its tank, and pooled in that last liquid in which the kraken lay.
Billy saw Byrne go for the syringe. He saw her move. He fired. The container of Grisamentum exploded.
• • •
BYRNE SCREAMED AS GLASS, INK AND BLOOD FROM HER LACERATED hand erupted across her front, fell through her fingers. Ink spattered across the floor, dissipated in the currents of the emptying house. A gunfarmer reentered and stared at Byrne and the ink-slick down her front. Billy roared a triumphant haaa! and stepped back through into the kitchen.
“Collingswood!” he shouted.
“What?” he heard. Billy glanced through the doorway and saw the kraken move.
“You got him?” Collingswood shouted.
“I did,” Billy gasped in delight. “I spilt him, he’s—”
Byrne was whispering into the tank. She was dripping, squeezing the ink that drenched her top into the kraken’s ink.
“Shit,” said Billy. He stared. “How much …”
The world answered him.
How much of Grisamentum does he need to merge with the kraken ink? To take it into him?
The world showed him: not much.
PLENTY OF GRISAMENTUM WAS RAGING IN WORDLESS LIQUIDITY AS the slosh of footprints dispersed him. But wrung out by his vizier was a small glassful of him, bloated with Krakenist knowledge from his hungry learning, squeezed into the tank. He swilled and bonded. He mixed with the kraken’s ink, ink also, the two inks one new ink, and changed.
The liquid in the tank began to bubble. The zombie squid flopped and wriggled and butted up against the Perspex. Its ink effervesced.
Billy fired at the tank, urgently. He punctured it right through, breaking off sections, and his bullets hit the dense body of the kraken. The liquid within did not flow from the holes. It held its tank-shape against gravity. A presence gathered into swirl-self out of the conjoined inks, burned man and kraken-writ. A voice made of bubbling laughed.
The dark liquid rose. A pillar, a man-shape that laughed and pointed. That raised both arms.
And started to rewrite rules.
So the wall that hid Billy disappeared. It did not fall down, did not evaporate, did not crumble but instead simply had not been there, was un. The kitchen was all part of the living room now, sinkless and cutleryless, full of lounges and bookshelves, wet with remnant sea.
The pistol in Billy’s hand was gone. Because Grisamentum wrote that there were no guns in that room. “Oh Jesus,” Billy managed to say, and the ink of Grisamentum wrote no across his consciousness. Not even God: he was the very rules God wrote. The gunfarmers stumbled. Byrne was laughing, was rising into the air, tugged by the boss she loved.
Billy felt something very dangerous and forlorn settle, the closing of something open across everything, as history began to flex at someone else’s will. He felt something get ready to rewrite the sky.
The ink gathered into a globe, hovering above the tank. Threads from it took word-shape and changed things. Writs in the air.
The kraken looked at Billy with its missing eyes. It moved. Spasmed. Not afraid, he saw, not in pain. Bottling it up. Bottling it up. Where was his angel? Where his glass-container hero?
This is a fiasco. He might almost have laughed at that strange formulation. It was the catastrophe, the disaster, the, the word was weirdly tenacious in his head, fiasco.
He opened his eyes. That word meant bottle.
It’s all metaphor, Billy remembered. It’s persuasion.
“It’s not a kraken,” he said. The ink-god did not hear him until he said it again, and all the attention in the world was, amused, upon him. “It’s not a kraken and it’s not a squid,” Billy said. The eyeless thing in the tank held his gaze.
“Kraken’s a kraken,” Billy said. “Nothing to do with us. That? That’s a specimen. I know. I made it. That’s ours.”
A troubled look went across Byrne’s face as she spun on her axis. Bottle magic, Billy thought. The ink shuddered.
“Thing is,” Billy said, in abrupt adrenalized bursts, “thing is the Krakenists thought I was a prophet of krakens because of what I’d done—but I never was. What I am—” Even if by mistake; even if a misunderstanding, a joke gone wrong; even if a will-this-do; how are any messiahs chosen? “What I am is a bottle prophet.” An accidental power of glass and memory. “So I know what that is.”
There was a sink by Billy again, and the wall was coming back, a few inches of it. The bottled kraken wheezed from its siphon. The wall grew.
“It’s not an animal or a god,” Billy said. “It didn’t