The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Chapter 7

THE MATERIAL WORLD IS ULTIMATELY COMPOSED OF PRIMItive matter. No one has ever seen primitive matter, however, since it has only a potential existence until it is acted upon by form to create air, fire, water, and earth, and the near infinite number of elements that are admixtures of those four. Creation occurs in two exhalations. The Sun's heat acting upon the ocean causes a vaporous exhalation, which is both moist and cold, and its resultant compounds are therefore largely, but not entirely, composed of water and air. But when the Sun acts upon the land, there is a smoky exhalation, which is both hot and dry, and its compounds are mostly admixtures of earth and fire.

Jane loved alchemy. She was fascinated by the elegance of it. From formlessness by way of two operations arose the four basic elements and all things that derived from them. An oak tree stripped down to its components was made up entirely of these four in combination. You could prove this by taking a log from that tree and applying sufficient heat. The unraveling would begin with the expulsion of flames and hot jets of airthe first two elements. As it burned, tarry liquids would bubble from the cut end of the logwater. Then, when calcination was complete, a residue of ash would remain, and this last was the final element of earth.

"The smoky exhalation," said the pale man, "is masculine and the vaporous one feminine. Mercury is a womb in which embryonic metals can be gestated. This is why all the great alchemists are female."

Female Jane wrote in her notebook, and underlined it three times.
* * *

"I don't see why anybody would want to be wicker queen anyway," Jane said.

The others looked at her pityingly.

"For the glory," Hebog said. "She gets to cut classes, skip finals, date whosof*ckingever she wants, and ride in a great big float while everybody looks up at her and cheers. She even gets to wear a stupid little tiara." He hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it out. "What's so hard to understand about that?"

"Yes, but"

"Oh, don't be tedious." Salome skinned a slim pink cigarette from her purse and lit up without offering the pack around. She was a musty-smelling girl of vague origins with a long skull, perpetually damp hair, and the unfortunate habit of biting her toenails in class. Jane didn't exactly like her, but it wasn't as if she had a great deal of choice whom she could hang with. "This topic is boring me to distraction, daawling. Let's talk about something else."

"Yeah." Ratsnickle took a casual swipe at Jane's head. "Change the record, dipshit."

"Hey, speak of the devil, here comes Peter," Hebog said. "Peter, my man! What's the word?" He was a red dwarf and like many of his kind his moods swung precipitously between surly fatalism and a puppyish eagerness to please that bordered on the grotesque.

"Yeah, hi." Peter of the Hillside nodded vaguely down at the dwarf, ignoring the others, and then, to her amazement, addressed Jane. "Listen, I hear you know how to lift tapes from that store down to the mall."

"Yes," said Jane. "I can do that."

"Well, could you tell me how? This rusalka chick I'm seeing, you know what they're like. She wants me to get her this one particular tape, you know, and I'm flat out of money."

"Jane never" Hebog began.

She quelled him with a look. It was her own decision to make, after all. To prove it, she said, "Okay. I've got this little red leather purse, see. I carry it in my right hand with the flap unsnapped, so I can slide in a cassette with my left when nobody's looking." The others, Salome in particular, were listening with interest; normally she didn't share her methodology. Ratsnickle's eyes were narrow slits of concentration.

"But what about the security gate?"

"That's why a purse instead of just shoving the cassette into your pocket. I go to the gate and just as I'm starting through, I see a friend out in the mall, okay? So I've got to call out to her, right? So it's like: Salome!" She squealed the name as if amazed and delighted, going up on her toes and waving her purse-hand high to draw her friend's attention. A step carried her through the imaginary gate and she brought her hand down. "You see? The purse actually goes over the gate, not through, but it all happens so naturally that store security doesn't think twice."

Her friends laughed and clapped their hands. "She's got a million of 'em," Hebog said proudly.

"That's no good," Peter said. "That'll only work for a girl." He started to turn away. "Well, thanks anyway."

"Wait," Jane said. "What tape do you want?"

"The new Conjunction of Opposites album. It's called Mythago."

"I'll get it for you. As a favor. Come see me tomorrow."

"Yeah?" He squinted, as if noticing her for the first time. "That's really nice of you."

When Peter was gone, Ratsnickle said, "Why did you go and tell him a thing like that?"

Jane didn't know why. She had acted on impulse. "He's kind of cute." She shrugged.

"She's sweet on him," Hebog said. "Talk about hopeless! That boy is doomed. You can see it written on his face."

"'As was prophesied Beneath the Mountain,'" Salome said mockingly, "'and y-carven in Runes ain spear's-haft deep even in its granite Heart.'"

"Hey!" Hebog clenched his fists and glared up at her. "That's not funny."

Ratsnickle stepped between the two and pushed them apart. "Shut up, Salome. You too, Hebog." He favored Jane with a withering look, as if it were somehow all her fault. "He's right, though. It's worse than hopeless. That rusalka bitch Peter's seeing, you know who she is?"

"No," said Jane.

The bell rang, signaling the end of recess. Salome threw down her cigarette. "Well, back to the mines."

"F*ck you too," Hebog said.

Jane caught up to Ratsnickle at the door, took his arm, and said, "Who?"

He smirked. "Gwenhidwy the Green. Oh, come on now, don't shake your head like that. You know Gwen. Yes you doit's the wicker queen herself."
* * *

Because she spent so much time in the mall, Jane aged more rapidly than the other girls in her class; it was possible to spend days on end within that glamourous domain and reemerge into a world no older than it was when she went in. Jane did a lot of schoolwork there. She was catching up in her studies, and only the predetermination by her teachers that she was stupid kept her from being promoted out of the pale man's tutoring sessions.

"What happens to the wicker queen?" she asked him that afternoon.

He stopped reading, looked directly at, through, beyond her. "You know what happens to the wicker queen."

"Yes, but why?"

"It's a tradition." He returned to the text. "Words which are transliterations from the Arabic via a metathetical process include 'Abric,' more accurately transcribed as al-kibrit, for sulphur; Alchitram,' from al-qitran, for pitch; Almagest,' or al-majisti for"

"Why is it a tradition?"

"It just is."

"But why?"

The pale man sighed. It was a singularly passionless sigh, and yet the first ghost of emotion Jane had ever yet caught the pale man at, and as such shocking. He put the book aside. "There are things," he said, "which may be known, and these we study in order to gain in understanding and increase our power. Alchemy, metaphysics, and necromancy are such fields of knowledge, and on them and their sister sciences are based the whole of our industrial civilization. But there are other, darker things which will not yield to the intellect. The intent of the Goddess is neither known nor knowable. She makes us dance, male and female, in ever-converging gyres that bring us ultimately each to our own destiny, and that destiny is always the same and never escapable. She does not tell us why."

"You said there were no outside forces ordering our lives. That there was nothing but chance and random occurrence."

He shrugged.

"You did!"

"The Goddess is unknowable and her aims unfathomable, unpredictable, and ineluctable. They might as well be random. We live our brief lives in ignorance and then we die. That's all."

"But the rest of us just die sometime. The wicker queen dies this year!"

"Have you even listened to me?" With short, violent motions, he stabbed a fresh cigarette into his mouth and lit it, throwing the paper match away so that it bounced angrily from the chalkboard. "The Goddess wants blood. And what the Goddess wants, she shall have. One way or the other. If the occasional sacrifice averts her desire from us, why then it is a case of the greatest good for the greatest number."

"Yes, but"

The pale man stoodit was the first time Jane had seen him standand strode to the window, tracing a fine blue line of tobacco smoke across the room. The panes were festooned with construction-paper flowers, priapi, eggs, taped up to welcome in the spring and already turning white at the edges. He stared through the streaked glass and the mesh grating, though there was nothing to be seen from here but the back of the gymnasium and the loading dock for the shop.

"I am not from here," he said. "But where I did come from, there was a young fool who loved not a wicker queen but an orend who was chosen to be the blood-maiden for a new housing project. She had hair like flame and skin as clear and unblemished as a lampshade.

"He was a scholar and wore a black robe. Like you, he thought that it was possible to outwit the Crow-god. So he made a simulacrum of his orend out of flowers. It was a brilliant piece of work. When the flower lass was burned she struggled and screamed most convincingly.

"Covertly they moved to a far city where he found work as a substitute teacher. He rented a room with money wetheyhad saved. He bought a mattress and a television first, and then later an icebox, a couch, and a bed. They were reasonably happy.

"But a night came when the air was filled with owls and omens. The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on. There had been a fire in the housing project. Two hundred died. Her eyes turned a milky white then. Her hair lifted and sizzled with electricity. Oh Goddess, she cried, what have we done?

"He comforted her as best he couldbut how good was that? The facts could not be changed. She should have burned. There was no denying her guilt. It festered and turned to a fever so hot within her that her skin blistered and flaked. Ihewould wake in the night to find the bedclothes smoking and about to ignite. It was necessary to keep a bucket of water close to hand at all times.

"Once I opened my eyes to a hideous blue light. She was an acetylene flare, hissing and spitting in the center of the room. In a panic I threw the blanket about her, smothering the flames. When she was herself again, I put her to bed. In the morning she would not speak to me. She wept and no tears came out. Only steam.

"Day after day, this went on. I cropped her hair short to prevent spontaneous combustion. I threw away all the matches so she could not eat them. I unplugged the appliances for fear of an electrical fire. Before I left for work each morning, I drenched the rugs and threw water on all the walls. Then I locked her in and pocketed the key.

"By that time her speech was barely intelligible. She sputtered and rattled like a teapot. Her skin had hardened and it crackled when she moved. She was more reptile than woman. Her eyes did not blink when she stared at me. Sometimes she was taken with the awen and would prophesize."

Jane could barely breathe. "What did she say?"

"You are too young."

The pale man was silent for so long then that Jane half-thought he would never speak again.

But when he did speak, his voice was normal once more, emotionless and flat. "One evening I came home and found she had put towels at the bottoms of the doors and windows, turned on the gas, and stuck her head in the oven. All my efforts had been for nothing. She had died, but not well.

"I bowed to the Crow-god then, and made my sacrifice to him." He shrugged. "Let me be frank. By then, it was a relief."

The pale man picked up his book and returned to the lesson. But Jane could not concentrate. Her mind was full of the vision of Gwenhidwy the Green, clad only in her beauty, swinging within a wicker cage hung over the fifty-yard line. The bleachers were full, and all the school assembled. She smelled the gasoline. Flames leapt up. Everyone roared.

Gwen was burning like a moth in a candle, and screaming too.
* * *

It was a vision that stayed with Jane through her classes and all the way home. The ground crunched underfoot where she crossed the landfill, rusty tin cans grinding against each other beneath the soil. She walked carefully, afraid of turning an ankle. Inside the dragon, she kicked a stack of underwear from the pilot's couch and patched herself into his sensorium.

"Hello," she whispered. "It's me again."

No response.

7332's vision was focused tightly on the ground. Jane started to raise it up and then, curious, returned it to the original settings. It took her a minute to figure out what he was up to.

He was watching the meryons.

Jane had never paid much attention to the six-legged folk. They were the smallest of all intelligent creatures, the remote descendants of pixies, reduced by the evolutionary processes of aeons to the stature of ants. Simplification had stripped them of passion, gallantry, honor, and ambition. Their wars were butchery. They had no literature or songs. They loved nothing but toil. She could not understand why 7332 would be watching them.

Tiny figures scuttled through the weeds, lugging scraps of metal thrice their size. Wisps of smoke from their underground forges rose here and there among the weeds, faint and blue. They'd be mistaken for ground haze at a distance.

A meryon trundled down an almost invisible trail pulling a wagon laden high with three chokecherries. Where a dirt bike had left a rut in the ground, two straws had been laid across it an axle's width apart to form a bridge. At the far end stood a minuscule amazon with a metal-tipped spear the length of a carpet needle. She waved the laborer past.

The carter pulled his load to the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner emerging from the dirt and disappeared within its maw. Jane blinked and in an instant of perceptual giddiness she realized that what looked like a scattering of trash beneath the trees was actually a well-ordered village. Here a pipe stem served as a fireplace for a buried hut with an egg carton roof and acorn-cap chimney pot. A coffee can half-sunken in the ground was a Quonset hut, within which were stabled a matched pair of field mice, broken to harness and available to haul the really big loads. Roads were being devised, widened, and camouflaged with plant cuttings. A rusting sadiron attached by a hundred threads to straining teams of June bugs served as a grader for the larger thoroughfares.

The meryons were everywhere in motion, tireless microengineers, wee masters of bricolage. A mayonnaise jar, shaded by three oak leaves stitched into a conical roof, held a reservoir of water, and a system of soda straws was being devised to pipe that water into every hidden house and den in the hamlet.

Jane was entranced.

She watched them until the light failed and there was naught to be seen but the occasional glowworm spark of a lantern carried in the invisible fist of a border guard and the ghostly light from a prototype methane gas production plant. For all their lack of individual complexity, meryon society taken as a whole was as intricate and inherently fascinating as a crystal pocketwatch.

Abruptly Jane looked up and realized that she was stiff and tired and still had homework to do. Well, she could afford to miss the occasional assignment; it wasn't as if any of them were expecting anything much from her.

Then she remembered that she had promised Peter she would lift the Conjunction of Opposites tape for him that night. "Shit!" There was still time to catch the shuttle to the mall, but only just. Anyway, she really didn't want to have to run to make the connection at this time of night, skip into the Cineplex for a quick nap so she wouldn't make any foolish mistakes, buzz the music store, cop a tin of something-or-other to kill her hunger, find a free bench and crack the books, then hurry back out to catch the Red Eye Express. It was too much work for just a casual promise.

In the end, though, that was what she did.

But she spent too long lingering in the mall's entrance-way, where the time flow was half-normal and all the flyers for the good sales were posted. So when she emerged, she was just in time to see the red taillights of the last ride home fading down the road. Two miles she had to walk down the miracle mile, with steel behemoths blasting by so close they staggered her with their backwash. The brickyards and vacant lots were full of bright eyes and tiny cries. Something shifted in the shadows, and she was sure it was following her. Wolf-boys! she thought, terrified.

To make matters worse, Peter never showed up the next day. At lunch Jane made a few cautious inquiries and discovered that he was known for cutting classes. "That's Peter for you," a nisse said carelessly. "As fickle as they come. You have to love him for it."
* * *

So it was that immediately after school Jane ventured out into the part of town beyond the landfill in search of Peter's digs, to give him the cassette and a good piece of her mind.

Peter lived in a declining commercial district. He had a dingy third-floor walk-up above a bankrupt discount stereo store. A length of wire stuck out where the buzzer had been but the lock on the door was busted anyway so Jane went on up. The stairway smelled of boiled linen and old paint. The linoleum in the hall before his flat was cracked and buckled. She knocked.

"Come in."

She opened the door.

He was lying pale in a rumpled bed, head back and naked. His ribs stuck out, and she could see one ash-gray nipple. A chance throw of the tangled sheets over one thigh hid his privates from sight. "Just set it down on the table," he said without opening his eyes. "Add two bucks for a tip and put it on my tab."

Jane stood there, not knowing what to say. Peter had a light fuzz of hair on his chest, with a fine line marching straight down the middle of his stomach. A black-and-white television set on a chair in one corner muttered to itself, video on, volume turned all the way down. "I… I don't think I'm the person you're expecting," she ventured at last.

Peter jerked up into a sitting position, and all in a panic grabbed at the sheet to wrap it about himself. Then he sank back down on the bed, all his energy expended. "Oh, right. The tape. Hey, I'm sorry, Iwell, you can see I'm not exactly in shape for school."

"You look terrible," she told him.

"I feel terrible," he agreed.

A toilet flushed. Gwenhidwy the Green emerged from the bathroom, snapping her skirt together. She saw Jane and stopped. "Hello," she said pleasantly. "Who is this?"

"It's a friend from school," Peter said. "Jane Alderberry." His eyes were closed, their lids almost translucent. His lips were white.

Jane didn't know which amazed her morethat Peter would call her his friend, or that he knew her name at all. She held out her little package. "I just came to bring this. It's yours. From Peter."

"How sweet." Gwen accepted the tape, admired it briefly, and made it disappear. She glided to Peter's side and, crouching by the bed, stroked his forehead. "Poor baby. Does this help?"

"Your hand is cool," he murmured. "So cool." He reached blindly to draw the fingers to his lips so he could kiss them.

Jane felt her heart go out to them. They were both so beautiful, so perfectly in love, so doomed. Her own life was tawdry, complicated, and inconsequential compared to theirs. She felt for them a sentiment so delicate and strong that it too could only be called love.

Suddenly Peter's eyes snapped open. "What time is it? Have we missed it? It must be coming on right about now."

"Hush." Gwen smiled. "I'm keeping track of the time." She went to the television set, put her hand on the volume control. "Just about now, in fact."

There was a talk show on. Everyone on it was tall and gracious, clothes accessorized, their hair and teeth and nails each as perfect as the other. Jane didn't watch much television; it was all elves and money, with maybe the occasional dwarf thrown in for relevance and contrast. The shows might as well be broadcast from another universe, one where nobody ever had body odor or crook-teeth or a dead mouse caught in their hair. They didn't have much to do with her own experience. "Well," she said awkwardly. "I guess I'll go now."

"No, stay!" Gwen cried. "It's my moment; we want you to share it too, don't we, Peter?"

"I want whatever you want. You know that."

"You see? Oh, I think there's still enough time to light up. Peter, where did you put the pipe?"

"On top of the dresser."

Gwen got out a long-stemmed pipe with a frowning meerschaum Toby bowl and dropped in a chunk of something black. "Hash," she explained. She sat down on the edge of the bed between Peter and Jane, lit a match and inhaled, drawing its flame down over the hashish. Without asking, she passed it to Jane.

The tip of the stem was still damp from Gwen's lips. Gingerly, Jane put it in her mouth. She inhaled deeply and her lungs filled with harsh, rasping smoke. She choked and coughed. Cloud upon cloud of smoke gushed out of her, impossible volumes filling the room, and still she could not stop coughing. She prayed she wouldn't disgrace herself by spilling the pipe.

Peter laughed. "Whoa! Hold it in, hold it in!"

But Gwen took away the pipe and pounded her on the back. "There, there," she said comfortingly. "Went down wrong, did it? Next time, don't draw in so much, you'll be fine."

"Yeah." The word buzzed and echoed in Jane's ears, reverberating deep into her skull where everything was sparks and swirling gray. For an instant she had no idea where she was or what she was doing, and to cover she said "Yeah," again, even though she was not at all clear on what she was agreeing to.

"It's on!" Gwen leaped up and turned up the sound on the TV.
* * *

Afterward, Jane was unable to separate what happened on the screen from what happened in her head. It was a documentary on Gwenhidwy, of that she was sure, filled with lingering slomo shots of her long, green hair swirling when she turned her head first one way then the other, like a transient planetary ring around her smile. Stoned, the narration was impossible to follow. The music swelled up and downor was this just Jane's perception of it?peaking with demon synthesizer shrieks and bottoming into baroque spinnet.

Something was being said on voice-over.

"A goddess? Oh, la!" Gwen cried. Peter emerged from the bathroom, newly dressed and looking ten times healthier than before. He sat down by Gwen and leaned his head against her shoulder. Absently, she stroked his hair.

Looking back and forth from Gwen on the screen to Gwen on the bed, Jane could not decide which impressed her most. The television Gwen was more voluptuous, leaner, with crisper cheekbones and the kind of glossy beauty that took video technology to perfect. But the real Gwen was so much warmer, so vital and spontaneous, so… real.

Peter stared at the screen, hopeless with yearning. Jane tried to imagine what it would be like to have a boy look at her that way. It must feel very strange.

At that very moment Gwen's face, lips moist and parting, was superimposed over footage of last year's wicker queen twisting in the flames. Jane turned to her and forgetting her manners entirely asked, "How can you stand it?"

Gwen smiled, as if possessed of some great secret. "I have Peter," she said. "Hush now, this is the best part."

When the show ended, Jane must have said something, for Gwen looked enormously pleased. "Oh, let's not go overboard," she said. Feet sounded on the stairway and she flung open the door. "All right! The pizza's here."

It was late when Jane finally staggered down the stairs, still high and a little dizzy, her throat cottony and dry. The night air seemed velvety warm, soft and inviting. Gwen followed her to the door. They were going dancing later, Peter and Gwen. Gwen loved to dance.

"You'll come back and visit again, won't you?" Gwen's eyes were large and dark. There almost seemed to bealthough there couldn't be, not reallya note of pleading in her voice.

Jane could refuse her nothing.
* * *

The next morning everyone in the schoolyard was talking about Gwen's special. Jane was filled to bursting with her visit to Peter's flat. Seeing Gwen's show with Gwen herself was just about the coolest thing she had ever done in her life. But she didn't want to say anything about it until lunchtime. She wanted to keep it her own special secret for just a little while longer.

But then something happened that drove all thought of Gwen from her mind.

It was obvious that the day was going to be different as soon as Jane stepped into her homeroom. Strawwe the proctor sat perched on the edge of Grunt's desk, tense and thin-lipped. That meant a test at the very least.

Strawwe wore a tricorn hat, flat side frontwards, as his badge of office. His hair was pulled into a pony-tail so tight he couldn't blink, and he was perpetually goggle-eyed as a result. He tapped his thigh with a steel-edged ruler once for each child who entered. When the last student was in, he nodded to Grunt.

After Grunt had called attendance, he cleared his throat. "The Three B's," he said. "The Three B's are your guide to scholastic excellence. The Three B's are your gold key to the doorway of the future. Nowall togetherwhat are they?"

"Be-lieve," the class mumbled. "Be-have. Be Silent."

"What was that last?" He cupped a hand to his ear.

"Be Silent!"

"I caaaaaan't heeeeear you."

"BE SILENT!"

"Good." He put his fingertips together. "Now, class. Children. Dear, dear little children. We are privileged todaymost privilegedto have a distinguished visitor coming here to visit us in our class from the Board of Industrial Corrections. Do you know who he is?"

Nobody said anything.

"That is correct. You do not know. You must wait for me to tell you."

Now Strawwe slipped from the desk and began silently gliding between the rows of students. It took an effort not to cringe when he appeared suddenly in the periphery of vision, or when the shadow of his ruler fell across Jane's knuckles, hesitated, hovered, and finally moved on. She didn't dare look at him as he passed. For such inattention, a sharp blow to the ear was the least of what she might expect.

A board creaked underfoot just as he reached the front rows, and a head covered with tight red curls turned reflexively at the sound.

Whack. The ruler slashed down, and Jane heard Hebog suck in his breath sharply. He didn't cry out, though. Dwarves were tough.

"Mis-ter Hebog. It appears you are a little short" Grunt paused, to let a tiny smile blossom on his puffy lips. "of attention today."

The tension broke and everyone roared with laughter, Jane included. Too late, she caught hold of herself and stopped. But even the other dwarves were laughing. Three of them were black dwarves, of course, but it was depressing even so.

When the laughter died down, Grunt said, "The Three Ins! Recite them!"

"In-dolence, In-solence, In-gratitude," they chanted dutifully.

"That is correct." A sense of Presence was building in the hall outside, an ominous pressure tinged with ozone, as if a storm cloud were gathering just over the horizon. "And when you are, despite my best efforts, indolent, insolent, and prone to ingratitude, you may then be required to answer to" The proctor materialized by the door, opened it a crack, and nodded. "the child catcher."

Strawwe flung open the door, and the child catcher stalked in.
* * *

He was an eerily handsome creature, artificially tanned, and wearing an imported silk suit. His strong hands were sheathed in black leather gloves. His hair was stiff and bristlythere must have been a touch of wolf in his bloodand his ears were aristocratically laminate. He smiled with square, even teeth. But he said nothing.

The class stirred uneasily.

Standing before the desk, the child catcher dominated vision. Grunt and Strawwe vanished in his presence. Above him the clock over the blackboard provided a secondary focus of attention, its disk the only curved line in a surround of right angles, the nervous once-a-second leap of its thin red hand the only movement in a universe where all motion had died long ago.

Now the child catcher took something from his pocket. It was a scrap of cloth, coarse and scratchy-looking, of a color somewhere between olive and brown. One black glove clenched it tight and raised it slowly to his long, lean nose. His eyes darted back and forth across the class.

Slowly, deeply, he inhaled.

Memory flooded Jane.

She was back in the dormitory in Building 5 of the steam dragon works. This was one of her earliest memories, and one that had always puzzled her. It was morning, and the forges were going full blast as they had for the past two weeks, their roar a constant in the background. She stood by her bed, folding her blanket. All the children were bustling about, preparing for Blugg's morning inspection and eager for breakfast.

Suddenly her vision blurred and doubled. Simultaneously she was standing here by the bed and sitting in the back row of what she did not then recognize as a classroom. Strangers were all about her. A tall, dark creature was staring at her from across the room, his eyes two pinpricks punched in reality.

Her hand froze on the blanket, its material coarse and scratchy, of a color somewhere between olive and brown. It seemed infused with some terrible significance. In all the world only it seemed truly real, an anchor to reality; if she let go of it, she would fall headlong into her vision and be lost forever.

Rooster punched her shoulder. "Yo, droopyhead. What's with you?"

She shrugged, and was back in the classroom. The child catcher was lowering the scrap of cloth from his nose and staring straight back at her. He raised a long arm, cuff links sliding smoothly into view, pointing toward the back row, and for the first time spoke.

"You. Young lady. Please stand."

Paralyzed with fear, Jane watched as the girl to her immediate left tremblingly stood. It was Salome.

The child catcher stared at her. One eyebrow rose quizzically, and his nostrils flared ever so slightly, as if there were something about the situation he did not entirely understand, but was sure he could puzzle out. He started to take a step forward.

Out of nowhere, somebody farted.

It was a horrifyingly drawn-out monster of a fart, one that brought all eyes to the front row. It smelled of methane and wild onions slathered over a base of boiled cabbage, with a nose-pinching tang of sulfur to give it depth. The air took on a distinctly greenish hue as it slowly expanded to fill the room. Several of the girls giggled nervously and clapped hands to mouths. The ruder feys held their noses.

"Mister Hebog!" Grunt cried, aghast.

Strawwe, returned to existence, had already reached the front row and yanked the struggling dwarf from his seat. Grunt seized the opposite arm and the two of them ran him full tilt at the blackboard. His skull hit the slate with a resounding crack, and a thin line zigzagged crazily away from the point of impact.

The child catcher watched it all with a politely detached smile.

Grunt stepped back, and Strawwe hauled the dwarf to his feet by the back of his collar. He held him so that Hebog stood on tiptoe, red-faced and choking. In a trice he had been whisked out the door, toward the detention hall.

Jane felt a soft touch on her wrist. She whirled, and no one was there.

At a frantic gesture from Ratsnickle, meanwhile, Salome had slipped back into her seat. It was exactly the sort of opportunity Ratsnickle would spot first, the chance to sit down and be forgotten. Salome appeared dazed. Softly, wonderingly, she said, "Hey. I didn't think he'd… Hey."

The child catcher cleared his throat. "Now where was I?" His shrewd eyes studied the last row, lingering this time on Jane. "Ah, yes."

Again, he drew the scrap of cloth from his pocket.

When he inhaled, Jane felt a shuddering wind blow through her insides. She shivered with cold and a strange sense of violation. The child catcher was still staring at her. His eyes narrowed.

Slowly the scrap of her old blanket came down from his nose.

The sounds and smells of the classroom faded away, like noise from a dying radio. Jane felt a panicky inability to catch her breath. The room was still and airless. Her classmates sat as motionless as so many brightly printed cut-out figures.

The child catcher turned to Grunt and took him between thumb and forefinger. He gave the pedant a shake, then laid him flat across his own desk.

Unhurriedly the child catcher went down each row, plucking the children from their seats and draping them across one arm. When the stack grew thick, he would return to the front of the room and set it down atop their teacher. He saved the back row for last, taking up everyone but Jane herself and carrying them to the front. Jane trembled and tried to avoid his eye. The last child to go was Ratsnickle, still smirking. The child catcher put Strawwe down atop him, bug-eyed and indignant.

He pulled a chair from back of the desk, and sat down.

"Come." The child catcher gestured to Jane. "Sit on my lap, and we'll talk."

Jane had no choice but to obey.

His legs were hard and bony under her; Jane felt awkward perched upon them. She stared at the back wall. One gloved hand squeezed and massaged her shoulder. "I have the power to seize you here and now and take you away by force. Do you doubt me?"

Jane shook her head, unable to speak.

"I am an agent of Law, Jane, and it is important that you understand and acknowledge my authority over you. A compact was made when you were small, a binding contract whose terms you have unlawfully tried to escape. You will say that this was your right because you had suffered an injustice, and that it was an injustice because it was not your signature on the deed of indenture." He shrugged. "But you wereyou still area minor, and legally your signature would mean nothing. If an injustice exists, it is rooted too deeply in the past for you to do anything about it." He took her chin in his hand and turned her face to his. His eyebrows were dark and thorny. His eyes were as flat and calm as two mirrors.

"You can see that, can't you?"

Jane squirmed, but said nothing. He could kill her, he could send her back to the dragon works to labor forever. He could never make her agree it was right.

The child catcher sighed then, as if profoundly disappointed in her. "I come from the North. We hunt monkeys there with a widemouthed bottle and a stick. Do you know how that's done?"

"No," she squeaked.

"It's very amusing. We drop a single sweet cherry into the jar and then withdraw a distance. The monkey comes along. He sees the succulent in the jar, reaches within, and grasps it in his fist. But the jar is so shaped and sized that he cannot withdraw his hand when it is clenched. He could easily escape the jar by letting go of the cherry, but he wants that little treat too dearly. He cannot bring himself to let go. Even when the hunter approaches whistling and twirling the stick, he cannot bring himself to surrender his prize.

"So up comes the hunter and bashes his brains out with the stick."

The child catcher drew an ostrich-hide memorandum book from an inside jacket pocket. He handed her a piece of chalk. "Now, Jane, I want you to write in your very best hand the words I tell you. Write them in five even columns as straight and neat as you can." He waited until she was in place. "Recurvor," he said. "Recusable. Recusacao. Recusadora."

Jane was so frightened that she was halfway down the board before she recognized the words she was printing as the operational lock-codes for Moloch-class dragons.

Trying hard not to show she knew what they were, Jane printed out the words as he gave them. Maybe, she thought, they wouldn't work. The landfill was a good quarter-mile from the school after all.

When she reached the bottom, she looked at what she had made:

Recurvor

Recusable

Recusacao

Recusadora

Recusamor

Recusancy

Recusative

Recusaturi

Recusavel

Recuser

Recuserati

Recussion

Recussus

Recutio

Recutionis

Recutitos

Recutitum

Redaccao

Redaccendo

Redactadas

Redactamos

Redactaron

Redadim

Redadinar

Redambules

Redamnavit

Redendum

Redibitar

Redictor

Redivamat

Redocculla

Redoctar

Redoctamos

Redombulas

Redorradio

"That's a good start," the child catcher said over her shoulder. His breath was sweet and tickled her ear. "Now take up the eraser."

His hand closed about hers and gently guided the eraser over the blackboard, like the planchette of a Ouija board. It glided above the surface, not touching, then abruptly dipped down to erase a word. Up and down the board their merged hands moved, seemingly at random, wiping out the lock-codes one at a time.

Finally the child catcher released her hand. "There," he said in a pleased voice.

Recurvor

Recussus

Recusadora

Recusamor

Redaccendo

Redactamos

Redadim

Redambules

Redamnavit

The temperature in the room dropped. A tremendous sense of presence darkened the air, like an iron cloud passing before the sun. Voiceless words said, What do you want?

It was Melanchthon.

Jane tried to turn around, but could not. Her neck muscles seized up tight and unswiveling as if she were held in steel claws. Nor would her legs respond. She stared at the blackboard while the child catcher said, "Your name."

What does it matter what my name is, little doggie? The dragon sounded gentle, almost sad. You can call me Death, if you wish. I killed your kind by the thousands in Avalon.

The floor creaked as the child catcher walked to Grunt's desk, slid open the drawer and removed something. A second later, he held that something sharp and slim against her throat. It was Grunt's silver letter opener. "Did you want to discuss death?"

Paralyzed, Jane felt like an egg held in the grasp of two hands and contested for by each. Melanchthon's presence was overwhelming, like the gravitational tug of a mountain that had suddenly materialized in the schoolyard.

Yes, let's. Tell me: Living I am worthless, until death gives me value. Dead, that value is gone. What am I?

"A hostage." The child catcher removed the letter opener from Jane's throat. She felt a dreadful itch where its point had pricked her. "You like riddles, do you? Try this one: Johnny-a-locket hides in my pocket. Yet when he shouts, whole armies turn out."

I do not think your beeper will work. My turn: See, see! What shall I see? A bow-wow's head where his feet should be.

The forces holding Jane captive weakened, and she turned to see the child catcher grimly confronting an empty room. For all that the dragon's aura was everywhere, a cold reptilian understench of malice, he was not physically present. He was waging this fight entirely by electronic countermeasure technology.

As quietly as she could, Jane edged sideways, toward the child catcher's blind spot, behind his head, between the blackboard and the desk.

A swirling formed about the child catcher, like swarms of gnats flying too fast for the eye to get a fix on them. A warping magnetic field, it spun about his head, but could not close upon it. "Idle threats!" he scoffed. "Did you think I would be sent up against a dragon without protection? You cannot decapitate me as easily as that."

Carefully he unfolded a pair of reading glasses and hooked them over his ears. He opened his memorandum book again, skipped over the page of locking codes and began to read. "The stuff of substance, the substance of thought…"

No!

"The matter of life, yet matter I'm not. A grain of me feeds you, live you never so long. A gram will destroy you, be you ever so strong!"

A howl filled the air, screaming up into the supersonic. Jane fell to her knees, clutching at her ears in pain. The sound was a steel needle through her skull. Her hands could not mute it. The dragon's presence faded, dwindled…

And was gone.

"There," said the child catcher. Shakily, Jane stood. She was directly behind him now, out of sight. She reached for the heavy stapler atop Grunt's desk. "Don't try it," the child catcher said casually. He folded his glasses up and carefully replaced them in his pocket. "Now, child, it's time you were put back where you belonged." He reached for her hand, unwillingly frozen just above the stapler.

Cold gusts of laughter filled the room. They grew and swelled until Jane felt like a cork bobbing on top of an ocean of scorn. Stupid little puppy! One of the first things I did on arriving here was to ground my electrical systems. Your electromagnetic pulse weapon is useless.

For the first time the child catcher looked startled. One hand jerked free of his trousers pocket, grabbing hastily for something in his jacket. "How…?"

But the dragon had already begun his next riddle:

Silent, unseen, small cousin of death,

Born this instant, closer than breath,

The killer of thought, assassin of dreams,

Memory's surgeon, the end of your schemes.

"You're bluffing!" the child catcher cried. "I've studied your systems from top to bottom. There is no such weapon." The dragon's laughter gushed up afresh. "You have no such weapon. You have no such capability. If your riddle has an answer, then what is it?"

For a long, still instant, the dragon did not answer, savoring his triumph. Then the words came, so quietly they seemed to float in the air:

An aneurism.

Abruptly, Jane found herself back in her seat. She could breathe again. There was a normal stir and bustle in her ears; her classmates were back in their places. To the front of the room the child catcher looked puzzled. His gaze moved blindly back and forth over the back row, but did not connect with hers. He could no longer see her. The scrap of blanket fell unnoticed from his nerveless hand.

The dragon had won.
* * *

When school let out, Jane was among the first out the door. She pushed outside and was free. The sky was wild and blue. A light breeze reached out and touched her gently, welcomingly.

The cherry trees were shedding their blossoms. A warm, gentle snow of petals swirled about her.

The other children were running and shouting, or slogging stolidly through the petal-storm, each according to their nature. The flower girls were in their element, moving graceful as ships under sail, while lesser sprites ran jeering circles about them and were ignored. Jane walked wonderingly through the cries and flurries of white, stunned by the perfect beauty of existence.

She was overwhelmed by a mingled sense of liberation, joy, and possibility. She was free and anything could happen. All she had been through, the years of forced labor in the steam dragon works, the petty persecutions of her teachers and classmates, the boredom and loneliness, the fact that she was still indebted to a dragon whose interests, today notwithstanding, were not herslife was worth it.

This one moment paid for all.