Kraken

by China Miéville

  “No. Sounds up my street, is all. I was wondering about joining.” The man nodded. The music changed. Soho, “Hippychick.” Whatever happened to Soho?

  “Fair enough. Be a bastard of a tourist to get here, anyway,” he said. “They ain’t in yet. Normally sit over there.”

  She took her place in the corner. The customers were subdued. They were men and women of all ethnicities and ages but a generally obscured air, as if the room had been painted with a dirty paintbrush. A woman drew in her spilt drink. A man talked to himself. Three people crowded around a table in one corner.

  I think I’ll have my next birthday here, she thought coldly. The music wandered on: “Funky Town,” the Pseudo Echo version. Holy shit, “Iron Lung,” Big Pig. Kudos for that, but you can’t catch me with these. You’ll have to up your game—Play Yazz, “The Only Way Is Up”—and then you’ve got me for my wedding party.

  She watched the woman draw pictures on her tabletop, now and then adding little splashes of her beer to the picture. The woman looked up and thoughtfully sucked the dirty beer from her finger. Marge looked down, revolted. On the table the beer picture continued to self-draw.

  “So what you been in?”

  Marge stared. Two men in their forties or fifties swaggered suspiciously toward her. One man’s face was set and impossible to read: the other, who spoke, changed expressions like a children’s entertainer.

  “Say that again?”

  “Brian says you want to play. What you offering? You scratch my soul, you know, I’ll scratch yours. Tit for tat, darling. So what you been in? We all like a bit of theology here, love, no need to be shy.” He licked his lips. “Give us an afterlife, go on.”

  “Sorry,” she said slowly. “I didn’t mean to be misleading. I’m here because I need some help. I need some information and someone told me … I need to ask you some questions.”

  There was a pause. The man who had said nothing remained quite impassive. He straightened slowly, turned and walked out of the pub, putting his untouched drink down on the counter as he went.

  “Fucking bloody Nora,” said the other quietly. “Who the fuck you think you are? Coming in here …”

  “Please,” Marge said. The desperation in her voice surprised even her, and stopped him speaking. She kicked out the chair opposite, gestured him to sit. “Please, please, please. I really need help. Please sit down and listen to me.”

  The man did not sit, but he waited. He watched her. He put a hand on the back of the chair.

  “I heard that someone …” she said. “I heard that maybe one of you knows something about the squid cult. You know the squid’s gone, right? Well, so’s my lover. Someone took him. And his friend. No one knows where they are, and it’s something to do with this, and I need to talk to them. I need to find out what’s going on.”

  The man tipped on his heels. He scratched his nose and glowered.

  “I know some things,” Marge said. “I’m in this. I need help for myself, too. You know …” She lowered her voice. “You know Goss and Subby? They came and hassled me.” The man opened his eyes wide. He sat then, and leaned toward her. “So I need to find the squid people because they’re sending people like that to bloody terrorise me …”

  “Keep it quiet,” he said. “Goss and buggeryfucking Subby? Holy bloody Ram’s bollocks, girl, it’s a wonder you’re still walking. Look at you.” He shook his head. Disgust or pity or something. “How’d you even get here? How’d you find this place?”

  “Someone told me about it …”

  “Marvellous, isn’t it? Someone bloody told you.” He shook his head. “We go to all the trouble. No one’s even supposed to know this blahdclat place exists.” He used the patois adjective, though he was white and his accent snarlingly Cockney. “This is a secret street, mate.”

  “It’s right here,” she said, and waved her map.

  “Yeah and that should be the only place it is. D’you know what a trap street is? You know how hard it is to sort out that sort of thing?” He shook his head. “Listen, love, this is all beside the point. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I told you why I came …”

  “No. I mean, if Goss and Subby are after you, you should not be here. If you got left alive it’s just because they din’t care about you, so for Set’s sake don’t get them caring about you.”

  “Please just tell me about the squid cult. I have to find them …”

  “‘Squid cult.’ What are you like? Which you talking about? Khalkru? Tlaloc? Kanaloa? Cthulhu? It’s Cthulhu, ain’t it? Always is. I’m just fucking with you, I know what you’re talking about. Church of God Kraken, isn’t it?” He looked around. “They ain’t nothing to do with Goss and Subby. Say what you like about the teuthists, doll, they don’t run with that kind of company. Don’t happen. Let me tell you something. I don’t think they know what’s up any more’n you do. It ain’t them took the kraken. Too holy for them to touch, or something. But they ain’t even looking for it, if you can believe that.”

  “I don’t care about any of that. I just want to know what happened to Leon and Billy.”

  “Sweetheart, whatever it is going on it’s all much too prickly for my bloody taste. None of us has gone anywhere near the teuthies since this kicked off. We’ll keep it nice and bloody simple, thank you very much indeed. Spider-gods, Quakers, Neturei Karta, that sort of shit’ll do me. Alright, maybe you don’t get as many points for those scriptures, but …”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor should you, deario. Nor should you.”

  “I heard you knew something about these people …”

  “Alright listen,” he said. He chopped the tabletop with his hand. “We ain’t going to have this conversation. I ain’t going down this road.” He sighed at her expression. “Now look. I already told you everything I know, which is bugger-all, granted, but that’s because that’s what the Kraks know. If you’re …” He hesitated. “You won’t thank me for helping you know. Helping.” He sighed. “Look if you really want to get yourself into this shit—and I do mean shit because that’s what you’ll end up in—there are people you should talk to.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Alright look. Jesus, girl, is this your first time on this side of things?” He sank all of his drink in one impressive swallow. “Rumours. Tattoo done it, Grisamentum’s back and done it, no one done it. Well that’s no help. So if I wanted to find out, and I do not, I’d think about who else might have claim on something like that? And think it’s their business?”

  He waited for an answer. Marge shook her head.

  “The sea. I bet you the sea might have ideas. Wouldn’t surprise me if the bastard ocean might have a little something to do with all this. Stands to reason, right? Taking back what’s its? Render unto sea, sir.” He cackled. Marge closed her eyes. “And if it didn’t, probably wishes it had and has a clue who did.”

  “I should talk to the sea?” Marge said.

  “God, woman, no need to sound so miserable about it. What, all of it? Talk to its ambassador. Talk to a flood-brother. Up at the barrier.”

  “Who are …”

  “Now now.” He wagged his finger no. “That’s your bloody lot, alright? You’ve done well enough to get here. If you insist on getting eaten you can go a bit further; it ain’t my job to walk you through. I don’t need that on my conscience, girl. Go home. You won’t, will you?” He blew out his cheeks. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your boy, alright? And for what it’s worth, which in my professional opinion isn’t a bloody lot, I’ll pray for you.”

  “Pray to what?” Marge said. He smiled. The jukebox played “Wise Up Sucker” by Pop Will Eat Itself.

  “Fuck it,” the man said. “Tell you what. What’s the point collecting stuff you don’t use? I’ll pray to all of them.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “SO SIMON’S DOING ALRIGHT,” DANE SAID. “GETTING OVER GHOSTS.”

  “So Wati said,” Billy said. “He
coming?”

  “Strike’s not going well,” Dane said. “He’s a touch bloody busy.”

  It was early daylight and they were near where the London Stone throbbed. Between buildings. Dane made little military hand motions the meanings of which Billy did not know. He followed Dane up onto a low wall, a complicated dance between cameras.

  On their way Dane had told opaque teuthic homilies. Kraken did not steal fire from any demiurges, did not shape humans from clay, did not send baby kraken to die for our sins. “So Kraken was in the deep,” Dane had said. “Was in the deep, and it ate, and it took it, like, twenty thousand years to finish its mouthful.”

  Is that it? Billy did not insist on exegesis.

  Dane moved faster and more gracefully than a man of his bulk should. Billy found this climb easier than the last one, too. He could see only roofs in all directions, like a landscape. They descended toward an internal yard full of cardboard boxes softened by rain into vaguely vectoral brown sludge.

  “This is where they come to smoke. Take out your weapon,” Dane said. He held his pistol.

  The first person out was a young man, who caned a cigarette and sniggered into his mobile phone. The second a woman in her forties with some stinking rollup. There was a long wait after that. The next time the door opened, it was Saira Mukhopadhyay, wrapped in smart scarves.

  “Ready,” Dane whispered. But she was not alone. She was chatting to an athletic guy lighting a Silk Cut. “Arse,” said Dane.

  “I’ll take him,” Billy whispered. “We haven’t got long,” Billy said. They could hear the conversation.

  “Alright,” Dane said. “Do you know how to … set your phaser to stun?” They couldn’t help it: they giggled. Billy pushed his glasses up his nose. He could not have made this jump a few weeks before, phaser in his hand, a pitch down into a hard but controlled landing. He stood and fired. The big man spun across the yard and went down in the rubbish.

  Here was Dane dropping beautifully behind Saira. She heard him, but he was already on her. He backhanded her into the bricks. She braced herself. Where her fingers clenched, they squished the bricks as if they were Plasticine.

  Saira hissed, literally hissed. Dane smacked her again. She looked at him with blood on her lip. It had been easy to forget that for Dane this was sacred fervour.

  “Steady, man,” Billy said.

  “Not many people could port something that size out of there,” Dane said. “But you know that. We know who got it out of there, and we know what you dangled to make him do it. I don’t like it when someone steals my god. It gets me all fucking twitchy. What did you do? What did Al Adler have to do with all this? The end of the world’s coming, and I want to know what you did with my god.”

  “You know who you’re bloody talking to?” she said. “I’m a Londonmancer …”

  “You’re living a dream. The London heart stops beating, you know what’s going to happen? Fuck all. London don’t need a heart. Your mates know what you been doing?”

  “That’s enough.”

  Fitch had entered the yard. They stared at him as he closed the door behind him. He stood by Saira, in the path of Dane’s weapon.

  “You think I should be in a museum,” he said. “Might be. But museum pieces have their uses, right, Billy? You’re almost right about me, Dane. See, when you don’t have the knack you used to, you’re no threat. So people tell you things.”

  “Fitch,” said Dane. “This is between me and Saira …”

  “No it is not,” Fitch said. He squared all pugnacious, then withered. “She just handled the money. You want to know what happened, talk to me.”

  “I SHOUT,” HE SAID, “AND THE OTHERS’LL BE HERE.”

  Things flew overhead. Edgy birds. He glanced at them, and from where Billy stood, the perspective looked wrong.

  “You took it?” Dane said.

  “If you were still a Krakenist, I’d not be talking to you,” Fitch said. “But you aren’t, and I want to know why. Because you’ve got him.” He nodded at Billy. “And he’s the one who knows what’s going on.”

  “I do not,” Billy said. “Not this again.”

  “Why don’t you want the Krakenists to know what’s going on?” said Dane. “We … they … ain’t London’s enemies.”

  “I know how they want to get rid of their holies. And I know where that sort of thing leads.”

  “What? They aren’t even looking for it, let alone getting rid of it,” Billy said.

  “I wish you was right, Fitch, but you ain’t,” Dane said. “The church ain’t doing anything.”

  “Why do you want the kraken?” Fitch said. “I’ve got no business seeing anything in the guts these days. They just sit there squelching. But there it was. Fire. First time since I don’t know how long, and oh my London what I did see.”

  “What’s Al Adler in this?” Billy said.

  “Why did you take it?” Dane whispered.

  Fitch and Saira looked at each other. Saira shrugged. “I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

  “It was his fault,” Fitch said. He whined. Billy could tell the old man was relieved to break his vow. “It was him started it. Coming here with his plans, and the burning at the end of it.”

  “Al? You said he was superstitious,” Billy said to Dane. “So—he came for a reading. But no one liked what they saw.”

  “Tell us,” Dane said, his voice shaking, “everything.”

  ADLER HAD COME TO THE LONDONMANCERS WITH A RIDICULOUS, audacious plan. He was going to steal the kraken. He was not afraid to say so in that hallowed confessional: Fitch, not judging, unshocked even at that stage by the enormous crime to come, bound to confidentiality by oaths in place since the Mithras temple, split the city’s skin to see what might happen.

  “There’s no way Al thought of that job,” Dane said.

  A courtesy, a formality. Fitch expected to see nothing, as he had for years. What he saw was fire.

  The burning end of it all. Burning what it couldn’t burn, taking the whole world.

  And after? Nothing. Not a phoenix age, not a kingdom of ash, not a new Eden. This time, for the first time, in a way that no threatened end had ushered in before, there was no post-after.

  “Most of the Londonmancers don’t know anything about this,” Saira pled. They could not have been expected to overturn their vows like their leader and his best lieutenant had done. “It was obvious Al was just a front guy. Hardly criminal genius, was he?”

  “What did you tell him?” Billy said.

  Fitch waved. “Some waffle. We had to decide what to do fast.”

  “Couldn’t you have told him not to do it?” Billy said. Everyone looked at him. That wasn’t the point at all. You didn’t alter plans on the basis of a Londonmancer reading, any more than you picked a spouse on the basis of a fairground palm reader’s wittering. “Why would he want to end everything?” said Billy.

  “I’m not sure he did,” said Fitch carefully.

  The plan might have set in motion something of its own. Ineluctable, final, unintended consequences. How bad does it have to be to make a Londonmancer break a millennium of honour and intervene? This bad is how bad.

  “So you had to get in there first to stop him setting it off,” said Billy in some kind of wonder. “You had to presteal it.”

  “That auction was coming up.” Saira shrugged. “We needed Simon-bait. It wasn’t that hard to find an armsmith to knack it. Dane … we didn’t know when this was going to happen.”

  “We had to move when we moved,” Fitch said. “Understand—everything burns and nothing happens again, if they got the kraken. When Adler told me, everything changed.”

  Simon performing his game, whispering phrases from his TV show, arriving in the dark of the Darwin Centre with an assiduously replicated fade-in like glitter in water, to “take coordinates,” and with a flex of power disaggregating the kraken and himself in a stream of particles, energy, particles again.

  “So what hap
pened to Adler?” Billy said. Saira met his eye. Fitch did not.

  “A place like that,” Saira said. “It’s guarded. You can’t just walk in.”

  “You cold bastards,” Dane said finally.

  “Oh, please,” said Saira. “I don’t take that from assassins.”

  “You used him as bait,” Billy said. “Told him whatever to keep him … no, for the timing, you sent him in.”

  “Simon would never have got in and out,” Fitch wheedled. “We didn’t know the angel would … we just needed to distract it.” The angel of memory, the mnemophylax, swooping in on Al, as Simon beamed the bewildered would-be burglar in. Not as if the wrecked Trekkie was innocent of that death, either. Turned out there was at the very least one culpable homicide he really did have on his hands.

  “And while it’s dealing with him, you took the kraken out.” Billy shook his head. “That raises the second issue. You did all this to stop this fire, right?” He raised his hands. “Well, you showed us the guts. We all know what the sky feels like. So what went wrong?”

  A long quiet. “It didn’t work,” Saira said. She shook her head and opened and closed her mouth.

  Billy laughed unpleasantly. “You saw what would happen if it was stolen. So you stole it to stop it being stolen. But by stealing it you stole it. And set it off.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Fitch said.

  “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” Dane said. “You are going to take me to my god.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  THE PIGEONS’ BELLIES WERE MISBEHAVING AGAIN, AND THE revolting results of these anxieties featured as quirky news filler. Other urban ructions were growing harder to ignore by selective banalising notice. Fuel would hardly burn in domestic fireplaces. There was nervous speculation about atmospheric conditions. Every flame was grudging. As if there were a limited amount of it available; as if it were being hoarded; saved up for something.

  Also, oh yes, people were disappearing. There are no civilians in war, no firewalls between the blessedly ignorant and those intimately connected to networks, markets of crime and religiosity. And Londoners, even those determinedly mainstream, were disappearing. Not in that mythical without-a-trace way, but with the most discomfiting remnants: one shoe; the shopping they had been going to get but had not yet bought sitting in a bag by their front door; a graffito of the missing where they were last seen. You may not have known what was happening, but that something was happening was not plausibly deniable.