The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  If I was being taken to him, I couldn’t imagine what might have happened since I ran away. I wondered what sins I’d been accused of and what my fellow students were saying about me.

  When I stepped through the innermost doors of Ravenhouse everything had changed. Walls were solid metal, held in place with rivets the size of my fist. Doors were submarine hatches, fully airlocked. Even the aether globes were constrained by mesh cages, useless to any prisoner wily enough to break them. My already leaden stomach sank further.

  “Here,” the officer grunted finally. “Stand still and straight until the door opens.”

  “I don’t understand why Mr. Draven wants to see me,” I said, trying one last ploy for innocence. “I’m just a student.”

  “Shut up,” the Proctor told me. “I don’t want to listen to you yap, and I don’t have to.”

  The door we stopped at was a real door, bound in brass, polished wood reflecting my pale face and sleepless eyes back at me. The Proctor pressed the call button on the phonovox next to it, not without hesitation.

  “Yes.” The voice was high, thin, smooth like glass. It chilled me as if I’d stepped into an icebox.

  “Mr. Draven. One of your flagged fugitives, sir. She surrendered to us at the jitney depot a few hours ago.”

  There was a wait, while the Proctor stared at me and I stared at my reflection. Trying to stay calm was just making things worse.

  “Bring her in.” The gears at the top of the door turned, releasing lock bars, and the door swung inward.

  Draven’s office was enormous, a long room that took up the entire back of Ravenhouse. It was also largely empty, floors and shelves bare, windows covered by metal shutters like a war shelter. A desk and two chairs sat at one end of the vast space, underneath a mural on the ceiling of a man in a chariot pulled by a light horse and a dark one traveling above the map of the world, constellations glowing softly in the light of the aether lamps.

  “Miss Grayson. Sit.” Draven rose and pulled out a chair. The Proctor shoved me, none too gently. I let out a small squeak as the hard chair impacted with my spine.

  Draven narrowed his eyes at the Proctor. “Leave, please.”

  The Proctor got out of the office so quickly that he left a wake of air. I kept my eyes on Draven as he walked with measured tread back to the seat behind his desk. He was tall, thin-faced, hair cropped so one could see the scalp underneath. Younger than I had imagined him by at least a decade, lines were beginning around his eyes, but his gaze still cut straight through me. They were frightening eyes, absolutely flat and yet alive. Predatory, was how I would classify Draven’s gaze, and I felt a dull chill work its way over my skin, like I’d pressed against a cold sheet of iron.

  Draven took a black cigarette from a silver case and offered me one.

  I shook my head. “I don’t.”

  “Good girl.” Draven lit his from a tubular jet lighter and exhaled toward the ceiling. “I noticed you looking at the mural.”

  “It’s very … detailed,” I said gamely. Anything but talking about why I was really here. Any amount of time for Cal and Dean to escape.

  “That, my dear, is Apollo, chasing the night across the face of the world. It is a blasphemous and heretical depiction of a dead religion, practiced by a fearful, craven civilization that the Master Builder ground under his heel.”

  I looked at my hands rather than make eye contact as he lectured. The shackles were beginning to burn as they chafed my skin.

  Draven let out a low chuff of laughter. “Don’t look so scared. I didn’t paint it over—it’s important to remember our history.”

  “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,” I quoted. I felt tremors all over, and terribly cold, almost like I had a touch of influenza.

  Draven’s mouth curved up. When he smiled, all of his graveness disappeared and he looked like a boy at the School. One who’d delight in playing cruel pranks on girls like me.

  “Aren’t you a little straight A?” he said. “I bet you make the boys in your classes furious. The bell curve wasn’t made for clever girls.” Draven smirked and I forced myself to keep my face neutral. Good thing that was far from the most insulting thing someone had said about me.

  “I get along with everyone,” I lied. “A ward can’t afford to be snobbish.”

  “No.” Draven stubbed out his cigarette. “But I suppose it’s difficult to keep that vapid smile on your face. Mad mother, mad brother, the bastard child of a rich man. How the barbs must fly.”

  “How did you know about my father?” I said, my surprise genuine. I tugged against the shackles. They were as immobile as the other ten times I’d tested them.

  “Come on now, Aoife,” Draven said. “Aoife Eileen Grayson. We Proctors are the eyes, ears and wings of the entire nation. There’s nothing we don’t know.”

  There was at least one thing about all this I was pretty sure Draven didn’t know, but I kept that to myself.

  A knock on the door cut off Draven’s smug smile. “Yes?”

  “Superintendent Draven.” A uniformed Proctor stepped in with my carpetbag. “The girl’s effects.”

  “Put them on the desk, Officer Quinn.”

  “Yes, sir.” Quinn set down the bag and stepped back. Draven lifted one eyebrow.

  “Something else, Officer?”

  “One of the boys is giving us trouble,” Quinn said. “The skinny one.”

  “Cal—” I bit back a further cry when Draven’s eyes crinkled in amusement. At least I knew Cal was alive.

  “Take him to a separate interrogation room and do whatever it takes,” he ordered. “I want information from him about what he and the girl have been doing out there in Arkham. He’ll give it quickly if he knows what’s good for him.”

  “No!” I shouted as Quinn saluted and backed out. “No, Cal had nothing to do with this!” I started up, to lunge for the door, to do something to prevent them from hurting him.

  “Sit.” Draven pinned me across the desk, his finger hovering in front of my face. “I am not going to humor your lies, Aoife. Not when I know what you are.”

  “I’m not anything,” I whispered, although I had the horrible feeling Draven knew my secret. “I ran away, I admit.” Maybe if I confessed to what the Proctors expected, I could buy Cal leniency. I started again. “I consorted with heretics and I’ve got a latent necrovirus infection, and you can do whatever you want with me, but I swear that Cal hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “You’re so sure of your good friend Cal? That’s nice,” Draven said, standing and going to the single window that wasn’t closed off by a shutter. His view looked down the hill, to the river, the bridge, the foundry. “I want you to think, Aoife. Think about the day your mother was committed. A young girl and her brother would go to a state orphanage, girls and boys in different institutions. You would never see your brother again. You knew this. You perhaps shed a few tears right there in the courtroom.”

  He turned back, arms folded. “Where did you go, Aoife?”

  “To … to a group home,” I said, wondering where this was leading. The house I’d gone to had been close, noisy, full of other children, who pulled my hair and taunted me with jokes until Conrad chased them off.

  “With your brother.” Draven ticked off on his fingers, backlit against the windows by the endless gray of the sky. “You stayed with your brother. Your needs were met. You both went to the finest school and you both gained entrance to the Lovecraft Academy.” He looked at his fingers. “If one were a heretic, one might almost say you had a guardian angel, Aoife. But of course we know the real reason, don’t we?”

  “I want to see my friends now,” I snapped. “What does this have to do with them?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Draven said. “Archibald Grayson may have fathered bastards, but he made sure they’d be as smart as him. He had his clever little ways of ensuring they were taken care of.”

  “My … my father?” I blinked at Draven, genu
inely confused as to why he thought my childhood was so important. To my mind, it had been nothing but misery from the day Nerissa was committed.

  Draven slammed his fist against the window sash. “Don’t pretend you don’t know! Archibald Grayson is a heretic and a traitor to the Iron World and you are going to be the honey that brings him home.” Draven leaned in and sucked a deep breath through his nose. “And what sweet honey it is.”

  I cringed away from him. The Iron World. How did he know that term? “I never knew my father. He doesn’t give one whit about me. I can’t make him come anywhere.” That, at least as far as I knew, was the absolute truth.

  Draven shook his head and laughed. I saw something else in his hard, beautiful face, a marring and a blurring. “You didn’t know him, Aoife, it’s true. But I do. And I know exactly what he thought of his filthy-blooded brood.”

  I felt tears starting and shut my eyes briefly to hold them back. “My father never even spoke to me in person. All I have are his eyes and his blood.”

  Draven’s lips pulled back and he gave a wordless snarl. “You think Archie’s little band of conjurers are the only things in this world that have magic beating in the blood? You think the Graysons stood alone after the Storm and the erecting of the Gates?”

  I was lost as to what he meant, but the rambling and the abrupt anger—that I’d seen before. I gave voice to what I’d recognized in his eyes. “You’re insane, Mr. Draven.” Not because he’d admitted he believed in magic as easily as he breathed—that was merely surprising. The insanity wasn’t apparent in photos and lanternreels, but up close, to a person who’d seen madness every week for nearly a dozen years, it was clear as day.

  “What I am is possessed of the truth, Aoife, and being called things like insane is the price I pay. And here’s the truth of that pitiful spark inside you that gives you a pitiful little piece of power: it will only get you killed.”

  Undoubtedly, that would be easier. If I confessed to heresy as the Proctors defined it, I’d be spared burning. But I didn’t want to be easy. Not after everything I’d endured trying to prove I wasn’t going mad. I met Draven’s eyes. “I’ll never renounce the Weird. It’s real. I know it and you know it. So burn me. Get it over with.”

  Draven reached his hand back and cracked me across the face, faster than a snake striking. The spot where Tremaine had hit me began to bleed again and I cried out in shock.

  “You walked through iron to come here,” Draven snarled. “This room may look like the lair of a soft man, but there are bones of steel running through these walls, bones charged with enchantment that will bleed something like you from the eyes. Do not force me to use it.”

  “Now who’s speaking heresy?” I grumbled, too confused and enraged to worry about whether he’d hit me again. “A City Head using enchantments. Honestly. Tell me another.”

  “The world was much younger when the Storm came.” Draven’s eyes went soft. “There have been many names for what came into our world that day since—witchcraft, Spiritualism, necrovirus. Many explanations to sate the public and make it feel safe. But they are all poison, all a filthy, otherworldly plague. And they have the gall to call it magic.” He sneered, then reached out and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Archibald Grayson thinks differently. He believes these forces are his to use. He consorts with the Folk and endangers every human being on earth each time he passes through the Gates. He thinks the Bureau of Heresy extremists, but I know he is a traitor to everyone like me, who only want to keep the Lands separated, keep the infection Archibald calls magic at bay. That is why I will have him here in Ravenhouse, and assure myself he can do no more harm.”

  I reeled. The avalanche of information was making my head hurt. I picked out the most shocking fact of the bunch. “You … you know of the Folk?”

  “Of course I know,” Draven scoffed. “The Folk, the Weird, the Mists … all of those portentous names humans before the Storm gave such things.”

  “But … no one believes in the Weird … no one in Lovecraft, no one rational.…” I was sure I was going to toss my last meal onto Draven’s elegant carpet. He was telling me he knew all about the Folk, all about magic. And it was clear this wasn’t new information to him.

  “People do not have the capacity, Aoife,” Draven said, as if I were a very small and stupid child. “Something called the necrovirus, something that has a specific cause and perhaps some day a cure, they can control. They can guard against infection. The Folk, magic—the truth, that ‘virals’ are really creatures crawled up from a world that only exists in their nightmares? That lands exist beside our own and some human’s very blood causes them madness or greatness, depending on a flip of a coin?” He sniffed. “If the world knew the truth, it would burn within the week. It nearly did, until a few of us took action, after the Storm.” Draven sighed. “I’m not one for telling tales, but in brief: in 1880 there was a man named Nikola Tesla. He was like Edison, but Tesla had a weakness of spirit. He saw things beyond this world, beyond reason. He created a machine, a machine that could tear the very fabric of the universe asunder. And he turned it on.”

  Draven passed a hand over his forehead. “It was terrible, terrible what happened. My father was only a boy, but he spoke of the magical cataclysms, the strange creatures that flowed unencumbered through the gateway Tesla ripped open. They called it the Storm. And a brotherhood stepped forward, composed of sorcerers and scientists and madmen. They beat back the Storm. They created the gates with magic and the wonder of Tesla’s technology. But they were not good men.”

  I stayed silent, not giving Draven the reaction he clearly wanted, even though my brain was racing to assimilate his version of history. His nostrils flared as he inhaled sharply. “They did not see that the only way was to cleanse the world of all supernatural corruption. We did. And so we called them heretics. We erased magic from all the corners of the earth, and only a few times has it reared its head since. But we’ll burn them out. Have no fear. And magic will always be a lie, be no more substantial than a shadow, as long as people believe it’s really only the necrovirus.”

  He stepped to his desk and pressed his buzzer as I watched him, insensible.

  The necrovirus wasn’t real.

  Magic was.

  Draven had known all along. He’d let it go on, the burnings and the lockdowns and people like my mother being shoved into madhouses. Why, I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.

  Everything about Lovecraft was a lie. Everything about this modern, scientific world, the ghoul traps and the madhouses and the worship of reason, was wrong.

  Before I could scream, Quinn and another officer appeared. Draven jerked his chin. “Take her to interrogation and test her blood for the usual panel of infection. She’s been outside the city limits. She’s a contamination risk.”

  “Let me go!” I screamed as they dragged me along. I lost one of my shoes on the thick carpet, skinned my knees as I thrashed and the Proctors wrestled me along. The truth was sinking in, and as Draven had warned, it was terrible. My head spun and I thrashed like I was a spastic in my mother’s asylum. “Let me go! I’m not contaminated! There is no necrovirus! He’s a liar!”

  As Quinn and the other officer dragged me away, Draven placed his hand on my carpetbag, on my father’s journal and the goggles and the invigorator, as if they belonged to him, and then he met my eyes and tipped me a wink.

  Draven and I. United in the awful, world-burning truth.

  The door of Draven’s office slammed shut and then only my own voice echoed down Ravenhouse’s long iron halls.

  The interrogation room was bleak and bare, entirely different from Draven’s office. There were no bones of finery here, just concrete and one-way glass.

  Cal would have loved it, I thought. It was just like his novels and Saturday matinees. Sweat the villains and make them talk.

  “Doctor’s coming in,” Quinn said. “Don’t you make a move, kid.”

  My lip had stopped bleed
ing. Now it just felt swollen and sticky, like I’d let candy melt and linger on my tongue.

  I counted stains on the acoustic tiles of the ceiling until the door buzzed and admitted a man in a white coat with a black leather bag. He had a cotton surgery mask over the lower half of his face, but he was taller than Quinn, rangier.

  “This is her?” He reeled himself to a quick stop inside the door.

  “What?” Quinn said. “You were expecting Al Capone?”

  “She doesn’t look contaminated.” The doctor took an identical mask from his bag and handed it to Quinn. “But all the same, I need to ask you to put this on and leave the room.”

  Quinn blanched. “I might be exposed?”

  It’d serve him right, I thought. Every one of them, if they did contract something nasty from Thorn. Get devoured by a nightjar, or see what really lurked in the Mists. Every last stinking Proctor on earth fed to a corpse-drinker. That would be a start.

  “Necrovirus is not transmitted through the air,” the doctor said. “As far as we know. But there are procedures the public health office must follow. Now please, for your own safety. Wait outside until I’ve drawn her blood.”

  The Proctor scuttled out of the room, and the door slammed and locked.

  “Oh yes,” I said loudly, to the door. “Watch out for the big, bad necrovirus.” Draven and the Proctors had lied to everyone. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what their lie meant for me. For my madness. For my family. If there was no necrovirus, then … what? What made my mother believe dreams and visions over reality, even if some of them had come true? Because she certainly wasn’t normal. What had made Conrad transform, at least for a moment, into someone who’d spill my blood?

  And when my birthday turned over, what in all of cold space would happen to me?

  The doctor gave me a smile from behind his mask, seemingly impervious to my shouting panic. “Pretty grim in here, isn’t it?”