The Black Lung Captain totkj-2 Read online

  'After what happened, you still want to try again?'

  'I'll get it right this time.'

  'What if you don't?'

  'I'll get it right,' Crake said firmly.

  Plome mopped his brow and licked his lips nervously. 'I want to be there.'

  'No. It's far too—'

  'I insist!' he said, his voice shrill. 'It's my sanctum!'

  His small eyes shone with fervour. Crake knew that look. He'd worn it himself once. Plome might maintain the facade of a businessman and a politician, but like Crake he was a daemonist first and foremost. The secrets of the other side were an addiction. Crake suspected that the tragedy attached to his name, far from appalling Plome, had actually increased his respect for his guest. Crake had been blooded in a way that Plome hadn't. He'd made a terrible sacrifice to the Art, and he was still coming back for more.

  Plome admired him. The thought made Crake feel even worse.

  'You'll handle the second line of defence,' Crake said. 'If it gets past me, we can't let it out of the sanctum.'

  Plome nodded eagerly and sprang out of his chair. 'Shall we get started, then?'

  'One more thing,' said Crake. 'Do you have a gun?'

  Plome frowned. 'I do. Why?'

  'I want you armed.'

  'Armed? Whatever for?'

  Crake stood up and walked past Plome towards the door. 'Because if things go wrong, I want you to shoot me.'

  Plome's sanctum lay underneath his house, in a hidden basement accessible through a daemon-thralled door which employed a strong mental suggestion to turn away casual snoopers. It was well organised and laid out like a laboratory. Electric bulbs hummed behind their shades. Complex chemical apparatus stood on a workbench near a chalkboard covered with scribbled formulae. Shelves were loaded with forbidden books. Resonators and modulators were fixed to frames and trolleys. The equipment here was the best: bigger and more powerful than the portable gear Crake used. Plome was not short of cash, and not afraid to spend it on his passion.

  A globular brass cage had once dominated the room, but now it had been relegated to the corner along with a few portable oil lanterns. The new prize piece stood in the centre, amid a mass of heavy cables. The echo chamber. Crake felt his stomach tighten at the sight.

  It looked like a bathysphere: a ball of riveted metal, two metres in diameter, with a single porthole in a door on one side. It stood on a low plinth, braced by struts. Cables were plugged into it all over its surface.

  Crake stared at the porthole, and the darkness within.

  You could still turn back. Tell them you couldn't do it. They'd understand.

  But back to what kind of life? What would he be to his crew, after this? Dead weight? Someone to be pitied and tolerated? No, he'd had enough of that from his family, when he was a younger man. He'd borne it from them because he didn't like or respect them. But he couldn't bear it from Frey, or Jez, or Malvery.

  He refused to be pathetic. Better to be dead.

  He set to work. He checked the cables to the echo chamber, making sure everything was plugged in properly. After that, he familiarised himself with the control console, which differed in small ways to the one he knew. Lastly, he pulled over a resonator and connected it to a sequence of inputs on the echo chamber.

  Plome was occupied with his own preparations, constructing a three-tiered defence of oscillation spheres, pulse pods and resonator masts. Crake approved of his thoroughness, but privately he wasn't at all sure that any conventional methods could contain a daemon capable of breaking out of an echo chamber.

  Crake was studying formulae from a book when Plome came over to him, mopping his brow. 'Boning up on echo theory, eh?' he asked nervously. 'I thought you knew all about that stuff?'

  'I do.' Crake snapped the book shut. He'd just needed something to stop his anxiety getting the better of him. He had it all by heart anyway. Not that it had done him much good last time. 'I'll assume this place is soundproofed? Things will get loud.'

  'Oh yes. Daemons thralled to the walls and ceiling. We could have an orchestra down here and you wouldn't hear it in the sitting room.'

  'Good,' said Crake. He'd used similar methods himself, in the wine cellar where he'd built his own sanctum.

  'Shall we, then?'

  'Activate the perimeter,' Crake told him. 'And whatever happens, stay out there. There's no telling what might come through.'

  Plome nodded. 'Good luck, Crake,' he said. He scurried away a few steps, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. 'For what it's worth, you're a braver man than I.'

  He retreated to the edge of the sanctum, where he'd connected up a series of control consoles to manage the defences. Crake felt a low vibration build in the air around him. Gradually a high-pitched whine slipped in, just at the edge of hearing. Soon the air was alive to his finely honed senses, a mass of sonic whorls and eddies. The invisible discord would confuse, repel or destroy any daemon that ventured outside the echo chamber.

  At least, that was the idea. But the idea was based on the weak, dim daemons that could be snared using conventional methods of daemonism. Echo theory gave access to the deeper realms, where dreadful beings lay. Creatures of craft and cunning. Whether or not they were susceptible to the crude science of their human adversaries depended on the strength of the daemon.

  Not for the first time, Crake wondered if he could have done this another way. Maybe he could have created a tracking device, like Frey's ring, that would lead them to the sphere? He could have done that using simpler, less dangerous techniques that he was comfortable with.

  But no, it wouldn't have worked. He'd have needed the sphere with him, so he could bind an identical daemon to both tracker and target in the same procedure. And if he had the sphere with him, there'd be precious little point looking for it. Perhaps, with time, he could have refined his methods and come up with a way to do it. But that was time they didn't have. So there was only one option left: to find a daemon smart enough to ask. And to be smart enough himself to get an answer from it.

  But there was another reason, too. It came from a bloody-minded, angry, stubborn place inside him. He wanted to face the echo chamber again, because he was damned if he'd be afraid of it any more.

  'Ready,' said Plome.

  Crake went to the resonator that was attached to the echo chamber. He tuned it carefully, according to the readings he'd scribbled down in the dreadnought. He'd noted the frequencies given out by the sphere while he was trying to determine if it was dangerous or not. Those frequencies formed a unique fingerprint that could be used to identify it.

  'Ready,' Crake agreed. He threw a switch on the side of the console. A bass hum came from the echo chamber, growing louder as it powered up.

  Crake closed his eyes. That sound. Just like last time. The feeling of retracing his steps towards disaster was inescapable. He knew what lay at the end of this path.

  Her.

  Slowly he started to turn the dials, seeking frequencies. He'd calculated and memorised the range he intended to search in. It was a space where, historically, there had been several notable successes and relatively few disasters. The knowledge did little to reassure him. He'd played it safe last time, too, and look how things turned out.

  No, he reminded himself. That was your fault. You found a monster and you didn't let it go. You wanted to be a pioneer.

  He worked the dials, beginning at the upper and lower ends of the range and narrowing in. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. It wouldn't be any of the five conventional senses that told him when he found a daemon.

  The sudden, oppressive sense of being watched came upon him. The kind of feeling a mouse must get when it knows it's been spotted by a cat.

  Each daemon was like a vast, complex chord, with primary and secondary notes. If he could match those notes, he had the anchors he could use to drag it into phase with his world.

  The room felt darker and colder suddenly. His skin prickled.

  That was it. He'd found
its range, its highest and lowest frequencies. He opened his eyes and looked at the control console.

  It was enormous.

  "You've found something?' Plome called from the other side of the sanctum.

  Crake stared at the dials for a moment. Could you do this? Could you bring it through? With Plome here as witness? Spit and blood, how they'd talk about that one in the secret journals.

  He caught himself. Hadn't he learned anything? Didn't he know where unrestrained ambition would get him?

  'It's nothing,' he said, and reset the dials. He wouldn't make the same mistake this time.

  He began again. Daemons fluctuated, shifting pitch and bandwidth all the time, and they were frustratingly tricky to pin down. It was another half hour before he found one that stayed still long enough for him to catch it. This one was smaller, occupying the higher end. He penned it in with interference frequencies, preventing it from escaping into the subsonics, and then set about identifying its primary resonances. It began to struggle, but Crake was persistant, and each time he nailed one of the notes in the chord it had a little less wriggle room.

  Acrid sweat trickled from beneath his hairline as he worked. Lost in his work, he forgot himself and where he was, his mind focused entirely on the task. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

  'You're not getting away,' he murmured. 'Not from Grayther Crake.'

  An atmosphere of unreality had descended on the sanctum. An indefinable feeling of strangeness. The mind knew something was wrong but couldn't quite work out what. The presence of a being from the aether disturbed the senses on a subconscious level.

  Something pounded on the inside of the echo chamber, making Crake jump.

  'By the Allsoul,' Plome gasped. 'Something's here.'

  Crake held his hand out to Plome to shut him up. He checked his dials again, zeroing in on the last of the frequencies he'd identified. He couldn't risk it slipping away or getting free.

  Another ringing metal impact. Crake wiped sweat from his eyes and turned a dial by a fraction of a centimetre.

  Got you.

  There was a flurry of pounding on the inside of the metal sphere. Crake reached for a lever and threw it, blasting the interior of the echo chamber with a muddle of conflicting frequencies boosted to incredible volume. The daemon wailed in agony and confusion, a high, thin shriek that made Plome clap his hands over his ears.

  Crake returned the lever to its original position, and the tumult ended.

  'I know you can hear me,' he said sternly, addressing the daemon in the chamber. 'Behave.'

  There was no sound from the daemon.

  He flipped a switch to turn on the resonator. It filled the echo chamber with the frequencies he'd recorded when he was studying the metal sphere. 'I'm searching for this,' he said. 'You will tell me where I can find it.'

  Crake waited. The echo chamber sat there, humming. The control panel was on the side of the chamber, and he couldn't see the porthole from where he stood. He felt a powerful urge to go round and peer inside, but he also remembered what had happened last time he did that. Glimpsing a daemon could send a man out of his mind.

  Careful, he thought. Get the job done. You can indulge your curiosity afterwards.

  A sudden, loud impact on the inside of the chamber, hard enough to dent it. A feral, blood-chilling roar. Crake threw the lever, and the roar turned to a squeal. He kept up the torture for longer this time.

  'You will damn well do as you're told!' he snarled through gritted teeth.

  He pulled the lever back, and the squeal faded. For a time, there was only the hum of the echo chamber and the mass of semi-audible frequencies thrown out by Plome's perimeter defence. Crake could feel his heart skipping, and hear the breath in his ears.

  Then there was another sound. A moist clicking, coming from within the chamber. Half-drawn breaths, quick, desperate gasps.

  Crake went cold. He'd heard that sound before.

  Throw the lever. Throw the lever and blast that thing back to the aether.

  But he didn't. He needed to see. A terrible curiosity drew him. It couldn't be what he thought it was. It was just a trick. It had to be. But he needed to prove that to himself.

  He stepped away from the controls and moved around to the front of the echo chamber. Plome was watching him breathlessly from the edge of the room, where he crouched by his own array of control panels.

  That sound. That wet, rattling clutch for breath. It couldn't be.

  He looked through the porthole.

  There was a little girl in the chamber. She was lying on her back, head tilted, staring out at him with an expression of terrified incomprehension. There was blood in her hair, blood on her lips; her white dress was sodden. It welled from slashes down her arms, across her collarbone and scalp. She drew a short, clicking gasp, dragging air into punctured lungs.

  His niece.

  An involuntary cry of anguish tore from his throat. A flood of sudden weakness threatened to make him faint. He stumbled back from the chamber, vision blurring with tears, then staggered sideways and tripped against one of the thick cables plugged into the echo chamber. There was an fizz and a bright shower of sparks as the cable plug was tugged halfway out of its socket. The sight alarmed him enough to shake him out of his horrified state. He lunged towards it, seized the cable with both hands, and plunged it back into the socket.

  There was a snap of wild electricity, and the lights in the sanctum went out.

  'Crake!' Plome cried. 'Crake! What's going on?'

  It was pitch black, and the temperature had plunged to below freezing. Crake listened to his own frightened breathing, to reassure himself he was still there. He fumbled in the pocket of his coat for matches. He always had matches somewhere on him, for those rare times when he felt the need to smoke.

  'Crake!'

  'Stay there!' he called. 'Don't leave the controls! That's what it wants!'

  Suddenly he remembered the oil lanterns he'd seen in the corner of the room. He lit a match. It illuminated little more than his hands, the steam of his breath, and the curve of the echo chamber. The darkness was thick and unnatural.

  'Crake! Crake, speak to me, damn it!'

  'I said man the controls!' he shouted.

  'Crake!' Plome's voice was distant now, fading. 'Crake, say something!'

  'Stay where you are!' Crake yelled. But he heard nothing more.

  He walked carefully around the echo chamber and headed across the sanctum in what he hoped was the right direction. He lit a new match from his old one, afraid to let the dark close in for even a moment. The flame seemed unnaturally feeble. He listened, but heard only the sounds of his own terror.

  His foot bumped against something, and he leaned down. A tarnished lantern. He grabbed it, and put his match to the wick. The flame caught and swelled, and drove the darkness back. Crake let out a shuddering breath, then stood up and came face to face with Bess.

  His hand flew to his chest at the sight of the great metal golem. This can't be right! She can't be here! But when several moments passed and she still hadn't moved, he realised something was different about her. He peered inside her face-grille and saw no light within. She wasn't there. It was only the armoured suit, vacant and immobile. Cables ran from it into the darkness. Back towards the echo chamber.

  Just like the night I made that suit come to life.

  He turned away from the suit and raised his lantern higher. The light shone on stone pillars, and hinted at arches high above. Crake knew this place. It had been a vast wine cellar, before he made it his own. This was his sanctum. Here, he'd created the sword Frey carried, and the gold tooth in his mouth. Here, he'd created a golem. And here, he'd committed the crime that had destroyed his old life for ever.

  This is the daemon's doing, he thought. It's playing with me. But it felt no less real for that.

  Shivering with the cold, he moved back towards the echo chamber.

  The room was silent. Even the electrical hum of the
chamber had quieted. The tap of his boots rang through the freezing cellar.

  What's it waiting for? What does it want?

  He stepped around the front of the echo chamber. The door, the seal that kept the daemon inside, hung ajar.

  Crake reached out and pulled the door open. He steeled his nerve and shone his light inside.

  The chamber was empty.

  He heard wet, clicking breaths coming from beyond the range of his lantern.

  No, he thought to himself. Please not that. Don't make me see her again.

  He became aware of a dripping sound, and looked down. In his hand was a letter knife with the crest of his university on the hilt. His hand and the knife were covered in blood. It dripped from the blade on to the stone floor.

  He cried out in pain and flung the blade down. Something scraped in the darkness behind him. He spun around, but saw nothing.

  'Curse you!' he shouted. 'You are not that daemon!'

  Not the one that made him do what he did. Not the one that made him stab his niece seventeen times with a letter knife.

  Then, a voice from the blackness. His niece's voice.

  'Why'd you put me in there, Uncle Grayther?'

  Crake looked around, teeth gritted, desperately seeking the source of the voice. He knew it to be a trick, but tears welled in his eyes anyway. He couldn't help it.

  'Why'd you put me in there?' the haunting voice asked again. There was a groan of metal, and the armoured suit tipped forward with a crash, cables snapping free as it fell.

  'You're not her! How dare you pretend you are!' he cried.

  But despite what his mind knew, his senses told him otherwise. That was Bess's voice, who he'd put into an echo chamber while she was dying, and whose essence he'd transferred into an armoured suit. But the process had been crude and hurried and was way beyond his abilities; she hadn't come through it whole. What was left was a simple creature, more like a pet than the little girl he knew. A daily reminder of his crime.

  'I'm so lonely, Uncle,' came her voice again. 'I'm so lonely and it'll never end.'

  'You rot-hearted bastard!' Crake shrieked into the dark. 'I loved her!'

  'It's so hard to think in here, Uncle. What did you do to me?'