The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “You don’t spend a lot of time around the fair sex, do you?” Dean teased, that insufferable grin coming into play.

  “It’s fine,” I told Cal when he tensed. Cal was easy to tease—the Master Builder knew that for a fact—but he was hurt and Dean wasn’t playing fair. I cast Dean a sharp look. “It’s not such a far journey upstate. It’ll be over before you know it.”

  “Not soon enough,” Cal huffed, but he let me help him through the foundry gate all the same.

  The Berkshire Belle

  I DEVELOPED A discordant rhythm walking with Cal, down from the county road outside the foundry, through a ditch that soaked my feet to the ankles with freezing brackish water, up the other side and across a frozen field patchy with forgotten cornstalks. Dean stayed a few feet ahead, his back and body tense, hands shoved in his dungaree pockets like a gunfighter waiting to draw. I knew better than to ask him where we were going, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t wondering. As an Academy student, I was rarely permitted to leave the grounds, never mind the city. The last in recent memory was a field trip to a quarry. Even by engineering standards, not exciting.

  The pulse of the lighthouse on Half-Moon Point winked through the trees as our footsteps disappeared into a carpet of early snow and pine needles, the field ending at a broken stone wall.

  “How much farther?” I whispered to Dean, as Cal’s soft pants of pain warmed my right ear.

  “Not far,” Dean said. “Other side of the woods, on the point. That’s where the airship lands.”

  “Airship?” I almost lost my grip on Cal from surprise.

  “Sure thing.” Dean grinned. “You want to get to Arkham—the Berkshire Belle and her crew are the quickest route.”

  The trees thinned as the ground became rock and I could hear the rush of the ocean and feel the tinge of salt on my skin. We were much farther away from the city than I’d realized.

  Directly beyond was the Lovecraft lighthouse, the white spire with its black band standing guard at the mouth of the river. Moored beyond, where the water met the rock, was an airship.

  I’d seen airships before, small skimmers that flew from Lovecraft to New Amsterdam, or out to Cape Cod and Nantucket when the weather was fair. This craft was different from all of them—the silvery hide of the rigid balloon was patched and the passenger cabin was battered, windowless and military gray, not sleek and welcoming like the Pan Am and TWA zeppelins that took off from Logan Airfield. The fans clicked as they rocked back and forth against their tie-downs in the wind. It was beautiful, in its own way, scarred and slippery—a shark built for air.

  “Now, you let me do the talking,” Dean said. “Captain Harry’s here every night, and passage is included in your fee, but if he doesn’t like your look …” Dean drew a thumb across his throat. My scar itched in response.

  “This Captain Harry sounds like a real pirate,” Cal said. Cal would bring up pirates. As if we hadn’t had a year’s supply of excitement just getting here.

  I looked at the Berkshire Belle’s hulk and listened to the moan of its moorings as we came closer, the sound like the murmuring of the madhouse after lights out, or the whispering of a ghost, if I believed in such things. Which I emphatically did not, but seeing the Babbage appear from nowhere, the ghostly dirigible, the moonlight and the frost called up echoes of a spectral world. The Proctors abhorred unsanctioned tales of witchcraft and fairies, angels or demons, but I’d never been chastised for listening to a ghost story. Now I wished that the girls in my hall hadn’t delighted in passing them around quite so much. Tonight, I could almost believe.

  “Harry’s a card,” Dean said. “Came out of Louisiana, swamp folk. He’d cut your tongue out soon as look at you, but the Belle ain’t never been stopped by the ravens.”

  “Never?” I said. The ravens saw everything—nothing lifted more than a foot off the ground under its own power in Lovecraft without Proctor approval.

  “Never,” Dean said. “Harry’s too fast for ravens.”

  “Yeah, well,” Cal groused. “Fast, slow … he better have someplace for me to sit, with this bum ankle.”

  Dean banged on the hull. After a moment the hatch wheel spun and it opened with a creak and a rumble of abused gears. Captain Harry might be stealthy in the sky, but he needed to learn his way around an oilcan.

  “Evening,” Dean said to the figure in the hatch, a massive man in a greatcoat, profile shielded in shadow. “Got two with me looking to take passage up Arkham way. The usual fee.”

  There was silence for a long time, and even though I only caught the gleam of lenses and brass where the man’s eyes should be, I could feel him staring. I shifted under the silence and the stare, letting out a small cough. “Hello, sir. Captain, I mean.”

  “Bonsoir, mam’selle,” he said, finally. “And Dean Harrison. I think I not see you again for some time after that trouble up Lovecraft way.”

  “Trouble?” Cal perked like a poodle sniffing hamburger meat. “What trouble?”

  I admit I wondered the same, but I had the sense to keep quiet about it in front of Dean and Captain Harry.

  “Nothing you need to get excited about, kid,” Dean snapped. “Got no time for gossip, Harry. I’ve charged this young lady fair and square and I’m her guide.”

  “Mais oui,” Captain Harry said. His accent was slow as syrup on a cold morning, but his voice was gravel, hardened and crushed by years of smoke and wind. “She’s a different class of traveler, no? Young.” He stepped out of the hatch, his big steam-ventor boots—bigger, thicker, brass-bound versions of the boots Dean wore—crushing the rock beneath the airship with a grating like bone on bone. In the light, Harry was about Professor Swan’s age, massive and unkempt, sporting red hair shot with white through the left temple, like he’d been struck by lightning. Bug-eyed ruby glass flying goggles covered his eyes and crimson stubble his face, which was split by a wide grin. He fit with the Berkshire Belle—scarred and rough, but in fine working order.

  Harry stuck out a large hand and said, “Who might you be, mademoiselle?” I didn’t take it. His paw could have crushed both of my hands with room to spare, and I’d abused them enough crossing the bridge.

  “I might be Aoife Grayson, and I might be in a hurry,” I said, tightening my grip on Cal. I wasn’t going to be the pretty, delicate thing who needed men to do her talking. Harry didn’t seem hostile, but Dorlock hadn’t either.

  “Pretty, hein,” Captain Harry hooted. “But even less manners than you, eh, Dean?”

  “We almost got peeped by some ravens on the bridge,” Dean said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to see the Lovecraft in my taillights just as much as the young lady.”

  “Oui, course you would.” Captain Harry gestured with a sweep of his greatcoat. The material was deep blue, and hid a red silk vest and oil-streaked gray trousers. It was a navy uniform, I realized on a second glance, from the war before the last one. Harry did look like he’d be at home manning the furnace on a war zeppelin, or pulling his weight as an antiaircraft gunner on a destroyer.

  “Come on, then,” Harry told me. “The night, she ain’t getting longer. Allez.” He pulled himself into the ship without another word, leaving us alone. I let out my breath, at long last. He hadn’t challenged me on being young, or female, or dragging along a friend with a bad ankle. Maybe this would end all right.

  Once I’d managed to wrest myself and Cal through the hatch, Dean followed and spun it closed. “We’re right and tight back here, Harry!” he hollered.

  The hold of the Berkshire Belle was one large convex room, hard benches bolted to the arched rib cage of the inner hull, and cargo netting swaying back and forth overhead like Spanish moss. I settled Cal on a bench in easy reach of a tie-down, should we hit rough weather, and tried to give him a reassuring smile. I think I managed one that made me seem only slightly nauseated. “I’m just going to look around, all right? Try to keep your ankle up so it doesn’t swell any more.” In truth, I was dying to get a look at
the Belle, to examine her engines and her clockworks, see how she flew. It would calm me down, and give me something to think of besides I’m a runaway madwoman and the Proctors are coming.

  “Be careful,” Cal murmured. “I don’t trust these miscreants.”

  “You don’t trust your own mother, Cal.” I gave his good foot a nudge. “I’ll be fine.”

  Dean was slouched on a bench opposite Cal, and no one else in the crew seemed to be paying attention to me, so I poked at the various supplies slung into cargo nets, and when I’d determined there wasn’t anything more interesting than spare parts and hardtack, went looking for the cockpit. I might never be on an airship—a real airship—again, and I wanted to soak up as much as I could. Girls weren’t allowed to attend the School of Aeronautics. Our changeable nature made us unsuitable for flying or the precision work needed to maintain a machine that was really just a steel box slung under a balloon full of deadly explosive gas.

  I didn’t particularly think that a twitchy idiot like Marcos Langostrian and his ilk would be suited either, but no one had asked me my opinion.

  I went forward first, and peeped into the fore compartment, trying to stay out of the crew’s way. For all her outward plainness, the Belle’s cockpit was a thing of beauty. The windscreen was divided into four parts like rose petals, each a bubble of solid glass. The flight controls, worked in brass, shimmered under the aether lamps laid into the swooping brass walls, and the knobs and switches for the PA system and pitch controls were ebony inlaid with ivory chevrons, like a V of spirit birds.

  Or ravens. I chased the thought away. The ravens hadn’t seen me. As far as the Proctors knew, the worst I was guilty of was being out of bounds after Academy curfew.

  Captain Harry came up behind me. “Welcome aboard,” he boomed. “Making yourself right at home, I see.” His voice made me start. I could tell myself we’d escaped the city cleanly all I wanted, but my nerves believed differently.

  “I was just looking at the cockpit,” I offered. “I’m sorry—”

  “No sorries!” Harry exclaimed. “She’s a magnificent flying machine, ma Belle.” He gestured to the twin pilot’s chairs, crimson thread stitched into oxblood hide, and the two pilots occupying them. “This here’s Jean-Marc and Alouette, the two finest canailles ever to sail the stormy skies.”

  Jean-Marc was thin and unremarkable, rather like Mr. Hesse, while Alouette wasn’t much older than Dean, with a round face and blond ringlets like a lanternreel starlet. She had the same cold, calculating look in her blue eyes as one of the femme fatales in the serials Cal loved—that icy cut-glass beauty that belonged to my mother, before sedatives and too much time locked up with her madness dulled it.

  “Hello there,” I said. Alouette jerked her chin over my head.

  “What did your boyfriend do to his ankle?”

  “He’s not …,” I started with a sigh, but she climbed out of her seat, brushed past me and knelt in front of Cal.

  “Boy,” she told him crisply, “we don’t take cripples on this boat. You’ll be the first one the Proctors snatch up, we get shot down.”

  “I fell,” Cal said. “It’s nothing really. Doesn’t even hurt anymore.” The veins in his neck pulsed as Alouette prodded his ankle. He did a good enough job of hiding his wince when she poked the swollen joint, but I saw it and so did Dean, who gave a snort.

  Alouette’s frosty expression changed to a smile as she inspected Cal. “Guess you did bang it up, at that. Once we’re airborne, I’ll dress it. I was a nurse down in Shreveport before I took up flying.”

  Dean rolled his eyes behind Alouette’s back, and pulled a harness around himself. “Best to sit down, Miss Aoife,” he told me. “Don’t want you knocking your noggin, and the way these cats drive, you will.”

  “Oui, sit,” Captain Harry commanded. “On board this ship, you are citizens of the air, and the air, she has a streak of mischief and malice. You disobey an order, you be over the deck rail. Otherwise, you keep quiet and you arrive up Arkham in one piece, oui?”

  Cal and I nodded that we understood. There was nothing angry about Harry, but he had an air of command that brooked no argument.

  Dean leaned his head back against the hull and shut his eyes, like this was all painfully everyday. I fleetingly wished I were calm. How many times had Dean made this trip? More than I ever would in my life.

  “Lift, you bastards!” Captain Harry bellowed. “And if a storm do swallow us, may she spit us back up again!”

  There was a jolt as the mooring lines retracted and then, with a dip in my stomach, the Belle sailed aloft, borne on the winter wind.

  Once the excitement of liftoff abated, I found myself leaning my head against the hull, feeling the vibration of the wind and the turbines against my skull. Lulled, I felt my eyelids dip and exhaustion wind like wire through every bit of me, twisting and tugging and coaxing me toward sleep.

  I decided that sleeping in a shipful of heretics and criminals might not be in my best interest. To keep awake, I focused on Dean. I’d never met a heretic who wasn’t strapped to the castigator or locked in a madhouse, and I wanted to memorize him, because soon enough he’d be gone and I’d be …

  I didn’t know. Alone? Searching for Conrad, certainly. Wandering through another person’s delusions, the way I had been since I was a child.

  Dean reached up and smoothed back his hair, shiny and black as his leather jacket in the aether glow. He plucked the cigarette from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth, shutting his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck. I was wondering what the short hairs at the base of his skull would feel like under my hand when Alouette spun around in her pilot’s chair, her eyes wide through the small slice of open hatch I could see. She leaped up, closed the distance across the hold like a swift golden cat, ripped the cigarette away from Dean and threw it across the cabin. I jumped at her sudden movement, and her shouting. “Are you crazy, boy?” she demanded. “We’re floating underneath tons of hydrogen and you want to light up?”

  Dean’s lips twitched and his entire body stiffened, like a valve with too much pressure on it. “I’m not an idiot, Allie, but I am bored. Being in this sardine can ain’t my idea of a fun Friday night.”

  “You’re welcome to step out any old time,” Alouette flared, flicking her long fall of golden hair in Dean’s face. Dean dropped his eyes and chuckled, taking the Lucky Strikes from his pocket and sticking another cigarette between his lips.

  “Don’t tempt me, Allie. You’d drive any sane guy off a ledge.” I watched the two of them stare at each other for a moment, until Dean crossed his ankles and leaned back against the hull, stretching himself out to his full height. “Go back to playing nursemaid. I’ll behave, I promise.”

  Alouette threw up her hands and went to Cal, brushing me aside as if I were inconvenient baggage. “Let’s see about that ankle now that we’re up.” She pulled off his oxford and his sock, her mouth quirking at the hole in the toe, and slid his school pants up to the knee, her pale hands brushing his skin. “My, my,” Alouette said, gently wiggling the swollen joint. Cal hissed, his cheeks caving in and his teeth showing. He looked like he wanted to bite Alouette, but he pulled himself together, covering his mouth to hide the feral grimace. I wanted to sit by him and let him squeeze my hand, like I had when he burned himself during our fabricating class, but I had the feeling Alouette might bite me if I did.

  “Like I said, miss,” Cal told her. “It’s worse than it looks.”

  Alouette fluttered at his words. “Listen to you, ‘miss’ this and ‘miss’ that. It’s Alouette, or Allie.”

  Cal swallowed and took his hand away from his face, and he was easygoing Cal again. “All right, mi—Alouette. Sorry I’m not in better humor—it does smart a bit.”

  “You did a number on yourself,” Alouette agreed. “Looks like a real war wound.”

  “It was my fault he fell,” I said, rather more loudly than I had to. Her hands were still on his leg. “He was trying to hel
p me,” I explained.

  Alouette spread a slow smile. “What a gentleman you are.” She whipped his ankle to the left, and Cal let out a yell, going stark white in the face. Alouette giggled at his expression.

  “Well, it’s not broken if you felt that. We’ll bandage you up, but no slaying dragons or chasing damsels for a week or so, all right?”

  Dean snorted. “Watch yourself, cowboy. I think the pirate wench has taken a shine to you.” He stood and twirled a small hatch open, one that I saw led to an outside deck. Cold air rushed in, lifting my hair and dappling my skin with moisture.

  “Close her up!” Captain Harry shouted from the cockpit, to my relief. “We none of us arctic creatures!”

  “Same Dean,” Alouette tsked when the hatch clanked shut behind him. “Still a child at heart.”

  I didn’t think Dean not wanting to be in the same space as Alouette was very childish. I wanted to get away from her cheap bottle-blond hair and tinny laugh just as much as he seemed to.

  “I’ll be happy when we’re rid of him,” Cal told her. “He’s just some freak Aoife hired to get us out of the city, but I’ll take care of her from there. Dean’s not an upright moral person like you.”

  “I’m upright, but honey, I’m far from moral,” Alouette said, giving him a practiced smile. “Hold still now and let me bandage this.”

  I felt irritation swell in me, and it expelled itself with a huff of air. Cal would still be collecting baseball cards and building model airships, hiding in his dormitory, if it weren’t for me. I was the one who’d taken us on the hour-long jitney ride to the machine shop where they milled gears for the Engine, who found the best pastries on Derleth Street, who coaxed Cal out into the wide city. I’d swear he was allergic to light before I’d dragged us outside the walls of the Academy. How dare he get to play the adventurer to Alouette while she treated me like a dumb kid? And why’d she have to keep rubbing his leg?

  “You look very moral to me,” Cal said, in a comically deep tone he no doubt adopted from some lanternreel actor. “And you’ve got a soft touch.…” He hissed. “But your hands are cold.”