Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (13 page)

Conrad’s lips compressed in a straight line. “If this is what’s going to happen, I’m not letting her touch the Gate again.” He fished in his jacket pocket, pulled out a dirty kerchief and handed it to me. “Clean yourself up,” he muttered to me, pressing the cloth into my hands. “Don’t like to see you bleeding.”

I swiped at my face and then shoved the kerchief into my own pocket.

“Thanks,” I whispered to Conrad. He shrugged—a gesture of kindness I thought we’d forgotten how to exchange. I felt a little less strained in that moment.

Planting my feet carefully until my balance came back, I returned to the Gate, but this time I examined the plinth itself. The Erlkin were engineers, I was an engineer. Surely
I could make their machine work without my Weird. I still had a brain, at least until I fetched up against that much iron again. The plinth, not iron itself but some kind of smooth black stone, revealed a hinged door in the side, which opened into a small space studded with dials and gauges.

The symbols stamped next to each were similar to what I’d seen in Windhaven, and I called Dean over to translate. “There’ve got to be instructions for this thing.”

Dean whistled. “There’s just markings for places like the black forests, the dry wastes—not that I know why anyone would want to head there—and there’s one marked
Iron
.” He fingered the burnt edges of the panel. “But this thing is dead, princess. No way we’re turning it on manually.”

“The Gates are made of magic,” Conrad said. “This is just their physical manifestation. The rift between here and the Iron Land is still there.”

I gave Conrad a look with a raised eyebrow, a private look that said
Can you feel the Gate?

Conrad coughed and looked away. “I mean, according to what I read at our father’s house.”

“Right, of course,” I said quickly, turning the dial Dean had pointed out to us.

The next dial asked for directionality in pictograms, incoming or outgoing, and I turned it. All that remained was to complete the circuit, but they were all fried.

Reflexively, I put my hand against the panel and felt a flutter of life from my Weird. The figure’s words came to me, but from far away. This could be our only chance to get out of here. I put both hands against the panel and fervently hoped this wouldn’t be the last thing I ever did.

“Here goes nothing,” I murmured so that only Dean could hear. Best case, the Gate worked for me and we got to go home. Worst case, I got electrocuted.

I wasn’t nearly as strong and capable as Dean and Bethina and Cal seemed to think I was, but I could do this. I could be brave, like they needed me to be.

I grabbed the lever with my hand, and my Weird with my mind, and flipped the metal circuit to the
On
position.

For a moment, there was nothing, just the sweet ache of the Weird coursing through me and into the circuit board. I didn’t try to push forward into the mechanism of the Gate, but I felt the void drop away again as the rift within the mechanism opened.

I felt a rumble under my hands and feet and heard the subtle swoop of aether rearranging itself inside the vacuum tube, and then I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and stand up. I jerked my hand away from the lever and stepped away from the Gate. The row of gauges below the dials vibrated to life, needles climbing toward maximum.

Above us, I saw a bright flash of lightning and heard a crack of thunder nearly directly above my head. The ionized air all around made my skin crawl, and my Weird ran frantic circles in my mind as it sensed the wondrous, terrible machine that controlled the incalculable power of the world rift.

The lightning flashbulbed again, brighter than anything, leaving whorls on my vision, black clouds gathering over us like ghost crows, swooping down and making my head ring with a thunderclap so loud my teeth shook.

I gasped, drawing back from the Gate, which had become a lightning rod, making sure the others were clear as
well. Nature and magic were beyond anyone’s control, even someone with a Weird. I didn’t feel ashamed of being wary of them.

The third flash snaked a bolt of electricity from the boiling clouds and hit the Gate, punctuated by a thunderclap so loud it deafened me instantly. Dean grabbed his ears and Bethina let out a scream, though I couldn’t hear it, could only see the panicked pink O of her lips.

Before me, in the center of the Gate’s iron arch, stood the same shimmering mirror that I’d seen when Conrad had transported us into the Mists, a wavering image of the Iron Land on the other side. It flickered, spiderweb cracks running across the glassine surface and then retreating. I could tell that the Gate still wasn’t stable, but it was open, and that was all that mattered.

I’d kept us safe from Draven. I’d gotten us home.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Dean shouted at the others. “Go!”

One by one, they hurried through the flickering hole in reality, Conrad bringing up the rear, until only Dean and I remained.

“Now or never, princess,” he told me. I looked back at the Mists, the ruined village, and the swirling white fog that hid Draven and his men, growing closer by the second.

“I hope this is the right thing to do.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, just step through the Gate, but it came out. I felt if it hadn’t, I might have exploded.

Dean looked into my eyes. “I don’t know that. But I trust you, princess. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders and you haven’t steered me wrong yet.”

I reached out and put my hand on one of his slightly
rough, stubble-covered cheeks. I pressed my lips to the other, and tasted the warmth and salt of his skin. “Thanks, Dean.”

He flashed me half a grin and skimmed his thumb across my lips. “Thank me when we’ve got your mother with us and we’re out of Lovecraft for good.” Motioning to the Gate, which had grown increasingly fractured and jumpy, he dropped his hand. “Go on, now. I’m right behind you.”

I touched the opening of the Gate with my fingers first. It was an absence of feeling in the shimmering space the aether had created. Holding my breath, and still thinking I could possibly be making the worst mistake I ever made, I stepped through, back along the line of travel to the last location, the one the Proctors had used. Back to Lovecraft, and whatever awaited me.

The Ruins of Lovecraft

T
RAVELING BY
G
ATE
was unpleasant, a fact that I had forgotten in the whirl of more pressing problems since Conrad and I had escaped Graystone.

I was reminded violently as I passed into the Gate and felt as if I’d been jerked by a string implanted in the center of my chest, down and sideways, spinning end over end, out of control. I caught flashes of other places, other skies not my own, mountains of a shape that no horizon of the Iron Land bore.

It was like seeing a tiny slice of the world the shadow figure from my not-dreams occupied, spinning by at a speed a human eye couldn’t hope to process.

I wished I knew how the Gates truly worked, how they folded in all the worlds between Mists and Iron and shot my matter across incalculable distances to reassemble it on the other end. But the only ones who knew that were the
Brotherhood, and the Fae, and neither one was a group I relished asking.

I landed on a patch of burnt earth when my journey ended, and pain stabbed up my right arm as my wrist twisted under my full weight.

“Dammit!” I shouted, cradling my arm. I had just recovered my equilibrium when Dean came flying from the Gate and landed on me, sending me into the dirt again.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, face buried in my hair. “Not much in the way of navigation through that thing.”

“It’s okay,” I managed, looking back at where we’d come from. There was no Gate on this side, nothing physical—just a weak spot that nobody except a Gateminder or a Fae would ever notice.

Dean raised his head and smiled down at me.

“All in one piece?”

I managed a smile in return. It was hard not to smile at Dean when he turned the full force of his eyes and his slow, full grin on you. “More or less.”

“Excuse me,” Conrad said loudly from above. His voice broke into the warm place I was drifting in within Dean’s eyes like a jangling chronometer alarm. “But if it’s not too much trouble for you, please get off of my sister.”

Dean dropped me a wink before he rolled up to his knees and then his feet and offered me a hand. I took it and stood, brushing ash and dirt from my clothes. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere around Nephilheim, looks like,” Conrad said. The slumped gray row houses and treeless vista did look like the factory town attached to the Nephilim Foundry, whose belching smokestacks I’d looked out at
my entire life in Lovecraft. Now the sad little houses were shuttered and deserted, and the brick factory buildings in the distance were blackened with long streaks of soot. One of the foundry’s smokestacks had partially collapsed, and reached for the brown-tinged clouds like the jagged end of a broken spoke.

I’d expected it to be bad, but the fact that this much ruin had spread across the river, right into Nephilheim, made my stomach drop. How far had the destruction of the Engine reached? How many people had been in its way?

“Aoife?” Dean said, touching my shoulder. “You want to get moving?”

“Yeah,” I said, blinking back what I told myself were tears from the ash drifting through the thick, acrid air. “The bridge isn’t far past the foundry. We should go that way.”

We walked, keeping in a tight group, Conrad at the head and Dean at the back. I nudged him in front of me—if something jumped out at us, Dean could protect Cal, Bethina and himself. Conrad and I would just have to fend for ourselves. Dean took it with good grace, and winked at me.

“Don’t worry, princess. I’m fine.”

I tried to smile back, but the farther we walked and the more wrecked homes we passed, the sicker to my stomach I felt.

“Where is everyone?” Bethina turned in a wide circle, taking in the dirt street and the empty houses.

No one else was in evidence, and the only movement I saw was a white curtain in an open window at the far end of the block, fluttering in the intermittent breeze. It was November and the beginning of winter in Lovecraft and
the surrounding towns, and I tucked my hands under my arms to warm them. I didn’t get the eerie prickle of being watched by live eyes as I had in the Mists, but that didn’t mean nothing was watching. The Proctors had plenty of ways to keep eyes all around Lovecraft without any flesh and blood involved.

“Not here,” Cal said. He sniffed discreetly. “There’s nobody within a mile of this place.”

Which just made me wonder where everyone in Nephilheim had gone. Foundry workers, jitney drivers, their families. There was really no good train of thought running down those tracks. I bit my lip hard, hoping the pain would distract me from my racing thoughts. It was just the iron. Whispering treacherous things to me, that I’d done this, that my stupidity with the Fae had made these people disappear.

Just the iron. Not the truth.

I walked a few steps away from the group and looked down the broad avenue. It ended at the west gates of the foundry. Beyond was the Erebus River, which I’d crossed for the first time a little more than two weeks earlier, fleeing the city where I’d spent my entire life.

Now I was willingly going back, into the jaws of the Proctors and who knew what else, things that had slipped through the tears appearing and disappearing in the Gates.

Reassuring myself that I wasn’t already insane was getting harder and harder. And with every step I took back toward Lovecraft, the iron of the city and the land around me whispered louder in my blood.

On the horizon, across the river, columns of black and silver smoke rose, as if souls were drifting up from the
broken cityscape, trying to find a hole in the overcast sky. The clouds were blood-red, and lightning danced between them as the smoke from burning aether formerly trapped in the Lovecraft Engine drifted into the atmosphere.

I could hear sirens faintly, the constant warning of an air raid. Those sirens were supposed to warn us of Crimson Guard attacks, but now they were screaming senselessly, echoing back from the smashed walls of the foundry.

Something crunched under my boots, and I looked down to see what it was. The street, in addition to being covered in ash, was peppered with shards of glass—silvery window glass and also crockery, as if everything had been flung and shifted in the Engine’s great spasm.

As we trudged on, block after block with no human in sight, and as the wreckage grew worse, some of the houses window- and doorless, merely yawning maws covered in smoke marks, I pulled Cal aside. “I think you and Bethina should stay here.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “I need to be with you. I have to stay close.”

“Cal,” I said. “You know what’s over there. You know what the Proctors will do if they catch you.” Never mind Cal’s own clan of ghouls, who regarded siding with humans as an offense serious enough to get you torn limb from limb and cooked in a stew.

I gestured toward Lovecraft. The sirens were louder with every step we took, and I imagined that on the same wind, I could hear the howling of the tribes of ghouls that had populated Lovecraft’s sewers. “You know all that,” I repeated to Cal. “And if you go across that bridge you’re not going to be able to hide what you are from her.”