The Iron Thorn (8 page)

Now I was as far out of bounds as one could go, and it felt like a crisp wind in my face or jumping from a high place. I looked to Cal’s comforting height, and smiled at him as we walked.

I’d heard whispers from older students that you could buy anything at the Nightfall Market—outlawed magic artifacts, illegal clockworks and engine parts, women, liquor.

Most importantly, I’d heard from Burt Schusterman, who’d been expelled during my first year for hiding a still in his dormitory room, that you could buy a guide in and out of the city after lockdown and before sunrise. A guide who wouldn’t necessarily need passage papers to cross the bridges out of Lovecraft.

I just hoped he didn’t want more than fifty dollars, or strike his bargains in blood, or dream fragments, or sanity. I didn’t know that I had anything of the sort to give.

I chided myself as we walked through the silent, frostbitten lanes of the Rustworks, enormous mounds and heaps of junk threatening to topple their aging bones onto our heads. “Grow up, Aoife.” I was so lost in staring at the dead machinery in the junk piles that I didn’t realize I’d voiced the thought. Burt Schusterman could have been the most enormous liar. Rotgut was supposed to fiddle with your brain, wasn’t it?

“Huh?” Cal said at my outburst.

My flush warmed my cheeks. “Nothing.” I walked a bit faster. The light wasn’t here, and the shadows were long, with fingers and teeth. On a night like this, with a scythe-shaped moon overhead, it was easy to believe, as the Proctors did, in heretics and their so-called magic.

It crossed my mind, only for a second, to suggest we turn back, but the thought of Conrad somewhere just as dark and cold, and by himself, kept me climbing over half-rusted clockworks, through the hull of a burnt-out dirigible and past all the wreckage of Lovecraft’s prewar age, before the Proctors, when heretics had run rampant and viral creatures waited in every shadow to devour the unwary.

Finding the market was a bit like seeing a ghost—I didn’t truly believe it was real until we happened on it, and I saw shadows in the corner of my eyes and smelled the dankness of an eldritch thing, its breath misting on my face.

The Nightfall Market crept up on Cal and me in shadows and song—I saw a low lump of tent, and heard a snatch of pipes, and slowly, slowly, like a shy cat coming from under a porch, the Nightfall Market unfolded in front of our eyes.

Tucked into the dark places of the Rustworks, below the crowns of old gears and the empty staring heads of antique automatons, the Nightfall Market pulsed with movement, with sound and laughter. I hadn’t expected laughter. Heretics were meant to be grim, weren’t they? Concerned only with the trickery they called sorcery and the overthrow of reason?

I put aside my nerves. I didn’t belong here, that much was obvious, in my plain wool uniform skirt and with Uptown manners, but if I showed that I was terrified of ending up an example to next year’s frosh—“Did you hear about Grayson? The crazy one who got taken by heretics?”—the citizens of the Nightfall Market would never help me find Conrad.

Cal and I wound among the tents and stalls, made up of oddities and things that regular people would cast aside—fabric and metal and leather, stitched or riveted into a riot of color and odd shapes. The strange bit was, that haphazard as it first appeared, there was a sense of permanence to the place.

A pretty redheaded girl smiled and winked at Cal, her eyes an invitation into a big candy-striped tent that smelled
like overripe oranges and orchids. “You looking for a port, sailor?” she called.

“Keep walking, partner,” I told Cal when his head swiveled toward the girl. He gave me a lopsided smile.

“You’re not the type to let a guy have any fun, are you?”

“When we’re safe in Arkham and we’ve found Conrad you can have all the fun your immune system can stomach,” I said, with an eye on the girl and her cosmetic-caked face. She reminded me of a cheaper, brassier version of Cecelia.

Cal made cat noises, and I didn’t hesitate to punch him on the shoulder, though not too hard.

“If you wanted a date, Aoife, you should have passed me a note or two during Mechanical Engineering,” Cal teased. “There were plenty of school dances we missed our chance for.”

I snorted. The idea of a respectable boy like Cal with a girl like me was as ridiculous as the idea of him with the girl from the tent. She’d probably be more acceptable to the professors and his parents. Boys were allowed to go wild once or twice.

“Believe me, Cal, nothing is further from my mind than a date right now,” I told him as I tossed the girl a glare. She waggled her fingers at me before sticking out her tongue. I returned the gesture. I suppose I often don’t leave well enough alone, but Cal was
my
companion on this little adventure. She could go and find her own.

We turned a bend in the market’s alleyways and came to a square thronged with people. I paused. I had expected the girls of questionable reputations, accompanied by bandits and vagrants of the type popular with sensational
writers. But in actuality, an old pipe fire from a house long ago made wreckage was open to the air, and vendors had set up grills and kettles over the flame. The smell was oaky, earthy, a good cut of meat rubbed with spices. My stomach burbled at the scent, and I was reminded that I’d had to miss supper to come here.

“Books!” A boy in a checkered cap and an outdated newsie coat, half again as old as I was, shoved himself into my path, chest puffed like a bullfrog’s. “Spell books! Charmed paper! Never needs erasin’! Tinctures! Good for what ails you!” He squinted into my face. “Not much, by the look of it. Face like an angel on you, girlie.”

“I don’t have any money,” I returned. “You can save your pitch for some superstitious twit who does.”

“Ain’t no superstitions for sale here, miss,” he chimed back. “All of my charms ’er one hundred percent gen-nu-wine. I’ve got magics in my pen and a witch in my kitchen.”

“Magic’s not real,” I said. “If you’re so smart, you should know that.” I was trying to seem like someone who wasn’t easily conned, but my voice sounded small against the chatter of the market.

“Sure, an’ if you really believe that you’d be home in bed.” The kid wrinkled up his nose at me. “I could tell you where to buy a hairbrush instead, maybe. You need it.”

“Say,” Cal intervened, before I could make a move to strangle the little brat. “Where’s a guy find a guide around here?”

The boy spat in the dirt near Cal’s feet. “Piss off, townie. I look like I give out help to Proctor-lovers?”

Cal swiped at him. “You don’t know anything, you little rat.…”

I fished in my pocket for a half-dollar and held it up. The boy’s eyes gleamed to match. “What’s your name?” I said.

“Tavis. Thought you said you didn’t have any scratch?”

I made a second half-dollar join the first. Conrad had liked sleight of hand, though the Proctors frowned on something so close to what heretics considered magic. Tavis was practically panting. “We need a guide out of Lovecraft,” I said. “All the way to Arkham. I have money for that, and you seem like you know how things work around here. Or do you have a big mouth and nothing else?”

The first thing you learned in the School of Engines—if you want to understand how something works, ask the one who does the dirty job. Gear scrubbers and steam ventors and their foreman were in the pits. They knew their Engine intimately.

“I do, at that,” Tavis said. He pointed past the pipe fire to a blue tent. “You want old Dorlock back there. He’s a guide, best damn guide in the Rustworks. He could guide steam back into water. He could—”

I held up a hand, and dropped the two coins into his. I wondered what a pair of silvers bought in the Nightfall Market, besides bad manners from a shyster kid. “That’s fine. And for the record, I like my hair this way.” Truly, I hated it and toyed with chopping it into a modern style daily, but like I said, sometimes I don’t know when to leave it. Besides, I had a feeling Dorlock wasn’t as easily put in his place, and it might well be my last chance to feel in control of things tonight—or ever. Once I found Conrad, I’d have to face running off. I might be expelled. I didn’t think beyond that, because beyond expulsion was a cell in the
Catacombs, shock therapy to burn the madness out of me and finally, a place next to my mother. If I lived.

“Sure there isn’t,” Tavis snorted, brandishing his worn wares again. “And hey, townie,” he said to Cal as we started into the crowd. “You watch your girl. She’s got an edge of the pale on her, that one, and it’s like honey in a beehive down here.”

I shuddered, feeling like something rotten had touched me. Cal rolled his eyes. “Stupid little runt.”

“You mean, you don’t feel the urge to be my white knight?” I teased, nudging him in the ribs. “Thought that was your dream job.” This was my idea, and I wasn’t about to let Cal see that second thoughts had started the moment we left the Academy. A good engineer stood behind her plans as sound until they’d been tested and proved otherwise.

“Like you said, Aoife,” Cal grumbled, sounding for all the world like Professor Swan, “grow up.”

An edge of the pale
. If I’d had more coins to spare, I’d have asked Tavis what he meant. But my mother’s money was precious, and I needed every penny of it for this man Dorlock.

We skirted the fire and approached where Tavis said the guide lived, my feet slower with each step. Still, I grasped the tent flap firmly and pulled it aside. “Hello?” I peered into the tent, which smelled like a barbershop mixed with cheap liquor. “M-Mr. Dorlock, sir?”

“Hello!” The voice boomed back, sonorous and clearly used to the stage. Dorlock was entirely bald and sported a handlebar mustache, like a circus strongman. Somehow
I had expected our guide to be thin and shady, dark as the shadows he slunk through. But Dorlock would stand out at a Hallows’ Eve carnival.

“Why look at you, young lady!” he exclaimed. “Aren’t you ripe as a peach!”

If I were to treat him mathematically, take his measurements, he’d be extraordinarily large—a rolling tub of a man boiling over with cheer. I didn’t see what was so funny.

“We need a guide,” I said. “We need to leave Lovecraft. Tonight.”

Dorlock laughed, his kettledrum stomach trembling. “Doesn’t waste any time! Going to grow into one of those modern women, I fear, always in a rush!” He reached out to pinch my cheek, and I ducked. I’d grown an aversion to being touched a long time ago. Nuns will do that to a person.

“Please, sir,” I protested, trying to keep myself stiff and ladylike, like Mrs. Fortune. “Can you help us, or not?”

“Of course,” Dorlock boomed. “Of course, of course.” He crossed his bare arms over his leather vest and matted chest hair. I tried to look only at his face. “It’s all a question of payment, lassie.”

I looked back at Cal. “I have fifty dollars,” I said. Cal’s eyes went wide at the mention of the sum. Dorlock’s eyes, by turn, narrowed.

“Fifty United States American dollars, eh? Well, missy, it won’t buy much Uptown way but down here in the rat hole of the Rustworks, you just might have yourself a deal.”

I felt crestfallen, realizing at the gleam in Dorlock’s gaze why Cal had looked so alarmed. It was all my money.
I should have struck a harder bargain. A boy would have bargained. Conrad probably would have
made
money on the deal.

“We’ll leave in an hour or so, to beat the sunrise,” said Dorlock. “Up and down and all around we’ll go. It’ll be a grand adventure for you two kids.”

“I care less about the adventure than the Proctors,” I said, trying to stay firm.

“Yeah, and we’re fifteen,” Cal interjected. “We’re not
kids
.”

“Of course not, you’re a strapping young lad, aren’t you?” Dorlock chuckled. “Going to feed you up and get you big. Why don’t you go get something from the fires for your lady friend, strapping lad? It’s a long walk down under the ground.”

I frowned at that. “Ghouls live underground,” I said. Not even Proctors went into the old sewers and railway tunnels, the only “underground” I knew of. The new sanitation system ran on clockwork and didn’t need tending. Nobody went underground. Nobody alive, anyway.

Dorlock shook his head, brows drawing in like a bank of thunderheads. “You just have a head stuffed full of learning, don’t you, young lady? Worry less. You’ll get wrinkles before your time.” He laughed like he was the chief audience for his own joke.

I opened my mouth, knowing there was murder in my eyes, but Cal touched me on the arm. “I’ll get you a weenie with chili. If these people even know what one is.” He gave me a small nod before he walked away. I knew that nod—it was the
please don’t get us into trouble
nod. If Dorlock was
responsible for us not getting arrested, mouthing off would just be stupid.

As it turned out, the Nightfall Market didn’t possess any weenies or any chili to put on them, and Cal ended up standing in line to buy us two newspaper cones full of fish-and-chips. I sat on the fender of a Nash jitney that had rusted to chrome and bones next to Dorlock’s tent, where I could keep Cal in sight. Dorlock grinned at the white of my knees, and I pulled my skirt down over them.

“You do look sweet,” Dorlock said, reaching to push the hair out of my face. “Beauty soon fades, down here. You’re a rare treat.”

I glared up at him, knowing the knot in my throat that had started when he grabbed for me wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. “Don’t. We hired you to guide, and that’s all.”

“I’m just being friendly,” Dorlock said. “Loosen up, lassie.” He laid a hand on my shoulder and I shrunk, but it was like trying to pull myself out of a bear trap. “It’s a long time out of the city, and we might as well get along.”

Maybe that was the single blessing Nerissa’s madness had given me—I’d never had a mother to teach me smiles and manners, to do what a nice girl would do. I reached up and knocked Dorlock’s hand off my shoulder, hard. “Perhaps I don’t want to get along that way.”

Dorlock’s pouchy face fell in on itself, anger stealing into his small eyes. Hidden anger, like a snake. The most dangerous type.

“You don’t have any weight to throw around, lassie. I’m the one watching your hide underground, and it’d behoove you to treat me sweet.”