Cold Iron by Michael Swanwick

Author:Michael Swanwick [Swanwick, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2016-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

One day Jane was let off work early. Blugg took her back to his room, a typical troll’s den of black oak furniture and awkward ceramics of sentimental scenes. Puck stealing apples. The abduction of Europa. He stood her in the center of the room and inhaled deeply, noisily. His piggish little eyes looked pleased.

“At least you’re not bleeding.” He gestured toward a half-open door. “There’s a tub in the next room. And soap. Take your time cleaning yourself.”

It was small and dark next door and smelled warmly of ammonia and body gas. There was a bar of creamy white soap that smelled of lilacs resting on the lip of a zinc trough. Jane undressed and, seizing the soap in both hands like a sword, stepped into the steamy water.

She bathed slowly, thinking of napalm cannons, cannisters of elf-blight, and laser-guided ATS missiles. Contemplating the dragon’s weapons systems made the voice stronger, strong enough that she could sense it, weak as a tickle, even when she wasn’t physically touching the book.

She fell into a dreamlike trance, the water warm against her naked skin, the dragon’s voice almost real, stroking the bar of floral soap slowly up and down her body. The wiring diagrams floated before her like a mandala.

The dragon seemed to be insisting that she not let Blugg touch her.

Jane didn’t respond. She knew that the voice’s admonitions, whether real or a projection of her own fears, were useless. Blugg would touch her as he wished. He was bigger than she, and would do whatever he wanted with her. It was the way things were.

Her silence brought up a burst of outrage, and she seemed to feel the dragon dwindling in the western sky and she herself left behind, a prisoner, alone and unchanging, stuck here forever. In that adrenal burst of anger were undercurrents of what could only have been fear.

Jane had been gently lathering the brush of downy hair that had recently sprouted between her legs. Now she released the soap, and it bobbed to the surface. She turned her head sideways to look at it, one eye underwater and one eye not. She pretended it was a boat, a galleon that would take her far, far away. The water rocked up and down in time with her breath. All the world seemed to float in her vision.

The floor creaked under approaching footsteps. She heard it as a chord of sound, the solider grumble and squeak coming from the ear out of the water and its watery twin from the one under. She felt Blugg’s bulk at the back of her neck, and closed her eyes. The light dimmed as his shadow touched her.

“That’s enough.” She stared up into a crazily-skewed smile. “Rinse yourself, dry yourself off, and get dressed. We’ve got a date at the Castle.”

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