O livro é A Filha do Dragão de Ferro de Michael Swanwick (1994). Aqui está o resumo da trama da TV Tropes :
The main character is Jane, a human girl in a world of faeries and magical beings, who's a child slave in a factory that produces parts for Iron Dragons — that world's equivalent to fighter jets. One day, during a failed escape attempt, she finds a discarded grimoire, which turns out to be a operational manual to an Iron Dragon. This leads her to discover an old, broken down dragon who's Not Quite Dead. Melanchthon, Dragon #7332, offers to help her escape if she helps him restore his basic functions.
The story follows Jane as she tries to carve out some sort of life for herself in a world where humans are near-powerless rarities, first with the help of Melanchton, then without him when he abandons her, then with him again when he decides it's time to carry out his master plan: the destruction of Spiral Castle, and with it, the entire fantasy world.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter is, at its heart, a subversion of the Plucky Heroine archetype, as Jane is nothing special (as a human, she has no innate magic, nor any of the physical attribute of other species) and stays that way, even as she's drawn into Melanchthon's web of madness.
Um trecho relevante da resenha de Roz Kaveney sobre o romance :
The high elven lords here are genuinely powerful and glamorous; they are also completely ruthless in their exploitation of everything and everyone that can be exploited to provide them with more power or with more entertainment. There is grim satire on the yuppie era here and on the pleasures we take for granted - it is not as if the pleasures of the high and the mighty are fine or intellectual. Jane weasels her way into the circles of the powerful and finds herself slumming with them in low dives where armless trolls are sexually stimulated into prophesy.
A cena que você lembra é:
The troll groaned. He had the most amazing hard-on. It was a raw pink for most of its length, as if the top layers of skin had been abraded away, shading to a bruise-like purple at the tip. From the slow way he twisted about, Jane thought at first that he was masturbating. But then he turned over on his side, and she could see the stump by one shoulder and realized that he had no arms with which to perform that function.
Há uma sequência, Os Dragões de Babel (2008).