Kraken

by China Miéville

  “Is it?” Collingswood said, offering him a cigarette.

  “Well …” Darius glanced around. “We’ve been told to go softly on his lot for a little while. Which is funny, because you know they ain’t exactly subtle.” The Tattoo’s predilection for ostentatious, damaged and reconstituted henchpersons as a method to spread fear was notorious. “They reckon he’s got Goss and fucking Subby on payroll at the moment. But we’ve been told tread a bit light unless it really spills out into Oxford Street.”

  “Who’s doing who favours?” Collingswood said.

  Darius shrugged. “You’d be slow if you didn’t think it had something to do with the strike. Word is the UMA are having a bit of a time of it. Look, all I know about Al is that he was a good thief and loyal to his mates. And he liked things to be proper, you know? He had those tattoos, I know, but he had proper manners too. I’d heard bugger-all about him since Grisamentum died.”

  “So,” Vardy said, “you’ve no reason to think he was devout. Have you heard of him having any run-ins with angels?” Collingswood looked at him and sipped.

  “Boss,” said Darius, finishing his drink. “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Now if you’ll excuse me. Collers, always a pleasure. Giz a snog.” She flapped her tongue at him. He made a slurping sound as he stood and left.

  “Jesus,” said Collingswood to Vardy. “I feel like arse. You’re alright, aren’t you? The Panda’s not doing your head in. I can’t see you crossing any palms with fucking euros.” As the shapeless anxiety approached, the foreseers of London were doing incredible trade. Second-, third- and fourth-stringers were getting employment, as people tried to find someone, anyone, to see something, anything, other than an end.

  “Panda? Oh, yes, that’s your funny joke, isn’t it? Well, I’m keeping busy. There’s a lot to do.” He did not look merely busy: Vardy seemed invigorated, energised by the crisis. His university must be complaining—not that they could do anything—because he was spending all hours at the FSRC offices.

  “What the hairy bollocks was that about?” Collingswood said. “Angels? What are you getting me into?”

  “Have you heard of mnemophylaxes?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Another word for the angels of memory.”

  “… Oh that. I thought that was all bollocks.”

  “Oh no, there’s certainly something to it. The difficult thing is working out exactly what.”

  “Can’t you ask one of your snouts?” He glanced at her with a ghost of humour.

  “My collectors are no good. Nobody worships these angels. They’re … well, you’ve heard stories.”

  “A bit.” Not much. Some archons of history, not memories but metamemories, the bodyguards of remembrance.

  “There was a witch, years ago. She’d been a Londonmancer, but she broke with them because she was tired of noninterference. She and a couple of rent-a-mob broke into the Museum of London, to fetch something or other. Found dead the next morning. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Her friends were dead. She was nowhere. There was just a knocked-down pile of bricks and mortar in a display case. Some of the bricks were oddly shaped. We took the pile and did a bit of a jigsaw, fitted it back together. It was a sculpture of a woman. In brick. It had been made, then knocked down.” He looked at her. “Thinking of angels, I wanted to suggest that you have a look at the readouts from the scene there, and perhaps compare to whatever you get from the spot in the basement where Billy found Adler.”

  “So, what you wanted to suggest was I do a load of extra work, is it?” she said. Vardy sighed.

  “There are points of connection,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. I’m not sure the Tattoo’s the only thing we’re looking at. And you’re still getting no whisper about the whereabouts of the squid. I presume.”

  “You presume right.” Snouts, bribery, violence, scrying, possibility-running, prophecy poker—nothing was netting any word at all. And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city’s alchemists whine like dogs—was provoking more and more interest from London’s repo-men and -women.

  “It ain’t just us looking for it,” Collingswood said.

  Chapter Thirty

  COME CHAMPION SADDLE UP TIME FOR US TO GO WE MUST BE QUICK WE have a job to do

  One moment Billy was deep under the surface of sleep and dreaming so vividly and quickly it was like being in a sped-up film.

  saddle up and lets get those

  He was under the water, as he was most of the times he slept, now, but it was light not dark this time, the water so bright it was like sunlight; it was daylight he was in; the rocks were deepsea rocks or they were the innards of a canyon; he was in a canyon, overlooked by buttes and mesas, with the sun or some underwater light above him. He was getting ready to ride.

  champion, he shouted, champion saddle up

  Here was his mount. He knew what would come over the rocks and hills for him to grab and with cowboy drama swing himself onto its back as it passed. Architeuthis, jetting, mantle clenching and tentacles out ready to grab prey. He knew it would scud over the plains, sending out limbs to grab hold of what it passed, to anchor itself and hunt.

  It came. But something was not as expected.

  how do i get on that? Billy thought. do i get in maybe?

  What came bucking over the hills was Architeuthis in its tank, the great glass rectangle pitching like a canoe, Formalin sloshing up against the see-through lid and spraying out of edges, in drips, leaving a damp trail in the dust. The kraken in its tank whinnied and reared, the long-dead flesh of the animal sliding.

  champion champion

  One instant Billy was in that dream. The next he was awake, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling of the flat to which Dane had taken him. He breathed in, out. Listened to the silence of the room.

  The nonexistent person the flat belonged to was a professional woman, a GP, judging from the books on shelves and certificates on walls. She had never lived, but her ghost was everywhere. The furniture and decorations were tastefully and carefully patterned. Amulets and wards were hidden behind curtains. They were on the second floor of a shared house.

  Dane was sleeping in the bedroom. “We’re going to talk to Wati tomorrow,” he had said. “We need to get some shuteye.” Billy was on the sofa. He lay, staring at the moulding on the ceiling, trying to work out what had woken him. He had felt a scraping like some fingernail against something.

  All the tiny noises of air and the shuffling of his clothes, his head against the cushion, ended. He sat up and there were still no sounds. In that unnatural quiet what he heard, for a clear second, was the rolling grind of glass on marble. His eyes widened. He felt something vibrate against glass. Without knowing how, he was standing a little way from the sofa, now by the window, pulling back curiously resistant limp curtains. He was wearing his glasses.

  A man was on the windowsill outside. Another was on the ground, looking up. Billy did not even feel surprise. The first man was gripping a downpipe, scoring at the glass of the window with a cutter. He and his companion were motionless. Not even the midnight clouds moved. Billy dropped the corner of curtain, and it fell instantly back into the draped shape it had been in.

  He knew this would not last more than another few seconds. He did not try to wake Dane, did not think there was time, nor that Dane would move if he tried. He took a step and felt air move again, heard the tiny shifting of the living world. The curtains wafted.

  With astoundingly silent motion the intruder opened the window. He began to come through, a lumpy shape being born from the split between curtains. Billy grabbed him in a half-remembered judo hold, around his neck, rolled him onto the floor, choked him fast and hard. The man made tiny sounds. He rose onto all fours, braced and shoved, rising from prone to standing in an impossible corkscrew jump that crushed Billy into a wall.

 
The door to the bedroom opened and there was Dane, his fists clenched, dark as a man-shaped hole. He crossed the room in three freakishly nimble steps, smacked the incomer in his jaw, sending his head snapping backward. The man dropped, deadweight.

  Billy clicked his fingers and caught Dane’s eye. He pointed down through the curtains: there’s another one. Dane nodded. He whispered, “Handcuffs in my bag. Gag him, lock him.”

  Without drawing the curtains, Dane reached round their edges and began to pull the window open. The curtains gusted as cold air came in. There was a curt whisper and a thwack. One curtain jerked and shuddered around a new hole. An arrow jutted from the ceiling.

  Dane vaulted through the window. Billy gasped. The big man dropped the two full storeys, twisting, landed low and silently in the building’s shrubby front garden. He went straight for the man, who ran with a bolt-gun in his hand. They went very fast into and back out of the streetlamp light. Billy tried to watch as he found the cuffs and locked the unconscious intruder to a radiator, stuffed a sock in his mouth and tied it in place with a pair of the invented woman’s tights.

  The front door opened. Billy stood ready, but it was Dane who entered, breathing heavily, his belly shaking. “Get your shit.”

  “Did you get him?” Billy said. Dane nodded. He looked grim. “Who are they?” Billy said. “Tattoo’s guys?” Dane went into the bedroom.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “Ain’t he got a proper face? He’s not some walking machine, is he? Nah. That’s Clem. The other geezer’s Jonno. Say hello. Hello Clem,” he said to the gagged man. He swung his bag up. “Oops,” he said. “Looks like the Teuthex does know about some of these hideouts.” He gave an unhappy little laugh.

  Clem met Dane’s eyes and breathed snottily into his gag. “Hey, Clem,” Dane said. “How you doing, mate? How’s everything? Going alright, mate? Good, good.” Dane went through Clem’s pockets. He took what money he found, Clem’s phone. In his pack he found another of those little spearguns.

  “Krak’s sake, Clem, mate, look at you,” Dane said. “You put all this effort into getting me and you’re happy to sit there like lemons while someone walks off with God. I got a message for the Teuthex. Tell him this, alright, Clem? When he comes to pick you up, you give him this message, okay? You tell him he’s a disgrace. You all are. I’m not the one who’s exiled. I’m the one doing God’s work. I’m the church, now. It’s the rest of you who’s excofuckingmunicated. You tell him that.” He patted Clem’s cheek. Clem watched through bloodshot eyes.

  “Where are we going to go?” Billy said. “If they know your safe houses, we’re screwed.”

  “They know this one. I’ll have to keep more careful. I’ll stick to the newest ones.”

  “And what if they know them too?”

  “Then we’re screwed.”

  “WHAT WOULD THEY DO TO US?” BILLY SAID. DANE DROVE THEM IN A newly stolen car.

  “What would they do to you?” he said. “Lock you up. Make you tell them what you see at night. What would they do to me? Apostasy, mate. Capital crime.” He took the car past a canal, where rubbish scabbed the edges of a lock and the streetlights were cold and silver.

  “What do they think they’re going to find out from me?”

  “I’m not a priest,” Dane said.

  “I’m not a prophet,” Billy said. Dane did not reply. “Why aren’t you asking me what I dream? Don’t you care?”

  Dane shrugged. “What do you dream?”

  “Ask me what I dreamed tonight.”

  “What did you dream tonight?”

  “I dreamed I was riding the Architeuthis like Clint Eastwood. In the Wild West.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “But it was …” It was still in the tank. It was still dead and bottled.

  The night opened up as they turned onto a main street, an avenue of neon, crudely drawn illuminated fried chicken and the three globes of pawnbrokers. “You did well, Billy. Clem’s no pushover. He’ll get out of there before long. Where’d you learn to fight?”

  “He was about to kill me.”

  “You did well, man.” Dane nodded.

  “Something happened. And it was to do with the dream.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “When I woke up nothing was moving.”

  “Not even a mouse?”

  “Listen. The world. It was all …”

  “Like I said, mate,” Dane said. “I ain’t a priest. Krakens move in mysterious ways.”

  It didn’t feel like the kraken moving, Billy thought. Something was doing something. But it didn’t feel like the kraken, or any god.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  WORD GOT AROUND. IT DOES THAT. A CITY LIKE LONDON WAS always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. There’d be all those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there’d be quite contrary tendencies.

  There, there was no state worth shit, no sanctions but self-help, no homeostasis but that of violence. The specialist police dipped in, and were tolerated as a sect or offhandedly killed like cack-handed anthropologists. “Oh, here we go, FSRC again,” wink wink stab stab.

  Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, by all means—London had its social bandits—but that was fact.

  So when a power put out word it was looking for a hunt-and-fetch, that was like police-band radio—an announcement of forthcoming law and order. “Tattoo? Seriously? He’s got plenty of his own muscle. What’s he employing outsiders for?”

  The last time was when he had stopped being human and become the Tattoo, when Grisamentum had trapped him in a prison of someone else’s flesh. “Whoever brings me Grisamentum’s head has the run of the city,” was what he had said then. When renowned personhunters who’d taken up that commission were found ostentatiously dead, the enthusiasm for it had ebbed. The Tattoo had gone unrevenged.

  Now a new situation. Anyone up for a job?

  They met in a nightclub in Shepherd’s Bush, its doors roped off behind a “Private Party” sign. It had been a long time since the last trade-fair. The gathered bountymen and -women cautiously and courteously greeted each other, no one breaking protocol, the market-peace of the room. If they met in the course of competing for their quarry, whatever it was, then, sure, there would be blood, but just then they sipped drinks and ate the nibbles provided, and it was all “How was Gehenna?” and “I heard you got a new grimoire.”

  They had checked their weapons; a pebble-skinned man guarded a cloakroom of Berettas, sawn-off shotguns, maggot-whips. They gathered in little groups according to micropolitics and magic allergies. Perhaps two-thirds of the people in the room could have walked down any high street without causing consternation, if in some cases they changed their clothes. They wore every kind of urban uniform and ranged in ethnicity across the whole of London’s variety.

  There was a whole slew of skill-sets in the room: miracle-sniffing, unwitchery, iron blood. Some of those present worked in teams, some alone. Some had no occult skills at all, were only extraordinarily lucky with contacts and good at everyday soldierly expertises like killing. Of the others, there were those who would disguise themselves when they left this congenial atmosphere: the miasmic entities drifting at head-height like demon-faced farts would reenter their hosts; the huge woman dressed in a reverse-polarity rainbow would reinstitute her little glamour and be a teenager in a supermarket uniform again.

  “Who’s here?” Muttered censuses. “He’s got everyone. Nu-Thuggers, St. Kratosians, the lot.”

  “No gunfarmers.”

  “Yeah, I heard they were in the city. Not here, thank God. Maybe they’re on another gig. Tell
you who is here. See the bloke over there?”

  “The twat dressed like a new romantic?”

  “Yeah. Know who he is? A Chaos Nazi.”

  “No!”

  “Shit you not. All limits out the window, obviously.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about that …”

  “We’re here now. Might as well see what’s on the table.”

  THERE WAS A COMMOTION ON THE STAGE. TWO OF THE TATTOO’S enforcers stepped forward in their uniform of jeans and jackets, wearing helmets as they always did, not speaking. They cracked their knuckles and swung their arms.

  Between them was a ruined man. He was slack-mouthed and empty-eyed; not so much balding as threadbare, his scalp pitiably tufted. His skin looked like rotting, soaked wood. He walked in tiny little steps. Protruding from his shoulder like some grotesque pirate parrot was a boxy CCTV camera. It clicked and whirred, and swivelled on its stalk in the man’s flesh. It scanned the room.

  The nude man would have kept walking, fallen from the edge of the stage, but one of the helmeted guards held out an arm and stopped him a foot from the edge. He swayed.

  “Gentlemen,” he said suddenly, in a deep staticky voice. His eyes did not move. “Ladies. Let’s get to business. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours. They’re true. The following are the facts. One. The kraken lately stored in the Natural History Museum has been nicked. By persons unknown. I have my suspicions, but I’m not here to feed you ideas. All I’d say is the people you think are dead have a habit of not being, especially in this bloody city. I’m sure you’ve noticed. No one should’ve been able to get that thing out. It was guarded by an angel of memory.

  “Two. There was a man in my custody, name of Billy Harrow. Knows something about this. I didn’t think he did, but more fool me. He did a bunk. That’s not alright with me.

  “Three. Word is that Mr. Harrow was aided in his unacceptable bunk-doing by one Dane Parnell.” A murmur went around the room. “Long-time stalwart of the Church of God Kraken. Now, Dane Parnell has been excommunicated.” The muttering got a lot louder. “From what we gather, the whys of that have something to do with his making Billy Harrow his bumboy.