"It's a duty of care," Dane said.

"Dane. We need understanding, certainly," Moore said. "But we have to have faith."

"What could show more faith than getting out there?" Dane asked. "You understand what's going on?" Dane said to Billy. "How dangerous it all is? The Tattoo wants you, and someone has a kraken someone has a kraken. That's a god, Billy. And we don't know who, or why."

A GOD GOD, B BILLY THOUGHT. THE THIEF HAD A BLEACHY Formalin-preserved mass of rubbery stink. But he knew truths were not true. Formalin-preserved mass of rubbery stink. But he knew truths were not true.

"God can take care of itself," Moore said to Dane. "You know things are happening, Billy. You've known for days."

"I seen seen you feel it," Dane said. "I seen you watching the sky." you feel it," Dane said. "I seen you watching the sky."

"This is an end," Moore said. "And it's our god's doing it, and it isn't in our control. And that's not right." He splayed his fingers in a ludicrous prayer-motion. "That's why you're here, Billy. You know things you don't even know," he said. The fervour in it gave Billy a chill. "You've worked on its holy flesh." worked on its holy flesh."

Chapter Eighteen

"YOU COULD JUST STAMP YOUR LITTLE FEET, COULDN'T YOU, Subby? You could unbuckle your shoe and throw it in the lake." Subby? You could unbuckle your shoe and throw it in the lake."

Goss stamped. Subby walked a few paces behind him, his hands behind his back in crude mimicry of the man's pose. Goss was bent forward and beetling with energy. He uncoupled his hands repeatedly and wiped them on his mucky top. Subby watched him and did the same.

"Where are we now?" Goss said. "Well you may ask. Well you may ask. Where indeed are we now? Not often his nibs is wrong, but that Mr. Harrow clearly not so butter-wouldn't-melt as he'd give you to think, if he's got bouncers like that ready to spirit him away. Still not sure who that was who banged your bonce, you poor lad. You doing better?" He ruffled Subby's hair to the boy's openmouthed gaze.

"What is is he like? He's all snotted up in this like slurry in alveoli. Still our best lead, of which his skin-inked eminence now admits, and, what do you say, once is never enough. We've caught up with him before, we'll do it again. he like? He's all snotted up in this like slurry in alveoli. Still our best lead, of which his skin-inked eminence now admits, and, what do you say, once is never enough. We've caught up with him before, we'll do it again.

"Where? That's the question mark indeed, my young apprentice.

"Ears to the ground, Subby, tongues aflap." He did as he said and tasted where they were, and if pedestrians or shoppers in that pre-suburban shopping precinct noticed his slurping snake lick they pretended not to. "Mostly we're after Fluffy, so any flavours of the you-know-what, a distinct and meaty-bleachy-gamey bouquet I'm told, then veer we go, but otherwise, seems Mr. Harrow knows a little smidgeon, and of him I still recall the savour."

THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF DRAMAS OCCURRING IN THE CITY IN those days: machinations, betrayals, insinuations and misunderstandings between groups with distinct and overlapping interests. In the offices, workshops, laboratories and libraries of angry scholars and self-employed theorist-manipulators were screamed arguments between them and those nonhuman companions still around. "How can you do this to me?" was the sentence most regularly spoken, followed by, "Oh go fuck yourself." those days: machinations, betrayals, insinuations and misunderstandings between groups with distinct and overlapping interests. In the offices, workshops, laboratories and libraries of angry scholars and self-employed theorist-manipulators were screamed arguments between them and those nonhuman companions still around. "How can you do this to me?" was the sentence most regularly spoken, followed by, "Oh go fuck yourself."

In the headquarters of the Confederation of British Industry was a hallway between a much-frequented toilet and a small meeting room, that, if most members of the organisation noticed, they did so to briefly wonder why they had never done so before; and they tended not to again after that first time. It was not as brightly lit as it should be. The watercolours on its walls looked a bit vague: they were there, certainly, but rather difficult to pay attention to.

At the end of the corridor a plastic plaque read STOREROOM STOREROOM or or OUT OF ORDER OUT OF ORDER or something-some phrase tricky to recall with exactitude but the gist of which was or something-some phrase tricky to recall with exactitude but the gist of which was not this door, go somewhere else not this door, go somewhere else. Two figures ignored that gist. In front was a large man wearing an expensive suit and a black motorcycle helmet. Just behind him, her hand in his, a woman in her sixties stumbled and tripped like an anxious animal. She was slack-faced, dressed in a threadbare trench coat.

The man knocked and opened without waiting for an answer. Inside was a small office. A man stood to greet them, indicated the two seats in front of his desk. The suited man did not sit. He pushed the woman into one of the chairs. He kept his hands on her shoulders. Her coat swung open and she wore nothing beneath it. Her skin was cold- and sick-looking.

For several seconds nothing happened. Then the woman moved her mouth extraordinarily. She made a ringing noise.

"Hello?" said the man behind the desk.

"Hello," said the woman, clicking and hollow-sounding, in a man's voice, a London voice. Her eyes were blank as a mannequin's. "Am I speaking to Mr. Dewey of the CBI?"

"You are. Thank you for contacting me so quickly."

"Not a problem," the woman said. She drooled slightly. "I understand you have a proposal for me. With regard to the, ah, current dispute."

"I do, Mr.... I do. We were wondering whether you might be able to help us."

IT WAS IN CRICKLEWOOD THAT, AFTER A CONSULTATION BASED ON highly specific geographopathic criteria, the Metropolitan Police had located its abquotidian operatives: the FSRC and their highly specialist support staff-secretaries unfazed by the information they were required to type, pathologists who would autopsy whatever bodies were put in front of them, no matter how unorthodox their arrangements or causes of death. Vardy, Baron and Collingswood met in the cold lab of one such, Dr. Harris, a tall woman vastly unfazed by absurd and knacked evidence. They had her show them the remains from the basement of the museum one more time. highly specific geographopathic criteria, the Metropolitan Police had located its abquotidian operatives: the FSRC and their highly specialist support staff-secretaries unfazed by the information they were required to type, pathologists who would autopsy whatever bodies were put in front of them, no matter how unorthodox their arrangements or causes of death. Vardy, Baron and Collingswood met in the cold lab of one such, Dr. Harris, a tall woman vastly unfazed by absurd and knacked evidence. They had her show them the remains from the basement of the museum one more time.

"You told me to leave it in one piece," she had said.

"Now I'm telling you to open the ruddy thing," Baron had said, and half an hour later, after a crack and careful prising, the jar rocked in two pieces on the steel. Between them, the man who had been inside almost retained his cylindrically constrained form. The edges of his flesh, the pose of his hands, still looked as if he were pressed up against the glass.

"There," Harris said. She laser-pointed. The man stared at her with the intensity of the drowned. "Like I told you," she said. She indicated the bottle's neck. "There's no way he could have got in there." The FSRC operatives looked at each other.

"Thought perhaps you might have had a change of heart about that," Baron said.

"Couldn't have happened. He couldn't have been in there unless he was put in when he was born and left to grow up in it. Which given that he has several tattoos, plus for all the other obvious impossibility-related reasons, is not what happened."

"Alright," Baron said. "That's not what we're concerned with here. Right, ladies and gentlemen? What do we know of the methods of our suspects? Do we see any signature moves here? Our question here here is about Goss and Subby." is about Goss and Subby."

GOSS AND S SUBBY. GOSS AND S SUBBY!

Collingswood was sure she was right. Anders Hooper was a good origamist, but the main reason he had got the job was because he was new, young, and did not recognise his employer.

He was no younger than she, of course, but as Vardy had said, with stern approval, "Collingswood doesn't count." Her research might have been unorthodox, her learning partial, but she took seriously knowledge of the world in which she operated. She read its histories in chaotic order, but she read them. How could she fail to know of Goss and Subby?

The notorious "Soho Goats" pub crawl with Crowley, that had ended in quadruple murder, memory of the photographs of which still made Collingswood close her eyes. The Dismembering of the Singers, while London struggled to recover from the Great Fire. In 1812, Walkers on the Face-Road had been Goss and Subby. Had to have been. Goss, King of the Murderspivs-that designation given him by a Roma intellectual who had, doubtless extremely carefully, resisted identification. Subby, whom the smart money said was the subject of Margaret Cavendish's poem about the "babe of meat and malevolence."

Goss and fucking Subby. Sliding shifty through Albion's history, disappearing for ten, thirty, a hundred blessed years at a time, to return, evening all evening all, wink wink, with a twinkle of a sociopathic eye, to unleash some charnel-degradation-for-hire.

There was no specificity to Goss and Subby. Try to get what information you can about precisely what their knacks were, what Collingswood still thought of as their superpowers, and all you'd get was that Goss was a murderous shit like no other murderous shit like no other. Supershit; Wonder-shit; Captain Total Bastard. Nothing funny about it. Call it banal if it makes you feel better but evil's evil. Goss might stretch his mouth to do one person, stories said, might punch a hole in another, might find himself spitting flames to burn up a third. Whatever.

The first time Collingswood had read of them, it had been in a facsimile of a document from the seventeenth century, a description of the "long-fingered bad giver and his dead alive son," and for some weeks afterward, unfamiliar with old fonts, she had thought them Goff and Fubby. She and Baron had had a good laugh at that.

"Fo," she said. "Iff it? Iff it the work of Goff and Fubby?" Baron did, in fact, briefly, laugh. "Iff it their MO?"

And there was the problem. Goss and Subby had no such thing as an MO. Baron, Vardy and Collingswood peered at the preserved man. They referred to their notes, made more, circumnavigated the corpse, muttered to themselves and each other.

"All we can say for sure," said Baron at last, peering, leaning in, "is that so far as we know, there's no record of them having done anyone in like this before. I pulled the files. Vardy?"

Vardy shrugged. "We're flying blind," he said. "We all know that. But you want my opinion? Ultimately I think ... my opinion's no. What I know of their methods, it's always been up-close, hands, bones. This is ... something else. I don't know what this is, but this isn't that, I don't think."

"Alright," said Baron. "So we're after Goss and bloody Subby, and we're also looking for someone else else, who pickles their enemies." He shook his head. "Lord, for a bloody Grievous Bodily Harm. Alright, ladies and gents, let's get moving on this fellow. We need an ID on the poor sod ASAP. Among many other bloody things."

Chapter Nineteen

INTO NEW L LONDON? THE CITY'S VAST UNSYMPATHETIC ATTENTION'S on you, the Teuthex said. on you, the Teuthex said. You're hunted You're hunted. Billy imagined himself emerging big-eyed as a fish, and London-where the Tattoo, Goss, Subby, the workshop waited-noticing. Oh Oh there there you are you are.

He walked almost as if free under the city. More than once Krakenists passed him and stared and he stared back at them, but they did not interrupt him. In places the grey bas-reliefs of cephalopods were crumbled and beneath were antique bricks. He found a door into a bright-lit room.

It made him gasp. It had the side-to-side proportions of a small sitting room, but its floor was way below. Absurdly deep. Steps angled down. It was a shaft of roomness, shelved with books. Ladders dangled from the stacks. As the church's holdings grew, Billy thought, horizontal constraints required generations of kraken worshippers to dig for their library.

Billy read titles on his way down. A Tibetan Book of the Dead A Tibetan Book of the Dead by the Bhagavad Gita, by two or three Qur'ans, testaments old and new, arcana and Aztec theonomicons. Krakenlore. Cephalopod folklore; biology; humour; art and oceanography; cheap paperbacks and antiquarian rarities. by the Bhagavad Gita, by two or three Qur'ans, testaments old and new, arcana and Aztec theonomicons. Krakenlore. Cephalopod folklore; biology; humour; art and oceanography; cheap paperbacks and antiquarian rarities. Moby-Dick Moby-Dick, shapes etched onto its cover. Verne's 20,000 Leagues 20,000 Leagues. A Pulitzer medal escutcheon stapled to a single page of one book, on which the line "Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness" was the only part left visible below paint. The Highest Tide The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch, nailed upside down like something unholy.

Tennyson and a book of poems by Hugh Cook faced each other, open to competing pages. Billy read the counter to Alfred Lord.

THE KRAKEN WAKES The little silver fish Scatter like shrapnel As I plunge upward From the black underworld.

The green waves break from my sides As I roll up, forced by my season, And before the tenth second I can feel my own heat- The wind can never cool as oceans do.By mid-morning, My skin has sweated into agony.

The turmoil of my intestines Bloats out against my skin.

I'm too sick to struggle-I hang In the thermals of pain, Screaming against the slow, slow, slow Rise toward descent.And the madness of my pain Seems to have infected everything- Cities hack each other into blood; Ships sink in firestorm; armies Flail with sticks and crutches; Obesity staggers toward coronary Down the streets of starvation.

"Jesus," Billy whispered.

Samizdat, sumptuous hardbacks, handwritten texts, dubious-looking output from small presses. Apocrypha Tentacula; On Worship of Kraken; The Gospel According to Saint Steenstrup Apocrypha Tentacula; On Worship of Kraken; The Gospel According to Saint Steenstrup.

We cannot see the universe, Billy read in a text taken at random. It was cobbled in incompetent typeface.

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to glow. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.

Old volumes bulged with addenda, were embossed Catechismata Catechismata. Scrapbooks with glued-in snips. Annotated and those notes annotated, and on in unstinting interpretation, a merciless teuthic hermeneutic.

He read the names Dickins and Jelliss, Alice Chess Alice Chess. A spread about mutant versions of the game with arcane rules, bishops and pawns given strange powers, transmogrified pieces called saurians, torals and anti-kings, and one called a kraken. The "universal leaper" was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was. Kraken = universal leaper + zero Kraken = universal leaper + zero, he read, = universal sleeper = universal sleeper. It could move to any square including the one it was already on including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.

On the board & in life for Kraken in the void nothing is not nothing. Kraken stillness is not lack. Its zero is ubiquity. This is the movement that looks like not moving, & it is the most powerful move of all.

Price rises were a function of neutral buoyancy, Billy read. Art Nouveau was coil-envy. Wars were meagre reflections of speculated kraken politics.

AFTER UNCOUNTED HOURS B BILLY LOOKED UP AND SAW, BY THE room's raised entrance, a young woman. He remembered her from one of the moments during his visions. She stood in her nondescript London uniform of hoodie and jeans. She bit her lip. room's raised entrance, a young woman. He remembered her from one of the moments during his visions. She stood in her nondescript London uniform of hoodie and jeans. She bit her lip.

"Hi," she said, shy. "It's an honour. They said that, like, everyone out there's looking for you. The angel of memory and everything, Dane said." Billy blinked. "Teuthex said do you want to come, and they'd be glad if you was ... if you want follow me because they're waiting."

He followed her to a smaller room, containing one big table and many people. Dane and Moore were there. A few of the other men and women were in robes like the Teuthex's; most were in civvies. Everyone looked angry. On the table was a digital recorder. The noise of rowdy debate stopped with his entry. Dane stood.

"Billy," said Moore after a moment. "Please join us."

"I protest," someone said. There were murmurs.

"Billy, please join us," Moore said.

"What is this?" Billy said.

"There's never been a time like this," Moore said. "Are you interested in the future?" Billy said nothing. "Do you ever read your horoscope?"

"No."

"Sensible. You can't see the the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong." future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong."

"Might be," Dane said.

"They might," Moore said. "But it's all degrees of might. You want want your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And no one disagrees." no one disagrees." He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. "And that's wrong. He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. "And that's wrong.

"This is a recording we made of a consultation with the Londonmancers," he said.

"What's ...?" Billy said.

"Well you may ask," said Dane.

"Voices of the city," Moore said.

"They wish."

"Dane, please. Oldest oracles in the M25."

"Sorry," Dane said. "But Fitch has been off for years. Just tells you what you want to hear. People just go for tradition ..."

"Some of the others are sharper," said someone else.

"You're forgetting," the Teuthex said. "It was the Londonmancers called it first. Fitch may be past it, true. People go out of tradition, true."

"Sentiment," Dane said.

"Maybe," Moore said. "But this time it was him called it. He's been begging people to pay attention." He pressed Play.

"-best if you ask," said a curt digital voice. said a curt digital voice.

"That's Saira," Moore said.

"-what you're here for."

"Something's coming up, underneath everything." It was the Teuthex. It was the Teuthex. "We're looking for a path between possible-" "We're looking for a path between possible-"

"Not this time." An old man's voice. He muttered in and out of sense. He sounded urgent, in a confused way. An old man's voice. He muttered in and out of sense. He sounded urgent, in a confused way. "Have faith, but you have to "Have faith, but you have to do do something, understand? You're right, it's coming, and you have to ... It's all ending." something, understand? You're right, it's coming, and you have to ... It's all ending."

"Have faith in what?" the Teuthex said. " the Teuthex said. "In London?"

The old man Fitch maundered about back streets and hidden histories, described pentacles in the banalities of town planning. "Time was I'd have said that," "Time was I'd have said that," he abruptly said. he abruptly said.

"I don't understand ..."