The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “It’s not a vacation to Cape Cod, that’s for sure,” I grumbled. The doctor chuckled.

  “Keeping your sense of humor. That’s important.” He took out a rubber cord and a syringe. “I’m going to roll up your sleeve, since you’re shackled. Is that all right?”

  “There is no necrovirus,” I insisted. “I’m not infected. Draven lied.…” I realized that my frantic denials at least sounded crazy to somebody who was a doctor, a man of science. I had to try to convince him and not sound like a lunatic. “I haven’t contacted any … any virals,” I amended. The word sounded so trite now. If there was no virus, there could be no virals.

  My shoggoth bite still throbbed when I moved too quickly.

  What was a shoggoth really? A monster? A thing from beyond the stars, fallen to earth? A creature that had oozed into our land from Thorn?

  “I know,” the doctor said. He tied the cord around my arm and slapped the inside of my elbow with two fingers. I blinked at him, not understanding.

  “You do?”

  “I do.” The doctor picked up his syringe and laid it against the blue vein crawling up my arm.

  “How do you know?” I pulled away as much as the shackles would allow. What did he know?

  “Listen to me very carefully,” the doctor said. His eyes bored into mine, stony green as if they’d been mined from some dark, secret cave. “In fifteen seconds, the aether and vox feed for the interrogation rooms will be interrupted. Look around the room. What do you see?”

  “I …” I tried not to gape. I might have a week ago, but now I just darted my gaze from the mirrored glass to the tired blue aether lamp bolted into the ceiling to the scuff marks, slimy and concentric, in the cement from a poor job of mopping.

  “You’re going to have less than thirty seconds in the dark,” said the doctor, jamming the needle into my arm and filling the long glass tube with blood, ignoring me when I gasped and jerked. “Go through the vent. Go quickly.”

  “Who are you?” I said. I might not be surprised any longer but I was just as bewildered.

  The doctor snapped the band off my arm and zipped his bag closed. “You know who I am, Aoife.”

  He backed away from me and pressed the door buzzer. I jumped from my seat, feeling like I was moving through a molten river, but I couldn’t let him leave before I’d seen his face.

  I wasn’t quick enough. The doctor stepped through the door, vanishing like he was a vision borne by madness.

  A half second later, the aether lamp went out.

  Darkness closed over my head like a drowning pool, and I moved forward on instinct. I fetched my shin against the metal leg of the table and bit back a curse.

  Go through the vent. Go quickly. Doctor’s words echoing in my mind, I closed the distance to the far wall and reached up with my shackled hands to grasp the vent cover. It was coated with dust and grease, but it fell away easily enough.

  Climbing in with my hands bound was nearly impossible, but the doctor hadn’t gifted me with a key or a leg up. Just the darkness.

  Outside the room, there was shouting, and the door buzzed. Quinn was coming back, coming to see that his prisoner was still in her rightful place and to administer pain if she wasn’t.

  I jumped and landed half in, half out of the vent, bashing my forehead on the top and my stomach on the lip.

  Pain was tertiary. I could feel it later, for any length of time it desired. Now I felt as if there were a furnace inside me, a steam engine pressurized to bursting. I crawled for my life, using my elbows, my knees, bruising and skinning all of the sharp edges of myself.

  I was perhaps fifteen meters down the vent when the lights came back on. A junction presented itself and I curled up in a ball, rolling to the left just as a hand lantern’s light sliced the spot where I’d been.

  “Foul the gears! She’s in the ventilation!” Quinn’s nasal voice, made sharper by bouncing off metal, followed me. “Lock down Ravenhouse. Get officers at all the exits. Alert the raven mechanics to have a flight ready to sweep the city.”

  I kept crawling, his exhortations to his fellows growing fainter and fainter. I passed over grates, saw Proctors running to and fro like insects in a man-sized ant farm.

  When I felt like I had stripped every last shred of skin from my knees, I stopped, panting, above a grate that covered me in bars of light.

  The door in the room below swung open and I heard the clank of shackles. “Get in and stay put!” a Proctor shouted.

  “Up your vents!” the prisoner snapped back. I froze in place, curling my fingers over the vent. I knew the voice, the tall silhouette and the dark hair.

  Dean.

  The Proctor’s Truth

  “DEAN!” I HISSED. He cast about for a moment and then looked up.

  “Aoife?” His mouth slackened. “What the hell are you doing up there?”

  “Long story,” I said. “I promise, when we’ve gotten away from here I’ll explain in full.” I shoved on the vent until it gave, then swung myself down, wincing as I landed. I had knocked myself around but good getting out of the interrogation room.

  Dean helped me up as best he could with his hands shackled, pressing his forehead against mine. “I can’t believe you’re here. I thought I’d never clap eyes on you again.”

  I breathed in for a moment, letting his scent of leather and cigarettes and boy calm my ragged breathing. “They tried,” I whispered. “But it’ll take a little more to get rid of me for good.” I held out my hands. “I think I can slip the door, but these shackles are another matter.” The skeleton lock, complex and virtually without moving parts, gave not a whisper to my Weird.

  “Leave that to me,” Dean said. “Got a hairpin, princess?”

  I reached up and snatched one from my bun, which had become just another one of my wild nests of hair in the face of Proctor force.

  “I met Grey Draven,” I said as Dean went to work on my shackles. Even with his hands tied, he was quick and smooth as a cardsharp shuffling a deck.

  “No kidding.” Dean stuck the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he worked the lock. “Always gave me the creeps in the lanternreels. He has those dead-man eyes, like he sees everything at once.”

  “He told me some things,” I said very quietly. “Some really terrible things, Dean. About me, about my father—”

  “Got it!” he said as my handcuffs snapped open. He handed me the pin. “I’ll talk you through it—get mine off and we’re gone, baby, gone.”

  “There is no necrovirus,” I said as I went to work on Dean’s shackles. “They made it up. Draven knows about the Folk. He told me how the gateways between Iron and Thorn used to be open. How people like my father have been trying to keep the balance while the Proctors just lie. Draven knows everything about me.”

  “That’s …” Dean shook his head. There was a long time where the only sound was the scrape of the pin against the lock. “Aoife, I don’t know what you want me to say to make that all right,” he said at last.

  “Nothing,” I said as I wiggled the pin in his locks. “Don’t say anything. I just had to tell someone before I exploded.”

  “So if there’s no virus”—Dean gave a long breath of relief as his shackles came loose, and rubbed his raw wrists—“what’s wrong with your old lady and your brother?”

  I turned to the door, laying my cheek against the metal, caressing the lock and the handle with my Weird. “I don’t know,” I told Dean. “But something is making us mad, and I aim to find out what.” I had always known that Nerissa’s behavior and her hallucinations and my dreams weren’t normal, never mind my own brother coming at me with a knife. There was still something in our blood. But now, at least, there might be a real cure.

  The lock popped and the door swung open before me. The Weird was quiet in this place encased in iron, easier to control. I flinched as my nose began to leak blood again. My vision slurred left and right as I stumbled along the wall with Dean.

  “We need to find Cal
,” I gasped. “Draven said … he said for the Proctors to torture him.…”

  I became aware that Dean was no longer behind me.

  “I don’t think we’re going to get far on that plan, princess,” he said, and I turned to watch him put up his hands. My stomach plummeted. We’d been so close.

  “Nice to see you again.” Quinn was flanked by two other Proctors, and they were all armed. He shouldered his weapon and snatched me by the arm. “Be a good little girl this time,” he whispered. He dragged me away from Dean and down flights of stairs, until dripping water and mold told me I was deep beneath the earth. We spilled into a hallway containing a row of iron doors lit only by a series of aether lanterns hung from crossbeams.

  “We’re below the riverbed,” Quinn told me as he unlocked the nearest door. “Unless you’ve got gills, you’re ours for good.”

  He tossed me into the cell and the door shut behind me. I shouted and screamed and pounded on the door, but it did no good. Once more, I was alone in the dark.

  Escape from Ravenhouse

  I LAY IN the dark for a long time, on cold stone, listening to water drip and things slither in the dark. Rats scuttled in and out of my view, through a drain in the floor trickling filthy water from the cell into the new sewers. I wondered if this blackness and the foul, eldritch caress of damp river air would be the last things I saw and felt before I was executed or lost to madness.

  I thought about what Draven had said, that he meant to use me to lure my father back to Lovecraft. I thought about the fact that nearly the entire world believed the most elaborate of lies.

  I wondered how many other heretics had gone to the castigator knowing what I knew.

  At last, when I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts for another moment, a second door rolled back from a nether part of the cell, letting in light and sound and two more forms, both of whom hit the floor with a thump and a curse from the Proctor herding them.

  “Who’s there?” A man’s voice, from the corner. I curled myself up, putting my back to a wall, trying to get as far away from the invisible rasp as possible. Who’d been dumped in here with me? I had a feeling they might be worse than the Proctors.

  “Who are you?” Something ran over my foot and I kicked at it.

  “Aoife?”

  I squinted into the dimness of the cell. “Dean?”

  A hand reached out and felt for mine, and I grabbed it. “Oh, Dean. You’re all right.” I had never been more glad of anything in my life. Alone, I might make it out alive, but knowing that Dean’s life rested with me as well redoubled my resolve.

  “Of course I am, kid,” he whispered. “You never doubted me, did you?”

  “Did they hurt you?” I demanded. “I can’t see you.” I reached out and felt for Dean’s face, and he caught my hands and pressed them against his cheek.

  “I’m in one piece, at least,” he murmured. “It’s going to be all right, Aoife.”

  “Cal,” I said, seized with panic again. “Where’s Cal?”

  Dean went quiet. I stood up, slowly, feeling my way along the wall. “Dean. Where’s Cal?”

  “You can’t get marginal on me, Aoife,” he said. “But they brought us in at the same time. He’s in here.” There was a shuffle and a click, and Dean’s lighter flamed to life.

  The light illuminated Cal’s body, and I let out a small cry, which I trapped with my hands. My empty stomach rebelled for the hundredth time that day and I choked, the sight before me grotesque and unbearable.

  Dean leaned forward, cupping the flame with his hands. “Looked pretty rough when they brought us in here. He didn’t say anything.”

  Cal’s face was a welter of bruises, his right eye swollen shut and his lower lip split. Bruises on his wrists mapped where he’d been tied with something sharp and elastic, and his shirt had blood on it.

  “Oh, please no …,” I whispered. “Cal, Cal, Cal.” I shook his shoulder, but he didn’t move except to roll away from me, toward the wall.

  “Why would they do that?” I said. I wanted to hit something, and I banged my fists against the cell door, over and over, wishing it were the Proctor who’d beaten my friend. Dean grabbed my hands, pinned them at my side.

  “I don’t know why, Aoife, and there doesn’t have to be a reason. The situation is, they beat him bad and he’s going to kick off if we don’t do something.”

  Dean had bruises too, when I looked closer. I touched the cut on his cheekbone, twin lines of red. He flinched. “It’s nothing. Just standard heavy work. Letting me know they weren’t fooling around.”

  “Cal’s not a criminal,” I said. “They had no reason … Draven just needs me.”

  “These people don’t need much of a reason for anything, Aoife,” Dean said. “They need you, sure. Us, they’ll keep here until they need more bodies for the castigator. Then … we’ll be broiled beef.”

  “Stop saying that,” I ordered, my last reserve of will close to snapping. I could put on a brave face, but sooner or later my true one would show and I’d be in a heap. “I almost got out of here, and there will be another chance.”

  “Not to piss on the parade,” Dean said, “but all the Rustworks knows: you end up in Ravenhouse, you end, full stop.” He held the lighter over me while I felt Cal’s pulse and checked his eyes, the basic first aid all engineers had to know in case of an accident on the job.

  I never imagined using it like this.

  “You can’t give up on me,” I said to Dean. I was scared, so scared my fingers were vibrating, but more than that I was angry. Angrier than I’d ever been. Draven’s lies were the reason we were down here, not through any fault of ours. “If you give up,” I told Dean, “then I’m going to break into a million pieces.”

  Dean frowned as the lighter flickered, flame lowering. “Bad news, kid. We’re going to be in the dark for the rest of this party.” He shut the lid of the lighter. “But I’m here, Aoife. I’ll give you everything I’ve got.”

  “Thank you,” I said softly. “I need you, Dean.”

  He nodded, squeezing my shoulder in the dimness. “Figure I need you too. You are the brains of the operation, after all.”

  I rolled Cal onto his back and felt him over. He groaned when I touched his ribs, his chest. “He might have gotten something crushed internally,” I said. “He needs a doctor.”

  “And I need a drink,” Dean said. “I figure Cal and I have the same chance at both. We should wrap his ribs, at least for comfort. I busted one during a pit fight in Jamestown and it hurt like knives.”

  “Pit fighting?” I was talking so that my mind wouldn’t run away, chattering like I was at one of Mrs. Fortune’s inane tea parties, to keep from the ugly reality of my situation. “Who would have guessed an upstanding boy like you would enjoy such a pastime?”

  “Never tell an Irishman three sheets to the wind that he’s got a pretty sister,” Dean said. “Sound advice.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I murmured as I ripped open Cal’s shirt, buttons flying, and extricated his long arms from the too-short sleeves. “Dammit. He never gets anything tailored.” Tears welled up, the pressure too much.

  “Give it here,” Dean said. “I’ll make bandages. Get him talking—if they whammed his noggin, he shouldn’t fall asleep.”

  “Cal.” I shook him, gently as I could. “Cal, say something.”

  “Aoife.” My name on his lips was thickened with blood and delirium. “They brought you back.”

  “I was trying to get out,” I said. “I got caught.”

  “I …” Cal coughed, and dark blood appeared on his chin like inky raindrops. “I gotta tell you something, Aoife.”

  “No,” I said, smoothing a hand over his forehead. “Save it. There’s time yet.”

  Linen shredded as Dean ripped up Cal’s school shirt. Cal grabbed for me. His palm was slick, with blood or sweat, I couldn’t tell. “Can’t wait. I can’t wait.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “You have to stay still,
Cal. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I lied to you.…” Cal’s voice went dreamy, and his pulse under my fingers slipped away like a drop of mercury on glass.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Whatever you did, I forgive you.”

  “You shouldn’t,” he said. “I’m so far away, Aoife … so far away from home.…”

  My shoulder began to throb, and I clamped my free hand over the bite. “Dean, he’s not making any sense.”

  “He lost a lot of his juice,” Dean said. “Probably needs a transfusion.”

  “Cal.” Shaking wasn’t working anymore, so I slapped him across the face, trying to avoid the worst of his bruises. “Don’t you die on me, Cal Daulton. I’ll get you blood. Just please hang on.”

  “I don’t need blood,” he wheezed after a moment. “I need …” Another coughing fit, more blood droplets scattering across the stones and my hands.

  “What?” I said. “Tell me, Cal.”

  “I need meat,” he rasped. “Fresh meat. Something live.”

  I gaped at him. “Why in the stars would you need that?” The pain in my shoulder where the shoggoth had bitten intensified and I groaned. I’d be seeing double if I could see at all. The last time it had hurt this much was when I’d been close to eldritch creatures, as if, in a peculiar way, the shoggoth’s venom had given me an early warning.…

  “Meat,” Cal whined, in a voice that echoed off the high parts of the cell. “I want to eat.…”

  “Aoife.” Dean grabbed my shoulder and I yelped. His touch burned the shoggoth’s bite. “Get away from him. Now.”

  “He’s in shock,” I said. “He’s hallucinating.”

  Cal gave another groan like bones creaking, and then he sat up, as if someone had jammed a rod into his back. The spot on his face I’d touched was beginning to peel back, skin hanging in loose ribbons. I stared, unable to think of moving, or anything but the sloughing flesh on the face that had formerly been Cal’s.