Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

'Err . . .' said Jez, who was still catching up. 'That was the idea, actually.'

'Good! Good!' Plome cried. 'I thought it would be wonderful having him here, you know. Such an eminent daemonist to learn from. Oh!' He clamped his hand over his mouth, aware that he'd let something slip. 'You mustn't tell anyone!' he urged.

'Tell anyone what?'

'That I'm a daemonist. Just an amateur, you understand, but then, aren't we all? No professionals in our business!' He laughed nervously, produced a handkerchief and mopped his glistening pate. 'I'm in politics, you know. Running for the House of Chancellors. If anyone knew, it'd be the death of me.'

Jez held up her hands. 'Mr Plome. Calm down. I'm not going to tell anyone anything. Now what's happened to Crake?'

Plome was describing frantic little circles around the hallway, wringing his handkerchief. 'He's become a liability, that's what! Oh, don't think badly of me. I've been a good friend to him. I lent him money. I helped him in everything. He bought rare books, sought out other daemonists, gathered all the research he could. But he always needed more. And one time he emerged from the sanctum, ranting about daemonism, while there were guests in the house! Came damnably close to blowing my cover and sending me to the gallows!' He threw his hands up in the air. 'I've become a recluse! Trapped in my own home, guarding him! I spend every day dreadfully afraid that the madman in my basement will break out and the world will know I've been dabbling with daemons. It's a short trip from there to the noose, believe me, young lady! And I'm supposed to be in the middle of a campaign to become a Chancellor of the Duchy! My rival makes ground every day I'm not out there! The Tarlocks are breathing down my neck, wondering what I'm up to! It's a disaster!'

He was panting by the time he finished. Jez decided she'd heard enough. 'Show me where he is.'

Plome led her around the side of the staircase at the end of the hall. There a cupboard door lay hidden and out of sight. He began fumbling in his pocket for something.

'Through here?' Jez asked, and pulled the door open.

'Wait! Don't open that yet!' Plome said.

Jez felt a strange tingle through her body. Her senses tipped, threatening to send her into a trance. Then everything righted itself, and she was looking at a set of steps, leading down, just beyond the door.

'He's down there?' she asked.

Plome, who was holding a tuning fork in his hand for some reason, gaped at her. 'But . . . the glamour . . . You can see the stairs?'

Jez looked at him oddly. 'Of course I can. Can't you?'

Plome looked bewildered. 'Oh, my. It's time I thralled a new daemon to that doorway. This one's lost its fizz. You shouldn't have seen anything but an old cupboard.'

Jez was eager to see Crake. She headed down. There were deep scratches on the walls of the stairway, which looked relatively fresh.

'Don't tread on the third step from the bottom!' Plome called after her. Jez stepped over it obediently. She could feel the faint thrum of energy 7from the wood. Another daemon, she guessed. She wondered if it was any more effective than the last.

The sanctum was a mess. Electric lights buzzed behind their shades, but half the bulbs had died and not been replaced. Chemical apparatus lay half-disassembled. Muddled equations were scrawled on blackboards, overlapping one another. There was a huge brass vat against one wall with a window in the side. It was full of a murky yellow liquid and attached to various machines. A large, riveted metal device like a bathysphere stood in the centre of the room. Books lay face-down and open where they'd been thrown.

Crake was sitting at a desk, his back to her. He was scribbling in a notebook, with occasional pauses to consult an enormous hidebound tome. His blond beard and hair had grown out; he looked shaggy and untidy. Bess sat near the desk, dormant. She was wired up to a complex tangle of equipment.

Jez suddenly understood the scratches on the narrow stairway. They must have had quite a time getting her down here.

'Crake,' she said.

He jumped at the sound of her voice, and his pen nib snapped. He stared at the notebook for a moment, then swept it off the desk.

'I can't make it work, Jez,' he said. He got to his feet and began pacing back and forth, his hand on his forehead. Red-rimmed eyes searched the middle distance restlessly. 'I can't make it work.'

'You can't make what work?'

'This!' he snapped, gesturing towards Bess. 'It's impossible!'

Jez was shocked by the state of him. He was like a madman, full of frantic energy, waving his arms around, bubbling on the edge of mania. He stank of sweat.

'What were you trying to do?'

'I was trying to get her back! There were rumours, you see. Always rumours among daemonists. They said there was a way to bring someone back from the dead. If you just collected the right raw materials, you could put them in a tank, you could infuse it with the essence, the . . . the . . . frequency of your loved ones, that you'd recorded when they were alive. And the body would grow itself!

Bones would form and muscles knit and there they'd be, floating in the tank, the way they always were!'

As he spoke, his face was full of mad hope, like a crazed prophet; but then his expression twisted and turned to rage.

'Lies! All lies! There are no records! I've searched everywhere, I've asked everybody, and no one's ever done any such thing! I don't even know where to start, do you understand? It's so far beyond me I can't even beginV

Jez was appalled. That had been his plan? She'd suspected that he'd left the crew to deal with the question of Bess, but this sounded like a far-fetched method of doing so, even to her. She began to worry 7that he'd taken leave of his reason altogether.

'You were trying to bring her back from the dead?'

'The dead!' he cried, pointing at her. 'That was my next thought! After all, you walk around without a pulse. Why not my Bess? But what was I to do? Her body's gone, Jez! Dust and worms! Am I supposed to murder someone else to provide her with a form? No, I couldn't. So I tried to find corpses, but when I saw them, I ... I couldn't . . . I . . .'

'Wait, you did what?

'Don't you dare judge me!' he shouted. 'Don't you dare! I'd do anything to get her back. But not that way. Not some stitched-up post-autopsy puppet of cold meat. I'd be exchanging one abomination for another. That wouldn't be my Bess. So I looked for another method, but there isn't one!' He raked his hand through his hair anxiously. 'And after that . . . after that I wondered if I could make her smarter, you know, something closer to what she once was. Spit and blood, at least that'd be something. But I don't have the slightest notion how to do it! I don't even know what I did when I put her in there!' He was pacing back and forth now, making wild gestures, so agitated that he could barely contain himself. 'And then I thought . . . I thought, what if I did rescue her from wherever she went? What if I did restore her, and my beautiful little niece woke up and looked at herself, and held up those metal hands in front of her, and realised what she was? Can you imagine such a horror? Trapped inside an unfeeling metal shell for ever, her only companion the man who put her there? It's . . . it's positively macabre! It's that kind of meddling that led to all of this in the first place!'

He stopped, stared at her, and suddenly the angry expression on his face wavered, his lip trembled and tears shimmered in his eyes. 'I can't bring her back,' he said.

'No,' said Jez. 'You can't.'

She pitied him. Blinded by guilt, desperate to atone for the crimes of his past, he'd wanted to achieve the impossible. But Bess's body was gone. He might have salvaged a part of her, but he'd never get back the girl he'd known and loved. Her skin, her hair, her smile -they'd rotted away in the grave. All he could do was move her essence from the vessel she occupied to another one. And that wasn't any kind of solution.