The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [61]
“I’m not your bloody apprentice, Malvery,” Crake said. “This isn’t about you.”
But Malvery wasn’t about to be put off. “You’re a smart feller. Careful. Polite. You think things through. But lately, mate, you’ve been getting nasty when you drink. And that’s not you.”
This was ridiculous. Crake felt like he was being preached at, and it made him angry. “So what’s the diagnosis, Doc?” he said, his voice dripping with scorn. “How do you propose to cure me?”
“I faced my daemons, mate. You made me. Now you gotta face yours.”
“What do you know about my daemons?” Crake sneered.
Malvery shrugged. “Not much, not much. But I know you’ve got ’em, and they’re big ugly bastards at that. Otherwise you wouldn’t be spending half your life in a bottle.”
“More than half,” Crake said, refilling his mug. “So what?”
Malvery studied him for a moment. “How’d it feel, when you fixed that door for us?”
“What do you mean?”
“The door in the dreadnought. The one you popped open.”
Crake thought about that. “It felt good,” he said. “I felt useful.”
“You like all that daemonist stuff, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t be a daemonist if I didn’t,” Crake replied. He ran his fingers through his scruffy blond hair. “Obsession comes with the territory. Once you’ve seen the other side …” He trailed away.
“And how much have you done, these last couple of months?”
“Excuse me?”
“How much daemonism, mate? New stuff, I mean. Testing your boundaries, learning your craft, all of that.”
“I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
Malvery leaned forward on his elbows. “I see the stuff you’ve made. Frey’s cutlass, your gold tooth, those little ear thingies the pilots wear, that skeleton key you’ve got. Some of those things are real damn clever.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, how many of them did you make in the last six months?”
Crake opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again.
“I expect you’ve been all tied up in research, trying out some new method or something, ain’t you?” Malvery prompted. “Maybe you’re working on something really special?”
Crake glared at him. Malvery sat back and folded his arms. Point made.
Crake took a resentful swallow from his mug. Being called an alcoholic was easy enough to take, but he didn’t like having his commitment to the Art questioned. And yet he couldn’t deny that Malvery had a point. He didn’t have any excuses. He’d stopped practicing daemonism almost entirely of late. The thrill of it, the allure of new discoveries, had disappeared.
For a while, he’d rather enjoyed the challenge of working aboard the Ketty Jay. Being without a sanctum forced him to think of creative ways to get the best out of his portable, substandard equipment. But as the weeks passed, there were fewer and fewer hours in the day when he was clearheaded enough to study the formulae he needed. He seemed to be always hungover or drunk, and it became a huge effort to turn his brain to the complex problems of daemonism. Easier to leave it until the next day. He told himself he’d do some work then. But the next day was the same as the last, and somehow it just never happened.
He looked at the bottle on the table. It was the first time it had occurred to him that his drinking was affecting his Art. Without that forbidden knowledge to set him apart, he was simply another layabout aristocrat, no better than Hodd. The idea appalled him. He considered himself better than that. Yet the evidence indicated otherwise.
Then an idea occurred to him. A drunken, stupid, furious idea born out of frustration at being faced with his own inadequacies. Something he never would have dared consider when he was sober. But he was keen to prove Malvery wrong, keen to show the doctor—and himself—that he was still worth something. He was more than a privileged idler with a hobby; he was extraordinary. So he said it aloud, and, once said, he was committed.
“I think I know a way we can find that sphere.”
“How?”
“I’m going to ask a daemon.”
AN UNEXPECTED VISIT—CRAKE’S REQUEST—THE SUMMONING
rake raised his hand to knock on the door, hesitated, and let it fall. He looked both ways