Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (9 page)

Draven laughed. “I came through the Gates, of course. The gates Miss Grayson so kindly ripped asunder when she destroyed the Engine in my city.” A pause, while Shard turned to stare at me. “Oh, I’m sure she didn’t tell you that,” Draven purred. “That she’s the reason for all of this misery. That with her unnatural talents, she sent a pulse of power from the Engine to the Gates so great that it shattered the very fabric between our worlds and all the others, that she destroyed countless innocent lives, that she’s a traitor to her kind, prey to the honeyed words of the Fae.”

Shard took a step toward me, another. Her eyes weren’t flat now. She’d been proven right. I was nothing but a criminal, something foul that had contaminated her little flying
world. I was in deep trouble, and began to consider where I could run to. Nowhere good.

“Commander,” said the pilot. “We have visual contact.”

Shard let her gaze wander from me, and we both stared as a dirigible hove out of the mists. It was the largest I had ever seen, a zeppelin with its rigid balloon painted matte black and embossed with the gold seal of the Proctors, raven’s wings stamped just underneath the gear and sickle, the symbol of the Master Builder, the false god Draven and his kind had created to replace magic and religion.

The dirigible was running red lanterns, a color aether took on when it was treated with other chemicals to burn brighter or hotter or longer. The hull was silver and looked like the body of a beast that lived deep under the ocean and only surfaced in legend, when it feasted on what floated above.

Gatling guns swiveled toward Windhaven from the hull, their cylinders turning slowly, and the dirigible was so close I swore I could count the individual bullets waiting to stream forth and puncture the glass bubble we stood in.

Shard swore, a coarse, barking word I didn’t understand but recognized instantly as a curse. “Evasive action,” she snapped. “Get us out of their fire zone!”

“Headwind, Commander,” the pilot said. “We can’t.”

“Do it!”
Shard screamed.

“You have a choice, Erlkin,” Draven’s voice purred. “It’s an easy one. Give me Aoife Grayson or I blow that floating scrap heap out of the sky.”

I backed toward the door, desperate to get away from Draven’s voice and the view of his great dark shadow of an airship. If I couldn’t see or hear him, I could pretend
this wasn’t happening. Shard wasn’t paying attention to me now. She was screaming orders, and her crew was scrambling to obey.

“I guess you’ve made your choice,” Draven said. “Too bad.” With that, tracers of orange fire streaked across the distance between the zeppelin and Windhaven. One shell shot through the glass of the pilothouse and embedded itself in the far wall. Wind screamed through the opening, and cracks like spiderwebs spread from the hole. Windhaven appeared to be well armored, but Draven’s gunners had been lucky, and the glass fell away in jagged slices as the negative pressure fought with the bullet holes.

“Return fire!” Shard bellowed. “Don’t let them get another shot like that!”

I bumped into the hatch and reached behind me to spin the wheel. My heart was hammering in time with the rounds from the Gatling guns on Draven’s airship. I couldn’t think beyond the cold fact that we had to get off Windhaven before Draven boarded it and found us. If he’d already tracked us here, there was nowhere I could truly hide from him. Draven was relentless. Eventually he’d board Windhaven, and then we’d be, as Cal would put it, screwed up like sugar in the gearbox.

I’d known Draven was depraved and possibly insane, but obsessive enough to track me into a foreign land full of hostile Erlkin? I shuddered to think what he’d do if he actually caught me again.

I slipped out through the hatch, unnoticed by any of the crew, and fled down the corridor, back the way I’d come. Windhaven jolted and swayed under round after round of
fire, and there was a shriek followed by a thump that rocked me off my feet, sending vibrations through the entire hull.

Some kind of antiaircraft projectile. Windhaven righted, but I felt a change in the tenor of the turbines. We’d been hit, and a dip in my stomach told me the craft was losing altitude.

Hands took me by the arm and tried to right me, and I swatted at them reflexively.

“Relax!” Dean shouted over the whooping alarms and thudding of projectiles as Windhaven and the dirigible exchanged fire. “It’s me. Just me.”

“Thanks be for small favors,” I said, slumping. “We have to go, Dean. Now.”

His face was grim, and his jaw twitched when he nodded. “Yeah. Figure no good’s going to come of me staying here. My mother can take care of herself.”

I let him pull me to my feet. “Where are Conrad and the others?” I said.

“Cal and Bethina are in the regular cabins like you,” Dean told me. “My mother put Conrad in a holding cell down near the engine room.”

“Of course she did,” I muttered. Nothing could ever be easy on me and my family. “Is there a way we can tell Cal and Bethina how to meet us at the balloon bay?”

“There’s aethervox between the rooms, yeah,” Dean said. We stopped at a red iron box with a symbol stamped on the outside, three lines rising from a triangle. Dean picked up the handset and cranked a knob to bring up power, then turned two dials, one for deck number and one for room.

Erlkin were beginning to fill the corridor around us,
rushing to and fro. Nobody paid any attention to me, since I was with Dean and they had more pressing matters, like the ever-increasing tilt of the floor beneath our feet. The hit to the bridge must have been worse than it looked. We were falling, and at a rate of speed that made my stomach float slightly off center, a sick reminder of the impact that awaited us. I’d brought Draven here, and now I’d destroy Windhaven like I’d destroyed Lovecraft—unless I got off the ship and directed Draven’s rage away from the Erlkin. I’d honestly rather be back under his thumb than have the weight of more lives on me.

“Cal!” Dean yelled. “Get the milkmaid and meet us in the balloon docks.” He paused and then rolled his eyes at me. “Why do you think, dummy? Get your ass moving!” He slammed down the handset and turned to me. “I swear, that kid’s thick as two boards. Let’s go.”

“I’m sorry,” I said as we ran against the tide of Erlkin moving toward the bridge and the doors to the outside. “This is my fault.”

“This is no more your fault than mine,” Dean said. “Draven’s the one shooting shells at our hull.”

As if to punctuate his point, an explosion rocked us against one of the curved walls and debris sprayed from a direct hit, filling the air with dust. The fine paneling and polished copper that made up the walls of the corridor and the section of hull beyond bowed and broke, and a shriek of cold air snatched at my hair and cheeks. A smoking hole reaching down into nothing stared back from where I’d been about to place my foot, half the floor and wall gone. Draven was using heavy shells—it took more than mere bullets to punch through inches of iron and rivets.

Dean’s forehead was cut, and blood ran from one of his ears. My own were ringing, like I’d stuck my head inside a bell, and wetness trickled into my left eye. “You’re bleeding!” Dean shouted at me, though I read his lips more than heard him speak.

I swiped at my face and my entire palm came away coated red. “I’m fine!” I shouted back. Whatever had hit me, I could still walk, and that was the important thing. I could panic about the amount of blood when we were away from Windhaven.

We struggled to our feet, and Dean went first along the narrow span of corridor that hadn’t been blown away. To the side was open air, and below I could see down at least four decks, sparks and escaping aether mingling to create tongues of short-lived blue fire amid the twisted wreckage.

“This way,” Dean panted. His voice came to me sounding flat and far away, like a bad connection over the aether.

We reached a stairwell, and looking over the railing dizzied me. We were at least twenty levels up.

“No lifts,” Dean said. “We’re in one and another shell hits …” He clapped his hands together.

“I hope Conrad’s all right,” I said. He had to be. My dazzlingly clever brother, who could escape any trap. He’d be fine. If he wasn’t, I’d lost my only other family and was totally alone. I couldn’t let myself contemplate that right now. I could only run.

Dean didn’t say anything, but he did move faster, taking the stairs two at a time.

The downward journey seemed interminable, especially when I was alone with my own heartbeat and the faint screech of the alarms. Every time Windhaven bounced
violently, I had to stop and grab the rail or risk being pitched headfirst off the landing.

“Here,” Dean said at last. “Prison level.”

“Thank stone you know your way around here,” I panted, slowing at last. Dean shrugged.

“I grew up here. Skip and I used to sneak off all the time.”

I tried not to look too surprised. I’d always thought Dean hated the Erlkin side of him, and had pictured him absconding to Lovecraft as soon as he could toddle. But maybe it had been later. Shard’s pain over Dean’s return certainly seemed to indicate that.

By the cells, two Erlkin in uniform carried the same sort of guns Skip and the other soldiers had carried slung across their backs when they’d caught us in the forest. The cells themselves were plain gray doors, each marked, mercifully, with a number rather than a foreign symbol.

“We should evacuate,” one Erlkin was insisting, gripping his gun so tightly I could see the white of his bone through his papery skin. They hadn’t spotted us yet, and I waited in the curve of the corridor with Dean, sharing his breath and smelling the salt of his sweat and the sweetish odor of tobacco that permeated his clothes.

“And do what with the prisoners?” the other Erlkin demanded.

“Hell, I don’t care!” the other said. “Leave their asses behind. Filthy Fae and slipstreamers, the lot of them.”

“Fine,” said the other as another artillery blast shook Windhaven. “Let’s get to the balloons.”

I pulled Dean into an alcove as they passed, but they were beyond caring about a couple of teenagers wandering around. Dean picked up a left-behind manifest hanging
on a clipboard and skimmed the sheet of vellum, pointing down the corridor. “Cell nine.”

Relief coursing through me, I ran down the hall and stopped at number nine, peering through the barred window in the top half of the door. Conrad had braced himself against the far wall of the cell, and his face slackened in relief when he saw me.

“Oh, thank stone,” he said. “Get me out of here.”

The lock was a tumbler and a bolt, nine pins, too complicated for me to try to shove with my mind at a time like this. If I had an episode and knocked myself out, I’d be useless, and we’d be sitting ducks for Draven. “Dean!” I shouted. “Keys!”

“They’re not here!” he yelled back. “Guards must’ve taken ’em.” He came down the corridor, looking up as Windhaven shuddered like an animal in the throes of a death rattle. The aether lamps flickered, throwing us from bright to black and back again. “We need to move,” he said. “Before all the evac balloons are gone.”

“Leave me,” Conrad said. “There’s no help for it.”

“No,”
I snarled. “We’re not splitting up again—that’s what got us into trouble the first time.” When he opened his mouth to protest, I played my ace. Conrad and I could be equally stubborn, but I was better at changing his mind than he was at changing mine. “Draven is out there, Conrad. He’ll torture you. Throw you in some dark hole.” I’d already lost Nerissa. I couldn’t abandon Conrad to Draven and ever expect to sleep again. If he survived the crash of Windhaven at all.

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Nobody here is going to be your friend if you stay, man. It’s time to motor.”

“Aoife,” Conrad said. “Don’t listen to him. Get out before it’s too late and we’re both back in Draven’s cells.”

“Don’t,” Dean started, pointing at Conrad. “Don’t make your sister feel any worse than she already does.”

“
I’m
making her feel worse?” Conrad came to the bars, looking for all the world as if they were the only thing preventing him from wringing Dean’s neck. “You little grease monkey, it’s
your
mother who locked me up in here!”

“Both of you shut up!” I shouted, sick of their arguing. My head throbbed, warning me that all the iron on the prison level was building up in my blood. “Let me think!”

Dean and Conrad stared at me for a moment and then went quiet. They both knew me well enough. I pressed my palm against the door lock and tried to tamp down the panic inside me, control my heartbeat and breath. It wasn’t easy. I felt fragile, as if the frantic racing of my pulse would shatter the delicate vessel of my body.

My Weird came as intolerable pressure against my skull. My vision skewed and filled with the glow of the aether lamps, but I pushed the pain back. I grabbed the pressure and squeezed it out through my pores, my tear ducts, my nose and mouth, funneled the thing in my blood into the lock. It popped open, dead bolt flying back so violently it bowed the iron of the door, which in turn swung back and hit the cell wall with a sound like a gong.

“Come on,” I said, reaching for Conrad, who stood still and glassy-eyed, and grabbing his arm. This was the first time he’d seen me use my Weird, and much as I wanted to know he didn’t think I was a freak, we just didn’t have the time to talk now. He stumbled as I yanked him.

“Jeez, Aoife,” he said. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

Dean leading the way, we ran toward the balloon bays as fast as the jostling, tilting vessel would allow.

Just before we reached the outer catwalks, which sprang away from Windhaven like a collection of spindly antennae, we ran into Cal. Bethina was with him, clinging to his arm as Windhaven shuddered under our feet, the death throes of the city feeding through the soles of my boots.

“It’s no good in the balloons,” Cal said. “Some got off, but they got shot down. They’re trying to slag the docking arms.”

Indeed, many of the catwalks were wrecked and smoking, just twisted memories of what they’d been. My heart sank to my feet. Draven was going to make me his prisoner again. Torture and interrogate me. Use me to bring in my father.