The Iron Thorn

needed my help enough for me to risk it.

Or he was mad, and I was following him, the infection dropping my guard, making me take risks. Follow criminals. Act irrationally.

I rubbed the scar under my jaw with my free hand. My other was around Cal’s waist, fingers pressed between his ribs. “Thanks, Aoife,” he whispered. “But maybe we can just forget this bit when I tell the guys about our trip?”

He smiled at me, and I managed to smile back through my effort of supporting half his weight. “Whatever you say, Cal. You’re the hero of that story.”

Dean whistled low from up ahead. “Back gate,” he said. “Locked, though.” He extended his palm to me. “Got a hairpin you can spare, miss?”

I pulled the bobby pin out of the left side of my regulation bun and handed it to him. Dean bent it open with his teeth and worked on the padlock. It popped with an irritable creak. I wished misbehavior came as easily to me, with as few compunctions. The nervous knot in my guts wouldn’t be nearly choking me now.

“Nice work,” I said. He shrugged and tucked the pin inside his pack of cigarettes.

“Easy trick. If you like, I’ll teach you sometime.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Cal said. “Aoife’s a nice girl.”

“You don’t spend a lot of time around the fair sex, do you?” Dean teased, that insufferable grin coming into play.

“It’s fine,” I told Cal when he tensed. Cal was easy to tease—the Master Builder knew that for a fact—but he was hurt and Dean wasn’t playing fair. I cast Dean a sharp look. “It’s not such a far journey upstate. It’ll be over before you know it.”

“Not soon enough,” Cal huffed, but he let me help him through the foundry gate all the same.

7 The Berkshire Belle

I DEVELOPED A discordant rhythm walking with Cal, down from the county road outside the foundry, through a ditch that soaked my feet to the ankles with freezing brackish water, up the other side and across a frozen field patchy with forgotten cornstalks. Dean stayed a few feet ahead, his back and body tense, hands shoved in his dungaree pockets like a gunfighter waiting to draw. I knew better than to ask him where we were going, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t wondering. As an Academy student, I was rarely permitted to leave the grounds, never mind the city. The last in recent memory was a field trip to a quarry. Even by engineering standards, not exciting.

The pulse of the lighthouse on Half-Moon Point winked through the trees as our footsteps disappeared into a carpet of early snow and pine needles, the field ending at a broken stone wall.

“How much farther?” I whispered to Dean, as Cal’s soft pants of pain warmed my right ear.

“Not far,” Dean said. “Other side of the woods, on the point. That’s where the airship lands.”

“Airship?” I almost lost my grip on Cal from surprise.

“Sure thing.” Dean grinned. “You want to get to Arkham—the Berkshire Belle and her crew are the quickest route.”

The trees thinned as the ground became rock and I could hear the rush of the ocean and feel the tinge of salt on my skin. We were much farther away from the city than I’d realized.

Directly beyond was the Lovecraft lighthouse, the white spire with its black band standing guard at the mouth of the river. Moored beyond, where the water met the rock, was an airship.

I’d seen airships before, small skimmers that flew from Lovecraft to New Amsterdam, or out to Cape Cod and Nantucket when the weather was fair. This craft was different from all of them—the silvery hide of the rigid balloon was patched and the passenger cabin was battered, windowless and military gray, not sleek and welcoming like the Pan Am and TWA zeppelins that took off from Logan Airfield. The fans clicked as they rocked back and forth against their tie-downs in the wind. It was beautiful, in its own way, scarred and slippery—a shark built for air.

“Now, you let me do the talking,” Dean said. “Captain Harry’s here every night, and passage is included in your fee, but if he doesn’t like your look …” Dean drew a thumb across his throat. My scar itched in response.

“This Captain Harry sounds like a real pirate,” Cal said. Cal would bring up pirates. As if we hadn’t had a year’s supply of excitement just getting here.

I looked at the Berkshire Belle’s hulk and listened to the moan of its moorings as we came closer, the sound like the murmuring of the madhouse after lights out, or the whispering of a ghost, if I believed in such things. Which I emphatically did not, but seeing the Babbage appear from nowhere, the ghostly dirigible, the moonlight and the frost called up echoes of a spectral world. The Proctors abhorred unsanctioned tales of witchcraft and fairies, angels or demons, but I’d never been chastised for listening to a ghost story. Now I wished that the girls in my hall hadn’t delighted in passing them around quite so much. Tonight, I could almost believe.

“Harry’s a card,” Dean said. “Came out of Louisiana, swamp folk. He’d cut your tongue out soon as look at you, but the Belle ain’t never been stopped by the ravens.”

“Never?” I said. The ravens saw everything—nothing lifted more than a foot off the ground under its own power in Lovecraft without Proctor approval.

“Never,” Dean said. “Harry’s too fast for ravens.”

“Yeah, well,” Cal groused. “Fast, slow … he better have someplace for me to sit, with this bum ankle.”

Dean banged on the hull. After a moment the hatch wheel spun and it opened with a creak and a rumble of abused gears. Captain Harry might be stealthy in the sky, but he needed to learn his way around an oilcan.

“Evening,” Dean said to the figure in the hatch, a massive man in a greatcoat, profile shielded in shadow. “Got two with me looking to take passage up Arkham way. The usual fee.”

There was silence for a long time, and even though I only caught the gleam of lenses and brass where the man’s eyes should be, I could feel him staring. I shifted under the silence and the stare, letting out a small cough. “Hello, sir. Captain, I mean.”

“Bonsoir, mam’selle,” he said, finally. “And Dean Harrison. I think I not see you again for some time after that trouble up Lovecraft way.”

“Trouble?” Cal perked like a poodle sniffing hamburger meat. “What trouble?”

I admit I wondered the same, but I had the sense to keep quiet about it in front of Dean and Captain Harry.

“Nothing you need to get excited about, kid,” Dean snapped. “Got no time for gossip, Harry. I’ve charged this young lady fair and square and I’m her guide.”

“Mais oui,” Captain Harry said. His accent was slow as syrup on a cold morning, but his voice was gravel, hardened and crushed by years of smoke and wind. “She’s a different class of traveler, no? Young.” He stepped out of the hatch, his big steam-ventor boots—bigger, thicker, brass-bound versions of the boots Dean wore—crushing the rock beneath the airship with a grating like bone on bone. In the light, Harry was about Professor Swan’s age, massive and unkempt, sporting red hair shot with white through the left temple, like he’d been struck by lightning. Bug-eyed ruby glass flying goggles covered his eyes and crimson stubble his face, which was split by a wide grin. He fit with the Berkshire Belle—scarred and rough, but in fine working order.

Harry stuck out a large hand and said, “Who might you be, mademoiselle?” I didn’t take it. His paw could have crushed both of my hands with room to spare, and I’d abused them enough crossing the bridge.

“I might be Aoife Grayson, and I might be in a hurry,” I said, tightening my grip on Cal. I wasn’t going to be the pretty, delicate thing who needed men to do her talking. Harry didn’t seem hostile, but Dorlock hadn’t either.

“Pretty, hein,” Captain Harry hooted. “But even less manners than you, eh, Dean?”

“We almost got peeped by some ravens on the bridge,” Dean said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to see the Lovecraft in my taillights just as much as the young lady.”

“Oui, course you would.” Captain Harry gestured with a sweep of his greatcoat.