The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  There was a long, razor-sharp moment between the four of us, and then Dorlock swore. “It’s your funeral, stupid girl. Next time you trust a pretty face I hope it’s a springheel jack waiting underneath.”

  He stomped back to his tent, and Dean flipped the black cylinder one last time before he shoved it back into his pocket. “So, it seems you folks are in need of a guide.”

  “Y-yes,” I managed. I sounded like a child who’d been caught out of bed, and I cleared my throat. “I mean, we are. Still.”

  Cal scoffed. “And let me guess—you’re the answer to our plight?”

  Dean passed a hand over his hair, putting the slick strands that Dorlock had mussed back in place. “I’m a bit of a tradejack, and guiding is one of my trades. I don’t need to advertise because I’m good. And I sure won’t charge you any fifty dollars.”

  “Was Dorlock really going to feed us to ghouls?” I asked him, the blue tent now crouched like a poison mushroom. It seemed like the sort of thing you’d read in a Proctor manual, something that was supposed to scare us into behaving.

  “Sweetheart, your white flesh would be their filet mignon,” said Dean. I flinched. Cal glared.

  “Watch your language, fella. That’s a young lady you’re talking to.”

  “Word of advice, kid,” said Dean. “This may be the Wild West down here, but you ain’t a cowboy. You’re not even a boy in a cowboy suit.”

  “Cal,” I said sharply when a lean, angry look came over his face. “Why don’t you make sure we have all of our supplies before we head out?” It was for his own good—Dean was twice his heft and carrying a knife, but Cal wasn’t the type to consider mathematical odds.

  “I’m not leaving you alone with him,” he told me, pointing at Dean.

  “She’s snug as a bug with me, brother.” Dean flashed me a smile that promised rule breaking and breathlessness. I decided to be interested in the laces on my shoes rather than risk turning red.

  “I’m not your brother,” Cal grumbled, but he found a space to open his duffel and check out his supplies. I did the same with my book bag.

  “So, Miss Aoife,” said Dean. “I guess now’s a decent time to tell me what’s on the other end of this skedaddle.”

  Oh, nothing much. Just a plan to find my mad brother and rescue him from a danger he may or may not actually be in. I settled for the abbreviated version.

  “My father’s house. In Arkham.” I counted the number of pens and pencils in my satchel, refolded all of my spare clothes and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.

  “Woman of few words,” Dean said. “I like that. Here’s the deal, pretty one: I get half when we’re clear of the city and half when I deliver you safe and sound and without any Proctors crawling all over you. Dig?”

  “How much?” I said, bracing myself for a price even worse than Dorlock’s. I’d learned one thing at least in the Nightfall Market, and that was nothing came free or easy.

  Dean lifted his shoulder. His leathers and grease-spotted denim were as far from my idea of a guide as I probably was from Dean’s idea of an adventurer, but in an odd way we fit. Neither what the other thought we should be. I rather thought we complemented each other.

  “Bargains are different for everyone,” Dean said. “From some I take a lot and some nothing they’ll miss at all. You’ll know when it’s time to pay up.”

  I thought of Dorlock’s hand on me, and shivered. But Dean had intervened, and he hadn’t tried to con me out of my money, either.

  Conrad would be decisive, show that he wasn’t worried. I gave a nod. “All right.”

  “Good,” Dean agreed. “For now, we gotta shake a leg if we want to be out of raven’s sight by sunrise.” He whistled to Cal. “Saddle up, cowboy! The Night Bridge is waitin’ for us and the earth is turning fast.”

  Across the Night Bridge

  WE FOLLOWED DEAN away from the pipe fire, away from the music and the light. I never thought I’d regret leaving the Nightfall Market, but as the noise faded, my apprehension swelled.

  The groan and creak of the ice on the Erebus River grew loud as we approached the embankment, like two giants shouting at each other.

  “What kind of backwards way are you taking us?” Cal demanded. I wondered too—there was nothing on the other side of the river but the foundry, and the road was patrolled by Proctors.

  Dean stopped at a set of steps slick with ice and river water. The river rushed below our feet, beneath a walkway bolted to the bulwark with flimsy rivets oozing rust. I could look down through the gaps and see black, freezing nothing waiting to swallow me whole.

  “I’m taking you out,” Dean said. “What you wanted, ain’t it?” His engineer’s boots, leather over steel toes and hobnail soles, clanked on the metal as he descended the stairs.

  Cal grabbed my arm and slowed my steps, so we fell paces behind Dean. “I don’t trust him, Aoife. He could be leading us right into a trap.”

  I concentrated on placing my feet on the icy steps. The water whispered to me as it swept along the ancient embankment and the old sewer lines that emptied out at the base of Derleth Street. A ghoul could practically reach up and touch the sole of my foot, we were so far down.

  “If I wanted to trap you,” Dean yelled back, “I would have turned right instead of left back at the Rustworks fence.” His roughened voice was loud enough to echo from the opposite bank of the river.

  Even in the cold, my face flushed. I gave Cal a censuring glance. This wasn’t one of his adventures—if he made Dean cross, we’d be at the mercy of the Proctors. Or something worse.

  I fell into step behind Dean, careful not to slip and pitch myself over the walkway into the water. “Why? What’s right instead of left?”

  “Right is the old submersible launch. Ran the Hunleys and the diesel subs down to Cape Cod during the war. Nowadays, the mill workers come from Lowell and snatch pretty little girls like yourself to work your fingers to the bone on the assembly lines and in the mills.” He tilted his head to Cal. “Him, they’d just put a shank in his skinny gut and leave him to freeze to death on the riverbank.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said quietly.

  Dean shrugged. “Now you do, miss.”

  “I can handle myself,” Cal huffed. “And you’re going to find out if you keep up the lip.”

  “How much farther?” I said, attempting to keep things peaceable.

  “Not far now,” Dean said. “The Night Bridge is just up and around the bend. It’s always waiting for travelers who need it, and for those who don’t … well.” He jerked his thumb over the rail, toward the black and rushing river.

  “That sounds like something my brother would say,” I murmured without thinking. Dean cocked his head.

  “Oh? He a heretic too?”

  A stone dropped into my stomach, cold and smooth as the ice churning below my feet. As the walkway creaked and shuddered, I shuddered with it.

  Dean swiveled his head toward my silence, his bright eyes searching my face. “I say something wrong, Miss Aoife?”

  “Forget it,” I gritted, concentrating on where I stepped. Conrad wasn’t any of Dean Harrison’s business. Dean was a criminal, who smuggled other criminals for cash. What did I care if he thought my family was strange or common? We were strange. No power in science or the stars could change that. To all Rationalist folk, Conrad was a heretic—a boy who’d rejected reality and substituted the fantastical lie of magic and conjuring for science and logic. Heretics were, by their very definition, liars. Dean and Conrad would probably get along famously.

  “Forgotten as yesterday’s funny papers,” Dean said easily, and then let out a low whistle. “Night Bridge ahead. In the shadows. This isn’t something many from Uptown get to see.”

  Like one of Conrad’s hidden picture puzzles, the Night Bridge revealed itself to me by degrees. I saw the struts, the dark iron towers reaching for the bleak velvet sky, piercing it with sharp finials. The scrollwork railings crawled into focus, the
cables knitting themselves into cohesion as my eye pierced the darkness. I felt something sharp catch in my chest as I beheld the antique span, dark and skeletal, drifting through the night air.

  “Well?” Dean spoke close to my ear. I could feel his breath.

  “I’ve seen this before,” I said. The Gothic bridge arched a spiny back, cables rattling in the harsh wind blowing up the channel from the Atlantic.

  “Reckon you have,” Dean agreed. “In history books at whatever fancy school that uniform of yours belongs to.”

  The bridge before me was as familiar as the ceiling of my own room at the Academy, a span that dominated my structural engineering texts. The Babbage Bridge, a marvel of design, erected by Charles Babbage in 1891.

  “This isn’t possible,” I said out loud. “The Babbage collapsed in ’twenty-nine.”

  “That’s what they said,” Dean agreed. “But you tell me, Miss Aoife—what are you seeing now?”

  The Babbage Bridge, known to the citizens of Lovecraft as the Bouncing Baby, was a marvel in every way except one—its thin spiky towers and ultralight span were ill-equipped for the nor’easters and winter ice that bound up New England during the cold months, and on a particularly breezy January morning, the Babbage had given up the ghost, plunging twenty-one to their deaths in the Erebus. Condemned by the city, the usable pig iron had been salvaged and turned into the bones of Joseph Strauss’s newer, stronger, more practical bridge.

  Of course, people said you could still hear the screams of the twenty-one the Babbage claimed moaning through the cables of the new span, if the wind was from the east.

  But this was impossible—I was not seeing the bridge that had broken its back against a gale nearly thirty years earlier. That bridge was gone.

  “I’m not seeing things,” I told Dean. “That is not the real Babbage.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Dean said, walking again. I was forced to follow or be left behind. “You think just because the Head of the City or the Proctors down in Washington say a thing doesn’t exist, all memory up and fades away? You think twenty-one deaths don’t resonate in the aether to this day, on this spot?”

  “I don’t … I … Cal, are you seeing this?” I looked to him in confusion. Tales of phantoms were one thing. A phantom bridge was another, entirely.

  He grunted. “Uh-huh.” Cal couldn’t take his eyes from the span either, stumbling over his own feet as he approached it with the same reverence he used when opening the newest issue of Weird Tales. But this was beyond anything the Proctors used to make heretics seem like either fearful phantoms or a joke with the stories they paid people like Cal’s favorite pulp writer, Matt Edison, to pen. This looked real, in the way my own hand was real.

  “The Babbage became the Night Bridge,” Dean said. “Don’t ask me to explain all that existential beatnik stuff, about memory and manifest will, ’cause I can’t, but what I know is that the Night Bridge is here when I need it, because I can find it.”

  “If you expect me to believe that we’re crossing out of Lovecraft on some ghost bridge,” I started, drawing myself up severely like Mrs. Fortune, “you’re patently crazy.”

  “Boss design,” Cal said. “But is it sound?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It wasn’t sound in ’twenty-nine, was it? Babbage didn’t account for the wind drag and … I can’t believe I’m even explaining this. That is not the Babbage. It’s a trick.”

  It had to be. According to the laws of the Rationalists, the bridge was impossible.

  “No trick,” Dean said. “And it’s sound enough for your footsteps, Miss Aoife. I promise you.” He beckoned when he reached another set of steps, spiraling upward toward the span. “Come on. Now that we’ve seen it, we can’t very well not cross it.”

  “Let me guess—I’ll be cursed by the ghost of faulty engineering?” I said as we started up, to the bridge bed. Sarcasm wasn’t befitting a young lady, but I had to say something or I’d be too terrified to go another step. I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing. And yet I was walking it, feeling the frozen iron of the span under my hand, crossing a bridge that existed only in memory.

  “Now the Night Bridge has seen you, too,” Dean said, “and if you turned back, it could keep your soul forever.”

  I shivered, tucking my hand back into my pocket.

  “People don’t have souls,” Cal interjected. “That’s blasphemy.”

  “Do us a favor, cowboy,” Dean said. “If you have the urge to call blasphemy again on this trip … don’t.”

  Cal’s lip curled back, but I grabbed his hand. “It’s not worth it. We need his help.” I didn’t believe in souls the way the Rationalists explained them, but something was keeping this bridge hidden—keeping it in existence—and it wasn’t engineering.

  Cal growled in his throat. “I don’t like him, Aoife. He’s a heretic, and he’s common besides.”

  I stopped in my tracks, shoving a finger into Cal’s chest. “Why is he common, Cal?” I demanded. “Because he’s poor? Because he doesn’t have a family? Because he’s not like you?”

  He backed away from my prodding. “Aoife, I didn’t mean …”

  I dropped my hand and placed myself equidistant between Cal and Dean, in the orbit of neither. “Leave it. I don’t want to talk about it. With either of you,” I added when Dean’s ears pricked. I put my attention on the bridge. It could still be a trick. Mirrors, or a modification to Mr. Edison’s light-lantern.

  The stairs ended at a dilapidated tollbooth at the beginning of the span. Through cracks and holes the size of my body in the roadbed, I could see down to the water. My stomach flipped. I had no fear of heights, but a healthy one of drowning.

  From where I stood, I watched the span sway in the light wind, groaning and shuddering down to its base deep below the riverbed. I looked upward, at the towers moving. Bony fingers clawing at a cloud-streaked sky, trying to peel back the vapor to the stars. I shook my head at Dean. “This is unsafe. We need to turn back.” I didn’t care any longer if it was a trick or … something not a trick. I simply didn’t want to step foot on it.

  Dean lifted his shoulders. “Told you already, Miss Aoife—too late.”

  With a creak, the tollbooth window swung open. I jumped inside my coat. A brass face topped by a ragged cap and a brass arm encased in the tatters of a city worker’s uniform swung forth, nearly nose to nose with me. “Toll, pleassssse.”

  Dean reached inside his white T-shirt and pulled out a worn iron key on a chain. “Just a traveler, friend.”

  The automaton’s eyes flashed with a blue spark and it cranked its hand backward to pull aside the tatty blue uniform jacket hiding the rusted ribs beneath. A keyhole sat in place of a heart.

  “Pleasssse insert youuuur passsss … key,” the automaton creaked. The voice box wound slow, and every syllable dragged forth from the dented throat.

  I watched with fascination. Automatons were the purview of graduate students, those who passed their apprenticeships and were recommended to be master engineers. Powered by aether or clockwork, they worked in the foundries or in stately homes like the Langostrians’. This was likely the closest a common engineer like me would ever get to one.

  Dean inserted his key and turned it. Something whirred to life inside the automaton, its clockwork innards firing with a click-clack of gears wanting oil. Its eyes lit, small blue aether flames that stared at me. This wasn’t usual—automatons couldn’t see, couldn’t hear or feel. They were just metal laborers, doing tasks too punishing or delicate for human labor. Someone had modified this one, made it look and act like a man. It was wrong, like a springheel jack taking on the face of a trusted friend, until it could show its true, monstrous face and gobble you up. I didn’t want to look into its blue-flame eyes, any more than I wanted to look into the heart of the Engine without shielding goggles.

  The automaton croaked at me. “The traveler walkssss the Night Bridge freely. The ssssstranger paysss the toll.”

&nb
sp; “Does it want money?” I asked Dean, reaching into my skirt pocket. “How much?”

  “Easy,” he said, removing the key and tucking it back under his shirt. “Your money’s no good on the Night Bridge.”

  Cal shifted behind me. “I don’t like the look of this.”

  “What does it cost?” I demanded of Dean. “I’m not doing anything inappropriate.”

  “And I wouldn’t ask you to, Miss Aoife—least, not while you’re paying me as a guide. That’s a sacred, serious bond between guide and traveler and breaking it isn’t something I do.” His frown drew a line between his dark eyes, and he swiped a loose strand of hair off his forehead.

  “Fine,” I said. “What is it I have to pay?”

  Dean pointed with his chin at the slot below the tollbooth window, while the automaton looked on. “From an Academy girl like you, only blood will do.”

  My eyes must have gone wide even as I felt the color drain out of my cheeks, said blood coursing hard through my heart. I could be forgiven for going to the Rustworks, even the market. In the eyes of the Proctors, I was only a girl, and I couldn’t be expected to display the sense of a boy. A week’s suspension, a lecture or two from Mrs. Fortune and Professor Swan, and I could go on with my life at the School.

  But this was real, heretical dealings I’d be a part of. Giving blood in oath was a grievous offense, something the Proctors would have your hands in the castigator for. Blood was too much like the old ways, the old superstitions the Rationalists had burned out of the world when the necrovirus came.

  Dean tilted his head to the side. “That’s the toll, Miss Aoife. Prick your finger on the spindle and tumble on into dreamland, or go back to those safe stone walls and those cold metal gears before you’re a heretic and a criminal besides.”