The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 15 —

THE WINTER PROCEEDED AT A SLOWNESS OF PACE THAT was entirely without precedent. The Lords of the City declared a third December, so that Black December passed into Ice December with the possibility of a fourth December at the back of every mind. Meanwhile, it was the Wolf Moon, and the Goddess had taken on her most hostile aspect. Sometimes it seemed the Teind would never arrive.

One week after Ratsnickle's reappearance, Jane went out window-shopping with him and Monkey. She trailed after them, anxious and unwilling, through the upscale stores of Gladsheim and Carbonek, elegant places like Horn Fair, Fata Padourii, and Maleficium, where Jane looked and felt hopelessly out of place. Ratsnickle stood back, jingling the keys in his pockets, a satisfied smile on his puffy lips, when some bright trinket caught Monkey's avaricious eye.

"Oh, look," she said then, "isn't it lovely?"

"Yes," Ratsnickle replied, looking steadily at Jane. "Isn't it?"

They wound up the evening at The Cave. It was open mike night, and every would-be bard and minstrel manqué for miles around was on hand with a sheaf of bad poetry. They sat around tables made from telephone cable spools, sipping espresso and waiting their turns. Undergrads in jeans and black turtlenecks brought fresh mugs and cleared away empties.

"Oh the gloves, the faun-skin gloves," Monkey enthused. "I'm doing all my shopping at la jettatura from now on." Reaching up to trace the line of Ratsnickle's jaw with a fingertip she purred, "Think how… sooofft they'd feel."

Up on the tiny stage, a poet who looked like he spent daytimes sleeping under haystacks recited:

The lady no longer crouched at his side,

But stood before him glorified,

Ratsnickle rolled his eyes. Then, picking up an earlier train of rhetoric, he said, "Sex is all about power. Mastery and surrender, that's the game in a nutshell."

"That's not how it is with us," Monkey said. "Is it, sweetie?"

He patted her hand indulgently. "Somebody has to take and somebody give. That's just the nature of things. The male is a natural aggressor. The female is passive and nurturing. Inevitably, love in action is a clash of hard and soft, seizing and yielding, a war in miniature. Everything else—courtship, estrangement, reconciliation—is but refinement and sublimation of these primal forces."

"You're a brute." Monkey pouted. Then, in a wheedling tone she said, "But, honeypie, nobody likes to be ordered around all the time."

"In a threesome, of course," Ratsnickle said thoughtfully, "things are different. It can go either way, but most commonly you end up with two people on top. To maintain balance, whoever winds up on the bottom has to accept twice the dominance. She has to learn to grovel. To crawl. She has to be made to cherish her own humiliation."

Monkey looked quickly at Jane. Her eyes were hard and bright, like jet buttons, and her nostrils flared. Then she shook her head and turned away. "That's perverse."

"Oh yes," Ratsnickle agreed. "But then, so many things are."

Jane stared hard into the candle sconce. Watching the flame vanish and reappear in the thick red glass. Like a moth struggling to escape. "You said you had something to tell me."

Shining and tall and fair and straight

As the Pillar that stood by the Beautiful Gate,—

"Ah? So I did. You left in such a flurry of strange events—" Ratsnickle drew an envelope from an inside coat pocket, placed it on the table by his mug. Jane reached for the envelope and he drew it back. "Strange events, strange indeed. You left so abruptly you didn't even bother to say good-bye to your old friends. After all we meant to each other. It roused my curiosity. I decided to do a little poking around."

Sharply, Monkey said, "You went out together?"

"No."

"It was nothing—a folly of youth." Ratsnickle waved a hand airily. "I convinced Strawwe to put in an inquiry to the Office of the Child Catcher." He tapped the envelope meaningfully. "Aren't you curious what they said?"

Herself the Gate wherby love can

Enter the temple…

The poet's voice was high, nasal, and hesitant, a bouquet of unpleasant qualities.

"Do we have to listen to this crap? No, I'm not curious. What business is it of mine?"

"What indeed?" Ratsnickle returned the envelope to his pocket and abruptly changed the subject. "I hope you enjoyed tonight, Monkey, my sweet. Strolling about the City, window-shopping, our pleasant conversations."

She hugged him. "You know I did, Rattikins."

"If you could have only one item of all those we looked at tonight, what would it be?"

"Oh, the faun gloves. Without question, the gloves."

Ratsnickle turned to Jane. "You heard the lady." He snapped his fingers, as if she had perforce to obey.

Too horrified to sort and order her indignation, Jane cried, "But they wouldn't even let me through the door. La jettatura is right out of my league. It's too swank."

"We have faith in you." Ratsnickle stood, and Monkey after him. He closed a proprietorial hand over her behind to steer her away. "Our little Maggie is capable of a lot more than she thinks she is." Over his shoulder he mouthed a kiss at her.

As the two swept out, a smattering of applause rose from the floor. The poet was done reading. He stepped down from the stage, and was replaced by another as like to him as two cigarettes in a pack. The replacement cleared his throat into the microphone and began:

Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

Instead of dithering over whether or not la jettatura was beyond her talents, Jane should have challenged Ratsnickle directly. She should have told him she would never steal for him again. Should have said there was nothing in his envelope that could possibly affect her academic standing. That she wasn't afraid of him, not any more.

There were so many things she should have said.

The booksellers in Old Regents Hall served all the City. But since most of Senauden was taken up by the University, many specialized in secondhand texts, works of obscure scholarship, and other books of special interest to students.

The bookstalls were two and three stories high, but so narrow within that two customers could not slide by one another without discomfort. Long ago, plumbing had been retrofitted into the space below the indigo-and-gold-star vaulted ceiling. Steam hissed gently, unrelentingly, from the joints of one set of pipes and water condensed on the undersides of another. A steady drizzle fell onto the green roofs of the stalls and the tiled street between.

"Why are you so anxious to get an orchid book? Can't you think of a name without?" Sirin took an umbrella from the rack by the west door and shook it open. Jane took another.

"Maybe. It's kind of tough, though. It's such a personal thing, you know? I'd hate to decide too quickly and get stuck with something like Lady Fatima." Umbrellas up, Jane and Sirin linked arms. The passage between the stalls was thick with pedestrians.

"Jenny Greenteeth named hers Miss Primsey's Garden."

"Too flowery. That's almost as bad as what Eleanor named hers."

"What? Tell me."

"Bossy."

"Oh, vile! 'Tis the name of a cow! Do you know the bwca down the hall from you? She swears she's decided on Siege Perilous."

"That's a good name."

"And yet not one likely to draw in much traffic." Sirin giggled. "Raven says she's thinking of naming hers the Ineluctable Cavern of Despair."

"She's just sulking over being dumped for a blood-may. You've heard what Nant named hers?"

"What?"

"Trouble." They were both laughing now. "What about you?"

"The Meat-grinder."

"Oh, don't! Really?"

"No, of course not. I named her Courage. Wasn't that a—"

"Quick!" Jane seized her friend's arm and swung her into the nearest bookstall. Gilt lettering over the door proclaimed it to be INGLESOOT'S. "In here!"

Astonished, Sirin craned and gaped out into the passage. "Jane! Whatever can be the—" Puck Aleshire strode by the doorway, grim of face and bareheaded to the rain, looking neither to the right nor left. The bobbing umbrellas swallowed him up. Sirin made an exasperated noise. "Oh, Puck. This thing between you and him is getting out of hand."

Jane's heart skipped. "What thing? What has he been saying about me?"

"He doesn't say anything about you, and do you know why? Because you ignore him, you avoid him, you won't have anything to do with him. He can't want what he doesn't know exists."

Jane began poking through a tray of remaindered dream books, crosswords collections, and herbals. "He has the stench of death about him. You can tell at a glance that he's not going to survive the Teind."

"That only makes him the more delightful. It ought to pander to everything that's depraved in you." An angry light danced in Sirin's eyes. "Come on, Jane, it's perfect. You can do anything you want with him and he's not going to come sniffing around to remind you of it next semester. Any normal girl would kill for that kind of opportunity."

"Well, I've been through all that before, thank you. Never again."

Sirin stamped her foot. "Church bells and holy water! You're just fucking impossible. I don't know why I put up with you."

"But I—"

"Forget it! See if I ever—ever!—try to do any more favors for you."

White with fury, Sirin slammed out of the shop. She disappeared into the swirling currents of the crowd.

Jane was stunned. It made no sense at all. One instant Sirin was laughing, and the next in a rage. Her merry mood had evaporated as quickly as the light on a meadow when a cloud passes over the sun. Nothing Jane had said could possibly account for this transformation.

She sighed, turned to the shelves, and put her hand on exactly what she was looking for. It was a slim volume bound in tooled leather and titled The Name of the Orchid. Jane flipped through it. There were a dozen hand-colored plates and a dictionary of several hundred names defined, derived, and argued by merit and deficiency. To hold it was to desire it.

She looked up and down the stall. It was empty. She peered upward. The shelves seemed to dwindle and recede toward infinity. A long, slender ladder stretched beyond the hanging electric lights, into faraway realms where the endless ranks of books were lost in obscurity. "Hello?" she called. "Is anybody up there? Master—" What was the name out front? "—Inglesoot?"

There was no reply. She shrugged and made for the door.

The ladder rattled irritably. A cobbly scrambled headfirst down from above. When he reached the eighth rung he leaped off to flip and land at her feet with a thump. "Not for sale." He plucked the book from Jane's hand.

"What?" She stepped back.

"Not for sale, not for sale! Are you feebleminded? Not for sale means you can't buy it." Master Inglesoot stood as high as her waist and his gold half-rims were bright semicircles against his grizzled black face. "Get out. There's nothing for you here."

"Um… this is a bookstall, isn't it?"

"Well, and what of it?"

"Most bookstalls sell books."

"Don't chop logic with me." Inglesoot passed the orchid book from hand to foot and stuffed it into the bottommost shelf without even looking at it. Intentionally or not, he was standing between Jane and the door. Otherwise she would simply have left. "I'm wise to your thievish little schemes. These books are mine, d'ye hear? Mine! I'll defend them to the death, and that's no idle boast."

Jane found herself trembling. "This is the craziest store I've ever been in."

"Crazy?" He rounded on her, all angles and motion, and shook a finger under her nose. "I know your type and your pathetic delusions. Oh, yes, I do. You think of a library as being like the mind of a great and noble Scholar—catholic, universally educated, and precisely organized. Every opinion balanced against its opposite, every fact quickly retrievable. The only biases those that exist in the knowledge itself. If a gap exists in the collective omniscience, a horde of servants will scurry to patch it with the best available volumes, each weighed and tasted to make sure the quality and flavor of information is suitably rich. And this puerile construct, this mock-loremaster, you think is a good thing. Get a life, why don't you!"

"If you'll just back up a step or two, I'll leave."

"You sneer at my bookstall because it's more like your mind as it really is—erratically educated, stocked with whatever unexamined assertions chance to pass within reach, crammed with dubious and contradictory information. The volume you need is here somewhere, but misplaced and out of date. Trash and treasure are thoroughly intermingled with no way to easily distinguish which is which." He yanked a volume at random and read the spine. "Scribbledehob. Musings on fireplaces? The picaresque adventures of a young demon? The demented scrawls of a disordered maniac? Who is to say?" He put it back, pulled out another. "Infangthief and Outfangthief, the merry pranks, doubtless, of a pair of witty and lovable rogues, filed alongside that useful reference work Unspeakable Cults. And to serve and order and replenish them? Only I, myself."

"It's okay. I don't want to buy anything. I changed my mind."

"Yet think! Use your head, for once. It is not commonality that we value in others but eccentricity. It is our differences that individuate us. Were you to meet your vaunted Scholar astride down this very corridor, with his perfect features and flawless diction, you would think him knowledgeable but strangely dull, a farrago of facts and citations and nothing more.

"Compare this with the wit and variety, the eternal surprise of my sweet, sweet mistress." Blindly, lovingly, he stroked the books with his piebald old hand. "And would you wish to see her mutilated, reduced—aye, and lobotomized? Oh vile, vile, ten thousand times vile!"

"It was only one book!"

"Excuse me." A mild-faced lizard woman poked her head in the door. "I'll show the young lady out. I think she meant to come into my stall in the first place. Sit you down, gaffer. Take your ease."

"Eh?" Inglesoot started, and swiveled halfway toward the door. A puzzled expression spread over his face. Then his knees bent and in slow collapse he sank down onto a cardboard box overspilling with maps, pamphlets, and commercial throwaways. He put his head in his hands. "Gone, all gone forever," he grieved.

This was Jane's chance. She accepted the lizard woman's hand and delicately stepped over the unheeding cobbly. The way out was clear now.

At the doorway, she opened her umbrella and quietly asked, "What was that all about?"

"It's an occupational hazard." The lizard woman shrugged. She was heavy bodied and her motions were suitably torpid. "You start by reading books, and you end by loving them."

"But all that wild talk! About death and mutilation and lobotomies."

"The notices came three days ago." She fished a yellow flimsy from an apron pocket, unfolded it, looked at it, refolded it, and put it back in. "The authorities will be collecting a tithe of our stock for the Teind-fires. Inglesoot was functioning well enough until then. But when he tried to weed out the redundant books, he found he could not. A few of us came over with cardboard boxes to get him started, dropping into them duplicates, inferior texts, things that would never sell. He scrabbled after us, squeaking, and snatching them back. By the end of the day we had but one carton with a single coverless paperback romance at its bottom, and that he set aside for further consideration. So we gave up."

"What will happen to him?"

"They'll seize all his books, of course, and him with them."

"That's awful. Can't you stop him?"

"Child, what good is a bookseller who won't sell books? It sounds harsh, but he's exactly the sort of misfit the Teind is meant to clear away. We're best off without him." The lizard woman smiled sadly, and ducked into the next door stall.

Jane stood in the rain, hesitating. At last she stepped back inside. "Master Inglesoot."

Without looking up, he said, "Who are you?"

"Nobody. A friend. Listen to me. The City only wants a tenth of your inventory. Consider how many hundreds and thousands of books you have—you can't possibly read them all!"

Master Inglesoot looked up and in his eyes she saw the gnarled toughness of old roots, a fanatical determination that might be killed but never weakened. "It's better this way. Better we should burn together than for me to survive and inhabit the corpse of my beloved, surrounded constantly by reminders of her former beauty."

"Your collection is not a woman. That's only a metaphor—an abstraction! You'll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend."

As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she'd smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.

"It's not the principles that kill you in the end." Inglesoot hugged an almanac to his chest with both arms. His voice was fading as his interest in her waned. "It's the books."

Entering la jettatura was like walking into a dream. The quietly intrusive background music of the mall stores was replaced by textured layers of quiet. When she squeezed past the pine-tall coat trees, her cheek was brushed by the imperial softness of vicuna. Here was the quiet gleam of brass, there the gentle cry of a hand-held bell. Everything conspired to soothe the senses. Yet the air quivered with tension, as if an elf-lord were just about to enter the room.

From her observations of the customers, Jane had assembled an outfit that might let her pass. She'd ripped her best jeans at the knees and three places up the thighs, fraying the threads so that they stood out white and defiant. Over a black lace bra she wore a sheer silk blouse with a string of pearls in a setting dowdy enough to suggest they were inherited. To top it off she had borrowed from Raven an embroidered jacket acquired for a fraction of its value on an independent study trip to the mountain country of Lyonesse.

A touch of makeup finished the look. Examining the results in the mirror Jane decided that she was the visual embodiment of a Teggish girl with money trying to pass for an elf-brat with an attitude.

The faun gloves were to the front. Jane passed them by without a glance, as was her usual technique. She lingered over a display of spiderweb shifts that clung to her fingertips when she touched them, then followed a long, winding aisle past autumn shawls and handbags the rich brown hue of dried oak leaves. She startled a squirrel, and it scampered away to disappear among the woolen skirts.

Everywhere Jane felt the pressure of small, bright eyes on her. Yet whenever she turned the sales personnel were discreetly distant, heads turned away, fading already into obscurity. Their attentiveness was perfection itself.

This would definitely have to be a snatch-and-run.

Across the cobbled hallway from la jettatura was a cul-de-sac lined with professional offices. She could burst through the insurance adjustor's and out its back door, skip around a corner, and disappear into the ladies' room there in no time flat. Into a stall, climb atop the toilet, and up into the drop ceiling. From there she could emerge in any of a dozen locales. She'd already moved an acoustic panel aside and checked the space within for trolls. All it would take were nerve and speed.

She took a long, slow breath to calm herself.

"Young miss." A slim and deferential fey in impeccably anonymous clothes touched her hand. "I'd like to have a word with you."

"I really don't think—" Jane started to turn away, then gasped in pain as his hand closed about her wrist.

His apologetic smile did not extend into his eyes. "Over there would be convenient."

In the shadow of a sea-green marble pillar were two gray plush chairs. Her captor released Jane so she could sit. He then sat down himself, tugging lightly at the knees of his trousers so they wouldn't wrinkle. He adjusted his chair so that it faced her slightly. They must've looked like old friends having a confidential chat. "My name is Ferret. Store security. I couldn't help noticing that you were thinking of stealing some of our merchandise."

Jane filled her voice with indignation. "You can't tell any such thing just by looking at me."

"No? We all of us reveal more about ourselves than we suspect. Let's see what subtle signals there are to be seen on you. Don't bother to deny anything. This is just an exercise." He looked at her steadily for a moment. His lids sank low over eyes as white as his teeth. "You're human, a changeling, and a student at the University. Majoring in the sorcerous rather than the liberal arts. That much is obvious. You're not stealing for your own sake." He made a regretful tsking noise. "Somebody gets a kick out of forcing you to do this. That is unfortunate, but more common than you'd think.

"You're not so ordinary as you seem, though. A shadow clings to you, and a whiff of cold iron. There's a factory somewhere that would like you back, young miss."

She started to stand. But Ferret's hand tapped her knee and stopped her. "Please. Our clientele require a serene and gracious surround. If you're not going to cooperate… well. You are going to be cooperative, aren't you?"

She sat. Ferret raised a prompting eyebrow and she nodded miserably. "Yes. Yes, I'll cooperate."

"Good. I want to remind you that we're just having a pleasant chat, nothing more." He took a silver case from an inside pocket and tapped out a throat lozenge. He did not offer her one. A slate gray junco perched atop a rack of Italian scarves took wing and flew away. "You're an extremely lonesome child," Ferret said. "Tell me. Do you know what the penalties are for shoplifting?"

When Jane shook her head, Ferret pursed his lips. "Let me tell you, then. For stealing a pair of gloves—gloves of the quality we sell, at any rate—the punishment is flogging, public humiliation, and possible loss of one hand."

Jane felt sick. It must've shown on her face, for Ferret kindly reminded her, "You haven't stolen anything yet.

"But allow me to pursue this line of thought a little farther. Suppose you were to break into somebody's apartment, armed, let us further stipulate, with a knife. We'll say you've chosen well. You might expect to take away with you gold bars, jewelry, perhaps a few items of artistic value. An armful of silverware, at any rate. Burglary takes little more ingenuity than shoplifting, does it? And the rewards are potentially so much greater than a pair of faun-skin gloves. Now what do you suppose the punishment for this crime would be? Flogging, public humiliation, and possible loss of one hand."

Jane waited, but Ferret said no more. She could not guess at the meaning of what he had said. It was like one of those stories that the oracle told on your name day, dense with portent and yet at the same time so smooth and cryptic that the mind could not get a grip on it.

He stood and offered her a hand. She took it.

"I want you to think long and seriously about what I've said."

"I will," Jane said.

"Excellent."

Ferret led her to the shop's front. At the door he released her and, bowing politely, said, "It's been a pleasure chatting with you. Let me, if I may, remind you that, should you come into money, la jettatura stands ready to serve you."

"I've been looking for you," Puck Aleshire said.

Jane whirled. She'd stashed her bike in a public locker two floors down from the store. She was unlocking it when Puck suddenly loomed at her shoulder.

His hand closed about something and stuffed it into a jeans pocket. "Listen," he said. "I hear you're having a little trouble with Monkey's new boyfriend."

"I don't see where that's any of your business."

He stood silent for a moment, head down, one thumb hooked into his belt. Bicycles whizzed by, their riders rattling angry bells at him. He paid them no mind. "Yeah, well, see, I have some friends on the street. If you want, I could arrange for them to have a word with Ratsnickle. Some of these guys can be pretty persuasive."

Jane lifted her bike off the hook and eased its back tire to the ground. "If I needed your help, I'm sure I'd be grateful for it."

"Look," Puck said. "I know his type. They think they're tough but they're not. They're just nasty. Drop you down an air shaft for fun, that kind will, if they think they can get away with it. But break just one finger—the little finger, mind you!" He held up his own. "—and they fold. You'll never see him again, I promise."

Lips thin, Jane shook her head. She would not meet his eye.

"You don't have to know anything about it. Just tell me you wouldn't mind."

She ducked her head into her helmet and pulled the cinch snug. "I'm not going to tell you anything of the kind. Maybe I'm happy with what's going on. Maybe I like Ratsnickle. Maybe my problem isn't with him, but with you. Did you ever think of that?" Stooping, she donned her clips. Straightening, she gripped the handlebars so hard her hands turned white. "So get out of my face, okay? Get out of my life. Just… lay off!"

Puck wasn't buying a word of it. His eyes blazed with anger. Tightly, quietly, he said, "Just keep it in mind."

Jane climbed onto her bike, leaned on the pedal, and fled.

But his eyes stayed with her, the puzzled concern in his voice, and the smell of his leather jacket. He saw deeper into her than anybody else, and she knew not so much from his words as by the tone and timbre of his voice that he cared.

Slowly his eyes faded, and then the memory of his voice. It was the smell of leather that stayed with her, through the day and deep into the night.