The Iron Thorn

35 The Gift of the Ghouls

THE GHOUL NEST crouched under the junction like a giant spider, the long fibrous ribbons of the nest tunnels clinging to the ancient drainage main that swept debris from old Lovecraft south and out to the river.

“Go slow,” Cal said. “Let them smell you and see that you’re not hostile.”

I had no desire to rush into the heart of the city’s worst nightmare, and I stopped a few yards from the waist-high hole that was the nest’s entrance.

The ghoul nest was woven from snatches of metal and leather, canvas and fabric, humped tents clustered around a central hub wafting gentle smoke that smelled of char and something richer and darker. An old, old memory, of a madhouse surgery after my mother broke her mirror into a knifelike shard, called back to me. I was smelling blood.

An ancient jitney, so old it still bore the seal of the Massachusetts Transit Authority rather than the City seal, contained a horde of ghoul pups, all jockeying for position at the windows. They bared their teeth, pocketknives instead of wicked blades, but still sharp enough to eat me.

“Ever feel like an entrée?” Dean muttered. “All we need is a little drawn butter.”

“Mother!” Toby called, dropping onto all four limbs so he could pass easily into the nest. “We’re home. We’re all home!”

“Your mother lives in there?” I said, then realized I sounded as spoiled as any typical Uptown princess. “I mean, of course she does.”

Cal looked to me. “This is what Draven said he’d come and burn to ashes.” His eyes begged me to understand.

A female ghoul half my height came forth, an ivory-handled walking stick in her grasp. Though she limped on two legs, her hair was only half silver, and twisted into gypsy braids, and her arms and legs were banded with iron muscle. There was a scar across her smushed nose, and unlike Cal, nothing human glinted in her gaze. “We?” she demanded. “I sent you out for a simple errand, October, and you return with—”

Cal lifted one paw. “It’s me, Mother. I came back.”

The woman’s walking stick clattered out of her grasp, and she let out a sound that was half shriek and half sob. “Carver!” she gasped. “I thought we’d next see you in the hunting halls beyond.…”

They met halfway between the nest and where I stood, and I couldn’t help but feel a stab close to my heart when Cal threw his arms around his mother.

I wouldn’t get the chance to do the same with Nerissa. I wouldn’t ever see Conrad again.

The pups bounded forward from the doors and windows of the jitney, chattering to Cal and Toby and, thankfully, ignoring Dean and me.

Toby laid his hands on the heads of the two smallest and growled gently, shaking them by their scruffs. The rest mobbed Cal, climbing up his legs and into his arms, demanding to know where he’d been and if he’d brought them presents from aboveground.

Cal and Toby’s mother turned her eyes on Dean and me while Cal roughhoused with the pups.

“Does some kind soul wish to tell me why there is live meat at my door?”

Dean stepped forward and extended his hand. “Dean Harrison, ma’am.”

Cal’s mother snarled at his fingers, and Dean snapped his hand out of range. I felt my eyes widen at the sight and size of her teeth.

“Erlkin,” she snarled. “We’ll have none of your trickery here.”

“No, ma’am,” Dean assured her, eyes the size of quarters. The crone humphed, and picked up her stick once more, jabbing it at me.

“A female, young … you’re the bag of bones my boy was taken and tortured over.”

My knees knocked at her cut-glass gaze. Her eyes were the same color as Cal’s but sharper, tempered with anger and more sights of the hard world. “Yes,” I said quietly. “I suppose I am. My name’s Aoife Grayson.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what your name is, meat,” she croaked, reaching up to pinch my arm. Her claws dug into my skin. “You’re barely fit for a cook pot, never mind my boy’s life.”

“Mother …” Cal shifted in place.

“I’m sorry that Draven took Cal away from you,” I said. “But we’ve helped each other get free of him, and I don’t have anywhere else to go.” I stiffened my spine against the next words, which I could hardly believe flew out in the face of something that could tear me limb from limb. “If you don’t like it, I suggest you ask your son about me.”

“Carver, what foolishness is she spouting?” Cal’s mother demanded, jabbing one clawed finger at me. There was something dark and crusted at the end of her talon.

“The Proctors want to burn me,” I elucidated. “The Kindly Folk have threatened to kill me, and I may or may not be going mad inside of a week. So if it pleases you …” I paused and waited for her name.

“Reason.” She spat it at me, with a hiss on the end.

“If it pleases you, Reason, I’m here to fulfill my duty to my father and my friends and then accept whatever fate is mine, and being called names and threatened is, frankly, nothing new.”

Cal’s mother looked me up and down, a pale white tongue flicking over her spotted lips. I didn’t know if she was about to slap me or eat me, but I stood fast.

“You’re still meat,” she said at last, and then tapped Cal on the leg with her cane. “But for the life of my son, you gain yours.” She put her teeth away, her grimace becoming something marginally less terrifying. “Bring them inside, Carver. Who taught you manners?”

“You did,” Cal shot back. Reason gave him a quick box on the ear, and when Cal hissed in pain her smile vanished.

“You’re hurt,” she exclaimed.

“It’s my fault,” I piped up. “The Proctors said they wanted information. But I really think Draven just paid him back for not stopping me soon enough.”

Reason glared at me over the top of Cal’s head. “You think that you’re special, little girl? You have something extra the other meatbags don’t?”

“I have a task,” I said quietly. “And I’m sorry that Cal got caught up in it, but he was protecting me. You can be proud of him for that.”

Reason put her arm around Cal and drew him away from me. “I don’t need to hear from human meat that my boy is a good boy. I know it.”

They disappeared into the nest, and Toby followed them. “You can wait with me,” he grumbled. “Cal’s the baby of our litter. Mother fusses, but he’ll be fine soon enough.”

I ducked my head to fit into the door of the nest, the scent of burnt meat and wood smoke filling my nostrils. My eyes watered from the close, hot atmosphere, but the nest was clean and dry, and soon enough we came through the woven tunnel to a center point.

Toby flopped down on his haunches with a sigh. “This is our hearth. Never had any humans sitting at it before.”

“First time for everything,” Dean said, sitting cross-legged next to Toby. Dean’s shoulders were tight, but he took pains to settle himself close enough to Toby that the ghoul could have leaned over and bitten him in the throat.

I sat on Toby’s other side, showing the same trust. Beds of shredded rags and hay and small coal fires dotted the ground of the central nest. The air was close and heavy but not spoiled, laden with spice and tang. The hearth itself was a brick chimney built around a heat source drifting up from below the brick. The rotten-egg scent of a pipe fire was missing, but the chimney exuded warmth, and I curled against the outer wall.

Presently, Cal and Reason returned, Cal’s bruises and cuts faded to weeks old rather than hours. Cal crouched next to me, and I brushed a finger over his temple. His skin as a ghoul had a velvet cast, nothing like the slimy, clammy hide I’d first touched when he’d changed.

“You’re all fixed,” I said. “Good as if I fixed you myself.”

Cal grinned at me. I still wasn’t able to reconcile his teeth with the boy I’d known, but it was getting easier to look at him. “I’m not sorry about what happened in Ravenhouse.”

I smiled. “Me either.”

He pointed down a tunnel off the hearth. “I’m going to sleep. You and Dean can stay by the hearth. None of the others will bother you there, but don’t wander around. You smell pretty tasty.”

“Just what every girl wants to hear,” I told him. “We won’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Not all of us feel the same way about humans.” He crawled off down the tunnel, and after a time Toby took his leave as well.

I poked in corners of the hearth room a bit, while Dean dozed with one eye open against the warm brick. “You need a pillow, princess, I’ve got an arm,” he said.

“I’m not tired,” I told him, fingering a dog-eared, year-old copy of Amazing Stories. I smiled to myself. Knowing that Cal’s love for trashy pulps, at least, hadn’t been a lie eased the wound his true face had left.

Dean drifted to sleep while I examined the detritus that the ghouls had collected—broken china, collections of gears that came from a hundred different machines, a single red patent-leather pump. Shards of glass and metal hung on red string from the ceiling, refracting the gentle light from the gaps in the hearth chimney. Broken dolls were nailed in rows along the walls of the nest, their empty eyes staring down at me. At the apex of the roof, glass globes from old lamps had been arranged on wire to reflect our solar system. A ghoul had made a miniature universe above my head, stars and planets spinning slowly in their orbit.

Even here, ghouls saw the same stars I did, though not in the same way. They saw broken, fractured, fragile glass, while I saw the only constant in the world. The sky was the sky, no matter where I stood.

Except, it appeared, under the ground.

To distract myself from the cold knowledge of where I’d ended up in my mad plan to awaken the queens, I tried to discern how the hearth chimney worked. A small cooking door sat nestled into the hand-laid brick, and I turned the wheel to crank it open. Heat pinked my face as I squinted into the depths of the hearth. A steam pipe sat in the center of the brick, puffing fragrant warmth into the open air. My Weird prickled as I realized what I was seeing. I gasped and then shouted for Dean.

He came upright with a start, and Cal and Toby appeared from the nest tunnels.

“What’s wrong, Aoife?” Dean demanded. “You find trouble?”

“No,” I said. “Just the opposite.” I pointed to the gear and sickle stamped into the pipe casing, just above where it had snapped and left itself open to the ghouls.

“You’re gonna have to explain this one,” Dean said. “I’m not seeing the excitement in a grody old pipe.”

I beamed, feeling sweat trickle down my spine from the proximity to the steam. “You will, Dean.” I pointed at the pipe, at its route down and back, toward the heart of the city. “This is how we’re going to get into the Engineworks.”

The ghouls had collected a vast store of lost things, and Toby showed me the nest where most of it was kept. “It’s all here,” he said. “Meat keep the strangest things, and they throw even stranger things away.”

I beckoned to Dean. “We need to find some climbing gear. Something to make a harness and crampons from.”

Dean cocked an eyebrow. “I know you’re not talking about climbing down that thing, kid. You’ll roast.”

“Not if we can vent this chimney,” I said. “Ventors work in the pipes every day. I can certainly make one trip.”

Dean uncovered a length of sturdy rope, and I found a pair of golf shoes roughly the same age as I was. “These’ll do,” I said.

“Well, find a pair for me, too,” Dean said. I blinked at him, already pulling the spikes off the bottom of the shoes.

“Whatever for?”

“If you think you’re going down there alone all on the spur of the moment, you’re cracked,” Dean said. “We’ve already gotten sucked into a ghoul nest—I’d hate to see what else is down here.”

I gave Dean a small smile. Him coming with me meant I’d come back. Dean could always find his way back. I clung to the sentiment as I found a toolkit with most of the tools missing. A few minute’s work had fashioned the golf spikes and some wire into a serviceable pair of crampons, which I strapped to new shoes I found amid the mess.

I took a deep breath. I couldn’t turn around now.

My only adventure into a steam pipe had come the previous year, when the chief ventor of the Engineworks took us into the bowels of the Engine, one by one. I’d never forgotten the roar, the oppressive heat and the weight of the water in the air as we journeyed as close as an unprotected person could come. As I lowered myself down the side of the steam pipe, the heat stippling my skin with moisture, I thanked every ventor I’d known at the School for their wisdom.

“You all right down there?” Dean shouted.

My foot found the bottom of the pipe’s junction, and I tugged on the rope. “Yes! Come down.”

Dean lowered himself until he landed next to me, panting. We’d both stripped down to our bottom layer: I to my dress and stockings, Dean to his white T-shirt. His hair hung lank, while mine became like a thundercloud in the humidity.

“If the Proctors are wrong, and there is a heaven … this is definitely hell,” he said, swiping his hand over his face.

“The Proctors are wrong,” I said, sure of that if nothing else. “So very, very wrong about so much.”

We crouched to make our way down the pipe, until it widened, and a grate blocked our path. The sign hanging from the mesh had nearly rusted away, but the flared symbol, like a blooming flower, was familiar from our first-year safety lectures.

I snatched Dean’s arm. “Get back.”

“Why—” he started, but was drowned out by a great rumbling. A moment later a jet of concentrated steam shot along the pipe, heating the mesh so that it glowed.

“It vents up,” I said. “Direct from the Engine to aboveground.”

Dean whistled. “Well, we sure aren’t getting in that way.”

“If we can’t go in through the river then we have no choice,” I said. “This is the only way into the Engineworks besides the front gate, and we’re sure as hell not getting in that way.” I tugged at Dean’s hand. “Let’s go back. I need to ask Cal exactly where we are relative to the Engine and make some sketches.” And get out of the heat before I collapsed into a puddle. I never would have made it as a ventor.

The climb back into the ghoul nest was far harder than the climb out, now that I was tired and wrung of moisture. Dean had to pull me out and onto the soft floor of the nest. Cal hovered where he’d obviously been waiting since we’d gone, claws flexing in and out. “Stop breathing so hard!” he ordered me. “You sound like prey!”

I concentrated on bringing my heartbeat and breath back under control. Dean found a scrap of burlap and blotted some of the sweat and grit from my face.

“That’s better,” Cal said at last, as a few of his skulking brethren who’d been watching me from the tunnel entrance retreated. “Did you find anything?”

I nodded and tried to smooth down my hair in a token effort to look human. “Where are we, exactly?”

“Near the riverwalk,” Cal said. “Close to where we met the nightjar, below Old Town.”

I shrugged back into my jumper, chilled now that my sweat had beaded and cooled on my skin. “I need a pen and some paper.”

I settled in one of the hammocks in the hearth room, and presently Dean brought me what I’d asked for.

“Won’t be easy,” Dean said as I sketched.

“No,” I said. “It won’t be.” I thought of my goggles and the invigorator, back in some cold evidence locker at Ravenhouse.

Damn Grey Draven three times over. Him and his lies, and his peculiar fascination with my father.

The paper was the back side of an ancient Metrocar schedule, and the pen was barely more than a nub dipped in cheap, grainy ink, but working from remembered diagrams and lectures and the rough coordinates Cal had provided, I soon had a rudimentary sketch of the vent tunnels into the Engine. I handed it to Dean.

“Some of it is from memory, but I think we can use it to get in.”

“Not bad,” Dean said, examining the sketch. “Of course, there’s the small matter of getting out again.”

For once, I was on sure footing and had an answer for him. After weeks of drifting anchorless, it made me a bit giddy. “We can trip the pressure alarms in the Engineworks,” I said. “There will be an evacuation. It happened once when I was doing field study. People scrambling everywhere, no order. Nobody will notice us.” A pressure vent could fling shards of Engine, gears and rods at hundreds of PSI in every direction. Another way a ventor could die. Anyone caught in the line of fire looked like they’d been in the path of a war Engine. If I went to the heart of the Engine, I’d be going the opposite way from everyone else and could be unobserved, hopefully for as long as I needed to use my Weird. If I could do what I’d claimed to Tremaine. Right now it was a theory, and I knew I could be very, very wrong. But I couldn’t be scared. Cal’s and Dean’s futures and my own were riding on me being strong, stronger than even my father.

I could be. I had to be.

“I can get a message to Captain Harry to get us out of the city once we go topside,” Dean said, “but up until then … it’s up to you to make this work, princess.”

“Don’t worry.” I elbowed him. “I’m the brains of the operation, remember?”

Dean leaned down and kissed me, and I still wasn’t used to the weightlessness it brought on. He helped me fly for a moment, and I slid my hands under his jacket, so I could touch cotton and skin. “That’s not what I meant. If this goes badly …,” he said.

I touched my finger to his lips. “If it goes badly … I’m glad I met you, Dean.”

We sat quietly after that, watching the ghoul pups play with a doll among the piles of junk in the corners of the nest, stalking and killing the crude human shape over and over. It didn’t get darker or lighter under the city, but when night closed in, I curled in my hammock and dreamed, of a burning city and falling stars.

I woke, frantic and alone. My mother stood over me, in her nightgown, a man’s cardigan and bare feet. Her expression twisted up, the one that came when she wanted me so badly to believe her and knew I wouldn’t, because she was crazy.

“You shouldn’t have walked in the lily field, Aoife.”

“You’re not real,” I said. My mother reached out and slapped me. It stung.

“I warned you! I warned you, daughter. The dead girls dance on the ashes of the world and we will all weep for what they do.”

I held my cheek where it stung. “You are mad, Mother.”

“And what do you think seeing me makes you?”

When I came awake into actuality, where the world was real and solid, I was screaming. Dean grabbed me, caught me as I fell from the hammock.

“Aoife, what is it?”

“I saw …” My teeth chattered so hard they stole my speech and my thoughts were racing faster than my tongue could form words anyway. “My mother,” I managed. “She was here.”

“There’s no one here,” Dean said gently. “No one but me.”

Cal crept in from the nests. The fires were low and I knew that this was what passed for night under the earth. Cal’s face fell. “It’s the madness dream? You’re still having it.”

“At least you’re not saying necrovirus any longer.” I half-smiled.

“No need.” Cal’s tongue flicked in and out. “All a lie, isn’t it? You don’t know how it stuck in my craw pretending to be scared of the Proctor’s fable. Ghul weren’t made by any virus. We’ve always been here, under the skin of your world.”

“It’s no comfort, the lie,” I said. “My family does go mad, no matter what causes it. I feel like there’s an abyss in front of me, and a wind at my back.…”

“Aoife.” Cal wrapped his long, skeletal arms around himself. “No matter what happens, you’ll be Aoife. I’ll come visit you in the madhouse, if that’s what it takes, but I won’t desert you. I’ll learn a new boy-shape. Draven will never catch me.”

“Why can’t I just go back?” I whispered, ignoring his attempts at comfort. “Erase all of this and go be a student whose biggest problem was a schematic she couldn’t draw?”

“Because,” Dean said, “then you’d lose everything you’ve gained since. Truth, magic. Even the real face of your obnoxious little friend here.”

“You’re calling me obnoxious,” Cal huffed. “If you could only hear yourself.”

I managed a laugh. “At least some things haven’t changed.”

“I’m still the Cal you knew,” he said. “I know you don’t trust me, but underneath I’m the same. I’ll go to the Engineworks with you. If I don’t make it, or the Proctors grab me again—”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, moving away from Dean and straightening up. “You won’t be coming.”

Cal sighed. “I’m not working for Draven anymore. I swear it.”

“I mean,” I said, “we need someone to meet the airship. To come for us if Dean and I get caught again.” I gave Cal a smile, a whole one, even though it was purely meant to make him cooperate. I guessed I had learned a thing or two from Dean. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have looking out for me.” And if Cal did decide that his loyalties lay elsewhere, at least we wouldn’t be together in the Engine when he did.

Dean stayed when Cal crept back to his nest. “I can stay,” he said. “If you want me.”

I moved and made room for him in the hammock. I wanted Dean to stay, badly. I never, I realized, wanted him to leave again. “Please.”

Dean slipped out of his leather jacket and his heavy boots and settled next to me, letting me sink back into the comfort of his chest, wrapping his arm around my waist and resting his chin on the top of my head. His breath ruffled my hair. I stayed still, afraid I might break our comfortable silence like a soap bubble.

Dean spoke, eventually. “Dreams, huh?” he whispered in my ear. “Bad ones?”

“The worst imaginable,” I said. “Ever since I was a little girl.”

“Well,” Dean said softly. “I’m here now. Any bad’s going to have to get through me.” He ran his fingers down my cheek, over my neck and arm, and then kissed the back of my neck before settling his head onto the pillow. “Sweet dreams, princess.”

I knew that no one, not even Dean, could keep the dreams at bay, but I allowed myself to think he might, until I fell back into a fitful, smoke-tinged sleep.

I woke alone, shivering in the chill of a dead fire. Ashes blew softly across the hearth, as if subterranean snow had fallen while I slept.

“Dean?” I whispered, scrubbing vision back into my eyes. I was stiff and sore from sleeping in the crook of the hammock, but I had slept soundly and long. Light fell from somewhere far above, in bars and crosses across the rough earthen floor.

“He went to smoke a cigarette,” Toby’s guttural voice piped from the corner of the hearth. “I don’t understand why you breathe the smoke in willingly. Your city is covered in it.”

“We all have our vices,” I said. Toby grinned at me, his bluish fur almost silver in the early light.

“I said I’d watch you so you didn’t turn into breakfast. Although I am hungry.”

I swung myself down from the hammock, planting my feet with a thud. “We both know you’re not going to do anything of the kind as long as Cal’s around, so why don’t you shove a sock in it?”

Toby laughed. I was beginning to see subtle differences in the ghouls—Cal was slight and skinny no matter what shape he was in, while Toby was larger, darker. Tanner’s voice had been nightmarish, but Toby’s and Cal’s were strange in a way that made me want to listen.

“I sorta see why Carver decided to protect his meat friend,” he said. “You’re not like a human. You’re more like one of us.”

“I wish that were true,” I said, and meant it. If I could fight and hunt, if I were something to be afraid of, none of this misfortune would have happened.

Toby drew something out from behind his back, awkward as any human boy. “Carver said you lost your kit in Ravenhouse. I know humans need things. Even though they just clank and clack, hanging from your bones.” He shoved the object into my hand.

I gasped when I saw Tremaine’s blue goggles. “Where did you get these?”

Toby grinned at me. “Those men following you and Carver and the Erlkin. Some of us went back, went hunting. The fat one had them on his belt.”

Quinn. I’d be lying if I said I was sorry.

I slid them over my eyes and looked at the nest. Toby appeared wavy and insubstantial, only his bones showing clearly. His ghoul spine with its cruel curve that made him able to spring and twist in midair, the long jaw full of teeth, and the knifelike claws.

All around me, the underworld revealed itself, disused pipe and tunnel running off in every direction, a drain that dribbled overhead directly to the river, and the broken, branching chimney that vented the ghoul’s hearth.

Toby panted, itching behind his blunt ear with one long claw as I slid the goggles onto my forehead. “So it’s a fair bargain, yes? For saving Carver’s life?”

“Yes, Toby,” I said. “More than fair. Thank you.” I tried Tremaine’s goggles again. “Now I know what it’s like to be Dean—to see everything that’s hidden.”

Dean poked his head from the nest tunnel to the outside. “I hear my name?”

“Dean!” I waved the goggles at him. “Look what Toby found.”

He took a glance through the lenses and just as quickly jerked the mask off. “That’s Folk trickery. Splits my head in two.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But they’ll help us get down the vent tunnel. I can watch for the steam, and time it.”

“Assuming we get through that grate,” Dean said.

Toby extended his claws with the sound of daggers being drawn. “Leave that to us.”