The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [21]
Of course, those facts brought their own set of fears.
At last, the train yard ended at a ditch, and the terrain grew more turbulent, treacherous under my slick school shoes. A fence loomed above me, the border between Lovecraft and the Rustworks. For a gateway between worlds, it wasn’t much. Just corrugated steel eaten away into lace by exposure to salt air and rain. Beyond, I saw indistinct piles of slag and metal—small mountains, really, of everything from jitneys stacked high as a house like domino tiles to disused antisubmarine rigs, with their great steam-powered harpoons blunted, which had been brought back from the defense lines on Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras after the war. So many machines, all of them dead. It was like happening upon the world’s largest open grave, silent and devoid of ghosts. If I’d believed in ghosts.
I slipped through a gap in the fence, and the last of the aether lamps of Uptown winked out behind me, eclipsed by the wreckage. As Cal and I were enclosed by the bulk of the Rustworks, I felt a curious lightness in my step. I never walked out of bounds at the Academy. Storybook orphans were always meek, well-behaved, mousy things who discovered they possessed rich uncles who’d find them good husbands. Not the sort with mad brothers and mothers, who would rather stick their hands into a gearbox than into a sewing basket.
Now I was as far out of bounds as one could go, and it felt like a crisp wind in my face or jumping from a high place. I looked to Cal’s comforting height, and smiled at him as we walked.
I’d heard whispers from older students that you could buy anything at the Nightfall Market—outlawed magic artifacts, illegal clockworks and engine parts, women, liquor.
Most importantly, I’d heard from Burt Schusterman, who’d been expelled during my first year for hiding a still in his dormitory room, that you could buy a guide in and out of the city after lockdown and before sunrise. A guide who wouldn’t necessarily need passage papers to cross the bridges out of Lovecraft.
I just hoped he didn’t want more than fifty dollars, or strike his bargains in blood, or dream fragments, or sanity. I didn’t know that I had anything of the sort to give.
I chided myself as we walked through the silent, frostbitten lanes of the Rustworks, enormous mounds and heaps of junk threatening to topple their aging bones onto our heads. “Grow up, Aoife.” I was so lost in staring at the dead machinery in the junk piles that I didn’t realize I’d voiced the thought. Burt Schusterman could have been the most enormous liar. Rotgut was supposed to fiddle with your brain, wasn’t it?
“Huh?” Cal said at my outburst.
My flush warmed my cheeks. “Nothing.” I walked a bit faster. The light wasn’t here, and the shadows were long, with fingers and teeth. On a night like this, with a scythe-shaped moon overhead, it was easy to believe, as the Proctors did, in heretics and their so-called magic.
It crossed my mind, only for a second, to suggest we turn back, but the thought of Conrad somewhere just as dark and cold, and by himself, kept me climbing over half-rusted clockworks, through the hull of a burnt-out dirigible and past all the wreckage of Lovecraft’s prewar age, before the Proctors, when heretics had run rampant and viral creatures waited in every shadow to devour the unwary.
Finding the market was a bit like seeing a ghost—I didn’t truly believe it was real until we happened on it, and I saw shadows in the corner of my eyes and smelled the dankness of an eldritch thing, its breath misting on my face.
The Nightfall Market crept up on Cal and me in shadows and song—I saw a low lump of tent, and heard a snatch of pipes, and slowly, slowly, like a shy cat coming from under a porch, the Nightfall Market unfolded in front of our eyes.
Tucked into the dark places of the Rustworks, below the crowns of old gears and the empty staring heads of antique automatons, the Nightfall Market pulsed with movement, with sound and laughter. I hadn’t expected laughter. Heretics were meant to be grim, weren’t