cat knocked away Edderkopp’s hand and tried to pull Anthea to her feet. But the predator-woman only bowed her head more deeply, so that her brow touched the floor.

  Edderkopp made that dry rattle of amusement he did. He leaped up, slapped knees, clapped hands, clicked heels. Then he said, “Lady Sans Merci swore out a writ of dowagerhood, shortly before your father died, which left his title to be assumed by his oldest surviving child—Fingolfinrhod, it was expected. Had your brother died in possession of that title, it and all your father’s wealth would have, for ill or for nil, passed to a cadet branch of the family. He did not. Which means that now you, as the only living blood-child of the old lord, will, as soon as my young associate here notarizes and files the papers, inherit his estate in its entirety, both tangible and intangible, including goodwill and spite, enemies and allies, entanglements and entitlements, debts and vendettas, stocks and bonds, cash, lands, options, et cetera, et cetera, und so weiter.”