The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [77]
I cried out as the ice-hot pain of a burn imprinted itself on my hand. In that moment, I couldn’t even struggle. I simply froze, whorls of vertigo overwhelming my vision, and willed my body not to faint from the sensation.
This was not the necrovirus. It was not the dreams that stalked me through all my nights in the School. Not the looming ghost of my mother, not the bite of the shoggoth.
The feeling causing my vision to black and my body to throb was nothing I had ever known, and nothing I could explain with any of the Proctor’s laws or the Master Builder’s tenets of rational science.
The closest word I could use was, after all, witchcraft.
I didn’t care that it made me a heretic. I didn’t even care that in the eyes of everyone I knew, it confirmed my madness. Sorcery was the only explanation for what was happening to me, for the pain that was chewing through me from the inside out.
Then, as abruptly as it had stolen my senses from me, the ink’s enchantment released. The serpents on the page curled, tongues tasting the air, hissing with satisfaction. I fell back against the books, cradling my palm against my stomach and fighting both tears and panic. My hands were my fortune. I could never be an engineer with a crippled hand. I couldn’t even be a stenographer. I’d be less than useless, a ward of the city until I died.
When at last I had the courage to examine my burn, I saw a stigma on the spot where heretic palmists would tell me that my life and heart lines intersected. The mark sat in the shape of a wheel with pointed spokes and sharpened treads—not a wheel, I saw, but a gear, a gear which shimmered just under my skin—not a brand like the Proctors’ stigmas, but inky, like a navy boy’s tattoo. The spot was rimmed with pink and slightly warm, but I was otherwise whole, with no hint of the agony I’d just endured. My mind, however, was still telling me that my palm was on fire, that I was going to lose my hand, the one thing I couldn’t lose and still be an engineer.…
“Breathe, Aoife,” I ordered myself in a whisper. “Breathe.”
I stared at my palm for a long time, feeling the crow wings of my heartbeat flutter and finally still as my panic faded. My hand was still there. It wasn’t lost, along with any future hope.
Something had touched me. I could fall back on what they taught us at the School all I wanted, but there was no denying that the ink—the entire journey since Lovecraft—was inexplicable with pure science.
I sat for a long time, turning my hand over, waiting for the stigma to vanish. It didn’t. At last, I remembered that the journal was still lying at my feet.
Gingerly, I picked it up. It was only paper once again, good paper bound in good leather, innocuous as my own notebooks from the School. On the page, the ink was no longer twisting and obscured with age. Handwriting clear and sharp as a razor blade stared back at me.
Property of Archibald Robert Grayson
14th Gateminder
Arkham, Massachusetts
My father’s hand sat square and precise on the page, and the book was no longer the least aged and mouse-eaten, but whole as any of the volumes in the library below.
There was ghost ink, simple chemicals and trickery. There was Conrad, making a half-dollar appear from under his tongue and disappear again behind my ear.
This book was something different.
I was faithful to the science that gave us the Engine and protected our cities from the necrovirus, but in the small attic room I was beginning to feel the enchantment sending slow, hot pinpricks from my palm to my heart.
I was a rational girl, but in that second I admitted this might be magic.
The belief only lasted for a moment. There could be a dozen explanations for what I’d seen.
It didn’t have to be magic. Magic was an obfuscation used by the Crimson Guard to frighten their citizens.
But I couldn’t change what my father’s handwriting had set down, and as far as I knew Archibald was as rational as I. I read.
Witch’s Alphabet
My breath stopped. This was what I’d hoped for. The book that would tell me how to find Conrad. I read