The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I suppose,” I said. I didn’t want to be here, out in the cold. I didn’t want to see a person burned. The Proctors would say that made me unpatriotic, but dead flesh and screaming reminded me too much of the madhouse.

  I had to read Conrad’s letter. If he was in trouble, if he needed me … The thought that I wouldn’t be quick enough to do any good cut at me and I crossed my arms and tucked my chin against the wind.

  “Heretics.” Cecelia pursed her lips, pink like her nails. “Is there anything more disgusting than trafficking in unnatural arts?”

  I watched her wet tongue flick out and take off a patch of lipstick. I could think of a few things. “I suppose you could strip the skin off of corpses and wear it, like the springheel jacks down in Old Town,” I said aloud. Cecelia wrinkled up her nose.

  “You are so strange, Aoife, I swear. I guess it comes from doing such mannish work in the School of Engines, hmm?”

  At least she wouldn’t come out and call me trash, like Marcos. Cecelia regarded herself as refined. I regarded her as an idiot.

  “Without the Engine, there wouldn’t be any burnings,” I pointed out. “The Engine creates the steam. The steam is the blood of the city.”

  “All glory to the Master Builder,” Cecelia mumbled automatically, unwinding one of her curls between her fingers.

  Banishment Square was half full of people, just normal-looking people, some of whom were eating a late lunch from twists of newspaper. The centerpiece of the square, the castigator, was deserted.

  “I hope the scum’s accused of something good this time,” Cecelia said. “Not just conjuring or selling magic or fortune-telling.”

  Cecelia had a gram of belief under her parroting of the Proctor’s laws. Most of the students did. They wanted to believe that magic could be real, something to be giggled over in secret, like smoking or kissing or wearing a garter belt instead of the ugly, itchy underthings the Academy issued us.

  I had learned the day my mother was committed that crimes against the Proctors mattered very little, individually. Belief or disbelief in heretical topics mattered even less. Some of us were just unfortunate. I was supposed to be afraid of the man about to be burned, but I was more afraid of being next.

  Two Proctors, their midnight black cowls around their faces, led a skinny man in iron shackles up the steps of the castigator. The brass fixings hissed as escaping steam met the biting air. A third Proctor, his cowl thrown back so that I could see he was just a young, dark-complected man in a black uniform with brass buttons on the chest, followed with a key. The pair of them, Proctor and heretic, could have been anyone. They could have been my brother.

  Cecelia sneered. “Heretic looks like a deviant. What do you suppose he did?”

  “I’m sure they’ll tell us,” I muttered. I knotted my hands together for warmth, and tried not to look, but it was impossible. It was like watching a person being hit by a jitney. You freeze, and you can’t even blink.

  The Proctor with the key inserted it into the castigator, a contraption that resembled a brass coffin with three holes in the front and a gear assembly in the back. I knew from Mechanics in first year that a pipe connected it directly to the Engine, far below.

  Heretic or not, the man in the shackles looked terrified. He sagged, gray, a puppet of a man held up by the Proctors. Cecelia sniffed. “It’s so cold. I hope they get on with this.”

  “The charges are as follows,” said one of the Proctors holding the heretic. “Consorting with dark forces.”

  That was a given. Anything not explained by the necrovirus could be nothing in a Proctor’s eyes but heretics attempting magic.

  “Corruption of human flesh, desecration of the dead and performance of pseudo-magic rites, outlawed under the Ramsay Convention of 1914,” the Proctor rang out. His voice reverberated off the black stone of Ravenhouse and washed over the crowd. The murmur settled and for a moment the scream of the wind and the hum of the Engine were the only sounds.

  Then the heretic began to sob. It was a droning sound. I’d heard it in the madhouse, the helpless sobbing of a mind whose gears have fouled into slag. My chest clenched for the man. I’d heard that same fear the day they took my mother.

  “Human flesh.” Cecelia’s tongue flicked out. Another wedge of pink. “Decadent. For once.”

  “At this time,” the Proctor said, “for rejecting the great truths of the Master Builder, the truth of aether and of steam, for rejecting the twin foundations of reality and science”—he looked over the crowd, the no-face beneath the cowl rippling black—“burning of the hands is penalty.”

  I curled up my own hands inside my gloves. They were numb, slow to respond.

  “Just the hands?” Cecelia echoed the grumble from the crowd. “I say hands and face, for that sort of thing. Human flesh. Honestly.”

  The heretic struggled only a little as the Proctors put his hands into the two lower holes in the castigator. The third Proctor turned the key one, twice, thrice.

  Steam rushed into the October air. The heretic screamed. I couldn’t blink.

  Suddenly, my stomach lost its tolerance for my lunch and I felt turkey casserole lurch up my throat. I turned and staggered to the gutter at the edge of the square. Cecelia bolted after me.

  “Poor thing.” She pulled my hair away and rubbed my back. “I know you don’t like to think about what that disgusting man must have done, but it’s all right. He’s being punished now.”

  I shoved Cecelia off me.

  “Honestly, Aoife!” she cried. “I’m trying to help!”

  I stared at her for a moment, her moon face blocking out the platform and the castigator. I’d seen burnings in lanternreels, but this was different. A little more fighting back, a little less sympathy from the Proctors, and my mother could have been there. My brother.

  Me.

  “I need to go home,” I gasped. I ran out of Banishment Square. I pelted down Storm Avenue, but I swore I could still smell the bubbling flesh of the heretic in the castigator. Hear his screams borne on the winter wind.

  All I could see, in my head, was Conrad.

  The Secret in the Ink

  AFTER A NIGHT of sleepless tossing and chills, I begged off my morning classes and spent an hour pacing the sophomore common room, waiting until the chronometer above the fireplace told me the library would be deserted. I didn’t try to find Cal. Cal only knew what the other students knew about Conrad. That he’d gone mad from the necrovirus, attacked his sister. Escaped the Proctors and the madhouse and Lovecraft itself. Cal didn’t know Conrad, my brother, who’d taken care of me when our mother was committed. The boy who’d taught me how to strip and repair a simple chronometer and later an entire clockwork device, put bandages on my fingers when the gears cut me, told me forbidden stories about witches, fairies and the gruesome king of imaginary monsters, Yog-Sothoth.

  Cal could take me straight to the Proctors for harboring a madman and he’d be within his rights. Memory didn’t matter, only the madness.

  Mrs. Fortune was coming toward me along the walk, and I remembered the meeting with the Headmaster after supper. I took a hard left through the passage to the library, avoiding her sight line.

  The Academy’s library was a silent place, a morgue for books and papers, lined up on their little-disturbed shelves like stacks of corpses.

  Passing through the dank, musty stacks, my footsteps muted on carpet soft with rot, I spied Miss Cornell, the librarian. She glared at me from under her wispy red bun before she turned back to stamping overdue textbooks.

  I climbed the iron spiral stairs to the turret room, deserted but for books, oil lamps and shadow. I took an oil lamp off its wall hook and put it on the reading table. Closing my fingers around the wrinkled paper, I held Conrad’s letter up to the light.

  As much as I loved numbers, my big brother loved puzzles. Mazes, logic, anything that required him to spend hours with his head bent. I wondered if that was his way of keeping his mind orderly, like math was mine.
And I shuddered at the knowledge it hadn’t worked for him, just like music hadn’t worked for our mother.

  Conrad had showed me tricks, before our mother got taken away and we went to the charity orphanage. He showed me tricks of the eye and tricks of the mind. The ghost ink was his favorite, and had the added benefit of destroying his letters. My brother looked out for me.

  I held the vellum over the oil lamp, and the paper browned and curled at the edges like a dead oak leaf. I chewed my lip, praying the whole thing wouldn’t disappear before my eyes. Ghost ink was a tricky substance—soak a letter too long or give it too much heat and you could singe your eyebrows off and lose your fingertips in the bargain.

  “Foul the gears, anyway,” I hissed as my hand got too close to the lamp’s globe and pain crawled over my hand like a spider. Hands are the engineer’s fortune.

  The letter curled up and smoke began to puff from the center of the page. The vellum crumpled in on itself, turning to ash as the smoke grew denser and darker, a chemical smell billowing from it that made my eyes water. Miss Cornell’s footsteps approached. “What’s going on up there, missy?”

  “Nothing, ma’am!” I called. “Just … making up a test.”

  “Don’t think you can hide up there all afternoon when you have classes! This is not a common hall!” Miss Cornell barked, and then the bone-cracking clack of her cheap heels retreated down the steps.

  I exhaled. That had been closer than I liked to play things. When you were a charity case, it behooved you to give all outward appearances of decorum and class. My rebellions, unlike Cal’s, were nearly always in my head or scribbled in the margins of my workbooks. The five-pointed mark of the witch, a fanciful sketch of a fairy hiding among the gears of my practice schematics. Always burned or studiously forgotten before a professor or a Proctor saw. I didn’t believe in magic, but the rules the Proctors preached were against more than that. They were against ideas. And science without ideas was useless. That, I believed.

  People in Lovecraft had been sent to the Catacombs or to a burning for far less than idle drawing. Proctors didn’t delineate between a rational person having a fancy and a heretic stirring dissension. I knew that the Proctors were doing their best to protect us from ghouls and from the encroachment of the necrovirus. Viral creatures and infected people swarming in the streets were a true nightmare, more than the specter of witches or their craft. If it weren’t for the Proctors, Lovecraft would become another Seattle, just a ghost town overrun with madness and horrors like the nightjar.

  The shame of my family was the price we paid to keep ourselves safe. Professor Swan hammered the facts home time and time again, but I couldn’t seem to stop dreaming.

  Perhaps if the professor were less of a toad about his Proctor-mandated lectures, I’d be inclined to listen.

  Heat warned me that the ghost ink was close to combusting, and with a small pop of displaced air the entire letter disintegrated, the ash swirling around me like darkling snow. The ink of the HELP lifted off the page, suspended in the smoke, corpse-pale. As the smoke dissipated, the ink stretched and re-formed, spelling a new phrase in its ghostly hand, the encoded message the ghost ink had kept hidden.

  Go to Graystone

  Find the witch’s alphabet

  Save yourself

  A string of numbers followed, and I grabbed a fountain pen from my pocket and scrawled the entire message on my hand before it blew away on the draft.

  31–10–13

  The ink bled into my skin, like a scar.

  Cal was waiting for me outside the library. “Knew you’d be here,” he said. “You always hole up in that worm factory when you’re sour.”

  “It’s not a worm factory, it’s a library,” I sighed. “And what business of yours, exactly, is my mood? Worried I’m going to lose my marbles before my birthday and embarrass you in front of Marcos and his pals?” I ducked around Cal and started for the dormitories. Conrad, and the words in the smoke, dominated my thoughts.

  Cal stopped me with a hand. “All right. What’s wrong? This spitfire act isn’t like you.”

  “Can I trust you?” I questioned Cal. I wanted to trust him. He was the only one I could trust.

  He blinked and ran a hand through his hair. A bit fell into his eyes.

  “Of course, Aoife. Is it something with your mother? She acting up?” His thin eyebrows drew together and his face tried to form a frown. Cal couldn’t look dour to save his life, but at least he was trying.

  “Not my mother,” I said, walking. “Conrad.” The words whispered to me. I felt as if I’d crack open if I didn’t give them voice.

  “Conrad?” Cal’s eyes widened. “You can’t just leave me hanging with that, Aoife. Can’t just drop your crazy brother’s name …” He paused, and swallowed. “Sorry.”

  “Like I haven’t heard worse.” I showed him the writing on my skin. Cal frowned.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Conrad sent that to me,” I said. “In a letter. He needs my help.”

  I didn’t expect Cal to grab me by the wrist, sliding his big bony palm to cover the writing on mine. “Are you trying to get sent to the madhouse, Aoife? Is what everyone’s saying true?”

  My wrist burned under his grasp, flesh heating, while my face matched it at his words. Out of all students in the Academy, I’d hoped Cal wouldn’t buy into the rumor. I squirmed, but Cal didn’t let go. “What are they saying this time?”

  Cal’s jaw worked. “That the Grayson line has bad blood. From the first infected on down. They say that you all go mad sometime around sixteen … that you’re dangerous.”

  Tears burned behind my eyes, but I shut them, so the tears wouldn’t betray me by falling. “Cal, I thought you were my friend.”

  “I am,” he said. “I’m your only friend right now, Aoife. I don’t believe any of it, but you know what they say. You know what Conrad did.”

  My throat went tight. I remembered the point of the knife warmed to the temperature of skin, Conrad’s tears wetting my hair as he held me close. “I don’t want to, Aoife, but they whisper and watch and they lap up the blood. I don’t want to listen, but they won’t stop, until there’s blood on the stone.…”

  “Conrad didn’t mean to hurt me,” I told Cal. “Dammit, Cal, you know that.” I pulled away then. If Cal thought that I carried the necrovirus in me, then I’d never be more than a thing to be pitied in his eyes.

  My school scarf covered up the crooked scar most days, unless it was getting near the end of the year, when the wet breath of summer on my skin made wool unbearable.

  “He went mad on his birthday, Aoife, and he tried to cut your throat. Your birthday is coming and now you’re talking about helping him. Like it or not, that sounds mad.”

  “Conrad was your friend too,” I whispered. My only friends: Conrad and Cal. Cal and Conrad. I had thought nothing could change that.

  Cal grimaced. “Yeah, and when he snapped, how stupid do you think I felt for believing he’d fight off the madness? This—this gibberish he’s feeding you—is just a delusion. Same as the fairies and demons that your mother sees.”

  I didn’t think, I just lashed out and slapped Cal across the cheek with my free hand. He recoiled, hissing in pain. “I’m sorry,” I said instantly, though my blood still pounded through my ears and I didn’t feel sorry. At all.

  “Dammit, Aoife, you really clocked me.” He wiggled his jaw.

  “Conrad isn’t like my mother,” I insisted. Conrad had never showed any signs of madness. He never told me his dreams. My brother had to be different. Because if he wasn’t, then there was no hope for me. “He needs my help,” I told Cal, “and I thought you just said I could trust you.”

  Cal sighed and scratched at the top of his ear, a habitual gesture that meant his nature was warring with the rules of the Academy and the Proctors. “What do you want from me, Aoife?”

  “Read it,” I said, putting my palm under his nose. Cal frowned.

  “What’s Gra
ystone? What are these numbers?”

  “Graystone is my father’s house. It’s upstate, in Arkham,” I said. “At least, that’s what my mother told me.” I sighed. “The numbers … I don’t have the faintest idea.”

  Truthfully, I hadn’t the faintest idea about my father, either. I had his name—Archibald Grayson—and my mother’s rambling about his strong hands and moss-green eyes. They were my eyes, and they caused Nerissa by turns to be doting and furious toward me. Most days, I wished the bastard had kept his eyes to himself.

  But if Conrad had evaded the Proctors long enough, if he’d made it to Arkham … he could have found our father. A man who’d fall for and get a woman with the necrovirus in a family way, twice, unafraid of madness. A man who might help him.

  “Please, Cal,” I said when he hesitated. “I just need someone to believe that this might not all be madness.”

  “I can’t believe I’m helping him again—or you,” Cal sighed. “The Proctors could have me in the Catacombs in a heartbeat.”

  I nudged his shoulder. “Not if you don’t run up to Ravenhouse and confess to them.” Relief lightened me and stopped my heart from thudding. Cal wasn’t going to turn me in. He was still the boy I’d met on Induction Day.

  “Ravens are wise, Aoife,” Cal said. The rain was coming down in earnest now, and I dug my collapsible umbrella out of my satchel while we walked back to the common house. “The Proctors use them for a reason.”

  “Ravens are too busy chasing real live heretics and Crimson Guard spies down in the Rustworks,” I said, hoisting the umbrella over Cal’s much taller head. I left out the rumor that Conrad had told me, that the Crimson Guard were witches who could do impossible things. Cal was sensitive enough. “Ravens have bigger worries than a couple of Academy students.”

  “If you say so,” Cal muttered darkly, looking over his shoulder as if a Proctor were closing in on us.