The Ace of Skulls

Eight

‘That’s Osger?’ Frey asked, barely suppressing his disbelief. ‘That’s who we’ve come to find?’

Pelaru didn’t reply. He rocked slowly back and forth, hugging his partner’s severed body to his own, trembling with the effort of keeping his emotions contained. Crake didn’t know whether to be appalled or touched by the bizarre lantern-lit tableau before him.

‘Well,’ said Ashua chirpily. ‘Mission accomplished, I suppose.’

Jez hissed at her, baring her teeth like an animal, making Ashua jump. ‘Not the time for jokes,’ she said, and suddenly she seemed terrifying. ‘Look at him!’

‘Your. . partner was a half-Mane?’ Frey asked. And looking at the Thacian now, Crake realised now that Osger must have been more than just a business partner.

‘Yes. What of it?’ said Pelaru, without raising his head. ‘So is your navigator.’

Of course, thought Crake. He knew the signs. No wonder he was so interested in her.

‘Did he always, er, look like that?’ Frey asked.

‘Of course not, you fool!’ Pelaru snapped. He seemed about to say something else, but he reined himself in, brought himself under control again. His eyes became sad. ‘This isn’t him,’ he said quietly. ‘This is his infection.’

He laid down the body on the ground. It was hard to look at, but not frightening. The daemon was gone. What remained was merely a lump of warped meat. Pelaru seemed to think so too, for when he stood up he didn’t look at it again.

‘Do we need to take him back, bury him or something?’ Ashua asked carefully. She was still a little cowed by Jez. It took a lot to intimidate her, but Jez could do it.

‘There’s no need,’ said Pelaru, suddenly cold. ‘But I ought to find the rest of him.’

He walked off up the corridor a little way. Jez almost went after him, then caught Frey’s look and didn’t.

‘What now, Cap’n?’ Silo asked.

‘What do you think?’

‘Reckon we can’t be far from that shrine. Ought to take a look while we’re here. Seem to remember loot was part of the deal, yuh?’ He fixed the captain with a steady gaze. ‘Can’t think of no other good reason why we’d be down here.’

‘Plus one for looting,’ said Ashua, raising her hand.

‘Whatever you want, Cap’n,’ said Jez distractedly.

‘Crake?’ Frey turned the daemonist.

Crake’s instinct was to get out of there as fast as they could. He ignored it. Marshalling all his bitterness, he said ‘I want to see what the Awakeners were up to in there.’

But that was only half the truth. For while the others hoped to avoid the thing that had torn Osger apart, Crake hoped to meet it.

Three months ago, he and Frey had faced down a powerful Azryx daemon known as the Iron Jackal. With the help of a Yort explorer called Ugrik and the daemon thralled to Frey’s cutlass, they’d trapped and destroyed it. Previous to that, Crake’s experience of daemonism had been confined to the sanctum, where he could deal with daemons in a controlled environment. In order to save Frey’s life, he’d been forced to take on the Iron Jackal in the field. And he’d won.

Inspired, he’d begun working on more techniques for field daemonism. Instead of lamenting the lack of a good sanctum on board the Ketty Jay, he’d embraced it. No longer would he be chained to cumbersome machines and elaborate lairs; no longer would he hide away in the dark as daemonists had for so many years. He’d conduct his research out in the open. His passion for the Art had returned, and he felt like a new man because of it.

But research was no good without testing. And for that, he needed daemons. Terrifying as it was, this was an opportunity not to be missed.

He took off his pack and readied it. Most of the space inside was taken up by a chemical battery. The rest was occupied by a modified resonator, into which he screwed a set of cylinders tipped with a pinecone arrangement of rods. Then he took a controller from the side pocket of the pack and connected it with wires to the resonator. The controller was large and inelegant, too big to easily hold in one hand. When he hefted the pack onto his shoulders again, the wires ran under his arm and into the pack, and the rods poked up higher than his head. It was clumsy, but it would do.

‘Ready,’ he said.

‘You look like ridiculous,’ Frey observed.

‘What is that thing you’ve been lugging around, anyway?’ Ashua asked, cocking an eyebrow.

‘This,’ he said proudly, ‘is a flux thrower.’

‘A flux thrower?’ Ashua said. ‘Isn’t flux, er, when you get sloppy diarrhoea?’

Crake reddened. ‘The other kind of flux. Sonic flux! You see, the frequencies change constantly and that causes-’

‘I’m just saying,’ Ashua went on, her voice curving with suppressed amusement. ‘Back in the slums, kids used to go down with the flux all the time. Something in the water.’

‘There’s more than one kind of flux! This will allow me to narrow down on a daemon’s primary frequencies and pull it out of phase with our senses, actually send it back to the aether, and-’

‘ ’Cause I want to be sure, you know? If that thing’s gonna be flinging diarrhoea around, I plan to stand well back.’

Frey was in quiet tears of laughter. Crake shut his mouth. He gave Ashua a glare that communicated the level of betrayal he felt. That she should turn her vicious wit on him. On him!

Pinn came puffing up the corridor. Evidently he’d decided he didn’t want to be left behind. Crake was disappointed to see that he hadn’t fallen into the chasm.

‘You’re all bastards,’ he told them sullenly.

‘Doc not coming?’ Silo asked.

‘Does it look like he is?’

‘What’s that on your back?’ Pinn asked Crake.

‘It’s my shit-thrower,’ Crake replied primly, before anyone else could get in first. Ashua and Frey fell about in hysterics. Pinn just looked puzzled.

Pelaru returned, dragging the lower half of Osger. He dumped it next to the rest of him, and his expression killed their laughter. Pinn opened his mouth to ask what he’d missed, then didn’t bother.

‘We’re going on,’ Frey told Pelaru.

‘Alright,’ said Pelaru.

‘We’ll talk later about payment,’ said Frey. Crake saw the look that passed between them, the hidden meaning there. Then Pelaru nodded. He seemed defeated.

Some private matter of the Cap’n’s, no doubt. Crake wasn’t too curious. He had private matters of his own, namely the Shacklemores he’d seen roaming round the camp earlier.

Come the mornin’, this’ll all be over. So you just keep yourself safe till then, you hear?

Yes. Once they were done, he’d go to Samandra. The thought of it made him thrill with anticipation.

Come the morning. Until then, he had work to do.

Pelaru led them up the corridor, where they found more bodies. These were human and, unlike Osger, they’d bled. The corridor was thick with the stench of them, and dismembered parts were everywhere. Crake wanted to be sick, but he’d already brought up everything he had in the sewer.

What a glamorous life I lead, he thought to himself, and retched.

‘You’d think he’d seen enough bodies by now,’ Frey said to Silo, as they stepped over the dead.

‘Oh, I’m quite alright with the ones that still have their skin on the outside,’ Crake replied.

A set of steps joined the corridor, heading upward. Pelaru took them. At the top they found an arched doorway that had previously been blocked by a heavy wooden door. It had been smashed long ago, and only rotted chunks remained. Above the door, their lanterns revealed a symbol etched into the stone. The interlocking lines and spheres of the Cipher.

‘Huh,’ Frey said. ‘Maybe that explorer was on to something.’

They stepped into the shrine and raised their gas lanterns to get a better look. A ruined hall was revealed. There were hints of the grim grandeur it might have once possessed — a section of cornice here, the groin of a vault there — but calamity had spoiled it. The building above had fallen through the ceiling in places. Huge pieces of masonry had tumbled in and smashed the floor where they hit. Piles of rubble were heaped up higher than their heads. One wall had burst and the bedrock had thrust in from the side. It smelt of must and decay and something else, something subtle and insidious that made Crake’s senses prickle.

Crake had never been inside an Awakener shrine. None but Awakeners were allowed in. Only they were privy to the inner mysteries of their order, sole keepers of the secret knowledge. Only they could interpret the will of the Allsoul. That way, their believers always needed them.

He hated them. Hated everything they stood for. Daemonism was a science — poorly understood and dangerous, but a science nonetheless — and the purpose of science, in Crake’s view, was to further the knowledge of all mankind, not just a select few. The Awakeners hoarded knowledge for their own gain, jealously exterminating their rivals. Perhaps they feared what would happen if people saw what was behind the veil. There was no better example than the Imperators of that.

‘This isn’t exactly the wealth of riches I was hoping for,’ Ashua said, surveying the chamber.

‘Split up, dig about a bit,’ said Frey. ‘Damned if I’m leaving empty-handed now.’

They made their way between the rubble piles, brandishing guns and lanterns. Restless shadows slid among the stones as they passed. Crake saw his companions pulling things from the rubble: once-fine cloth now dusty and ripped; broken icons; a battered gold cup that was still good enough to salvage.

They found bones too, and pieces of skeletons. Some were buried under rubble. Others weren’t, but they were broken nonetheless. Crake wondered what had happened to them, and whether it was the same thing that happened to Osger many decades later.

He didn’t trouble to search. He wasn’t interested in riches. He’d been born with them, and they hadn’t done him much good in the end. He was after something else, something he could use against his enemies. Something that would damage them.

What he found was a machine.

It was huge, occupying one end of the hall, where it had been hidden by the dark. Half of it was destroyed, crushed by a cave-in from above, but what was left was enough to get a sense of it. It was a great apparatus of pipes and wires and diodes, of valved tanks and banks of gauges and dials. The stark design and the bulk of its parts told him it was old, perhaps thirty or forty years older than the quake that had destroyed it.

Eighty or ninety years ago, then. That’s when they built this machine. He began to put the story together in his head, his scientist’s mind assembling and examining the evidence. And later they sealed up the place with daemonic wards, until it was opened again by the quake. But there are still relics around; they didn’t take them when they left. That implies they left in a hurry.

He looked at the machine. There, at the centre, was a narrow cage somewhat like a gibbet, shaped to fit a person inside. The bars on one side had been bent and twisted by some enormous force.

And then he knew.

Spit and blood. Imperators. They were creating Imperators here.

It all fit. The timing, the secret location. Long ago, a group of daemonists, full of hubris, attempted a grand summoning and accidentally unleashed the Manes. The Awakeners heard what had been done, kidnapped the survivors, and learned how they’d managed it. They refined the technique, and soon after the first Imperators appeared.

They took their most faithful servants and put daemons inside them. And they did it using apparatus like this.

He studied the machine and did some calculations in his head. This wasn’t one of the original devices. It was too advanced for that. Imperators had been around for twenty or thirty years by the time this was built, though their powers were cruder then, by the accounts of the day. But this shrine must have been an important place, judging by its size and location. Perhaps they were up to something here, something more ambitious than simply creating more of their terrible enforcers.

He looked at the broken gibbet.

Something that went badly wrong.

Encouraged, he went looking for more evidence, while keeping a wary eye on the darkness beyond his lantern. Whatever was in that cage had escaped, and he’d lay odds that it was the same thing they’d heard howling earlier. Perhaps it was nowhere nearby, or perhaps it was already watching them.

He rounded a huge stone, larger than he was, and caught sight of Pelaru. The whispermonger had found something in the debris, it seemed. He’d put down his lantern and was holding a large grey metal casket in his hands. There was a frown on his face as he examined it. As Crake watched him, the Thacian’s expression slackened in realisation. Then he turned his head, and saw that he was being observed. His features became a carefully composed mask again as he met Crake’s gaze.

He recognises it, Crake thought. Damned if he doesn’t recognise what he’s got.

But the thought fled his mind as a new sensation crept over him. He recognised this feeling, this faint sense of detachment and unreality, this increasing paranoia and unease. He’d felt it many times before, in the presence of daemons.

He looked around frantically. ‘It’s here,’ he said, his voice echoing up to the roof of the hall.

‘You what?’ Frey called from elsewhere, loud enough to make Crake flinch. ‘You say something, Crake?’

‘It’s here!’ Crake yelled. ‘The daemon! It’s here!’

From the darkness, something screamed.