Caitlin Kittredge - The Iron Thorn

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.

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.