"Michael Swanwick - Cold Iron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Cold Iron
Michael Swanwick
1.
The changeling's decision to steal a dragon and escape was born, though she did not know it then, the
night the children met to plot the death of their supervisor.

She had lived in the steam dragon plant for as long as she could remember. Each dawn she was marched
with the other indentured minors from their dormitory in Building 5 to the cafeteria for a breakfast she
barely had time to choke down before work. Usually she was then sent to the cylinder machine shop for
polishing labor, but other times she was assigned to Building 12, where the black iron bodies were
inspected and oiled before being sent to the erection shop for final assembly. The abdominal tunnels were
too small for an adult. It was her duty to crawl within them to swab out and then grease those dark
passages. She worked until sunset and sometimes later if there was a particularly important dragon under
contract.

Her name was Jane.

The worst assignments were in the foundries, which were hellish in summer even before the molds were
poured and waves of heat slammed from the cupolas like a fist, and miserable in winter, when snow blew
through the broken windows and a grey slush covered the workfloor. The knockers and hogmen who
labored there were swart, hairy creatures who never spoke, blackened and muscular things with evil red
eyes and intelligences charred down to their irreducible cinders by decades-long exposure to magickal
fires and cold iron. Jane feared them even more than she feared the molten metals they poured and the
brute machines they operated.

She'd returned from the orange foundry one twilit evening too sick to eat, wrapped her thin blanket tight
about her and fallen immediately asleep. Her dreams were all in a jumble. In them she was polishing,
polishing, while walls slammed down and floors shot up like the pistons of a gigantic engine. She fled
from them under her dormitory bed, crawling into the secret place behind the wallboards where she had,
when younger, hidden from Rooster's petty cruelties. But at the thought of him, Rooster was there,
laughing meanly and waving a three-legged toad in her face. He chased her through underground caverns,
among the stars, through boiler rooms and machine shops.

The images stabilized. She was running and skipping through a world of green lawns and enormous
spaces, a strangely familiar place she knew must be Home. This was a dream she had often. In it, there
were people who cared for her and gave her all the food she wanted. Her clothes were clean and new,
and nobody expected her to put in twelve hours daily at the workbench. She owned toys.

But then, as it always did, the dream darkened. She was skipping rope at the center of a vast expanse of
grass when some inner sense alerted her to an intrusive presence. Bland white houses surrounded her,
and yet the conviction that some malevolent intelligence was studying her increased. There were evil
forces hiding beneath the sod, clustered behind every tree, crouching under the rocks. She let the rope
fall to her feet, looked about wonderingly, and cried a name she could not remember.

The sky ripped apart.

"Wake up, you slattern!" Rooster hissed urgently. "We coven tonight. We've got to decide what to do
about Stilt."

Jane jolted awake, heart racing. In the confusion of first waking, she felt glad to have escaped her dream,