The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [67]
“Crake!”
“Stay there!” he called. “Don’t leave the controls! That’s what it wants!”
Suddenly he remembered the oil lanterns he’d seen in the corner of the room. He lit a match. It illuminated little more than his hands, the steam of his breath, and the curve of the echo chamber. The darkness was thick and unnatural.
“Crake! Crake, speak to me, damn it!”
“I said, man the controls!” he shouted.
“Crake!” Plome’s voice was distant now, fading. “Crake, say something!”
“Stay where you are!” Crake yelled. But he heard nothing more.
He walked carefully around the echo chamber and headed across the sanctum in what he hoped was the right direction. He lit a new match from his old one, afraid to let the dark close in for even a moment. The flame seemed unnaturally feeble. He listened but heard only the sounds of his own terror.
His foot bumped against something, and he leaned down. A tarnished lantern. He grabbed it and put his match to the wick. The flame caught and swelled and drove the darkness back. Crake let out a shuddering breath, then stood up and came face-to-face with Bess.
His hand flew to his chest at the sight of the great metal golem. This can’t be right! She can’t be here! But when several moments passed and she still hadn’t moved, he realized something was different about her. He peered inside her face grille and saw no light within. She wasn’t there. It was only the armored suit, vacant and immobile. Cables ran from it into the darkness. Back toward the echo chamber.
Just like the night I made that suit come to life.
He turned away from the suit and raised his lantern higher. The light shone on stone pillars and hinted at arches high above. Crake knew this place. It had been a vast wine cellar before he made it his own. This was his sanctum. Here, he’d created the sword Frey carried and the gold tooth in his mouth. Here, he’d created a golem. And here, he’d committed the crime that had destroyed his old life forever.
This is the daemon’s doing, he thought. It’s playing with me. But it felt no less real for that.
Shivering with the cold, he moved back toward the echo chamber. The room was silent. Even the electrical hum of the chamber had quieted. The tap of his boots rang through the freezing cellar.
What’s it waiting for? What does it want?
He stepped around the front of the echo chamber. The door, the seal that kept the daemon inside, hung ajar.
Crake reached out and pulled the door open. He steeled his nerve and shone his light inside.
The chamber was empty.
He heard wet, clicking breaths coming from beyond the range of his lantern.
No, he thought to himself. Please not that. Don’t make me see her again.
He became aware of a dripping sound and looked down. In his hand was a letter knife with the crest of his university on the hilt. His hand and the knife were covered in blood. It dripped from the blade onto the stone floor.
He cried out in pain and flung the blade down. Something scraped in the darkness behind him. He spun around but saw nothing.
“Curse you!” he shouted. “You are not that daemon!”
Not the one that made him do what he did. Not the one that made him stab his niece seventeen times with a letter knife.
Then, a voice from the blackness. His niece’s voice.
“Why’d you put me in there, Uncle Grayther?”
Crake looked around, teeth gritted, desperately seeking the source of the voice. He knew it to be a trick, but tears welled in his eyes anyway. He couldn’t help it.
“Why’d you put me in there?” the haunting voice asked again. There was a groan of metal, and the armored suit tipped forward with a crash, cables snapping free as it fell.
“You’re not her! How dare you pretend you are!” he cried.
But despite what his mind knew, his senses told him otherwise. That was the voice of Bess, whom he’d put into an echo chamber while she was dying and whose essence he’d transferred into an armored suit. But the process had been crude and hurried and was way beyond his abilities; she hadn’t come through it whole. What was left was a