The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [14]
“The charges are as follows,” said one of the Proctors holding the heretic. “Consorting with dark forces.”
That was a given. Anything not explained by the necrovirus could be nothing in a Proctor’s eyes but heretics attempting magic.
“Corruption of human flesh, desecration of the dead and performance of pseudo-magic rites, outlawed under the Ramsay Convention of 1914,” the Proctor rang out. His voice reverberated off the black stone of Ravenhouse and washed over the crowd. The murmur settled and for a moment the scream of the wind and the hum of the Engine were the only sounds.
Then the heretic began to sob. It was a droning sound. I’d heard it in the madhouse, the helpless sobbing of a mind whose gears have fouled into slag. My chest clenched for the man. I’d heard that same fear the day they took my mother.
“Human flesh.” Cecelia’s tongue flicked out. Another wedge of pink. “Decadent. For once.”
“At this time,” the Proctor said, “for rejecting the great truths of the Master Builder, the truth of aether and of steam, for rejecting the twin foundations of reality and science”—he looked over the crowd, the no-face beneath the cowl rippling black—“burning of the hands is penalty.”
I curled up my own hands inside my gloves. They were numb, slow to respond.
“Just the hands?” Cecelia echoed the grumble from the crowd. “I say hands and face, for that sort of thing. Human flesh. Honestly.”
The heretic struggled only a little as the Proctors put his hands into the two lower holes in the castigator. The third Proctor turned the key one, twice, thrice.
Steam rushed into the October air. The heretic screamed. I couldn’t blink.
Suddenly, my stomach lost its tolerance for my lunch and I felt turkey casserole lurch up my throat. I turned and staggered to the gutter at the edge of the square. Cecelia bolted after me.
“Poor thing.” She pulled my hair away and rubbed my back. “I know you don’t like to think about what that disgusting man must have done, but it’s all right. He’s being punished now.”
I shoved Cecelia off me.
“Honestly, Aoife!” she cried. “I’m trying to help!”
I stared at her for a moment, her moon face blocking out the platform and the castigator. I’d seen burnings in lanternreels, but this was different. A little more fighting back, a little less sympathy from the Proctors, and my mother could have been there. My brother.
Me.
“I need to go home,” I gasped. I ran out of Banishment Square. I pelted down Storm Avenue, but I swore I could still smell the bubbling flesh of the heretic in the castigator. Hear his screams borne on the winter wind.
All I could see, in my head, was Conrad.
The Secret in the Ink
AFTER A NIGHT of sleepless tossing and chills, I begged off my morning classes and spent an hour pacing the sophomore common room, waiting until the chronometer above the fireplace told me the library would be deserted. I didn’t try to find Cal. Cal only knew what the other students knew about Conrad. That he’d gone mad from the necrovirus, attacked his sister. Escaped the Proctors and the madhouse and Lovecraft itself. Cal didn’t know Conrad, my brother, who’d taken care of me when our mother was committed. The boy who’d taught me how to strip and repair a simple chronometer and later an entire clockwork device, put bandages on my fingers when the gears cut me, told me forbidden stories about witches, fairies and the gruesome king of imaginary monsters, Yog-Sothoth.
Cal could take me straight to the Proctors for harboring a madman and he’d be within his rights. Memory didn’t matter, only the madness.
Mrs. Fortune was coming toward me along the walk, and I remembered the meeting with the Headmaster after supper. I took a hard left through the passage to the library, avoiding her sight line.
The Academy’s library was a silent place, a morgue for books and papers, lined up on their little-disturbed shelves like stacks of corpses.
Passing through the dank, musty stacks, my footsteps muted on carpet soft