The Iron Thorn (5 page)

Cal sobered, and I knew he was remembering the nightjar. The Proctors did their best to keep Lovecraft free
of viral creatures, but there were old sewers, old train tunnels and the river itself gave birth to some of the worst. No one could keep the horrors from creeping in at the edges of things. We weren’t an island, like New Amsterdam, and we weren’t walled like the modern marvel of San Francisco. Lovecraft was a previrus city, and it was dangerous.

“Contact with a viral creature can what, students?” Professor Swan fixed us with his pale eyes. His robes made him appear to be bodiless, just a diaphanous mass.

Marcos raised his hand. “Cause madness in a healthy person, Professor. In almost every case.”

Cal dropped his Civic Duty text on the floor with a crack like a steam rifle. “Or sometimes just a nasty case of influenza. Isn’t that what you had last week, Langostrian? Been kissing ghouls?”

The class tittered, and Professor Swan tinted from pale to flushed like a developing sepia. “Daulton. Two detention hours.” The rest of us got another sweep of his lantern eyes. “You think it’s a diversion, this talk of protecting our city, the city the Master Builder gave us?” He hit the podium again. “The world is a harsh place, a dark place, made darker by the heretics who would fill your heads with fancy notions like magic spells and fortune-telling. They do this to keep you from your true purpose. The necrovirus is not fancy. It exists, and it eats at each and every one of your reprehensible, superstitious cores. Now each of you will write an essay on the menace of madness infection to Lovecraft and how you suggest we better defend our city.”

The class groaned. Marcos muttered, “Thanks a lot, Cal.”

“You started it, twit,” I grumbled back. Marcos gave me a baleful look.

“Don’t you have a birthday coming up, Grayson?”

My cleverness died in my throat, replaced by a lump. Was there no one in this damn school who didn’t know about that?

Before I could grab him again, Cal started out of his seat. “You need to learn how to speak to a lady, pip-squeak.” Someone Cal’s size calling anyone a pip-squeak would have been funny, if Marcos hadn’t looked ready to pound his face.

“
Sit
down,” Swan bellowed. “Two more hours.”

“Just leave it,” I said to Cal. It was plain truth that I’d always be a city ward, the daughter of a madwoman, to Marcos. It was a fact of life, like uniform stockings itching behind the knees—unpleasant and inevitable. Fighting back just told the Marcoses of the world that their barbs hit home.

Cal glared at the back of Marcos’s head, slick with hair oil. “He shouldn’t say those things.”

“He can say whatever he wants. His brother is a Proctor in their national headquarters and his family could buy and sell me ten times over.” Not that it wouldn’t give me immense satisfaction to see Marcos take a sock in the jaw, just once. I filled up my pen and pressed it against the ruled paper. A little bit of ink dribbled out and made a dark sunburst on the top line.

“One last announcement before you begin work,” Swan said. “The heads of house will be conducting their monthly sweep for heretical contraband tomorrow. Remember, merits will be granted to those who turn in their roommates.
Informants are the backbone of the Proctors. All glory to the Master Builder.”

The class chorused back raggedly. I didn’t join in. Heretics—heretics who practiced magic, at any rate—were a child’s story. Those glass-eyed fanatics who threw Molotov cocktails at Proctor squads could no more practice
real
magic than I could fly without a dirigible. Magic couldn’t hold a candle to the necrovirus, to the great Lovecraft Engine that turned below the city, to the invisible grace of the aether. There was no magic. Not the way the heretics believed. If there were, why would I be stuck in Civic Duty writing a pointless essay?

The Engine had powered the city for twice as long as my lifetime, a heart made of brass and iron and steam. The Engineworks would be my eventual workplace, my home. Unlike spells and scrying, the Engine was a real place, a real device that managed to keep an entire city warm and lit and free of ghouls. That was real magic, not the ephemeral and heretical conjurations of self-proclaimed witches.

That was what Professor Swan and the Proctors would say, at any rate. My mother would disagree.

Instead of writing the essay Swan wanted, I pulled out Conrad’s letter and read it.
HELP
, over and over again.

Things didn’t improve during our schematics exam in the afternoon. I watched, my stomach leaden, as each student went forward and placed their folded plans on the professor’s table.

Finally, when it was just Cal and me left in the room, I gathered my things and walked out.

Cal caught up with me in the passageway, in between the stone pillars that held up the slate-roofed porch of the main classrooms. The rain was light, just fingers of mist drifting over the peaked gables of Blackwood Hall.

“Hey,” Cal said. “You didn’t turn in your schematic.”

“Hey, you’ve got eyes,” I returned, my anger landing on Cal instead of the one I really wanted to scream at. Cal’s mouth twisted downward.

“Aoife, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I grumbled. The failed exam was just the final nail in the coffin. Nothing had been right since I’d seen my mother. Cal leaned against the opposite pillar, a genial scarecrow after all the crops have gone.

“You know, if you fail exams this year we can’t apprentice at the Engineworks together next.”

Apprenticeships were far from my mind at that moment. Conrad’s letter was a guilty secret barbing me from where it sat in the pocket of my uniform skirt, and Dr. Portnoy’s words were its sound track.
An experimentation facility. HELP
. Over and over.

“I have to go,” I said, gathering my books and satchel. “Study,” I added.

Cal drooped at the shoulders like a sad clockwork man.

“Yeah. I have to get to detention anyway. See you after supper.” Cal loped away and I fingered the letter again. I needed to find a quiet place to burn it, to read the real words hidden in the ink. My dorm room was useless, with Cecelia meddling in everything. I’d make up for snapping at Cal later. That was the thing about Cal—you could push him away and he kept coming back. Cal was loyal. He wouldn’t hold my mood against me, and because of that I
felt doubly guilty for snapping. I didn’t think of it as often as I should, but truthfully Cal was the kind of friend a poor girl like me should thank the Master Builder for.

And I would. Once I’d read Conrad’s letter.

“Aoife!” Cecelia’s bell of a voice cut into my thoughts and made me jump. She grinned at me. “Did you want to come?”

“No, I have to make up my schematics exam …,” I started, surprised to see her outside our building. The Lovecraft Conservatory, where she studied, was on the other side of the campus. “Come to what?” I cocked my head at her flushed cheeks.

“It’s a burning!” Cecelia exclaimed. “It’ll be the last one before Hallows’ Eve. Come on!” She tugged me along and I had to follow, or be yanked off my feet.

“I have a lot of work to do …,” I tried again, diplomatically hinting I’d rather not go. Students were filtering in and out the front gate, crimson scarves like comet tails in the bright afternoon. The mist-shrouded night before seemed like a year ago.

“Work, shirk.” Cecelia giggled. “Get it? Besides, you work too much anyway. Just look at your hair. You’d think you’d never met a brush.”

She tugged me along and we walked down Storm Avenue, the leaves from the oaks swirling around our ankles. The rain stopped as we walked and the sky turned bright. The stone in the houses along Storm sparkled diamond hard.

“This is exciting, huh?” Cecelia trilled, squeezing my arm. I managed to pull away, this time. Cecelia was small,
every bit of her round and bouncy from her curls to her patent-leather pumps. She could be excited over everything from a concert to a burning. I was less excitable. Mrs. Fortune would say that was why I was an engineer.

“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