It would not have been Dane’s church’s planned end, their infolding of convolutes into the glint on a giant eye, when roaring perhaps at the surface the elder kraken might rise like belligerent continents and die, and spurt out like ink a new time. This would not have been that hallelujah-worthy end, but an antiapocalypse, a numinousless revelation, time-eating fire. An accident.
What terrible anxiety. Dane’s horror had been that his church would be the butt of a cosmic banana-skin-slip. It’s no one’s fault, but we set fire to the future. God, how embarrassed are we?
“But look,” Dane said. He indicated around him. “There’s no one left to burn it now, and that ending still hasn’t gone. So that’s not what’s going to cause it. I was wrong. Maybe if I’d done what I was told to do, we would have saved everything.” He swallowed.
“This isn’t your fault.”
“Reckon?” Dane said, and Billy had no idea. Should have would have could have. They sat in the office of the dead Teuthex and looked at broken pictures.
“Where are the Londonmancers?”
“Panicking,” said Billy. “Grisamentum must be coming, and it isn’t going to be long before he finds us. All we need to do, what they think, is just keep the kraken safe till that night’s over. That’s the plan.”
“That’s a bullshit plan.”
“I know,” Billy said.
“It is,” Dane said. “How many times they going to say the night’s about to come? If Paul hasn’t given in to the Tattoo it won’t be long before he does. Or Goss and Subby’ll find him. Or Griz’ll burn the world down first.” Something somewhere was dripping. Dane spoke to its rhythm.
“So,” said Billy.
“So we make it the night,” Dane said. “Don’t run. Take it to Grisamentum. It’s his plan that gets everything burning, for whatever reason, whether that’s what he has in mind or not. So we get rid of him, when he’s gone …” He brushed imaginary dust from his hands. “Problem solved.”
Billy had to smile a bit. “We don’t even know where he is. He’s got gunfarmers, he’s got monsterherds, he’s got who-knows-what paper-and-ink magic—what do we have?” Billy said. He barely even heard the absurdity of words like that in his mouth anymore. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to—”
“Remember how we found the Teuthex?” Dane said. “Why d’you think he was reaching for the altar?”
IN THE CHURCH ROOM THE LAST TWENTY OR SO KRAKENISTS WERE gathered. Old women and men and young, in all manner of clothes. A slice of London, weak with grief. New unwilling recruits to a tiny historical crew, who had outlived their own religion.
“Brothers and sisters,” Dane muttered.
“This is the last Krakenist brigade,” he said to Billy. “Any others out there ain’t coming back.”
The altar, of course, was a mass of carved suckers and interwoven arms. Dane pressed certain of the pads in a certain order. “This is what the Teuthex was going for,” he said.
It had not been some mere valedictory nearer-my-god gesture, the Teuthex’s reach. An inset section of the altar uncoiled. Dane slowly swung the metal front of the altar down.
Behind it was glass. Behind the glass, things preserved. Relics of kraken. Billy gasped as the scale of what he saw made sense to him. The altar was as high as his chest. Filling it almost completely was a beak.
He had seen its shape many times before. Vaguely parrot, extravagantly wicked in its curve. But the largest he had ever seen would have fit his hand, and that would have belonged to an Architeuthis close to ten metres long. This mouthpiece reached from the floor to his sternum. It would gape large enough to swallow him. When those chitin edges met they might shear trees.
“It’s going to bite me,” Dane said. He spoke dreamily. “Just a nip. Just to draw blood.”
“What? What, Dane? Why?”
“All this lot left. We’re the end crew.”
“But why?”
“So we can attack.”
“What?” said Billy. Dane told him.
Last-ditch defenders were not new. There were always kings under the hill. The golem of Prague—though that was a bad example, had missed its call, a dreadful oversleeping. Each of the cults of London had hopes in its own constructs, its own secret spirits, its own sleeping paladins, to intervene when the minute hand went vertical. The Krakenists had had their berserkers. But the fighters who had volunteered and been chosen for that sacred final duty were all dead, before the Teuthex could effect their becomings. So the last Krakencorps had to be from the