The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 6 —

JANE LIVED AS A WOOD-MAY IN A PATCH OF SCRUB trees just beyond the landfill. She made her home within the cabin of what seemed to the rest of the world the rusting hulk of an ancient and wrecked dragon, half-buried in the loamy earth, with steel plates welded over the windows and pusher rods motionless.

She was a quiet creature, just coming of age, and a pretty one too, though she did not know that. The stench of cold iron hung about her from her choice of dwelling place, and she might normally have been expected to raise a fair amount of local comment. But she did not. The locals thought of her, when they thought of her at all, as a dull neighborhood institution, a nondescript fey who had lived in the area for as long as any of them could remember.

Such was the dragon's pervasive influence that only she and 7332 knew she was actually human and had lived there only a few short months.

Every weekday morning the school bell cast its glamour over the surrounding hills, calling the young to classes. They came running down the slopes and leaping over the streams, out from caves and the hollows of trees and suburban tract homes, impelled by powers greater than their own to gain an education.

Flinging open the door one morning, Jane discovered that spring had come to the land. The frozen ground had thawed and softened to mud, and a glorious earthy smell filled the air. The trees were still naked, black and budless, but the brown grasses looked hopeful, with tincts of fresh green glowing from the depths of each clump. A meryon struggled to haul a corroded zinc washer back to its nest.

A crocus had sprouted by the dragon's haunch. She hopped to the ground and squatted beside it, admiring, not touching. The petals were a delicate, almost translucent white. They had no scent, and trembled in the wind from her nostrils.

To her, this was freedom. So small a thing as being able to take a moment to admire a flower, the very uselessness of the act, was both token and reward for her, meat and drink for the spirit.

The bell sounded again, and the muscles in her calves jumped.

Convulsively, Jane stood. She slapped her wide-brimmed Morgan Calabrese hat onto her head and shoved both hands deep into the pockets of her loose trousers. Her windbreaker she left unzipped.

It was too fine a day to hurry. Forcibly resisting the tug of the bell at her heels, she ambled down the hill.

After a minute she began to whistle. She couldn't help it.

Even when she arrived at the schoolyard and found it empty, doors shut and a solitary carrion-dog skulking across the soccer field, that warm sense of well-being stayed with Jane. She was going to the mall today—Ratsnickle had promised to show her how to jigger the change box on the shuttle bus. It wasn't until she actually stepped into the redbrick school building that her mood darkened. The hollowing echoes of those gray halls were a mumbling surf of misery. The fluorescent light fixtures hummed a jittery song.

In the depths of the building, the hideous creature that the Principal kept in his office screamed. Her stomach flipped over, as if somebody had scraped fingernails down her spine.

Hunching her shoulders slightly, Jane hurried to her homeroom.

Fat old Grunt puffed out his cheeks like a toad in display when she walked through the door. "Well! Miss—" A quick, almost imperceptible sidelong glance at the attendance roster he kept taped to his desktop. "—Alderberry, have you deigned to grace us with your presence? And only six minutes late? How charming! Perhaps you would care to share the source of your oh-so-fashionable tardiness with the rest of the class?"

Jane flushed and stared down at the floor. "I was looking at a flower," she mumbled.

Grunt put a hand to his ear and bent his knees out to either side, bobbing his round body lower. "What's that?"

"A flower!"

"Ohhhh, I see." His expression was so exaggeratedly solemn that scattered giggles arose here and there in the room. "Lost in the rhapsodic contemplation of our precious little floral friends, were you?" Now the entire class was laughing outright at her.

She could sense Grunt slipping around behind her, up on his toes, with that slithery, exaggerated bounce of a walk he employed when he was playing to the back rows. Grunt was proud of his histrionics, and often boasted to his pupils that they made him the most clearly memorable—and therefore best—teacher in all the district. "But my dear, sweet Miss Alderberry, don't you know that flowers are never fully enjoyed until they are—"

He was in back of her now, his breath sour over one shoulder, and she knew from having seen this same ritual enacted upon others, that he was dipping that sharp little chin of his down, down, until chin, smirk and all, disappeared entirely in fatty folds of neck and cheek, and his mouthless face was dominated by the vicious gray light glinting from the dusty twin disks of his spectacles. She knew what was coming, and knew too that if she didn't put up with it, she would be kept after school in retaliation and miss out entirely on going to the mall. Or, worse, she could be sent to the Principal's office, to learn firsthand what it was like to look a basilisk in the face. Jane squeezed her eyes tight with humiliation.

"—plucked!" He thrust his hand between her legs and snatched up at her crotch. With an involuntary chickenlike squawk, she clumsily leaped and twisted away. The class convulsed with mirth, all of them braying, snorting, snickering, laughing as if they had never seen him pull this joke before.

"Take your seat, Jane!" Grunt said sternly. "We have work to do, and no time to waste on your foolishness."

It was a long walk to the slow learners' row in the back of the room, where she and Ratsnickle both sat.

Jane had no friends in the class and thus to her they were largely indistinguishable, an anonymous field of feys and weirds. But even had she known them all, Ratsnickle would still have stood out among their malicious faces and wicked expressions. Two red little eyes peered madly from an uncombed thatch of hay, and a wise-guy grin cocked up one side of his mouth. His arms were too skinny and too long, at odds with his lumpish body; but once you accepted that, he had beautiful hands, fingers wondrously long and so fluidly jointed they could wrap twice around a Coke bottle.

He turned away when she sat down.

Jane felt an icy coldness tighten her face. Her hands gripped the sides of her desk so tightly the nails turned white. An alien resolve took hold within her. She waited until Grunt turned and bent to pick up the chalk. Then she straightened her back and flipped him the finger.

Only those kids nearest her saw. At their laughter, Grunt whirled. But Jane was prepared. Her hands were out of sight, and her expression was neither guilty nor innocent, but sullen and defensive in exactly the right proportions. Grunt turned back to the blackboard, baffled.

Ratsnickle swallowed back a guffaw. A lilac maid caught Jane's eye and smiled. Jane nodded back, ever so slightly, and opened her textbook.

She was learning.

At lunchtime, she hovered at the edge of the cafeteria, tray in hand, looking for an empty place. There was no point in sitting with dwarves, thumblings, or grigs, even if she could have fit into one of their chairs; they were all too clannish, each in their own way. Nor would it be wise to sit too close to a lamie, gwarchell, or kirk-grim. A corner seat would be good, preferably with another empty chair to serve as buffer from that table's cliques. She didn't want to seem presumptuous. Or a chair between two disparate groups; she could stare straight ahead of her then, and be ignored.

Finally, because there were no good alternatives, she took a place alongside Ratsnickle.

Ratsnickle was deep in conversation with a lanky fey named Peter of the Hillside. Jane shared a couple of classes with him. Peter was wearing acid-wash jeans and a denim jacket with the Wild Hunt's "Horns of Elfland Tour" logo painted on the back. He had a bad complexion and a good haircut. He looked up, not at her, when she sat, and addressed the air: "Who's the git?"

Jane stiffened.

"She's with me," Ratsnickle said. "Okay?"

Peter shrugged. "All the same to me."

Jane ate in silence, afraid to join in the conversation. It was all about machines—Peter was apparently a shop major—the psychology of wyverns, the aberrant behavior of a drill press that had been with the school for as long as anyone could remember and might have to be put to sleep. Jane listened in fascination. Her classes, where they touched on machinery at all, were purely theoretical; she envied the boys their hands-on experience.

When she gathered up her tray to leave, Ratsnickle offhandedly said, "Still on for this afternoon?" She nodded yes, and fled.

Because she lagged so far behind the rest of her class, Jane had to go to the pale man for two hours' tutoring every afternoon. The pale man was a tall, thin creature who wore beige chinos, a white shirt, and canvas deck shoes. His skin was as lifeless as his clothing, and his eyes deader yet.

As always, he did not look up when she entered. He sat motionless on a wooden chair, hands on knees, back to the chalkboard, staring straight ahead of him into nothingness.

"Hello? I was sent here for remedial?"

The pale man looked up. He nodded wanly. Unhastily, without emphasis, he picked up a book, opened it, paged forward a leaf, and then back one. "There are three stars in the heavens," he said, "moving about Jupiter, erratic sidereal bodies which establish a lesser zodiacal process for that wanderer in its mighty twelve-year progression about the sun."

Jane had to concentrate hard to catch the meaning of his words, so flatly were they delivered. If she didn't watch it, she'd find herself zoning out, thoughts drifting off into the empyrean as he droned on and on. The pale man would let her. He didn't care in the least. He was a forest creature, and exiled from his proper environment he had grown so enervated, thin, and attenuated that he seemed hardly to be there at all. There was a natural strength and vigor all other living things possessed that was lacking in him.

Without pausing in his lecture, he teased a limp cigarette from a softpack in his shirt pocket, straightened it between two fingers, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and began patting down his pockets in search of a match.

She sighed to herself. Through the window the horizon was ragged with a wintery fringe of trees. She thought of Ratsnickle and the mall with yearning.

But she had made promises to 7332. Shelter, protection, and the food that through technological subterfuge he caused to be delivered twice weekly to the door were not free. The dragon needed an engineer if he were ever to be restored to full power; in her present ignorant state, she was useless to him. As Jane saw it, it was a fair deal, a conspiracy of equal needs. Tutoring sessions with the pale man were part of the price she had agreed to pay.

"Excuse me," she said hesitantly, "but what effect do these minor planets have on our behavior and fortunes? I mean, you know, astrological influence?"

He looked at her. "None."

"None at all?"

"No."

"But if the planets affect our fortunes—" She stumbled to a stop at the dispassionately scornful look on the pale man's face, the slow way he shook his head. "Surely you'll agree that the planets order and control our destinies?"

"They do not."

"Not at all?"

"No."

"Then what does? Control our destinies, I mean."

"The only external forces that have any influence on us are those we can see every day: the smile, the frown, the fist, the brick wall. What you call 'destiny' is merely a semantic fallacy, the attribution of purpose to blind causality. Insofar as any of us are compelled to resist the flow of random events, we are driven solely by internal drives and forces."

Jane seized on this last. "Then what you're saying is that our fate lies within us, right?"

He shook his head. "If so, it must be extremely small and impossibly distant. I would not suggest you put any reliance in such an insignificant entity."

An icy, nihilistic void seemed to unfold itself around Jane, stretching to infinity in all directions at once, a perfect sphere encompassing all the universe. It seemed unimaginable, this existence the pale man presented her with, unregulated, sourceless, without purpose or direction. And yet, he was so obviously beyond illusion, solace, or desire, she could not imagine him lying to her. Why would he bother? "But everyone I know believes in planetary influences."

"Yes. They do."

She waited, but he did not elaborate. "In introductory astrology they told us that each person has a tutelary star and that each star has its own mineral, color, and musical tone, and a plant as well that is a specific for the disease that is caused by that star's occultation."

"All untrue. The stars do not concern themselves in the least with us. Our total extinction would mean nothing to them."

"But why?" Jane cried. "If it's not true, why would they teach it to us?"

A dry fingertip tapped the page not impatiently but pedagogically. "All courses require textbooks, charts, and teaching aids. By the time the information codified as astrology was discredited and became obsolete, it had a constituency. Certain… personages benefit from the supply contracts."

The smell of chalk dust was harsh in Jane's nostrils, a statistical effluvium of dead molecules suspended in the still air and nothing more. She could taste it in her mouth. "But if what you're saying is so, then it's all meaningless. Isn't it? I mean, nothing means anything at all then, does it?"

"Acu tetigisti" the pale man said in his affectless voice. "You have touched it with a needle."

She shivered, as if a rat had run over her grave. Maybe it was just that the chance evocation of Rooster's true name brought back memories she did not want. But deep inside something small and true as a bell told Jane that it wasn't like that at all.

Something awful had just happened, and she had no idea what.

The mall was everything Jane had imagined it to be, and more. It rose from a gracefully bulldozed hilltop on white marble pillars, and was roofed over by a high, grassy dome. She passed nervously through a lot in which chrome horses snorted, pawed the tarmac, leaked oil. "Come on," Ratsnickle said disgustedly. "Don't be such a pussy." He led her through the gates of ivory at the main entrance.

Within, time did not exist.

Soft music filled the air, and subtly arrayed lights pleased the eye with an endless variety of shades and textures, rendering shadows edgeless, gleaming from brass bedsteads and joyously leaping away from the mirror balls that spun among the banners overhead. Jane felt ennobled just being there, one of a thousand gracious shoppers whose tastes all the soft interior world sought to please.

The air smelled of lilies, leather, and chocolate chip cookies.

"Don't dawdle, okay?" Ratsnickle said.

The mall contained a hundred perfect shops, each one a jewel box of treasures. Sound systems, cloth-of-gold gowns, emerald shoes: row upon row of identical riches filled the racks, wealth multiplied and repeated upon itself in such profusion the mind could not contain it. Standing in front of Der Zauberberg, her reflection in the plate glass window superimposed itself upon cut crystal goblets, ashtrays, decanters, paperweights, and bowls, each diamond-sharp facet throwing off flecks of rainbow, while behind her floated the rippled ghosts of nutmeg trees, fountains, and escalators. Jane's head swam for the sweet richness of it all.

Dazedly, she let Ratsnickle lead her into a boutique. It was called Eulenspiegel's.

"Stop gawking," he said testily. "Here." He yanked at her trousers and something fell heavily to the bottom of her pocket. "Look natural."

"What?" She froze and in a whisper asked, "What is it?"

"A wristwatch." Ratsnickle made a face. "Don't whisper like that, you'll draw attention to us."

Timidly, she let him lead her through several stores. Speaking in a perfectly normal voice, one that lapsed naturally into silence whenever someone drew too near, he lectured her on security procedures and the finer points of shoplifting. "Don't snatch any of the gold," he said before a jewelry store. "It's only for display; the real stuff is kept in a safe in the back. The crap in the windows is only good for a day. By the time you get it home, it'll have changed into dried leaves or a dead mouse. Pebbles maybe."

"Oh," she said.

Ratsnickle showed Jane where the antitheft charms were placed, in high unobtrusive corners of the shops, the ensorcelled mirrors through which a security ogre might be watching over the merchandise from a distance, the quickened silver brooches that would cry thief if removed from their cases. He certainly seemed to know his business.

She noticed, however, that he didn't hit Enchanté or Mother Holle Fashions or indeed any of the high-elven shops, but concentrated on the more proletarian and traffic-dense stores, places where their mere presence would not be enough to draw the baleful glare of security.

"Now it's your turn," he said.

"I couldn't!"

He ignored her. "That one right there—The Eildon Tree. Just be sure you don't touch any of those scarves in the back. They're protected. I felt it when we walked by; like a little electric shock." He gave her a shove. "I'll meetcha by the well."

Somehow, Jane found herself inside. She walked slowly between a rack of pushed-lime and cherry sweat suits and a countertop perfume display, then turned and carefully, wonderingly picked up a leaded-glass bottle of Merde du Temps from Ricci of Ys. It was a lovely thing, and fit perfectly in the palm of her hand.

"May I help you?" A hag materialized at her side, cheekbones aristocratically sharp, skin of a fashionably corpselike pallor. Her expression suggested that she rather doubted it.

"No!" Jane hastily returned the bottle to its table. "Just—just looking."

With an icy smile, the hag retreated slightly. Jane journeyed deeper into the store.

Wherever she went, though, she felt the hag's suspicious eyes at her back, like a physical force pushing her farther and farther to the rear of the shop, until she wound up at the very back, fingering a red-and-black scarf with a border of white skulls and four Celtic spirals on the fly. She looked up and saw for a wonder that the hag was distracted by a new customer and no longer looking her way. Hastily, she shoved the scarf inside her blouse.

It was only then that she remembered Ratsnickle's warning to avoid the scarves.

For an instant she expected lightning to strike her, guards to descend, a clawed hand to close upon her wrist. Then, glancing up into the corner of the ceiling, she recognized the bundle of bones and feathers there affixed. It was, with minor variations, exactly the same as the fetish bundle outside Blugg's doorway, which she had crossed to steal his nail parings on the day she had discovered the dragon's grimoire.

Her blood was human. The fetish was helpless against her.

Heart pounding, she made her way from the shop.

When she and Ratsnickle rendezvoused at a bench by the holy well at the far end of the mall, she had already gone to the ladies' room to draw out the scarf in privacy and reposition it. Standing on the well's mossy rim she twirled on her toes, momentarily as wild a creature as any of the girls in her homeroom. She made a fist and then, reaching through it, pulled the scarf from her sleeve and waved it in the air. "Do you like what I got?" she asked, and laughed at Ratsnickle's amazement.

"How did you do that?" he asked suspiciously.

"Oh," she said airily, "I have my ways." She licked her lips. "Let's do it again."

When Jane finally left, she had a handful of gimcracks stuffed into one trousers pocket and the scarf blowing from her neck. They had spent hours within the mall, and yet outside the afternoon was no later than when they had entered. Almost, she turned around and went right back in. But Ratsnickle wouldn't let her lift any more. Her enthusiasm for the sport unnerved him. She suspected he hadn't had as much experience at shoplifting as he'd led her to think.

But she knew she was going to come back on her own.

"I'm home!"

7332 did not answer. He never did. In all the time they had lived above the landfill, he had not spoken to her once. After their one wild and glorious flight the night of their escape from the factory grounds, he had gone completely to ground. "They will be looking for us," he had said. "Keep your promises, and there won't be any trouble." Since, he had lapsed into silence. 7332 had the uncanny patience of all iron-based saurians. Yet for all the months since she had last heard him speak, his presence still lay heavy at the back of her skull, like a lump of dirty ice that had outlived winter.

She laid out her books and began to study.

Outside, there was a soft thud and then the softer sound of wings laboring heavily to lift into the twilight. An owl, possibly, or a lesser harpy had found food for its young. Jane yanked a grab rod to open a cabin window. The sky was beautiful outside. Three low stars glinted in the dusk. A bead of red gleamed atop the water tank.

It was around this time of night she could sometimes glimpse the wolf-boys running single file over the landfill on their way to the park, and hear their howls, lonely and ecstatic. She longed to be one of their pack then, to wear a heavy leather jacket that creaked when she moved and shitkicker boots with short chromed chains across the back of their heels, to hang out at the arcade, bored and spoiling for a fight, listen to some hot music, maybe score a little taste of something illegal.

Often, she would stay up at the window into the small hours of the morning, waiting for them to come trotting by on their way home, bloody-muzzled and sleepy. Once, one of them, last in line, had turned to look at her. Their gazes had locked for an instant, and she had felt a wild urge to fling open her door and go running barefooted after him.

Jane knew better, though. Wolf-boys weren't safe.

So tonight as always she kept the door locked. After a while, she undid her scarf and smoothed it over her knee. It was pure silk, hand-dyed by dwarven artisans with the spirals arrayed as if radiant from a common center, so that they seemed to whirl one into the other. She reknotted it loosely about her neck, and turned it around so the triangular part hung down in front. "Did you see what I got? Pretty, isn't it?"

7332 did not respond.

"It's stolen."

Nothing.

"I went out to the mall with a boy, and he taught me how to steal things. I was good at it."

Still the dragon did not answer.

Every night, just before she slept, Jane spoke to 7332, meditating silently and with all her will, trying to communicate her needs to him. My shoes are wearing thin, she thought, I'll need new soon. And galoshes too. Money for schoolbooks, new jeans, a poster of Bryan Faust dressed in black leather with his Stratocaster slung low at the hip. Sometimes he listened; more often he did not. Now the cumulative effect of his indifference welled up within her and came boiling out in tears.

"Damn you! Why won't you answer me, you stupid fucker? Why?" She slammed an iron plate wall with her fist. "You know what? I don't believe you're even alive anymore. You only had the stuff for one flight left in you, and you used it up. You're nothing now but a hunk of iron. Maybe there's still some current in your electrical systems, some kind of dim awareness, but that's it. You've been lobotomized, you can't even speak. You're nothing! Nada. I ought to sell you for scrap."

No response.

Angrily, she swept her books from the pilot's couch. They slid down and scattered themselves across the Pnuk counterpane that covered her bedless mattress. Her possessions were meager, but even so the cabin was tiny enough that there was scarcely room enough for them.

She plonked down in the couch.

At a touch the navigational systems came alive. The wraparound closed about her head, and she was once more looking through Melanchthon's eyes. He was staring fixedly at the ground. She raised up his gaze. Her vision now covered a full 360 degrees, over the landfill to one side of the scrub, and down a short, sharp slope on the other, where a sooty-bricked line of row houses showed their narrow backyards, all cinders and the rusting bones of bicycles and other dead machines. The graffiti on the garden walls shone in the dragon-sight like neon: ELVES GO WRACK! and DWARVES RULE O.K. with a pair of crossed hammers beneath it. In the human range of the spectrum, three windows flickered an uncanny television blue.

For a long instant she hung on the edge of the precipice, ready to invoke Melanchthon by name. The syllables hovered a fraction of a second away from her tongue. But at even this faintest thought of them, nausea rose up within Jane, a perceptual queasiness so strong she almost threw up. Something half-uncoiled inside her brain.

Her gaze unfocused and turned inward on the machine diagnostics, green lines unscrolling and multiplying upon themselves as if they had a life of their own. Schematicized, Melanchthon was a map of misery and disrepair, every break and gap where reconstruction was needed—lubricants, rewiring, replacement parts—glaringly obvious. There must have been a thousand such failures riddling the black iron body, and each one an obligation she had pledged her soul to heal.

The presence of the dragon welled up beneath her, all iron and cold, cold blood. She felt like an ant on a moving mountaintop. An aura of sickness emanated from him, blackening the air, and the realization struck her for the first time that in his present state Melanchthon was a cripple, and like any crippled creature, dangerous in proportion to his strength and former vigor.

Sanity returned to her, and with it, fear.

With hands gone suddenly cold, Jane slapped off the interactives. The dragon's presence died away.

It took her a while to pull herself together. When she did, she began to gather up her books. She was not going to invoke the dragon. Not tonight at any rate. Their next conversation would have to wait on a moment of far greater import.

The printed pages, however, were unreadable to her now. Seven times she went over one before realizing she had not the slightest notion which text she had opened. She let it slip from her fingers, and rolled over on her back, staring blankly at the iron ceiling of the cabin.

After a while she began to cry.

Her loneliness seemed overwhelming, now, her isolation complete. Jane felt her inferiority like a physical blow. In a world filled with enchantment, she was nothing but a changeling girl, nothing but a high school kid, nothing but a little thief.