Kraken

by China Miéville

  BILLY AND DANE HADN’T DONE BADLY. THE CARE OF THEIR MOVEMENTS; the camouflage Dane dragged behind them with little shuffled hexes, second nature for a man of his training; the disguises, ridiculous but not ineffective; Dane’s soldier care: all these had kept them from collectors’ eyes for days, which when you’re the target of by some way the largest collection of bloodprice talent to be assembled on a single job in London for a whole pile of years, isn’t nothing.

  For a creditable time, those stalkers had been frustrated. The tallyho of the urban hunt sounded like a parping fart in the latest hours, as they rode unorthodox horses over roofs, making locals think there had been very brief very heavy rain, and tracked down bugger-all. The vaguely cowboy gunslingers had failed to run them down. Londoners slept badly, as their internal nightlands were infiltrated by eyeless snuffling beasts that lolloped through their sex reveries and parental angsts, dreamhounds sent out by hunters at their most dangerous when they slept. They could not sniff their quarries either.

  The hunters fought among themselves. More than once they faced murderous confrontations with figures that seemed part of some other agenda, that were come and gone too fast to make sense of in any political schema of which anyone knew. Men who disappeared when seen, men and women accompanied by shuffling monster shadows.

  The gangs and solitary freelancers seeded the city with rewards: anything for a harvest of hints. With all his care, nous and skill, Dane could not stand in the way of all the snips, momentary glances, overheard words—all the stuff that registered not at all on passersby, but that the best hunter could winkle out of someone who did not even know they were withholding, could collate and aggregate.

  “I’M GOING INSIDE,” FITCH SAID. “THE REST OF THE LONDONMANCERS need to see me. And we’ll have to find a way to get him onside, now.” He indicated the man Billy had shot.

  “You got to let me go back in, Dane,” he said. “You want to get them worried?”

  Dane raised his weapon as if he did not know what to do with it, and gritted his teeth.

  “Do you believe them?” Billy whispered.

  “We didn’t know what you wanted to do with it,” Fitch said. “Or we would have said.”

  “We didn’t know if we could trust you,” Saira said. “You know how some Muslims get rid of Qur’an pages? They burn them. That’s the holiest method. Whatever’s coming is after burning the whole world down, starting with the squid. And it’s still out there. We thought that might be your plan.”

  “You thought I’d end the world?” Dane said.

  “Not deliberately,” Fitch said, in a strange reassurance. “By accident. Trying to set your god free.”

  Dane stared at them. “I ain’t going to burn shit,” he said levelly. “Take me to it.”

  And we can tell you what we know, Billy thought. That Grisamentum’s still alive.

  “There’s things need preparing,” Fitch said. “Protections. Dane, we can work together. We can be in this together.” He was eager now. How long had he been bending under this?

  “We ain’t short of offers,” Dane said. “Everyone wants to work with us.”

  “There’s things we need to know,” Saira said. “There’s got to be something about this kraken. That’s why we need you,” she said to Billy. “You’re the squid man. This is perfect. If we can work out what it is about this one, maybe we can stop it.”

  “Do you believe them?” Billy whispered. He heard the grind of glass. “I think I do, Dane.”

  THAT WAS HOW THE TWO OF THEM ENDED ALONE IN THE YARD, while the Londonmancers returned inside, to mum normality for a few more hours.

  “What if they …?” Dane said as they waited.

  Billy said, “What? Run? They can’t disappear their whole operation. Tell someone? The last thing they want is anyone to know what they did.”

  “What if they …?”

  “They need me,” Billy said.

  They wedged the door closed so frustrated smokers would find another place to go. “Wait,” Saira had told them. “When we’re done here, we’ll go.” They sky went dark over hours.

  “Soon,” said Dane. What impeccable timing, what a perfect jinx: as he said that, there was the glass noise, in Billy’s head. Knowledge came with it. He stood.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said.

  “What?” Dane stood. “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” Billy held his temples. What the fuck? “Jesus.” His headache was talking to him. “I just know they’re coming. I don’t think they know where we are. Not exactly. But they’re close and they aren’t friends.”

  Dane looked around the yard. Grind grind. “They’re getting closer,” Billy said.

  “They can’t find us here,” Dane said. “They can’t know the Londonmancers are in on this. We can’t lead them to God.” He grabbed a metal shard and ground into the wall the words BACK ASAP. Written in scratches among scratches.

  “Up,” he said. Made his hands a sling and pushed Billy back onto the roof. They scuttled under the arriving night, back down drainpipes and corporate fire escapes, to the main streets of the city, close to deserted now. This was the worst for them, being almost the only people in a street. Every lamplight was like a spotlight. Billy could hardly think through the noise of glass.

  “You hear a noise?” Dane said. “Like glass?”

  No one else was supposed to hear it! There was no time. There was another sound now. Running feet. CCTV cameras spun, twinkled their lights, looked every which way. From around a corner came men.

  Billy stared. They wore a raggedy new romance of costumes. He saw punk stylings, top hats, pantaloons and tube tops, powdered wigs. Their faces were quite ferocious. Billy raised his phaser.

  As they came the attackers’ bad knacks waxed, and the streetlamps they passed glowed too bright, changed colour, snapped one by one into blacklight, so the men’s white cuff-frills and reflective cat’s-eye flourishes glowed. Billy could see stitched on their clothes many-armed tags, some kind of profligate mutant swastikas. The men hissed like moon monkeys.

  Dane and Billy shot. There were so many flamboyant figures. Billy shot again. He waited for them to shoot back, but they held whips, blades. Darkness encroached, overtook the attackers and hid them. There were no lights in any window, no glimmer from any office. There was only one last orange streetlight still burning, a lighthouse now, at which Billy stared as the men came.

  Dane went back to back with him. “They want us alive,” Dane whispered.

  “Alive yes for discussion,” someone said. “Someone wants to pick your brains.” There were laughs at that. “Alive, but limbs and eyes are optional. Come on now and you can keep them.”

  “There’s always the workshop,” someone else said.

  “There is the workshop,” the first voice said. Obscured by the unnatural dark. Billy fired at random, but the shot illuminated only itself. “He does love his workshop. What will you be?”

  “Be ready,” Dane whispered.

  “For what?” the voice said. A whip kinked out of the shade and wrapped around Billy’s leg, sticking where it touched like a gecko foot, yanking him off his feet and out of the circle of last light. Down on the tarmac Billy opened his mouth to shout, but there was that glass grinding, much louder than he had ever heard it before. His head was full of communicative pain. Something came. It whirled.

  Bone arms windmilling. There was a clack of teeth, vivid empty eyes. Finger bones punctured meat like fangs. The thing arrived with incomprehensible motion, too fast. It punch-punched stiff-fingered, leaving blood, ripping the throats of two, three, five of the attackers, so they screamed and fell pissing blood.

  Billy kicked off the whip. He crawled back. The interceder rocked at the edge of the light.

  It was a skull on the top of a giant jar. A huge glass preserving bottle, of the type that Billy had for years been filling with preservative and animal dead. This one was nearly five feet high, full of flesh slough and clouding alcohol. On
its glass lid was a shabby human skull liberated, Billy absolutely knew, from one of the cupboards of remains in the Natural History Museum. It snapped its teeth. Where the rim met the lid the flaring glass served as shoulders, and the thing raised two fleshless taloned arms taken from bone boxes, humerus, ulna radius, clacking carpals and those sharpened phalanges.

  The angel of memory.

  The jar-angel rolled on its round base, oscillate-rocking forward. It punched again and killed again, and with a tiny incline of the skull-head opened its lid. A dandy man froze. He was motionless, then not there at all, and Billy saw more meat shreds in the jar. The bounty hunters scattered. There was a flat sound. Dane was down and motionless. Billy was too far, and the lasso or whatever it was that had Dane by the neck went taut, and Dane was dragged into the dwindling shadow the swastika-wearing men had brought with them.

  Billy fired twice, but he could see nothing of them, and Dane was barely visible anymore. Billy grabbed Dane’s gun. “Here!” he shouted to his glass rescuer, and he heard it wobble and roll toward him. The attackers hurled half-bricks and iron as they retreated.

  A lucky heavy piece took the cylinder full on. The jar-angel smashed. The guard of the museum’s memory burst. Its bones went dead among the chemical slick and glass shards.

  Billy raised his phaser in one hand, gun in the other. But the attackers did not come back. He ran in the direction Dane had been dragged, but the darkness retreated quicker than he moved, and when it was gone he was alone. The corpses were still there, the glass scintillas, the skull of what had saved him. Dane was gone.

  As always when a quiet holed the city, a dog barked to fill it. Billy walked through the ruined remains of his rescuer, left preservative footprints. He sat heavily and held his head by the dead, in the doorway of a sandwich bar.

  That was where he was when the Londonmancers found him—nothing so dramatic could take place so close to the London Stone without them knowing it. He could see them at the limits of his vision, but they would not come closer, would not breach their neutrality, which only a few of them could have known was already fucked.

  It must have been one of them who got word to Wati, who came into the toy Billy still carried, so the voice came from his pocket. “Billy, mate. Billy. What happened? We better go, Billy. We’ll get him back. But right now we better go.”

  PART FOUR

  LONDON-UPON-SEA

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  “SO THE HONEST BLOODY SHITTY BOLLOCKS IS THAT I’M WONDERING what the fuck it is we’re up to.”

  “Look,” said Baron sharply. “You know what, Constable? I’d be obliged if we could have a smidge less of that.”

  Collingswood was terribly startled. She covered with a swagger. She didn’t look at him but at her bracelet.

  “We could do with a few things, Collingswood,” Baron said. “We all know it.” He took a moment and spoke again more calmly, jabbing his finger at her. “Not least of which is some information. And we’re on that. Now … Calm down and get back to work. You’ve got your own sniffers sniffing, I presume? Well, see what they can smell.” He walked away, through a door that he closed loud enough on her to almost be a slam.

  In the grounds of the police training college at Hendon was the portacabin where the specialists of various FSRC cells went through their training. Pitifully nicknamed Hogwarts by most attendees, Cackle’s and Gont by a few who exchanged smug looks when others didn’t get it.

  Collingswood hadn’t. Didn’t care. Had been too busy listening to the semiretired witches, mavens and karcists. “You are police officers, or will be,” one of her instructors had said, “unless you bollocks this up proper.” He was ancient and small, lined like discarded skin scooped off cocoa. He had stroked his chin as if everything he said was well considered. He swaggered too, in a very different way than she did. She loved watching him.

  “Your job is to get villains. Right? You’ll have to know what to do. If you don’t know what to do you have to find out. If you can’t find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so. Do I make myself clear?” The little lux ex tenebris that he flashed between his fingertips as he spoke (blue, of course), was a nice touch.

  Through all the occult jurisprudence since then, chasing things down and banging them up, that sort of fuckity vigour was what she had always seen as being police. The lack of it in him was what had made Collingswood impatient with, if amused by, Billy Harrow.

  With a pitch inside, Collingswood considered the possibility that Baron was not sure what to do. She thought about that. She examined that as carefully as if it were something she had picked off the floor and was trying to identify. Officers walked around her where she stood—she was there long enough. Some of them didn’t even give her an odd look. Collingswood, you know.

  She stood near the dispatch room, so she was the first FSRC officer the messenger saw to give word to. It was she, then, who shoved open the door on Baron sitting folded-armed staring glumly at his computer, hung to the doorframe with one hand like a kid on a climbing frame, and said, “Ask and you receive, boss. Currently hospitalised. But it’s info.”

  IT WAS A SHITTY DAY, ALL SODDEN DRAB GREY AIR AND A SULKY wind as irritating as a child. Despite that Marge spent the morning outside, in the Thames Barrier Park. She trudged in drizzle through the waveform topiary, past miniature football pitches. That morning she had cried a long time about Leon, and it had felt like a last time. She had finished, but it was as if the sky had not.

  Marge suspected that she did not have a job anymore. Her boss was a friend, but her repeated nonanswering of his messages must have put him in an impossible position.

  It was not as if she felt confused. It was not as if she felt driven, precisely, overtaken, losing her mind, anything like that. It was just, she thought, that she could not concentrate on anything else. She was not hysterical. It was just that having discovered that London was not what it was supposed to be, having discovered that the world had been lying to her, she had to know more. And she still had to know what had happened to Leon.

  Not that he was alive. She knew that ridiculous sputtering message in bad light must be true.

  Which brought her here, to this little sculpted grassland by the river’s defences. There at the notional mouth of the river, by the industrial lowlands of Silvertown, the piers of the Thames Flood Barrier squatted in the water like huge alien hives, like silver-carapaced visitors. Between them chopped brown water, and below that water in the slime of the river’s bed ten gates hunkered, ready to rise.

  It was a long way round to the foot tunnel in Woolwich, but Marge had the whole day. She could see the barrier control building rise from the roofs of the south bank. She thumbed at her phone.

  Christ Jesus it was depressing, she thought, this part of the city. She took the route by City Airport and under the river, huddling into her coat. She did not check the details she had printed out: she knew them by now. The information had been hard to winkle out of her online informants but not that hard. It had taken wheedling and guile but not quite as bloody much as it should have done if you asked her. As she’d been able to tell, yes, these were “secret” bulletin boards, but plenty of their members were just bursting with pride about what they knew. It was all I’ve said too much, and You did not hear this from me.

  From who, you fucking prick? Marge had thought at that particular disavowal. All I know is your screen name, which is blessedladee777 if you fucking please, so please just get on with it.

  Pre-armed by the cult-collector with the terms “floodbrother,” and the location of “the barrier,” it had taken a couple of days, but no more, to uncover a little bit more information. This time it was a place of work and an affiliation, the outlines of a system of belief.

  Marge finished her cigarette. She shook her head and jogged on the spot for a bit, then came rushing into the Thames Barrier Visitors’ Centre. The woman behind the reception desk stared at her in alarm. “You have to help me,” Marge said
. She made herself gabble. “No, listen. Someone here calls themself floodbrother, yeah online. Listen, you have to get them a message.”

  “I, I, what, what’s their name?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not crazy. I swear. Please, this is a matter of life and death. I mean it, literally. There must be a way of getting a message to everyone who works here. I’m not talking just about the Visitors’ Centre, I’m talking about the engineering. Listen to me, I’m begging you, I’m begging you.” She grabbed the woman’s hand. “Tell whoever here’s nickname’s floodbrother, just say that, that there’s a message from Tyno Helig. He’ll understand. Believe me. Tyno Helig, got it?” She scribbled the name on a scrap. “I’ll be waiting. I’ll be in Maryon Park. Please.”

  Marge stared into the woman’s eye and tried for some insinuatory sisterly thing. She wasn’t sure how well it went. She ran out and away, until she had turned a corner, at which point she slowed and wandered calmly along Warspite Road, past the roundabout to the park.

  The weather was too different and too bad to jog much reminiscence, but she looked around until she was pretty sure she had found a spot recognizable from the film Blow-Up. She sat as close to it as she could. She watched everyone who came in. She fingered the little flick-knife she had bought, for whatever useless good it would be. She was banking rather on daylight and passersby. Marge wondered whether she would know if her quarry entered the park.

  In the event, when, after almost an hour, her call was answered, there was no question at all. It was not one person but three. All men, they strode urgently along the little paths, looking in all directions. They were big, athletic guys. They wore identical engineers’ uniforms. The oldest, at the front, was gesturing to his two companions to fan out. Marge stood: she would feel safer facing all three of them than one. They saw her immediately. She closed her hand around her knife.