Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (14 page)

“It’ll be fine,” Cal insisted.

“Calvin,” I hissed, anger at his stubbornness bubbling up. “It will not be
fine
. It will be a disaster. You’re my friend and I love you, but those ghouls over there aren’t all your family. You said it yourself when the Engine got destroyed—the ghouls in Lovecraft are on a Wild Hunt. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it can’t be good.”

Cal swallowed, his lumpy Adam’s apple scraping at his pale throat. “A Wild Hunt is what we do when we mean to cleanse a place of all prey. It means that everything not a ghoul is fair game, and ghouls who refuse to hunt become the hunted.”

“Then that includes Bethina,” I said. “And you, by extension. You don’t want to do that to her, Cal. If you insist on lying to her, don’t put her in danger on top of it. Please. I like her, and I don’t want her hurt.”

He sighed, raking a hand through his stiff, oily blond hair. “I hate this, Aoife. I’ve never met anyone like her. I do want to be …” He dropped his hand, ungainly and too big for his wiry frame. “I want to be Cal, sometimes. Cal all the time. If my nest heard me say that …”

“I know,” I murmured. “Trust me, I know the wanting to be something you aren’t. I want it too.” I stopped and faced him, reaching up to put my hands on his shoulders and meet his eyes. Those eyes could be stone cold, animal and vicious, but they’d also provided the only kind gaze I’d known in all my time at the Academy. “The best thing you could do for Bethina right now is not let her come to any more harm. And when this is over, the next best thing you can do is tell her the truth.”

Cal’s shoulders drooped at that, and he opened his
mouth, probably to tell me how crazy I was to even suggest that he reveal his true nature, but he straightened again and went quiet when Bethina caught up.

“This place is spooky, huh?” she said, linking her arm with Cal’s. I moved away and let her have the closeness. From having Dean, I knew how important that could be.

“It’s not so bad,” he said, trying to stand and push out his chest to look bigger. “Besides, I’m here with you.”

“Like I was saying to Cal,” I told Bethina. “I think it’s best if the two of you wait here, in Nephilheim. Cover our retreat, sort of.”

Cal nodded now that Bethina was listening, but his jaw was tight. I knew how much Cal lived for adventure, in fictional form and in the cheesy aether plays the Bureau of Proctors broadcast over the tubes. Being told he had to stay behind might grate on him, but if he went into Lovecraft, he’d be eaten alive. That was, if the Proctors didn’t capture and torture their former informant to death first.

It was the truth, and Cal knew it just as well as I did.

“Stay here?” Bethina trilled, loud enough to reach Dean and Conrad. “But this is an awful place to stay! Stone knows what’s hiding in these houses.”

“No, this place is good,” Cal soothed. “It’s fine, Bethina. We’ll be fine.”

“Well, of
course
we’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m not a shrinking violet, but I don’t relish fightin’ off viral creatures with my bare hands, either.”

“Probably best,” Dean chimed in before Bethina could read the flinch on my face. I hadn’t told her about the Proctors’ lie. Escaping the Mists was already more than she could handle. In a way, I guessed I was just as guilty as
Cal. “We’ll move quicker that way,” he added. “No offense, Bethina.”

Cal pointed to a cottage that was in relatively good shape. “We’ll wait in there, okay? I’ve got a pack of cards. It’ll be like no time at all.”

Bethina cast a wary look back at me as Cal escorted her into the cottage. I smiled and waved, feeling not one iota of the cheerful expression plastered across my face.

“Thank goodness,” I muttered, once they were inside without more protests. Bethina wasn’t stupid—soon Cal’s and my carefully constructed tower of falsehood was going to collapse like so many blocks, and when it did, I wouldn’t blame her one bit if she smacked us both across the face. Repeatedly.

“Yeah,” Conrad agreed. “That girl’s sweet, but she’s deadweight.”

Dean shot me a look, but I waved him off, hoping to avoid yet another contest to see who could puff his chest out farther. Conrad didn’t know about Cal’s little skin-changing trick either, and right now that was best. I wasn’t up to explaining to my brother, especially considering how he’d been acting lately, exactly why we were running around with a ghoul to watch our backs.

We approached the foundry gates, which hung open at odd angles, as if something large and out of control had smashed them in its mad dash for freedom.

Dean pressed a finger to his lips, moved along the iron of the foundry fence and peered around the gate without letting anything that might be on the other side get a look at him. I pressed against his back, curling my fingers in the leather of his coat, and followed his eyes.

Great tread tracks led to the gate from the innards of the foundry, where the forge and the assembly sheds lay, and one side of the nearest sheds was smashed, bricks lying in piles. The automatons that worked in the hottest, most dangerous parts of the foundry had vanished.

“I don’t like this at all,” I said in Dean’s ear. So much destruction, and now the foundry was so quiet.

I was close enough to Dean that I could smell his hair cream, like a hint of sweetness on my tongue, when he turned to reply.

“Me either,” he said. “But like they say, princess—only way out is through. No other road to the bridge on this side of the river, and swimming’s going to get us a nice case of hypothermia and not much else.”

“Forward, then,” I said, and I slipped my hand into Dean’s as we walked, making Conrad snort as he brought up the rear. “Grow up,” I muttered at him, but he pretended not to hear me. Brothers didn’t make life easier, not even the jinxed sort of life we’d found ourselves in, I decided. They were tailored by evolution to be annoying.

The foundry grounds were as quiet as the town behind us, but unlike that of the town, this wasn’t the silence of abandonment. It was more like walking along a darkened street at night, with the pressure on the back of your neck that let you know something was watching you from the shadowed places along the way.

Conrad pointed to a bright spray of paint splashed along the walls, overlaying the wing-and-crucible logo of the foundry. The paint was red and black, violent slashes that depicted blood pouring from the crucible, great arrowheads
through the wings. The sort of things the Proctors would have had scrubbed away immediately, before.

“We’re gone two weeks and this place goes full-on anarchist?” Dean said. “This is nuts.”

“Maybe we should be quiet,” I suggested nervously. The foundry was silent and felt wrong. No smoke belched from the stacks, and the resounding clang and clank of cooling ingots that used to echo across the river and into my dormitory room had ceased.

Dean, Conrad and I formed a sort of line, Conrad at the rear and Dean at the head. I wanted to tell them I didn’t need the press of a boy’s body to keep me safe—whatever was running loose here would just as soon chew on their flesh as mine.

We passed through the smaller wooden outbuildings, several of which had been crushed to matchsticks, presumably by the vast weight of runaway automatons. One such machine slumped in its tracks near the last shed, the aether globe in its chest that had kept it powered smashed and a broad burn mark scorching its metal torso. The scent of burnt paper was still in the air.

Conrad approached the thing and touched one of its tracks, which had come off the wheels. Each tread was twice the span of his arm.

My eye was caught by movement from behind the automaton. Just a flicker, but my heart clenched with surprise and fear, and I tapped Dean on the arm, pointing. “Something’s over there.”

He followed my finger, and we both saw the flicker of red on the unbroken gray brick of the foundry walls.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean growled, jamming his hand in his pocket and pulling out his switchblade. “Hey!” he bellowed at the moving shadow. “Hey, you!”

“Dean …,” I started, thinking that perhaps shouting at the figure wasn’t the best idea.

“I see you!” Dean shouted. “No point in hiding.”

“Dean, we don’t know what it is,” I whispered, worried that if he made a move, whoever or whatever lurked beyond the automaton would take it badly. Dean shook his head.

“Relax, princess. It’s a kid.” He advanced on the shadow. “Aren’t you?”

“Up yours, mister!” the shadow shouted back. I pressed a hand over my mouth, both to stifle a laugh and from relief. To find another person in this wasteland was ten times more unexpected than finding a creature like the nightjars and ghouls that populated Lovecraft’s underground.

“Say,” Dean drawled, brows drawing together. “I know you, kid.”

“I know your mother!” the kid retorted. “And she has some disappointing things to say about you.” The kid’s brassiness didn’t worry me half as much as his actually wandering around out in the open, but Dean’s lip curled back and he balled up his hands.

Before Dean could swing a fist, I closed distance, reached out and grabbed the boy’s red scarf, jerking him into the light.

“Tavis?” Dean said.

The boy and I gaped at one another for a moment. I realized that Dean did know him, and so did I. Tavis, the peddler boy in the Nightfall Market. I’d met him the same
night I’d met Dean, when Cal and I had run away from the Academy. Tavis had steered me to a guide who wasn’t a guide at all, but a man who sent people to be devoured by ghouls in exchange for free passage and scavenging rights in the old Lovecraft sewers.

“Oh, cripes,” Tavis sighed, relaxing a bit. “The wags in the Market said you were long gone, Dean.”

“No such luck for them,” Dean told him. “What are you doing all the way on this side of the river?”

“Live here now, don’t I?” Tavis squirmed in my grip. “Come on, girlie. Give a guy a break.”

I let go of him, and his bright red scarf fluttered to the crushed gravel. I picked it up and ran it through my hands. Soft wool, dyed and still smelling of woodsmoke. “This is an Academy scarf,” I said, the unexpected appearance of an object from my former life making my voice barely a whisper. “Where did you get this?”

Tavis shrugged, but his gaze darted away from mine as he tried to disguise the lie. One end of the scarf was darker than the other, stiff and soaked in blood.

I let the scarf fall from my hands. “What happened over there?” I asked Tavis. “In Lovecraft? After the blast.”

“Hey,” he said, ignoring my question and looking back and forth between Dean and me. “Are you two going steady? Harrison, you sly dog.”

“You’re way too young to be throwing that kind of talk around,” Dean said. “You still dealing in piss-poor information and tonics that are mostly rusty tap water?”

“Nightfall Market’s gone,” Tavis said, kicking at the broken bricks with the toe of his boot. “Proctors raided the Rustworks right after the big blow. Rounded up everyone
they could find. Ghouls got the rest. Monsters’ve been crazed lately—even springing out on folks in broad daylight.”

Dean rubbed his chin, a calm gesture, but I saw the thunderheads of anger steal into his eyes. “Figures.”

I dropped my gaze to the vicinity of Tavis’s boot. The people in the Rustworks might have been rough and dishonest, but they hadn’t deserved the blame for the Engine. The Proctors were all too eager to name scapegoats for every little thing that went wrong in their city.

“Some of us came here,” Tavis said. “Foundry workers ran when the automatons went nutty and started smashing things. It’s safe here. For the most part.”

Conrad waved at us from near the wrecked sheds and mouthed
We should go
.

“Good seeing you, kid,” Dean told Tavis, ruffling his hair. “Keep yourself safe, you hear?”

Tavis gave Dean a smile, and it was as sly and slippery as the tongue of a snake. “Oh, I don’t gotta worry about that,” he said. “I kept you talking. I’ll get my cut.”

My heart sank. Dean pulled his knife again. “What did you say?”

A low rumble started from behind the sheds, the gravel around my feet jumping. With it came the clamor of voices and the clatter of an automaton’s tread.

I grabbed Tavis by the front of his shirt. “What did you do?”

“Can’t have you tipping off the Proctors!” he squeaked. “And we need food! Weapons! Cash!”

“Do we
look
like we’d tip off the Proctors, you weaselly
little bastard?” Dean snarled. His switchblade gleamed in the low gray light coming down through the smoke.

“Rules of the Rustworks,” Tavis said. “You’re gone a little while and you forget. Every man for himself.”

A foundry automaton rolled around the corner of the shed, surrounded by a dozen men and women wearing identical red scarves and carrying weapons, from pump-action shotguns and the sort of electric rods the Proctors carried to simple tools like axes and pitchforks and, in one case, a baseball bat with rusty nails driven into the business end. I stared, rooted to the spot by both shock and the hungry look in their eyes. Hungrier than any ghoul, and twice as frightening.

The man driving the automaton had a scar that closed one eye, a gray beard, and white hair flying out from under a ratty top hat. He wore evening clothes, wildly mismatched, and his high-collared shirt was so blood-soaked that it was the color of Tavis’s scarf.

“Throw down your weapons!” he bellowed at us through the automaton’s vox system. The things weren’t meant to be driven, but I could see where a torch had cut away the chest plate to make a spot for a man to sit and manipulate the controls in real time, rather than having an engineer program the thing and send it on its way. I might have admired the wild-eyed man’s ingenuity if he hadn’t clearly been about to crush us with his metal appendages.

“Screw off!” Dean shouted back. “You’re not getting a damn thing from us!”

“Not that we have anything to give, anyway,” I murmured so only Dean could hear.

“Don’t be so sure, princess,” he said softly. “Those boots and my coat will get fought over down in the dirt by types like this.”

I realized he had a point—the refugees from the Rustworks were starving, likely freezing as winter set in, and clean clothes and sturdy shoes would be worth as much as fine steel or aether. They didn’t appear to be reasonable, so I braced myself to either fight or run, waiting for Dean’s cue.