“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.”
WHEN GRISAMENTUM 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.
“WHY’S HE DONE ALL THIS?” DANE SAID. HE 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