The Iron Thorn

39 The Fate of Graystone

DEAN SLEPT ON the flight back to Graystone, but the rocking motion of the Belle failed to soothe me. Instead, I got out of my seat and made my shaky way to the cockpit, to stare over Harry’s and Jean-Marc’s shoulders at the landscape below.

“You all right, mademoiselle?” Harry demanded. I tried to smile at him but it hurt.

“I suppose I’ll live.” I’d stopped shivering and mostly dried out, but the ache of falling into the freezing water was prodigious. My head still rang from the Weird, and I’d watched my nose stop and start bleeding three times since Harry had snatched us from the jaws of the river.

“Coming up on the village, Captain,” Jean-Marc said. “And it’s a pitiful sight.”

The ship passed small fires burning like ghoul eyes in the fading light, over wrecked jitneys in the street and prone bodies lying facedown on the cobbles.

“What’s happened?” Cal said, coming to stand next to me. “The whole town’s blazing.”

I felt an awful premonition creep along my spine and into my twinging shoggoth bite, and turned to Captain Harry. “Can we go faster?”

“We are at the mercy of the winds now, petite,” Captain Harry said. “And the ill wind, she’s blowing over your valley.”

As we crossed the empty field and drifted up against the mountain, I saw more and more signs of carnage. Blood smearing the cut cornstalks of the fields. Dead crows circled by worrying, cawing live ones. Dark shapes that darted from shadow to shadow, like liquid.

The rising moon overhead was swollen and yellow, nearly full. Ghoul howls echoed from the mountain, and the only respite I saw was that Graystone was not blazing like Arkham.

“Set it down. Set it down!” I shouted at Harry, already scrabbling for the hatch. It was my fault the Folk’s monsters were lose, my fault that bodies were littering Arkham’s streets. Tremaine had played me, and it had worked. The barriers between Thorn and Iron were no more.

Harry lowered the dirigible only long enough for me, Dean and Cal to jump off. He hollered at us from the cockpit, “Good hunting, chère!” and then with a whirr of fans the Belle was gone.