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.
Chapter Seventy-Four
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