“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.”
“Billy.”
“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.”