They did not look hard at Billy. They did not care anymore if he was a feral prophet, some pointless urban Saint Anthony. They were uninterested in anything but grief. They treated Dane as if he were the Teuthex. Though his role had always been that of licenced outsider, then renegade, he was as close as they came, now, to authority. None of them even shouted blame, called him apostate. He all but glowed with their piety.

“Grisamentum’s going to come for us, you know,” Billy said.

“Yes.”

“For the kraken.”

“Yes.”

“He’ll find it.”

“Yes.”

They sat. This was a time for valedictories.

“Dane. You can feel it. It’s now, it’s got to be tonight, or tomorrow night, or just maybe the night after. All we have to do’s keep the kraken out of danger till then, and we’ll have beat that prophecy.”

“I don’t care. And you don’t believe that anyway.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Which?” Dane said.

“Neither,” said Billy. “Either.”

“No, I do. Both.” Dane dialled a number on the desktop phone, still unsmashed, handed it to Billy. “It’s a voice-mail box,” he said. “Mine.”

“You have seventeen messages,” Billy heard. “First message.” A click, and the voice was the Teuthex’s. “Alright. I want to know what exactly you think you’re bloody doing? I read your note. You have a certain bloody leeway, but stealing a prophet is pushing your luck.”

Billy looked at Dane. Dane took the phone, pressed buttons to scroll on many days. To quite a recent moment.

“Yeah,” Dane said. “What you are doing now,” Billy heard, the Teuthex again, voice terse, “is blasphemy. I have given you a direct order. I’ve told you. Bring it in. Now is not the time to be having crises of faith. We can end this bloody abomination.”

“What’s this?” Billy said. He held the receiver up.

“I’m an operative,” Dane said.

“You were excommunicated…”

“Come on now. Please.”

Who would ever have trusted a representative of the cephalopod fundamentalists to deal with the issue of the kraken? A rogue, on the other hand… Who could be more trustworthy?

Billy shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It was all an act. You were under the Teuthex’s orders all along.”

“It wasn’t an act. It was a mission.” That ostentatious renegacy. “People are more likely to help if you’re exile.”

“Who knew?”

“Only the Teuthex.”

“So the rest of the church thought you really were…,” Billy said, and stopped. If your whole congregation thinks you outcast, are you not?

“They don’t care now,” Dane said.

“But you took me with you. Were you… you weren’t supposed to?”

“I needed all the edge I could get. You knew things. Still do. You bottled it, Billy. You never thought you was, Billy, but you are a prophet. Sorry, mate.”

“So the Teuthex telling everyone at that meeting that he wasn’t going to hunt for it…” The stance, that benthic remove, had been a lie, of which, in their loyalty to their pope, the church had been persuaded. Only the Teuthex and his faux-exile operative knowing the squiddish truth, and hunting for the body of god.

“But…” Billy said slowly, “you disobeyed orders.”

“Yeah. I brought you with me and wouldn’t bring you back. And when we found it I didn’t bring it back to them.”

“Why?”

“Because they were going to get rid of it, Billy, as they should. And they were right, but you know how you’d get rid of it? Everyone’s said. It’s true. They would’ve burnt it. That’s the holy way. Having that kraken out there in that tank like that… it’s a blasphemy. So I was to bring it back. But the Teuthex was going to burn it.”

“And then you saw the prophecy.”

“The Teuthex was going to burn the squid. And that’s what they said started… this. This whole thing. What if it was us?” Dane said. He sounded very tired. “What if it was my church, doing the right thing, releasing it like that, but bringing on… whatever it is that’s coming?”

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 ranks of the church’s clerks, functionaries, cleaners and everyday faithful.