Kraken

by China Miéville

  “Four. There’s something badly bollocksed up with the universe right now, as I’m sure you know, and it’s something to do with this squid. So. Here’s the commission.

  “I want war. I want terror.

  “I want, in descending order: the kraken, or any sign of it; Billy Harrow—alive; Dane Parnell—couldn’t give a shit. Let me stress that I do not give a tinker’s shit what you do on the way. I do not want anyone to feel safe as long as I don’t have what I want.

  “Now …” The voice in the sick man’s throat got crafty. “I’m going to pay a stupid amount for this. But cash on delivery only. This is no-win—no-fee. Take it or leave it. I can tell you, though, that anyone who delivers the kraken will not have to work again. And Billy Harrow’ll give you a good couple of years off.” The camera scanned the room again. “Questions?”

  The swastika-wearing man in mascara texted a set of exclamation marks to a comrade. A renegade Catholic priest fingered his dog collar. A shaman whispered to her fetish.

  “Oh, shit.” The voice came from a mild-looking young man in a shabby jacket whose creative gunplay would astonish most people who met him. “Oh shit.” He bolted. The man hunted by empathic homing, an annoying side effect of which, in his case, was an allergy to other people’s greed (not, he regularly thanked Providence, his own). The gust of venality that had gone through the room at that moment was strong enough that he never had any hope of reaching the toilets before vomiting.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “THIS IS A LIST OF PEOPLE WHO OWE ME FAVOURS, WHO AIN’T IN the church, and who won’t screw me over,” Dane said. There were not many names. They were in a hide way out in zone four, in what both was, and mystically masqueraded as, a deserted squat. They were waiting for Wati.

  “What’s a—does that say ‘chameleon’?” Billy said. “That name rings a bell …”

  Dane smiled. “Jason. He’s the one I said. He goes from job to job. Yeah, him and me go back.” He smiled at some reminiscence. “He’ll help if it comes to it. But it’s Wati who’s our main man, no question.”

  “Where was that workshop where the Tattoo had me?” Billy said.

  “What do you want to know for? Have you got some stupid idea, Billy?”

  “What would be stupid? You’re a soldier, aren’t you? You’re worried about the Tattoo getting hold of your god. Is there a reason we’re not taking all this to him? You know I want to do whatever I can to him. I’m honest about that. And Goss and Subby. We want the same thing, you and me. If we can mess with them, everyone’s happy. Except them. Which is the point, right?”

  “Billy,” Dane said. “We ain’t going to be storming the Tattoo’s place. Not without an army. First off I don’t know where he is, not for certain. That’s one of his gaffs, but you never know where he’s going to be, or where that workshop’ll be. Second, his guards? They’re not nothing. And plus he’s one of the biggest powers in London. Everyone owes him a favour, or money, or their life, or something. We mess with him we’re bringing down no end of shit on ourselves, even if we got to him, which we wouldn’t.”

  “Has he got …? Can he …?” Billy swirled his hands suggestively.

  “Knacks? It ain’t about knacks with him: it’s about money and smarts and pain. Look, someone out there has the kraken, and no one knows who. The only thing we’ve got at the moment is that Tattoo’s as buggered by that as us. I know you want to … But we can’t waste time going after him. What’ll screw him over worse is if we get hold of it. He’s too big to hunt, I’m sorry. We’re just two guys. With my know-how and your dreams.

  “You should start dreaming for us. You can’t pretend they’re nothing anymore: what you’re seeing’s real. You know that. The kraken’s telling us things. So you got to dream for us.”

  “Whatever it is I’m dreaming,” Billy said carefully, “I don’t think it’s the kraken.”

  “What the hell else would it be?” Dane did not sound angry, but pleading. “Someone is doing something to it.” He shook his head and closed his eyes.

  “Can you torture a dead god?” Billy said.

  “’Course you can. You can torture a dead god. You can torture anything. And the universe don’t like it—that’s what’s got the fortune-tellers sick.”

  “I have to tell Marge Leon’s dead.” Billy rubbed his chin. “She should—”

  “I don’t know what this is about, mate,” said Dane, without looking at him. “But you better let it go. You ain’t going to talk to no one. You can’t. It’s for your sake and it’s for her sake too. You think you’d be doing her a favour if you got her interested? I know this ain’t really about her, but still …” He left Billy feeling unfinished.

  On the floor between them was a plastic gnome. They were waiting for Wati. Dane showed Billy truncheon strikes using a wooden spoon, showed him slowed-down punches and neck locks. “You did good,” he said.

  His tuition was distracted. But when Wati did come, it was so quietly that neither man had any intimation of his presence until he spoke. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, a snarly voice in the chubby plastic man’s pipes. “Emergency meetings. You got no idea.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Not even. We got attacked.”

  “What happened?” Dane said.

  “Look, it ain’t a picnic and everyone knows that, right? But they came in hard, and they came in brutal. André’s still in hospital.”

  “Cops?”

  “Pros.”

  “Pinkertons?” The agency’s name was a byword for mercenary strikebreaking.

  “They weren’t secret about it. It was the Tattoo’s bastards.” Dane stared at the statuette, and it stared back at him.

  “I guess that ain’t such a surprise,” Dane said. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Do we know who’s paying him?”

  “Take your pick. No shortage of candidates. But d’you understand what this means? They’re gunning for us. They’ve taken it up to DEFCON One.”

  “I’m sorry, mate. You’re not the only one. I thought I knew which of my places were secure,” Dane said. “The Teuthex sent some of … You remember Clem?” Wati whistled slowly.

  “That’s got to fuck with your head,” he said. “At least I know the bastards I’m up against are no friends of mine. If I could, I’d go in have a shufti, see what your old church are up to.”

  “There are statues all over the walls …” Billy said.

  “There are blocks,” Dane said. “Ways to keep people out. They’re careful.”

  “I got to look out for my members, Dane,” Wati said. “We have to win this. But it turns out that I’m warring with the Tattoo whether I like it or not. He comes for my members, I’m coming for him. If the main thing he wants is to get hold of the kraken, the main thing I want is to get it first. Whatever he’s for, I’m against it.”

  The two men smiled.

  • • •

  WATI SUMMONSED A JACKDAW OUT OF THE SKY AND TO THE kitchen window. It dropped a piece of paper on the counter, sang something to Wati and left. It was Dane’s list of porters. It was much folded, scratched with bird claws, written on in various clumsy hands, in red, blue and black.

  “It wasn’t hard to get information,” Wati said in that out-of-time accent. “Mancers know each other. People with this sort of talent, even if my members haven’t met them through their bosses, they know of them.”

  “Why are these ones crossed off?” Dane said. “I’d’ve thought Fatima Hussein was a good candidate for having shifted it.”

  “The ones crossed out in blue are out of the country.”

  “Alright. What about these others?”

  “They have familiars. Their knacks are so tied up with them that with the strike, they couldn’t port cheese into a sandwich.”

  “How does it work?” Billy said.

  “Quid pro quo,” Dane said. “They’re your eyes and ears, but more’n that. Put something into your animal or your whatever it is …”
/>   “Magic.”

  “Put something into it, you get more out,” Wati said. Animals as amplifiers. “There’s four people we reckon could’ve ported this. Simon Shaw, Rebecca Salmag, the Advocate, and Aykan Bulevit.”

  “I know a couple of them,” Dane said. “Simon retired. Aykan’s a tosser. Any beamers? I hate beaming.”

  “Yeah, but we ain’t talking about you,” Wati said. “We’re talking about your god.”

  “Its body.”

  “Well, yeah. So, either it was one of this lot, or we’re dealing with something we’ve never seen before,” Wati said. “And it isn’t that bloody easy to stay secret in London.”

  “Not that whoever it is seems to be having much trouble,” Billy said.

  “There is that,” said Wati. “Keep something in your pocket for me to get into. So I can get to you quick.”

  “How’d you feel about a Bratz doll?” Dane said.

  “I’ve been in worse. But there’s something else. It isn’t just a question of being able to get the thing out. It’s getting past the protection. All those people on the list are porters, but none of them are fighters. There’s no way any of them should’ve been able to get past the phylax.”

  “The angel,” Dane said. “The angel of memory.

  “Alright, mate, alright,” he said, seeing Billy’s face. “None of us know much about this. This is out of our league. When the kraken got took, the angel messed up badly. I had to know a little bit because I was in the Centre.”

  The presence of a guard from the faithful could have been seen, and was by some, as disrespectful. Because the Architeuthis was already under an aegis, protected, along with every other specimen in the museum.

  “What angel?”

  “The mnemophylax is the angel of memory. There’s one in all the memory palaces. But this one screwed up.”

  “What is it?”

  “You think something like memory won’t grow spikes to protect it? That’s what angels are: they’re spikes.” Memory’s defences. Their content irrelevant: the fact of them, and their pugnacity, was all.

  “The angel’s not letting this one go,” Wati said. “You pick this stuff up in the in-between. It’s raging. It feels like it failed.”

  “It did fail,” Dane said.

  What had failed was one of an old cabal abraded into existence out of the city’s curatorial obsession. Each museum of London constituted out of its material its own angel, a numen of its recall, mnemophylax. They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. In a city where the power of any item derived from its metaphoric potency, all the attention poured into their contents made museums rich pickings for knacking thieves. But the processes that gave them that potential also threw up sentinels. With each attempted robbery came the rumours of what had thwarted it. Battered, surviving invaders told stories.

  In the Museum of Childhood were three toys that came remorselessly for intruders—a hoop, a top, a broken video-game console—with stuttering creeping as if in stop-motion. With the wingbeat noise of cloth, the Victoria and Albert was patrolled by something like a chic predatory face of crumpled linen. In Tooting Bec, the London Sewing Machine Museum was kept safe by a dreadful angel made of tangles and bobbins and jouncing needles. And in the Natural History Museum, the stored-up pickled lineage of the evolved was watched by something described as of, but not reducible to, glass and liquid.

  “Glass?” Billy said. “I think I … I swear I’ve heard it.”

  “Maybe,” said Dane. “If it wanted you to.”

  But the squid had been taken, the angel defeated. No one knew the meaning of or penalty for that. Savants could feel an outpouring of alien regret. They said this ushered in something terrible. That the angels were stepping out of their corridors, beyond the remit that had thrown them up. They were fighting for memory against some malevolent certainty that walked the streets like the dead.

  “It isn’t just some porter we’re looking for,” Wati said. “It’s someone who can take on an angel of memory and win.”

  “Did they win, though?” Billy said. “You’re talking to the man who found a bloke in a jar.” They glanced at each other.

  “We need more information,” Dane said.

  “Go to the tellers,” Wati said. “The Londonmancers.”

  “We know what they’ll say. You heard the recording. The Teuthex already spoke to them …” But Dane hesitated.

  “Why won’t they shop us?” Billy said.

  “They’re neutrals,” Wati said. “They can’t intervene.”

  “The Switzerland of magic?” Billy said.

  “They’re nothing,” Dane said. But he sounded hesitant again. “They were the first, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” Wati said.

  “It’s like they’re oracles again,” Dane said. “Maybe.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous for them to see us? People could hear about it,” Billy said.

  “Well,” Dane said. “There is one way to make them keep us secret.” He smiled. “If we’re going to see them anyway …”

  In for a penny. How else could they have negotiated the power logics of London so long? Employ their services, and like doctors and Catholic priests the Londonmancers were committed to silence.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  THERE ARE MANY MILLIONS OF LONDONERS, AND THE VERY GREAT majority know nothing of the other mapland, the city of knacks and heresies. Those people’s millions of everydays are no more everyday than those of the magicians. The scale of the visible city dwarfs that of the mostly-unseen, and that unseen is not the only place where there are amazing things.

  At that moment, however, the drama was in the less-travelled metropolis. Nothing changed for most Londoners but for the onset of a wave of depression and anger, a bad intimation. That was not good and not nothing, certainly. But for those who lived in the city’s minority articulation things were growing daily more dangerous. The strike paralysed large sections of occult industry. The economy of gods and monsters was stagnating.

  The journals of the secretive places—The Chelsea Picayune, Thames’ Unwater Notes, The London Evening Standard (not that one: the other, older paper of the same title)—were full of foreboding at millennial signs. Drug use reached record levels. Smack and Charlie, narcotics that user-mages squabbled with the knackless over in the mainstream capital; and more arcane fixes, the sweepings from ley lines and certain time-crushed places, the buzz of choice for dust-junkies, addicts of collapse and history, high on entropy. Inferior supply grew to meet demand, product ground up and adulterated by impatience, rather than genuine snortable ruins.

  A group of mysterious independents intercepted a shipment of product the Tattoo was moving. No one got to trip on this degraded antiquity: they burnt, blew away and oil-fouled the goods, then disappeared, leaving holes in the bodies of the killed, and rumours of monstrous shapes coagulated out of city-matter.

  Word spread on graffitied walls, on secret bulletin boards virtual and corporeal, corkboards in ignorable offices frequented by curious visitors you couldn’t be quite sure worked there, that Dane Parnell was exiled from the Church of God Kraken. What heresy or betrayal could he have committed? The church would say only that he had showed a lack of faith.

  IT WAS EARLY DAYLIGHT. DANE AND BILLY WERE IN THE OPEN, NEAR the City of London. Dane twitched with nerves. His hands were in his pockets with his weapons.

  “We need more information,” Dane had said.

  Cannon Street, opposite the Tube. In the emptied remains of a foreign bank was a sports shop. Below posters of physically adept men was a glass-front cabinet and iron grille, behind which was a big chunk of stone. Dane and Billy watched the comings and goings a long time.

  The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances. Trusting in that old rock was a quaint or dangerou
s tradition, depending on to whom you spoke. The London Stone was a heart. Did it still beat?

  Yes, it still beat, though it was sclerotic. Billy thought he could feel it, a faint laboured rhythm making the glass tremble like dust in a bass line.

  This had been the seat of sovereignty, and it cropped up throughout the city’s history if you knew where to look. Jack Cade touched his sword to the London Stone when claiming grievances against the king: that was what gained him the right to speak, he said, and others believed. Did he wonder why it had turned on him, afterward? Perhaps after the change in his fortunes, his head had looked down from the pike on the bridge, seen his quartered body parts taken for national gloating, and wryly thought, So, London Stone, to be honest I’m getting mixed messages here … Should I in fact maybe not lead the rebels?

  But forgotten, hiding, camouflaged or whatever, the Stone was the heart, the heart was stone, and it beat from its various places, coming to rest at last here in an insalubrious sports shop between cricket equipment.

  Dane took Billy through shadows. Billy could feel that they were, he was, hard to see. By an alley, bracing himself in a corner of brick and launching astonishingly up, Dane entered the tumbledown complex like some thickset Spider-Man. He opened the door for Billy. He led through scuffed passages behind the shop, by toilets and office rooms to where a young man in a Shakira hoodie loitered. He fumbled for his pocket, but Dane’s speargun was out, aimed straight at his forehead.

  “Marcus, ain’t it?” Dane said.

  “I know you?” The young man’s voice was impressively steady.

  “We need to come in, Marcus. Got to speak to your crew.”

  “Appointment?”

  “Knock on the door behind you, there’s the boy.” But at all the noise the door opened preemptively. Billy heard swearing.

  “Fitch,” Dane said, raising his voice. “Londonmancers. No one wants trouble. I’m putting my weapon away.” He waved it so the watchers could see. “I’m putting it away.”