Quite Contrary (21 page)

Now that we were near whatever passed for civilization in a land far away, farmhouses and outbuildings lurked in the distance in every direction. An elegantly sleek black cat sat by the side of the road next to a bulky, muscular pit bull. As the wagon brought me eye to eye with them, the dog whispered anxiously, “She’s looking at us!”

“Just stay calm, would you? They can smell fear!” the cat murmured back in a clipped, feminine voice.

It would have been mean to panic them, so I rolled around and stared the other way. That hid how I grinned from ear to ear nicely.

The sign read ‘Now Entering Somewhere.’ Fair enough. I slid off the back of the hay wagon and stared up at it. I’d seen metal road signs like this plenty of times, this one bent awkwardly to the side and its pitted, ragged surface looked a hundred years old.

The town looked a hundred years old. I saw one car, but while I knew they hadn’t built them that boxy in my lifetime, that was all I knew. There were three horses on the street besides the one pulling the wagon. Square little buildings had a lot of wood or bare brick, and the inhabitants’ clothes looked either stiff and formal or hillbilly casual.

Obviously, the whole town had fallen off the map. Just in case I wasn’t sure where it had landed, a girl leaned out of an attic window ahead of me, whispering to a blue jay cupped in her hand. No, the bird stood wrong. Birds tilted forward, and this one stood upright. It was a fairy. When the fairy blue jay flew off, I sidestepped discreetly, and the bird poop splatted down right where I’d been standing. Yep, fairy.

Rat and I walked down the street into the middle of town. The town was big enough that I couldn’t be sure if this was really the middle, but the streets formed a square around a big pavement and grass plaza with a statue in the center. It looked like your standard “Our Noble Founder” monument with a guy in a pioneer outfit posing with his gun and one foot propped on a buffalo, except for the featureless mask over his and the buffalo’s faces. This town had been begging to get lost from day one, I could see.

I walked up to the statue to give it a closer look. Up close, the buffalo’s mask was clearly stitched to its head over the weird flat buffalo face. Yeah, any moment now this place would be hip deep in Ancient Gods. I resolved not to stay the night.

Turning around, I sat down on the lowest level of the statue’s pedestal and demanded, “Okay, Rat. Give. Where is Elizabeth and what do I have to save her from?”

The mangy little vermin ran off. Of course, he didn’t run far. He dragged a whiskey flask from under a bush over to me. Then, he ran over and got a beer bottle. Next, he climbed into a trash basket and threw out a bunch of bent tin cans. Running back to me, he arranged them in a crude square, before running off to grab the next piece of junk.

That was when he started narrating. “Once upon a time, Miss Mary, there was a city of iron and yellow smoke. It had always been a city of iron, but the yellow smoke came later. The town did not need to be made of iron, but its people loved metal. They smelted and forged, and wagons and trains brought them every kind of ore to be turned into something useful. A haze of ash hung over the city and its fogs became thick and foul-smelling, but that was not their mistake. They worked from the rising of a sun they couldn’t see until only their lamps could pierce the darkness, then collapsed into bed to be ready to work the next day, but that was not their mistake. They chose this life and would not give it up. But they knew that what happiness their town had was corroding, day by day, like the rust spreading over the walls of their buildings. Their mistake was to think that, being smelters, they could create this happiness, distil it, and purify it. They would not give up their lives of hard work, but they wanted to make a princess who could be happy for them. Just one pure heart, they thought, would be enough for the whole city. And they loved pure things.”

By the time he’d run through all that, he’d built a little model city out of bottles and cans, ringed it with pipes to make walls, and was dragging a little wooden crate up in front of it to stand on. The story sounded like a disaster waiting to happen, except that obviously, it had already happened.

But you know what? “So far, I’m on their side, Rat. I wouldn’t want their life, but they did. Wanting someone else to be happy for them doesn’t sound like a crime.”

Rat spread his tiny hands. “I don’t know if it was a crime, or a bad idea, but they thought like smelters. They smelted happiness, melted and focused all of the happiness of the whole city into a single, beautiful crown. A girl would have to be very pure to begin with, but wearing that crown, she would become the true princess of the city and her happiness would fill it and give it life.”

I sighed. “Elizabeth qualifies, I’m sure. What was the catch?”

Rat stared up at me with solemn, pitch-black eyes. “They smelted their own happiness to make it. All the happiness of a whole city to make one crown. It is a terrible place now, and no one lives there. The giant forge at the center of town warped itself into a castle, imprisoning the crown within layers of traps before a girl could be found to wear it. I guided Elizabeth all the way to the last trap, and there I messed up. She’s … well, you’ll see, Miss Mary. She’s trapped in a cage of the shadows of her own heart.”

“That sounds painful,” I guessed. I really didn’t like imagining a nice girl like Elizabeth going through that, especially since I could imagine it so clearly.

“She lost consciousness very quickly,” Rat told me. It wasn’t a reassurance. It was one tiny mitigating detail in the awfulness we had to deal with.

“But that is the story of the city of iron and yellow smoke!” Rat declared loudly. He’d been looking right up at me, but now he spun around on his wooden crate to address the townsfolk. “Maybe some of you have heard it before? Perhaps you’ve heard hints of it, rumors of a cursed metal castle? My mistress needs directions if she is to save the princess and the town.”

This wasn’t going to work. Nobody wanted to look at us. Scratch that, some people did want to look at us, and not in a friendly way. A thin, mean looking old man in a gray pinstriped suit strolled stiffly up to us and snapped at Rat-In-Boots, “Tell your mistress to take her familiar and get out. A witch and her demon rat will get no help here for anything.”

I lunged to my feet, sending bottles and cans clattering noisily in all directions as I stomped through Rat’s model town. Bending down, I snatched him up in one hand, stuffing him into the hood hanging behind my neck as I stepped up on his soap box. It didn’t quite bring me up to the man’s eye level, but close enough that I could look him right in the eyes.

“You think I’m a witch. You think I’m a witch because I have a talking rat. That’s it, right? Because he’s a rat. If I had a talking dove, or a dog, or I bet even a cat you’d be okay with that, right?” I asked.

“You consort with vermin—” he started to snipe back, but I lost it before he finished.

“You stupid, bigoted, arrogant, old mummy!” I yelled, “What is wrong with you? How do you even dare? Do you know this rat? Do you know how hard he’s worked to keep me alive as I’ve done stupid thing after stupid thing, when he’s got nothing tying him to me but that he found me about to get my fool self killed? But if he was a cat, that would be okay, right? Hey, you like cats. Except I bet you don’t, because you’re a miserable prune with hate instead of blood, just looking for any excuse to bully a stranger. So, let me give you an excuse!”

And then, I kicked him in the balls.

His reflexes weren’t good enough. He started to crouch, but I connected well enough to drop him onto his knees, wheezing. Then, I looked around, because as trouble went, I’d just let my temper buy us a truck full. It was time to run, and I needed to know which way to bolt.

The laughter wasn’t totally unexpected, but the applause caught me by surprise. A solidly built man with a lot of gray stubble and a metal Sheriff star on his shirt swaggered over and bent down to pull the old jerk I’d kicked back to his feet. “Come on, your honorableness. Let’s get you back to the mayor’s mansion, and you can draw up an arrest warrant so I can put it in the filing cabinet with the others. I reckon I’ll be warm this winter.”

That got a lot of laughter too, and people crowded around me. That was uncomfortable, and even more uncomfortable when a man grabbed my hands and shook them while a woman grabbed my shoulders and kissed my cheek.

“Does anybody know how to get to this metal town they’re going to?” a man in the crowd called out.

I heard a lot of mumbled variations on ‘no’.I was distracted by the first pie dropped in my arms. A loaf of bread followed. People were giving me food?

“That was beautiful,” a woman who might as well have had ‘housewife’ printed on her apron gushed. “I wish I’d had the sense to do that two years ago.”

Someone dropped a red and white checkered cloth on me. Oh, for pity’s sake. But Rat hopped over my shoulder and wrapped it around the pile of food, tying the corners into a fat knot that I had to admit looked easy to hold.

“Is there a guide, then? An explorer? Perhaps a retired adventurer who might know a backwoods path or a secret gully to get us closer to our goal?” Rat chirped from the top of the pile.

“The woods are full of paths,” an old lady answered, “Mordecai makes his living hunting in those woods, and he knows where they lead. But you don’t want to take your girl there, not dressed like Red Riding Hood.”

I stared at her flatly. “Just tell me where he lives, okay?”

smell blood,” Rat warned before we even got there.

This Mordecai guy’s house wasn’t too hard to find. You could see it from the edge of town, barely. Like, “little speck on the edge of the forest” barely. I’d almost left behind the sack full of food. It bugged me that I was expected to carry this thing around, but nobody’d demanded it. They were just being generous. I’d given in and taken it because when I stuck a stick through the knot and carried it over my shoulder in the old-timey picture way, Rat scampered up and stood on the tip, peering over my head. That was way too adorable for me to give up.

So, I walked across fields for a while with him playing lookout, until I reached a fence. Beyond that were more fences, and a chunky house with log cabin walls but shaped more like a cottage, a hen house and some other little wooden buildings like it. Which was when Rat decided to give me an update on the whole blood thing.

“If he’s a hunter, shouldn’t this place smell like blood all the time?” I asked him skeptically. I sniffed. I sure couldn’t smell it.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” he hedged.

“But you want me to play it safe.”

He didn’t answer, and I had to laugh. “Playing it safe’s not something I’m good at. Running like … ueesh. You and your stupid ‘please.’ I don’t even know what to say, half the time.” I rolled my eyes as I swung over the fence, landed on my feet again with a thump, and headed for the side of the house. There was no door on this side anyway.

“Keep watch, okay? I’m sick of being snuck up on,” I added in a whisper.

I don’t know why I felt like someone might overhear me. Nothing bigger than Rat himself could be hiding within a hundred yards.