The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [35]
“Nice work,” I said. He shrugged and tucked the pin inside his pack of cigarettes.
“Easy trick. If you like, I’ll teach you sometime.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Cal said. “Aoife’s a nice girl.”
“You don’t spend a lot of time around the fair sex, do you?” Dean teased, that insufferable grin coming into play.
“It’s fine,” I told Cal when he tensed. Cal was easy to tease—the Master Builder knew that for a fact—but he was hurt and Dean wasn’t playing fair. I cast Dean a sharp look. “It’s not such a far journey upstate. It’ll be over before you know it.”
“Not soon enough,” Cal huffed, but he let me help him through the foundry gate all the same.
The Berkshire Belle
I DEVELOPED A discordant rhythm walking with Cal, down from the county road outside the foundry, through a ditch that soaked my feet to the ankles with freezing brackish water, up the other side and across a frozen field patchy with forgotten cornstalks. Dean stayed a few feet ahead, his back and body tense, hands shoved in his dungaree pockets like a gunfighter waiting to draw. I knew better than to ask him where we were going, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t wondering. As an Academy student, I was rarely permitted to leave the grounds, never mind the city. The last in recent memory was a field trip to a quarry. Even by engineering standards, not exciting.
The pulse of the lighthouse on Half-Moon Point winked through the trees as our footsteps disappeared into a carpet of early snow and pine needles, the field ending at a broken stone wall.
“How much farther?” I whispered to Dean, as Cal’s soft pants of pain warmed my right ear.
“Not far,” Dean said. “Other side of the woods, on the point. That’s where the airship lands.”
“Airship?” I almost lost my grip on Cal from surprise.
“Sure thing.” Dean grinned. “You want to get to Arkham—the Berkshire Belle and her crew are the quickest route.”
The trees thinned as the ground became rock and I could hear the rush of the ocean and feel the tinge of salt on my skin. We were much farther away from the city than I’d realized.
Directly beyond was the Lovecraft lighthouse, the white spire with its black band standing guard at the mouth of the river. Moored beyond, where the water met the rock, was an airship.
I’d seen airships before, small skimmers that flew from Lovecraft to New Amsterdam, or out to Cape Cod and Nantucket when the weather was fair. This craft was different from all of them—the silvery hide of the rigid balloon was patched and the passenger cabin was battered, windowless and military gray, not sleek and welcoming like the Pan Am and TWA zeppelins that took off from Logan Airfield. The fans clicked as they rocked back and forth against their tie-downs in the wind. It was beautiful, in its own way, scarred and slippery—a shark built for air.
“Now, you let me do the talking,” Dean said. “Captain Harry’s here every night, and passage is included in your fee, but if he doesn’t like your look …” Dean drew a thumb across his throat. My scar itched in response.
“This Captain Harry sounds like a real pirate,” Cal said. Cal would bring up pirates. As if we hadn’t had a year’s supply of excitement just getting here.
I looked at the Berkshire Belle’s hulk and listened to the moan of its moorings as we came closer, the sound like the murmuring of the madhouse after lights out, or the whispering of a ghost, if I believed in such things. Which I emphatically did not, but seeing the Babbage appear from nowhere, the ghostly dirigible, the moonlight and the frost called up echoes of a spectral world. The Proctors abhorred unsanctioned tales of witchcraft and fairies, angels or demons, but I’d never been chastised for listening to a ghost story. Now I wished that the girls in my hall hadn’t delighted in passing them around quite so much. Tonight, I could almost believe.
“Harry’s a card,” Dean said. “Came out of Louisiana, swamp folk. He’d cut your tongue out soon as look at you, but the Belle ain’t never been stopped by the ravens.”
“Never?” I said.