Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

How, then, could these people live so day-to-day? How could they discard the past and ignore the future with such enviable ease?

Or was it simply that the past was too painful and the future too bleak to contemplate?

He finished his drink and got to his feet. This was a question for another time.

‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I have to pay someone a visit.’

His announcement was greeted by a rousing wa-hey! from the table.

‘A lady friend, eh?’ Malvery enquired with a salacious nudge that almost unbalanced him. ‘I knew you’d crack! Three months I’ve known him and he’s not so much as looked at a woman!’

Crake managed to maintain a fixed smile. ‘You must admit, the quality of lady I’ve been exposed to hasn’t been terribly inspiring.’

‘Hear that?’ jeered Pinn. ‘He thinks he’s too good for our sort! Or maybe it’s just that women aren’t to his taste,’ he finished with a smirk.

Crake wasn’t sinking to that level. ‘I’ll be back later,’ he said stiffly, and left.

‘We’ll be here!’ Frey called after him.

‘You great big ponce!’ Pinn added, to raucous howls of laughter from his companions.

Crake pushed his way out of the tavern, cheeks burning. The cold, clear air off the sea soothed him. He stood outside Old One-Eye’s, collecting himself. Even after several months on board the Ketty Jay, he wasn’t used to being mocked quite so crudely. It took him a short while before he felt calm enough to forgive the crew. Not Pinn, though. That was just one more score against him. Ponce, indeed. That moron didn’t know how to love a woman.

He buttoned up his greatcoat, pulled on a pair of gloves and began to walk.

Tarlock Cove at dusk was rather picturesque, he thought. A fraction more civilised than the dives he’d become accustomed to, anyway. With the Hookhollows rising steeply at the back of the town and the wild Poleward Sea before it, there was a dramatic vista at every corner. It was built into the mountainside and straggled around the encircling arms of the bay, connected by steep stairs and winding gravel paths. Houses were narrow, wooden and generally well kept once you got away from either of the two docks. Vessels of both air and sea made port here, as Tarlock Cove was built on fishing. The ships trawled the shoals and sold their catch to the aircraft crews for distribution.

It was, in fact, the reason they’d come here. Having been burned by their last endeavour, Frey decided to play it safe with some nice, legal work that wasn’t liable to get them all killed. He’d all but emptied the Ketty Jay’s coffers to buy a cargo of smoked bloodfish, which he planned to sell inland for a profit. Apparently, it was ‘easy work’ and ‘nothing could go wrong’, both phrases Crake had learned to mistrust of late.

He headed up railed stone stairways and along curving lanes. The houses pressed close to a waist-high barrier wall, which separated pedestrians from the sheer cliffs on the other side. Lamplighters were making their way along the cobbled streets, leaving a dotted line of hazily glowing lamp-posts in their wake. Tarlock Cove was preparing for dusk.

As Crake climbed higher, he could see the lighthouse at the mouth of the bay, and he was pleased when he noticed it brighten and begin to turn. Such things, signs of a well-run and orderly world, gave him a sense of enormous satisfaction at times.

Orderliness was one of the reasons he’d liked Tarlock Cove on his previous visits. It was overseen by the family whose name it bore, and the Tarlocks ensured their little town wasn’t left to ruin. Houses were well painted, streets swept clean, and the Ducal Militia made certain that the ragamuffin traders who passed through were kept from bothering the respectable folk higher up the mountainside.

Dominating it all from the highest point of the town was the Tarlock manse. It was unassuming in its grandeur, a wide, stout building with many windows, benevolently overlooking the bay. A classically understated design, Crake thought: the picture of aristocratic modesty. He’d visited with the Tarlocks once, and found them delightful company.

But it wasn’t the Tarlocks he planned to see tonight. He went instead down a winding, lamp-lit lane and knocked at the door of a thin, three-storey house sandwiched between other houses of a similar design.

The door was opened by a rotund man in his sixties wearing pincenez. The top of his head was bald, but stringy grey hair fell around his neck and over the collar of his brown-and-gold jacket.

He took one look at his visitor and the colour drained from his face.

‘Good evening, Plome,’ Crake said.

‘Good evening?’ Plome spluttered. He looked both ways up the alley, then seized him by the arm and pulled him over the threshold. ‘Get off the street, you fool!’ He shut the door the moment Crake was inside.

The hallway within was shadowy at this hour: the lamps hadn’t yet been lit. Gold-framed portraits and a floor-to-ceiling mirror hung on panelled walls of dark wood. As Crake began to unbutton his greatcoat, he glanced through the doorway into the sitting room. Tea and cakes for two had been laid out on a lacquered side table next to a pair of armchairs.

‘You were expecting me?’ Crake asked, bemused.

‘I was expecting someone entirely different! A judge, if you must know! What are you doing here?’ Before Crake could answer, Plome had taken him by the elbow and was hurrying him down the hall.

At the end of the hall was a staircase. Plome steered Crake around the side to a small, innocuous door. It was a cupboard under the stairs, to all appearances, but Crake knew by the prickling of his senses that appearances were deceptive here. Plome drew a tuning fork from his coat and rapped it smartly against the door frame. The fork sang a high, clear note, and Plome opened the door.

Inside was a single shelf with a lantern, and a set of wooden steps leading down. Plome held the fork high, still ringing, and ushered Crake past. Crake felt himself brushed by the daemon that had been thralled into the doorway. A minor glamour. Anyone opening the door before subduing the daemon with the correct frequency would have seen nothing but a cluttered cupboard, probably accompanied by a strong mental suggestion that there was nothing interesting inside.

‘Watch yourself,’ said Plome. ‘I’ll go first. Third step from the bottom will paralyse you for an hour or so.’

Crake stopped and waited for Plome to shut the door, strike a match and touch it to the lantern. He led the way down the stairs, and Crake followed him. At the bottom Plome struck another match and lit the first of several gas-lamps set in sconces on the walls. A soft glow swelled to fill the room.

‘Electricity hasn’t caught on here yet, I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically, moving from lamp to lamp with the match. ‘The Tarlocks banned small generators. Too noisy and smelly, that’s the official line. But really it’s so they can build their own big generator and charge us all for the supply.’

The sanctum under the house had changed little since Crake’s last visit. Plome, like Crake, had always leaned towards science rather than superstition in his approach to daemonism. His sanctum was like a laboratory. A chalkboard was covered with formulae for frequency modulation, next to a complicated alembic and books on the nature of plasm and luminiferous aether. A globular brass cage took pride of place, surrounded by various resonating devices. There were thin metal strips of varying lengths, chimes of all kinds, and hollow wooden tubes. With such devices a daemon could be contained.

Crake went cold at the sight of an echo chamber in one corner. It was a riveted ball of metal, like a bathysphere, with a small circular porthole. He felt the strength drain out of his limbs. A worm of nausea crawled into his gut.