Kraken

by China Miéville

  The satnav blinked at them and pointed them through streets, at Saira’s movement. “Look,” said Billy. “Watch her. Evasive manoeuvres.”

  As they approached London’s edges Billy felt risingly strange. “Where is she going?” Wati said. He was clipped to peer from the top of Billy’s pocket.

  “The sea couldn’t see it, or hear it,” Billy said. They turned onto the North Circular, the city ringroad, and traced a way out east. “They’re … Look, look.”

  There was the car, stationary, and there, pulled over onto the hard shoulder, was a lorry. Large—not one of the really huge articulateds that filled streets like poured-in concrete, but big enough, way larger than most house-movers. There was some forgettable logo on its sides. They pulled in behind it and the rear doors opened minutely. Saira beckoned. She pulled the door to behind them as they hauled into the dark insides. Wati could not enter past repulsive fields. He whispered and went out away to his other front, his union war. The vehicle started again. Striplights came on.

  Strapped in place in the trailer’s centre, cushioned and surrounded with thick industrial cording stretched to the edges and corners, holding it so it barely jostled on the steel table, was the tank. And in it, placid in its death-long bath, was the kraken.

  THE LORRY VEERED A LITTLE, SENDING A LAP OF LIQUID UP THE tank’s inside. The movement clouded the preserving liquid. There were the knotted arms, the gone eyes. Architeuthis. Billy almost whispered hello.

  A couple of other Londonmancers, more of the conclave within the already secretive sect, were there. There were tools. Microscopes, scalpels, computers loaded with biological modelling software and sluggish 3G connections. Centrifuges. Chairs, books, a cabinet of weapons, a microwave, chunks of masonry torn from London walls, bunks built into the truck’s sides.

  Nothing moved a moment but the truck and the shreds of skin in Formalin. Of course it travelled, so as not to snag attention. A weight of animal godhead like that couldn’t but become meaning: stay fixed and people would notice. So it was escorted in a circle like an aging king. Its motion hid it, as must the scraps of gris-gris stuff, the offcuts, the accoutrements nailed or placed in the vehicle’s interior.

  “Who’s driving?” Billy said. He turned.

  Dane was on his knees. He knelt close to the tank. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. His hands were clasped. He was weeping.

  EVEN THE LONDONMANCERS, USED TO STRANGE FERVOURS, STEPPED back. Dane murmured. He prayed half audibly. Billy could not hear what it was he said, but he remembered a snip that he had read in the teuthic canon, a phrase: Kraken, with your reaching, feeling the world to understand it, feel and understand me, your meaningless child, now.

  The passion ran as long as it would run, and it was a long time. Dane opened weepy eyes. He touched the glass. “Thank you,” he said, again and again, to the tank. He stood at last.

  “Thank you,” he said to the room.

  “I can’t fucking believe you,” he screamed suddenly. “Why would you do this, why wouldn’t you tell me?” He slumped, and made a face that Billy realised he must have made when he was being tortured to death. “But you took care of, of, of it,” he said. “Of my god.”

  DANE SANK AGAIN. POOR TORTURED MAN. HE PRAYED. BILLY PUT ON the long full-arm rubber gloves, like a vet’s, the Londonmancers provided. They—well, their little inner cabal—watched him.

  He did not know exactly what he was looking for. He looked at Dane until Dane saw him do so and did not stop him or say anything, and with that permission Billy took off the lid and reached through the cold broth of dead cells and chemicals. He touched the specimen. It was dense, coldly and deadly dense.

  We found you, he thought.

  “What’s going on?” said Saira.

  Billy clenched, but there was no twitch of time now. He pressed into the flesh to feel what he would feel. He ran his hands along it, parted its parts, gently, pressed his fingertips into the suckers that acned the dead animal’s limbs. It could not vacuum him, but the very shape of those pads stuck them for a moment to him, as if it were gripping, all dead as it was. He heard Fitch make some noise like huh. Then Fitch said, “I need … I need to read …”

  “I don’t think you do,” Billy said, without turning. He pressed down. What’s this, then? he thought, but no knowledge crept in through his fingertips, his own inadequate ten tentacles. He shook his head: no haptic gnosis, no insight. There was nothing, no knowledge of what would happen, or why, or what it was of this fucking squid, this squid, why this squid? Why would it usher in the end?

  Because it still would.

  “I don’t think you need to be a seer to know that,” he said. “Cut open the city you’ll see the same thing.” He turned and held his arms up like a surgeon in a sterile field, as they dripped toxins. “I know we were hoping,” he said. “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” He nodded at Dane. “He’s come back from the dead for this, you know? That’s got to be written somewhere. Can’t tell me there’s no verses about that somewhere. And then you’ve got me. That’s two of us must be all over some scripture like a bloody rash, so you might think this’d change stuff.” He peeled off a glove. “But come on.” He shrugged. “It’s still the same.”

  Maybe it was because it was a misunderstanding. He, Billy, had been chosen by the angel of memory for some stupid error, some misapprehended gag. Specimen magic, not the alien majesty of the benthic tentacular.

  “Don’t matter,” Dane said, surprising him, as if he’d spoken aloud. “How’d you think messiahs get chosen?”

  Dane was the real deal, had really gone into it and come out again, and his was real faith. One might have hoped that that was the end, the reuniting of faithful and faithee enough to heal the burning. That perhaps the Londonmancers—having failed to banish that finality by offering themselves as rescuers, believing finally that the intent of Billy and Dane was not to burn the thing themselves, handing control of the stranded deep god to its devotee and kind-of-sort-of prophet—might have averted the worst. But.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Billy said. You did not, he was sure, need to be, as he was, a mistaken beloved of an angel to feel it. London was still wrong. You could hear the not-ending of tension in the city, the continuance not of fights but of a particular kind of fights, the terror of it all.

  Everything was still going to burn.

  • • •

  SAIRA SAT, DEFEATED. SHE HEFTED A CLUTCH OF BRICKS AND MORTAR anxiously, a wound torn from a wall. She kneaded it. In her hands and knack all the city’s separate scobs and bits and pieces were the plastic matter of London. She prodded and pulled at the bricks and they squelched silently into other bricks. She dug in her fingers and made the stuff into other Londonness—a mass of food wrappers, a knot of piping, a torn-off railing top, a car’s muffler.

  “What now?” It was Saira who said it, at last, but it could have been any of them. She held out her hand and Billy pulled her up. Her hand was sticky with Londongrease.

  “You remember Al Adler?” Billy said. “Who you killed?” She was too tired to wince. “Know who he was working for? Grisamentum.”

  She stared at him. “Grisamentum’s dead.”

  “No. He’s not. Dane … He’s not.” She stared. “What that has to do with anything I don’t know. But it was Adler who … started this. With you. And he was still with Grisamentum when he did. Place your bets whose plan it was.

  “We know what’s happening’s close, now, and we know it starts when the squid burns,” he said. “So I suppose we have to keep trying. We just have to keep it safe. Maybe if we can do that, keep it unburnt past … the night … we’ll be okay. All we can do’s keep looking. The Tattoo’s got no reason to burn the world. Neither did Al. Neither does Grisamentum, whatever their plan was.” He shook his head. “It’s something else. We have to try to keep this thing safe.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Everyone looked at Dane. It was the first thing he had said for a long time that was not m
uttered devotion to his dead god. He stood, looking reconfigured. “You keep it safe,” he said to Saira. “We can’t be here. We’re too dangerous. We’ll do the stuff you’re saying,” he said to Billy. “First we’re going to get Jason out.”

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  “WHAT DO WE DO?” BILLY SAID. CRASHING THE HIDEOUT OF dangerous violent nutcases they might get away with, but the state? It’s too risky, Fitch had said. You have to help us protect it, Saira had said. There’s nothing you can do, they had said.

  “Give me the satnav,” Dane replied. “We ain’t leaving him behind.”

  “And maybe we can find stuff out,” Billy had said. “They might have some better ideas than we do, Collingswood and Baron.”

  Dane had stared at the dead squid and made some sign. “We can find you when we need to. You keep my god safe. And let us out now.”

  Now they waited. “We have to get Wati in,” Dane said. He spoke quickly. “We need to know the lay of the land in that copshop before we go cracking in. Where is he?”

  “You know they’ve got stuff in place,” Billy said. “He can’t get in. Anyway …” Wati, guilty at his disappearances from the struggle at hand, was still at hasty rallies. “He said he’d be back when he could.” He wanted to help, and he would again, but Don’t you know there’s a war on? A class war that pitted rabbits against conjurors used to getting away with a stick and the scrawniest carrot, between golems and those who thought scrawling an emet on a forehead granted them rights, or any fucking thing at all.

  Where gargoyles or bas-relief figures were close enough, Wati would deliver rallying speeches to whatever strikers maintained interventions (homunculi creeping in the angles between wall and pavement, rooks staggering). What might pass as twists of wind were pickets of militant air elementals, whispering in gusty voices as quiet as breath, “Hell No We Won’t Blow!”

  There were scabs and sympathisers. Wati heard all the rumours, that he had been targeted—old news that—and that people had been searching all over the world, literally, outside of London, for some leverage against him.

  The situation wasn’t great. The grind of economics forced some back to work, shamefaced, shamesouled where their faces were carved and immobile, shamewavelengthed when they were vibrations of aether. Rushing in a statued path all over the city, Wati kept arriving at aftermaths. Picket after picket closed down by spectral police spells on obscure, antique charges pressed into innovative use. Hired muscle in various dimensions.

  “What happened?” Wati would cry, on emerging into a lion face made in mortar, to see a picket bust up, its members scattered or killed, two or three still there trying to fix themselves. They were tiny sexless homunculi made out of animal flesh. Several had been left just bone-flecked smears.

  “What happened?” Wati said. “Are you okay?”

  Not really. His informant, a man built of bird parts and mud, dragged a leg smudgelike. “Tattoo’s men,” he said. “Help, boss.”

  “I ain’t your boss,” Wati said. “Come on now, let’s get you …” Where? He could not take him anywhere, and the animal-man-thing was dying. “What happened?”

  “Knuckleheads.”

  Wati stayed with him as long as he could bear. The Tattoo had been paid to close the strike down, and efforts were being stepped up. Wati went back to the dolls in Billy’s and Dane’s pockets. In agitation he trembled between the two as he spoke.

  “We’re being attacked.” “The Tattoo …” “… and the police …” “… trying to finish it.”

  “I thought they already were,” Billy said.

  “Not like this.” “Not like this.”

  “We made him angry,” Dane said slowly.

  “By getting you out,” Billy said.

  “He wants me back, and he wants you, and the kraken, and he’s getting at us through Wati. I heard him, while I was there. He’s desperate. He can feel everything speeding up, like we all can.”

  “We have one of his knuckleheads, you know,” Wati said with the ghost of humour. “Got political after he joined. Got sacked, no surprise.”

  “Wati,” said Billy. He glanced at Dane. “We need to get into the police station.”

  “Where even are we?” Wati said. He had followed the aetherial ruts ground out from and back into this figure without even clocking his location. “Not that I can get in—they’ve got a barrier.”

  “Near,” Dane said. They were in an alley out back of a café in the dark but for a fringe of streetlight. “It’s round the corner.”

  “Jason’s inside,” said Billy.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Wati said.

  “Wait,” Billy said. “Hold on. I’m thinking … how I first met Goss and Subby. It was the entrance that they had to get over. Collingswood didn’t make the whole place out of bounds.”

  “It’s a lot easier to just guard a perimeter,” Dane said. “I get it.”

  “So if we can get you past that …” Billy said.

  WATI IN THE FOETAL, MOST INNER OF THE RUSSIAN DOLLS THAT Billy had snagged a long time ago, jogged in the mouth of his mouse escort, a longtime activist of the UMA. She had never spoken in twelve years of membership but was absolutely solid.

  She was a big mouse, but the doll was still a big mouthful. The mouse was a speck of dark under headlights, disappearing under gates, up an incline of crumble, below unmoving cars and through cavities. “Alright, this is great,” Wati said. “Thanks. We’ll sort this out, don’t sweat it. We’ll sort this all out.”

  Midway through the outer wall Wati felt a limit point, felt space try to keep him out, “Whoa,” he said, “I think there’s a …” But the mouse, little physical thing, felt nothing and ran on through, hauling Wati’s consciousness with her, straight on in, snapping through the block.

  “Ow,” Wati said. “Shit, that was weird.”

  The distinctive mutter of striplights. Wati was used to dramatic shifts of scale and perspective, to seeing from giant figures then lead miniatures. Right now the corridor was cathedral. He felt the pounding of an incoming human. The mouse waited under a radiator. Legs came past. Several officers. There was some emergency.

  “Can you follow that lot?” Wati said in his small voice. “Careful now.” The mouse went after the earthquake footprints, down stairs, onto different carpet, into different lights. “He’ll be in a cell,” Wati whispered. The animal agent stuck to the shadows: crouched under the open door itself, of a cell around which the police were gathered. Near what was definitely blood.

  “Oh fuck me sideways,” Wati whispered.

  The mouse turned him slowly in its little mouth, so Wati’s eyes tracked up the mountain of dead body that lay on the cell’s bed, the red dead man. There were the FSRC. The other milling police shunned them. Among the bustle of voices two words rose to Wati’s attention. “Goss,” he heard, and “Subby.”

  “Oh, no no no,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The mouse waited while he whispered miserable curses. “Okay. Okay. Let’s concentrate. Let’s find their office,” he said eventually. “See if we can get some information. Goss and Subby are with the Tattoo, and I thought he had these buggers’ backing. Something’s going nuts.”

  The station was all afaddle with the crisis, and it was not so hard for a mouse to run room to room uninterrupted, looking for and at last finding signs of FSRC involvement—religious pieces, books one would not normally associate with the police. At Collingswood’s desk, CD cases of several Grime artists.

  “There’s got to be something,” Wati said. “Come on.” He was exhorting himself, not his escort.

  The mouse walked Wati on all the papers they could find. A laborious ambulatory notetaking. Wati was not altogether surprised when he heard voices approaching. “Go,” he said. “Go go!” But the mouse walked one last paragraph, so when the FSRC officers entered, they saw her scuttling from Vardy’s desk.

  Collingswood moved at shocking speed, not like a human. She dropped to her
haunches and lurched sideways, keeping the tiny animal now running for the space between a filing cabinet and the wall in her line of sight. Vardy and Baron had still not moved. Collingswood spat a word that made the mouse go plastic-stiff skidding with momentum to the back of the little runnel, where the animal lay immobilized as Collingswood shuffled toward her. She still bit-gripped Wati.

  “Mouse! Mouse! Come on!”

  “Help me with this fucking cabinet,” Collingswood yelled at her sluggish colleagues, and at last they shifted their arses and began to tug it.

  “Mouse, you better move,” Wati said. He felt statues beyond the walls that he might, from here on the nonblocked side of the magic caul, jump to. But he muttered and muttered at the mouse, until she regained enough of herself to crawl from Collingswood’s fingers. “Get into the fucking wall,” said Wati, and the mouse made it excruciatingly around a corner of architecture while Collingswood swore.

  THE MOUSE DRAGGED HERSELF THROUGH THE WALLS, AT LAST TO deliver the doll to the cool air outside. “Thank you,” Wati said. “You okay? Good work. Thanks. There’s, look, there’s some food over there.” Remains of kebab. “Get that down you. Thanks. Big time. You’ll be alright, now?”

  The mouse nodded, and Wati skittered through a few statues to where Billy and Dane waited for the news of Jason that he would have to give.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  “GOSS AND SUBBY.”

  “It was Goss and Subby.”

  “Holy fucking Kraken. Goss and Subby.”

  Goss and Subby, Goss and Subby, names both names and barks of outrage at those so named. They had been that way since year who-bloody-knew? Certainly for centuries the bereaved, the beaten, the tortured had shouted those names in aftermaths.