Kraken

by China Miéville

FUCK YOU.

  “Where’s the rest of you?” Billy said.

  FUCK U.

  Billy dripped in more bleach and the ink rolled. “We’re not going to pour you down the sink. You don’t get to dissipate painlessly with rats and turds.” He held the pipette over the glass. “I will piss in you and then bleach you so you dissolve. Where is the rest of you?”

  He wrote. The penmanship was ragged. FUCKERS.

  “Alright,” said Dane. “Bleach that murdering bastard.”

  WAIT. Billy scratched. INK FACTRY. CLOSED.

  Billy looked at Saira. Dane whispered to the toy he carried, though Wati was not in it. “Why take all the books?” He dipped more bleach again.

  RESERCH.

  “How can he read them all?” said Dane. “Research? Why does he care anyway? What in the name of God has all this been about?”

  It was Grisamentum’s plan that started the countdown to the fire to come. Kicked everything into motion. Only by the superstition of Adler, one of the few who knew his boss still lived in that intermediate ashy way, had the Londonmancers found out about the scheme. Grisamentum’s intended theft had made them intervene, against their own oaths, because they could not have that burning.

  “Why,” whispered Billy, “do you want to burn it?”

  DONT CRAZY WHY?

  “So what is it?” Billy said.

  “What’s he doing?” Fitch said. “Why did he even want the kraken?”

  CANT U GUESS?

  The ink wrote that, forcing the needle unexpectedly to the paper and scribbling with Billy’s hand. Billy redipped.

  MAGIC.

  ONLY I CAN BE.

  “Okay,” said Billy after seconds of silence. “Does anyone understand this?”

  “Why’s he saying this?” Dane said. “You’re not even bleaching him.”

  “He’s crowing,” said Paul, suddenly. Billy nodded.

  “Bleach the motherfucker,” said Dane. “Just on principle.” Billy dipped the bleach-tipped needle and the ink swilled to get away.

  NO NO BE ITS MAGC ONLY I CAN. NO 1 ELS IN LONDONN CN BE.

  “He’s losing it,” Saira said.

  “Ink,” Billy said.

  • • •

  THEY STARED AT HIM.

  “That’s what he means,” Billy said. “That’s what no one else in London can be. The kraken’s ink. Anyone else might be able to use it, but Grisamentum can be it.”

  Such a magic beast. Alien hunter god in its squiddity. Englassed. Knowing how this stuff worked, Billy thought. It had the biggest eyes—so all-seeing. Bastard of myth and science, specimen-magic. And what other entity, possessing those characteristics, being that thing, had the means to write it all down?

  “Jesus,” Billy said. “This has always been about writing. What do you mean?” he said to the ink. “How does it work?”

  CAN B IT CAN WILL BE INNNK

  It was too gone, too bleached and limited, that little drip of Grisamentum, to answer. Alright. Analogies, metaphors, persuasion—this, Billy knew, was how London did it. He remembered watching Vardy gnosis up, from will, and Billy decluttered his mind and tried to mimic him.

  So.

  With script, a new kind of memory, grimoires and accounts. Traditions could be created, lies made more tenacious. History written down sped up, travelled at the speed of ink. And all the tedious antique centuries before we were ready, the pigment was stored for us in the cephalopod containers—motile ink, ink we caught and ate and let run down and stain our chins.

  Oh, what, he thought, it was camouflage? Please. Architeuthis lives in the aphotic zone: what purpose would the spray of dark sepia serve in a world without light? It was there for other reasons. We just would not get the hint, not for millennia. We didn’t invent ink: ink was waiting for us, aeons before writing. In the sacs of the deepwater god.

  “What could you do with kraken ink?” Dane said. Not scornful—breathless.

  “What can you be with it?” Billy corrected.

  The very writing on the wall. The logbook, the instructions by which the world worked. Commandments.

  “But it’s dead,” Billy said.

  “Come on, look at Byrne, he’s worked with thanatechs before,” Dane said. “All he needs is to wake its body up, just a little bit. For a little bit of ink. All he has to do is milk it.”

  It would not take so much to bring that preserved kraken an interzone closer to life. Thanks to Billy and his colleagues there was no corruption, after all, no rot to cajole backward, which was always the hardest battle for necrosmiths. A threshold-life would be enough to stimulate the ink sacs.

  “But why would he burn it?” Saira said. “Why the burning?”

  “His plan sets it in motion,” said Fitch at last. “That’s all we know.”

  “Maybe it’s to do with his crew,” Billy said. “It must be him has Cole’s daughter. Maybe it’s out of his control. What are you doing with the girl?” He said the last sentence loudly to the ink spot. “What are you doing with Cole’s daughter?” He shook it to wake it.

  WAT?? ALK? NO GIRLL INK

  “Bleach it away,” said Saira. Billy wrote an alarming jagged line, and the words IS TATOO IS U? An arrow. Pointing at Paul. Paul stood.

  “Hey,” said Billy. “Why do you have the girl?” He wrote in tiny print again. TA2 NO CATCH YOU YES. HELO

  “That’s enough,” Billy said. A couple more meaningless scrawls, the words came again, and this time fast.

  WHAT WILL THEY DO 2 U?

  “What? Do what?” Billy wrote, looking away. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Wait wait,” shouted Fitch, and Billy pulled the nib up and looked at what he had written.

  THEY HAVE U & TA2. WONT LET YOU LIV I PRTECT U QIK

  “What …?” “Wait …” “Is that…?” Everyone was sounding it out.

  They have you. Paul was standing. And Tattoo. Dane was beside him. They won’t let you live.

  Billy stared at Saira and Fitch. I protect you, Grisamentum was telling Paul. Quick.

  “Hold on, now,” Fitch said.

  “What?” said Billy.

  “Wait,” Dane said. “He’s messing with you.” He looked at Fitch. Paul moved faster than Billy would have thought he could. Paul snatched the container of ink and the papers on which Grisamentum had written from Billy’s hand. Grabbed scissors from a table. He backed to the lorry door.

  Billy looked at Fitch’s face, and did not try hard to stop Paul.

  “Look,” Fitch said. “See? It’s stirring between us all.”

  “Alright,” said Dane. He stood between Paul and the Londonmancers. “Let’s calm down …”

  Billy lowered the needle and wrote with the last of what was on the needle. “Don’t,” said Fitch, but Billy ignored him and read out loud.

  “‘Why would they let you live?’”

  Billy caught Dane’s eye. A recognition sparked between them that the tiny fuggy-minded drop of Grisamentum had a point.

  BILLY SWUNG HIS PHASER AT THE LONDONMANCERS. THEY DID NOT know it was empty, or almost. He doubted it would fire. “Look,” said Saira. She stood in a pugilist’s pose, but glanced at Fitch. “This is bullshit.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Fitch said. He stammered, “No one intends any, no one has any … why would we …?”

  “You …” whispered Paul. “He’s right.” He moved back against the door.

  “Wait,” shouted Fitch, but even as his last able-bodied Londonmancers stepped forward, Dane came to meet them.

  “Back,” said Billy, standing by Dane, now. Protecting Paul. “What the hell are you planning?” he said.

  The lorry reached a stop sign, or a red light, or a hazard, or just stopped, and Paul did not hesitate. He opened the back so there was a glow of headlights in from behind them lurching side to side, as perhaps some glimpse of kraken was granted a startled motorist. Too fast to be stopped, Paul was down, gone, out of the lorry, ink and papers in his hand, slamming the door closed. />
  “Shit!” said Dane. He fumbled, but the lorry, its driver unaware, was speeding up. When Dane at last got the door open again, it had moved some way off and Paul was gone.

  “We have to find him,” Billy said. “We have to …” To bring him back to the Londonmancers, to Fitch, who had not made a full denial of the ink’s allegation. Billy hesitated. Dane had taken a right old time opening that door.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  “YOU LET HIM GO,” FITCH SAID. “WE HAD THE TATTOO AND YOU LET him go.”

  “Do not give me this shit,” Billy said. “You shut your face. Paul is not the Tattoo.”

  “We weren’t going to let you kill him, Fitch,” Dane said.

  “We weren’t going to kill him.”

  “We saw you,” Billy said. “Couldn’t even meet his eye. Don’t come the innocent, we know what you did to Adler.”

  “Anyone could get hold of Paul and then we’re all in trouble,” Fitch said. “I have no intention of hurting him, but I make no apology for keeping all options open.”

  “All options open?” Billy more or less screamed.

  “What?” Saira said to Fitch.

  “We had one of the two kings of London right here,” Fitch said. He trembled. “Responsible for God knows how much. We had to be ready to secure the situation. What could we do?”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Saira said. “We’re not murderers.”

  “Such drama.” Fitch tried to look unrepentant.

  “You weren’t going to let him go,” said Billy. “Don’t you think he’d had enough of being someone else’s property?”

  “There was a debate to be had,” Fitch said.

  “I imagine,” Billy said, “Paul would have disagreed strongly with those who proposed the motion that his incarceration or death were the least bad option. I bet he’d have strongly seconded those who leaned toward not that.”

  “Now would you all listen?” Fitch said. “Paul knows where we are.”

  “What are you talking about?” Billy said. He gestured beyond the trailer. “I don’t know where we are and I’m there.”

  “He knows how we travel; he’s seen the vehicle. If the Tattoo gets the better of him again, and it did it before, then it’ll gather its strength and forces and then we are in serious trouble. We have to assume we’re compromised.”

  IT COULD HAVE GONE NIGHT TO NIGHT, SKIPPING DAY ALTOGETHER, was how long it seemed to have been dark. Paul did not mind. He liked it that way. He manoeuvred away from sounds, breathed deep and tracked whatever London silence he could find. He was panicked, exhilarated. It was the first time for many years that he had walked without chaperone and threat, that he decided which way he was going.

  So which way was he going? He kept running for a long time. There were many people running that night, he learnt. He glimpsed them at junctions, at roundabouts, escaping whatever sort of catastrophes chased them.

  Despite years of effort to numb himself from the acts ordered and committed by the ink on his back (memories of murders committed behind him, the screams of those close by he did not see die), Paul had picked up various criminal tips. How could he not? He knew that most escapees were recaptured because they underestimated how far they needed to get away before they slowed, so he just kept running.

  He held his hand closing the ink’s container. He felt the liquid bite his thumb when it splashed it. It was too weak for anything else. He knew he would be sought not only by the Londonmancers, but by the Tattoo’s old employees, missing their boss. He knew he would be found.

  Goss and Subby would be hunting. Buy them and you bought them. They would be raging to get back into the service of the illustration he wore.

  Paul would be crippled, this time. He knew he would be blinded, boxed without limbs, forced to swallow vitamined gruel without the tongue that would not be left him.

  He slowed at very last. He did not feel tired. He looked carefully around him.

  “Is it driving you crazy?” he whispered, so only his own skin could hear. “Not knowing what’s going on?” Blind and mute. “You must be able to feel I’m running.”

  He heard breaking glass. He felt knacked percussions that the news would probably nervously report as Molotov cocktails. Paul vaulted iron railings into a scrub-filled corner between streets, a green oversight too small to be a park. Huddled runaway animal out of sight of the estates, he lay in shrubbery and thought.

  The Tattoo stayed quiet. At last Paul stood. It really did: the Tattoo was still. He put the tiny container he had grabbed in front of him. He stared at it as if he might throw in his lot with this adversary of his tormenting skin, as if he might collaborate with Grisamentum. He watched the ink watch him.

  He whispered to it. “Thanks for the offer,” he said. “Thanks. For, you know. Warning me. And saying that you’d take care of me. Thanks. Do you think I’m going to let you run me instead?”

  He stood. He unzipped his fly and urinated messily into the tiny pot, dissipating and spattering the tiny self of the ash king of London, pissing him away. “Fuck you,” he whispered. “Fuck you too. Fuck you as much as him.”

  When he was done there was only his urine in the bottle. He took out the paper on which Billy’s hand had let Grisamentum write himself. Helpful wind moved the last clinging leaves so a streetlamp could shine on it directly. Paul looked through every piece he had. He put together bits of information about Billy from these remnants from Billy’s bag. Patchwork detectiving. He worked things out.

  One sheet he kept hold of. He sat, his back to the railings, and read and reread it many times. He folded it and put it to his head and thought and thought.

  At last, treading the streets again in his shabby Converse he found a phone box. He went through a thicket of front organisations reversing charges and taking their cuts, even then, that night, before connecting to the number on the paper. It was voice mail.

  “I have the leaflet you put out here,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Is that Marge? I have your leaflet. I know where Billy is. Do you want to meet? I know it’s all going weird tonight, but it’s now or it’s not going to happen. I’ll wait here. Here’s the number. Call me when you get this.” He gave it. “I need you to pick me up, and I need you to come now. I’ll tell you everything.”

  Finally, but hesitantly, the Tattoo twitched. The movement was, by chance or not, in time with a horrible twitch in history. Everyone felt that. A heating up, a smoulder and disappearance. History was scorching.

  “DID YOU FEEL THAT?” FITCH SAID.

  If Paul surrendered to what he wore and the Tattoo regrouped and came back for them, they were done. The Londonmancers agreed. Or perhaps Paul might even collaborate with Grisamentum, the little drips he carried, take them back to the rest of the liquid criminal, in which case it was all finished, too.

  “What kind of team-up would that be?” Billy said.

  No one heard him over the overlapping arguments. Fitch shouting at Dane and Billy for letting Paul go, then lapsing into muttering. Dane growling back in a truly scary way, then giving up suddenly and sticking his head out of the trapdoor or window and whispering to Wati, who if he woke in the doll said nothing anyone else could hear. Londonmancers shouting at Fitch, despite who he was, at the plan they could still hardly believe he might have countenanced. Saira saying nothing.

  “There’s just too many dangers,” Fitch said. “He’s not stable. The Tattoo’s back out there, now. First thing it can, it’s going to be making for Goss and Subby. You understand? Then they’ll come for us … and it’s not just us who’ll die.”

  They could not let it happen. They had to keep the kraken safe from the burning approach.

  “What did we say in front of him?” someone said.

  “I don’t know,” Fitch said. “We have to take the kraken somewhere safe.”

  “Where do you fucking propose?” Dane said. “It’s starting.”

  “Don’t you understand?” Saira said. “We could on
ly keep this safe so long as no one knew it was us, and no one knew where we were. Well, the worst two people in the world know, now.”

  Chapter Seventy

  PAUL AND MARGINALIA SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER. WHERE THE fuck to begin?

  She would not risk answering any of her phones anymore, but she checked her messages, and she had arrived after many hours in her cheap car. She had sneaked back to her flat for it and come for him. Paul had watched it arrive, pulling slowly like some sea-carriage through sunken streets. It was quiet in the London corner he had found.

  She had parked metres away from him under a different lamp. She had waited and waited and when he did not run for her or do anything other than wait, too, she had beckoned. Marge wore headphones. Paul could hear a tiny tinny yattering voice from them, but she seemed to be able to hear him reasonably over it. “Drive,” he had said. “I’ll keep you out of sight.”

  They had driven around and around the night. She followed his directions. He’d listened to his ink parasite; he knew how to have her drive a sigil. “Here,” he said. “Turn.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s places it’s hard to find us.”

  He directed her a long way through London, sticking to rear alleys, intricate convolutes. “Where was it?” he muttered, nodding at memories. At last to an underground carpark at the entrance to some swanky flats. Between pillars in the dark they stared at each other.

  Paul looked at her. Marge looked at the ruin-faced man. He was agitated. He was a man, she thought, with plans.

  “Where are we?”

  “Hoxton.”

  “I don’t even know what to ask you …” she said. “I don’t know what to—”

  “Me too.”

  “Who are you? What’s your story?”

  “I got away.”

  Silence. Marge kept her grip on the stun-gun Taser thing she had got hold of. You could get anything. He looked at it.

  “Why you talking to me?” she said. “Where are you in all this?”

  “I know a friend of yours, I think …”

  “Leon?” The hope was ebbing from her voice before the end of the word. “Not Leon …”