Retribution Falls

Twenty-Nine

Crake was shaken out of sleep by Frey’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Get up,’ Frey said. ‘What is it?’ he murmured.

‘Come on,’ insisted the captain. ‘I need you in the mess.’

Crake swung his legs off the bunk. He was still fully clothed, having gone to sleep as soon as Frey left the Ketty Jay. He’d hoped to shake off the headache he’d picked up from breathing the lava fumes. It hadn’t worked.

‘What’s so urgent, Frey? Stove making spooky noises? Daemonic activity in the stew?’

‘There’s just something we need to sort out, that’s all.’

Something in his tone told Crake that Frey wasn’t going to let this go, so he got to his feet with a sigh and shambled after his captain, out into the passageway. But instead of going down the ladder to the mess, Frey walked past it and knocked on the door of the navigator’s quarters. Jez opened up. She glanced from Frey to Crake, and was immediately suspicious.

‘Can you come to the mess?’ Frey asked, though it sounded less a request than an order.

Jez stepped out of her quarters and shut the door behind her.

They climbed down into the mess. Silo was in there, smoking a roll-up and drinking coffee. He was petting Slag, who was lying flat on the table. At the sight of Jez, the cat jumped to his feet and hissed. As soon as the way was clear, he bolted up the ladder and was gone.

Silo looked up with an expression of mild disinterest.

‘How’s the Ketty Jay?’ Frey asked.

‘She battered, but she tough. Need a workshop to make her pretty again, but nothing hurt too bad inside. I fixed her best I can.’

‘She’ll fly?’

‘She’ll fly fine.’

Frey nodded. ‘Can you give us the room?’

Silo spat in his palm and stubbed the roll-up into it. Then he got up and left. Since speaking with Silo, Crake couldn’t help seeing the Murthian’s relationship with his captain in a new light. They’d been companions so long that they barely noticed one another any more. They wore each other like old clothes.

‘Sit down,’ Frey said, motioning to the table in the centre of the mess. Jez and Crake sat opposite one another. The captain produced a bottle of rum from inside his coat and put it on the table between them.

‘She doesn’t drink,’ Crake said. He was beginning to get a dreadful idea what this was about.

‘Then you drink it,’ Frey replied. He straightened, standing over them. ‘Something’s going on between you two. Has been since you went to Scorchwood Heights. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know, ’cause it’s no business of mine. But I need my crew to act like a crew, and I can’t have this damned bickering all the time. The only way we’re gonna survive is if we work together. If you can’t, next port we reach, one of you is getting off.’

To his surprise, Crake realised that Frey meant it. The captain looked from one of them to the other to ensure the message had sunk in.

‘Don’t come out of this room till you’ve settled it,’ he said, and then he climbed through the hatch and was gone.

There was a long and grudging silence. Crake’s cheeks burned with anger. He felt awkward and foolish, a child who had been told off by his tutor. Jez looked at him coldly.

Damn her. I don’t owe her an explanation. She’d never understand.

He hated Frey for meddling in something that didn’t concern him. The captain had no idea what he was stirring up. Couldn’t they just let it lie? Let her believe what she wanted. Better than having to think about it again. Better than having to face the memories of that night.

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Jez said.

He met her gaze resentfully.

‘What the Shacklemore said,’ she prompted. ‘You stabbed your niece. Seventeen times with a letter knife.’

He swallowed against a lump in his throat. ‘It’s true,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she whispered. There was something desperate in the way she said it. Some wide-eyed need to understand how he could do something so utterly loathsome.

Crake stared hard at the table, fighting down the shameful heat of gathering tears.

Jez sat back in her chair. ‘I can take the half-wits and the incompetents, the alcoholics and the cowards,’ she said. ‘I can take that we shot down a freighter and killed dozens of people on board. But I can’t be on this craft with a man who knifed his eight-year-old niece to death, Crake. I just can’t.’ She folded her arms and looked away, fighting back tears herself. ‘How can you be how you are and be a child-murderer underneath? How can I trust anyone now?’

‘I’m not a murderer,’ Crake said.

‘You killed that girl!’

He couldn’t bear the accusations any more. Damn her, damn her, he’d tell her the whole awful tale and let her judge him as she would. It had been seven months pent up inside him, and he’d never spoken of it in all that time. It was the injustice, the righteous indignation of the falsely accused, which finally opened the gates.

He took a shaky breath and spoke very calmly. ‘I stabbed her,’ he said. ‘Seventeen times with a letter knife. But I didn’t murder her.’ He felt the muscles of his face pulling towards a sob, and it took him a moment to control himself.

‘I didn’t murder her, because she’s still alive.’

The echo chamber sat in the centre of Crake’s sanctum, silent and threatening. It was built like a bathysphere, fashioned from riveted metal and studded with portholes. A small, round door was set into one side. Heavy cables ran from it, snaking across the floor to electrical output points and other destinations. It was half a foot thick and surrounded by a secondary network of defensive measures.

Crake still didn’t feel even close to being safe.

He paced beneath the stone arches of the old wine cellar. It was cold with the slow chill of the small hours, and his boot heels clicked as he walked. Electric lamps had been placed around the echo chamber—the only source of light. The pillars threw long, tapering shadows, splaying outward in all directions.

I have it. I have it at last. And yet I daren’t turn it on.

It had taken him months to obtain the echo chamber. Months of wheedling and begging and scraping to the hoary old bastard in the big house. Months of pointless tasks and boring assignments. And hadn’t that rot-hearted weasel enjoyed every moment of it! Didn’t he relish seeing his shiftless second son forced to run around at his beck and call! He’d strung it out and strung it out, savouring the power it gave him. Rogibald Crake, industrial tycoon, was a man who liked to be obeyed.

‘You wouldn’t have to do any of this if you had a decent job,’ he’d say. ‘You wouldn’t need my money then.’

But he did need his father’s money. And this was Rogibald’s way of punishing him for choosing not to pursue the career picked out for him. Crake had come out of university having been schooled in the arts of politics, and promptly announced that he didn’t want to be a politician. Rogibald had never forgiven him for that. He couldn’t understand why his son would take an uninspiring position in a law firm, nor why it took over three years for him to ‘work out what he wanted to do with his life’.

But what Rogibald didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that Crake had it worked out long ago. Ever since university. Ever since he discovered daemonism. After that, everything else became petty and insignificant. What did he care about the stuffy and corrupt world of politics, when he could make deals with beings that were not even of this world? That was power.

But daemonism was an expensive and time-consuming occupation. Materials were hard to come by. Books were rare and valuable. Everything had to be done in secret. It required hours of study and experimentation every night, and a sanctum took up a great deal of space. He simply couldn’t manage the demands of a serious career while pursuing his study of daemonism, and yet he couldn’t get the things he needed on the salary of a lawyer’s clerk.

So he was forced to rely on his father for patronage. He feigned a passion for invention, and declared that he was studying the sciences and needed equipment to do it. Rogibald thought he was being ridiculous, but he was rather amused by the whole affair. It pleased him to let his son have enough rope to hang himself. No doubt he was waiting for Crake to realise that he was playing a fool’s game, and to come crawling back. To have Crake admit that he was a failure, that Rogibald was right all along—that would be the sweetest prize. So he indulged his son’s ‘hobby’ and watched eagerly for his downfall.

Since Crake was unable to afford accommodation grand enough to suit his needs, his father allowed him to live in a house on the family estate which he shared with his elder brother Condred, and Condred’s wife and daughter. It was a move calculated to humiliate him. The brothers’ disdain for each other was scorching.

Condred was the favoured son, who had followed his father into the family business. He was a straight-laced, strict young man who always acceded to Father’s wishes and always took his side. He had nothing but contempt for his younger brother, whom he regarded as a layabout.

‘I’ll take him under my roof if you ask me to, Father,’ he said, in front of Crake. ‘If only to show him how a respectable family live. Perhaps I can teach him some responsibility.’

Condred’s sanctimonious charity had galled him then, but Crake took some comfort in knowing that Condred regretted the offer now. Condred had envisioned a short stay. Perhaps he thought that Crake would be quickly shamed into moving out and getting a good job. But he’d reckoned without his younger brother’s determination to pursue his quest for knowledge. Once Crake saw the empty wine cellar, he wouldn’t be moved. He could endure anything, if he could have that. It was the perfect sanctum.

More than three years had passed. Three years in which Crake spent all his free time behind the locked door of the wine cellar, underground. Every night he’d come back from work, share an awkward dinner with his disapproving brother and his snooty, dried-up bitch of a wife, then disappear downstairs. Crake would have happily avoided the dinner, but Condred insisted that he was a guest and should eat with the family. It was the proper thing to do, even if all concerned hated it.

How typical of Condred. Cutting off his nose to spite his face, all in the name of etiquette. Moron.

The only thing that made life in the house bearable, apart from his sanctum, was his niece. She was a delightful thing: bright, intelligent, friendly and somehow unstained by the sour attitude of her parents. She was fascinated by her uncle Grayther’s secret experiments, and pestered him daily to show her what new creation he was working on. She was convinced that his sanctum was a wonderland of toys and fascinating machines.

Crake found it a charming idea. He began to buy toys from a local toymaker to give to her, passing them off as his own. Her parents knew what he was doing, and sneered in private, but they didn’t say a word about it to their daughter. She idolised their layabout guest, and Crake loved her in return.

Those three years of studying, experimenting, trial and error, had brought him to this point. He’d learned the basics and applied them. He’d summoned daemons and bid them to his will. He’d thralled objects, made simple communications, even healed wounds and sickness through the Art. He corresponded often with more experienced daemonists and was well thought of by them.

All daemonism was dangerous, and Crake had been very cautious all this time. He’d gone step by tiny step, growing in confidence, never overreaching himself. He knew well the kinds of things that happened to daemonists who attempted procedures beyond their experience. But it was possible to be too cautious. At some point, it was necessary to take the plunge.

The echo chamber was the next step. Echo theory was cutting-edge daemonic science, requiring complex calculations and nerves of steel. With it, a daemonist could reach into realms never before accessed, to pluck strange new daemons from the aether. The old guard, the ancient, fuddy-duddy daemonists, wouldn’t touch it; but Crake couldn’t resist. The old ways had been mapped and explored, but this was new ground, and Crake wanted to be one of the first to the frontier.

Tonight, he was attempting a procedure he’d never tried before. He was going to bring life to the lifeless.

Tonight, he was going to create a golem.

He stopped his pacing and returned to the echo chamber, checking the connections for the twentieth time. The echo chamber was linked by soundproofed tubes to a bizarre armoured suit that he’d found in a curio shop. The shopkeeper had no idea what it was. He theorised that it might have been made for working in extreme environments, but Crake privately disagreed. It was crafted to fit a hunchbacked giant, and it wasn’t airtight. He guessed it was probably ornamental, or a sculptural showpiece made by some deranged metalworker. At any rate, Crake had to have it. It was so fascinatingly grotesque, and perfect for his purposes.

Now it stood in his sanctum, ready to accept the daemon he intended to draw into it. An empty vessel, waiting to be filled. He studied the armoured suit for a long time, until it began to unnerve him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was about to move.

Surrounding the echo chamber and the suit was a circle of resonator masts. These electrically powered tuning forks vibrated at different wavelengths, designed to form a cage of frequencies through which a daemon couldn’t pass. Crake checked the cables, following them across the floor of the sanctum to the electrical output he’d had wired in to the wall. Once satisfied, he turned them on one by one, adjusting the dials set into their bases. The hairs on his nape began to prickle as the air thickened with frequencies beyond his range of hearing.

‘Well,’ he said aloud. ‘I suppose I’m ready.’

Standing on the opposite side of the echo chamber to the armoured suit was a control console. It was a panel of brass dials, waist-high, set into a frame that allowed it to be moved around on rollers. Next to the controls was a desk, scattered with open books and notepads displaying procedures and mathematical formulae. Crake knew them by heart, but he scanned them again anyway. Putting off the moment when he’d have to begin.

He hadn’t been so terrified since the first time he summoned a daemon. His pulse pounded at his throat. The cellar felt freezing cold. He’d prepared, and prepared, and prepared, but no preparation would ever be enough. The cost of getting this wrong could be terrible. Death would be a mercy if an angry daemon got its hands on him.

But he couldn’t be cautious for ever. To be a rank-and-file practitioner of daemonism wasn’t enough. He wanted the power and renown of the masters.

He went to the console and activated the echo chamber. A bass hum came from the sphere. He left it for a few minutes to warm up, concentrating on his breathing. He had a feeling he might suddenly faint if he didn’t keep taking deep breaths.

It’s still not too late to back out, Grayther.

But that was just fear talking. He’d made this decision long ago. He steeled his nerve and went back to the console. Steadily, he began to turn the dials.

There was an art to catching a daemon. The trick was to match the vibrations of the equipment to the vibrations of the daemon, bringing the entity into phase with what the uneducated called the ‘real’ world. With minor daemons—little motes of power and awareness, possessing no more intelligence than a beetle—the procedure was simple enough. It was rather like fishing: you placed a sonic lure and drew them in.

But the greater daemons were another matter entirely. They had to be caught and forced into phase. A greater daemon might have six or seven primary resonances that all needed to be matched before it could be dragged unwillingly before the daemonist. And once there, the daemon needed to be contained. It was a foolish man who tried to deal with an entity like that without taking measures to protect themselves.

Crake wasn’t stupid enough to think he could handle a greater daemon yet. He was aiming lower. Something with a dog-like level of intelligence would suit him very nicely. If he could thrall an entity like that into his armoured suit, he’d have a golem dull enough to be biddable. And if it proved troublesome, he had procedures in place to drive it out and back into the aether.

But summoning daemons was dangerous in many ways. A man didn’t always know exactly what he was getting. He might fish for a minnow and find a shark on the line.

Crake had made calculations, based on the findings of other echo theorists and his own ideas. He’d identified a range of frequencies where he’d be likely to find what he wanted. Then he commenced the hunt proper.

The echo chamber began to vibrate and whine as he searched along the bandwidth. Daemonism was as much about feel and instinct as science. Crake closed his eyes and concentrated, turning the dials slowly.

There it was. That creeping sensation of being watched. He’d found something. Now he had to catch it before it slipped away.

He set up new resonances, starting high and low and then moving them closer together, feeling out the shape of the entity. He stopped when he felt the resistance of it.

The reaction was more pronounced now: a cold shiver, a slight feeling of vertigo and disorientation. He had to keep his eyes open. When he closed them, he started tipping forward.

He looked at the dials. The thing was huge, spread right across the subsonics.

Let it go, he told himself. Let it go. It’s too big.

He had it now, though. There was no way he could hold on to something like that with his standard equipment. It would simply phase into a different frequency and escape. But with the echo chamber, he could keep it pinned, pounding it with confusing signals that all interfered with one another.

He could get this one. Forget the golem, forget everything else. He just wanted to see it. Then he’d send it back. But just to see it!

Excited, riding on a fear-driven high, he worked the dials feverishly. He set up more vibrations, seeking the daemon’s primary frequencies, narrowing and narrowing the bandwidth until he matched them. The daemon was shifting wavelengths, trying to escape the cage, but he shifted with it, never letting it get away from him. The closer he came, the less space the daemon had to wriggle.

The air was throbbing. The echo chamber pulsed with invisible energies.

Spit and blood, this is working! This is actually working!

Once he had it fixed as best he could, he stepped away from the console and went to peer inside the echo chamber. Through the porthole in the door, he could see that the sphere was empty. But he wasn’t disheartened. Inside, perspectives bent out of shape, and the air warped in eye-watering contortions. Something was coming. He could hardly breathe for terror and fascination. Leaning close to the thick glass, he tried to see further inside.

A colossal, mad eye stared back at him.

He yelled, falling away from the porthole, his heart thumping hard enough to hurt. That vast eye had surged out of nowhere, surfacing into his reality, burning itself on to his consciousness. He saw it now, impossibly huge, belonging to something far bigger than the echo chamber could contain.

There was a heavy impact, and the echo chamber rocked to one side. Crake sat where he’d fallen, transfixed. Again, the sound of a giant’s fist pounding. The echo chamber dented outwards.

Oh, no. No, no.

He scrambled to his feet and ran for the console. Get rid of it, get rid of it, any way you can.

Another impact, sending a shudder through the whole sanctum. The electric lamps flickered. One tipped over, crashing to the ground. Crake lost his footing, stumbled onwards.

And then he heard her scream.

The sound froze him to the bone. It was more dreadful than anything he could imagine; more dreadful than the thing in the echo chamber. His world tipped into the primal, inescapable horror of a nightmare as he looked over at his niece, standing there in her white nightdress. She was just outside the circle of resonator poles, transfixed by the scene before her.

He’d never know how she’d got the key to the wine cellar. Perhaps she’d found an old copy in some dusty, hidden place. Had she been planning this moment ever since? Had she been unable to sleep, so keen was she to see the secret wonderland of toys where her uncle Grayther worked? Had she set her clock to wake her, hoping to sneak down in the dead of night when she thought he wouldn’t be there?

He’d never know how or why, but it didn’t matter in the end. What mattered was that she was here, and the daemon was uncontainable. The door of the echo chamber flew open, and the last thing he knew before his life changed for ever was a hurricane wind that smelled of sulphur, and a deafening, unearthly howl.

When his senses returned to him, the sanctum was dark and silent. A single electric lamp remained unsmashed. It lay on its side near the echo chamber, underlighting the looming shape of the armoured suit, which was still connected by cables to the dented metal sphere.

Crake was disorientated. It took him several seconds to understand where he was. His mind felt scratched and sore, as if rodents had been scrabbling at it from the inside, wounding his senses with small, dirty claws. The daemon had been in his head, in his thoughts. But what had it done there?

He realised he was standing. He looked down, and saw in his hand a letter knife with the insignia of his university on the hilt. The knife and the hand that held it were slick and dark with blood.

There was a clicking noise from the shadows. Red smears on the stones. He followed them with his eyes, and there he found her.

Her white nightdress was soaked in red. There were slits in her arms and throat, where the knife had plunged. They welled with rich, thick blood, spilling out in pulses. She was gaping like a fish, making clicking noises in her throat. Each breath was a shallow gasp, and her lips and chin were red. Her brown hair was matted into sodden wads.

Her eyes. Pleading. Not understanding. Dazed with incomprehensible agony. She didn’t know about death. She’d never thought it could happen. She’d trusted him, with a blind, unthinking love, and he’d turned on her with a blade.

It was the daemon’s revenge, for daring to summon it from the aether. It had been cruel enough to leave him his life and wits intact.

Crake hadn’t known that pain and despair and horror could reach the heights that they now did. The sheer intensity of it was such that he felt he should die from it. If only the darkness would come back, if only his heart would stop! But there was no mercy for him. Realisation smashed down upon him like a tidal wave, and he staggered and gagged, the knife falling from numb fingers.

She was still alive. Alive, begging him to make the pain stop, like some half-broken animal ruined under the wheels of a motorised carriage. Begging him to make it better somehow.

‘She’s a child!’ he screamed at the darkness, as if the daemon was still there to be accused. ‘She’s just a damned child!’

But when the echoes had died, there was only the wet clicking from his niece as she tried to draw breath.

What overtook him then was a grief so overwhelming that it drowned his senses. He was seized by an idea, mad and desperate, and he acted on it without thought for consequence. Nothing else was important. Nothing except undoing what had been done, in the only way he could think of.

He scooped her up in his arms. She was so light, so thin and pale, white skin streaked with trails of gore. He carried her to the echo chamber, and gently placed her inside. He pushed the door shut. Despite the abuse it had suffered, the lock engaged and it sealed itself. Then a weakness took him, and he fell to his knees, his forehead pressed against the porthole in the door, sobs wracking his body.

She was lying on her back, her head tilted, looking at him through the glass. Blood bubbled from her lips. Her gaze met his, and it was too terrible to stand. He flung himself away, and went to the control console.

There, he did what had to be done.

Jez had seen men cry before, but never like this. This was heartbreaking. Crake’s sobs were deep, wild, dredged up from a depth of pain that Jez couldn’t have imagined he held inside him. His story had become almost impossible to understand as he neared the end. He couldn’t even form a sentence through the hacking sobs that shook his whole body.

‘I didn’t know!’ he cried, his face blotched and his beard wet with tears. His nose was running, but he didn’t trouble to wipe it. He was ugly and shattered before her. It hurt to see him so. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing! Only it . . . it didn’t work like I thought. The tra . . . the tra . . . transfer wasn’t perfect. She’s different now, she’s not . . . like she was . . .’ He gasped in a breath. ‘I just wanted to save her.’

But Jez couldn’t give him pity or sympathy. She’d hardened herself too much. She saw the tragedy of him now, but if she let herself forgive him, if she gave in even a little, there would be no going back. He could perhaps be excused the crime of stabbing her, if he wasn’t in his right mind. But what he’d done next was nothing short of diabolical.

‘One thing,’ she said. Her voice was so tight that it hardly sounded like her. ‘Her name.’

‘What?’

‘All this time, you never told me your niece’s name. You’ve avoided it.’

Crake stared at her with red eyes. ‘You know her name.’

‘Say it!’ she demanded. Because she needed just this final closure, before she could walk away.

He swallowed and choked down a sob.

‘Bessandra,’ he said. ‘Bessandra was her name. But we all just called her Bess.’