Kraken

Chapter Forty-Seven

“SO THE HONEST BLOODY SHITTY BOLLOCKS IS THAT I’M WONDERING what the fuck it is we’re up to.”

“Look,” said Baron sharply. “You know what, Constable? I’d be obliged if we could have a smidge less of that.”

Collingswood was terribly startled. She covered with a swagger. She didn’t look at him but at her bracelet.

“We could do with a few things, Collingswood,” Baron said. “We all know it.” He took a moment and spoke again more calmly, jabbing his finger at her. “Not least of which is some information. And we’re on that. Now… Calm down and get back to work. You’ve got your own sniffers sniffing, I presume? Well, see what they can smell.” He walked away, through a door that he closed loud enough on her to almost be a slam.

In the grounds of the police training college at Hendon was the portacabin where the specialists of various FSRC cells went through their training. Pitifully nicknamed Hogwarts by most attendees, Cackle’s and Gont by a few who exchanged smug looks when others didn’t get it.

Collingswood hadn’t. Didn’t care. Had been too busy listening to the semiretired witches, mavens and karcists. “You are police officers, or will be,” one of her instructors had said, “unless you bollocks this up proper.” He was ancient and small, lined like discarded skin scooped off cocoa. He had stroked his chin as if everything he said was well considered. He swaggered too, in a very different way than she did. She loved watching him.

“Your job is to get villains. Right? You’ll have to know what to do. If you don’t know what to do you have to find out. If you can’t find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so. Do I make myself clear?” The little lux ex tenebris that he flashed between his fingertips as he spoke (blue, of course), was a nice touch.

Through all the occult jurisprudence since then, chasing things down and banging them up, that sort of fuckity vigour was what she had always seen as being police. The lack of it in him was what had made Collingswood impatient with, if amused by, Billy Harrow.

With a pitch inside, Collingswood considered the possibility that Baron was not sure what to do. She thought about that. She examined that as carefully as if it were something she had picked off the floor and was trying to identify. Officers walked around her where she stood-she was there long enough. Some of them didn’t even give her an odd look. Collingswood, you know.

She stood near the dispatch room, so she was the first FSRC officer the messenger saw to give word to. It was she, then, who shoved open the door on Baron sitting folded-armed staring glumly at his computer, hung to the doorframe with one hand like a kid on a climbing frame, and said, “Ask and you receive, boss. Currently hospitalised. But it’s info.”

IT WAS A SHITTY DAY, ALL SODDEN DRAB GREY AIR AND A SULKY wind as irritating as a child. Despite that Marge spent the morning outside, in the Thames Barrier Park. She trudged in drizzle through the waveform topiary, past miniature football pitches. That morning she had cried a long time about Leon, and it had felt like a last time. She had finished, but it was as if the sky had not.

Marge suspected that she did not have a job anymore. Her boss was a friend, but her repeated nonanswering of his messages must have put him in an impossible position.

It was not as if she felt confused. It was not as if she felt driven, precisely, overtaken, losing her mind, anything like that. It was just, she thought, that she could not concentrate on anything else. She was not hysterical. It was just that having discovered that London was not what it was supposed to be, having discovered that the world had been lying to her, she had to know more. And she still had to know what had happened to Leon.

Not that he was alive. She knew that ridiculous sputtering message in bad light must be true.

Which brought her here, to this little sculpted grassland by the river’s defences. There at the notional mouth of the river, by the industrial lowlands of Silvertown, the piers of the Thames Flood Barrier squatted in the water like huge alien hives, like silver-carapaced visitors. Between them chopped brown water, and below that water in the slime of the river’s bed ten gates hunkered, ready to rise.

It was a long way round to the foot tunnel in Woolwich, but Marge had the whole day. She could see the barrier control building rise from the roofs of the south bank. She thumbed at her phone.

Christ Jesus it was depressing, she thought, this part of the city. She took the route by City Airport and under the river, huddling into her coat. She did not check the details she had printed out: she knew them by now. The information had been hard to winkle out of her online informants but not that hard. It had taken wheedling and guile but not quite as bloody much as it should have done if you asked her. As she’d been able to tell, yes, these were “secret” bulletin boards, but plenty of their members were just bursting with pride about what they knew. It was all I’ve said too much, and You did not hear this from me.

From who, you fucking prick? Marge had thought at that particular disavowal. All I know is your screen name, which is blessedladee777 if you fucking please, so please just get on with it.

Pre-armed by the cult-collector with the terms “floodbrother,” and the location of “the barrier,” it had taken a couple of days, but no more, to uncover a little bit more information. This time it was a place of work and an affiliation, the outlines of a system of belief.

Marge finished her cigarette. She shook her head and jogged on the spot for a bit, then came rushing into the Thames Barrier Visitors’ Centre. The woman behind the reception desk stared at her in alarm. “You have to help me,” Marge said. She made herself gabble. “No, listen. Someone here calls themself floodbrother, yeah online. Listen, you have to get them a message.”

“I, I, what, what’s their name?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not crazy. I swear. Please, this is a matter of life and death. I mean it, literally. There must be a way of getting a message to everyone who works here. I’m not talking just about the Visitors’ Centre, I’m talking about the engineering. Listen to me, I’m begging you, I’m begging you.” She grabbed the woman’s hand. “Tell whoever here’s nickname’s floodbrother, just say that, that there’s a message from Tyno Helig. He’ll understand. Believe me. Tyno Helig, got it?” She scribbled the name on a scrap. “I’ll be waiting. I’ll be in Maryon Park. Please.”

Marge stared into the woman’s eye and tried for some insinuatory sisterly thing. She wasn’t sure how well it went. She ran out and away, until she had turned a corner, at which point she slowed and wandered calmly along Warspite Road, past the roundabout to the park.

The weather was too different and too bad to jog much reminiscence, but she looked around until she was pretty sure she had found a spot recognizable from the film Blow-Up. She sat as close to it as she could. She watched everyone who came in. She fingered the little flick-knife she had bought, for whatever useless good it would be. She was banking rather on daylight and passersby. Marge wondered whether she would know if her quarry entered the park.

In the event, when, after almost an hour, her call was answered, there was no question at all. It was not one person but three. All men, they strode urgently along the little paths, looking in all directions. They were big, athletic guys. They wore identical engineers’ uniforms. The oldest, at the front, was gesturing to his two companions to fan out. Marge stood: she would feel safer facing all three of them than one. They saw her immediately. She closed her hand around her knife.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Tyno Helig.”

They hung just a little back. Their fists were clenched. The front man’s jaw worked with tension.

“Who,” he said, “are you? What the hell are you doing? You said you had a message?”

She could see his contradictory emotions. Rage, of course, that they should be discovered and outed at work, when they were in mufti. Rage that they should be mocked like this, their faith scorned, as she could see him think surely this must be. And yet, as well as that anger, wrestling with it, excitement. She recognised that little bastard hope. “What’s your message?” he said.

Her plan had worked, then. Tyno Helig, no person but a place: one of the sunken kingdoms, the Welsh Atlantis. That, she had thought, making her plan, should intrigue them. “Who are you?” the man said.

“Sorry for misleading you,” she said. “I needed to get you out. I’m sorry”-she hesitated for a second, but sod it, she was too tired not to piss people off-“this isn’t about your aspirational tidal wave. I have a question for you.”

The man raised his clenched fist to his head, as if he would hit himself, then suddenly grabbed her by the lapels. His companions crowded them, shielding them from others’ view. “Our what?” he whispered. “You have a question? Do you know who we are? You better start convincing me not to drown you. Do you know who we are?”

SHE HAD AN IDEA, YES. OUTRÉ BELIEFS WOULD KEEP CROPPING UP IN her researches. She had trawled around hard enough for the info.

The Communion of the Blessèd Flood. The rainbow, she gathered from some furtive online theologian, wasn’t a promise: it was a curse. The fall didn’t come when the first couple left the garden: all that was some ghastly prerapturous dreamtime of trials. What happened was that God rewarded his faithful with eventual holy rains.

Mistranslation, she had read. If what Noah, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim or the same figure by any other name had been told to build was a ship, why did the Torah not say so? Why was his ark not an oniyah, a ship, but a tebah-a box? Because it was built not to ride the waves God sent, but to move below them. History’s first submarine, in gopher wood, three hundred cubits long, travelling the new world of God’s promise. It harvested the meadows of kelp. But those chosen for the watered paradise had failed, and God had been wrathful and withdrawn the seas. That landscape of punishment was where we lived, exiled from the ocean.

The Communion of the Blessèd Flood prayed for the restoration of the wet. Marge read of their utopias, sunk not in ruination but reward: Kitezh, Atlantis, Tyno Helig. They honoured their prophets: Kroehl and Monturiol, Athanasius, Ricou Browning, and John Cage’s father. They cited Ballard and Garrett Serviss. They gave thanks for the tsunami and celebrated the melting of the satanic polar ice, which mockingly held water in motionless marble. It was a sacred injunction on them to fly as far and often as they could, to maximise carbon emissions. And they placed holy agents where they might one day help expedite the deluge.

So this little cell, working in what might seem the most blasphemous industry of flood-defence. They were biding their time. Blocking piddling little backtides and holding out for the big one. When that final storm surged, that sublime backwash came roaring from the deep, then, then they would throw their spanners in the works. And after the water closed on the streets like a Hokusai trapdoor the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood would live at last in the submerged London of which they dreamed.

And now her message. It was the end of the world, everyone knew that… maybe, they’d thought, it was theirs.

“Count yourself lucky no one’s messed with you till now,” Marge said. She pulled out of his grip. “I never even heard of you until a few days ago. Someone said you speak for the sea. And maybe you took the squid. You know what I’m talking about. I need to know… Someone who did something with that bloody thing did something to my man.”

“You’ve got face,” he said. “I’m not saying that buys you an out, but you’ve got something.”

“I told you, man,” said another. “Everything’s messed up.”

“It’s not face,” she said. “It’s just that I’m really tired, and I loved him. He was with Billy Harrow… Billy Harrow.” She said it again at his reaction. The man rolled his thick neck and glanced at the others.

“Harrow,” he said. “Harrow? He’s the one took the kraken, I thought. That’s what I heard. He’s like its prophet. He went with Dane Parnell, when he ran from the Krakenists. It’s them you want to talk to. They’re the ones took it.”

“No they’re not.” They stared at each other.

“Dane ran from his church when the kraken went, to join Harrow, so if they’ve got something to do with your bloke…”

“I’m telling you,” she said. “That isn’t what happened. I don’t know anything about Parnell, I don’t know much about much, but Billy Harrow did not take the squid. I had a pizza with him.” That made her laugh. “And I know it wasn’t him. I think he’s dead, anyway. And if he knew where Leon was, he’d tell me…” She shut up, at the memory of the on-off-on-off streetlamp. “He’d tell me,” she said slowly. “If he could.”

The man huddled with his companions. She waited. She could hear them in debate.

“Do you think,” she said suddenly, to her own mild surprise, “that I’d be messing around with you if I had any choice?” They blinked at her. “I don’t want any of this, I don’t want this bollocks, I don’t believe your crap, I don’t want a drowned world and I don’t want a squid to be the king of the universe and I don’t want to get involved in this crazy shit, and I don’t even think I’m ever going to get Leon back. I’m just tired and it turns out”-she shrugged to say who knew?-“it turns out I need to find out what happened. You telling me you’ve got no idea what’s going on? What is the use of you people.” She was tearing up a little bit, not weakly or weepingly but out of infuriation.

“Whoever it is been talking to you,” he said, and hesitated. “They don’t know what they mean. We don’t represent the sea, we don’t… How could we? That’s misinformation.”

“I don’t care…”

“Yeah, I do. People need to know. Stuff’s brewing. How do you know all this? Who’s helping you?”

“No one. Jesus.”

“I can’t do nothing for you.” He wasn’t speaking gently, but not aggressively either. “And I don’t talk for the sea.” He spoke with irritated care. Her impression was that this man devoutly wishing for the effacing of the world by water, the reconfiguration of all humanity’s cities by eels and weeds, the fertilizing of sunken streets with the bodies of sinners, was a decent enough guy.

“You need to be careful,” he said. “Stay out of trouble. You need protection. This is a dangerous town any time, and right now it’s mad. And you’re going to tread on toes. Get protection. You’re not wearing a damn thing, are you.” He clutched at his chest, where an amulet might hang. “You’ll get yourself killed. No good to your bloke that way, are you?”

She was going to say I’m not a child, but his brusque kindness unmanned her. “Leave this alone. And if you don’t, go to someone. Murgatroyd, or Shibleth, or Butler, or someone. Remember those names. In Camden, or in Borough. Tell them Sellar sent you.”

“Look,” she said. “Can you, can I take your number? Can I talk to you about all this? I need some help. Can I…?”

He was shaking his head. “I can’t help you. I can’t. I’m sorry. This is a bit of a busy time. Go on now.” He patted her shoulder, like she was an animal. “Good luck.”

Marge left that dogged landscape of Woolwich. She did not look back at the horrible flattened dome, all white as if sickly. Her best lead had gone nowhere. She had more to do. Perhaps she would, as he advised, seek protection.

HER BEST LEAD HAD GONE TO NOTHING, TRUE, BUT SHE HAD BEEN A lead herself, though Marge had not known it. The revelation that Billy Harrow, the mysterious kraken prophet, might not be the force behind the godling’s disappearance, was important.

The armies of the righteous needed to know. The sea needed to know.

Chapter Forty-Eight

JASON SMYLE, THAT PROLETARIAN CHAMELEON, LISTENED AS BILLY begged him to take out an unpaid commission.

“You’re Dane’s friend,” Billy said.

“Yeah,” Jason said.

“Do this for him,” Billy said.

Billy did not know where Jason was. They had no time to arrange a meet. He had given Wati the number of the phone he had-without much difficulty, even in the miserable aftermath of that assault-stolen. Wati found Jason and passed on the number.

“Do you understand what’s happened?” Billy said. “They took him. Chaos Nazis. You know what that means.” Billy felt as if he knew, too, as if this was where he had lived a long time. Dane, unlike him, had had no angelus ex machina watching.

“What do you want from me?” When he spoke, even down the line, Billy felt as if he knew Jason from somewhere.

“We need to find him, and we need to know what’s going on. There’s bad connections going on here. Listen.” Billy hooked the phone with his shoulder and swung through a tear in wire into a fenced-off yard. “These Nazis are being paid by the Tattoo. And his people are also the ones doing shit to Wati’s pickets. Along with the police.

“We need to know how deep those connections go. For all we know the cops might be holding Dane. They’re obviously in some sort of cahoots with the Tattoo, they must at least know where he is. So we need you. But even if we could find them you couldn’t walk into the Nazis, it wouldn’t work, right?”

“No,” said Jason. “They’re not paid, so it’s a nonstarter. They’re committed, and I can’t hide behind belief. That and proper knacking’ll screw me.”

“Right. So you need to go into Neasden Station and see what they’ve got on all this. Find out what you can. Jason, it’s Dane.”

“… Yeah,” Jason said. “Yeah.”

Though his voice had not admitted the possibility that Jason would refuse, Billy closed his eyes in relief. “Call me when you’re done, tell me what you can find out,” Billy said. “Thanks. You need to do this now, Jason. Thank you. We’ve got no idea where they are.”

“What are you…?”

“I’ve got some other stuff I need to find out about. Jason, please do this now. We need to find him.” Billy disconnected.

How do you walk away from a scene like that? All Billy had been able to do, in the cold quiet overlooked by big dead buildings, when Dane had been taken, was follow Wati’s voice. The rebel spirit had led him from his pocket and from what few figurines it could find in that awful empty sector.

Billy said, “The Londonmancers.”

“Keep it down, mate,” Wati had told him from some la-la Billy did not even see. “No one’s going to help us.” That inner core, Fitch and Saira and their little crew, the stunned man Billy had shot and unintentionally press-ganged, could not come to his aid. Billy had no safe houses, no hides.

“Oh bloody hell,” said Wati.

As if it weren’t in trouble enough, the UMA had to act as babysitter for this suddenly bereft little messiah. But Billy had not obeyed his injunction to raise the metal lid out of the street, with intricate finagling and a strength he had not had a few weeks before, to slip into the undercity. Instead, Billy had paused, clenched without clenching, and felt time hesitate and come back, moving like a shaken blanket. He had told Wati to come with him, rather, and gone and stolen a phone. He had taken the innermost doll of a Russian doll set from some shop, held it, not his foolish Kirk, though he had kept that, up to his eyes, and said to Wati, “Here’s what we need to do.”

“OF ALL THE LITTLE TOERAGS WE EVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH,” BARON said, “the bastarding Chaos Nazis are the ones I hate most.”

He stood between Collingswood and Vardy. He was scratching his face furiously, anxiously. They crowded around each other to look through the reinforced glass into a hospital room, where a bandaged man was shackled by tubes, and by shackles, to a bed. A machine tracked his heartbeat.

“You actually said ‘toerags,’” Collingswood said. “Are you auditioning for something?”

“Alright,” he said vaguely. He sniffed. “Arseholes.”

“Fuck’s sake, boss,” Collingswood said. “Up your game. Shitfoxes.”

“Bastards.”

“Spitfish, boss. Fucklizards. Little cuntwasps. Munching wanktoasters.” Baron stared at her. “Oh yeah,” Collingswood said. “That’s right. I got game. Say my name.”

“Tell me,” Vardy interrupted. “What precisely do we have from them? There were several of them, correct?”

“Yeah,” said Baron. “Five in various degrees of injuredness. And the dead.”

“I want to know exactly what they saw. I want to know exactly what’s happening.”

“You got ideas, Vardy?” Collingswood said.

“Oh, yes. Ideas I have. Too bloody many. But I’m trying to put all this together.” Vardy stared at the man in the bed. “This is the Tattoo. We heard he was employing headsmen. I wasn’t expecting it to be this lot.”

“Yeah, bit of a breach of protocol, isn’t it?” Baron said. “CNs are a bit out of polite company.”

“Has he worked with them before?” Collingswood said.

“Not that I know of,” Vardy said.

“Has Grisamentum?”

“What?” He looked at her. “Why would you say that?”

“Just I was looking at all them files on your desk, of Tat’s associates. And you’ve got Grizzo’s as well. I was wondering what’s that about?”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, true. Those two… They move in lockstep. Always did, while Grisamentum was around. Which as we now bloody know-are we agreed?-it appears he still is. Associates of one could well be associates of the other.”

“Why?” said Collingswood. “That don’t make no sense. They hated each other.”

“You know how this bloody works,” Vardy said. “Friends close, enemies closer? Bought off, turncoat, whatever?”

She wagged her head. “If you say so, blood. I don’t know,” she said. “Griz’s bunch lurved him, didn’t they. His crew were all mad loyal.”

“No one’s so loyal they can’t be bought,” said Vardy.

“I forgot what a mad bunch he was cavorting with in the end,” Collingswood said. “Griz. I was looking at them files.” Vardy raised an eyebrow at her. “Doctors, doctor-deaths… Pyros, too, right?”

“Yes. He did.”

“And you reckon some of them are working with the Tattoo now, right?” Vardy hesitated and laughed. That was not like him.

“No,” he said. “It turns out not. But no reason not to check.”

“So you’re still chasing them up?”

“Yes I bloody am. I’m chasing all of them, every lead, until I know for an absolute bloody certainty that they’re not involved in the squid thing, either with Grisamentum, or with the Tattoo. Or as independents. You do your job, I’ll do mine.”

“I thought your job’s to channel the spirit of nutty god-bothering and write up holy books.”

“Alright, you two,” Baron said. “Settle down.”

“Why the bollock can’t we find the squid, boss? Who’s got it? This is getting stupid.”

“Collingswood, if I knew that I’d be commissioner of the Met. Let’s at least try to map who’s who in this mayhem. So we’ve got the Chaos Nazis, our wanktoasters-thank you, Constable-among recent employees of the Tattoo. Along with everyone else in the city.”

“Not everyone,” Collingswood said. “There’s gunfarmers about, but they’re on some other dime. No one knows who, and no one’s feeling very safe about that.”

“Well that’s got to be our squidnapper, surely,” said Vardy. “So who’s paying them?”

“Can’t track it. They’ve gone into hush mode.”

“So get it out of them,” Baron said.

“Boss, what do you think I’m trying to do?”

“Splendid,” said Baron. “It’s like a Zen koan, isn’t it? Is it better or worse if holy visionary shooters are fighting against us alongside Chaos Nazis, or against them and we’re in between? Answer that, my little bodhisattvas.”

“Can we please,” said Vardy, “establish what’s going on here with that chap? Did any of them tell us anything?”

“Certainly,” said Baron. “He had to finesse how quick I got him to roll over, so under guise of glorying in the chaos he would bring by terrifying me with the truth, a-blah-dy blah-dy blah, this little bugger sang like the most beautiful nightingale.”

“And?” said Vardy.

“And Dane Parnell is not having a good time of it. They snaffled our exile, sounds like. That much he saw”-he pointed through the window with his chin-“before passing out. Which leaves little lost Billy out on his tod in the city. Whatever will he do?”

“Yeah, but he ain’t exactly helpless, though, is he?” Collingswood said. “I mean, just pointing out…” She waved her hand at the savagely wounded man. “It ain’t as if Billy’s got nothing fighting his corner, is it?”

“Vardy,” said Baron. “Care to give us your opinion?” He made a big show of opening his notebook, as if he didn’t remember everything about the description he was about to give. “‘It was a bottle, policeman, you law-worm, we brought chaos to each other, you scum, etc…’” he read, deadpan. “I’m going to editorialise. I’ll trim the epithets and skip to specifics. ‘It was a bottle. A bottle that came at us. It bit with a skull. Its arms were bones. It was a real glass enemy.’ I like that last line, I have to say.” He put the notebook away. “So, Vardy,” he said. “You must have thoughts.”

Vardy had closed his eyes. He leaned against the wall and puffed out his cheeks. When at last he opened his eyes again he did not look at Baron or Collingswood: he stared intently through the window at the crippled Chaos Nazi.

“We know what that’s about, right?” Baron said. “Let me rephrase. We’ve no idea what it’s about. No one does. But we’ve a reasonable notion of what it bloody is that swooped in and swept young Harrow away.”

“Alright, I’m going back to the museum,” Vardy said. “See if I can make a little more sense of this. Just once,” he said with abrupt savagery, “in a goddamn while, it would really be a pleasure if the goddamn world worked the way it’s supposed to. I am tired of the universe being such a bloody aleatory frenzy all, the bloody, time.”

He sighed and shook his head. Gave an abashed, tight brief smile at Collingswood’s surprise.

“Well,” he said. “Really. Come on. Why the bloody hell is an angel of memory protecting Billy?”

BUT NOT PROTECTING DANE, WHICH FACT WAS WHAT HAD HIM NOW woozily half waking, strapped in a horribly cramping position that it took him a long time to identify as a crooked cruciform. He was attached like an offering to a rough man-sized swastika. He did not open his eyes.

He heard echoes; footsteps; from somewhere, deliberate, foolishly screaming laughter, that made him afraid anyway, despite its ostentation. The growl and barking of a huge dog. One by one he tensed the muscles of his arms and legs, to check that he was still whole.

Kraken give me strength, he prayed. Give me strength out of your deep darkness. He knew, if he opened his eyes, what figures he would see. He knew his contempt, no matter how real and strong, would be equalled by his terror, and that he would have to overcome that, and he did not have the head or stomach to do so, just at that moment. So he kept his eyes closed.

Most wizards of Chaos would bore you arseless about how the Chaos they tapped was emancipation, that their nonlinear conjuring was the antithesis of the straight-lined bordering mindset that led, they insisted, to Birchenau, blah fucking blah. But it was always a sleight of politics to stress only that aspect of the far right. There was another, somewhat repressed but no less faithful and faithfully fascist tradition: the decadent baroque.

Among the fascist sects, the most flamboyant, eager as Strasserites to reclaim what they insisted was the true core of a deviated movement, were the Chaos Nazis. The creaking black leather of the SS, they insisted to the tiny few who would listen, and not run or kill them on sight, were a coward’s pornography, a prissy corruption of tradition.

Look instead, they said, to the rage in the east. Look to the autonomous terror-cell-structure of Operation Werewolf. Look to the sybarite orgies in Berlin, that were not corruption but culmination. Look to the holiest date in their calendar: Kristallnacht, all those Chaos scintillas on stone. Nazism, they insisted, was excess, not prigrestraint, not that superego gusset bureaucrats had chosen.

Their symbol was the eight-pointed Chaos star altered to make a Moorcock weep, its diagonal arms bent fylfot, a swastika that pointed in all directions. What is “Law,” they said, what is Chaos’s nemesis but the Torah? What is Law but Jewish Law, which is Jewishness itself, and so what is Chaos but the renunciation of that filthy Torah-Bolshevist code? What was best in humanity but the will and rage and indulgence, do what thou wilt the autopoiesis of the Übermensch? And so, endlessly, on.

They were provocateurs of course, and a ludicrously tiny group, but notorious even among the wicked for occasional acts of unbelievable, artistic cruelty, restoring the true spirit of their prophets. Sure the Final Solution was efficient, they insisted, but it was soulless. “The problem with Auschwitz,” their intellectual wags of torture-killing insisted, “is that it was the wrong sort of ‘camp’!” Their hoped-for Chaos Führer, they thought, might achieve a sufficiently artistic genocide.

It was to these figures that Tattoo, Goss and Subby had gone for help, and they had let London know to whom they had gone. They had approached these outrageous, dangerous monster-clowns to hunt down Dane and Billy. And from them Billy had been saved, and Dane had not.

Chapter Forty-Nine

BILLY PUT ON HIS GLASSES. THEY WERE IMMACULATELY UNBROKEN, and still clean. He said, “Wati.”

“I don’t know where Dane is,” Wati said immediately. “I keep looking, but we’re going to have to hope Jason has more luck. They’ve got charms up or something.”

Billy said, “I want to tell you something I dreamed.” He spoke as if he were still dreaming. “I could tell it was important. I dreamed about the kraken. It was a robot. It was back, the whole thing in the tank. I was standing next to it. And something said to me, ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’”

There were seconds of silence. “Jason’s going in, and while he is I want to find out why that angel’s looking after me,” Billy said. “It might know something about what’s going on. It knew to come find me. And it might have been looking after me, but it let Dane get taken.”

He told Wati what Fitch and Saira had done. He felt no hesitation, though he knew it was a deeply secret secret. He trusted Wati, insofar as he trusted any Londoners now. “Tell them they have to help us,” he said.

Wati went leapfrogging, body to body, but had to return. “I can’t get in there,” he said. “It’s the London Stone. It pushes out. Like swimming up a waterfall. But…”

“Well you better find a way to tell them they have to help me, because otherwise I’m going to walk around the city screaming what they did. Tell them that.”

“I can’t get in, Billy.”

“Screw their secrets.”

“Billy listen. They’ve made contact. I got a message from that woman Saira. She’s smart-she knows I was with you and Dane. She put a message through my office. Didn’t give nothing away, just, ‘We’re trying to get in touch with our mutual friend. Perhaps we can arrange a meeting?’ She’s telling us they want to help. They’re already against the Tattoo. That makes them nearer friends than enemies to us, right? I can’t go in, but I’ll try to send some of my people. Get them to ask Fitch where the Nazis are.”

“Because if it’s in London…” Billy said. “He should know.”

“That’s the idea. That’s the idea.”

“How long?”

“Don’t know.”

“We move,” Billy said. “We’ll get him out. I’m looking in the wrong direction. I have to know who’s fighting me and who’s fighting with me. So Wati, how do I find out about angels?”

I N A CITY LIKE LONDON…

Stop: that was an unhelpful way to think about it, because there was no city like London. That was the point.

London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where.

London had its go-betweens, guerrilla shadchans facilitating meetings for a cut. Wati could tell Billy where they were, and which had weak connections with the angels. Wati kept searching, and he had his own war to attend to, too. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.

So there was Billy, all alone, and he knew that he should have been terrified, but he was not. He was itching. He felt as if clocks hesitated with each of his steps. It was early when he started walking the list Wati gave him.

Billy knew how hunted he was. Now more than ever. He discovered that his legs had learned the step-spells that Dane had stepped for him, that he walked now with self-camouflaging rhythm. That he automatically went for half-shade, that he moved a little like some occult soldier. He held his phaser in his pocket, and he watched his surrounds avidly.

So, alone, Billy knocked on a door at the back of a sandwich shop in Dalston. A church and a carpet showroom in Clapham. A McDonald’s in Kentish Town. “Wati said you could help me,” he said again and again to the suspicious people who answered.

The safest approach was to never speak to anyone about anything. Communication could mean implication in some fight you might not even believe was taking place, taking a side, inadvertently signing on a dotted line. Nonetheless.

Fixers and goers-to had their scenes. Rooms and Internet shacks where men and women employed by their faiths to steal, torture, kill, hunt and fix could be among others who understood the pressures of the work and got the references of gossip.

“Dane couldn’t have gone,” Wati had warned Billy. “He’d be recognised. But people don’t know you. They might know your name, if they keep their ears open. But not your face.”

“Some do.”

“Yeah.”

“Some might be talking to Goss and Subby.”

“Might.”

“Where even are they?”

“Don’t know.”

The politics of a city of cults made for complex encounters. Seeing an assassin of the Beltway Brethren share a joke with someone from the Mansour Elohim but blank the twins from the Church of Christ Symbiote was a crash course in realtheologie. As much as possible, though, in these places Billy visited you left allegiances at home. That, as a message above the door in one hideaway had it, is the Loar.

Law or lore it maybe-“Loar” a superposition of those two homophones-but let’s not be idiots. Billy entered each place cautiously, and wore a false moustache. Even had he not been looking for Dane and shoring up his compañeros, Wati could not have come in. There were no familiars allowed, and NO DOLLS, said the entrance signs, and Billy wouldn’t risk disobeying. All statuettes had been cleared out since the strike began. Wizardry was a petty bourgeois world. They spent this unwanted leisure time denouncing their familiars, and did not want an organiser listening in.

Twice Billy’s request for help was declined when he mentioned what little cash he had to offer. “Memory angels?” one old woman said. “For that? I can’t get mixed up with that. Now? With them walking?” Billy played out fantasies of bank robberies, but a sudden very different thought occurred, another way to fish for such aid. He went back to where he had seen the key in the tarmac. In moments between cars he took a knife to it and prized it from the road. Straightening up with it he swayed, orthostatic. He ate quickly in a basement restaurant and examined the tarry key. A junk-bit grubby with metaphor. Thinking in that register helped him take unexpected advantage of the place. On the way to the toilets, in an alcove in the wall, there was a lightbulb resting in a frying pan. It was so unrestrained a visual pun, so utterly ovate, he gasped. He had to take it, in a moment of simultaneously meaningless and powerful theft.

When he arrived at the next address he had for a broker of contacts, a bar in Hammersmith, the first thing he said to the young man was, “I can pay you. Put this in the right hands, this’ll unlock the road.” He held out the key. He held up the bulb. “And I don’t know what’s incubating in this, but someone might hatch it.”

Chapter Fifty

“VARDY’S GOING BANANAS,” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. THEIR SAVANT miner of vision was in and out of the office on a frenetic schedule. He was racing off with one folder or other full of connections and contacts.

“Come on,” said Baron. “You know how it works. We have to give him his head.” He hesitated. Vardy’s colleagues had not seen him go quite so hard, for so long, perhaps ever before. They came in to find incomprehensible notes, references to interviews Vardy had conducted solo, with suspects or people whose identities they were not sure of. Like everyone else, his behaviour was new in the shade of the catastrophe, that late, thuggish millennium.

“Where is he now?” Baron said, a little plaintively. Collingswood shrugged and glanced at him with narrowing eyes. She was sitting feet up playing a video game. Her romping avatar evaded the electronically growling beasts that tried to eat it. She was not in fact moving it, was concentrating on the conversation, had knacked the joystick into clearing the level on its own.

“No idea,” she said. “From what I can decipher of his fucking crab scrawl he wants to find some informer from Grisamentum’s old crew. One of the necros or pyros or something. Do you think he even has a clue what it is he’s looking for?”

“No,” said Baron. “But I bet you he’ll find it. I gather there are gunfarmers in town.”

“I told you. Yeah them and everyone. We get all the best visitors, man,” Collingswood said, pointing at the reports in front of her.

“Which visitors?” It was Vardy, returned with papers in hand.

“About time,” Baron said. “I thought you’d buggered off?”

“So it’s true about the farmers?”

“Did you find anything out on your little mission?”

“If it is true,” Collingswood said. She swung in her chair to face Vardy. Her digital figure continued its adventures. “Would you be scared?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m scared of all sorts of things.”

“Would you?”

“There’s no shortage of assassin-sects out there.”

“Exactly.” Collingswood had nicked members of a few herself. Sisters of the Noose, Nu-Thugees, theologies of Nietzschean kitsch. They were like the cruder readers of Colin Wilson and de Sade, aficionados of Sotos and a certain genre of trite “transgression,” an inverted BBC moralism. They glorified what they quaintly thought the will, slandered humanity as sheep, maundered murder. Their banality did not mean they were never dangerous, did not perform atrocities for the glory of themselves, whatever Lovecraftian deity they illiterately decided wanted their offerings, their orientalist’s Kali, or whomever. Even as they killed you, you’d hold them in contempt.

“Well, they aren’t like that lot,” Vardy said. “They’re only mercenaries sort of contingently. The point of a gun isn’t the killing but the gun. At first it was more generally pagan as it were.”

“Care to fill an old man in?” said Baron. “Sorry to intrude on this.” Vardy and Collingswood glanced at each other, until she smirked.

“Did you ever meet any?” she said to Vardy.

“Do you mind?” Baron said.

“They got sick, boss, back in the day,” she said. “But I could never work out what it was about the guns.”

An arcane disease had taken their ur-tribe and made their life infectious. What they touched would jostle, tables would tap, chairs would tap, books dance, the inanimate as boisterous and alarmed as any newborns. Midas couldn’t eat a sandwich made of gold, but no more could one of these vectors, Life-oid Marys, eat the bread and cheese slices all abruptly eager to run around.

“It was a mutation,” Vardy said. He said it carefully and with neutral distaste. “An adaptive mutation.”

“Is that bad?” Collingswood said, at the sight of his face.

“Bad for whom? Mutation saves, apparently.” Perhaps it was because of the careful grooming husbandry necessary for a flintlock, that fussy lead-barking animal; perhaps repressed resentment at life: whatever, it became only their firearms they made alive, in quieter, less motile ways-what weapons they wielded became selfish-gene machines. “The bullets are gun-eggs,” Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched. “What I never got’s why all that makes them all badass.”

“Because they look after their flocks,” Vardy said. “And find them nests.” He looked at his watch.

“If you say so. So someone’s getting totally killed,” Collingswood said. “So who the fuck’s paying their way? I’m not getting much. And what that means bollock knows.” If her attempts at projection, remote viewing, sensory tickling, nightwalk sniffery, drift-jamming and a codewar flutter were not yielding any information, then a cowl was for certain draped over her quarries.

“Vardy,” said Baron, “where d’you think you’re going? Oy.”

“Leave it, boss,” Collingswood said. “Let Mystic Pizza do his thing. I want to sort out this gunfarmer stuff. We don’t need Doc Vision for a money-trail, surely?”

PETE DWIGHT WONDERED IF HE HAD CHOSEN THE RIGHT CAREER. IT was not that he was a particularly bad police officer: there had been no complaints, no dressings-down. But he was never relaxed. He spent his uniformed days queasy with low-level anxiety, gnawed by the sense that he must be doing things wrong. It was going to give him an ulcer or something.

“Alright?” The man who greeted him was a plainclothes officer Pete recognised, though he could not remember his name.

“Alright, mate?”

“Seen Baron around?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Pete said. “But Kath’s in the back. What do you want with them nutters?” Pete laughed collegially and was suddenly terrified that the man was part of the very cult task force he was mocking. But, no, that was not where he knew him from, and anyway the bloke was laughing in turn, and heading for the rear of the station.

In the main room, among the clatter of keyboards, Simone Ball was leafing through her paperwork. She was in her midthirties, loved classic animated films, and was an enjoyer of, though not a frequent participator in, European travel. She had been a support worker for the police for seven years. She suspected her husband was cheating on her, and was bewildered that she did not mind very much.

“Where’s Kath?” a man asked her. She recognised him, and she waved him in the right direction and continued to think about her husband.

In the corridors, Detective Inspector Ben Samuels, considering his daughter’s piano exam, looked up and greeted the man with familiarity. The man asked directions from a uniformed WPC, Susan Greening, who grinned as she gave them, piqued by a sense that he and she had, she was sure, flirted recently. Outside the rooms used by the FSRC were three men comparing notes on a football game, though one of them had not watched it and was pretending. They parted as the newcomer arrived, nodded and greeted him, murmuring phonemes when they could not remember his name, and the one who was bullshitting in a surge of overcompensation even asked him what he had thought of the match. The man whistled and shook his head appreciatively, and the three men enthusiastically agreed and could still not quite remember his name but did recall that he was a supporter of one of the teams that had played or the other.

He entered the FSRC office. The only person in the room was Collingswood, prodding a keyboard as if at idle random. She glanced up at him and he nodded, crossed to the filing cabinets against the far wall. “Alright, Kath,” he said. “Just got to find some files.” He opened the drawers. He heard Kath stand. A silence went on. He turned. She held a pistol in her expert grip, aimed at his chest.

“And just who,” she said, “the motherfuck, are you?”

Chapter Fifty-One

“I WANT TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE ANGELS,” Billy said, and the middleman made phone calls, sent emails, got on instant messenger and dropped queries in chatrooms. Eventually he told Billy where to go.

“Okay, it knows you’re coming. Otherwise it would be bad.”

“What am I looking for?” Billy said. “Who’s going to meet me?”

“Duh. An ex-angel.”

This was more than Billy had expected. Not a specialist or an angel-geek, but a semi-member of the jar’s tribe itself, to whom he might sort-of speak. The custodians of the museums could hardly be comprehended: their agenda was memory’s, which is not human. What they spoke was not like language. But redundant, they lingered, a few last years, and then they would become more like women and men out of a kind of loneliness.

The shell of the Commonwealth Institute was a conquistador helmet sweep of building at the southern edge of Holland Park. It had closed in the early 2000s. The ludicrous collection of exhibits honouring its member countries, that baffled and polite imperial aftermath, was long dispersed. But it was not all empty. When it grew dark Billy broke in-that was easy now with his new skills. He listened to his own reverberating steps.

The dust was only millimetres thick but thick enough. He felt as if he were wading in it, toward the last unmoved display cases. In many rooms the darkness should have been absolute, and Billy wondered what faint light it was that let him see. Once he heard a guard-some human guard-on halfhearted rounds. All he did was stand still in a cupboard and wait until the echo was gone from that section of hall.

A few exhibit pieces were left, forgotten, unworthy of rehousing, or hidden and, later in the solitude, they reemerged. Billy walked into a hall where though it was windowless there was not only light but shafts of it, ajut from the ceiling, each starting at a random point in the unbroken surface and crazy-pillaring down in random cross-hatched directions, as if the room were nostalgic for moonbeams it had never seen and grew its own simulacra. He walked through and under those interlaced fat fingers of imagined light toward a waiting thing.

God, he thought as he approached. God. I remember you.

The decommissioned angel of Commonwealth memory eyed him. “Hello again,” he said. He had seen it on its day job, when he was a child, and it, in the daylight, an exhibit.

Plastic in the shape of a little cow. It eyed him sideways, so it could display its flank made of glass. Inside were its four stomachs, which had lit up, one by one, he remembered, and there, they still did, repeatedly, one at a time. Paunch, king’s-hood, fardel and maw, digestion glimmering in each in turn toward its lactic telos, stalwart of some Commonwealth economy. From the New Zealand room, Billy thought.

He could feel its attention, its waning self. When the institute was open, this mnemophylax had after hours stamped the hallways with a gait modelled on Taurus myth. It had protected that mooncalf memory-palace from the forces of angry time or postcolonial rage-magic. Public uninterest had killed it finally and left it lonely and post-dead and full of stories.

Heard you were coming. Its voice was distant. It tried to tell Billy about the fights it had had. The references were inhuman. It tried to tell stories that made no sense and faded into nothing, leaving Billy nodding politely at each absent anecdote. With a cough, as genteel as at a tea party, Billy brought it back to the matter in hand.

“I was told you could tell me what’s happening,” he said. “One of you’s been following me. Keeping an eye out for me. From the Natural History Museum. Can you tell me why?”

Can, it said. It was eager to answer. You’re what it waited for, it said.

“The jar? The angel of the Natural History Museum? How do you know?”

They telled. The others. We speaked. Dead it might be, but it kept in touch with its still-active cousins. It failed, the thing said. Behind him was a gust of air, as swing doors opened and closed to help it speak. Its voice was building sounds. The kraken went. It did bad. It’s full of guilt.

“It’s left the museum,” Billy said.

All of them. All of us. There’s a fight on against the end thing. No point staying still. They fight the endingness. But it. Was the first to walk. Wants to make amends. Tries always to find you. Look after you.

“Why?”

Billy backed away and bumped into the open-closing door. He stood away from it so the phylax could say in its hinge-squeak, Remembers you. You’re chosen.

“What? I don’t… How? Why’s it chosen me?”

Angels wait for their christs.

Angels wait for their christs?

And you came, born not of woman but of glass.

“I don’t understand.”

Gives you strength-you are christ of its memory.

“This thing with time? It gave me that? Dane said it was because of the kraken… Oh. Wait, wait. Are you…?”

Billy began to laugh. Slowly at first, then more. He sat on the floor. He made himself laugh silently. He knew he was hysterical. It did not feel like release. The cow moved toward him. It was just one moment at the end of the room, one moment two or three feet closer and eyeing him with its sideways glass eye. “I’m alright, I’m alright,” Billy said to the decaying memory.

“You know why Dane thinks those things happen?” he said. He smiled like at a drinking buddy. “He thinks it’s because of the kraken. He thinks I’m some kind of John the Baptist, or something. But, so, that’s the wrong direction. It’s nothing to do with the squid.

“None of this is anything to do with the squid. It’s the sodding tank.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to admit that’s funny. You know what’s even funnier? The best of it? I was joking.”

Billy had kept a straight face during all his claims to be the first person born of in vitro fertilization. That ridiculous, meaningless gag, made in that place, that for the sake of the rigour of humour he had stuck to, had been overheard by the genius loci, the spirit of the museum. Maybe it was attuned to any talk of bottles and their power. Maybe it did not understand the idea of a joke or a lie. “It’s not true,” he said. The bovine angel of memory said nothing. Clack clack clack clack went its four stomachs, lighting in time.

Billy leaned over. “I’m not a kraken prophet, I’m the bottle messiah.” He laughed again. “But I’m just not, I’m not.”

The bottle-angel was diminished, diminished and receding daily, by its wanderings beyond its demesne, by its failure, its efforts, the smashing of that iteration of glass, preserver and bone. It would look for him again, pulling itself another self out of bits and pieces from its palace, though, sniffing out that portion of its own self it had put inside him. That gave him these unearned powers. Until it was gone it would strive to find Billy again, and through him the Architeuthis it had lost.

“I WISH IT WOULD COME BACK,” HE SAID.

Will.

“Yeah, but now. My partner’s gone. I need all the help I can get.”

You are the memory christ.

“Yeah, only I’m not.” Slowly, he looked up. Slowly he stood and smiled. “But you know what, I’ll take that. I’ll take whatever.” He reached and clenched, and thought maybe there was a tiny scutter of time. Maybe there was. “You going to come? Outside?” The cow said nothing. Dead as it was it did not have the strength to fight in the war that its living siblings were waging. “Alright,” Billy said. “Alright, it doesn’t matter. You stay here, look after this place. It needs you.” He felt kind.

From some other part of the building came a noise that was not part of the cow’s voice. Billy was at the door, his weapon out, listening, ready, without knowing how he had got there. The cow angel tried to speak, but Billy held the door closed, and it had nothing with which to make noise. “Hush,” he whispered. Ordering an angel around. It was gone, though, in a series of those being-elsewhere steps. Billy thought for a moment that it would bring a human guard running in consternation. (He did not know that they were all aware something old and melancholy walked in the building, that they tried never to disturb.)

“Godammit,” he said, and he went after the dead angel, holding his phaser out. He followed the screech of hinges and things falling from last shelves. He came suddenly into an unwindowed room where the plastic cow screamed with the voice of the building at a tall man.

Billy ducked and fired, but the man moved faster, and the phaser beam scored over the ineffectual cow and dissipated across the wall. “Billy Harrow!” the man was shouting. He held a weapon himself, but did not fire. “Billy!” The word came from behind him too, Billy thought, but realised that the second, tinier voice was in his pocket. It was Wati.

“I’m not here to fight,” the man shouted.

“Stop, Billy,” Wati said. The angel wheezed with windows. “He’s here to help,” Wati said.

“Billy Harrow,” the man said. “I’m from the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood. I’m not here to fight. Marge came to us.”

“What? What? Marge? Oh Jesus, what’s she doing, what does she want? She’s got to stay out of all this…”

“This isn’t about her. I’m here to help. I’ve got a message from the sea. It wants to meet you.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

THE SEA IS NEUTRAL. THE SEA DIDN’T GET INVOLVED IN INTRIGUES, didn’t take sides in London’s affairs. Wasn’t interested. Who the hell could understand the sea’s motivations, anyway? And who would be so lunatic as to challenge it? No one could fight that. You don’t go to war against a mountain, against lightning, against the sea. It had its own counsel, and petitioners might sometimes visit its embassy, but that was for their benefit, not its. The sea was not concerned: that was the starting point.

Same at the embassies of fire (that constantly scorching café in Crouch End), the embassy of earth (a clogged crypt in Greenwich), the embassies of glass and wire and other more recherché elements. The same standoffishness and benignly uninterested power. But this time, this time, the sea had an opinion. And the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood were useful.

They were a faith themselves, not dictated to nor created by the sea. Though the sea, so far as any Londoners could judge, took the worship of the Brotherhood wryly and graciously enough. That was always disingenuous. What the Brotherhood offered was plausible deniability: the sea itself did nothing, of course; it was the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood that sought out Billy Harrow, and if they brought him back to the sea’s embassy, well?

It was an urgent journey. It was raining, which made Billy feel better in some way, as if water wanted to protect him.

“What’s going on with Marge?” Billy said again.

“I don’t know,” Sellar said. “She came to see me. She thought we took the kraken. We thought you and Dane did. So when she said that wasn’t right, I went and spoke to the sea, and-”

“Is Marge alright?”

“No.”

“Right,” Billy said. “No one is.” He looked again at his phone, but he had missed no calls. Jason had not called him. Maybe he didn’t go yet, Billy thought and did not believe. Maybe he’ll get back to me soon.

A row of semidetached Victorian houses in the northwest of London. A Tube train, emerged from the tunnels, drummed through the night, behind bricks. Cars moved slowly. There were few pedestrians. The houses were three storeys high and only a little dilapidated, bricks well weathered, stained, pointing eroded, but not slums nor derelicts. They were fronted by little gardens with their few plants and coiffed patches. Billy could see children’s bedrooms with pretty animals and monsters on wallpaper, kitchens, sitting rooms with the cocoon-light of television. From one address came laughter and conversation. Smoke and music came out of its open windows. The building next to it was quiet and unlit.

Closer, and Billy saw that was not quite the case. Its curtains were drawn, on all three floors. There was perhaps something very faintly illumined, visible, just, through the curtains, as if someone carried candles in the deeps of the rooms behind.

“Have you been here before, Wati?” he said.

“Never inside,” the figure he carried said to him. “There’s nothing I can get in.”

Sellar tapped at the door, a complicated code staccato. By his ankles were a collection of empty bottles. Sellar pressed his ear to the wood, waited, then beckoned Billy. The ground-floor curtains were heavy oxblood cotton; the first floor, in blue-green paisley; the top, with cartoon plants. All were pressed up against the inside of the glass.

“Come then,” said Sellar.

Sellar wrote a message Billy could not see, rolled it up and placed it inside a bottle. He screwed its lid on tight and pushed it through the door’s post flap. Several moments passed, but only several. Billy started when the flap opened and the bottle dropped back out and smashed against the concrete step. The barks of dogs did not abate, nor the calls of children playing late. Billy picked up the paper. He held his doll so Wati could read, too.

The paper was damp. The ink was spread in stain-coronas around the written words, in an intricately curling font, spreading beyond its lines.

Teuthis no longer our creature. No longer creature. Not of ocean. We have spoken to the kraken within us to know why this. Neither they nor we are indifferent to what might come. It is no princeling commissar chosen by them or us in the tank.

Billy looked at Wati. “Well? Do you get this?”

“I think…” Wati said. “It’s saying it’s just a kraken.”

“Just?”

“Like not a, a particular kraken. I think. And… but, I mean… it’s not theirs no more, I think.”

“Dane thought there might be something about that one in particular, that was why it was taken. That it might be a hostage.” A part of the incomparable squabbles of kraken. Warlords in feud, battles conducted at the pace of continental drift. A century for the creep of each province-long arm around an enemy’s; a bite excising cities’-worth of flesh clenching over the duration of several human dynasties. Even the fleetingly majestic altercations of their krill, the Architeuthis, were just squibs by the bickering of their parents.

“There has to be something,” Billy said. “There are other giant squid in the world. Why this one? Why’s this one the deal? What’s its… parentage? Where’s it from?”

“It said that ain’t it,” Wati said. “The sea.” Billy and the figure stared at each other.

“So why are we here?” Billy said. “Why does this kraken baby lead to the end of everything?” He stared into the doll’s eyes. “What does the sea really know, or the krakens? What about…? How about this, Wati-you could ask the krakens direct.”

If they took a boat. They should take a boat and a big iron or brass Buddha, say. Where the water was deep, above a trench in the Atlantic, they could tip the statue over the side and Wati could begin a long wobbling voyage down, a precipitation into very crushing dark. Come to rest at very last in mud and hagfished bones, and Wati could politely clear his throat, and wait to attract the attention of some eye that had no business being that big. “Hello. Any particular reason your little plankton baby’s going to set the world on fire?” he might say.

“How’m I supposed to get out again?” Wati said. There was a litter of statues on the seafloor, but how far might they all be from his abyssal interview? What if they were out of reach, and he had to sit there in the black in terrified boredom, fingered by glowing fish until the ocean eroded him out of statuehood and self? So: put his heaviest anchor-statue on the end of a chain strung with other made bodies, so when the questioning was done he could rise through them back up into the ship’s figurehead-

“What are we doing?” Billy interrupted himself. There was another breaking-bottle sound. Another message.

We are not indifferent. To the end in fire. We do not wish London gone. You and the exile Krakenist and we wish the same thing. Our self a product of concatenate development. The kraken would not have this, this is not about them.

Were the giant squid themselves, or their parents, god instars, their apotheosed others, helping with this? Out of, what, divine irritation at some misrepresentation? “Why this squid?” Billy whispered.

Others are against us. We had thought otherwise. We know now. You must get to the kraken and keep it safe from fire.

“Ooh, d’you think?” Billy muttered. “Thanks for that, hadn’t occurred…” He continued reading.

You must free the exile.

“That’s Dane,” he said.

You will be shown.

“Why will we?” said Billy. “What does ‘concatenate development’ mean?” He frowned and tilted his head and read.

Destroy this paper. You will be helped.

AND DANE?

Dane was hanging upside down, and dripping. He had been reciting to himself stories of his grandfather, his grandfather’s courage. “Once,” he said inside his own head, in his grandfather’s voice, “I got caught.” Was it a memory or an invention on Dane’s part? Never mind. “So there was this time there was some scuffle going on with the ringstoners. You ever gone toe-to-toe with a ringstoner? Anyway, we were at it over something or other, can’t even remember, some saint bone of some church we said we’d help so they’d help us, I don’t know…” Concentrate! Dane thought. Come on. “Anyway, so there it was and they had me all trussed like in a bloody cat’s-cradle, and in they come to give it all this, yadda yadda, like. So.” Sniff. Dane as his grandfather, sniffing. “I let them get all close. I was all letting my head go all over the place, you know? They were crowing. You’ll never this, we’ll always that. But when they got right up to it, right up to me, I didn’t say nothing. Till they were right there. Then I said a prayer and like I knew they would, like I bloody knew they would, all the ropes that they had were just what they always were, which is the arms of God, and God unrolled them, and I was free, and then, boy, there was some reckoning.”

Hurray. At some point the echoes of the room Dane was in changed, as people came in. Dane stopped talking to himself and tried to listen. He could not see who was there, with what had been done to his eyes. He could not see, but even through waves of pain he could hear, and he knew that the voice he heard was that of the Tattoo.

“Seriously, nothing?” the Tattoo said.

“Lot of screaming, but you don’t count that,” said the voice of one of the Nazis. “You alright? You seem stressed.”

“I am a bit stressed. Truth to tell I’m a bit bloody stressed. Remember the monsterherds?”

“No.”

A snuffling, a slobber, canine whickering. That dogman was there. That mage-knacked member of this crew, a man made himself half German shepherd, a pitiful fascist meat pun that Dane scorned even as the teeth and muzzle that pun occasioned mauled him.

“Well… They used to run with Grisamentum, back when I… Back when. Well, one of my factories just got interrupted by a bunch of dust or something acting very much like some kind of bloody dragon.”

“I don’t know what that means…”

“It means there’s stuff coming back I wasn’t expecting to face again. This little shitfucker has to know something. He’s in on something. He knows where the fucking squid is-it’s his god, isn’t it? And he knows where Billy Harrow’ll be. Keep at it.”

Keep at it. Dane prayed without ceasing. He prayed silently and motionlessly. Tentacled God in darkness please give me strength. Strength to listen, and to learn. Krakens in your vast silent and ammoniac wisdom have mercy. He knew that he should listen, that he should wait and say nothing, if even he could answer the questions, which mostly he could not even if he would, which he would not, because this would not end. He knew that it would not be too long now, weak as he was and unblooding from all the holes the Nazis had made, woozy and too tired and done to even scream, a thing hanging in thermals of pain-he knew that this was a pitch of this that was its own limit, and that therefore, again, for the second time, before that moment when he would spill enough of himself out that a critical mass of lack would be reached and he would have nowhere to go but into death, the ghastly chaos sunwheel he could no longer see would be rotated. The swastika was, as its hippy antifash defenders insisted, a sign of life, even when deployed like this.

Who made you? Kraken made me. As a by-product. Uncaring. Was the comfort in that, or in the secret hope that secretly the secret kraken cared? We are all squidshit, Dane thought.

The Chaos swastika mightn’t be able to return those actually passed for much time, but it was thuggishly fecund enough to infect him, up to the very point of death, into livingness again. It would rotate with him swastikad on it, and it would wind in life out of all control, pouring it back into him, so blood would drip up, ruined organs reinflate, splayed bone ends grope for each other, grizzling as they slotted shard back into shard hole, fixing him all up, back into pain.

Chapter Fifty-Three

A “TWO-WAY MIRROR”-ONCE A LONG TIME AGO PERHAPS intended to dissemble, but now a lie that drew attention to itself. Behind it were Baron and Vardy, standing in such similar poses that it would have been comical to an observer. On the other side of the glass, Collingswood questioned Jason.

“So how come I can notice him now?” Vardy said. “I should think I recognise him, presumably.”

“Collingswood,” Baron said.

“She’s not bad, is she?”

“She’s bloody good,” Baron said. “That’s how she saw him in the first place.” Her questions to Jason had been tempered, nuanced, enhanced by various knacked enhancements: from an uncanny form of unbearable wheedling to the imposition of unphysical pain. “If you’d been here when you were supposed to… Where the bloody hell have you been, Professor?”

“Professor is it now?”

“Well.” Baron turned to him. “Look, you can’t say I haven’t given you your head, right? Thank God Collingswood isn’t in here to hear me say that-we’d never hear the end of her giggling. I know your job’s to channel the bleeding divine, and when have I ever stood in your way? Aren’t I the bloke puts ‘Do Not Disturb, Eschatology Being Revelationed’ on your door? Eh? But you’re supposed to keep me in the loop, and turn up when I need you, and do me the sheer minimum modicum of salutage and whatnot, right? You were supposed to be here for this questioning about two hours ago. So where the bloody hell have you been?”

Vardy nodded. “Apologies. But I do have news.” He organised the air with his hands. “There’s no way you get an end like this without someone wanting it-this is not just an accident. And now the Tattoo’s going mad. I still can’t work out where this ending comes into whoever-it-is’s plans.”

“He is going mad,” Baron said. He was tearing up the city. “We’ve tried to have a word with his people, but something’s pushed him over the edge…”

“So I’ve been out quizzing a bunch of the people in Grisamentum’s and the Tattoo’s penumbra, you might say,” Vardy said. “We know Adler was an associate of the former, but we don’t know why he was in the museum when he was. We don’t know what he had planned, so I’ve been wondering if it’s some of the others who were all cut loose when Grisamentum died… who are behind all this.”

“And?”

“Listen to me, this is what I’m saying. There’s a presiding intelligence behind all this. Whatever’s coming, that’s got the angels walking, it’s not some by-product of another scheme, it has intent behind it. But we don’t know what.”

“I know that…”

“No. It’s not an accident. Listen. We’re close. Do you understand?” Vardy spoke in a surly lecture. “The world is going to end. Really soon. End. Soon. And we don’t know why, or who wants it to.”

“It’s got to be Griz,” Baron said quietly. “Got to be. He never died…”

“But why? It doesn’t make any bloody sense. Why’d he want to burn himself now, then? That’s why I’ve been out there. Asking questions.”

“And? Bloody and? Where’s it getting you?”

“Does the name Cole ring any bells?” Vardy said. “If I say ‘physicist.’ If I say ‘Grisamentum.’ Any bells at all?”

“No.”

“One of the names being thrown around Grisamentum’s court around the time he, ahem, died. Died according to the oncologists. Cole’s a pyromancer. Works with djinn, is the whisper. Rather closely, according to some rumours. One of several people that for no reason we could clock was talking to Grisamentum in the last days. Apparently he was one of the ones you tried to debrief after the funeral but he always diligently refused to chat to the force.”

“… Oh, right, I think I remember. I always assumed he was there because Griz wanted a dramatic send-off, to be honest. Big sparkly pyre. What’s your point?”

“There’s dramatic and dramatic.”

“What was it he did for Griz, then?”

“Experimental pyro stuff: memory-fire, that sort of thing, he says.”

“Says?”

“I’ve been looking into Grisamentum’s associates, so I was asking around about him. I told you I had news. Not expecting much, to be honest. Expecting some hedging of bets, some ‘Grisamentum was a gentleman, you could leave your doors unlocked, was a pleasure to work with him,’ a thank-you-very-much-and-bugger-off. But what I got was a bit more surprising. He has a daughter. Cole does.”

“Mrs. Cole on the scene?”

“Dead years ago. Don’t you want to know what I heard? His daughter’s gone missing.”

Baron stared. Eventually began to nod. “Is that so?” he said slowly.

“It’s the word.”

“What does that mean?”

“First Adler, then Cole. Someone’s working through Grisamentum’s known associates. Doing things to… inconvenience them.”

“Like shoving them in bottles.”

“And snaffling their kids.”

“Why?”

“If I knew that, Baron. But it’s a pattern.”

“Bit out of your remit, this, isn’t it? Where’s the goddery?” Vardy closed his eyes and shrugged. “So… How do you think we should play this? Have a word, obviously, but…”

“Well, you’re the boss, obviously, but I’d suggest me being point man here.”

“I thought he won’t speak to cops.”

“He wouldn’t back then, certainly, but I’m not a policeman, am I? I’m an academic, like him.”

“And what more tenacious freemasonry do there be, eh?” Baron nodded. “Alright. For God’s sake, though, keep me apprised. We’ll see what we can do about tracking down young Miss Cole. Now look, this is not unimbloodyportant. Shut up and pay attention to what your colleagues are doing. Like this colleague here, right now.” Baron pointed through the window.

THERE IS NOWHERE THE SEWERS DON’T GO. FAT FILAMENTS TRACKING humans under everything, unceasingly sluicing shitty rubbishy rain. The gentle downslope links all those pipes to the sea, and it was back along those pipes, defying gravity and the effluvial flow that the sea had sent its own filaments, its own sensory channels of saltwater, tickling below the city, listening, licking the brickwork. For a day and a half there was a secret sea under London, fractal in all the tunnels.

Pipes filled with brine that spied on the inhabitants of buildings, watching, listening, hunting. You might obscure the attention of the Londonmancers, with the complicity of a treacherous borough, with strikebreaking hexes strong enough: but nothing could stay hidden from an inquisitive sea.

Billy waited, alone but for the repeated anxious occurrences of Wati, who came, went, into the doll and out again, to the frontlines of the strikes.

“Done what the sea asked me,” said Sellar at some low dark point of the night, and went, with a quick backward wave, returning to his dreams of drenched apocalypse. It’s fire, not water, Billy thought. I don’t think you’re going to like it.

His phone went, and he connected immediately. He said nothing, only listened. There was a brief silence before a voice said, “Billy?” He could tell it was not Jason. He broke the connection and swore. They had the proletarian chameleon. It had gone wrong.

He stood in the front garden of the sea’s embassy-it was dark, his clothes were dark, no light glinted on his glasses, and he knew he could do this unseen-and threw the phone as hard as he could, which was hard, now, into the darkness over the roofs. He did not hear it land. At last, as he sat by the step of the house, he heard a swill of water in the pipes below his feet. Another bottle was pushed from the letter box.

The sea told him where the Chaos Nazis were. It said that was where its help would end. That it would not be intervening, could not take any sides. It was closing in on time for daylight. Billy leaned forward on his knees and rested his forehead on the door.

“Now listen,” he said. “Listen a minute. You can’t get in there, can you, Wati?” Billy said.

“No figures in that house.”

“Listen, sea,” Billy said. “See here, sea.” He smiled tiredly. “That’s the sort of thing’s helped get us where we are now, people wanting to stay neutral.” He felt some recognition. He felt as if he remembered this. As if he’d been in the sea only days before, or nights before, in fact, at night, in the night, as he dreamed those ink dreams. He put his hand on the door. He knew this place.

“What is it you want to stay neutral about? You want to stay out of a war. This wouldn’t be London versus you-that’s not what we’re up against. So what is it? Chaos Nazis? I don’t believe it. The Tattoo? Does a gang boss really frighten you?”

Oh, snap! Did that kind of petty psychology work on the fucking ocean? Nothing ventured, Billy thought, nothing ventured. What else did he have? Two weapons he did not understand and a polybodied trade unionist. There was nothing but silence from inside the embassy.

“So what is it? Protocol? Niceties? I’m going to say this. I’m going to beg.” Billy was already on his knees. “Please. So you mess up some balance of power? So what? You know what’s coming. The fire and end of it all. I bet this fire burns seawater too. Dane’s going to fix it, though, you know. So if you don’t want everything to burn, if you don’t want London to burn, if you don’t want the sea to burn… help me.”

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NOW?” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. JASON Smyle wheezed. A few cosmetic knacks, a little unnatural dermatological intervention, and his skin looked quite untouched, all his bruises glamoured away.

“What happens now is this,” she said. “You’ve broken various laws, but as well you bloody know they’re oddball laws. They’re like the constitution, they ain’t written. What that means is you go into the other court system. Which means whatever I want it to mean.” She was less than half Jason’s age. She leaned back and put her feet on the table. “So your cooperation will be greatly appreciated. So.” She twanged briefly into ridiculous American. “One mo’ ’gain. What was you after, coming here? Where’s Billy? And where’s the squid?” But they had been over this many times, and no amount of cajoling or threatening elicited any more.

“I swear, I swear, I swear,” Jason kept saying, and she believed him. He did not know. All he knew was the number Billy had given him, that he had surrendered immediately. That was it. Collingswood glanced through the mirror and shook her head. She left the room and joined her colleagues.

“So what have we got?” Baron said. “It’s all a bit of a turn-up for the books, isn’t it?”

“And you believe him,” Vardy said.

“Yeah,” said Collingswood. “Yeah. So…”

“So,” said Baron. “So our man Billy is not an abductee at all. Is in fact collaborating with a known member, now exile, of the Church of God Kraken. It turns out our ingénue isn’t so ingenuous after all.”

“What is it with this fucking Stockholm Syndrome?” Collingswood said. “Is Billy, what’s her name, fucking Patty Hearst?” She looked at Vardy.

“Possible,” he said. “This whole thing stinks of belief to me. I take it we got nothing from the number he gave us?”

“Nah. Belief in what?”

“In something.”

“Alright children, alright,” Baron said. “So, we thought we were looking for a captive, but it turns out we’re looking for a fugitive. Vardy, you better fill Collingswood in on Cole.”

“Who’s that?” she said. “What did he do? Or she. Was it she? Can I play?”

“A pyromancer,” Baron said. “Ex-associate of Griz.”

“Pyro?” Collingswood narrowed her eyes. “Isn’t it fire that people keep seeing? Vardy?”

“… Yes, it is. Sorry, I just… I’m…” He chewed his knuckle. Baron and Collingswood blinked at this unusual hesitation. “A pyromancer, a squid from the museum, an end of all things, it’s… there’s something close. I just have to parse the faith of it.”

SO WHAT WAS UP WITH MARGE? HER BEST LEAD HAD GONE TO nothing.

She had new priorities. She believed all these strangers who kept telling her she was in danger, that she was drawing dangerous attention to herself, that she needed protection.

Don’t you know what a trap street is? the cult collector had said, and no she had not, but a moment online sorted that. Invented streets inserted into maps to right copyright wrongs, to prove one representation was ripped off from another. It was hard to find any definitive lists of these spurious enmapped locations, but there were suggestions. One of which, of course, was the street on which the Old Queen was.

So. Was it that these particular occult streets had been made, then hidden? Their names leaked as traps in an elaborate double-bluff, so that no one could go except those who knew that such traps were actually destinations? Or were there really no streets there when the traps were set? Perhaps these cul-de-sacs were residues, yawned into illicit existence when the atlases were drawn up by liars.

Well, either way. Those were obviously the streets to investigate. Marge looked for more names.

Chapter Fifty-Four

THE CHAOS NAZIS HID NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR. JUST AN EMPTY building. There was no metaphoric logic to its whereabouts, no cosmic pun: it was just isolated enough and empty enough and easy enough to break into and recustomise from the inside-soundproofing and such-and then to protect that it had been chosen. It was in the far east of London, in a zone depressed enough that not many people took a lot of notice of stuff. It had a deep basement where Dane was being tortured and where Chaos swastikas were cranked and turned. It was near a garage.

The Nazis were alone and unsupervised. An outsourced resource, subcontracting being as fashionable in gangland as in the rubble of Fordism. The Tattoo had told them, vaguely, to continue what they were doing, and to try to extract something, some hint, from Dane, as to where Billy and the kraken were.

Inside, it was decked in memorabilia from the Reich, guaranteed-spattered with genuine spatters, blood, brains, gauleiter cum. Candles in niches beside icons of various deviltry, smoke-damaged posters of Nazi bands and pictures from the camps. Exactly what you would expect.

The Chaos Nazis stood, patchwork fascist fops, all glitz, spandex, leather and eagles. They eyed Dane. He was tied behind a rack of crusted tools. His rack had turned to put a bit more tumourous life in him, so he had eyes and teeth, though not all his teeth, and he could breathe through his nose though it was broken. They had only brought him back a couple of hours ago, had not really got started again yet. He stared at them, alternately spat and raged, and slumped and tried to go into himself.

“Look,” said one. “His lips are moving. He’s praying to his snail again.”

“Stupid Jewish snail scum,” said another.

“Woof,” the dogman Nazi said.

“Where’s Billy, you scum?”

“Where’s the squid?”

“Your dead squid won’t save you.”

They all laughed. They stood in the windowless room. They hesitated. “Stupid Jew,” said one. They laughed again.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specificities, becomes, inevitably, just pain. Not that Dane was indifferent to the idea of more of it: he shivered as the men mocked him. But he had been surprised that they had taken him twice to the point of death through their bladey interventions and he had still not told them that he knew where the kraken was, nor who had it, nor where Billy might be. That last he did not know himself, but he could certainly have given them leads, and he had not, and they were at a loss.

Still he kept nearly weeping. Dane kept praying.

“You can stop your whining,” one of the Nazis said. “You’re alone. No one knows where you are. Nothing can help. Nothing’s coming to save you.”

HAD THE SEA WAITED JUST FOR THAT MOMENT? DID IT COME WITH a sense of theatre, pausing in the pipework that infested the house as pipes infest all houses, listening for just such an announcement to refute? Whatever: the stars aligned, everything came together for that perfect beat, and just but exactly as if in answer, brine burst every piece of plumbing in the house, and the building began to bleed sea.

Saltwater ripped through the walls. It buckled the floor. Lovingly gilted World War Two knickknacks spilled into new holes.

The Nazis scattered, ran, did not know where to run. Dane shouted without words. Rage, elation, hope and violence. Water gulped at the Nazis; seawater freezing and London muddy sucked and pulled them down with eddies and undertows it imported from its wide ocean self. Some reached the stairs, but more than one was felled by misplaced waves and brutally kept under, and, bewilderingly, in inches in the city, began to drown.

The water reached Dane’s chin. He wondered if it would kill him too. He’d mind, he realised, he would, he would. Kraken let me breathe.

The Nazis ascending the stairs were met. Billy’s phaser cut them down. No stunning now. He descended, shooting as he came. He sent a poker-hot ray scorching through the fur on the Hitler-worshipping dogman. Turning into the torture room Billy growled like a goddamn animal and shot many times while the sea roared and smashed the Nazi bric-a-brac from wall to wall and sunk it as if at the bottom of the world.

“Dane,” he said. “Dane, Dane, Dane.” He knelt in the swells. Dane wheezed and smiled. Billy took a hacksaw to his bonds. “You’re alright,” Billy said. “You’re okay. We got here in time. Before they did anything.”

And Dane even actually laughed at that, as he flopped free from his crooked starburst constraint.

“No, mate,” he whispered. “You’re too late. Twice. Never mind though, eh?” He laughed again and it was bad. “Never mind though. It’s good to see you, man.” He leaned on Billy like someone much more wounded than he looked, and Billy was confused.

“They’re blocking the way out,” Billy said. Nazis from other rooms were massed at the top of the stairs and firing down with Third Reich weaponry. “Here,” said Billy, and gave Dane his gun. Dane stood a little straighter. “Are you with me, Dane?” Billy said. Dane did something, aimed and fired up the stairs. There were a lot of them up there.

“I’m with you,” he said. He looked at the weapon. His voice croaked back to something like normal. “Works okay.”

“We can’t get out that way,” Billy said.

As if in answer, certainly in answer, the sea gave a rocking swell and receded very fast, fast enough to take a great chunk of flooring with it. It left a hole in the centre of the room, a smeary slipping hollow the size of another room, broken by the stubs of pipes and the ruins of masonry. The sea poured violently back out and tore a gap as it went, sluicing from the pit to some half-used end of sewer or old river-run, opening into the labyrinth.

“Can you?” Billy said, and braced him. Dane nodded. They braced and careened in a cold, dangerous slide into the mud and receding seawater, and into the cavern.

They stared up through the fingering pipes and the slurry of brickwork, the dirty cascade, into the dinge of the room. Faces peered over the lip. Billy and Dane fired volleys, hallooing, smacking twisted features from sight. In the second of silence that followed they ran into the slime under everything, and from there, dripping like fresh clay golems, into the dark tunnels of London.