Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

Silo didn't say a word. He just held her, while she cried like a child.

Crake could smell himself. Stale alcohol leaked from his pores as he worked. His stomach was sore, and felt swollen. He couldn't tell if he was hungry or not. Even the small exertion of setting up his equipment was making his heart pound. His knees hurt from kneeling on the floor of the antechamber.

Damn it, he needed a drink.

Working by lanternlight, he leaned over and shifted one of the tuning poles a fraction to the left. It was important to get them right. If they weren't all equidistant from the door, the readings would be skewed. There were five poles, thin slivers of metal standing on round bases, in a semicircle around the door. They were linked by cables to an oscilloscope, a small wooden box with a half-dozen gauges on its face.

Next to the oscilloscope was his portable resonator. It was another box of roughly the same size, wired to a damping rod: a smooth globe of metal, standing on a short, thick pole, which was set in a heavy square base. Like the oscilloscope, it was covered with a bewildering array of brass dials, gauges and switches.

He was conscious of the others watching him as he made his final adjustments. He ignored them as best he could. They'd all come to this horrible place because of him. Grist only sought out Frey so he could get his hands on a daemonist. If he failed here, he'd let them all down. Maybe the whole expedition would be ruined then, and that fellow Gimble would have died for nothing.

Keep your head down. Keep working. Prove you can do this. Prove you're good for something.

They watched him work, and none of them had any idea how loathsome he really was.

Jez had disappeared and Silo had gone after her. That was good, at least. He could do without the Murthian's silent scrutiny. Silo had a way of making it seem like he knew something about you that he wasn't telling. And he could certainly do without Jez. He wished he'd never told her about that day, when he did the most terrible thing. She'd never said a word since, but it didn't matter. He couldn't stand her looking at him. Was it disgust in her eyes? Pity? He didn't know which was worse.

He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He wanted to be sick. Maybe he'd feel better if he was sick.

Grayther Crake. Look what you've become. Look where your fascination with daemonism has got you. How your dear brother would laugh.

But his brother wouldn't have laughed. His brother had hired the Shacklemores, the best bounty hunters in the land, to hunt him down. They'd almost caught him in the Feldspar Islands a year ago, at Gallian Thade's Winter Ball. He'd stayed ahead of them ever since, but he couldn't ever let down his guard. They always got their man in the end, the Shacklemores. They were well known for it.

Never able to relax, never able to forget.

He couldn't close his eyes without seeing her.

'Crake?' said Frey. 'You alright?'

He realised that he'd stopped working, wrapped up in his private misery. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to concentrate. 'I asked you to be quiet,' he said, irritated more at himself than Frey.

There's a job at hand. Get it done. Don't think about anything else.

He connected the oscilloscope and the resonator to a chemical battery. Sparks crackled as he attached the clips.

'I need absolute silence from now on. Any noise is going to upset the readings.'

Grist chose that moment to have a minor coughing fit. He tried to suppress it, but that only made it worse. Eventually he had to leave the room, eyes watering. They heard him barking his lungs up outside. Crake sighed and waited till he was done. He came back with his cigar clamped between his lips, took a soothing drag, and exhaled with a brown grin.

'Apologies, Mr Crake,' he said. 'I'll be good now, for a while at least.'

Crake pushed a lank strip of hair out of his eyes and got to work.

First, the oscilloscope. He took hold of a dial, lowered his head, and listened. Millimetre by millimetre, he turned the dial. When the needles on the gauges began to tremble, he shifted to another dial and began turning that, picking out the harmonics that the door was emitting. Once he had the bottom and top end of the harmonics, he began closing in on individual frequencies. At that point, his devices gave way to old-fashioned intuition.

He turned the dials a fraction at a time, attending to his instincts. Each time he nailed a frequency, the sense of strangeness grew. The fine hairs on the back of his hand stood up. He got the feeling he was being watched, which deepened into outright paranoia as he progressed. A faint whine, like the buzzing of a mosquito, started up in his ears.

The human body reacted to the presence of the unnatural. A daemonist learned to listen to that. Behind him, the others shuffled nervously. They were discomfited, even scared, but unsure why.

He lost himself in concentration. It had been a while since he'd had a puzzle like this to work on. It was good to bury himself in the Art. With no possibility of a proper sanctum aboard the Ketty Jay , he'd been using crude, portable equipment this past year, working in a corner of the cargo hold. It limited him to small, simple effects, like the earcuff communicators, which were comfortably within the range of his skill. But thralling a daemon was one thing; subduing someone else's was a different matter.

Finally he was satisfied that he'd accounted for all the elements of the complex, dissonant chord emanating from the door. The chord was like a cage, binding the daemon there. It was a weak entity, this one. Barely more than a spark of other-worldly life, set to a single task.

He scanned the settings on the oscilloscope, then sat back on his heels. 'Well, if it isn't daemonism, I don't know what it is,' he said. Now he had the readings, silence was no longer necessary.

'What do you mean?' asked Hodd.

'I mean, it's no kind of special technology or anything else. It's straightforward, thralling-a-daemon-to-a-door daemonism.'

'You mean the Manes have daemonists?'

'Just telling you what's here.'

'Can you break it?' Grist asked, eagerly.

'I should think so,' said Crake.

He set to work again, this time on the resonator. He turned the first dial, tuning in to the frequency he wanted. The damping rod hummed as it sent out frequencies of its own, interfering with those that bound the daemon. Crake saw one of the gauges on the oscilloscope drop to zero. One frequency neutralised. He sought out the next. He had the readings from the oscilloscope, so homing in on them was easy. With each frequency he matched, the damping rod hummed louder. He could feel the vibration in his back teeth, his stomach, his bowels. The brainless daemon thralled to the door was fighting to escape back to the aether. It made him want to be sick again.

The last gauge on the oscilloscope dropped. The chord thai chained the daemon was countered. Crake felt his skin prickle, then there was a sensation of lifting in his body, as if there had been a pressure on him these past few minutes which had suddenly been released. The paranoia dissipated. All was normal.

The daemon was gone.

He made a cursory scan for frequencies with his oscilloscope, then reached over and undipped his equipment from the battery.

'It's done,' he said.

'You're a damned marvel, Mr Crake,' said Grist, stepping past eagerly. He reached for the handle of the door, hesitated, then grabbed it. When nothing happened, he chuckled. 'A damned marvel.' He pushed the door open.

'Hey, we should see what's happened to Silo and Jez,' Frey said, but Grist ignored him and went on through, with Crattle and Hodd close on his heels. Frey shrugged and followed them. 'Suppose they can take care of themselves.'