Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [132]
He realized he was standing. He looked down and saw in his hand a letter knife with the insignia of his university on the hilt. The knife and the hand that held it were slick and dark with blood.
There was a clicking noise from the shadows. Red smears on the stones. He followed them with his eyes, and there he found her.
Her white nightdress was soaked in red. There were slits in her arms and throat, where the knife had plunged. They welled with rich, thick blood, spilling out in pulses. She was gaping like a fish, making clicking noises in her throat. Each breath was a shallow gasp, and her lips and chin were red. Her brown hair was matted into sodden wads.
Her eyes. Pleading. Not understanding. Dazed with incomprehensible agony. She didn’t know about death. She’d never thought it could happen. She’d trusted him, with a blind, unthinking love, and he’d turned on her with a blade.
It was the daemon’s revenge for daring to summon it from the aether. It had been cruel enough to leave him his life and wits intact.
Crake hadn’t known that pain and despair and horror could reach the heights that they now did. The sheer intensity of it was such that he felt he should die from it. If only the darkness would come back, if only his heart would stop! But there was no mercy for him. Realization smashed down upon him like a tidal wave, and he staggered and gagged, the knife falling from numb fingers.
She was still alive. Alive, begging him to make the pain stop, like some half-broken animal ruined under the wheels of a motorized carriage. Begging him to make it better somehow.
“She’s a child!” he screamed at the darkness, as if the daemon was still here to be accused. “She’s just a damned child!”
But when the echoes had died, there was only the wet clicking from his niece as she tried to draw breath.
What overtook him then was a grief so overwhelming that it drowned his senses. He was seized by an idea, mad and desperate, and he acted on it without thought for consequence. Nothing else was important. Nothing except undoing what had been done, in the only way he could think of.
He scooped her up in his arms. She was so light, so thin and pale, white skin streaked with trails of gore. He carried her to the echo chamber and gently placed her inside. He pushed the door shut. Despite the abuse it had suffered, the lock engaged and it sealed itself. Then a weakness took him, and he fell to his knees, his forehead pressed against the porthole in the door, sobs racking his body.
She was lying on her back, her head tilted, looking at him through the glass. Blood bubbled from her lips. Her gaze met his, and it was too terrible to stand. He flung himself away and went to the control console.
There, he did what had to be done.
JEZ HAD SEEN MEN cry before, but never like this. This was heartbreaking. Crake’s sobs were deep, wild, dredged up from a depth of pain that Jez couldn’t have imagined he held inside him. His story had become almost impossible to understand as he neared the end. He couldn’t even form a sentence through the hacking sobs that shook his whole body.
“I didn’t know!” he cried, his face blotched and his beard wet with tears. His nose was running, but he didn’t trouble to wipe it. He was ugly and shattered before her. It hurt to see him so. “I didn’t know what I was doing! Only it … it didn’t work like I thought. The tra- … the tra- … transfer wasn’t perfect. She’s different now, she’s not … like she was …” He gasped in a breath. “I just wanted to save her.”
But Jez couldn’t give him pity or sympathy. She’d hardened herself too much. She saw the tragedy of him now, but if she let herself forgive him, if she gave in even a little, there would be no going back. He could perhaps be excused the crime of stabbing her, if he wasn’t in his right mind. But what he’d done next was nothing short of diabolical.
“One thing,” she said. Her voice was so tight that