“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 exist until I curated it. That’s my specimen.”

The new rules were being crossed out. Billy could feel the fight. He saw the wall shrink and grow, be there and un-be and have been and not have been; he felt able to stand and not; he felt the fucking sky reshape and rework as with instructions written and put under erasure in penmanship-duel the consciousness of Grisamentum-full of new krakeny power, ink-magic-battled with the tentacled thing that was not kraken at all.

The specimen pressed its arms against its tank. Suckers pressed vacuum-flush against the plastic, pulling the great body into position. It was not trying to get out-that was where it belonged.

Billy was standing.

He had birthed it into consciousness. It was Architeuthis dux. Specimen, pining for preservative. Squid-shaped paradox but not the animal of the ocean. Architeuthis, Billy understood for the first time, was not that undefined thing in deep water, which was only ever itself. Architeuthis was a human term.

“It’s ours,” he said.

Its ink was vast magic: Grisamentum had been right about that. But the universe had heard Billy, and he had been persuasive.

Maybe if Grisamentum had harvested ink direct from those trench dwellers, not from a jarred, cured, curated thing, the power would have been as protean as he had intended. But this was Architeuthis ink, and it was disinclined to be his whim. “It’s a specimen and it’s in the books,” Billy said. “We’ve written it up.”

The comixed inks raged against each other. The universe flexed as they fought. But as Grisamentum mixed with the ink it mixed with him; as he took its power it took his. And much of Grisamentum had been spilt: there was more of it than of him. It was specimen ink, curated by a citizen of London, by Billy, and bit by bit it metabolised the ink-man. The wall was rising again, and Byrne was falling to the ground.

Grisamentum sent out anguish that made the house quake. He slipped out of selfness like all the rest of him, in the tide, in the drains. He was overwritten. He was effaced by ink that, as it won, in an instant’s satisfaction returned to its unthinking form and fell out of the air like dark rain.

THE WALL WAS BACK. THE KITCHEN WAS BACK. THE WET HOUSE WAS full again of dead fish.

“What did you do?” Byrne screamed at Billy. “What did you do?”

The sense, all sense, of Grisamentum, was gone. There was only the undead Architeuthis, still moving, stinking, chemical in its tank, poor skin flaking, poor tentacles palsied, drenched in ink that was nothing, now, but dark grey-brown liquid.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

THE GUNFARMERS RAN. WHY WOULD THEY STAY? BYRNE STAYED. Why, and where, would she go? She let Billy disarm her. She ran her fingers through the water on the floor.

“Nice one, rudeboy,” Collingswood said to Billy.

He sat with his back to the streaming walls. London was safe, Billy kept thinking, not subject to that cosmic scriptic totalitarianism. He heard Saira and Simon coming, having seen their enemies run. Collingswood turned as they entered.

“Alright, nobody move,” she said. “This is the police.” They stared at her. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you,” she said. “What happened, Billy? Jesus, look at that thing. And it’s fucking moving.” Architeuthis wriggled sluggishly.

Collingswood took half-hold of Byrne, who slumped and did not try to fight.

“Where’s your ghost?” Billy said to Simon.

“… I think it’s gone.” They heard sirens, the swish of wheels on the sea-wet street. Police came to the house, in not a very long time.

“Hi Baron,” Billy said, as Baron came blinking in, pistol outstretched, blinking at the sea ruin. Baron and his officers stared at the twitching squid, the exhausted fighters.

“Billy,” Baron said. “Billy bloody Harrow, as I live and breathe…”

“Boss,” said Collingswood, and turned her back. “See you made it.” She lit a cigarette.

“What the bloody hell have you lot been up to?” Baron said.

“Want me to fill you in?” Collingswood said.

“No Vardy?” Billy said.

Baron shrugged. “You’re coming with me, Billy.”

“Ataboy boss,” said Collingswood. “That’s sorted them.”

“Enough of your shit, Kath,” he said.

“I’ll come with you.” Billy nodded. “As long as I can sleep.”

“What are the plods going to make of this?” Baron said.

“Collingswood’ll do you a report,” Billy said.

“Doubt it,” she said. She was looking around the room, squinting, sniffing, knacking. “Hang on.”

Billy approached the Architeuthis. Baron watched and let him go. He whispered to it as if it were a skittish dog. “Hello,” he said to the preserved eight-metre many-armed newborn thing, moving in the dregs of its preserver, slathering itself with its prehensile undead arms, pining for the ullage.

“It ain’t finished,” Collingswood said, in a dead voice.

“Look,” Billy said to the Architeuthis. It wriggled its wrist-thick arms. “You sorted it. Made us safe.”

A squelch answered him. Collingswood was breathing deep and looking at him with some kind of ragged expression. Saira was frowning. Billy heard the wet sound again.

It was the fattest pile of fish-flesh he had noticed. He saw its glowering eyes. Something switched one side to the other. It was a ceratioid enormity, a huge anglerfish beached and collapsing under its own weight. It struggled to open the snaggled split of its mouth. It watched him come and swung again the organic spit before it-its lure, a still-glowing snare on a limb-long spur from its forehead. It wagged it side to side. Was it trying to fool him into its mouth, even now as it drowned in air?

No. The motion of its bait-flesh had none of the fitful jerk of little swimming life that it would mimic to hunt. It tick-tocked the lure in what was not a fish motion at all, but a human one. Speaking his language. The motion of its lure was the wag of a correcting finger. He had said to the Architeuthis specimen, You made us safe, and the sea said no, no, no, no, no.

“What the hell?” Billy whispered.

“What does it mean?” Saira said. “What’s happening?”

“It is not finished,” Collingswood said. “Oh shitting fuck.” She was bleeding. Her eyes, her nose, her lips. She spat the cigarette and blood away. “It just got a bloodyfuck sight closer.”

Billy closed his eyes. He was trembling, a preemptive allergy to whatever was to happen.

“It’s still…” he said. To his shock, he felt his hands yanked behind him. Baron had cuffed him. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “It’s all about to burn.”

“Shut your cakehole, you,” Baron said. He indicated one of his men to cuff Saira too.

“Oh, something’s very fucking up,” Collingswood said. “Boss, don’t be a prick.” Sensitives all across the heresiopolis must be praying to be wrong, for something other than the burnt nothing they felt fast coming.

“Let me go,” Billy said.

“Baron, wait,” Collingswood said.

“It never made any sense,” Saira said to Billy. They stared at each other. “No matter how powerful kraken ink is, there was no way it could have… let him end everything. In fire. Even if he wanted to, which why…?”