The Iron Dragon's Daughter (21 page)

Strawwe finished.

"Well!" The secretary tucked a bony knee under her arm and stood on one leg. "In all the years I have been here, this is the most outrageous and brazen episode that has come to my ears. Can there be any doubt of her punishment?"

She looked to Grunt. He cleared his throat and looked away. She looked to Strawwe. He met her gaze. "Very well," she said at last. "Throw this wretched child to the basilisk!"

With eyes averted, Grunt and Strawwe dragged her out into the hall. They flung open the door to the dire office and thrust her inside. The door slammed shut behind her. She looked up and saw the Principal's creature preening itself atop a blotter befouled with green droppings.

The basilisk clutched at the corner of the desk with clawlike fingers. It was a featherless biped, pale as chicken flesh, with a long neck and undersized appendages that were less wings than stumps. The round alembic of its belly was taut as a drum, where the rest of its body had the disorganized looseness of butchered meat.

But it was the creature's face that inspired dread, eyeless, all but headless, tiny human ears framing enormous soft lips that glistened with mucous surfaces. It had no nose, so that its every breath was a liquid gasp of pain.

Seeing this horror, Jane involuntarily found herself imagining what it must be like to be trapped within such flesh. It would be a fate even more repulsive than the creature itself. She wanted to look away and could not.

It flapped its stubby, goosefleshed wings.

Suddenly it craned its pale neck forward and down, and stretched wide its rubbery lips, revealing even white teeth and a wet pink tongue. Jane flinched away from its blind scream.

Everything went blank. For a timeless, airless instant she stood nowhere, dimensionless, unthinking. In a state of perfect negation. Then she staggered as she found herself back in the Principal's office, staring horrified at the basilisk, mouth closing, lips wet with spittle.

She had not heard the least fraction of the basilisk's black scream, yet its effects echoed in her body. She wanted to run for the nearest toilet so she could vomit up bile and foulness. She felt unclean, filth encrusting her tongue and digestive passages all the way down to her anus.

Then for the first time Jane managed to drag her gaze away from the basilisk, and up to the Principal. He sat unmoving behind the desk, dressed in waistcoat, rep tie, and jacket. His hands rested inert in his lap. His eyes studied her with a reptilian alertness that was totally without emotion.

It was the Baldwynn.

A little choking cry rose up in the back of Jane's throat. She had been found! Melanchthon had promised he would shield her from detection, from search, from the hounds of persecution. It was yet another lie. She experienced now such a despair and sense of betrayal as she had never felt before.

But the Baldwynn, though his eyes tracked her every movement, said nothing, and made no move to stop her when she edged toward the door.

Jane's hand was on the knob when her eye was caught by the folder in the Baldwynn's lap. It was a pale manila rectangle, held lightly in both hands, and something about it told her it was significant.

This is crazy, she thought. But, cringing a little, she forced herself back to the Baldwynn.

His eyes followed her hand down to his lap. There were age spots on the backs of his pale hands. Cautiously she took the folder between thumb and forefinger, and tugged. It came free of his hands. His eyes followed the folder up. She looked at the name on its label.

Peter of the Hillside.

In a frenzy she opened the folder. It held a single flimsy square of paper, and nothing more. The lettering on it was gray and blurred; she could not possibly read it here. Not in the state she was in. Jane folded it in quarters and slipped it inside her blouse.

The Baldwynn did not move, even when she put the folder back in his spotted hands.

The halls were empty. Slowly, she stepped into them. A teacher starting out his doorway saw her emerge and ducked back in again. He clearly did not want to know.

Feeling dizzy and unreal, she floated down the hall.

As she passed the secretary's office, Grunt and Strawwe seized her by the arms and hauled her backwards into the room. "What did he say to you?" the secretary demanded. "What did he say?"

Jane had been holding herself tightly under control. Now she broke down, crying uncontrollably, from fear and disgust intermingled. "She's hysterical," the secretary said. She cocked her arm back and slapped Jane so hard her face rang. Spittle flying, she screamed, "
What did he say
?"

Some cold calculating aspect of Jane, lurking unsuspected deep within her, saw the chance then and took over. They none of them had a clue. They were so fearful of the Principal that they dared not confront him in person. They had no more idea what he really wanted than Dame Moon herself. "He said I should be an alchemist!" she sobbed. "He said you should get me a full scholarship."

The three traded looks of perfect bafflement. They could not believe what they heard, no more than they could imagine someone being able to lie after an encounter with the basilisk. It was an incredible statement, and at the same time undeniable.

But in the end there was nothing they could do about it.

The secretary began typing up the forms.

THE DRAGONFLY GIRLS STOOD IN A KNOT BY THE SIDE DOOR, smoking. Because their bodies remained neotonous well into sexual maturity, they looked like perverse children. Jane saw them every day, gossiping together, their wings buzzing with excitement, sharp-hipped and all but breastless in their designer jeans and sheer silk blouses, flicking lipstick-stained cigarette butts into the yard.

She picked out one who looked marginally less aloof than the others, and waited for her to separate herself from the group. "Excuse me," Jane said.

The dragonfly girl walked right by her, then stopped and glanced scornfully over a shoulder. "It's the thief," she said to nobody.

"Look." Jane dipped into her handbag and pulled out a silver amulet. It was a delicate thing, a hammered flower-of-life, and worth a pretty bit of change. She had cut classes this morning to lift it, and if she'd been caught, there would have been bad trouble. It was a chance she'd had to take, though, because the masses of cold iron in the dragon meant she could never take jewelry home; inevitably it always sickened and died. The silver sang in the sunlight, and the dragonfly girl's eyes widened at the sight of it. "It's for you."

"Gra'mercy." She extended an anorexically thin arm.

Jane jerked the amulet back. "There's a price."

Those dark eyes went lightless and cruel, lips parting slightly to reveal small, pearly fangs. Jane bulled ahead anyway. "Where can I get good information on birth control?"

Blank astonishment. Then: "Birth control?
You
?" The dragonfly girl threw her head back in savage elven laughter.

"Do you want it or not?"

"Hand it over."

The instant the amulet hit the dragonfly girl's palm it disappeared. She spun and strode away. But in the air behind her floated the words, "Peg o'the Landfill. She'll want silver."

It took Jane weeks to build up her courage. But on a cold and rainy morning early in the Matron's Moon, she stood shivering in a too-thin windbreaker before Peg's place. It was a rundown redbrick row house, one of those that backed onto the landfill. A corroded tin plaque with a double-headed ax on it was all that indicated a witch dwelt within. A crack ran crazily up the front wall, skewing the bricks to either side off true, and plastic sheets had been stapled over the insides of all the windows. The shades were drawn.

Jane stared at the doorway, unable to approach. Save for that desperate night when they had escaped the dragon works, she had never defied Melanchthon, not really, not on anything important. Certainly nothing like this! Coming here was an implicit breach of faith, for virginity was a
sine qua non
of hands-on engineering magick. She didn't know the technological reasons for this; but she knew that all the big corporations neutered their engineers before trusting them with any important work.

She took from her pocket the scrap of paper she had stolen from the Baldwynn. It was folded tightly in four, the edges frayed and gray from repeated handling. She opened it, read it through. It still said what it said.

Take a deep breath, she told herself. Walk up the steps. Go to the door. Knock.

She did.

A long silence, a creak, and then more silence. The door opened. "Yeah? Waddayou want?"

Peg was a fat old crone, heavily made up, with a cigarette jutting from her mouth. She wore a terry cloth robe and a worn brown pair of flip-flops. There were circles under her eyes and a mug of coffee in her hand.

"I can come back later, if you'd like," Jane babbled. "I didn't mean to wake you up or anything."

One penciled eyebrow lifted. Red lips twisted scornfully. "In or out, just don't stand in the doorway. I'm freezing my ass off out here." Peg held the door open and Jane squeezed by her, brushing against that soft belly, those enormous breasts. A stale odor, compounded of nicotine and incense, rose from her robe.

A television was flickering in the fireplace, news footage of refugees fleeing the violence in Carcassonne. Peg snapped her fingers irritably and it died. The sitting room was small and stuffy and impossibly cluttered with escritoires, end tables and chairs, a dwarven anvil, etchings of flayed horses, an ebony apothecary's cabinet, a homunculus preserved in brine. In effect it was like a collage of images torn from different magazines; the eye could assemble it into no coherent whole.

"Sit," Peg said. "I'll get some clothes on." She pushed through a curtained doorway, setting the rings to rattling.

Jane rested her hands on her knees and waited. An electric heater in the center of the room buzzed and clattered. It made her hot on one side and cold on the other. The homunculus stared at her with those dead, astonished eyes, as if to say, What an ugly creature you are.

She looked away. In a bell jar on the mantelpiece was an ormolu clock. She could see the agonized second-by-second twitch of its hand, but because all the air had been pumped out, the mechanism made no sound. It wasn't long before she found herself staring again at the pickled imp atop the ebony cabinet. I hate you, its frozen expression said, because you can move and I cannot, because you have a freedom I can never hope for and yet you do nothing with it.

Jane shifted in her chair.

Against one wall was a set of glass shelves lit by hidden bulbs so that they shone with a cold and unfriendly brightness. Arrayed on them in even rows were eggs, an insane variety of them, all of a size and carved from gem malachite and snowflake obsidian, green onyx and pink onyx, golden srutilated quartz and blue argonite fire opal, or else crystal glass with miniature scenes within, cities and mountainscapes, children at play, manlike fleas with baskets full of eggs and within those eggs smaller fleas carrying baskets of yet smaller eggs.

Jane couldn't imagine why the sight of the eggs should fill her with distress, but it did. She felt nauseous just looking at them. Twisting back around she found herself once again facing the homunculus's petulant mouth, its goggly eyes.

You're stupid, too.

Jane blinked. "Hello?" she said tentatively.

Well, it's about time. You're something of a dim bulb, aren't you? Developmentally challenged. Not exactly the first horse out the gate.

This was too rude to be fugitive thoughts. Wonderingly, Jane approached the bottle, touched its side. The little man within was white and bloated, a puffball about to explode into spores. "Are you alive?"

Are you?

Jane retreated from the bottle. She knew she should say something, but for the life of her could not imagine what.

Ask me what I want, the manikin suggested. That's always good for a laugh.

"What do you want?"

I want to die. I want the witch stuffed into this bottle alive so she can suffer as I have. I want to know what that is standing behind you.

Jane whirled. Nothing. When she turned back to the homunculus it wryly observed, Well of course it's not going to be there when you
look
. It's that sort of creature. Look there on the anvil. Do you see that maul? Of course you do.

A twenty-pound hammer lay atop the anvil, not an arm's length from the homunculus and situated where it was constantly in his sight.

"Yes."

Go to it. Touch the hammer, that's all I ask. Doesn't it feel fine? So strong and heavy.

From a window a weak bar of silvery light slanted down to stab the corner of Jane's eye. It dazzled her and when she moved away tiny suns danced in her vision. The heater's buzz was a constant. She felt weak, dizzy, unreal. "I… guess so."

Run your hand along the shaft. So smooth. Lift it a little. Feel the heft of it. Feel how your muscles shift and move. Such a fine sensation, a luxury really, you'd have to be paralyzed like me to fully appreciate it. Lift it a little higher. Swing it back and forth. Feel the force of momentum, the way you have to strain to handle it.

"You're right." Jane had never consciously paid much attention to the workings of her body before; it was an interesting sensation. The room seemed to fade away, drawn into the loudening hum of the electric heater. "It's kind of fun."

Now raise the hammer up over your head. Feel how your arms tremble from the weight. The head is yearning for the ground. It wants to overbalance you and soar curving downward. Can you feel it?

"Yes."

Then swing it down—now! Smash the bottle!

For a giddy instant Jane started to obey. "No!" She yanked the hammer to the side and it fell clangorously onto the anvil. She retreated to her chair. "Why did you do that?"