Krakenists, come home, in mourning.
Around the same number as there had been for the service that Billy had witnessed, but that had been just a regular Sabbath, a sermon: this was the last gathering in the world. Those lapsed, busy, usually too tainted by secularism and the exhaustions of everyday life to attend with the regularity the faith they professed would prefer were all here.
A couple of those muscular young men, though most of the enforcers of devotion had been guards, and guarding, and were gone. Mostly these were unremarkable men and women of all types. The end of a church.
They did not look hard at Billy. They did not care anymore if he was a feral prophet, some pointless urban Saint Anthony. They were uninterested in anything but grief. They treated Dane as if he were the Teuthex. Though his role had always been that of licenced outsider, then renegade, he was as close as they came, now, to authority. None of them even shouted blame, called him apostate. He all but glowed with their piety.
“Grisamentum’s going to come for us, you know,” Billy said.
“Yes.”
“For the kraken.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll find it.”
“Yes.”
They sat. This was a time for valedictories.
“Dane. You can feel it. It’s now, it’s got to be tonight, or tomorrow night, or just maybe the night after. All we have to do’s keep the kraken out of danger till then, and we’ll have beat that prophecy.”
“I don’t care. And you don’t believe that anyway.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Which?” Dane said.
“Neither,” said Billy. “Either.”
“No, I do. Both.” Dane dialled a number on the desktop phone, still unsmashed, handed it to Billy. “It’s a voice-mail box,” he said. “Mine.”
“You have seventeen messages,” Billy heard. “First message.” A click, and the voice was the Teuthex’s. “Alright. I want to know what exactly you think you’re bloody doing? I read your note. You have a certain bloody leeway, but stealing a prophet is pushing your luck.”
Billy looked at Dane. Dane took the phone, pressed buttons to scroll on many days. To quite a recent moment.
“Yeah,” Dane said. “What you are doing now,” Billy heard, the Teuthex again, voice terse, “is blasphemy. I have given you a direct order. I’ve told you. Bring it in. Now is not the time to be having crises of faith. We can end this bloody abomination.”
“What’s this?” Billy said. He held the receiver up.
“I’m an operative,” Dane said.
“You were excommunicated …”
“Come on now. Please.”
Who would ever have trusted a representative of the cephalopod fundamentalists to deal with the issue of the kraken? A rogue, on the other hand … Who could be more trustworthy?
Billy shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It was all an act. You were under the Teuthex’s orders all along.”
“It wasn’t an act. It was a mission.” That ostentatious renegacy. “People are more likely to help if you’re exile.”
“Who knew?”
“Only the Teuthex.”
“So the rest of the church thought you really were …,” Billy said, and stopped. If your whole congregation thinks you outcast, are you not?
“They don’t care now,” Dane said.
“But you took me with you. Were you … you weren’t supposed to?”
“I needed all the edge I could get. You knew things. Still do. You bottled it, Billy. You never thought you was, Billy, but you are a prophet. Sorry, mate.”
“So the Teuthex telling everyone at that meeting that he wasn’t going to hunt for it …” The stance, that benthic remove, had been a lie, of which, in their loyalty to their pope, the church had been persuaded. Only the Teuthex and his faux-exile operative knowing the squiddish truth, and hunting for the body of god.
“But …” Billy said slowly, “you disobeyed orders.”
“Yeah. I brought you with me and wouldn’t bring you back. And when we found it I didn’t bring it back to them.”
“Why?”
“Because they were going to get rid of it, Billy, as they should. And they were right, but you know how you’d get rid of it? Everyone’s said. It’s true. They would’ve burnt it. That’s the holy way. Having that kraken out there in that tank like that … it’s a blasphemy. So I was to bring it back. But the Teuthex was going to burn it.”
“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