The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,61

and narrowing in. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. It wouldn't be any of the five conventional senses that told him when he found a daemon.

The sudden, oppressive sense of being watched came upon him. The kind of feeling a mouse must get when it knows it's been spotted by a cat.

Each daemon was like a vast, complex chord, with primary and secondary notes. If he could match those notes, he had the anchors he could use to drag it into phase with his world.

The room felt darker and colder suddenly. His skin prickled.

That was it. He'd found its range, its highest and lowest frequencies. He opened his eyes and looked at the control console.

It was enormous.

"You've found something?' Plome called from the other side of the sanctum.

Crake stared at the dials for a moment. Could you do this? Could you bring it through? With Plome here as witness? Spit and blood, how they'd talk about that one in the secret journals.

He caught himself. Hadn't he learned anything? Didn't he know where unrestrained ambition would get him?

'It's nothing,' he said, and reset the dials. He wouldn't make the same mistake this time.

He began again. Daemons fluctuated, shifting pitch and bandwidth all the time, and they were frustratingly tricky to pin down. It was another half hour before he found one that stayed still long enough for him to catch it. This one was smaller, occupying the higher end. He penned it in with interference frequencies, preventing it from escaping into the subsonics, and then set about identifying its primary resonances. It began to struggle, but Crake was persistant, and each time he nailed one of the notes in the chord it had a little less wriggle room.

Acrid sweat trickled from beneath his hairline as he worked. Lost in his work, he forgot himself and where he was, his mind focused entirely on the task. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

'You're not getting away,' he murmured. 'Not from Grayther Crake.'

An atmosphere of unreality had descended on the sanctum. An indefinable feeling of strangeness. The mind knew something was wrong but couldn't quite work out what. The presence of a being from the aether disturbed the senses on a subconscious level.

Something pounded on the inside of the echo chamber, making Crake jump.

'By the Allsoul,' Plome gasped. 'Something's here.'

Crake held his hand out to Plome to shut him up. He checked his dials again, zeroing in on the last of the frequencies he'd identified. He couldn't risk it slipping away or getting free.

Another ringing metal impact. Crake wiped sweat from his eyes and turned a dial by a fraction of a centimetre.

Got you.

There was a flurry of pounding on the inside of the metal sphere. Crake reached for a lever and threw it, blasting the interior of the echo chamber with a muddle of conflicting frequencies boosted to incredible volume. The daemon wailed in agony and confusion, a high, thin shriek that made Plome clap his hands over his ears.

Crake returned the lever to its original position, and the tumult ended.

'I know you can hear me,' he said sternly, addressing the daemon in the chamber. 'Behave.'

There was no sound from the daemon.

He flipped a switch to turn on the resonator. It filled the echo chamber with the frequencies he'd recorded when he was studying the metal sphere. 'I'm searching for this,' he said. 'You will tell me where I can find it.'

Crake waited. The echo chamber sat there, humming. The control panel was on the side of the chamber, and he couldn't see the porthole from where he stood. He felt a powerful urge to go round and peer inside, but he also remembered what had happened last time he did that. Glimpsing a daemon could send a man out of his mind.

Careful, he thought. Get the job done. You can indulge your curiosity afterwards.

A sudden, loud impact on the inside of the chamber, hard enough to dent it. A feral, blood-chilling roar. Crake threw the lever, and the roar turned to a squeal. He kept up the torture for longer this time.

'You will damn well do as you're told!' he snarled through gritted teeth.

He pulled the lever back, and the squeal faded. For a time, there was only the hum of the echo chamber and the mass of semi-audible frequencies thrown out by Plome's perimeter defence. Crake could feel his heart skipping, and hear the breath in his ears.

Then there was another sound. A moist clicking, coming