Kraken (54 page)

“Why is it we don’t see him?” Billy said. “Only Byrne.”

“He’s hiding.”

“Yeah but even when there was … like when they fought the Tattoo. Tattoo was there. You’d think for a night like that Grisamentum would show in person. We know he must be desperate to get his hands on the kraken.”

“I don’t know,” Dane said. He ran his hand along the shelves. Billy was reading the strange words and examining the odd figures on the paper planes he had picked up. Dane descended, picking up dust on his trailing fingers. He turned and looked at Billy, who was still, and staring at the planes.

“Remember what you were saying about when Grisamentum died?” Billy said. “About when he was cremated?”

“No.”

“I just …” Billy stared into an ink blot. He moved it and kept staring at it. “This ink,” he said. “It’s greyer than you’d think,” he said. “It’s …” He looked up into Dane’s eyes.

“It was Cole did his cremation,” Dane said at last. He ascended.

“It was,” Billy said, staring at him. “Remember the kind of fires he deals in?” They stared at the paper. It riffled as if in a little wind. There was no little wind.

“Kraken,” whispered Dane, and Billy said, “Oh my Christ.”

W
HEN
G
RISAMENTUM DISCOVERED HE WAS DYING IT WOULD HAVE
offended him. There were no techniques to prevail against his own injurious blood. He was uninterested in an heir: his desire was never dynastic but to rule.

History was punctuated with women and men who had by grit forced their ghost-selves back to continue their business, who had wedged their minds out into host after host, who had by simple doggedness failed to die. But these were not Grisamentum’s knacks. Byrne was good, her expertise indispensable, her commitment to the project swiftly personal, but she could not unwind death itself. Only filigree it, in certain ways.

“Christ, he must have made … other arrangements,” Billy said.

He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?

Was it when he decided on the spectacle of cremation that something had occurred? Perhaps he was writing the order of the service. Perhaps scribbling instructions to Byrne he began to stare at the pen he held, the paper, the black ink.

“Pyros, he was talking to,” Billy said. “And necros. What if Byrne wasn’t remote-talking to him at all, when we saw her? Remember how she wrote?” He unfolded the little eyes. “Why are there paper planes here? Remember how he found us in the first place? Why’s this ink
grey?”

Grisamentum had burnt
alive
, in that temporally and psychically knacked variant of memory fire, that mongrel of expertise, the pyros’ and Byrne’s, her deadist insights. But he had not quite died. He had never died. That was the point.

After hours of it, after the mourners had left, he would have been collected. He was ash. But he never quite died. He was safe from his illness—he had no veins for it to poison, no organs for it to ruin. Byrne (her name a sudden joke) must have taken him, charcoal-coloured in his urn, ground any last black bone shards and carbon into powder. Mixed him into the base he had had prepared: gum, spirit, water, and rich knack.

Then she must have dipped her pen into him, closed her eyes, dragged the point across her paper. To see the thin line jag into scrappy calligraphy, a substance learning itself, she gasping in loyalty and delight as the ink self-wrote:
hello again
.

“W
HY’S HE DONE ALL THIS
?” D
ANE SAID
. H
E STARED AT THE PAPER.
It stared inkly back. “Why does he want the world to burn? Because he did? Revenge on it all?”

“I don’t know.” Billy was gathering the paper planes. He held one up. The word on it was
Poplar
. On another
Binding
. Another said
Telephone
. In super-thin writing. All incorporating two little scribbled eyes. This was the remnant of honour, nostalgic for spurious legendary times.

Was it always a lie, Billy thought? Had this neutrality-breaching killer always been so savage? Had something happened to make him the purveyor of this? The vastness of this murder.

Dane went from room to ruined room and gathered bits of Krakenist culture, accoutrements here and there, weapons. There must have been some of the Krakenist congregation out, on errands, having their lives, who would find out soon what had happened to their religion. Like the last of the Londonmancers they were now an exiled people. Their pope murdered before his altar. But in that burrow at that moment, sifting through the rubbish of the dead, Dane was the last man on earth.

Where was the light coming from? There were some bulbs not smashed, but the grey illumination in the corridors seemed greater than those little sepia efforts. The blood everywhere looked black. Billy had heard moonlight made blood look black. He met the eyes of one of the paper planes. It regarded him. Its paper fluttered again, unblown.

“It’s trying to get away,” he said. “Why would they … he … why would he actually come here, not just issue orders? He’s watching. See how thin this pen is? Remember how careful Byrne was with the papers she wrote on? How she swapped pens? So she could scrape the ink off again. There can only be so much of him.”

“Why would he
do
this?” Dane shouted. Billy still looked at the fallen paper’s eyes.

“I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out. So my question is, how do we interrogate ink?”

Chapter Sixty-Eight

T
HEY WORKED IN THE LORRY
. S
AFER THAN IN WHAT WAS SUDDENLY
a sepulchre. Billy had all the planes he could find, all with blood and mud torn off, so it was only ink that stained them.

The kraken overlooked them. Dane prayed to it. While the Londonmancers muttered and looked at Dane, suddenly bereft like them, Billy soaked the paper in distilled water, pulped it and squeezed it out. Paul watched him, his back, his tattoo, to the wall. Billy extracted the weak-tea-coloured water and boiled off a little excess. The liquid rilled away from him in a way not right.

“Be careful,” said Saira. If the ink was Grisamentum, perhaps each drop of him was him. Perhaps each had all his senses and his thoughts and a little portion of his power.

“She scraped him off each time she got him back and remixed him,” Billy said. Each separate pipette full added back to Grisamentum’s bottled consciousness. Why else would there be these eyes? The ink must know what all those rejoined drips of him had known. “I guess they’ve got to husband him.” He was finite. Every order he wrote, every spell he became, his communications
were
him, and eroded him. If he was all written up, there would be only ten thousand little Grisamenta on scraps, each enough to be perhaps a magic postcard in some pathetic way.

When Billy was done there was a thimbleful, more than a drop but not much more. He dipped a needle into it. Dane stood, made a devotional sign, joined them. He glanced up. Wati hibernated through the union’s defeat in a doll strapped on the vehicle’s roof. Billy rifled through the papers he was using, scraps from his bag, all manner of odds and ends.

“Is this going to work?” Saira said.

“Works for Byrne,” Billy said. “Let’s see.”

“Are we actually finally going to find out what his plans are?”

Billy kept his eyes on Dane’s. He put the needle to the paper and dragged his hand, without looking, across the page. He drew a line, only a line.

“Oy,” Billy said. “Grisamentum. Pay attention.” He drew another line, and a third, and this last time suddenly it spasmed like a cardiogram, and there was writing.
UP YOURS
, the writing wrote. Tiny scratchy font. Billy redipped the needle.

“Let me,” Dane whispered, and Billy waved him back.

“You aren’t thinking straight,” Billy whispered to the little residue at the bottom of the container. “You’re probably a bit foggy. You must be a bit dilute, a bit mucky. Your little brain must be … little.” He held a pipette over the ink.

“We can dilute you a bit more. Does alcohol sting? We’ve got some lemon juice. We’ve got some acid.” Billy would swear the tiny pool flinched at that. The pigment that was Grisamentum swilled in the cup.

“What are you doing?” Billy said to the ink.

“My people …” Dane said.

Billy dipped, scratched, wrote.
FUCK YOU
.

“Right,” said Billy. He dipped the needle in bleach, and then into the ink. A tiny amount: this had to be a delicate kind of attack. The colour twitched, left a little fade. Billy mixed it, dragged the needle again.

BASTARDS
, Grisamentum wrote in itself.

“What are you doing?” Billy said.

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.

•   •   •

T
HEY 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.