“I don’t know who that is,” he said gently.
“Billy?”
“Billy. He’s with the Londonmancers. He’s with the squid.”
“Did he send you?”
“Not exactly. It’s complicated.” He spoke as if unpracticed at it.
“Tell me.”
“Let’s both.”
Over hours she gave him what small details she had, descriptions of her altercations with Goss and Subby, which made him wince and nod. He said he would tell her his story, and said that he was doing so, but what came out was a soup of specifics, names, images that made little sense. She listened, though she never removed her earphones, and did not learn anything she could make sense of. At the end of it, she understood only that Billy was way deep in something, and that the sense of something ending was not a paranoia of hers.
“Why did you find me?”
“I think we can help each other,” Paul said. “See, I want to get a message back to the Londonmancers, and to Dane and Billy, but I’ve got good reason not to think they’ll play straight. Not with me. Dane and Billy I don’t know. I don’t know about them. But I need them to listen to me too because I got plans. When I saw your paper, I thought, Oh, she knows Billy. I remembered I heard about you. He’ll play straight with her, I thought.”
“You want me to be a go-between?”
“Yeah. I got access to … It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve got access to some … powers that they want. But I need protection. From them. And other stuff too. I can make them a deal. But they might think they’ve got reason not to trust me. I’ve not been myself. I’m being chased.”
“You’re the one that knows where they are, I don’t have any idea, I told you, they haven’t contacted me, even though they’ve got my number …”
“Billy was trying to protect you. Don’t think too hard of him. But you can still get a message to him. Like I say he’ll trust you.” He met her eye, looked around.
“How? Got a number?”
“Hardly. I mean through the city. The Londonmancers’ll get that.”
“… I got a message through the city myself, once.” He looked closely at her when she said that. “From Billy.”
“Is it?” he said quietly. “Did you? Noise? Light? Brick Braille?”
“Light.” He smiled quickly and rather beautifully at that.
“Light? Did he? Yeah. Perfect, then, light.” He stepped out of the car and Marge followed. “Already a little connection then, between you. Makes this easier.” He peered toward the bins, toward the shadows, then pointed—“Look”—at a fluttering bulb in the concrete roof, one among several, but one about to fail. “Give you an idea the way it comes on and off?”
“Oh,” Marge said. She almost whispered. “That’s how this all started.”
He smiled tightly again. “Don’t need to know where Billy is. By now, I got no idea. But the Londonmancers always listen to it. The city’ll pass a message to them. Yeah, I know Morse Code. I learned all kinds of things these past few years. All kinds of useful things. Do you trust me?” He stood in full view, put his arms a tiny bit out, to show her he held nothing. “I can do him a deal. We can help each other. And he wants to see you. You can ask him to come to you.”
• • •
BILLY, SHE WROTE, IT’S MARGE MEET ME.
“He’ll think it’s a trap,” she said. Paul shook his head.
“Maybe. He might have a pootle around to check if it’s you.” A momentarily humorous saint. “Maybe he’ll just come. He’s worried about you.” Is he? she thought. “Tell him something secret if you want. So he knows it’s you.” She wrote Leon’s middle name. She wrote the address of the carpark where they were. Paul translated it into the longs and shorts of Morse and transcribed dots and dashes under the letters. She was the one getting Billy a message, he told her. It was her message, he told her, to her friend, her way.
If Paul was out to kill her, she thought, this was the longest way around to do it. She stood on her bonnet as her companion crooned, done have to be rich la la to be my girl. She untwisted the fluorescent bulb enough to break the connection.
Paul said, “Dash dot dot dot,” and so on. Screwing and unscrewing the bulb, she shed its light and darkness in a not-very-expert, she hoped legible, coded message, for the city to pass on, tap-tapping London, entrusting the metropolis with her information like a vast concrete-and-brick telegraph machine.
You never know, she thought. Worked before.
DANE WOULD NOT LET LONDONMANCERS REENTER THE RUINED rooms of the kraken church to which he returned. They were not sure of their relationship to him nor he of his to them anymore—were they allies, still? Wati, traumatised and almost unconscious, could not breach the still-extant barriers. Only Billy came with Dane. When they descended, there were others there, though. The last scattered Krakenists, come home, in mourning.
Around the same number as there had been for the service that Billy had witnessed, but that had been just a regular Sabbath, a sermon: this was the last gathering in the world. Those lapsed, busy, usually too tainted by secularism and the exhaustions of everyday life to attend with the regularity the faith they professed would prefer were all here.
A couple of those muscular young men, though most of the enforcers of devotion had been guards, and guarding, and were gone. Mostly these were unremarkable men and women of all types. The end of a church.
They did not look hard at Billy. They did not care anymore if he was a feral prophet, some pointless urban Saint Anthony. They were uninterested in anything but grief. They treated Dane as if he were the Teuthex. Though his role had always been that of licenced outsider, then renegade, he was as close as they came, now, to authority. None of them even shouted blame, called him apostate. He all but glowed with their piety.
“Grisamentum’s going to come for us, you know,” Billy said.
“Yes.”
“For the kraken.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll find it.”
“Yes.”
They sat. This was a time for valedictories.
“Dane. You can feel it. It’s now, it’s got to be tonight, or tomorrow night, or just maybe the night after. All we have to do’s keep the kraken out of danger till then, and we’ll have beat that prophecy.”
“I don’t care. And you don’t believe that anyway.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Which?” Dane said.
“Neither,” said Billy. “Either.”
“No, I do. Both.” Dane dialled a number on the desktop phone, still unsmashed, handed it to Billy. “It’s a voice-mail box,” he said. “Mine.”
“You have seventeen messages,” Billy heard. “First message.” A click, and the voice was the Teuthex’s. “Alright. I want to know what exactly you think you’re bloody doing? I read your note. You have a certain bloody leeway, but stealing a prophet is pushing your luck.”
Billy looked at Dane. Dane took the phone, pressed buttons to scroll on many days. To quite a recent moment.
“Yeah,” Dane said. “What you are doing now,” Billy heard, the Teuthex again, voice terse, “is blasphemy. I have given you a direct order. I’ve told you. Bring it in. Now is not the time to be having crises of faith. We can end this bloody abomination.”
“What’s this?” Billy said. He held the receiver up.
“I’m an operative,” Dane said.
“You were excommunicated …”
“Come on now. Please.”
Who would ever have trusted a representative of the cephalopod fundamentalists to deal with the issue of the kraken? A rogue, on the other hand … Who could be more trustworthy?
Billy shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It was all an act. You were under the Teuthex’s orders all along.”
“It wasn’t an act. It was a mission.” That ostentatious renegacy. “People are more likely to help if you’re exile.”
“Who knew?”
“Onl
y the Teuthex.”
“So the rest of the church thought you really were …,” Billy said, and stopped. If your whole congregation thinks you outcast, are you not?
“They don’t care now,” Dane said.
“But you took me with you. Were you … you weren’t supposed to?”
“I needed all the edge I could get. You knew things. Still do. You bottled it, Billy. You never thought you was, Billy, but you are a prophet. Sorry, mate.”
“So the Teuthex telling everyone at that meeting that he wasn’t going to hunt for it …” The stance, that benthic remove, had been a lie, of which, in their loyalty to their pope, the church had been persuaded. Only the Teuthex and his faux-exile operative knowing the squiddish truth, and hunting for the body of god.
“But …” Billy said slowly, “you disobeyed orders.”
“Yeah. I brought you with me and wouldn’t bring you back. And when we found it I didn’t bring it back to them.”
“Why?”
“Because they were going to get rid of it, Billy, as they should. And they were right, but you know how you’d get rid of it? Everyone’s said. It’s true. They would’ve burnt it. That’s the holy way. Having that kraken out there in that tank like that … it’s a blasphemy. So I was to bring it back. But the Teuthex was going to burn it.”
“And then you saw the prophecy.”
“The Teuthex was going to burn the squid. And that’s what they said started … this. This whole thing. What if it was us?” Dane said. He sounded very tired. “What if it was my church, doing the right thing, releasing it like that, but bringing on … whatever it is that’s coming?”
It would not have been Dane’s church’s planned end, their infolding of convolutes into the glint on a giant eye, when roaring perhaps at the surface the elder kraken might rise like belligerent continents and die, and spurt out like ink a new time. This would not have been that hallelujah-worthy end, but an antiapocalypse, a numinousless revelation, time-eating fire. An accident.
What terrible anxiety. Dane’s horror had been that his church would be the butt of a cosmic banana-skin-slip. It’s no one’s fault, but we set fire to the future. God, how embarrassed are we?
“But look,” Dane said. He indicated around him. “There’s no one left to burn it now, and that ending still hasn’t gone. So that’s not what’s going to cause it. I was wrong. Maybe if I’d done what I was told to do, we would have saved everything.” He swallowed.
“This isn’t your fault.”
“Reckon?” Dane said, and Billy had no idea. Should have would have could have. They sat in the office of the dead Teuthex and looked at broken pictures.
“Where are the Londonmancers?”
“Panicking,” said Billy. “Grisamentum must be coming, and it isn’t going to be long before he finds us. All we need to do, what they think, is just keep the kraken safe till that night’s over. That’s the plan.”
“That’s a bullshit plan.”
“I know,” Billy said.
“It is,” Dane said. “How many times they going to say the night’s about to come? If Paul hasn’t given in to the Tattoo it won’t be long before he does. Or Goss and Subby’ll find him. Or Griz’ll burn the world down first.” Something somewhere was dripping. Dane spoke to its rhythm.
“So,” said Billy.
“So we make it the night,” Dane said. “Don’t run. Take it to Grisamentum. It’s his plan that gets everything burning, for whatever reason, whether that’s what he has in mind or not. So we get rid of him, when he’s gone …” He brushed imaginary dust from his hands. “Problem solved.”
Billy had to smile a bit. “We don’t even know where he is. He’s got gunfarmers, he’s got monsterherds, he’s got who-knows-what paper-and-ink magic—what do we have?” Billy said. He barely even heard the absurdity of words like that in his mouth anymore. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to—”
“Remember how we found the Teuthex?” Dane said. “Why d’you think he was reaching for the altar?”
IN THE CHURCH ROOM THE LAST TWENTY OR SO KRAKENISTS WERE gathered. Old women and men and young, in all manner of clothes. A slice of London, weak with grief. New unwilling recruits to a tiny historical crew, who had outlived their own religion.
“Brothers and sisters,” Dane muttered.
“This is the last Krakenist brigade,” he said to Billy. “Any others out there ain’t coming back.”
The altar, of course, was a mass of carved suckers and interwoven arms. Dane pressed certain of the pads in a certain order. “This is what the Teuthex was going for,” he said.
It had not been some mere valedictory nearer-my-god gesture, the Teuthex’s reach. An inset section of the altar uncoiled. Dane slowly swung the metal front of the altar down.
Behind it was glass. Behind the glass, things preserved. Relics of kraken. Billy gasped as the scale of what he saw made sense to him. The altar was as high as his chest. Filling it almost completely was a beak.
He had seen its shape many times before. Vaguely parrot, extravagantly wicked in its curve. But the largest he had ever seen would have fit his hand, and that would have belonged to an Architeuthis close to ten metres long. This mouthpiece reached from the floor to his sternum. It would gape large enough to swallow him. When those chitin edges met they might shear trees.
“It’s going to bite me,” Dane said. He spoke dreamily. “Just a nip. Just to draw blood.”
“What? What, Dane? Why?”
“All this lot left. We’re the end crew.”
“But why?”
“So we can attack.”
“What?” said Billy. Dane told him.
Last-ditch defenders were not new. There were always kings under the hill. The golem of Prague—though that was a bad example, had missed its call, a dreadful oversleeping. Each of the cults of London had hopes in its own constructs, its own secret spirits, its own sleeping paladins, to intervene when the minute hand went vertical. The Krakenists had had their berserkers. But the fighters who had volunteered and been chosen for that sacred final duty were all dead, before the Teuthex could effect their becomings. So the last Krakencorps had to be from the ranks of the church’s clerks, functionaries, cleaners and everyday faithful.
What was squiddity but otherness, incomprehensibility. Why would such a deity understand those bent on its glory? Why should it offer anything? Anything at all?
The krakens’ lack of desire for recompense was part of what, their faithful said, distinguished them from the avaricious Abrahamic triad and their quids pro quo, I’ll take you to heaven if you worship me. But even the kraken would give them this transmutation, this squid pro quo, by the contingencies of worship, toxin and faith.
“Twenty krakenbit is not nothing. It’s down to us, now. We have to bring the night,” Dane said. “Bring it on and rule it. And it ain’t just us, is it? There’s the Londonmancers and the London antibodies. They’ll piss and moan, but. Well, we’re going in, so they’ve got two choices. Be part of that, or try to disappear. Good luck with that. Fuck Fitch, talk to Saira. She’ll do it.”
“Why are you telling me to—” Billy stopped. “You really think you can take on Grisamentum?”
“Let’s have a little last crusade, eh?”
“You think this’ll win it for us? You think you can take him?”
“Come on,” Dane said.
Billy had learnt about the rules of this sort of landscape. He hesitated, but there was no getting away from what he thought he knew.
“This …” he said. “It’ll kill you, won’t it?” He said it quietly. He pointed at the beak.
Dane shrugged. Neither of them spoke for seconds.
“It’ll change us,” Dane said at last. “I don’t know. We weren’t meant to be vessels for that kind of power. It’s a glorious way to go, but.”
Billy tried to work out what to say. “Dane,” he said. He stared at those impossibly huge bite-parts. “I’m begging you not to do this.”
“Seriously, you can’t … You have to …” There was so little crazy fervour to Dane. Okay, not counting those incredible facts of what he did, and why he did it, his demeanour was everyday. A very English faith. And it was as shocking to discover about him as it would have been about the polite and subdued-dressed congregation of any country church, that he, and they, would die for their belief.
“Wait,” said Billy. “What if you fail? If you fail, that’s our last line down.”
“Billy, Billy, Billy.” Dane did not care if the world survived.
“Tomorrow night, Billy,” Dane said. “I know where Grisamentum is.”
“How?”
“There aren’t that many old ink plants in the city, mate. I sent Wati around when he was last awake. There’s statues most places.”
“They can’t have been so stupid, can they, to leave them there …?”
“No, but they’re pretty much everywhere, so where there’s none in a place, nowhere for Wati to go, that kind of gap is information. Tells him something. Someone’s making an effort to keep him out. I know where Grisamentum is, and he won’t be expecting dick. Tomorrow, Billy.”
When they emerged Saira was waiting for them aboveground. “At last,” she said. She was antsy, looking around and swallowing. A young Londonmancer was with her. The police would come sometime, though there were other things taking their time, and a vandalised community church was a very low priority right then. “Billy, you got a message.”
“What did you say?”
“It came through the city. Bax heard it. It’s from your friend. Marge.”
“Marge? What are you talking about? Marge?”
“She got back to us,” Saira said. “She answered. The same way you got a message to her. Through the city.”
That pitched Billy back to that odd little Londonmancer intercession, his message to Marge whispered into the darkness of the post. That he’d hardly thought of since. It abruptly shamed him that he had thought it some therapeutic performance to make him feel better. Perhaps it had been that as well, but could he have been so trite and unliteral as to doubt that it was, as described, a message? And if she got it, why would he think Marge would, as he had adjured, stay away?
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