China Mieville - Kraken

“He’s seen us,” Billy said.

“He’s not sure yet,” Dane whispered. His weapon bucked. The man dropped, silently.

“Wow,” Billy said.

“Shit,” said Dane. He was trembling.

“We don’t have long now,” Billy said.

The krakenbit were emerging from their cars, moving with strange ungainliness. As they came forward, their diversion arrived.

THE LONDONMANCER ATTACKERS CAME AS AGREED, WITH DRAMA. An army of masonry. Those few left whose knack was to wake the city’s defences had done what they could do. They had sent their alarums in parachemicals, waves of pathogen anxiety. They stimulated immune response in the factory grounds. Birthing of brick angles; emerging from hollows in boscage; unwinding from the ruined car; London’s leucocytes came on in attack.

One was ambulant architecture; another a trash marionette; another a window onto another part of the city, a monster-shaped hole. They moved across urban matter, niche-filling and/or huge. Their footsteps made the sounds of barking dogs and braking cars. One threw back its head-analogue and shouting a war shout that was the puttering-engine call of a bus.

It threw open the compound doors. The bravest Londonmancers ran in. They raised weapons, or goads with which to direct their giant cellular charges. There was movement behind the factory windows.

Emerging from side doors and from behind dustbins came gunfarmers, murmuring fertility prayers as they shot. A canine shape of discarded paper leapt from a window. For seconds Billy thought it was blown by monsterherds, but there was no one to gust it. Each shred of paper in that wolf totality was ink-stained.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Dane. That’s him. He’s all over them.” Enough of Grisamentum’s ink presence was on each piece to knack his motion. He was profligate now, impatient at the edge of his intended apotheosis. The ink-paper wolf jumped onto a screaming Londonmancer, and the paper teeth tore her as if they were bone.

“Oh Christ,” Billy said. “Time to move.” He aimed his phaser and crawled.

Below him in the wall a stretch of crumbled brick changed, was pressed into new shape, become an ancient door with a long-broken lock so it could be pushed open. Saira came in and bit her lip and stood aside, and the krakenbit came in behind her. Billy saw those nipped by the squid god.

They were stronger than they had any right to be. They picked up masonry and hurled it. They were misshapen and changing. Tides moved on them; their muscles fluttered in directions they had not been made to take. “Christ,” he whispered. He fired a weak whining jolt at the building, a wild distraction as he stared.

One man was growing Architeuthis eyes, fierce black circles taking up each side of his head, squeezing his features between them. A woman bulged, her body become a muscular tube from which her limbs poked, absurd but strong. A woman streaked across the distance, jetted by her new siphon, moving through air as if it were water, her hair billowed by currents in the sea miles off. There was a man with arms raised to display blisters bursting and making themselves squid suckers, another with a wicked beak where he had had a mouth.

They tore at the gunfarmers and through the swirl of inked paper. Bullets ripped them, and they roared and bit and smashed back. The suckered man looked hopefully at the inside of his arms. The marks were blebbing into little vacuums, but arms his arms remained. Billy watched him. It was awesome, yes, but.

But was it a godly tease that none of the krakenbit had tentacles?

Dane was not newly shaped. Only, he looked back at Billy and his eyes were all pupil now, all dark. He had no hunting arms.

“Billy.” A tiny voice from Billy’s plastic man.

“Wati!” Billy snapped to draw Dane’s attention. He waved the figure. “Wati.”

“… Found you,” the voice said, and coughed again. Faded out.

“Wati…”

After seconds of silence, Wati said, “First thing I did ever that was mine was un-be that body that got made. Could do it again. They caught me off guard, is all. I just got to…” The rude reanchoring in that doll of exploitation had hurt him terribly. “This was the only place I could find. Been in it so much.” He was half-awake, at best, from the no-soul’s-land between statues where he had been in coma. He drifted back into silence.

“Damn it,” Billy said. “Wati.” There was nothing more, and their time was up. Billy beckoned and crept forward, and Dane crouched with him on the balcony below the factory’s high window, looking down within at the last preparations of Grisamentum.

THE CHAMBER SWARMED WITH PAPER. IN PLANES AND SHREDS, torn-up pieces, flitting with purpose, all smeared with ink. Below them the room was scattered with old machinery, the remains of printing presses and cutters. Walkways circled at several levels. Billy sighted the core of gunfarmers remaining.

There was Byrne, scribbling notes, looking down and arguing, writing Grisamentum’s response to her in himself. By a huge pile of torn-off hardcovers, technicians fiddled with gears, ignoring the chaos, pressing soaked paper pulp in a hydraulic machine and collecting the dirt-coloured off-run.

“It’s the library,” Billy said. The soaked, shredded kraken library, rendered to its ink. He pointed through the glass.

All that antique knowledge poured over with solvent, the inks seeped out of the pages where they had been words. Some pigment must be the remains of coffee, the dark of age, the chitin of crushed beetles. Even so, the juice they were collecting was the distillate of all kraken knowledge. And Billy saw, there, presiding over the rendering, on a raised dais, in a great big plain pail, the bulk of Grisamentum. His sloshing liquid body.

Dane shoved into the glass and made some enraged noise. He was radiating cold.

“He’s going to add it to himself,” Billy said. “Or himself to it.” It would be rich, that liquid print. A liquid darkness that had been all the Architeuthis secrets, homeopathically recalling the shapes it had once taken, the writing, the secrets it had been. Metabolise that, and Grisamentum would know more about the kraken than any Teuthex ever had.

“Speed this up!” They could hear Byrne through the glass. Like the glass was thinning to help them. “There’s time to finish this. We can track down the animal, but we’ve got to get the last of the knowledge down. Quick.” The paper stormed as if a whirlwind filled the room.

A high-flying scrap at the top of the rustling column flattened itself against the glass beside Billy and Dane. The ink on it regarded them. A still second. It plummeted back through the paper vortex. The rest followed, the swirl falling through its own centre.

“Come on!” shouted Billy. He kicked the glass into the room and fired through the paperstrom, but no beam came out. He threw the dead phaser at the giant inkwell full of Grisamentum.

There were shots, and one, two of the Krakenists who had fought their way in fell. Dane did not move. Billy heard a percussion and a damp smacking into Dane’s body. A new wound in Dane’s side oozed black blood. Dane looked at Billy with abyssal eyes. He smiled not very human. He made himself bigger.

Billy grabbed for the pistol in Dane’s belt, and the papers bombed him. Some came at him as a biting skull. He swung the bleach bottle he carried and sent a spray of the stuff in a curve like a spreading-out sabre. It depigmented where it landed. He could smell bleach amid the gun smell, the same ammoniac scent as that of Architeuthis.

Screams. A Krakenist was being devoured by a flock of Grisamentum stains shaped playfully murderous into a paper tiger. Billy caught Dane’s eye. They looked something at each other. Dane vaulted the fence, his wound not slowing him at all. He fell fast, but not at gravity’s idiot control. The paper tried to disrupt him, but he twisted as he fell. He fired and killed an engineer. He sprayed bleach on his way down, streaming it through papers that instinctively flinched away, at Grisamentum.