The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [46]
Dean slowed so we walked abreast. “Ain’t thrilled about seeing your old man?”
“You’re assuming he wants to see me.” That was the other half of the orbit of possibilities. Archibald Grayson could deny his bastard child, shut the door and send me on my way. As would be his right, as a man of breeding and good standing.
Dean winced. “I’m with you there, kid. All the way down the line.”
An owl hooted in the trees at the field’s edge, concealed by the morning twilight. Nerissa hated owls, shrieked about them watching her, lantern eyes and iron claws.
Owls carried the necrovirus, if you minded the lanternreels. I’d seen pictures of their wings, aerodynamics lessons drawn in fine, careful ink. The rounded tips of the feathers that let them fly silent. What I’d give to fly silent as an owl, unwatched by the Proctors or anyone else. Sometimes I thought that if I made my clothes colorless enough, my shoulders narrow enough, that I could round off all my edges and disappear into the air like the lantern-eyed harbingers of the night. I hadn’t managed it yet.
I watched my feet squelch into the mud instead. The mist and the morning called for silence, and even Cal had given up the challenge of talking. I was almost enjoying the quiet, haunted walk until the sweet stench of meat left in a warm place clapped me across the nose, thick and wet as a wool blanket.
Cal pressed his handkerchief over the lower half of his face like a bandit. “Stones … what’s rotted on the vine?”
The mist parted on a humped black hide with a watery sheen, and a great lidless eye that swam up from the depths of the thing’s boneless mass, bilious green and cloudy with cataract.
“Shoggoth,” I breathed, stumbling to a halt. “It’s an actual shoggoth.”
The shoggoth exhaled with a sound of pipes belching steam. Its eye roved over its hide in no particular pattern, floating like a lamprey below the surface of a dark sea.
“They swallow us whole.” Cal’s whisper came as a shout in the absolute stillness. “Digested by degrees inside that mass. You can stay alive for days, becoming a part of it. Listening to it whisper in your brain. Filthy damn thing.” He picked up a stone and flipped it in his palm.
“Cal, no …,” I started, but Cal cocked his arm and threw.
A fingerlet of skin and muscle snapped out of the creature’s mass, sprouting a mouth, round and rimmed with teeth. The rock disappeared into the shoggoth’s maw with a snap of gravel.
Dean worried the Lucky Strike behind his ear as the shoggoth shuddered all over like a bear waking up from a long hibernation. “Fine job, cowboy. You work to be this stupid, or is it innate?”
“It doesn’t have a brain!” Cal argued. “It’s just a dumb, deaf ball of necrovirus. Wasn’t even human once. Grew up out of the mud, like a living infection.”
I watched in fascination as the creeper of boneless, waterlogged flesh writhed over the ground where the rock had come from, seeking and searching. More eyes opened on the shoggoth’s hide, filmy and infected as the first.
“It’s blind,” I realized.
“And ancient, to get that big,” Dean said. “I’ve seen them from the air, and I’ve seen the carcasses they leave behind. You want my expert guide’s opinion, we need to stoke fires and get outta here.”
“We’ll have to find another way up to Graystone,” Cal sighed. “I knew I should have packed my road atlas. I could practice my navigation.”
“Or we could knock off pelting Ol’ Stinky here with rocks and just tiptoe on around,” Dean suggested. “If that meets with your approval, Scout Leader.”
“You know, I’ve had just about enough of you,” Cal snapped. “So far, all you’ve guided us to is a heap of trouble, and kept Aoife out in the cold and the wet.”
“Cal”—I scratched at my scar, underneath the damp wool of my school scarf—“leave me out of this.”
“We can’t just go around,” Cal growled at Dean, ignoring me completely. “Shoggoth can travel fast over ground, and then we’ll be dead, as well as trapped out here in stinking manure.”
“Here’s an idea,” Dean retorted. “Unknot your bloomers and admit that your lily-white city-boy ass doesn