The Iron Thorn

to find where he’s gone.”

“Aoife, be reasonable …,” Cal started, but I walked away from his words. Cal and I had been friends ever since we’d both been without a partner for our first tour of the School of Engines, but lately we sat at odds over everything, our conversations going in unfamiliar directions that twisted them into something angry with jagged edges.

Losing my only friend over my family sat poorly, like something rotten and too large in my gut. If I had no Cal, then right now I’d have no one.

To distract myself from my thoughts, which were swirling off in a black direction indeed, I went back to the library, brushing past the doors like I had nothing to worry over.

Conrad had told me to fix the clock, and I would use machines and math to soothe my troubles.

The clock waited at the far end of the long high room, pendulum twitching at random like a rat’s tail. I knelt before it and opened the case, staring into the wicked, sharpened gears.

“I’ll fix you,” I said. “If you’ll let me.”

For a moment, nothing happened and then the gears turned faster, pendulum lashing like the shoggoth’s tentacles.

“I’m not going to break anything,” I promised the clock. “Please. I have to fix you.” Was this the first sign of madness? Talking to inanimate machines? Perhaps I was only mad if I got a reply.

I reached slowly toward the clock’s case, even though sticking my hand inside the whirl of gears with the way they spun would result in me losing a crop of fingers. “Conrad told me,” I whispered. “I have to fix it. I have to fix you.”

My fingertips tingled, and my head echoed as the clock began to chime; I felt as if a pipe fire had sparked to life in my chest. My entire body ran fever-hot, and dampness broke out under the silk of my dress. The dancing snare of static spread up my arm, all through me, and the tolling of the clock became a single reverberation, splitting my skull in half.

I shrieked. “Stop!”

Quickly as it had ramped up at my appearance, every gear within the clockwork ground to a halt, fine metal shavings raining to the bottom of the case as gears fouled themselves against one another’s filed teeth.

I waited for a moment, the idea that the clock had stopped on my command ludicrous even to my mind, but the mechanism was still. As if it were waiting.

I reached into the case, mindful of my cut thumb and bruised knuckles. Every sharp edge of the clock’s innards was hungry, and I exhaled shakily as I felt edges and ridges catch on my skin. If the clock started again it would take my fingers off, but Conrad had told me to fix it, and I didn’t see another way to do it.

Trying to recall what I knew about clockwork from our basic class in gearworking the previous year, I loosened and reset each gear that had slipped out of sync, and tugged on the clock’s weight to start it ticking again. It groaned in protest and still ticked out of time.

Dean stopped in the double doorway, shrugging into his leather jacket. “I’m going out for a smoke, miss. You want to tag along, or …” He came closer, crouching to unzip my toolkit and examine it. “Looks like you’re busy.”

“The ticking,” I lied. “It keeps me awake at night.”

“I dunno, princess,” Dean said as I tugged at a stuck gear. “Can you really fix this old thing?”

“The timing is fouled,” I said, finding a useless lump where the master gears should be. “It looks like I need to strip and recalibrate the entire assembly to get it working properly.”

Dean grinned. “Need any help?”

I laid out the first gear and its bolt on the carpet, and noted its position in the clock case. “What happened to your smoke?”

Dean handed me a wrench as I fumbled for it, body half in the clock case. “Smoke’ll keep.”

The job of recalibrating a large and complex assembly like the one in the library would be a thing even for a skilled clockmaker, and Dean and I were both cursing and grease-covered by the time we’d emptied the case of gears, bolts and rods. Gutless and silent, the clock appeared as a skeleton rather than a beast, and I felt a flush of shame that I’d ever been afraid of it.

Cleaning and reassembling the clock took a bit less time than getting it apart, though only a bit, and Dean and I were tired enough to work in silence. It was companionable in its own way, he carefully cleaning the gears and handing them to me, me placing them back into the clock. The clock itself was far more complex than any I’d encountered, even the scientific chronometer in the School of Engines that had six faces and kept times for the whole of the world at once. This had any number of gear parings that attached to rods planted far back in the wall, which were attached to other assemblies that I couldn’t see. This had to be why doors opened by themselves and why I could hear the clock ticking even on the other side of the house.

“You and your brother,” Dean said at length, breaking the silence. “Thick as thieves, I take it.”

“We took care of each other,” I allowed. “He’s … he was my only family.” Lying on my side and tilting my head backward into the case to reach the last gear, I put it in place and twisted the bolt to hold it steady, before gently pressing it into place with its companions. “There,” I said. “Let’s wind it and see what we’ve got.”

“Pretty boss scar you got there.” I jumped when Dean’s fingers brushed my neck. “Didn’t see it till now. You’re always looking at your feet.”

I jerked away from Dean’s touch and stood to open the glass door of the clock face. “We have to wind it,” I repeated, resolute that I wasn’t going to blush, cry or show any reaction whatsoever to Dean seeing my scar. It wasn’t any of his concern. It wasn’t any of my concern what he thought of it.

“So you’re not going to spill how it got there?” Dean pulled a mock pout. “Hardly seems fair. You know everything about me.”

“I find that hard to believe, Dean.” I wound the clock key. It was stiff but turned smoothly, with none of the hitches in the gears that I’d first encountered.

“You know plenty,” Dean said. “You know that my name’s Dean Harrison, that I’m a heretic but a hell of a charming guy, I smoke Luckies and I don’t much care for onion rings.”

I laughed, hoping Dean had let the scar go at mild curiosity. “That last part, I didn’t know.” The key wound tight, and I stepped back, shutting the glass over the sinister paintings on the clock face.

“Now you,” Dean coaxed. “Come on. What’s your favorite lantern flick? Favorite record? Preferred flavor for a milk shake?”

I watched the gears of the clock whirr to life. “You don’t get my secrets that easily, remember?”

Dean shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying. Secrets are my stock-in-trade.”

I gave Dean a small smile, a genuine one. I hadn’t felt much like smiling since I’d gotten Conrad’s letter, but Dean made it a little easier. “Maybe you should try a bit harder.”

The clock hands flipped over on ten o’clock, and the chime drowned out any secret I might have been tempted to slip into Dean’s grasp.

“That’s something,” Dean said when the sonorous tolling had ended. At least it didn’t make my head spin anymore. “I know my way around a jitney engine, but this …” He smiled. “You’re a bright penny, kid.”

I wiped the grease from my hands with my toolkit’s supply of rags, watching in satisfaction as the clock spun on with nary a hitch. “You can call me Aoife, you know.” Not that I minded very much being called princess.

Before Dean replied, a great rumbling like a waking beast began under our feet. Dean’s eyes snapped wide. “What on scorched earth is that?”

The books on the shelves vibrated, as if they were itching to shed their covers and fly away. I grabbed hold of a shelf to keep my footing, and Dean reached for me as well. “I don’t know,” I shouted over the rumbling. From far off, I heard crockery falling and Bethina give a scream. What had I done now?

“Aoife?” Cal stumbled into the library on the bucking floorboards. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know!” I didn’t, truly, and my panic rose along with the rumbling from under the floor, as if we were standing in the bowels of the Lovecraft Engine, chambers turning at full capacity and pressure building without a relief valve.

Then, abruptly as it had come upon us, the rumbling ceased and a section of wall above my father’s writing desk rolled back, soundless as the servant’s passage to the kitchen. But this was smaller and older, clearly built into the house at conception. It hid a brass panel, half as tall as I was and twice as wide. Dials and switches, valves and