Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

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.