Kraken

by China Miéville

  They could not think for his bilious spiel. Dane held Paul and they removed his jacket. From his back, expressions passing in ink tides, bad-magic animation, the Tattoo snarled. It sneered. It looked side to side at Dane and Billy.

  “Fucking clowns,” it said. It puckered its lips and made spit noises. No spit came out of the black-ink pretend hole of its mouth, only that sound of disgust. “You think this is it? You think Goss can’t taste where I’ve been? Look at this cunt’s feet.” They were a little bloody. The Tattoo began to laugh.

  “Goss isn’t here,” Billy said.

  “Oh, don’t you worry, Goss and Subby’ll be back. Where’s your bastard commie friend?” They said nothing. “His plan’s going up in piss and so are you, soon as they’re back. You’re all going to die.”

  “Shut up,” said Dane. He kneeled by the vivid black-outlined features. “What do you want the kraken for? What’s your plan?”

  “You worthless little snail-worshipping turd, Parnell. You’re so fucking bad at that you got kicked out of your church.”

  “What do you know about Cole?”

  “I won’t insult your intelligence with if you let me go now I’ll let you live, because I totally won’t.”

  “I can hurt you,” Dane said.

  “No, you can hurt Paul.”

  That shut them up. Billy and Dane looked at each other. They looked at Paul’s skin.

  “Shit,” whispered Billy.

  “Oy Paul,” the Tattoo shouted. “When we’re out of here I’m going to have my boys fucking sand your feet off. Hear me, boy? You keep your mouth shut if you want any teeth, if you want a tongue, if you want lips or a fucking jaw.”

  They wound parcel tape around Paul’s midriff. He stayed still to let them. The Tattoo spat spitlessly and cursed them. He tried to chew on Paul, but it was only the motion of ink under the skin. Paul sat patient as a fussed-over king. Billy silenced the Tattoo, and taped also over its eyes, that glared at him until all obscured. Paul had other tattoos. Band names, symbols. They all behaved—motionless but for his muscles.

  “I’m sorry,” Billy said to Paul. “You’ve got a bit of a hairy chest—we should’ve shaved you first. That’ll hurt to get off.” Beneath the tape, the mmm-mmm mutterings continued awhile.

  That was how they brought him, with them, to the god.

  “Why would you bring him here?” Saira said.

  The kraken in its tank in the truck watched them deadly. Londonmancers surrounded them. There were more of them than previously—the insider cabal had spread, as secrets like this will not behave. They left behind “to hold the fort” the supposed mainstream of their antique tribe, now a truncated and confused remnant. Every one of the Londonmancers in the lorry was staring aghast at their unwanted captive. Billy and Dane had tracked them, worked out their route with the tiny satnav and gone ahead to intercept them. It had been a difficult journey, fearful that they were chased at every step by some or other power in the city’s war.

  The Londonmancers would not relax the charms they had to keep Wati from the lorry. Billy was enraged on his behalf, but the strike spirit had been agitated, in any case, had needed to circulate, to fight against another last strike crisis. “Just give me a doll or something on the roof,” he said. “Just something.”

  “We need to find Grisamentum,” Billy had said. “He’s got to be—”

  And Wati had said, “I’ll do what I can, Billy. I’ll do what I can. There’s things I have to …”

  Where could Grisamentum be? Much of the city was still in denial about the fact that he was anywhere at all other than heaven or hell, but there was no way the monsterherds and Byrne’s strange intercession, that terrible knacked gang fight, could be finessed out of facticity. London knew who was back. It just didn’t know where, why or how, and no amount of cajoling of even the most eagerly treacherous or venal set of the city’s streets, grifters or apocalypse chancers would reveal anything.

  “What would you rather we’d done?” Dane said to Saira.

  “We don’t have much time,” Billy said.

  “It’s coming,” Fitch said. “It’s suddenly closer. Much more certain. Something happened to make it … more near.”

  “We’ve got the Tattoo,” Billy said. “Do you not get that?”

  “We needed to get this poor sod off the streets as quick as,” Dane said. Paul sat still, looked at them all. He stared at the kraken in its stinking liquid, through its glass.

  “Don’t show him that,” Paul whispered. They looked at him. He wiggled his shoulders to indicate who he meant.

  “No one’s going to show him anything,” Billy said carefully. “Promise.”

  “We’ve interrupted him,” Dane muttered to Saira and Fitch. “We can find out what his plans are.”

  “His plans?” said Saira.

  “He’s been trying to get hold of the kraken,” Billy said. He tapped Paul gently on the back.

  “Oh, but it’s … look,” Saira said. “Whatever it is … it’s already happening,” she said. She actually mopped her forehead with whatever expensive scarf it was she was wearing. “The burning’s started.” In the last two days, two smallholdings had gone. Been burned, acts of strange arson. Self-cancelling. The memories of the destroyed buildings went almost, not quite but almost, as totally as the buildings themselves.

  One had been part of the Tattoo’s empire, a kebab shop in Balham that doubled as a lucrative source of drug money, distilling down the third eyes extracted from and sold by the desperate. The other, a medium-scale jeweller in Bloomsbury, had historically had an association with Grisamentum. Both had gone, and according to most attempted recall, Saira said, there had never been either such place.

  “You remember them, Dane?” Saira said.

  “No.”

  “Yeah.” She crossed her arms. “You don’t.” The lorry lurched and she adjusted while Fitch staggered, his beard and hair wild. “You and everyone else.”

  “So how do you know there was ever anything there?” Billy said. She stared at him.

  “Hello,” she said. “Perhaps we haven’t met. Hi. My name’s Saira Mukhopadhyay, I’m a Londonmancer. London’s my job.”

  “You remember them?” Billy said.

  “I don’t, but the city does. A bit. It knows something’s up. The burn’s not perfect. The … skin’s puckered, sort of. I remember remembering one of them. But they were never here. We’ve checked records. Never there. There was a fire-engine farting around the day Grisamentum’s must have gone up. The firemen were just driving around, didn’t know why they were supposed to be there.”

  “It’s Cole’s thing, it’s got to be,” Dane said slowly. “Who is it getting him to … Where’s that paper? The one that was in the book?” Billy gave it. “Here. ‘Katachronophlogiston.’ Look.”

  “Burning stuff right out of time,” Billy said. “Yeah. So, who and why?”

  “He might know,” Saira said. “He knows more than us.” She stared at Paul. Indicated his back. A long, unhappy pause. “He might know stuff about Cole. Might not even know he does.” They waited, they hesitated. They tried to think of interrogator’s tricks.

  Paul spoke. “Don’t,” he said. “He won’t … I can tell you.” He was so quiet they thought they had misheard, until he said it again. “I can tell you. Why he wants it. What he wants it for. I can tell you everything.”

  “IT WAS A TATTOOIST IN BRIXTON,” HE SAID. “I CAME IN TO HAVE A big, you know, Celtic cross on my back, but not only black and white—I wanted greens and stuff too, you know, and it was going to take hours. I always rather do that in one go—I can’t get my head around loads of sessions, you know, it’s all or nothing for me; it was always that way.” No one interrupted him. Someone brought him a drink that he drank without looking anywhere other than the nowhere at which he was staring.

  “I knew it was going to hurt, but I’d got drunk even though you ain’t supposed to. I been to that tattooist before. We’d talked, so he knew a b
it about me. About the people I knew, about what I did, that sort of thing, you know? I think he was saying what he’d been told, because I think he was like searching for candidates.

  “He asked if I minded him having this other bloke there, who was like another tattooist, he said, and they were comparing designs, and I said no, I didn’t care. He wasn’t much like a tattooist, I thought. I don’t know what I meant. I was too drunk, though, to care.

  “He watched while the guy did me, and he was like giving him advice. He kept going into a back room. I think we know what was in there? Who I mean I should say.” He gave a horrible sad little pretend laugh. This was not the story they had hoped for, but who could interrupt him?

  “They kept showing me my back in the mirror. The tattooist was giggling every time he did, but the other bloke wasn’t—he was all quiet about it. They must’ve done something to the mirror. Because when I looked in it, it was a cross. It looked fine. I don’t know how they did that.

  “The second day I unwrap the bandages to show a friend, and she’s like, “I thought you was going to get a cross.” I thought she meant it was too finickety. I didn’t even look at it. It was a little while after that, when the scabs came off, that it woke up.”

  It had been Grisamentum overseeing the design. And there in that back room, imprisoned and diminished over the hours, the man who then became the Tattoo. What an arcane gang hit. Not a murder—these men were too baroquely cruel for that—but a banishing, an imprisonment. Perhaps it had been blood colouring the ink. Certainly some essence, call it soul, drained from the man and left a man-shaped meat husk behind.

  PAUL HAD WOKEN TO THE MUTTERINGS FROM HIS SKIN. THERE WAS no one in his bed but him. The voice was muffled.

  “What did they do? What did they do?” That was what Paul first heard. “What did those fuckers do to me?”

  When at very last he unwound his bandages the glam had faded and Paul saw the real tattoo. Two shocks in immediate succession: that what he wore was a face; and much worse—much much worse, much greater, quite shattering—that it was moving.

  The face was shocked too. It took minutes for it to understand what had happened to it. It terrorised Paul. It began to tell him what to do.

  He had not eaten. “I need you healthy,” said the tattoo on his back. “Eat, eat, eat,” until Paul ate. It had him test his strength. It appraised him like a trainer. He told it to leave him alone, that it did not exist. Of course he went to a doctor and demanded to know how it might be removed. The Tattoo stayed motionless, so the doctor assumed Paul was merely an agitated drunk who had taken against his hideous design. There would be a very long waiting list, she told him. For cosmetics.

  Paul attempted home-grown removals with sandpaper, but each time he, screaming, failed, the Tattoo screaming with him. It had him return to the tattooist’s shop, but the proprietor was long gone.

  He covered it, but such muffling would never last. When the gags fell the Tattoo would shout when he was out in the street, curse him and mock him. It shouted filthy slurs, swear words and racist names, trying, with success sometimes, to have Paul beaten up. “Hush now,” it would whisper to him afterward. “Hush. Just do what I say, never need happen again.”

  It sent him to mages’ speakeasies. It made him connections, whispering to him the code words necessary to get in, had him sotto voce describe the clientele, or turn and let the Tattoo glance through his thin shirt, so the Tattoo would know who was where and direct Paul to those he knew.

  “Borch,” it would say, when Paul sat down backward at the tables across from startled operators. “Ken.” “Daria.” “Goss.” “It’s me. Look. It’s me.”

  Grisamentum’s intent must have been to exile him into that mobile skin prison where he would be powerless, carried by a host who hated him, tormented with bodilessness until his weak bearer died. But the Tattoo sent Paul to find his associates. He drew them back into his orbit. He sent Paul to secret stashes of money, used them to buy the services of magicians and underworld knowers-how. The Tattoo had only his voice and mind, but it was enough to grow his empire again.

  Among the first jobs he carried out while on Paul’s body was to track down and execute the tattooist who had trapped him. Paul did not see it—he had his back to the butchery, of course—but he could hear it. It was not quick nor quiet. He shook as blood spattered the back of his legs, held in place by the first of his followers the Tattoo had had made into fistmen.

  The Tattoo wanted to ignore Paul. It would let him eat what he wanted, read, watch DVDs with headphones on while the Tattoo did business. Paul might have been granted evenings out, trips to the cinema, sex. But after his first escape attempt the relationship hardened. After his second, the Tattoo had warned that one more would result in his legs being amputated, with anaesthetic an open question.

  The Tattoo was plotting his revenge. But as he auditioned assassins, he heard the stories: Grisamentum had been dying anyway.

  “WHY DOES THE TATTOO WANT THE KRAKEN?” FITCH SAID. PAUL stared at the bottled god.

  “He doesn’t know,” he said. “He just clocked that someone else wanted it. So he wants it first.” Paul shrugged. “That’s all. That’s his plan. ‘Don’t let anyone else get it.’ He might as well burn it …” Paul did not acknowledge the looks that occasioned. “I know who you are,” he said to Billy and Dane. “I heard everything he was saying.”

  “Look,” said Billy to Fitch. “We’re here. We’ve got it. We’re protecting it. We’re not going to let it burn, and that’s what kicks it off. Now we’ve got one of the big players. The whole … burning should be getting a lot less probable, right?” The Londonmancers had been future-hunting frantically. Fitch grinding pavements at every snatched stop; rushed ambulomantic walks to see what the twists of city nudge-nudged; ailuromancy over light-footed cats; the readings of dust and chance London objects. “This must’ve all helped, right?”

  “No,” said Fitch. He opened and closed his mouth and tried again. “It closes harder than ever. Soon. I don’t know how, but we’ve achieved nothing.”

  No redemption, no remission, no reversion. Still just that oncoming.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  COLE WORKED LATE. THE DEBRIS FROM THE FIGHT HAD BEEN cleared. He shook his head and sifted through the papers that remained on the desk, listing what was there and working out what must therefore have been taken. He ignored a knock, but his door opened. A man peered in.

  “Knock knock?” he said. “Professor Cole?”

  “Who are you?” The man shut the door behind him.

  “My name is Vardy, Professor. Professor Vardy, in fact.” He smiled, not very well. “I work with the police.” Cole rubbed his eyes.

  “Look, Mister, Professor, Doctor, whatever, Vardy, I’ve already …” He looked through his fingers and paused. “The police? I’ve had two visits from the police, and I’ve told them everything. It was a stupid prank, it’s all finished. Which police do you work with?”

  “You’re wondering whether I’m part of the conventional crime squad come to do a bit more dusting, or whether I’m with the—what do my colleagues call us? special unit?—and whether I know about all your other less conventional interests. Did they buy it? The regulars? That this was just a ‘prank’? Two men too old to be students breaking in and beating you up?”

  “They believed what I told them,” Cole said.

  “I’m sure they did. They’ve every reason not to want to get too involved. What with everything else going on. The sky, the city … Well, you can feel it all.”

  Cole shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference.”

  “That’s an odd thing to say.”

  “Look …” said Cole.

  “Professor Cole, listen. I know you were part of Grisamentum’s team.”

  “Just because I did some work for him …”

  “Please. Every knacker in London did some work for him at some point or other. And it was you behind that spectacular send-off. The funeral.
Great fire. The cremation.” Cole watched him. “You must know you’re not talking to a moron. Word’s getting out anyway. Did you hear about the rumble last night? Everyone’s saying Grisamentum was there. It’s not just me who knows he never died.”

  “I swear to you,” Cole said, “I’m not in touch with him. I don’t know what he’s doing, and whatever his plans are, I’ve got nothing to do with them.”

  “Professor Cole, you’re probably one of the few people who knows that things have been burning and disappearing, and might even have a chance of explaining how.”

  “That’s way beyond me! The principle’s the same as some of the stuff I’ve done, but that’s out of my league.”

  “Oh, I do know that.”

  “You know?”

  “It’s my job to have a pretty clear sense of what you can do and what you can’t do. So I know you couldn’t have burnt all that stuff out of time. But I also know that you did have something to do with it. You’ve been delivering information and charges, haven’t you? According to demands?”

  “… I …”

  “And no, I don’t think you’re in cahoots with Grisamentum. And I know why you’re doing this. Family. Professor, I know your daughter’s disappeared.” Cole’s face collapsed. Agony, relief, agony.

  “Oh, God …”

  “I know your wife’s no longer with us,” Cole said. “From what I gather—she’s at a C of E school, isn’t she?—your daughter probably takes more after you than her mother. But she’s mixed-race and she’ll have certain abilities. Combine that with whatever you’ve been handing over, in the right hands …”

  “You think she’s being used? You think they’re making her do this stuff?”

  “Could be. But if so, well. We can use right back. We can use you to track down whoever’s doing this. I’m asking you to work with me. To trust me.”

  HE MUST BE A PIG IN SHIT RIGHT NOW, GRISAMENTUM, BILLY thought. His worst enemy down, captive. Without their Svengali, enforcers like the Tattoo’s fistmen would fall back unhappily on a loose network of contacts and half-trusted lieutenants, trying to decide what to do. Subby and Goss were the most important of these, and they were many things—including back from wherever they’d been, apparently—but not leaders.