Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (30 page)

I gazed back at the street once more. A few Proctors moved in groups, Draven’s new needle pistols at the ready. One of them met my eyes and quickly looked away as he passed on the other side of the street without a second glance. No Proctor would touch me now; that much was clear. Not while I was marked as Draven’s agent.

The weight of the compass in my bag increased, or I imagined it did. The complicated clockwork within was driving my Weird crazy, like the tickle of a feather on my skin.

I was going to find a way to defy him, of course. There was no possibility of doing as he asked, allying myself with the Proctors. Draven might think he owned me by threatening to hurt Dean and my family, but hadn’t Tremaine threatened the same thing? I’d obeyed him out of what I thought was a lack of choice, and the results had been horrific. This time I had to fight. Had to be the girl my father told me I was—strong and smart. A Grayson, not a scared child.

Besides, Draven hadn’t discerned my entire mission in finding the Brotherhood. They were welcome to slug it out, but I had one goal in going north, and that was to find the nightmare clock. And once I did, the clock, if it worked, would set things right.

That was the promise I made to myself as I turned back and edged into the Nor’easter, letting the shadows dip across my face. It was oddly quiet and, as far as I could tell, empty. Dust motes were suspended in the gray midwinter light streaming through the broken windows. They cast jagged kaleidoscopic patterns on the dirty floor and showed just how shabby the place was.

“Hello?” I called.

Nobody answered me. I wandered a circuit of the small room, glass crunching under my shoes. The Nor’easter was beyond shabby, but that gave me a little hope. A place this run-down wasn’t likely to be harboring the law-abiding types who’d take one look at me and scream for a Proctor.

I determined that nobody was around, then pushed into the back room. Somebody screamed, and I raised my hands reflexively, until I realized it was the farmer’s daughter I’d seen at the barn.

“Great Old Ones return,” she hissed. “You do have a habit of popping up on people, don’t you?”

“Why are you here?” I said, shocked. The girl had changed from her nightclothes, but her face was still bruised and swollen. She gestured to her apron and the broom she held. “Proctors or not, if I don’t show up to work, I get fired. We can’t afford that in my house.”

“You seem all right,” I offered hesitantly.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks to you.” She stuck out her hand, awkwardly, and I shook it, just as awkwardly. “I’m Maggie,” she said. “Maggie Fisher.”

“You seem to already know who I am,” I said.

Maggie blushed. “I’m sorry about that stuff I said. I weren’t thinking. You did save me from the Proctors.”

“Forget it,” I said. I would have done the same in her position. I didn’t hold it against her. “Your mom all right?”

Maggie’s face fell. “She’s in and out, but the doc said she’d be okay. Might be in bed for a few weeks.”

“I’m sorry to ask you this now,” I said. “But do you know a woman named Rasputina Ivanova? Apparently she comes in here a lot.”

“Sure.” Maggie snuffled. “She’s always with this group of shady Russians. Hate ’em. They never tip.” She pointed back to the main room, to a round table in the corner. “She sits there and never talks, least not to decent types.”

I took a breath. “I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m just going to be frank. They smuggle people out of Innsmouth, don’t they?” I couldn’t exactly hop aboard a commercial steamer bound north, not with the sort of place I was heading for. And I didn’t want to run into any more Proctors if
I could help it. My encounter with Draven had been more than enough.

Maggie stared at me, and I could see the struggle taking place behind her eyes.

“Do they pay you to point desperate people in their direction?” I lowered my voice, drawing closer, hoping to impress on her how serious I was. “I’m desperate, Maggie. Desperate as they come. I know you don’t trust me, but the sooner you point me in the right direction, the sooner I’ll be out of your village.”

One hand crept up to touch the bruises on her face, and Maggie flinched. “The submersible comes up out past the jetty, eleven-thirty or so on nights with a new moon. Tonight, I don’t know. So many Proctors out there … but there’ll be desperate folks too. There always are, and Captain Blood out there never turns down a quick buck.”

“I thought her name was Ivanova.” I shouldered my bag and prepared to go find a place to lie low until midnight.

“Yeah, it is,” Maggie said. “But we all call her after that old pirate story, because that’s exactly what she is. A bloody pirate.”

I looked out at the angry ocean, past the jetty to the clanging buoy that signaled the start of deep water. “Terrific,” I said. More pirates. More people out for my blood. Just what I needed.

Maggie told me how when the sky was dark, the submersible would creep into shallow water, past the jetty, and signal those hiding beneath the pier. Sometimes they sent a boat,
but I doubted they would with the
Dire Raven
crouched over Innsmouth like an ill omen.

I spent the time as the sun set in the back room of the Nor’easter, where Maggie had agreed I could stay. I found an old vulcanized raincoat and turned it into a rubber sack for my journal, the compass and anything else vulnerable to seawater. I sealed it with a little glue and wrapped it tightly with rope, shoving it back into my satchel.

The hours as the clock crept toward midnight were agonizing. Nobody came into the pub, and Maggie paced restlessly, sweeping up broken glass, washing dishes and mopping the floor, chores to occupy a restless mind. In times past I had done math to keep my thoughts quiet, but I couldn’t focus that much tonight.

At last, the nautical clock chimed the quarter-hour, and I shrugged into my jacket and picked up my things. I couldn’t miss the sub.

“Hey,” Maggie said as I pushed open the door to the main room. “Be careful.” I stuck my head out the front door and checked the deserted street. “Those Russians on the sub ain’t exactly friendly.”

“I think it’s a little late for careful,” I told her. “But thanks all the same.”

The temperature had dropped from merely chilly to agonizingly cold, sea wind cutting across my bare cheeks like animal claws. I snuggled into my jacket and walked down to the end of the dock, scanning the dark-capped waves for any sign of life.

Nothing stirred except the wash of the waves against the dock, and as my chronometer crept past midnight, I began to lose hope.
They have to come
, I thought; even though I
didn’t relish the journey, it was the only way I was getting north. The only way I could get far enough from Draven to figure out how I was going to outsmart him.

Heights didn’t bother me, but I didn’t like water. It was black, and cold, and the rocking made me feel as if I’d lost my grip on both the earth and gravity. I couldn’t think about that now, though. I could only think about the nightmare clock, the one thing that could help me.

The clanging of the buoy reached my ears again, and clouds scudded above my head. Lit only by faintest starlight, they were black hulking things, like the creatures that strove endlessly through the hundred skies above the black figure’s dome in my dreams.

Just then, far off in the shipping channel, I saw a single blue spot glow, slowly joined by others as something long and sleek slid from the depths. It bobbed to the top of the water with a knocking groan, the sound of rivets and iron rather than soft, slippery flesh. That was the only hint I had that it wasn’t something entirely of the sea.

The submersible floated where it was for a moment, and then a hatch clanged faintly. A red light joined the blue, the pinpoint of a lamp. It flashed Morse code, a simple sequence asking if there was anyone on shore. My Morse wasn’t the best, but I grabbed one of the dock lanterns and flashed back, using the blue glass filter in place for just such a purpose.

Come quickly
, the red light said.

I was about to flash back that I didn’t have a boat and they’d have to come closer when I picked up another sound over the buoy bell and the waves. A powerful spring-wound motor, the kind that could move a craft along at tremendous
speed. I caught the movement of blacker on black, a craft with no running lights.

Proctors. I swore under my breath.

Though Draven had surely told them to steer clear, the crew of the submersible didn’t know that, and one of the faceless crew opened fire on them with some sort of gun that rattled fast and loud, striking sparks against the patrol boat’s metal hull.

I cried out, even though they couldn’t hear me, but then realized I had both an advantage and a much bigger problem. I wouldn’t be marked as one of Draven’s agents if the Proctors engaged the Russians. But then again, I wouldn’t have a ride in another minute, if the sub crew was being shot at.

The submersible was barely a hundred yards offshore. I could do this. I could reach the ship and be gone from this place, on my way toward fixing everything I’d broken. My fear couldn’t stop me. Not this time.

I stepped to the edge of the dock, wriggled out of my shoes and coat, strapped my satchel across my back and jumped into the ocean.

At first, when the water hit me, I felt nothing. It was like burning myself on an acetylene torch—my nerves simply went dead, and a great envelope of unfeeling covered me.

I surfaced and swallowed a mouthful of salt water, choking and sputtering as I tried to keep my head above the waves. I wasn’t a horrible swimmer—everyone at the Academy had had to take a swimming unit—but I wasn’t a great one either, and with my clothes and satchel weighing me down, I wasn’t making much progress.

I stroked against the aching cold, straining toward the
row of lights on the side of the submersible, the tracers of light from the guns as they exchanged fire with the Proctors. I didn’t hear any screaming—the Proctors were aiming wide, their shots splashing on the sub’s hull and coming nowhere near the crew. Draven really wanted me on board the sub, wanted me heading north to the Brotherhood.

The cold came to me by degrees and was heavy as any lead. It compressed my lungs and dulled my nerves, until I knew that I was freezing, sinking, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I was so close. I could almost touch the sub, could see its running lights dazzling my salt-stung eyes, but I would never get there on my own. I was swallowing more water than air, and I could feel the cold tugging my numb body down.

Light engulfed me, bizarrely, as if the moon had at last shown its face. I had the absurd notion I was in the grip of one of the creatures said to live under the waves, enfolded in clammy, webbed hands. And then there was the brightest flash of all, a searing, stabbing pain through my chest, and everything went dark.

The glass dome of dreams was black now, smoke and thunderheads swirling outside. The gear ticked frantically, sending spiderweb cracks through the glass. Lightning illuminated the dark figure, and he looked at me in profile. His nose was sharp, his skin the gray of something long dead and buried. It was the first time I had glimpsed anything of him besides his eyes, and I was frightened by what I saw
.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he rasped at me, hands buried in the mechanism of the great gear, fiddling with bolts and tiny
components that even my hands weren’t delicate enough to manage. Lightning flashed over the dome again, and I realized that I stood on fresh-turned earth rather than transparent glass. All around me, flowers bloomed, their buds opening to reveal skeletal hands reaching toward the dark sky
.

“What happened?” I asked. It seemed a question far too small to encompass the destruction all around me
.

“You happened,” the figure snarled. “You stole into my world, and you were the first I’d seen in so long, I was careless. You listened to me whisper secrets and now the barriers have broken, because you were never supposed to come here.”

“I … I did this?” I whispered in confusion
.

“You will,” the figure whispered as the glass began to shatter and fall, slicing through the stems of the bone flowers as it rained around us. “When you die.”

The flowers oozed blood, red and wet, that stained the dirt. I stood rooted where I was. “I’m dying?”

“Not yet,” the figure said. “Go away. Stop dreaming about this, or do like the others you care for and stop dreaming at all. Stop stealing into my world, Aoife. Or you’ll be here much sooner than you think.”

Something bright and hot cut through me when the lightning flashed again, and the dome cracked completely, vanishing from before my eyes
.

“There’s a good girl,” a cigarette-tinged voice boomed in my ear. I rolled away from the voice, from the blinding light in my dazzled eyes, and vomited what even in my delirious state I could tell was an impressive amount of seawater.

I blinked the sparks from my vision while I coughed. I
was lying on a brass walkway, mesh digging into my legs through my soaked stockings. The walls around me were curved, riveted, and painted a humorless gray. Iron pierced my brain, all around me. Lettering spun before my eyes until I realized I wasn’t delusional but was merely seeing a language I couldn’t read.

“Am I …,” I gasped. Breathing, never mind talking, embedded a cluster of small knives in my chest when I tried it. The light dazzled me again, and I slumped. Strong hands caught me, and my nostrils were invaded by the smell of pipe tobacco.

“Take it easy,” said the same voice. “Back from the dead and trying to walk so soon. Tough little thing.”

“Or desperate,” said another voice, strongly accented and female.

“Or that,” the smoker agreed.

“I made it,” I gasped as I lay staring at the round ship’s hatch above me. “I’m on the submersible.” I was honestly surprised not to be dead. I remembered the suffocating feeling of the water, the hands of the sea tugging me down, and shivered uncontrollably.

A face came into view, wavering around the edges as my eyes worked to dispel the ocean’s tears. “You are indeed aboard,” agreed the female voice. “And that brings us to the thorny question of who you might be.”