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“Honorable sir?” he said.
“What is it?” said the captain testily.
“We seem to have a miserable instrument failure. Seabed in this area should be two hundred meters.”
“What of it?”
“I’m reading 15,000 meters, honorable sir. And still falling.”
“That is foolish. There is no such depth.”
The captain glared at several million yen worth of cutting-edge technology, and thumped it.
The navigator gave a nervous smile.
“Ah, sir,” he said, “it is shallower already.”
Beneath the thunders of the upper deep, as Aziraphale and Tennyson both knew, Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea / The kraken sleepeth.
And now it was waking up.
Millions of tons of deep ocean ooze cascade off its flanks as it rises.
“See,” said the navigator. “Three thousand meters already.”
The kraken doesn’t have eyes. There has never been anything for it to look at. But as it billows up through the icy waters it picks up the microwave noise of the sea, the sorrowing beeps and whistles of the whalesong.
“Er,” said the navigator, “one thousand meters?”
The kraken is not amused.
“Five hundred meters?”
The factory ship rocks on the sudden swell.
“A hundred meters?”
There is a tiny metal thing above it. The kraken stirs.
And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.
The cottage windows burst inward. This wasn’t a storm, it was war. Fragments of jasmine whirled across the room, mingled with the rain of file cards.
Newt and Anathema clung to one another in the space between the overturned table and the wall.
“Go on,” muttered Newt. “Tell me Agnes predicted this.”
“She did say he bringeth the storm,” said Anathema.
> “This is a bloody hurricane. Did she say what’s supposed to happen next?”
“2315 is cross-referenced to 3477,” said Anathema.
“You can remember details like that at a time like this?”
“Since you mention it, yes,” she said. She held out a card.
3477. Lette the wheel of Fate turne, let harts enjoin, there are othere fyres than mine; when the wynd blowethe the blossoms, reach oute one to anothere, for the calm cometh when Redde and Whyte and Blacke and Pale approche to Peas is Our Professioune. [? Some mysticism here, one fears. [A F Device, Octbr 17, 1889] Peas/blossoms? [OFD, 1929, Sept 4] Revelations Ch 6 again, I presume. [Dr Thos. Device, 1835]]
