The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,40

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