“Tomorrow you can do whatever you want. But London owns you now. Understand? One more thing needs porting. You don’t even have to beam yourself, no more snuffing it. You are going to do this. I’m not even saying please.”
Chapter Seventy-Six
THE LORRY ROARED ON, IN PLAIN SIGHT, HARASSED BY A HARD core of inked papers that stayed in its slipstream to track its breakneck journey.
“We’re not going to lose them,” Saira said. She was driving now. “Just got to get there fast and do the job. They can’t take us, not this few. It’s when the rest of Grisamentum arrives we’re in trouble.”
Finally they reached the street Billy remembered. It was still all quiet, as if there were no war. People looked from houses at them and hurriedly away. Saira braked by the last, dim house.
“Are we here?” Fitch said. The trailer was stinking and crowded. The last Londonmancers waited by the dead kraken. “Why are we here? What’s the sea going to do?”
The papers rose, a malevolent little covey, circled. Fuck you, Billy mouthed, as they gusted over the roofs and away. “They’re fetching the rest of him,” he said. “Come on, come on.” He froze at approaching blue lights. A police car tore toward them and rubber-burned to a stop. Collingswood emerged, and Billy opened his mouth to yell at Saira to drive, but he heard Marge’s voice.
“Billy!” she almost screamed. She got out and stared at him. “Billy.” He ran for her, and they held on to each other a long time.
“Look,” said Collingswood. “It’s beautiful, innit?”
“I’m so sorry,” Billy said to Marge. “Leon …”
“I know,” she said. “I know. I got your message. And I got your other message. Look, I brought him.” Sitting in the car by Paul was Simon Shaw.
WHEN FITCH SAW PAUL, HE STARTED, AND OPENED HIS MOUTH BUT obviously did not know what to say. The other Londonmancers looked uneasily between the two. Fitch tried again to speak, and Paul just shook his finger no. “We got nothing to talk about,” Paul said. “Not while he’s on his way.” He pointed. Circling like a blown leaf was a single scrap of Grisamentum. “He’s coming, so let’s get this done.”
There would almost be a showdown between Grisamentum and the Tattoo, Billy thought, at last. But it would, rather, be between Grisamentum and Paul. Whatever Fitch’s plans had been or now were, Billy realised, Paul was not afraid of him anymore.
“Billy,” Collingswood said. “Mate. What the shit have you been up to?” She winked at him. “If you didn’t want the job you should’ve just said no, fuck’s sake.”
“Officer Collingswood,” he said. Found himself grinning at her for a second. She pursed her lips.
“What’s the plan then, geezer?”
“Come on,” Billy said. “Let’s move. You ready?” Simon looked terrified but nodded. They opened the lorry so he could stare at the kraken’s tank. Metabolise its position in his head. “Good man,” Billy said. “You know what’s going to happen?”
Billy had prepared his case in writing. It was a long and detailed message, which he had sealed in a glass bottle. “Shall we?” he said to Saira and Simon. “We need its permission.”
“And bearings,” Simon said. “I told you, I can’t do it without pretty precise bearings.”
Billy tapped the bottle. “I said all that. It’s in there. Don’t panic.”
The message in the bottle begged.
YOU SAID THE KRAKEN WAS NO LONGER YOURS. PLEASE, YOU HAVE TO help us. Even if it’s not one of yours, for the sake of the city where you’ve been for however long, please, we are asking you to use your neutrality and your power like when you helped against the Nazis. We need a safe place. We all heard about how the Tattoo wouldn’t face you that time, and we need that sort of clout again.
Everything is at stake, Billy had written. We just need to get past this night. And protect it. We are desperate. He pushed the message into the letter box.
They stood quietly in the dark. A man rode by them on a bike, with squeaking pedal-strokes. Fitch and the Londonmancers waited. The last krakenbit hid their teuthic tumourous amendations in the lorry. The sea inside the house did not answer the bottle for a long time.
“What’s happening?” Simon whispered.
“We can’t stick around forever,” Saira whispered.
Billy raised his hand, to rap the window, with a sense of blasphemy, when he was preempted. Something knocked instead from the inside. A slow beat through the curtain. A lower corner of the cloth moved. It was pulled slowly back.
“It’s showing us,” Billy said. “So you can see for coordinates, Simon. Do what you need to do.”
“Bloody hell,” said Saira. “I guess that’s permission.”
The curtain retreated from a corner of darkness. There was nothing visible behind it, until from deep within that dark came motions—insinuations in the pitch. They came closer, halting inches behind the glass. Staring out from the dim light that streetlamps shone into the room were tiny translucent fish.
Their ventral fins thrummed. They regarded Billy with see-through eyes. A suddenness came, a quick thing, viper-mouth agape, and the little fish were gone. The curtains gently eddied.
Lights came on in the dark room. The lights were moving. They came up on a grotto. A room full of sea. A living room, sofa, chairs, pictures on the walls, a television, lamps and tables, sunk in deep green water, investigated by fish and weeds. Those lights were the pearl tint of bioluminescent animals.
A living room, furnishings interrupted with coral, grazed on by sea cucumbers. The tassels of a lampshade moved with current, and an anemone waved its feathery stingers in filigree echo. Fish moved throughout, ghost-lit by themselves and their neighbours. Fingernail-sized things, arm-thick eels. By a sunken hi-fi riveted with barnacles, a fist-sized light moved like a long-armed metronome. The tick-tock light made Billy stare.
“Have you got it?” he said to Simon, with effort. “What you need?”
“I’ll have to move the water out, just before, in the right shape,” Simon murmured. He stared and itemised to himself according to the strange techniques he had perfected.
“Done,” he said. A moray glided from some dark, coiled around the sofa leg, tugged it into a new position, to make space for what was coming. “Okay,” Simon said. He closed his eyes, and Billy heard in the air around them the muttering of Simon’s last imbecilic vengeful ghost.
“He knows what I’m doing,” Simon said. “He thinks I’m going myself. He’s trying to stop me murdering me again.” He even smiled.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
THERE WAS THE NOISE OF PAPER. “THEY’RE HERE!” FITCH LEANED from the lorry. “Grisamentum! He’s coming!”
“Are you ready?” Billy said.
“They’re coming,” shouted Fitch. The air of the street was filling with papers. They investigated front gardens. They came at the lorry, staring with ink-blot eyes.
“Whatever the bloody hell you are going to do I suggest you do it,” Collingswood said.
Simon went to the kraken’s tank and put his hands on it. He closed his eyes. Headlights moved across the face of houses. There was the familiar prickling sound, the sequin glimmer. It faded up and down, and the tank was no longer there.
THERE WAS A RUMBLING FROM THE HOUSE. A BURP OF WATER SPILLED from the letter slot. With no tank to brace him, Simon fell to his knees.
“Big,” he muttered. He looked up and smiled. His ghost howled.
The kraken was in the embassy of the sea. Billy and Simon and Saira stared at each other.
“Did we …?” said Saira.
“It’s done,” said Billy.
“Congratufuckinglations,” Collingswood said. “Now will you please get in sodding prison?”
“It’s safe,” Billy said. The paper raged and raged around them. Cars came closer and stopped. Papers began to batter them angrily, pelleting into missiles. Paul shifted his chest out, as if he, not the picture he bore, were the ink’s enemy. Billy heard a voice he r
ecognised. Byrne shouting “Goddammit!” from somewhere, as she approached and saw the empty lorry. “Time to go,” he said.
Collingswood saw the motorcade of Grisamentum’s last troops. She appeared to consider her options. The other officer ran. “You cheeky little fucker,” she shouted at his back as he went. She jabbed the air in his direction, and his legs tangled and he went down hard enough to break his nose, but she turned away as he scrambled back to his feet and continued running. She let him go.
“You’re welcome to try to arrest Griz if you want, Collingswood,” Billy said. “Fancy that?”
“I do fancy that yeah, actually, blood.” Not that she was moving.
Saira hesitated. Simon was helping Fitch into the lorry. “Let’s get out of here,” Billy said. Marge and Paul scrambled in too, the vanguard of the papers harassing Paul in confused habitual animosity, thinking he was his adornment. Billy, Saira and even Collingswood wordlessly moved toward the lorry, but they had left it too late. Byrne was close, and she was directing two cars of gunfarmers toward the big vehicle.
“Shit,” said Saira, judging the distance. She caught Billy’s eye a moment. He nodded minutely and she indicated the lorry to go. It lurched from the kerb, its rear door flapping, a bewildered Londonmancer and Marge still leaning from its back, Marge shouting in protest as they left the others behind. But they were gone, around a corner, gone. Simon wailed, held out his hands like a baby. Billy grabbed him and hauled him away.
Saira kneaded the wall beside them and gave it a mossy weathered gateway. They got in out of sight. They hunkered by the wall of the sea-house and crept as Byrne and Grisamentum’s crew came near, ready to scatter into the streets the moment angry papers careened around them.
“They must be going spare,” Billy said.
“Fine bunch of mates you have,” Collingswood said.
“They left without us,” Simon said, loudly enough that Billy pinched his mouth shut.
“They didn’t have any choice,” Saira said. “I told them to. I’ll find them …”
They heard a loud slam. The wall faintly shook.
“What the hell?” Saira said. She and Billy stared at each other. The noise came again. “Oh my God,” Saira said. “He couldn’t be so stupid … The sea?”
Would he? They crept to the corner and looked.
The land could never defeat the sea. As Canute had illustrated for his fawning courtiers, tides are implacable. Even Tattoo, bluster notwithstanding, had known to duck that confrontation. It was just an inevitable rule.
But rules were what Grisamentum wanted to rewrite.
Scratch out the writing on the wall, rewrite the rules, rework the blueprint, using the inks stored in the ocean itself. Would he stop this now? All he needed was tonight.
This was why when Billy peered around the edge of brick, he saw the papers corkscrewing in impatience, he saw Byrne carrying a big bottle of her boss protectively, he saw gunfarmers on guard, and he saw their colleagues kicking and kicking like thugs and police at the front door.
The redoubt of the ocean in residence in London, this house was encircled in thalassic knacks. But part of its defence was the certainty that it would never be needed, and now the attack was backed by the unremitting focused hex attention of Grisamentum. Byrne squirted him with a turkey baster into the lock mechanism, onto the hinges. This close to his becoming, he was cavalier with the stuff of his substance. He wrote weakening spells on the innards of the keyhole. One more onslaught of boots.
“No no,” said Billy, trying very much to think of something, to gather a plan, but a gunfarmer stepped up and slammed his boot at the door, and it flew open. It flew open and threw the man aside, and with it came an onrush piston of water, a giant brine fist.
• • •
SEAWATER EXPLODED INTO THE SCRUBBY FRONT GARDEN, SKITTLING gathered attackers. From the top of the house down, the windows imploded. Sea slicked into the road, bringing its inhabitants. Weeds piled. Fauna was dragged into the street, coming dying to rest. Jellies, hagfish, fat deepwater creatures twitching and doleful between the bare trees. A person-sized blind shark gaped pale jaws, hopelessly biting at a car. In other houses, people began to scream.
Gunfarmers picked themselves up. They kicked fish from their feet, pulled wracks and weeds from their sodden suits. Byrne and the ink went in.
“What do we do? What do we do?” Simon said. “What do we do?” He was collapsed onto his knees.
“Get it out of there,” Billy said. “Send it anywhere.” Simon closed his eyes.
“I can’t, I … They’ve moved it. My bearings are screwed, I can’t get a lock on.”
“Your lot’ll be here soon, won’t they?” Saira said to Collingswood.
“And what the fuck are they supposed to do?” Collingswood said urgently.
“What do we do?” Saira said.
With the library he had imbibed, Grisamentum knew kraken physiology. He could have Byrne undeath-magic it just back enough to life to coax its flesh into a fear reaction, for its sepia cloud. That was all, Billy thought, he needed to do.
“Saira,” Billy said, calm. “Come with me.”
“Baron,” Collingswood was saying into her phone. “Baron, bring everyone.” She gesticulated angrily—wait a minute—but did nothing to stop Billy as he climbed the rear of the house, helping Saira after him. Billy looked down into the garden littered with building rubble and rubbish.
“Get us in,” he said to Saira.
She pushed at the rear wall, moulding the bricks, pressing them into flatness and transparency, making a window. Faded to glass clarity they could see through a film of undersea slime into a small bathroom. Saira opened the window she had made. She shivered with more than cold; she was shaking violently. She made as if she would crawl in and hesitated.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Collingswood below them, and snapped her phone shut. She shook her head as if at a friend’s unfunny joke. She pushed her hands apart and rose, not in a leap but an abrupt dainty dangling, up through the impossible twelve feet or more to land on the ledge by Saira and Billy.
Billy and Saira stared at her. “You,” she said to Saira, “wuss-girl, get down there and hold wuss-boy’s hand. You,” she said to Billy, “get in there and tell me what’s what.”
IT WAS FREEZING WITHIN. THE STINK WAS ASTONISHING, FISH AND rot.
They stood in a typical London-house bathroom: stubby bath with shower, sink and toilet, a tiny cupboard. The surfaces were white tiled under layers of grey silt, green growth, sponges and anemones reduced to lumps in the sudden air. The floor was inch-deep in water full of organisms, some still slightly alive. By the door was a half-grown sunfish—a huge, ridiculous thing—dead and sad. The bathtub brimmed with a panicking crowd of fish. Something splashed in the toilet bowl. The infiltrators held their hands to their faces.
Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps. Creatures from the top floors where the pressure was gentle and skylights illuminated the water.
Shouted orders were audible. Billy set out through the flopping drowning. He steadied himself on banisters interwoven with kelp.
In the kitchen there was a sea-softened door into the living room. The floor was littered with broken crockery. In the sink an octopus floundered. Billy watched it but felt no kinship. He could hear muffled noises from the next room.
“There’s quite a bloody few of them,” Collingswood said.
“We have to get in there,” Billy whispered. They stared at each other. “We have to.” She kissed her teeth.
“Give me a second, Billy,” she said. “Alright? You understand?”
“What are you …?” He started to say. She raised an eyebrow. He nodded, readied the pistol he had taken from Dane.
“If I’ve got all this right … Spill him,” she said. “Alright, Billy? Don’t be a loser all your life.” S
he pursed her lip and threw a sign with her fingers, something from a music video. “East side,” she said.
She stepped back into the corridor toward the living room’s main door. He heard her do something, some knack, some noise, some unnatural percussion. He heard the door open, a commotion, “Keep them out!” in Byrne’s voice, the stamp of footsteps toward her ingress and out of the door. Billy kicked open the other rotting entrance, his weapon raised.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
INTO THE GROTTO, THE SEA’S FRONT ROOM. BILLY WAS ABSOLUTELY calm.
He emerged with a burst of wall-stuff. There were the coralline constructions, the brine-stained everything, big fish lying still. In a corner was a huge sagging body, something he could not work out, though he saw eyes see him from a meat heap. The gunfarmers had left the room to hunt Saira.
There was the kraken in its tank, now emptied of all but a thin layer of preserver. There was Byrne, some bad-magic book under her arm, the bottle of Grisamentum in her hand. A huge syringe jutted from the kraken’s skin. Byrne was tickling, stimulating the dead animal in some obscene-looking way.
The kraken was moving.
Its empty eye-holes twitched. The last, brine-dilute Formalin swilled as the animal turned. Its limbs stretched and untwined, too weak still to thrash, its skin still scabrous and unrejuvenated, but the kraken was alive, or not-dead. It was zombie. Undead.
In panic at the sudden end of its death, it was spurting dark black-brown-grey ink. It spattered against the inside of its tank, and pooled in that last liquid in which the kraken lay.
Billy saw Byrne go for the syringe. He saw her move. He fired. The container of Grisamentum exploded.
• • •
BYRNE SCREAMED AS GLASS, INK AND BLOOD FROM HER LACERATED hand erupted across her front, fell through her fingers. Ink spattered across the floor, dissipated in the currents of the emptying house. A gunfarmer reentered and stared at Byrne and the ink-slick down her front. Billy roared a triumphant haaa! and stepped back through into the kitchen.
Kraken Page 47
