The Iron Thorn

33 Escape from Ravenhouse

I LAY IN the dark for a long time, on cold stone, listening to water drip and things slither in the dark. Rats scuttled in and out of my view, through a drain in the floor trickling filthy water from the cell into the new sewers. I wondered if this blackness and the foul, eldritch caress of damp river air would be the last things I saw and felt before I was executed or lost to madness.

I thought about what Draven had said, that he meant to use me to lure my father back to Lovecraft. I thought about the fact that nearly the entire world believed the most elaborate of lies.

I wondered how many other heretics had gone to the castigator knowing what I knew.

At last, when I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts for another moment, a second door rolled back from a nether part of the cell, letting in light and sound and two more forms, both of whom hit the floor with a thump and a curse from the Proctor herding them.

“Who’s there?” A man’s voice, from the corner. I curled myself up, putting my back to a wall, trying to get as far away from the invisible rasp as possible. Who’d been dumped in here with me? I had a feeling they might be worse than the Proctors.

“Who are you?” Something ran over my foot and I kicked at it.

“Aoife?”

I squinted into the dimness of the cell. “Dean?”

A hand reached out and felt for mine, and I grabbed it. “Oh, Dean. You’re all right.” I had never been more glad of anything in my life. Alone, I might make it out alive, but knowing that Dean’s life rested with me as well redoubled my resolve.

“Of course I am, kid,” he whispered. “You never doubted me, did you?”

“Did they hurt you?” I demanded. “I can’t see you.” I reached out and felt for Dean’s face, and he caught my hands and pressed them against his cheek.

“I’m in one piece, at least,” he murmured. “It’s going to be all right, Aoife.”

“Cal,” I said, seized with panic again. “Where’s Cal?”

Dean went quiet. I stood up, slowly, feeling my way along the wall. “Dean. Where’s Cal?”

“You can’t get marginal on me, Aoife,” he said. “But they brought us in at the same time. He’s in here.” There was a shuffle and a click, and Dean’s lighter flamed to life.

The light illuminated Cal’s body, and I let out a small cry, which I trapped with my hands. My empty stomach rebelled for the hundredth time that day and I choked, the sight before me grotesque and unbearable.

Dean leaned forward, cupping the flame with his hands. “Looked pretty rough when they brought us in here. He didn’t say anything.”

Cal’s face was a welter of bruises, his right eye swollen shut and his lower lip split. Bruises on his wrists mapped where he’d been tied with something sharp and elastic, and his shirt had blood on it.

“Oh, please no …,” I whispered. “Cal, Cal, Cal.” I shook his shoulder, but he didn’t move except to roll away from me, toward the wall.

“Why would they do that?” I said. I wanted to hit something, and I banged my fists against the cell door, over and over, wishing it were the Proctor who’d beaten my friend. Dean grabbed my hands, pinned them at my side.

“I don’t know why, Aoife, and there doesn’t have to be a reason. The situation is, they beat him bad and he’s going to kick off if we don’t do something.”

Dean had bruises too, when I looked closer. I touched the cut on his cheekbone, twin lines of red. He flinched. “It’s nothing. Just standard heavy work. Letting me know they weren’t fooling around.”

“Cal’s not a criminal,” I said. “They had no reason … Draven just needs me.”

“These people don’t need much of a reason for anything, Aoife,” Dean said. “They need you, sure. Us, they’ll keep here until they need more bodies for the castigator. Then … we’ll be broiled beef.”

“Stop saying that,” I ordered, my last reserve of will close to snapping. I could put on a brave face, but sooner or later my true one would show and I’d be in a heap. “I almost got out of here, and there will be another chance.”

“Not to piss on the parade,” Dean said, “but all the Rustworks knows: you end up in Ravenhouse, you end, full stop.” He held the lighter over me while I felt Cal’s pulse and checked his eyes, the basic first aid all engineers had to know in case of an accident on the job.

I never imagined using it like this.

“You can’t give up on me,” I said to Dean. I was scared, so scared my fingers were vibrating, but more than that I was angry. Angrier than I’d ever been. Draven’s lies were the reason we were down here, not through any fault of ours. “If you give up,” I told Dean, “then I’m going to break into a million pieces.”

Dean frowned as the lighter flickered, flame lowering. “Bad news, kid. We’re going to be in the dark for the rest of this party.” He shut the lid of the lighter. “But I’m here, Aoife. I’ll give you everything I’ve got.”

“Thank you,” I said softly. “I need you, Dean.”

He nodded, squeezing my shoulder in the dimness. “Figure I need you too. You are the brains of the operation, after all.”

I rolled Cal onto his back and felt him over. He groaned when I touched his ribs, his chest. “He might have gotten something crushed internally,” I said. “He needs a doctor.”

“And I need a drink,” Dean said. “I figure Cal and I have the same chance at both. We should wrap his ribs, at least for comfort. I busted one during a pit fight in Jamestown and it hurt like knives.”

“Pit fighting?” I was talking so that my mind wouldn’t run away, chattering like I was at one of Mrs. Fortune’s inane tea parties, to keep from the ugly reality of my situation. “Who would have guessed an upstanding boy like you would enjoy such a pastime?”

“Never tell an Irishman three sheets to the wind that he’s got a pretty sister,” Dean said. “Sound advice.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I murmured as I ripped open Cal’s shirt, buttons flying, and extricated his long arms from the too-short sleeves. “Dammit. He never gets anything tailored.” Tears welled up, the pressure too much.

“Give it here,” Dean said. “I’ll make bandages. Get him talking—if they whammed his noggin, he shouldn’t fall asleep.”

“Cal.” I shook him, gently as I could. “Cal, say something.”

“Aoife.” My name on his lips was thickened with blood and delirium. “They brought you back.”

“I was trying to get out,” I said. “I got caught.”

“I …” Cal coughed, and dark blood appeared on his chin like inky raindrops. “I gotta tell you something, Aoife.”

“No,” I said, smoothing a hand over his forehead. “Save it. There’s time yet.”

Linen shredded as Dean ripped up Cal’s school shirt. Cal grabbed for me. His palm was slick, with blood or sweat, I couldn’t tell. “Can’t wait. I can’t wait.”

“All right, all right,” I said. “You have to stay still, Cal. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I lied to you.…” Cal’s voice went dreamy, and his pulse under my fingers slipped away like a drop of mercury on glass.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Whatever you did, I forgive you.”

“You shouldn’t,” he said. “I’m so far away, Aoife … so far away from home.…”

My shoulder began to throb, and I clamped my free hand over the bite. “Dean, he’s not making any sense.”

“He lost a lot of his juice,” Dean said. “Probably needs a transfusion.”

“Cal.” Shaking wasn’t working anymore, so I slapped him across the face, trying to avoid the worst of his bruises. “Don’t you die on me, Cal Daulton. I’ll get you blood. Just please hang on.”

“I don’t need blood,” he wheezed after a moment. “I need …” Another coughing fit, more blood droplets scattering across the stones and my hands.

“What?” I said. “Tell me, Cal.”

“I need meat,” he rasped. “Fresh meat. Something live.”

I gaped at him. “Why in the stars would you need that?” The pain in my shoulder where the shoggoth had bitten intensified and I groaned. I’d be seeing double if I could see at all. The last time it had hurt this much was when I’d been close to eldritch creatures, as if, in a peculiar way, the shoggoth’s venom had given me an early warning.…

“Meat,” Cal whined, in a voice that echoed off the high parts of the cell. “I want to eat.…”

“Aoife.” Dean grabbed my shoulder and I yelped. His touch burned the shoggoth’s bite. “Get away from him. Now.”

“He’s in shock,” I said. “He’s hallucinating.”

Cal gave another groan like bones creaking, and then he sat up, as if someone had jammed a rod into his back. The spot on his face I’d touched was beginning to peel back, skin hanging in loose ribbons. I stared, unable to think of moving, or anything but the sloughing flesh on the face that had formerly been Cal’s.

My stomach lurched as the pain crested, and Dean yanked me out of Cal’s reach as he swiped at me. His hands were huge, and tipped with black claws that flexed and retracted.

“He’s not hallucinating,” Dean whispered in my ear. “He’s a ghoul.”

Trapped in the half-dark, I clung to Dean while Cal convulsed on the cell floor. “Cal …” I reached out an experimental hand, and Cal snapped at me. His teeth had multiplied and lengthened, and his bones protruded from under his skin like a mountain range.

I jerked my hand back. Cal wasn’t Cal any longer. He snarled at me, and I flinched as if I’d been slapped. How could I have not seen this? Cal had fooled me, more than even Draven.

“Keep away from him, princess,” Dean said. “Ain’t anything more we can do.”

“No,” I said, wriggling free of Dean’s grasp. “He’s still Cal.” I was mostly talking to talk myself into believing the thing on the floor was still my friend. I couldn’t deny he had changed. There was precious little of him left to the naked eye. Just the thing I’d been told my entire life was the embodiment of terror. Only the fact that I couldn’t see much in the dark kept me from screaming.

Keeping myself clear of his claws and jaws, I crawled over to Cal and forced myself to touch the clammy, loose skin hanging from his newly hollow ribs. “How could you not tell me?” I demanded. My voice rose, anger echoing off the cell walls. “How could you?”

Cal hacked and trembled, and reached for me. His claws put furrows in my wrist. “I had to. I had to. He came down and he found me and he told me that if I didn’t follow you, he’d burn us out of our home.”

“What?” I said. “Someone made you spy on me and pretend to be my friend?”

“Aoife, you should get away from him now,” Dean said. “If he’s changing, that means he’s going to feed.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” I shouted at Dean. “I want to know why my best friend in the world’s been lying to me!”

“It was Draven,” Cal croaked. “He found me two years ago. The Proctors would have burned me out, but I had something he wanted. I can take human skin, and he said … he said if I went to the Academy, watched you … I had to keep you under my eye.”

“Cal, why?” I gripped his shoulders, shaking him. I could feel bone and gristle, the foreign physiognomy of a ghoul instead of Cal’s skinny frame, and it made my skin crawl. I held on, anger overriding disgust. “Why did you pretend to be my friend?” I whispered.

“Because of what you are,” Cal said. His voice wasn’t Cal’s voice anymore. It was guttural, a growl of hunger rather than the person I knew speaking. “Draven told me that if you ever found out who you really are … what you can do … it would be … a disaster.”

“You’ve been bird-dogging us,” Dean said. “The ravens on the bridge. Alouette calling in the Proctors on the airship. Every bit of bad luck since we met.” He curled a fist, flexed it like you’d pull back the hammer of a gun. “I should smash your ugly face in. Do you realize what you’ve done? It’s your thrice-damned fault we’re in here.”

“No more.” Cal’s breathing was shallow and rapid, his limbs jittering and twitching of their own accord as his nerves played their last notes. “You found your Weird, Aoife. In the crypt, when my brothers tried to stop you. I played dumb because I hoped I could still salvage this and make you go home, but I failed. Two years watching you, pushing you away from the truth, two years being the most horrid, intolerant, party-line-spouting excuse for a human being I could be to keep you in check, and I failed.” He let out a shuddering gasp, a wheeze bubbling from his lungs that sounded dire. “Draven put me in here to kill you, I expect, when he gets what he wants from your pop. And then rot away from hunger myself.”

I sat back on my heels. My only friend, the gawkish boy who loved The Inexplicables and Gunsmoke, who helped me with engineering assignments tirelessly, was a monster.

In my chest, a cold ball of iron formed and expanded and turned into resolve. I would pay Grey Draven back for what he’d done to me. If I had to die to do it, I was going to expose the Bureau of Heresy’s lie.

“I won’t hurt you,” Cal managed. “I … won’t. You don’t deserve this.”

“You’re damn right I don’t,” I said. Cal shied away from my voice.

“Understand,” he begged. “It was this, or watch my nest burn alive. My whole family. You, with Conrad … you’d do the same, wouldn’t you?”

“There’s a difference.” I hadn’t known my voice could hold so many ice crystals. “I wouldn’t have betrayed you over Conrad, Cal.”

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said. “They’ll use you to bring your father out of hiding, and interrogate both of you until you forget all about me. And I’ll die, and the world will go on.”

“Star and stone, Cal,” I said. The anger trickled out, replaced by the solid ingot of defeat. “You’re just giving up. The Cal Daulton I knew wouldn’t give up.”

“The Cal you knew is fiction,” Dean said. “Just like his trashy magazines.”

“He’s not.” I kept my eyes on Cal. “He was my friend, my best friend, and he wouldn’t just curl up and die. He’d help me, because he’d know we aren’t getting out of here any other way.”

Cal let out a long, shuddering sigh. “You changed my mind about humans, Aoife. You showed me they’re not all roaches. But we’re not getting out of here.”

“You’d better hope we are,” I said. “Because Draven needs me alive for now. He gave the order to beat you senseless himself. You’re expendable.” I scooted closer to him, implored him with my gaze. “We need each other, Cal. No matter what you really think of me, if you want to keep breathing, we have to run before they come back. Now, you’ve been here at least once before. What can you tell me about Ravenhouse?” Below the water table as we were, trapped in the bowels with layers of Proctors above us, my little trick of opening doors wouldn’t do any good. I needed variables, options, a plan.

I heard Cal’s tongue flick out, tasting the blood on his lips. I tried to ignore his small, starved groan. “There’s a sewer main under the cell block,” he said. “Old main. Before the Army Corps dug the new underground. I used to hunt there … with my brothers.”

“Boss,” Dean said. “And we’re locked above it in a concrete cell with an iron door and two hundred Proctors who want us fried on the other side.”

“Give me meat,” Cal harshed, “and I can get us out.”

Dean looked at me. “You really want to help this critter get stronger?”

“He knows he’s just cannon fodder to Draven,” I insisted. “And he has as much to lose as we do staying here.”

Dean whistled through his teeth. “I just hope this plan is better than your last one.”

I gave him a dirty look even though he couldn’t see it. “Why don’t you find him something to eat?” I could tell by sound that there were many more living things in the cell than Dean, Cal and me. I held Cal’s head cradled in my lap, stroking the few strands of hair left on his lumpy skull to keep him awake, trying not to pull away from the feel of his clammy new skin. Dean felt along the floor of the cell and came up with a squealing, thrashing rat. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

I shied away. “Don’t make me touch that.”

Dean crouched next to Cal. “Fresh meat, buddy. Open your trap.”

Cal reached up feebly and grabbed for the rat. It screeched, and disappeared into his gullet in two bites. I had thought my gag reflex was exhausted, but it clamped again at the sight of the wriggling tail between Cal’s lips.

After a moment of chewing, Cal sat up shakily. He opened his mouth, unhinging his jaw by degrees, and dug his clawed hands into the floor. “You feel it, Erlkin?” he growled at Dean. “Below our feet?”

Dean’s brow quirked, and he placed his hand against the cell block floor. “He’s right. Something’s down there.”

Cal lay down, his cheek against the floor. He let out a low wail, notes spiraling and twisting. The dirge changed, lilting and high, then moaning and low. Cal sang, and my shoulder began to hurt, a twinge I was beginning to recognize as the shoggoth venom responding to its fellow monsters.

It was a beautiful song, the ghoul’s song, full of pain and loss and hope.

When Cal finished, my eyes were hot with tears. Dean coughed once. “That helps us how, exactly?”

“Just wait …,” Cal cooed. “My blood will answer me.…”

A rumble came from below, a thud, and the drain in the floor lifted out of its seat. Cal scrabbled at it with his claws. “Help me!”

A ghoul paw burst from below, and Cal grabbed it.

“Carver.” The throaty voice was like Tanner’s back in the crypt, but lacked the cruel edge of starvation. “Is that really you?”

“Me, Toby,” Cal said, as the floor around the drain collapsed with a rumble of stone and mortar, splashing into the water below where an old sewer main laid bare. “It’s really me.”

Outside the cell, a guard shouted.

“Go,” Cal rasped at Dean and me, gesturing to the hole. “Run for your lives.”

I snatched at his bare arm. His skin was loose now, papery like that of a man decades older, and his face was hollow-eyed and grim. A rictus grin showed off his teeth. Not the Cal I knew. Except in the eyes. His eyes were still Cal’s.

“You’re coming with us. You have to.”

“Get your cute little rear down that hole!” Dean shouted. “More Proctors are coming!”

Cal stared back at the door. It rattled as the guard struggled to cycle the hatch. “He smells like fear.”

“If you kill him,” I said, “Draven will be right. You’ll just be an animal on his leash. Come with us, Cal. Forget Draven.”

The longest seconds of my life went by while Cal crouched at the edge of the hole in the floor, staring hungrily between me and the door.

Then he jumped into the hole next to me, and Dean followed him. “Move, Aoife! That guard will shoot you in one more second!”

“Wait!” I cried, realizing that I was missing something. “The book! The witch’s alphabet and the tools are still back there with Draven!”

“No time!” Dean jerked me farther into the sewer. I thrashed, fighting in earnest against him.

“I have to get the book!”

Dean met my eyes. “It’s too late, Aoife. We have to run. Now.”

Sick at my failure, I followed him down the tunnel. Wood and brick dust dropped into the slowly trickling water below.

Behind us a Proctor bellowed for us to halt, in the name of reason. Dean squeezed my hand. “I’m right behind you.”

I ran into the dark without looking back.