Caitlin Kittredge - The Iron Thorn

In my mind, something pale and terrible raised its head and woke. It was larger than the Weird, sharper, and it blew through me like the aetheric fire of Oppenheimer’s war Engine.

Magic.

The Winter Queen opened her eyes and stared into mine. My shoulder flamed with pain and my vision blacked out.

“The Iron Land has dreamed a great dream,” Tremaine whispered in my ear as I writhed under the onslaught of power pouring back into the Thorn Land. “Peace from all but a few escapees of Thorn, exceptions that you explained with a virus. Peace from ensnarement and enchantment, as it was in the old days. But no longer.” He touched my forehead.

“Your father and your brother and Draven all played their parts,” Tremaine whispered. “In their furor to do what they felt was the true and righteous thing for Thorn and Iron. And now you’ve played yours. And now a new storm is coming, Aoife. If I were you”—Tremaine’s lips brushed mine, so soft and close was his whisper—“I’d run and hide.”

New pain erupted from my palm, sharp, thin silver pain, and my eyes flew open.

MY PALM WAS crosscut, bleeding freely into the heart of the Engine where I’d reached out my hand to touch the glowing star-fire blue of the aetheric chamber.

“You wouldn’t wake up.” Dean knelt by me where I lay. His voice shook. “I cut you. You wouldn’t wake up.” His switchblade was dark with blood.

The Engine gave a rumble, a death spasm, and a girder dropped in a graceful parabola, narrowly missing us and falling into the gears, fouling a set the size of cottages.

“It’s overload,” I murmured, because I’d seen the lanternreel. What to Do in Case of Overload . “We have to … get down … under our desks.…”

“Desks, hell,” Dean said. “We’re blowing this joint. Up you come.”

I managed to get up, with his help. “Yes … run.” The Engine was giving off smoke now and pressure alarms were screaming from every control set.

The end of that lanternreel showed a burning, cratered city. A great wound on the earth, burned from the inside out.

I had only meant to divert the Engine’s power, just for a moment. I hadn’t meant to cause overload.

I hadn’t meant to unleash Tremaine and his Folk on the Iron Land.

What had I meant to do? What had I done ?

Dean grabbed my good hand and together we joined the stream of evacuating workers, up staircase after staircase as the earth shuddered and convulsed beneath us.

Up and up, into the free, fresh air. It tasted like nothing except metal and death to my tongue. Tremaine said the iron drove me mad. Drove changelings mad. He’d said so many things.

Tremaine had done the thing my father had sought to deter his entire life. The Gateminder and the Folk need one another . To maintain a balance, to hunt down things that crossed from one to the other, to keep the gates between Thorn and Iron shut.

And I’d opened them. I’d let magic into a world that called it a lie, that couldn’t absorb it. That was what I’d done.

“Move, kid!” Dean bellowed in my ear. “This monster is gonna blow!”

The Engineworks had vents, all over the city, and they were sending out jets of steam that were melting the stone and iron around them as we crested the ground. Manhole covers flew off like bullets and Klaxons screamed in the air.

The grounds of the Engineworks were chaos, workers running headlong for the fences, piling up at the gate, screaming at the Proctors, who were themselves running for their lives.

In the city itself I could see the steam gathering over the tall spires of Uptown like a pair of vast wings, stretching to engulf everything that the Proctors and the Rationalists held dear.

The screaming wasn’t just sirens, I realized. There was a drone in the air, of human voices that rose and fell with the air-raid Klaxons. Outside the fences of the Engineworks, black shapes darted and hissed at the people inside. Nightjars, in the daytime. They were freed from the gates at last—every Proctor in the city was occupied, and the population was theirs for the picking.

Thorn’s children would feast.

“It’s horrible …,” I whispered. “I am so sorry. I didn’t want this.…”

“Enough,” Dean said. He ripped off his fire suit and helped me do the same. “We have to go, doll.”

The mob of workers were breaking the fences, only to be set upon by a cluster of nightjars and springheel jacks still wearing vestiges of their human faces. New screams joined the faint ones rolling back from the hills of Uptown.

Dean turned away from the carnage at the gates and ran for the river, dragging me with him. The icy black rushed up at us, and before I could protest or balk we went over the edge, off the pier.

In midair, a great hand snatched me and pulled me away from Dean, a crackle like a thousand rifle shots and then a boom and a loss of air.

A great emptiness opened up where my Weird sang.

I plunged into the dead winter water of the Erebus River knowing that the Lovecraft Engine was no more.

The cold kept me from fainting at the great bodily shock the overload of the Engine caused. It seized my lungs and forced me to kick for the surface. I scraped my palms on floating chunks of ice, but when I broke free of its grasp I sucked down air and tried to kick against the current.

From my vantage on the water, I watched Lovecraft burn. Crimson smoke from the Engineworks blanketed the sky like a red tide, and screams floated over the water. Clockwork ravens swirled aimlessly overhead, flummoxed by the devastation.

By the shore, black shapes crawled, coming out of sewer drains and shadows and the air itself. I couldn’t discern which screams came from the Engine and which from the crawling remnants of the Folk.

“Dean!” I shouted. My voice was gone, stolen by ice and smoke. “Dean!”

“Aoife!” His shout came from a piling on the bridge, toward which I rapidly swept. “Hold on! I’ll catch you.”

I caught his hand, nearly lost it again, grabbed on to his leather and clutched. Dean hauled me onto the piling next to him, only half out of the water, but half was better than none. “Thought I lost you, kid.”

“I’m n-not …” As soon as I hit the air, I began to shiver again. “I’m not that easy … t-to lose.”

“I’d drink to that, if I still had my flask,” Dean said. He squinted across the river. “It’s all gone. The Engine. The city. Lovecraft is eating itself.”

I looked away. I didn’t want to see my old home, the cold streets and Ravenhouse and my mother’s asylum.

My mother …

“My mother !” I shrieked at Dean. “She’s still there … I have to go back!”

Dean snatched me before I fell into the river again, but his arms couldn’t contain the swell of fear. Nerissa and I did not behave like mother and daughter, had never behaved that way, but she was my only mother and she was trapped in a dying city where the Folk were running free. I had to find her, had to take her somewhere the Iron Land engendered couldn’t touch her.

“We’ll come back for her,” Dean said, rocking me. “We’ll come back. She’s locked down in a madhouse; she’ll be all right. You have my word.”

I didn’t have the strength to fight his arms any longer, and I collapsed back against the pilings.

“It’s all gone wrong,” I rasped. My throat was raw from the water and the smoke that even now filled my nose.

I pulled my legs up to my chest, keeping myself as dry as I could, even though the wind meant that hypothermia would already be setting in. I’d escaped the Engine and Tremaine only to die under a bridge.