The Black Lung Captain (48 page)

'Strange and mysterious, the paths our hearts take us,' said the bartender sagely. But nobody was listening to him, so he drifted off to the other side of the bar, where there was another drunken soul in need of a sympathetic ear.

Thirty-Two

Plome's Confession —

Conversations In The Sanctum — An Ending, Of Sorts

Summer had got hold of Tarlock Cove, and Jez was glad to feel the sun on her face. After al that time in the arctic north it was a pleasure to be reminded that not every day was a hostile one. She took winding lanes up the mountainside, past streets turned sluggish in the heat. The distant sound of crashing waves drifted up to her as the sea patiently battered at the coast far below.

The address that Crake had left with the Cap'n turned out to be a tal, narrow house tucked away down a wel-kept cobbled aley. She approached the door and composed herself. Now that she was here, she felt nervous. She'd not seen Crake since that day on the
All Our Yesterdays
when her Mane side had taken over. By the time she was out of the infirmary, he was long gone. She had no idea what to expect from him.

Would he welcome her, or be angry? Would he resent her for coming, and scorn her attempts to talk him back to the
Ketty Jay?
Would he despise her for being part Mane? Or would he offer to help her, as she hoped? That was, after al, her reason for coming.

Yes, she wanted him back on the crew, for everyone's sake. Yes, she was concerned about his wel-being and worried that he might be in some kind of trouble.

But first and foremost, she needed him for his expertise. Because she had a daemon inside her, and who but a daemonist could drive it out?

If anyone could help her deal with what she was, it was him. But she'd never told him about her condition. He'd hinted in the past that he knew, or at least suspected, what lay behind her unique abilities. Yet she stil hadn't spoken out. And then, on the very day it became obvious to al and she could hide it no longer, Crake decided to leave.

Just when she needed him most. Just when she could finaly admit to him that she was part Mane.

Was it just bad timing? Or did he leave because of me? Does he fear me? Or does he fear what I might ask him?

No way to know. She should have talked to him a long time ago. Should have asked him to take care of the daemon that plagued her. But instead she'd suffered, because she didn't dare admit her secret.

In that, at least, they understood one another.

She rapped on the door and waited. After a few moments she heard footsteps, and the door was opened by a harassed-looking middle-aged man, stout and balding. This, she assumed, was Plome, the owner of the house.

'Yes?' he inquired, looking her over criticaly. It occurred to her that she should have worn something more impressive than her grey overals, but she'd never been much interested in clothes or jewelery.

'I'm looking for Crake,' she said. 'Is he here?'

'And who might you be?' he asked suspiciously, studying her over his pince-nez.

'I'm Jez. I'm the navvie on the—'

But Plome's face had already lit up. 'Oh, thanks be! Come in, come in!' He hurried her inside and shut the door.

'He spoke about you,' Plome explained, as Jez found herself propeled down the halway. 'Said you were the only one who knew about what happened to him.

I'm so glad you're here. So very, very glad.' He stopped and seized her by the shoulders. 'You have to take him away!'

'Err . . .' said Jez, who was stil catching up. 'That was the idea, actualy.'

'Good! Good!' Plome cried. 'I thought it would be wonderful having him here, you know. Such an eminent daemonist to learn from. Oh!' He clamped his hand over his mouth, aware that he'd let something slip. 'You mustn't tel anyone!' he urged.

'Tel anyone what?'

'That I'm a daemonist. Just an amateur, you understand, but then, aren't we al? No professionals in our business!' He laughed nervously, produced a handkerchief and mopped his glistening pate. 'I'm in politics, you know. Running for the House of Chancelors. If anyone knew, it'd be the death of me.'

Jez held up her hands. 'Mr Plome. Calm down. I'm not going to tel anyone anything. Now what's happened to Crake?'

Plome was describing frantic little circles around the halway, wringing his handkerchief. 'He's become a liability, that's what! Oh, don't think badly of me. I've been a good friend to him. I lent him money. I helped him in everything. He bought rare books, sought out other daemonists, gathered al the research he could. But he always needed more. And one time he emerged from the sanctum, ranting about daemonism, while there were guests in the house! Came damnably close to blowing my cover and sending me to the galows!' He threw his hands up in the air. 'I've become a recluse! Trapped in my own home, guarding him! I spend every day dreadfuly afraid that the madman in my basement wil break out and the world wil know I've been dabbling with daemons. It's a short trip from there to the noose, believe me, young lady! And I'm supposed to be in the middle of a campaign to become a Chancelor of the Duchy! My rival makes ground every day I'm not out there! The Tarlocks are breathing down my neck, wondering what I'm up to! It's a disaster!'

He was panting by the time he finished. Jez decided she'd heard enough. 'Show me where he is.'

Plome led her around the side of the staircase at the end of the hal. There a cupboard door lay hidden and out of sight. He began fumbling in his pocket for something.

'Through here?' Jez asked, and puled the door open.

'Wait! Don't open that yet!' Plome said.

Jez felt a strange tingle through her body. Her senses tipped, threatening to send her into a trance. Then everything righted itself, and she was looking at a set of steps, leading down, just beyond the door.

'He's down there?' she asked.

Plome, who was holding a tuning fork in his hand for some reason, gaped at her. 'But . . . the glamour . . . You can see the stairs?'

Jez looked at him oddly. 'Of course I can. Can't you?'

Plome looked bewildered. 'Oh, my. It's time I thraled a new daemon to that doorway. This one's lost its fizz. You shouldn't have seen anything but an old cupboard.'

Jez was eager to see Crake. She headed down. There were deep scratches on the wals of the stairway, which looked relatively fresh.

'Don't tread on the third step from the bottom!' Plome caled after her. Jez stepped over it obediently. She could feel the faint thrum of energy7 from the wood.

Another daemon, she guessed. She wondered if it was any more effective than the last.

The sanctum was a mess. Electric lights buzzed behind their shades, but half the bulbs had died and not been replaced. Chemical apparatus lay half-disassembled. Muddled equations were scrawled on blackboards, overlapping one another. There was a huge brass vat against one wal with a window in the side.

It was ful of a murky yelow liquid and attached to various machines. A large, riveted metal device like a bathysphere stood in the centre of the room. Books lay face-down and open where they'd been thrown.

Crake was sitting at a desk, his back to her. He was scribbling in a notebook, with occasional pauses to consult an enormous hidebound tome. His blond beard and hair had grown out; he looked shaggy and untidy. Bess sat near the desk, dormant. She was wired up to a complex tangle of equipment.

Jez suddenly understood the scratches on the narrow stairway. They must have had quite a time getting her down here.

'Crake,' she said.

He jumped at the sound of her voice, and his pen nib snapped. He stared at the notebook for a moment, then swept it off the desk.

'I can't make it work, Jez,' he said. He got to his feet and began pacing back and forth, his hand on his forehead. Red-rimmed eyes searched the middle distance restlessly. 'I can't make it work.'

'You can't make
what
work?'

'This!' he snapped, gesturing towards Bess. 'It's impossible!'

Jez was shocked by the state of him. He was like a madman, ful of frantic energy, waving his arms around, bubbling on the edge of mania. He stank of sweat.

'What were you trying to do?'

'I was trying to get her back! There were rumours, you see. Always rumours among daemonists. They said there was a way to bring someone back from the dead. If you just colected the right raw materials, you could put them in a tank, you could infuse it with the essence, the . . . the . . .
frequency
of your loved ones, that you'd recorded when they were alive. And the body would
grow
itself!

Bones would form and muscles knit and there they'd be, floating in the tank, the way they always were!'

As he spoke, his face was ful of mad hope, like a crazed prophet; but then his expression twisted and turned to rage.

'Lies! Al lies! There are no records! I've searched everywhere, I've asked everybody, and no one's ever done any such thing! I don't even know where to start, do you understand? It's so far beyond me I can't even
beginV

Jez was appaled.
That
had been his plan? She'd suspected that he'd left the crew to deal with the question of Bess, but this sounded like a far-fetched method of doing so, even to her. She began to worry7 that he'd taken leave of his reason altogether.

'You were trying to bring her back from the dead?'

'The dead!' he cried, pointing at her. 'That was my next thought! After al,
you
walk around without a pulse. Why not my Bess? But what was I to do? Her body's gone, Jez! Dust and worms! Am I supposed to murder someone
else
to provide her with a form? No, I couldn't. So I tried to find corpses, but when I saw them, I ... I couldn't . . . I . . .'

'Wait, you did
what?

'Don't you dare judge me!' he shouted. 'Don't you dare! I'd do anything to get her back. But not that way. Not some stitched-up post-autopsy puppet of cold meat. I'd be exchanging one abomination for another. That wouldn't be my Bess. So I looked for another method, but there
isn't
one!' He raked his hand through his hair anxiously. 'And after that . . . after that I wondered if I could make her smarter, you know, something closer to what she once was. Spit and blood, at least that'd be
something.
But I don't have the slightest notion how to do it! I don't even know what I did when I put her
in
there!' He was pacing back and forth now, making wild gestures, so agitated that he could barely contain himself. 'And then I thought . . . I thought, what if I
did
rescue her from wherever she went? What if I
did
restore her, and my beautiful little niece woke up and looked at herself, and held up those metal hands in front of her, and realised what she was? Can you imagine such a horror? Trapped inside an unfeeling metal shel for ever, her only companion the man who put her there? It's . . . it's positively macabre! It's that kind of meddling that led to al of this in the first place!'

He stopped, stared at her, and suddenly the angry expression on his face wavered, his lip trembled and tears shimmered in his eyes. 'I can't bring her back,' he said.

'No,' said Jez. 'You can't.'

She pitied him. Blinded by guilt, desperate to atone for the crimes of his past, he'd wanted to achieve the impossible. But Bess's body was gone. He might have salvaged a part of her, but he'd never get back the girl he'd known and loved. Her skin, her hair, her smile -they'd rotted away in the grave. Al he could do was move her essence from the vessel she occupied to another one. And that wasn't any kind of solution.

But he had to try. He had to prove to himself that it couldn't be done, that there was no way to save Bess. He needed to fail before he could be made to see.

'It's not as simple as life and death, Crake,' she said. 'You should know that. I'm technicaly dead. My heart doesn't beat. But I
am
Jezibeth Kyte. I'm as much Jezibeth Kyte now as I was the day the Manes caught me.' She looked at Bess: an empty7 shel, her essence departed to wherever it went when Crake sent her to sleep. 'Al that you knew of your niece, al the things that made you love her . . . they're gone. Gone for good. And what lives in that suit is not that girl.'

Tears had started to fal. Crake was beginning to sob. He wiped his nose. 'Why are you teling me this, Jez?'

'Because you can't change things, Crake. What you need to realise is that your niece died that night. That golem is just a memory of her. But it's not your niece.

Your niece is dead.'

Crake shook his head.

'Say it, Crake!' she urged him. 'It's been kiling you every day, and it won't stop kiling you until you accept it.'

'She's there!' he insisted, thrusting a finger at the armoured suit. 'I put her in there! It's up to me to get her out!'

'You can't!' said Jez, grabbing him by the shoulders. 'That over there, that's something else. And it loves you and it needs you to take care of it, but it's
not your
niece.'

Crake pushed her away with a moan of anguish. He spun around and lashed a mass of chemical apparatus off a nearby table, then snatched up the book he'd been copying from and hurled it at Jez. She stepped aside with ease.

'What do
you
know? What do
you
know about it?' he shouted at her. Spittle flecked his beard, and his bloodshot eyes bulged.

'I know the difference between being alive and being dead,' she said calmly. 'Better than anyone, I reckon.'

Crake rampaged around the sanctum, knocking over anything he could see. When he'd smashed or thrown anything he could lay his hands on, he wheeled drunkenly against the wal and leaned there, sweating and red and spent.

'Say it, Crake,' she said relentlessly. 'You can't save her. You don't have the power. She's dead. Say it.'

'Alright!' he said. 'She's dead! I kiled her and she's dead and gone! Happy now?'

His words rang into the silence, and then his face crumpled and he began to cry. He hugged himself and slid down the wal until he was sitting on the floor. 'She's dead,' he said again.