China Mieville - Kraken

“You still got it?”

“Why the hell would he want to end the world?” Billy said. “He’s not a nihilist. See the way he was looking at it?”

“Could be unintentional. Side effect. By-product.”

“Jesus, I hurt,” Billy said. “By-product of what? Burning the kraken? He sent Al to get it? Why’d he want to do that? Okay, maybe. But you heard what he said. Someone’s took her. He thought it was us. That’s part of this.”

In the boarded-up building they squatted, they went through the papers. They scanned the mainstream physics, but it was the arcana that gripped them.

“Look at this shit,” Billy said, turning the pages of Abnatural Burnings. He could not follow it, of course, but the abstracts of the essays-cum-experiments-cum-hexes gave glimpses. “‘Reversible ashes,’” he said. “Jesus. ‘Frigid conflagration.’” It was a textbook of alternative fire.

“What’s reversible ashes?” Dane said.

“If I’m reading this right, it’s what you get if you burn something with something called ‘memory fire.’” Billy read the conclusion. “If you keep them hot, they’re ashes: if they get cold again, they go back to what they were before.” There was endless fire, that burned without consuming-notorious, that one. Antifire, that burnt colder and colder, into untemperatures below absolute zero.

Papers were folded between the book’s pages, bookmarks. Billy read them. “‘Behave and you get her back. Prepare three charges of,” hold on, “katachronophlogiston. Delivery TBA.’” He and Dane looked at each other. “It’s like a ransom note. He’s making notes for his work on it.” Under the typed words were scrawled pen and pencil.

“I suppose using that as your pad would inspire your bloody researches,” Dane said.

“See what’s weird about this?” Billy said. He held out the photo. “Look. Look at it. The little girl’s in the middle, Cole to one side.” The two of them were smiling.

“It’s bonfire night, maybe.”

“No, that’s what I’m saying. Look.” The layout was skewed, the fire to the other side of the girl from Cole, very close, lighting them strangely. “He’s on one side of her and the fire’s on the other.” Billy shook it. “This isn’t a picture of the two of them, it’s the three of them. This is a family shot.”

Dane and Billy squinted at it. Dane nodded slowly.

“The djinns are freaking out, people reckon,” Dane said. “Maybe it’s got something to do with all this. This was a mixed marriage.”

“And now someone’s got his daughter. He thought it was us.”

“He’s obeying orders. Even if it’s his stuff behind the burning, this isn’t his plan, he’s just doing as he’s told.”

“His kid. Find the kidnapper…” Billy said.

“Yeah, which he thinks is us.”

DID THAT MEAN ANOTHER PURSUER? WELL. THEY HAD NEVER BEEN unhunted anyway. That was why they stayed well away from the kraken on its circling journey. No matter how out of sight the Londonmancers were, obscured by the matter of the city of which they were functions, Billy and Dane were the targets of the greatest personhunt in memory, and they could not risk bringing that sort of attention to the enjarred god. Dane prayed to it, quietly but visibly, quite unembarrassed. He hankered to be in its presence but would not endanger it-any more than it was already endangered, what with the whole end of the world.

The proximity of that worst horizon did not mean they should forget, as they did, the more everyday hunters and knackers after them for the Tattoo’s lucre. The drab and frightening fact of that came back to them that night, as they worked through Cole’s papers, auditioned theories as to who might be behind what terrible action done to Cole’s child, as they walked a dangerous walk to a dingy café where they could access the Internet. A commotion sounded in some alley near them.

“What’s that?”

“It’s…” A drone between the bricks. A bounty-hunting swarm, it sounded like, some baleful hive thinker coming at them for payment in evil apiary kind. Billy and Dane matched each other preparation for preparation. They checked weapons and clung close to the wall, got ready to fight or run while the moan came closer under the noise of the cars and the lorries only around the corner.

“Get onto the main road,” said Billy. “They going to send it out there?”

“Or under?” said Dane, nodding at a lid in the pavement. Billy weighed the options, but hesitated, because there was another sound coming. Dane and Billy heard a glass-and-bone rattle, the slide of a jar on the pavement.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “It’s still following. It’s back.” A quick warning in his head, in an articulate wave of pain. “It’s found me again.”

A bee-mass turned into their sight. Spread out like a chitin-cloud wall, blocking their exit, but through those insects another figure darkly was visible, roll-wobble-walking. There was an eddy among the bloodymoney bees and an inrush of air as a seal was cracked. The buzz faltered. A smoke of insects gushed like reversed film out of sight, like steam back into a kettle, like something, and there was nothing before Billy and Dane but the angel of memory.

It showed itself to Billy for approval, having saved him. The source of his glass and time clench; he, mistakenly, its test-tube prophet. Could it feel his guilt at not being what it thought? Being promised by nothing to no one? Its body was again a Formalin-filled bottle, in which, this time, floated hundreds of specks, evanescing bodies of the attacker. Its bone arms were bones, its head was made of bone.

But it was much reduced. It had been destroyed, probably more than once, on its exhausting treks to track and protect Billy. It had dissipated and reconstituted. This time it had made itself from some preserving jar less than half Billy’s height. This time its skull was an ape’s or a child’s.

It chattered at him from the dark of an alley. He raised his hand to it. Exhaustion came over it-Billy could feel the echo in his head-and it shivered. The glass-bottle-and-bone sculpture settled into a more natural and complete still as its fleshless arms fell from it to become rubbish, as its skull head toppled and rolled from its slanted lid to crack apart on the pavement. Only its jawbone stayed, held on the lid’s glass nub handle. Dissolving bees bobbed in its swill.

Maybe its presiding angel force was remaking itself in another yet-smaller bottle with a yet-smaller bone head, back at its museum nest, and it would set out on its journey again tracking the power it had given Billy, the trace of itself in him, to find him or be broken on the way and try again.

Dane and Billy went to another vagrant shelter. They were glad when it rained: it seemed to batten down the burning smell Cole had brought on them that would not quite go. Billy still smelt it when he slept. He smelt it through the water in which he sank in his dream. Warm, cool as the sea grew dark, cooler darker cold, then warm again. Through black he saw the dream-glow of swimming light things. He was falling into a city, a drowned London. The streets were laid out in glow, the streetlights still illuminated, each glare investigated by a penumbra of fish. Crabs as big as the cars they pushed aside walked the streets made chasms.

From towers and top floors waved random flags of seaweed. Coral crusted the buildings. Billy’s dream-self sank. There were, he saw, men and women, submerged pedestrians walking slow as flaneurs, window-shopping the long-dead long-drowned shops. Figures ambling, all in brass-topped deep-sea suits. Air pipes emerged from the top of each globe helmet and dangled up into the dark.

No cephalopods. Billy thought, This is someone else’s apocalypse dream.