Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [128]
“I didn’t murder her because she’s still alive.”
THE ECHO CHAMBER SAT in the center 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, savoring 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 or why it took more than 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 realize 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 favored son, who had followed his father into the family business. He was a straitlaced, 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