Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (28 page)

Tiny arms slipped round his leg, and a cold little body pressed against him.

‘Nice try,’ he said hatefully, and threw a switch.

The echo chamber blasted Condred with a sonic barrage, a mess of vibrations and harmonics that swooped and crossed and hammered. A shriek echoed through the wine cellar as the daemon was torn apart by the flux. It seemed to come from everywhere at once: from the walls, from the floor, from inside Crake’s head. It lasted a long time before it faded, receding to some unguessable distance as it did so.

He didn’t let off the assault until he was sure there was no little girl holding his leg any more. Only then did he dare to look down.

He wrenched the door of the echo chamber open. Condred was there, bundled and still, his eyes closed and his mouth and chin slicked red.

Dead?

‘You’re not dying on me!’ Crake said furiously. He reached in and pulled. He wouldn’t allow Condred to be dead. He’d make it unhappen through sheer force of will. He hadn’t half the affection for Condred as he’d had for Bess, but to kill them both in his sanctum would be more than he could take. It wouldn’t happen. No world could be so cruel.

It took all his strength to drag his brother out of the echo chamber. Condred’s bare feet slapped heavy and limp to the floor as the last of him emerged. Crake stumbled, borne down by the dead weight, and went down onto his arse. He sat there, with Condred’s head in his lap like a lover’s, searching that pale, slack face for a sign of life.

Condred’s eyes flew open, and he screamed.

‘No! Don’t! Don’t!’ he shouted, arms flailing as he fended off invisible enemies. He lurched away from Crake, rolled over and ended up on his side, hands held defensively in front of his face. Then a wary calm came over him, like a man woken from a nightmare.

‘Where is the man in black?’ he whispered hoarsely. He raised himself so that he was kneeling. ‘The intruder?’ His eyes went to Crake. ‘Is he gone?’

Crake’s heart darkened at his words. No wonder he’d sensed something sinister when he’d entered this house. One of
them
had been here. A man in black. An Imperator.

‘Yes, Condred,’ Crake said quietly. ‘He’s gone.’

Condred peered at him. ‘Grayther?’ he croaked.

Crake felt tears welling and fought them. ‘It’s me,’ he said.

Condred stared, his eyes widening in amazement. Then he lunged at Crake. Crake put his hands up, but he was too slow to stop Condred throwing his arms around his brother and hugging him tightly.

Crake did cry then. He couldn’t stop himself. He sobbed as he held his brother, the frail shell of the man he’d known, and despite all their animosity he clutched him like someone long-lost and dear. Of all the things he’d expected when the Shacklemores had caught up with him, he hadn’t expected this.

‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ said Condred over his shoulder. ‘Spit and blood, after all I’d lost, I thought I’d lost you too.’

‘Condred . . .’ Crake said. ‘Condred, I’m so
sorry
. . .’

Those words broke him, and his tears became hysterical, and he gripped his brother’s back with fingers like claws and knucklebones stark. But while Crake was wracked with grief, no tears fell from Condred. He breathed steadily, and held his brother and was silent.

Finally, Condred released him, and they sat facing each other on the stone floor amid the scattered apparatus of the sanctum. The shadows were deep in the grim electric light, and still the darkness lay beyond. Crake waited, half in hope and half in terror, for his brother to speak.

Condred wiped the blood away from his mouth with the sleeve of his nightshirt. He was weak, and his head was evidently causing him great pain, but he didn’t complain. That was his way. Their father had never liked a complainer.

‘Grayther,’ he said at last. ‘You don’t know what it means to lose a child and I pray you never do. If you had asked me before it happened, I would have said this: that I would hunt you to the ends of the earth and see you dead for what you did to Bess. But hate has a limit, at least for me, and I reached it long ago. When Bess was gone, when Amantha was . . .’ he swallowed, ‘
gone
. . . What was the point of revenge after that? To spite myself by killing the last person I loved?’

Crake felt a jab in his chest, a physical pain. To hear Condred say a thing like that. He’d never imagined Condred felt anything more than contempt for him. But hadn’t Condred taken him in when Crake needed a place to live, and made him part of the family, however reluctantly? Hadn’t he done what a brother should, even though every act came bundled in scorn?

‘I can’t explain it to you, Grayther,’ he murmured. ‘I just . . . One day, I didn’t hate you any more. So I resolved to let you go. There had been enough suffering. Causing more wouldn’t undo a thing.’

He’d never heard Condred speak this way before. Crake didn’t know what to say in return. Words seemed a pitiful tool for the purpose.

‘It was an accident . . .’ he said, and then stopped because it sounded pathetic.

‘I know,’ said Condred. ‘Of course I knew. You adored her. We all did.’

But Crake blundered on. If he didn’t get it out now, he feared he’d never get the chance. ‘It wasn’t . . .’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me that did it, do you understand? There was a daemon in me. It was my fault, oh, spit, it was my fault but it wasn’t
me
in there, it wasn’t
me
that did that.’ He felt tears coming again. ‘I locked the door. I always locked the door. But maybe that time I didn’t . . .’

‘You locked the door.’ Condred’s voice was weary, devoid of feeling. It was as if it had all been drained out of him. He was never an emotional man, at least not on the outside, and he must have cried all the tears he ever would over this. ‘I knew what you were doing down there.’

Crake looked up at him in surprise. Condred snorted. ‘Living under my roof, spending all your time in my wine cellar, pretending you were working on some grand invention? You think I’d let you build some scientific contraption without my knowing about it? I feared you’d blow the house up. There was always a second key, Grayther. So when you were away, I went down there.’

He sighed, and ran his hand over his forehead, pushing back his lifeless grey and white hair.

‘When I found out, I pitied you. Poor little brother with his wild ideas, never able to settle to business like I could, never able to find his place.’ He shifted position, sitting up against the echo chamber with a wince. ‘I thought daemonism was superstitious nonsense. I thought you’d grow out of it. But I was blind and careless, and one day I left the key out.’ He managed a small, bitter smile. ‘You remember how desperate Bess was to see your workshop? You told her you were making toys down there. Every so often you’d bring a toy from the city and tell her you made it. Well, she found that key. You locked the door, Grayther. It was my fault she got in.’

His head hung, though whether from exhaustion or grief Crake couldn’t tell. He stared at Condred, numbed by the moment, processing all that he’d been told. If not for Condred, Bess would never have been down in the sanctum that night. If not for him, she’d be alive. And his brother blamed himself for that.

‘The Awakeners did this to me,’ said Condred, raising his head. ‘I remember the man in my bedroom, the
fear
of him, how it crushed me. And then nothing.’ His eyes narrowed in concentration. ‘He was carrying something . . . He held it out towards me . . .’ Then he shook his head. The memory was gone.

‘Some thralled object, no doubt,’ said Crake, his voice firmer now they were on safer ground. ‘Perhaps a ring or a bracelet or a band. It contained the daemon that kept you unconscious. He put it on you after you were subdued, and the daemon passed into you.’ His voice became grave. ‘Others have fallen to this sickness. I’ll wager all of them are the sons and daughters of aristocrats who refused to bend the knee to the Awakener cause.’

‘Yes,’ said Condred. ‘I wonder if Father would have received some message eventually. Promising my recovery if he would lend his resources and support.’

Crake thought back on his conversation with his father. ‘Perhaps he already did,’ he said.

There was silence between them at that.

‘They want the rural areas,’ said Condred at last. ‘That’s where they’re strongest. They’ll get the country folk on their side, trap the Coalition in the cities, cut off their supplies.’

Crake was about to agree, but then he heard a faint sound from outside the cellar. A sound that had become familiar to him over these past years. He scrambled to his feet as he heard another, and another and another.

Condred pricked up his ears. ‘What is it?’

‘Gunfire,’ said Crake. ‘It’s gunfire!’

Nineteen

A Conversation – The Prize – The Mouth of the Allsoul – Frey Sees the Future – No Escape

‘S
omebody’s coming!’

Jez’s hissed warning sent them scampering back down the corridor and through a side door. Beyond was a small infirmary, shiny and sterile in a way that Malvery’s never was. They crowded inside. Frey left the door open a crack and pressed his eye to it.

Voices were approaching. Two men in conversation.

‘Then what’s the effective range?’

‘Ten kloms.’

‘Theoretically.’

‘Based on the Sammies’ measurements of an identical device.’

‘So, not actually tested at all, then.’

The voices were louder now, and Frey heard footsteps, walking fast and with purpose. He glanced round the room to check on his crew. Ashua was close to the door, listening, with Pinn crowding in to hear as well. Jez waited in that feral stance of hers that meant she was ready to pounce. Pelaru stood there fearlessly, arms folded; he even made a Sentinel’s cassock look good, damn him. Malvery was pilfering suppies from the medicine cabinet.

‘You know what we’re up against,’ said the first voice. ‘They want it kept secret. How are we meant to test its parameters when this place has become a refugee camp for every Awakener in Vardia? We needed more time.’

‘We get one chance at this, that’s all I’m saying. It’s our necks if we’re wrong.’

Frey saw them now, as they passed the door and continued down the corridor. Two middle-aged men, one balding and with spectacles, the other with unkempt hair and an untidy beard. They were wearing the standard issue Awakener cassocks, but unusually their cassocks were brown. Frey didn’t understand the significance of that. He wished Crake were there to shed light on the subject; he didn’t want to ask Pelaru.

‘Effective radius is ten kloms,’ said the balding one. ‘That’s all you need to say. Now tidy yourself up. They’ll hang you if you present yourself to the Lord High Cryptographer like that. Where’s your respect?’

‘Respect? I’m in it for the science. For the chance to work with something no one’s ever seen before. You know I don’t believe that Awakener nonsense.’

‘When you see him, you will,’ said the balding man, and with that they passed out of hearing.

‘Sounds like something we should be investigating, Cap’n,’ Ashua suggested.

‘That it does,’ Frey agreed.

Once the coast was clear, they sallied out and headed in the direction the men had come from. The interior of the building had an industrial feel to it, with steel floors and sterile grey walls. This wasn’t a place meant to impress somebody, it was a place where you got things done. The question was: what?

He covered his ear and listened to the earcuff again, but the signals were frustrating. Occasional garbled voices came in faint snatches, and none of it understandable. He heard Trinica’s voice once in a while, and she sounded relaxed and calm. That made him feel a little better. Probably they were all making nice, the Awakeners buttering up the captains with promises in order to secure their aircraft. But Frey wanted to know for sure; he wanted to know exactly what they were saying. This damned interference, though – he’d never heard anything like it.

Thanks to Jez’s uncanny senses they’d managed to avoid bumping into anyone in the corridors so far, but Frey wasn’t sure how much longer their luck would last. He was beginning to think that this whole idea was a bad one. He should have just taken a chance and trusted Trinica to tell him what she learned. But he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to look around the Awakeners’ base. He needed a card in his hand in case the Century Knights tracked him down, or someone stuck a bounty on him. The way events were going, it might be the only thing between him and the noose.

There was a sliding metal door at the end of the corridor, of the kind they used on the
Ketty Jay
, except considerably cleaner. Jez listened at it, then nodded at Frey. He pulled it aside.

Beyond was a small steel-walled room filled with a bewildering array of gauges, dials and instruments. A ledger lay open on a desk, full of scribbled calculations. Two half-empty coffee mugs stood cold next to it. Frey crossed the room, passing strange scientific devices of brass and glass. He could only guess at the purpose of half of them, and he didn’t care to. Behind the instruments was a window, and he went to that.

‘
That’s
what we’re looking for,’ he said.

They were standing in an observation room, set high up on the side of a large circular chamber. Around the edges of the chamber were banks of instruments: cabinets that clanked and chattered, bellows that wheezed up and down, gyroscopes tilting this way and that. None of that interested Frey. The prize piece was in the centre, on a pedestal, surrounded by rods and sensors and rot knew what else.

It was a tall cylinder, twice the height of a man, encased in a mass of pipes and protrusions that looked like they’d been carved from yellowed bone. Inside the cylinder, a bruise-coloured gas swirled, and little sparks of lightning flashed and flickered. At its four corners were squat, thick towers of some brass-like material that wasn’t quite brass. Their surfaces were trenched and pitted with what might have been language, or perhaps a form of subtle machinery.