The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

“I do say so,” I told him as we climbed the steps and shook off the rain inside the common-house door. I patted Cal on his damp shoulder. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Cal asked, looking longingly at the other boys sitting around the aether tube listening to the baseball game. “Maybe you could send him a letter back, or something. You can write it and I can get the score.”

  The truth that had been circling my thoughts since I read the letter solidified. Writing wasn’t going to help Conrad. “I’m going to Graystone,” I said. “Like Conrad asked.”

  Cal choked. “What? Right now?”

  Mrs. Fortune loomed in my head, and the meeting with the Headmaster. “Tonight.”

  I thought Cal was going to faint on the floor of the common house. “You really are mad, Aoife.”

  “Stop saying that,” I warned. I unwound my scarf and passed my fingers over the scar that Conrad’s knife had left. Conrad wasn’t like our mother. Conrad fixed our meals. Conrad braided my hair for school.

  But no one cared about the Conrad before. They just saw him standing over me, his knife crimson on the tip, madness burning in his eyes. They didn’t see the torture he went through, how hard he tried to hold it back.

  If Conrad needed my help, he’d get it, for all the years before he came into my room on his birthday, holding the knife.

  They won’t be silent until I do it, Aoife. I’m so sorry.

  “How are you proposing to just … take flight from the Academy with nothing except this wild notion to go to Arkham?” Cal demanded, when I stood silent for too long.

  “Will you speak up?” I said, jolted to attention as the group of boys turned toward us. “I don’t think everyone on Academy grounds heard that.”

  Cal pulled me down onto one of the threadbare sofas and leaned close, as close as we’d ever been. “This isn’t a simple thing, Aoife. Even if we made it out of the school—which is impossible, by the way—there’s still the city lockdown at dusk. We’d never make it over the bridges before they close the roads and the sewers against the ghouls. We’re underage. We could never convince the Proctors we had passage papers.”

  “I’m aware of the variables,” I said. Lovecraft was a fortress against the necrovirus, and its citizens; at night, when the viral creatures were most active, the same citizens became prisoners within the city blocks.

  Cal shook his head. “Math isn’t going to give us one lick of help this time, Aoife.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip, a habit Mrs. Fortune deplored as unladylike. “ ‘Us’?” I said after a time, casting a sidelong glance at Cal to test his expression. He heaved a sigh too large for his skinny chest.

  “If you think I’m letting you run off from school on the word of some madman on your own? Then you’re not mad, Aoife … you’re just nuts.”

  As quickly as I’d slapped him before, I threw my arms around Cal. He let out a small grunt. “Thank you,” I whispered fiercely. He returned my grasp, tentative.

  “All right, Miss Engineer … how are we hauling out of Lovecraft?”

  “Well … I …” My reasoning hadn’t led me much beyond “help Conrad.” Cecelia, her sharp eyes and sharp words during the burning, came back to me. “The Nightfall Market.”

  Cal let out a groan. “Great. We barely get clear of Dunwich Lane, and you want to go someplace twice as dangerous.”

  “Oh, listen to you. You’re worse than an old woman. When have I ever lead you into danger?”

  “Yesterday,” Cal said. “That bloodsucker in the alley.”

  “And I got you back out again, didn’t I? Don’t go to supper,” I said, the plan forming and gaining momentum in my mind. I felt the same when I sketched new machines, things that could fly or burrow or glide under the river like fish. “That’ll be our chance.” Supper was the one time all of the students and heads of house gathered in one place. “Play sick if you have to. Meet me behind the autogarage once the dining bell rings.”

  Cal nodded grimly. “Be careful, Aoife. I’d hate to see you … taken away. Before your time.” He squeezed my hand and went and joined the boys listening to the tubes.

  Nightfall

  RUNNING AWAY HAD never crossed my mind before. Certainly, I was an orphan for all intents and purposes, but I’d been accepted into the School and I had at least a journeywoman’s career ahead of me at the Engineworks. I wasn’t a cinder-girl from a storybook. A prince didn’t need to ride up on his clockwork steed and take me away.

  When I was small, my mother told me that before the spread of the necrovirus and the madness it inflicted, before the Proctors had burned every book that even smacked of heresy, fairy tales had been different. They’d contained actual fairies, for one thing.

  I didn’t take any memories of her when I packed my things, just a change of clothes, a toothbrush and hairbrush, all the money I’d received from the city when they auctioned Nerissa’s effects—a paltry fifty dollars—and my toolkit, the leather pouch of engineer’s equipment that every student was issued upon their acceptance into the School of Engines. I withheld one uniform shirt and unscrewed my last bottle of ink, splashing it down the front in a violent pattern.

  As soon as everything was secreted in my satchel, I went to the first floor and knocked at Mrs. Fortune’s pin-neat room. She cracked the door and sighed at the sight of me. “I’m very busy, Aoife.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s a bit of an emergency,” I said, holding up the shirt. “I was drawing my schematic, and—” I had the lie planned to the last word, but Fortune cut me short.

  “Oh, stars, Aoife.” She shook her head. “You’re clumsy as a fawn. It’ll be comportment classes next year if you don’t pull yourself together and learn how to be a lady.”

  I chewed my lip in remorse and dropped my head. “I’m ever so sorry, ma’am. But if you could have the security officer let me out, I could run up Cornish Lane to the China Laundry before they shut,” I said. “I only have two shirts, as you know”—I moved my toe across the crack in the floor—“being a ward, and all.” People like Mrs. Fortune—wealthy and well-meaning—were conditioned from birth to be charitable to the less fortunate. Even when the less fortunate were lying to their faces.

  Fortune patted her own cheek in sympathy, but stayed firm. “You are most certainly not running about the city after curfew on your own. What would the Headmaster say?”

  “Oh, it’s not a problem,” I said, prepared for this variable. “Cal will go with me. And I’ll be back before I have to meet the Headmaster about me going mad and killing people on my birthday. I swear.”

  Mrs. Fortune raised her eyes heavenward. “The mouth on you, Aoife Grayson, could fell a Proctor. Master Builder forgive me the blasphemy.” She waved the edge of her tartan shawl at me. “Go on. I’ll have the man at the side gate let you out.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, keeping my eyes on the floor so my victory wouldn’t live in my gaze. I struggled to keep my shoulders drooping and my expression contrite. “It should take me no time at all.”

  Waiting by the autogarage in the cold, doubt swooped down on me like the Proctor’s clockwork ravens on their black silken wings. Conrad could be sitting contentedly in some pub, whispering to his invisible friends while he wrote fanciful letters that put me in danger.

  Or Conrad could really be in danger, as he’d never lied to me, not even on his birthday.

  He picked up the knife from his toolkit, the same toolkit I’d receive at the start of term, and ran his thumb along the blade. “Have you ever seen your own blood, Aoife?” he murmured. “Seen it under starlight, when it’s black as ink?”

  They said the virus was in our blood, an infection passed from mother to child until time immemorial. Dormant, until a signal from within our biology woke it up, brought on the madness. No one could tell me how far back it went, as my mother refused to speak of her parents at all. I’d wormed my father’s name out of her before she dipped too deep into the pool
of illusion and fancy. I’d verified that Archibald existed in the city records at the Academy library, that he was real and not cut from the whole cloth of her madness. I’d also discovered that he didn’t appear to be mad. But he’d been with Nerissa, so there must have been something cockeyed in the man’s schematic.

  My fingers were cold inside my gloves and I stamped my feet, expelling steam breath into the night. A hand on my shoulder made me shriek in alarm and slam my palms over my mouth. I tasted lanolin and soap.

  “It’s me!” Cal hissed. “It’s only me.”

  “Don’t do that,” I cried, rasping. “That sneaking. That’s for ghouls and thieves.”

  He grinned at me halfway in the dim light of the auto yard, his crooked teeth and blond hair standing out stark like a negative photoplate. “Sorry. I’m quiet enough to be either, I guess.”

  I pressed my hands together to regain my composure and smiled to hide the shaking. “Not funny, Cal.”

  He chuckled softly. “You know, for a girl taking me to the Nightfall Market you’re as jumpy as if you’re juggling aether tubes.”

  “You’re not?” I said, incredulous, as we started for the gates. “Scared, I mean.” The Academy was brick banded in iron fencing to keep out viral creatures, and spiked with finials along the fence’s top to keep students bent on mischief in. The iron spikes’ jagged shadows breathed out cold when we approached.

  “I’m a young man set out on a great adventure,” Cal said. “The way I see it, the least that can happen is I have a story to tell the guys when I get back.”

  “When. Aren’t you the optimist,” I teased.

  “You did save me from the nightjar,” Cal said with a smile. “I feel my chances of coming back to school with all of my fingers and toes are better than average.”

  I knew that fighting off viral creatures was unladylike at best, but to have Cal’s praise warmed me a bit, even though my extremities and nose were still numb. It made me feel that maybe this wasn’t a doomed idea, that we could find the Nightfall Market, find Conrad and manage to come back again. Never mind that I’d never heard anything but thirdhand rumors of how to find the place, and the Proctors were eager to deny its existence at every turn. Something they couldn’t shut down and couldn’t even find was a grave embarrassment to law and order.

  When we reached the gate, a plump ex-Proctor sat in the security officer’s hut, and he stepped out to stop us. Before he could shout at us for being out of doors without permission, I held up the shirt. “Mrs. Fortune said I might be let out to go to the China Laundry.” I practiced my poor-ward-of-the-city look again.

  The guard examined us. “Just you,” he said. “You, boy—stay in.”

  “Oh no,” I said, couching the protest as alarm. A regular girl would be terrified to leave the safety of the Academy after dark. “She was very firm that I have an escort.”

  “Old Fussbudget Fortune ain’t his head of house,” said the guard. “He stays.”

  “But—” Cal started. The guard rattled his nightstick against the post.

  “You deaf, kid? Get back to supper and leave me be.”

  The old lump was clearly immune to my charms, so I switched to the other sort of false face I knew—the snooty Academy student with no time for the help. “Could you just open the gate and let me launder my only blouse?” I snapped, trying to adopt the tone of Marcos Langostrian or Cecelia. The guard grunted, but he took the keys off his belt and walked over to the bars.

  “Get ready,” I murmured to Cal, slipping my gloved palm into his. His hand was cool and thin, and when I squeezed I could feel all his small bones.

  The gate opened, and I started walking, Cal pulled with me. The officer gawped. “You there! Student out of bounds!”

  “Dammit to the deep, anyway,” Cal said. He just stood there, and I jerked him with me.

  “Run, idiot!”

  We made an odd pair fleeing down Cornish Lane, past closed-up shops and slumbering vendor carts. Cal loped along, stumbling over his own feet. I put my head down and ran as if all the ghouls of Lovecraft’s sewers were on my heels.

  At the intersection of Cornish and Occidental, I could still hear the shriek of the officer’s whistle, and I ran harder. Cal gasped like the faulty bellows in the machine shop. “Maybe … we … should … go … back.”

  “And then what?” I shouted as we took a hard left, pelting past the colorful Romany shacks of Troubadour Road, toward the train tracks and the bridge.

  “I don’t”—Cal sucked in a lungful of the night air—“I don’t know, but this is a terrible … terrible … idea!”

  We crossed the tracks, like a frontier border in their cold iron gleam under the moonlight. I twisted my ankle in the gravel as we stumbled down the other side of the embankment, and then Joseph Strauss’s marvelous bridge was in front of us, leading across the river and into the maze of the foundry complex.

  We were in the train yard, among rusted boxcars and Pullman carriages waiting for engines that would never arrive. I could see the pedestrian walkway of the bridge beyond the fence, and I watched it while Cal and I leaned against a United Atlantic car to catch our breath.

  Two Proctors in black hoods stood at the crossing, silent, their long coats fluttering around their legs in the wind off the river. One hid a yawn behind his fist, but the other’s eyes traveled into all the dark corners of the train yard. Searching, watching for movement in the shadows.

  “Come on,” I said, tugging on Cal’s arm when he just stared at the Proctors, licking his lips. “We can cut through the yard and take the old coal paths down to the Rustworks.” Cal still didn’t move, so I tugged harder and he grunted.

  “You’re not very gentle. Girls are supposed to be gentle,” he grumbled, finally creeping after me.

  “You should know me better by now,” I teased softly. I stuffed my ruined blouse into a dustbin as we crept by the South Lovecraft Station, its brick spires reaching up into the night, and we threaded between rolling stock sleeping on the rail, leaving the lights of Uptown behind. As they faded, my breath-stealing fear of being spotted diminished a little. Even Proctors hesitated to go into the Rustworks. The wreckage was dangerous and there were supposed to be old entrances to the sewers hidden among them, leaving the ghouls easy access to aboveground.

  Of course, those facts brought their own set of fears.

  At last, the train yard ended at a ditch, and the terrain grew more turbulent, treacherous under my slick school shoes. A fence loomed above me, the border between Lovecraft and the Rustworks. For a gateway between worlds, it wasn’t much. Just corrugated steel eaten away into lace by exposure to salt air and rain. Beyond, I saw indistinct piles of slag and metal—small mountains, really, of everything from jitneys stacked high as a house like domino tiles to disused antisubmarine rigs, with their great steam-powered harpoons blunted, which had been brought back from the defense lines on Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras after the war. So many machines, all of them dead. It was like happening upon the world’s largest open grave, silent and devoid of ghosts. If I’d believed in ghosts.

  I slipped through a gap in the fence, and the last of the aether lamps of Uptown winked out behind me, eclipsed by the wreckage. As Cal and I were enclosed by the bulk of the Rustworks, I felt a curious lightness in my step. I never walked out of bounds at the Academy. Storybook orphans were always meek, well-behaved, mousy things who discovered they possessed rich uncles who’d find them good husbands. Not the sort with mad brothers and mothers, who would rather stick their hands into a gearbox than into a sewing basket.

  Now I was as far out of bounds as one could go, and it felt like a crisp wind in my face or jumping from a high place. I looked to Cal’s comforting height, and smiled at him as we walked.

  I’d heard whispers from older students that you could buy anything at the Nightfall Market—outlawed magic artifacts, illegal clockworks and engine parts, women, liquor.

  Most importantly, I’d heard from Burt Schusterman, who’
d been expelled during my first year for hiding a still in his dormitory room, that you could buy a guide in and out of the city after lockdown and before sunrise. A guide who wouldn’t necessarily need passage papers to cross the bridges out of Lovecraft.

  I just hoped he didn’t want more than fifty dollars, or strike his bargains in blood, or dream fragments, or sanity. I didn’t know that I had anything of the sort to give.

  I chided myself as we walked through the silent, frostbitten lanes of the Rustworks, enormous mounds and heaps of junk threatening to topple their aging bones onto our heads. “Grow up, Aoife.” I was so lost in staring at the dead machinery in the junk piles that I didn’t realize I’d voiced the thought. Burt Schusterman could have been the most enormous liar. Rotgut was supposed to fiddle with your brain, wasn’t it?

  “Huh?” Cal said at my outburst.

  My flush warmed my cheeks. “Nothing.” I walked a bit faster. The light wasn’t here, and the shadows were long, with fingers and teeth. On a night like this, with a scythe-shaped moon overhead, it was easy to believe, as the Proctors did, in heretics and their so-called magic.

  It crossed my mind, only for a second, to suggest we turn back, but the thought of Conrad somewhere just as dark and cold, and by himself, kept me climbing over half-rusted clockworks, through the hull of a burnt-out dirigible and past all the wreckage of Lovecraft’s prewar age, before the Proctors, when heretics had run rampant and viral creatures waited in every shadow to devour the unwary.

  Finding the market was a bit like seeing a ghost—I didn’t truly believe it was real until we happened on it, and I saw shadows in the corner of my eyes and smelled the dankness of an eldritch thing, its breath misting on my face.

  The Nightfall Market crept up on Cal and me in shadows and song—I saw a low lump of tent, and heard a snatch of pipes, and slowly, slowly, like a shy cat coming from under a porch, the Nightfall Market unfolded in front of our eyes.

  Tucked into the dark places of the Rustworks, below the crowns of old gears and the empty staring heads of antique automatons, the Nightfall Market pulsed with movement, with sound and laughter. I hadn’t expected laughter. Heretics were meant to be grim, weren’t they? Concerned only with the trickery they called sorcery and the overthrow of reason?