He started off back towards the landing pad. Malvery trudged behind. ‘I miss the old Cap’n,’ he grumbled.
Frey had almost all the information he needed. He was missing only one piece. Someone was backing Duke Grephen, providing the money to build an army of mercenaries big enough to fight the Coalition Navy and take the capital of Vardia. He needed know who. When that last piece fell into place, he’d understand the conspiracy he was tangled up in. Then, he could do something about it.
A serene and peaceful feeling settled on him as they made their way back towards the Ketty Jay. Tomorrow would bring an answer. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was certain of it.
Tomorrow. That’s when we start turning this around.
Twenty-Nine
Intervention - The Confessions Of Grayther Crake - An Experiment, And The Tragedy That Follows
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.