The Black Lung Captain

by Chris Wooding

  It had been only the briefest of instants, but she'd never forgotten it. A moment of sight for a blind woman, before being thrown back into the dark. How could she not want more? And yet, what would be the price to get it? If she became a Mane, she wouldn't be human. If she was one of a collective, she wouldn't be an individual. She refused to be assimilated by anyone.

  I am human, she thought, addressing the empty craft. Damn you for trying to make me otherwise.

  She moved on, through the cannon bay. Beyond, she found a ladder leading to an upper deck, and climbed it. At the top was another slanted passageway, as chill and black as the others. Several doorways led off from it.

  Protruding from one of them was an arm.

  Jez stared at it. A forearm, visible up to the elbow, lay on the floor of the corridor. A torn, ragged sleeve. Yellowish, waxy skin. Long, cracked nails.

  She went closer. The arm was attached to a body. The body lay in a room. And in that room . . .

  There were dozens of them in there.

  The room beyond the doorway had a large brass globe in the centre, showing the land masses of Atalon in obsidian relief. Beyond it was a porthole, overgrown with vines, but not enough to completely choke the daylight. There were charts on one wall, a desk, a bookcase. The books had been thrown from the shelves in the crash. Now they were scattered on top of the pile of Mane corpses that were heaped against one wall.

  It was the captain's quarters. And there, among the pile, in a tatty greatcoat and boots, was the captain. Dead like the rest of them.

  How can the dead die twice?

  They'd lain here for decades. She knew that by the rainforest that grew around them. Yet they were perfectly preserved, as if they might get up and walk at any moment. The rot that infested the dreadnought hadn't touched them.

  She stepped over the corpse in the doorway. It was similar to the one that had tried to turn her: human in appearance, but twisted. Yellow-red eyes stared, unfocused, from a wizened face. Sharp teeth were exposed in a snarl.

  Some of the others were more hideous, others less so. Some had the look of monsters; some could have been human. One, even, was handsome, with a cold, eerie serenity to his face. Some wore rags; some were clad in motley armour. Some wouldn't have looked out of place on a street in Lapin; others wore fashions from times long past. There was not a mark of violence on them, except for the way they were heaped up on top of each other. As if they'd been thrown against a wall, limp and inanimate as the books that followed them.

  The smell, that awful, comforting odour, was strong here. Dry and animal-like. The smell of the Manes.

  She looked away from them. They were painful to see. Something about them inspired a sad ache in her chest.

  They didn't even seem dead, not really. They'd just . . . stopped.

  Her eyes fell on the books, scattered about the room, lying open, their pages bent. Some of them were in Vardic. Classics, many of which she'd read. Several were in Samarlan and Thacian, languages she recognised but couldn't speak. But most were in a script she'd never seen before.

  She picked up the nearest and studied it. The text was elegant and complex, all in curves. Circles and semicircles, speared through by arcs. Not a straight line to be seen.

  Where did this come from? she thought. It was printed, professionally done. She frowned at it, trying to puzzle out where it might have originated. Peleshar? Well, maybe. It was possible.

  But maybe the Manes had printing presses. Maybe they made books.

  Maybe they had their own literature.

  The thought dizzied her. Jez had seen them come from the sky to murder or kidnap the entire population of a small Yortish town. Feral creatures, springing from the rooftops, flickering and flitting like stuttering flames, sometimes moving too fast for the eye to follow. They'd mobbed men like animals, torn them apart with inhuman brutality.

  But these same creatures built and flew aircraft. They stole buildings, and presumably rebuilt them. And now, it seemed, they wrote stories.

  She let the book drop from her fingers. Nothing made sense. She'd been inducted into a club without knowing anything about its members or what it stood for. The idea of the Manes as a civilisation didn't match with their thoroughly deserved reputation as vicious, merciless raiders. No one, to her knowledge, had ever heard them speak. So what were they? Animals? Humans? Or something else?

  For that matter, what was she?

  She squatted down next to the pile of corpses. The captain was bearded, his face half-covered by a hat, eyes fierce and red, teeth sharp. Driven by some compulsion she didn't understand, she reached out toward his hand.

  Just to prove I'm not afraid. Just to prove they'll never have me. Just to know if I can.

  Her hand closed around the captain's, and the images burst into her mind as if through a dam, a deluge of screams and pleading, sweeping her away.

  —a captain, a rebel, a man made Mane who didn't want to be— —no more raids, no more murder, no more taking of people. No more Invitations. No more—

  —they are turning away from their brethren, severing connections, a crew setting out for a new world, a new life, isolation, peace—

  —but then came the loss, the lack! Once part of many, now they are few, too few—

  —Once they were beloved, but they turned away. The horror of their mistake overwhelms them but it cannot be undone and still they go on—

  —into the loneliness, the endless, all-swallowing loneliness—

  —too much to bear—

  —too much—

  She washed up on the shores of reality to find herself back in the captain's quarters, freezing cold. She scrambled away from the corpses, tears gathering. The captain's dead eyes stared past her. She knew now what was behind that gaze. She'd been brushed by the tragedy, the inexpressible sorrow of this crew. They'd been Manes, and chose not to be. They cut themselves free. The loss of it killed them.

  They lay down and died here, together, she thought. They died of loneliness.

  She heard a footstep in the doorway, and looked up. Silo was there, lantern in hand. A flicker of concern passed across his face as he saw her.

  'Cap'n sent me lookin',' he said.

  She flung herself at him suddenly, hugged herself tight to his chest. All that she felt, all the fear and horror and sadness . . . she couldn't keep it in any more.

  Silo didn't say a word. He just held her, while she cried like a child.

  Ten

  Crake Gets To Work — A Mysterious Object —

  Renegotiations — Jez Gets Some News

  Crake could smell himself. Stale alcohol leaked from his pores as he worked. His stomach was sore, and felt swollen. He couldn't tell if he was hungry or not. Even the small exertion of setting up his equipment was making his heart pound. His knees hurt from kneeling on the floor of the antechamber.

  Damn it, he needed a drink.

  Working by lanternlight, he leaned over and shifted one of the tuning poles a fraction to the left. It was important to get them right. If they weren't all equidistant from the door, the readings would be skewed. There were five poles, thin slivers of metal standing on round bases, in a semicircle around the door. They were linked by cables to an oscilloscope, a small wooden box with a half-dozen gauges on its face.

  Next to the oscilloscope was his portable resonator. It was another box of roughly the same size, wired to a damping rod: a smooth globe of metal, standing on a short, thick pole, which was set in a heavy square base. Like the oscilloscope, it was covered with a bewildering array of brass dials, gauges and switches.

  He was conscious of the others watching him as he made his final adjustments. He ignored them as best he could. They'd all come to this horrible place because of him. Grist only sought out Frey so he could get his hands on a daemonist. If he failed here, he'd let them all down. Maybe the whole expedition would be ruined then, and that fellow Gimble would have died for nothing.

  Keep your head down. Keep working
. Prove you can do this. Prove you're good for something.

  They watched him work, and none of them had any idea how loathsome he really was.

  Jez had disappeared and Silo had gone after her. That was good, at least. He could do without the Murthian's silent scrutiny. Silo had a way of making it seem like he knew something about you that he wasn't telling. And he could certainly do without Jez. He wished he'd never told her about that day, when he did the most terrible thing. She'd never said a word since, but it didn't matter. He couldn't stand her looking at him. Was it disgust in her eyes? Pity? He didn't know which was worse.

  He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He wanted to be sick. Maybe he'd feel better if he was sick.

  Grayther Crake. Look what you've become. Look where your fascination with daemonism has got you. How your dear brother would laugh.

  But his brother wouldn't have laughed. His brother had hired the Shacklemores, the best bounty hunters in the land, to hunt him down. They'd almost caught him in the Feldspar Islands a year ago, at Gallian Thade's Winter Ball. He'd stayed ahead of them ever since, but he couldn't ever let down his guard. They always got their man in the end, the Shacklemores. They were well known for it.

  Never able to relax, never able to forget.

  He couldn't close his eyes without seeing her.

  'Crake?' said Frey. 'You alright?'

  He realised that he'd stopped working, wrapped up in his private misery. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to concentrate. 'I asked you to be quiet,' he said, irritated more at himself than Frey.

  There's a job at hand. Get it done. Don't think about anything else.

  He connected the oscilloscope and the resonator to a chemical battery. Sparks crackled as he attached the clips.

  'I need absolute silence from now on. Any noise is going to upset the readings.'

  Grist chose that moment to have a minor coughing fit. He tried to suppress it, but that only made it worse. Eventually he had to leave the room, eyes watering. They heard him barking his lungs up outside. Crake sighed and waited till he was done. He came back with his cigar clamped between his lips, took a soothing drag, and exhaled with a brown grin.

  'Apologies, Mr Crake,' he said. 'I'll be good now, for a while at least.'

  Crake pushed a lank strip of hair out of his eyes and got to work.

  First, the oscilloscope. He took hold of a dial, lowered his head, and listened. Millimetre by millimetre, he turned the dial. When the needles on the gauges began to tremble, he shifted to another dial and began turning that, picking out the harmonics that the door was emitting. Once he had the bottom and top end of the harmonics, he began closing in on individual frequencies. At that point, his devices gave way to old-fashioned intuition.

  He turned the dials a fraction at a time, attending to his instincts. Each time he nailed a frequency, the sense of strangeness grew. The fine hairs on the back of his hand stood up. He got the feeling he was being watched, which deepened into outright paranoia as he progressed. A faint whine, like the buzzing of a mosquito, started up in his ears.

  The human body reacted to the presence of the unnatural. A daemonist learned to listen to that. Behind him, the others shuffled nervously. They were discomfited, even scared, but unsure why.

  He lost himself in concentration. It had been a while since he'd had a puzzle like this to work on. It was good to bury himself in the Art. With no possibility of a proper sanctum aboard the Ketty Jay, he'd been using crude, portable equipment this past year, working in a corner of the cargo hold. It limited him to small, simple effects, like the earcuff communicators, which were comfortably within the range of his skill. But thralling a daemon was one thing; subduing someone else's was a different matter.

  Finally he was satisfied that he'd accounted for all the elements of the complex, dissonant chord emanating from the door. The chord was like a cage, binding the daemon there. It was a weak entity, this one. Barely more than a spark of other-worldly life, set to a single task.

  He scanned the settings on the oscilloscope, then sat back on his heels. 'Well, if it isn't daemonism, I don't know what it is,' he said. Now he had the readings, silence was no longer necessary.

  'What do you mean?' asked Hodd.

  'I mean, it's no kind of special technology or anything else. It's straightforward, thralling-a-daemon-to-a-door daemonism.'

  'You mean the Manes have daemonists?'

  'Just telling you what's here.'

  'Can you break it?' Grist asked, eagerly.

  'I should think so,' said Crake.

  He set to work again, this time on the resonator. He turned the first dial, tuning in to the frequency he wanted. The damping rod hummed as it sent out frequencies of its own, interfering with those that bound the daemon. Crake saw one of the gauges on the oscilloscope drop to zero. One frequency neutralised. He sought out the next. He had the readings from the oscilloscope, so homing in on them was easy. With each frequency he matched, the damping rod hummed louder. He could feel the vibration in his back teeth, his stomach, his bowels. The brainless daemon thralled to the door was fighting to escape back to the aether. It made him want to be sick again.

  The last gauge on the oscilloscope dropped. The chord thai chained the daemon was countered. Crake felt his skin prickle, then there was a sensation of lifting in his body, as if there had been a pressure on him these past few minutes which had suddenly been released. The paranoia dissipated. All was normal.

  The daemon was gone.

  He made a cursory scan for frequencies with his oscilloscope, then reached over and undipped his equipment from the battery.

  'It's done,' he said.

  'You're a damned marvel, Mr Crake,' said Grist, stepping past eagerly. He reached for the handle of the door, hesitated, then grabbed it. When nothing happened, he chuckled. 'A damned marvel.' He pushed the door open.

  'Hey, we should see what's happened to Silo and Jez,' Frey said, but Grist ignored him and went on through, with Crattle and Hodd close on his heels. Frey shrugged and followed them. 'Suppose they can take care of themselves.'

  Crake trailed along behind, with one last look at his equipment. He didn't like leaving it lying around like that, but he didn't want to be left here on his own.

  Beyond the door was a short corridor ending in a small room. Grist was already at the other end, his lantern illuminating the way. Crake followed his captain in.

  It was not what he'd expected. The room was entirely unimpressive. Simple, square, and featureless. In the centre was a thin pedestal, a metre high, and on top of that was a metal sphere about the size of a grapefruit. There were no other exits.

  Frey looked around disdainfully. 'I'm not seeing any of this vast wealth you spoke of, Captain Grist.'

  Grist was studying the sphere. 'Mr Crake, do you know what this is?'

  Crake looked closer. It was made of black metal and appeared smooth. Silver lines ran across its surface in curves and circles. The pattern had no symmetry, and there was never a straight line. It gave him a headache just to look at it.

  But there was something more. At this distance, it was impossible not to notice. His finely honed daemonist's senses were quivering with the presence of unseen energies.

  'I have no idea what it is,' he said. 'But that little ball is putting out a lot of power. Makes the barrier I just broke through look like a card trick.'

  Grist's eyes glittered hungrily. His cigar moved from left to right in his mouth. 'Curious,' he said. 'Real curious.' He reached out to pick it up. 'Perhaps we should—'

  He was arrested by the tip of a cutlass, which flicked through the air to press against his throat.

  'Perhaps we should pause a moment, Captain Grist,' said Frey, 'so you can tell us exactly why we're here, and what we really came for.'

  Grist's gaze slid down the length of the blade to Frey. Frey met him with a defiant stare.

  'Now what you're doin' might be thought by some to be an unfriendly action,' Grist said,
his voice a gravelly snarl. 'One deservin' of recriminations, if you take my meaning. You'd best not be plannin' to rip me off, Frey.'

  'Odd,' said Frey. 'That's just what I thought you intended to do.'

  'Gentlemen!' Hodd said. 'Can't we be reasonable?'

  'Me and my crew were brought here under false pretences,' said Frey, never taking his eyes off the other captain. 'This man owes me some answers.'

  The suspicions had been there from the start, of course. They always were. Frey never trusted anyone outside his own crew, least of all strangers who came bearing promises of great wealth. He'd been burned that way before. Ever since he'd met Grist, things had been adding up and adding up until there was no doubt left in Frey's mind.

  He knew the ways of liars and cheats. He'd done enough of both in his time. He didn't always figure them out straightaway but, given time, he'd spot them. And as much as he liked Grist, he knew when he was being taken for a ride.

  It was that look in Grist's eyes that did it. That unguarded moment, when he reached for the sphere. Greed. Naked lust. It was like the poor saps he'd seen entranced by Crake's gold tooth. Spellbound.

  Grist knew what that sphere was. Frey would have bet his life on it. In fact, he thought, that was probably what he was doing right now.

  'What makes you think I ain't honest, Frey?' Grist said. A barely suppressed rage had darkened his face. Frey was used to seeing him full of bullish bonhomie, but now he caught a glimpse of the other side. Grist was capable of terrible, towering anger. Frey would have to be very careful from now on.

  'I'll tell you,' said Frey. 'But first, tell your bosun that if his hand gets any closer to that pistol, you'll be smoking your next cigar through a hole in your throat.'

  From the corner of his eye, Frey saw Crattle's hand drift away from his revolver.

  'Now,' said Frey. 'Let's begin at the beginning. Fifty-five, forty-five. You remember that?'