Kraken

Chapter Sixty-Three

WAS THAT IT? WERE THEY IT, PERHAPS MARGE SHOULD SAY? There were two, after all, weren’t there?

Not that what Marge had seen wasn’t impressive and strange and something that wouldn’t have floored her a few weeks before. Only that she had been hoping for revelation, and revelation came there none.

So what was it she’d seen? She was unsure. She had, after her escape from Collingswood, been rather far from the epicentre while whatever had happened had happened. Some of it had been-whatever it was she was going to say instead of magic: the way some of the people she had noticed moved, those dusty vague humans in the scrubland; the somethings she had never quite glimpsed above and around the sweeps of concrete road; her own repeated slippery moonwalk escapes from the attention of other tourists of finality. And there was the sweep of autumnal sky colours that really could, that really might be dramatic little storms.

There was nothing to do with squid, that she could see, and whatever the micropolitics had been, they had been opaque to her. She was no wiser, and frankly a little awe-numb by now.

So what now?

“W HAT’S YOUR NAME?”

At very last the man spoke.

“Paul.”

Cleaned up of the muck and blood that stained him, Paul was a thin man in his forties or fifties. When lucid he was cowed.

“Hush, hush, wait,” Billy and Dane said to him as he shook in their grip, as they skulked in hiding. “They’re going to come find me,” he kept saying. And during all that careful calming of him was the intervention of the Tattoo. The voice came continuously. Threats, insults, commands from the tattoo mouth on Paul’s skin.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” the Tattoo screamed. “Unfuckinghand me you little shits or I will kill you where you stand.”

They could not think for his bilious spiel. Dane held Paul and they removed his jacket. From his back, expressions passing in ink tides, bad-magic animation, the Tattoo snarled. It sneered. It looked side to side at Dane and Billy.

“Fucking clowns,” it said. It puckered its lips and made spit noises. No spit came out of the black-ink pretend hole of its mouth, only that sound of disgust. “You think this is it? You think Goss can’t taste where I’ve been? Look at this cunt’s feet.” They were a little bloody. The Tattoo began to laugh.

“Goss isn’t here,” Billy said.

“Oh, don’t you worry, Goss and Subby’ll be back. Where’s your bastard commie friend?” They said nothing. “His plan’s going up in piss and so are you, soon as they’re back. You’re all going to die.”

“Shut up,” said Dane. He kneeled by the vivid black-outlined features. “What do you want the kraken for? What’s your plan?”

“You worthless little snail-worshipping turd, Parnell. You’re so fucking bad at that you got kicked out of your church.”

“What do you know about Cole?”

“I won’t insult your intelligence with if you let me go now I’ll let you live, because I totally won’t.”

“I can hurt you,” Dane said.

“No, you can hurt Paul.”

That shut them up. Billy and Dane looked at each other. They looked at Paul’s skin.

“Shit,” whispered Billy.

“Oy Paul,” the Tattoo shouted. “When we’re out of here I’m going to have my boys fucking sand your feet off. Hear me, boy? You keep your mouth shut if you want any teeth, if you want a tongue, if you want lips or a fucking jaw.”

They wound parcel tape around Paul’s midriff. He stayed still to let them. The Tattoo spat spitlessly and cursed them. He tried to chew on Paul, but it was only the motion of ink under the skin. Paul sat patient as a fussed-over king. Billy silenced the Tattoo, and taped also over its eyes, that glared at him until all obscured. Paul had other tattoos. Band names, symbols. They all behaved-motionless but for his muscles.

“I’m sorry,” Billy said to Paul. “You’ve got a bit of a hairy chest-we should’ve shaved you first. That’ll hurt to get off.” Beneath the tape, the mmm-mmm mutterings continued awhile.

That was how they brought him, with them, to the god.

“Why would you bring him here?” Saira said.

The kraken in its tank in the truck watched them deadly. Londonmancers surrounded them. There were more of them than previously-the insider cabal had spread, as secrets like this will not behave. They left behind “to hold the fort” the supposed mainstream of their antique tribe, now a truncated and confused remnant. Every one of the Londonmancers in the lorry was staring aghast at their unwanted captive. Billy and Dane had tracked them, worked out their route with the tiny satnav and gone ahead to intercept them. It had been a difficult journey, fearful that they were chased at every step by some or other power in the city’s war.

The Londonmancers would not relax the charms they had to keep Wati from the lorry. Billy was enraged on his behalf, but the strike spirit had been agitated, in any case, had needed to circulate, to fight against another last strike crisis. “Just give me a doll or something on the roof,” he said. “Just something.”

“We need to find Grisamentum,” Billy had said. “He’s got to be-”

And Wati had said, “I’ll do what I can, Billy. I’ll do what I can. There’s things I have to…”

Where could Grisamentum be? Much of the city was still in denial about the fact that he was anywhere at all other than heaven or hell, but there was no way the monsterherds and Byrne’s strange intercession, that terrible knacked gang fight, could be finessed out of facticity. London knew who was back. It just didn’t know where, why or how, and no amount of cajoling of even the most eagerly treacherous or venal set of the city’s streets, grifters or apocalypse chancers would reveal anything.

“What would you rather we’d done?” Dane said to Saira.

“We don’t have much time,” Billy said.

“It’s coming,” Fitch said. “It’s suddenly closer. Much more certain. Something happened to make it… more near.”

“We’ve got the Tattoo,” Billy said. “Do you not get that?”

“We needed to get this poor sod off the streets as quick as,” Dane said. Paul sat still, looked at them all. He stared at the kraken in its stinking liquid, through its glass.

“Don’t show him that,” Paul whispered. They looked at him. He wiggled his shoulders to indicate who he meant.

“No one’s going to show him anything,” Billy said carefully. “Promise.”

“We’ve interrupted him,” Dane muttered to Saira and Fitch. “We can find out what his plans are.”

“His plans?” said Saira.

“He’s been trying to get hold of the kraken,” Billy said. He tapped Paul gently on the back.

“Oh, but it’s… look,” Saira said. “Whatever it is… it’s already happening,” she said. She actually mopped her forehead with whatever expensive scarf it was she was wearing. “The burning’s started.” In the last two days, two smallholdings had gone. Been burned, acts of strange arson. Self-cancelling. The memories of the destroyed buildings went almost, not quite but almost, as totally as the buildings themselves.

One had been part of the Tattoo’s empire, a kebab shop in Balham that doubled as a lucrative source of drug money, distilling down the third eyes extracted from and sold by the desperate. The other, a medium-scale jeweller in Bloomsbury, had historically had an association with Grisamentum. Both had gone, and according to most attempted recall, Saira said, there had never been either such place.

“You remember them, Dane?” Saira said.

“No.”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms. “You don’t.” The lorry lurched and she adjusted while Fitch staggered, his beard and hair wild. “You and everyone else.”

“So how do you know there was ever anything there?” Billy said. She stared at him.

“Hello,” she said. “Perhaps we haven’t met. Hi. My name’s Saira Mukhopadhyay, I’m a Londonmancer. London’s my job.”

“You remember them?” Billy said.

“I don’t, but the city does. A bit. It knows something’s up. The burn’s not perfect. The… skin’s puckered, sort of. I remember remembering one of them. But they were never here. We’ve checked records. Never there. There was a fire-engine farting around the day Grisamentum’s must have gone up. The firemen were just driving around, didn’t know why they were supposed to be there.”

“It’s Cole’s thing, it’s got to be,” Dane said slowly. “Who is it getting him to… Where’s that paper? The one that was in the book?” Billy gave it. “Here. ‘Katachronophlogiston.’ Look.”

“Burning stuff right out of time,” Billy said. “Yeah. So, who and why?”

“He might know,” Saira said. “He knows more than us.” She stared at Paul. Indicated his back. A long, unhappy pause. “He might know stuff about Cole. Might not even know he does.” They waited, they hesitated. They tried to think of interrogator’s tricks.

Paul spoke. “Don’t,” he said. “He won’t… I can tell you.” He was so quiet they thought they had misheard, until he said it again. “I can tell you. Why he wants it. What he wants it for. I can tell you everything.”

“IT WAS A TATTOOIST IN BRIXTON,” HE SAID. “I CAME IN TO HAVE A big, you know, Celtic cross on my back, but not only black and white-I wanted greens and stuff too, you know, and it was going to take hours. I always rather do that in one go-I can’t get my head around loads of sessions, you know, it’s all or nothing for me; it was always that way.” No one interrupted him. Someone brought him a drink that he drank without looking anywhere other than the nowhere at which he was staring.

“I knew it was going to hurt, but I’d got drunk even though you ain’t supposed to. I been to that tattooist before. We’d talked, so he knew a bit about me. About the people I knew, about what I did, that sort of thing, you know? I think he was saying what he’d been told, because I think he was like searching for candidates.

“He asked if I minded him having this other bloke there, who was like another tattooist, he said, and they were comparing designs, and I said no, I didn’t care. He wasn’t much like a tattooist, I thought. I don’t know what I meant. I was too drunk, though, to care.

“He watched while the guy did me, and he was like giving him advice. He kept going into a back room. I think we know what was in there? Who I mean I should say.” He gave a horrible sad little pretend laugh. This was not the story they had hoped for, but who could interrupt him?

“They kept showing me my back in the mirror. The tattooist was giggling every time he did, but the other bloke wasn’t-he was all quiet about it. They must’ve done something to the mirror. Because when I looked in it, it was a cross. It looked fine. I don’t know how they did that.

“The second day I unwrap the bandages to show a friend, and she’s like, “I thought you was going to get a cross.” I thought she meant it was too finickety. I didn’t even look at it. It was a little while after that, when the scabs came off, that it woke up.”

It had been Grisamentum overseeing the design. And there in that back room, imprisoned and diminished over the hours, the man who then became the Tattoo. What an arcane gang hit. Not a murder-these men were too baroquely cruel for that-but a banishing, an imprisonment. Perhaps it had been blood colouring the ink. Certainly some essence, call it soul, drained from the man and left a man-shaped meat husk behind.

PAUL HAD WOKEN TO THE MUTTERINGS FROM HIS SKIN. THERE WAS no one in his bed but him. The voice was muffled.

“What did they do? What did they do?” That was what Paul first heard. “What did those fuckers do to me?”

When at very last he unwound his bandages the glam had faded and Paul saw the real tattoo. Two shocks in immediate succession: that what he wore was a face; and much worse-much much worse, much greater, quite shattering-that it was moving.

The face was shocked too. It took minutes for it to understand what had happened to it. It terrorised Paul. It began to tell him what to do.

He had not eaten. “I need you healthy,” said the tattoo on his back. “Eat, eat, eat,” until Paul ate. It had him test his strength. It appraised him like a trainer. He told it to leave him alone, that it did not exist. Of course he went to a doctor and demanded to know how it might be removed. The Tattoo stayed motionless, so the doctor assumed Paul was merely an agitated drunk who had taken against his hideous design. There would be a very long waiting list, she told him. For cosmetics.

Paul attempted home-grown removals with sandpaper, but each time he, screaming, failed, the Tattoo screaming with him. It had him return to the tattooist’s shop, but the proprietor was long gone.

He covered it, but such muffling would never last. When the gags fell the Tattoo would shout when he was out in the street, curse him and mock him. It shouted filthy slurs, swear words and racist names, trying, with success sometimes, to have Paul beaten up. “Hush now,” it would whisper to him afterward. “Hush. Just do what I say, never need happen again.”

It sent him to mages’ speakeasies. It made him connections, whispering to him the code words necessary to get in, had him sotto voce describe the clientele, or turn and let the Tattoo glance through his thin shirt, so the Tattoo would know who was where and direct Paul to those he knew.

“Borch,” it would say, when Paul sat down backward at the tables across from startled operators. “Ken.” “Daria.” “Goss.” “It’s me. Look. It’s me.”

Grisamentum’s intent must have been to exile him into that mobile skin prison where he would be powerless, carried by a host who hated him, tormented with bodilessness until his weak bearer died. But the Tattoo sent Paul to find his associates. He drew them back into his orbit. He sent Paul to secret stashes of money, used them to buy the services of magicians and underworld knowers-how. The Tattoo had only his voice and mind, but it was enough to grow his empire again.

Among the first jobs he carried out while on Paul’s body was to track down and execute the tattooist who had trapped him. Paul did not see it-he had his back to the butchery, of course-but he could hear it. It was not quick nor quiet. He shook as blood spattered the back of his legs, held in place by the first of his followers the Tattoo had had made into fistmen.

The Tattoo wanted to ignore Paul. It would let him eat what he wanted, read, watch DVDs with headphones on while the Tattoo did business. Paul might have been granted evenings out, trips to the cinema, sex. But after his first escape attempt the relationship hardened. After his second, the Tattoo had warned that one more would result in his legs being amputated, with anaesthetic an open question.

The Tattoo was plotting his revenge. But as he auditioned assassins, he heard the stories: Grisamentum had been dying anyway.

“WHY DOES THE TATTOO WANT THE KRAKEN?” FITCH SAID. PAUL stared at the bottled god.

“He doesn’t know,” he said. “He just clocked that someone else wanted it. So he wants it first.” Paul shrugged. “That’s all. That’s his plan. ‘Don’t let anyone else get it.’ He might as well burn it…” Paul did not acknowledge the looks that occasioned. “I know who you are,” he said to Billy and Dane. “I heard everything he was saying.”

“Look,” said Billy to Fitch. “We’re here. We’ve got it. We’re protecting it. We’re not going to let it burn, and that’s what kicks it off. Now we’ve got one of the big players. The whole… burning should be getting a lot less probable, right?” The Londonmancers had been future-hunting frantically. Fitch grinding pavements at every snatched stop; rushed ambulomantic walks to see what the twists of city nudge-nudged; ailuromancy over light-footed cats; the readings of dust and chance London objects. “This must’ve all helped, right?”

“No,” said Fitch. He opened and closed his mouth and tried again. “It closes harder than ever. Soon. I don’t know how, but we’ve achieved nothing.”

No redemption, no remission, no reversion. Still just that oncoming.

Chapter Sixty-Four

COLE WORKED LATE. THE DEBRIS FROM THE FIGHT HAD BEEN cleared. He shook his head and sifted through the papers that remained on the desk, listing what was there and working out what must therefore have been taken. He ignored a knock, but his door opened. A man peered in.

“Knock knock?” he said. “Professor Cole?”

“Who are you?” The man shut the door behind him.

“My name is Vardy, Professor. Professor Vardy, in fact.” He smiled, not very well. “I work with the police.” Cole rubbed his eyes.

“Look, Mister, Professor, Doctor, whatever, Vardy, I’ve already…” He looked through his fingers and paused. “The police? I’ve had two visits from the police, and I’ve told them everything. It was a stupid prank, it’s all finished. Which police do you work with?”

“You’re wondering whether I’m part of the conventional crime squad come to do a bit more dusting, or whether I’m with the-what do my colleagues call us? special unit?-and whether I know about all your other less conventional interests. Did they buy it? The regulars? That this was just a ‘prank’? Two men too old to be students breaking in and beating you up?”

“They believed what I told them,” Cole said.

“I’m sure they did. They’ve every reason not to want to get too involved. What with everything else going on. The sky, the city… Well, you can feel it all.”

Cole shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference.”

“That’s an odd thing to say.”

“Look…” said Cole.

“Professor Cole, listen. I know you were part of Grisamentum’s team.”

“Just because I did some work for him…”

“Please. Every knacker in London did some work for him at some point or other. And it was you behind that spectacular send-off. The funeral. Great fire. The cremation.” Cole watched him. “You must know you’re not talking to a moron. Word’s getting out anyway. Did you hear about the rumble last night? Everyone’s saying Grisamentum was there. It’s not just me who knows he never died.”

“I swear to you,” Cole said, “I’m not in touch with him. I don’t know what he’s doing, and whatever his plans are, I’ve got nothing to do with them.”

“Professor Cole, you’re probably one of the few people who knows that things have been burning and disappearing, and might even have a chance of explaining how.”

“That’s way beyond me! The principle’s the same as some of the stuff I’ve done, but that’s out of my league.”

“Oh, I do know that.”

“You know?”

“It’s my job to have a pretty clear sense of what you can do and what you can’t do. So I know you couldn’t have burnt all that stuff out of time. But I also know that you did have something to do with it. You’ve been delivering information and charges, haven’t you? According to demands?”

“… I…”

“And no, I don’t think you’re in cahoots with Grisamentum. And I know why you’re doing this. Family. Professor, I know your daughter’s disappeared.” Cole’s face collapsed. Agony, relief, agony.

“Oh, God…”

“I know your wife’s no longer with us,” Cole said. “From what I gather-she’s at a C of E school, isn’t she?-your daughter probably takes more after you than her mother. But she’s mixed-race and she’ll have certain abilities. Combine that with whatever you’ve been handing over, in the right hands…”

“You think she’s being used? You think they’re making her do this stuff?”

“Could be. But if so, well. We can use right back. We can use you to track down whoever’s doing this. I’m asking you to work with me. To trust me.”

HE MUST BE A PIG IN SHIT RIGHT NOW, GRISAMENTUM, BILLY thought. His worst enemy down, captive. Without their Svengali, enforcers like the Tattoo’s fistmen would fall back unhappily on a loose network of contacts and half-trusted lieutenants, trying to decide what to do. Subby and Goss were the most important of these, and they were many things-including back from wherever they’d been, apparently-but not leaders.

“Goss and Subby went to get something,” Paul told Dane, Billy and the innermost Londonmancers. “They went hunting for something. I don’t know more.”

Baron and his crew must be highly in demand now, Billy thought, as local forces struggled with irrupting violence nightmaring their usual run. What would be turning up in these last days was not stabbed dealers of disallowed drugs and smashed shop windows, but strangely dead new figures with blood that did not run as blood should. Terrorised pushers of building-site dust. The Tattoo was gone, the dead Grisamentum was back, the balance of power was fucked, and the boroughs of London were Peloponnesea-as the world got ready to end, this was their great multivalent war.

“I need to…” Billy said, but what? He needed to what? He and Dane looked at each other.

Freelancers were rampaging. Puffed-up thugs with imperfectly learned knacks; consciousnesses born in vats, escapees from experiments; seconds-in-command of all kinds of minor ganglets decided that this was it!-their chance. The city was full of mercenaries carrying out long-delayed vendettas as the strike fell and the familiars came back to work, bit by defeated bit, on terrible, punitive terms.

Never mind, some thought, those in the worst circumstances. Only a few more days and we’ll all be gone forever.

Chapter Sixty-Five

ABSOLUTELY SOD-ALL WAS WHAT THEY HAD TO SHOW FOR THAT, Collingswood thought. Absolutely cack. It was obvious something big had happened. Not that she knew what it was yet: she’d pitched up at the site of some shitstorm or other, tasting familiar people in the air, tasting the very Billy and Dane they’d been there hoping to snatch, the knacks she threw out unpleasantly degrading in that atmosphere, slugs in salt. There was a shift, alright. Something had seesawed, and it was maddening and ridiculous how hard it was to work out what. And Baron and Vardy didn’t help.

That’s fucking it. Collingswood cooked up everything she had. Rang around and called in favours, sent out eager Perky on sniffing errands, stressed as shit by hurry, by whatever it was impending. Took, though she assiduously avoided reflecting on the fact, charge of the investigation. Seemed as if figures she’d never expected to hear from again, that she’d never faced herself but that were well known in the specialist police milieu, were back, or back again, or not dead, or pushing for the end of the world, or coming to get you.

This time it was her ignoring Baron’s calls for a bit. Working from home, from ley line-squatting cafés, with a laptop. Some stop-offs with contacts. “What are you hearing? Don’t give me that no one knows bollocks, there ain’t nothing no one knows nothing about.”

Because the one line of stories that kept coming, the one connection that made her think she still had it, in these winding-down times, concerned the gunfarmers. Whom she had officially mentally upgraded from rumour. Which she had done, she reminded herself later, scrabbling for pride in that wrecked time, before all those gathered hints reached her and critical massed into intuition, and she suddenly knew not only that the gunfarmers were about to attack, but where.

Holy shit. What? Why? That would have to wait. But still, Collingswood couldn’t stop herself thinking, If they’re being targeted they must’ve took it. Which meant the FSRC had even less of a clue than they thought they did.

“Boss. Boss. Shut up and listen.”

“Where are you, Collingswood? Where’ve you been? We need to talk about-”

“Boss, shut up. You have to meet me.”

She was shaking her head. The lurchingly sudden clarity of the intercepted intent staggered her. She knew she was good, but for her to get this kind of knowledge? They’ve given up hiding, they don’t care anymore.

“Meet you where? Why?”

“Because there’s about to be a big-ass attack, so bring backup. Bring guns.”

WOULD IT ESCAPE THE ATTENTION OF OCCULT LONDON THAT ON that night when small-scale apocalypse competition had been a wedge to crack the city open, Fitch and his Londonmancer cadre had been missing from the proximity of the London Stone? Could that be ignored?

“We’re on borrowed time,” Saira said. None of this could last. Those among the Londonmancer cadre who could obsessively parse the future-or, they reminded themselves to say, possible futures-from the safety of the trailer. Their job had become simple and minimal: keep the kraken out of the trouble until, up through and after the closing-in last day. To stop it being that day. That was all they could see to do. A new sacred duty.

“There was another one.” “Another two.” The Londonmancers, by agonising dream and memory interpretations interpreted the city’s history and burnlike blebs in its timeline, collected these new strange outriders, these architectural, temporal arson victims. “You remember that garage out by the gasworks? The really cool old Deco one?” “No.” “Well, that’s the point, it was never there anymore. But look.” A preserved postcard of the building, soot-stained and unstable-looking as it struggled gamely to exist, not to be snuffed in the burn-damaged timeline.

Wati went for hours, then a day. He would not respond to any whispers to figurines held out of the vehicle. Was it a retreat, a surrender he was negotiating?

They kept Paul comfortable. They had no trouble with food. Stop for a moment and Saira would dig her hands into the brickwork of an alley corner, knead like clay, and the bricks might go from being a buckle of scaffolding to a key ring and keys to at last a bag of takeaway.

Twice they unwound the tape from the Tattoo’s mouth, in reasonless hope that he would say something incriminating or helpful or illuminating. Everything should be falling into place now, in the presence of this malevolent player, and it was not. The Tattoo remained silent. It was wildly unlike him. But for a certain moue of ink face lines, you might have thought him uncharmed.

“He’s still got troops out there,” Paul said. Desperate little rearguard actions. Knuckleheads in half-assaults/half-defences, against traditional enemies, forced to take their own initiatives, the very thing they had strived so hard to avoid. People mindlessly showing secrets, knuckleheads fighting for them, winning some and dying, falling, their leather armours ripped, their helmets shattered, little dwarf-hand replacing their cocks and balls suddenly visible, meat-echoes of their head-hands. “Maybe Goss and Subby are back.”

Fitch screamed. The lorry lurched. Not in response to the sound of him-the Londonmancer driving could not have heard him-but because of something striking at the driver as it struck at Fitch, in that same instant. Fitch screamed.

“We have to go back,” he said, again and again. Everyone was up. Even Paul had jumped up, ready for whatever this was. “Back, back, back at the heart,” Fitch said. “I heard a…” In the twanging of aerials, in the cry from the city. “Someone’s come for them.”

THEY HAD TO TAKE THE LORRY OUT OF ITS AVOIDANCE CIRCLE along streets it barely fit through, so tight Billy could tell the driver knacked to keep them from crashing. They passed violence everywhere, occult and everyday. Police and ambulances and aimlessly meandering fire engines, the buildings that had gone up and the callouts themselves charring out of memory, so midway en route no firefighter could remember what they were out for. The lorry came as close as it could go to the tumbledown sports shop where the London Stone was homed. They heard more sirens and they heard shots.

There were a few pedestrians on the street, but far too few for what was still not yet night. Those out moved like what they were-people in a regime at war. There was police tape around the building. Armed officers waving them back, cauterising the area.

“We can’t get through,” Billy said. But he was with the Londonmancers. As if these alleys they ducked into would deny them, as if the alleys wouldn’t switch back and kink obligingly for Fitch and Saira and their comrades now they weren’t hiding and didn’t care if the city noticed. So they led Dane and Billy running like scarpering schoolkids down some bricky cul-de-sac that tipped them with architectural abruptness into a corridor within that ugly place, near the London heart, where there was battle, still.

The police would not enter a free-fire zone. From the Londonmancers’ lair in the corridor of shop fronts, two dark-dressed figures emerged. They held pistols, and were shooting behind them as they came. Dane kicked in the door of an empty shop, and Billy dragged Saira and the others inside out of their range. Fitch sat heavily and wheezed.

“Get off me,” Saira said. She was straining to make the plastic stuff of London into something deadly, pressing her fingers on what had been a bit of wall and was becoming that other part of London, a pistol. She was shaking, brave and terrified. The men fired, and two Londonmancers still in the hallway flew backward.

The men wore dark suits, hats, long coats-assassin-wear. Billy fired and missed, and the blast from his phaser was crackling and unconvincing. It was winding down. A blast from Dane’s gun hit one man but did not kill him and set him snarling.

Clattering shapes came out of the store doorway behind them. There were composite things, made of city. Paper, brick, slate, tar, road sign and smell. One’s motion was almost arthropod, one more bird, but neither was like anything. Legs of scaffold tubes or girder, wood-splinter arms; one had a dorsal fin of broken glass in cement, cheval-de-frise. Billy cried out at the mongrel urban things. One took hold with autumn-gutter fingers of the closest attacker and bit exactly as a rooftop bites. He screamed, but it sucked him, so he kicked as he was emptied. His colleague ran. Somewhere.

Both the shot Londonmancers were dead. Saira clenched her teeth. The predator city bits came toward her. “Quick,” Billy shouted, but she clicked her fingers as if at dogs.

“It’s alright,” she said. “They’re London’s antibodies. They know me.”

The immune system trilled and clattered. Another young Londonmancer joined Saira, and she did not look up. When Dane and Billy approached, the defence-things reared in complex ways, displayed cityness in weapons. Saira clucked and they calmed.

Inside the sports shop was a rubble of smashed fittings and bodies. Not all the Londonmancers left were quite dead. Most were, with bullet wounds in their heads and chests. Saira went from survivor to survivor.

“Ben,” she said. “What happened?”

“Men,” he said. His teeth chattered. He stared at his blood-sodden thigh.

The dark-suited men had entered. They had shot anyone who opposed them, with ferocious, astonishing guns. Of those left alive they had demanded, repeatedly, “Where’s the kraken?” They had heard the police come, but the police, following no-entry protocol, had sealed the attackers and attacked in together.

“We have to hurry,” Billy said to Dane. He waited, bided, as best he could, but he had to tell Saira to hurry too. She stared at him expressionless.

The attackers knew the secret Fitch and Saira and their treacherous comrades kept. But the rest of the Londonmancers they had come to butcher did not, had been the out-of-the-loop, the hard core of excluded, an unwitting camouflage left in place to pretend all was as it should be. Some were aware that they were being kept in a cloud of unknowing, but they had no knowledge of what that secret knowledge was. They did not understand the gunfarmers’ question. Which surely must be provoking to a killer. Some frantic seers had managed to provoke the antibodies into appearance, a little late.

“We were trying to keep them safe,” Saira said. “That’s why we didn’t tell them anything.” With a clatter of wood-bits and kicked-away plaster, Fitch arrived at the threshold. He looked in and simply wailed. He gripped the entrance.

“We have to go,” Billy said. “Saira, I’m sorry. The cops’ll come in any minute. And the bastards who did this know we’ve got the kraken.”

Dane put Billy’s hand to a dead woman’s wound. In the Londonmancer’s cooling flesh was a warmth. “Incubation,” Dane said. “Gunfarmers.” In the dead the bullets were eggs. Guns would grow and hatch, and perhaps one or two little pistols might muster the strength to emerge, call for their parents.

“We can’t take them,” Billy whispered.

“We can’t take them,” Saira said, dead-voiced, seeing Dane’s action.

The last of the Londonmancers and the London antibodies went with their leader, if that’s what Fitch still was, down those attention-drawing urban kinkways back to their lorry. “We’re the Londonmancers,” Fitch kept saying, and moaning. “Who would do this?” You broke neutrality first, Billy did not say.

“It’s new rules,” Dane said. “Everything’s up for grabs. This is just nuts. They didn’t care they’d be seen.” Like they wanted it. That’s how terror works. They stared at Paul.

“Not this one,” he said. Jerked his head at his own back. “Nazis and fists and Boba Fetts, but not gunfarmers.”

Blood puddled. Those Londonmancers who had survived stared at the kraken sloshing in its tank. “But why is it…?” they said. “What’s it doing here? What’s going on?” Fitch did not answer. Saira looked away. Paul watched them all. Billy felt as if the kraken were staring at him with its missing eyes.

Chapter Sixty-Six

“MARGE AIN’T HOME. AND SHE AIN’T PICKING UP HER MESSAGES. And I don’t know what she was doing there at the double-team. So what do you want us to do?” Collingswood reeled from a wave of the balefulness she had once called Panda. The nickname did not hold in her head, these worse days. “Was all a bit of a fucking balls-up, eh, boss? What now?”

Containment was all they could hope for on a night like this, with so many little wars under way. They could only intervene where possible, stand in the way of some carnages, patch up whatever aftermaths. The madness of, what-some kraken’s pain, perhaps?-seemed to have infected everything. The city was hacking itself.

So Collingswood asked the question not for elucidation-stepping into the ruins of the housing of the London Stone, the obvious signs that there had been murder there, though all they could do was log it and move on-but to make it clear that Baron had no answer. He was on the doorstep, looking in and shaking his head with the studied mildness that Collingswood had grown into her job witnessing. Around the room constables brushed things and pretended they were looking for fingerprints-conventional protocols increasingly ridiculous. They glanced at Baron to see if he would tell them what to do.

“Bloody hell,” he said, and raised his eyebrows at her. “This is all a bit much.”

Fucking no, she thought. She crossed her arms and waited for him to say something else. Not this time. She was so used to reading his nonchalance, his asides, his patient waiting for suggestions as if pedagogically, as signs that there was nothing that could faze him, as symptomatic of absolute police-officerly control, that it was not only with surprise but rage that she realised he had no idea what to do.

When was the last fucking time you came up with shit? she thought. When did you tell us what to do? She shamed him into meeting her eye, and what she saw in the deeps of his, like a lighthouse a long way away, was fear.

kollywood? She brushed the tiny voice out of the way as if her hair had irritated her. She did not need Baron knowing that Perky, her little pig-spirit friend, was with her.

“So,” he said at last. If you hadn’t known him a long time you might buy it. You might think he was calm. “Still no word from Vardy?”

“You already asked me. I told you. No.” Vardy had gone to speak to Cole, he’d said, to sound him out. That was the last anyone had heard. They could not track him down, nor could they Cole. Baron nodded. Looked away and back again. “It was his sodding idea that we decoy the end of the world; it was him who pulled whatever he does and tweaked the dates,” Baron said.

“Exfuckingscuse me, you reckon it was him spent a day with his head in the fucking astral persuading constellations to fart around a bit quicker?” she said. “Fuck off it was him, he had me do it.”

“Alright, well. I thought the whole idea was to flush everyone out and that it certainly did.”

“I think I was never a hundred percent sure what exactly the sodding idea was, boss.”

“Perhaps he’ll be good enough to join us,” Baron said.

“I’m going,” Collingswood said.

“What’s that?”

“Can’t help the London-tossers now. I’m going. I’m going out.” She pointed, in any direction. They could hear the rumpus of the night. “I been thinking. I know what I’m good at and I know what I can get. This information about this right here? That ain’t it. They got me here too early. I was supposed to hear about this. This was a fucking fake duck noise.” She blew a raspberry. “I’m police,” she said. “I’m going policing. You.” With three points she commandeered three officers. All obeyed her summons immediately. Baron opened his mouth as if he would call her back, then hesitated.

“I think I’ll come with,” he said.

“No,” she said. She left with her little crew following.

She trod over the smashed-up entrance into the night street. “Where to, guv?” one of the officers asked her.

where we goin kollywood? Perky said.

She had been trying to gather friends; given her druthers Collingswood would have been completely enveloped in amiable presences. But it was hard to get their attention, now. As time stretched toward whatever was at its end, the minds, wills, spirits, quasi-ghosts and animal intents she might have had flit around her in better times were skittish, and too nervy to be much help. She had Perky, with its uncanny porcine affection, and a very few diffuse policely functions too vague to do more than emit words so drawled in her hidden hearing that she could not tell if they were words or imitation of a siren, whispered now-then-now-then or nee-naw-nee-naw incessantly. Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.

“Perky,” she said. The officers looked at her, but they had learned on recent FSRC-seconded business not to ask questions like Who are you talking to? or What the fuck is that thing? “Perky, scoot off a bit, tell me where there’s fighting. Let’s see what we can do.”

kay kollywood sminit

Collingswood thought of Vardy, and what came to her mind was a tug of anger and concern comingled. You better be okay, she thought. And if you are, I’m fucking livid with you. Where the fuck are you? I need to know what this is.

Although-did she? Not really. It would not have made a great deal of difference.

She had spent some hours watching CCTV footage. Like radiographers, the FSRC knew what to look at, how to make sense of what shadows, which filters to switch on to bring which whats to the fore. What was artefact on the electric image and what a witch really breaking the world.

Rumours and scabby video came through of two figures who did not attempt to stay hidden. Goss and Subby. Goss completely unperturbed by all the salvos against him, unfussed by damage, killing offhandedly. “Where’s my boss?” he demanded of those he crippled, the few not murdered attested. “I’ve counted to a hundred over by the wall and it’s time to go in for tea and he’s still in the garden somewhere, Aunty’s getting tetchy,” and so on. After a strange and blessed absence, he was manifesting with his mute boy all over the place.

Did Collingswood’s less specialist colleagues think it was an endless day and night of causeless burglary, ferocious muggings and dangerous driving? Perhaps they might allow themselves to think here and there in terms of gang fights, muttered about Yardies or Kosovans or whatever, even with the reports of what she knew must be refugees from the Tattoo’s workshop-women and men shambling nude and altered, with lightbulbs, diodes, speakers and oscilloscope screens in them-horrifying everyday citizens who could only tell themselves for so long that they witnessed an art event.

Collingswood leaned on the wall and smoked while her companion zipped through the city looking for trouble like a pig for truffles, so that she could do something to look after London. It was better than nothing, she thought. Really? she asked herself, and, Yeah, really, she answered back.

THE WORLD LURCHED AGAIN. REELED, IN THE WAS PUNCHED SENSE, rather than the dancing. Marge felt it. She had not gone home since the foiled Armaggedons. There were places to stay if you didn’t much care. She did not know if she had a home left, and if she did she assumed it was not safe anymore, that she had been brought back into the attention of the dying city.

You say it best, hmm hmm it best. Boyzone was not one of her iPod-devil’s favourites, but it was muttering its version into her ears gamely enough. This was the track that had kept her safe in the brief moment when she had felt a hungry mammal consciousness of one of the gods notice her.

She was in an arriviste corner of Battersea, where late bars stayed open and proudly displayed doctored B-movie posters, and she could feel the bang bang of dance bass through doors, through the pavement and her feet. There were lights in the windows of offices, people working late as if in a month’s time they would still have a job and the world would still revolve. Gangs outside fast-food restaurants and cafés that pottered along as if it were not after midnight, their premises abutting the alleys that were the conduits to the other city that, over the incompetent supernatural impersonation of Ronan Keating, Marge could hear.

The littler streets were as lit as the main ones, but they were furtive. A landscape of degenerating knackery, violence and eschatological terror. Marge would swear she could hear shots, metres, only metres from where laughing hipsters drank.

She was beyond fear, really. She just drifted, she just went. Trying to ride out the night, which felt to her like a last night.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

SOME HOSPITALS WERE KNOWN TO BE FRIENDLY, TO ASK NO questions about odd wounds and sicknesses. There were quiet wings, where you could get treatment for lukundoo, for jigsaw disease, where no one would be put out if a patient spasmed out of phase with the world. The worst wounded of the Londonmancers were delivered, with whispered warnings that the bullets inside them might hatch.

Dane was lashed in place on the lorry roof like some Odysseus. He was pushed, lit up and darkened by the lorry’s passage. Dane held his Kirk and waved it, called Wati’s name. He made it an aerial. It was a long time until Wati found it.

“Oh God, Dane,” the figurine suddenly said.

“Wati, where’ve you been?” Dane hammered on the hatch. Billy looked through. The wind made him blink. Around him the city, like something fat, staggered toward a heart attack. The statuette coughed as if it had something caught in its nonexistent throat, as if its nonexistent lungs were bruised. “You heard about the Londonmancers?”

“Oh man,” Wati said. “I been, oh, God. They beat us, Dane. They brought in scabs. Goss and Subby are back.”

“They’re fighting you?” Billy said. “Even without the Tattoo around?”

“Most of the Tattoo’s guys must be screwed,” Dane said. “But if Goss and Subby’re still at it…”

“Griz’s got gunfarmers working for him.”

“It is,” Dane said. “It is him bringing the war. Grisamentum… Why the Londonmancers?”

“Wait,” Wati said. “Wait.” Coughing again. “I can’t move like I should. That’s why it took me so long to find you.”

“Take it easy,” said Dane.

“No, listen,” Wati said. “Oh God, Dane, no one’s told you, have they? It ain’t just the strike or the London Stone. There’s no neutrals now.”

“What do you mean?”

“It weren’t just the Londonmancers. They went for your people too.”

“What?” said Dane.

“What?” said Billy. That ostentatious assault of Fitch’s comrades, as if it were meant to be seen. “Who? Goss and Subby? Who’ve they-?”

“No. Gunfarmers. For the Krakenists. They attacked your church.”

DANE STOLE A CAR. HE WOULD NOT LET ANYONE BUT BILLY COME with him.

“They didn’t even have anyone out there,” Dane kept saying, slamming his hands on the dash. “They kept their heads down. How could anyone…? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was the only one, and I’m not…”

“I don’t know.”

A little crowd was outside the community church. Tutted at the smouldering from the windows, the broken glass, the obscene graffiti that now covered it.

“Hooligans.” “Awful.” Dane shoved through them and inside. The hall was smashed up. It was very much as it would be had the perpetrators been a rampaging group of fools. Dane went through the junk room and pulled the hatch open. Billy could hear how he was breathing. There was blood in the corridors below.

There, in that buried complex, were the ruins left by the real attack. Very different from the foolish display above.

Throughout the halls were bodies. They were punctured and blood-sodden, hosts for grubbing little bullets. There were those who looked killed in other ways-by bludgeons, suffocation, wetness and magic. Billy walked as if in a slowed-down film, through carnage. The ruined bodies of Dane’s erstwhile congregation lay like litter.

Dane stopped to feel pulses, but without urgency. The situation was clear. There were no sounds but their footsteps.

Desks had been ransacked. As well as mud, in a few places on the floor were trampled origami planes, like the one that had alerted Dane to Grisamentum’s attention. Billy picked up two or three of the cleanest. On each folded dart was the remain or smudge of a design in grey ink-a random word, a symbol, two sketched eyes.

“Grisamentum,” he said. “It’s him. He sent them.” Dane looked at him without any sign of emotion.

In the church, before the altar, was the bullet-ruined body of the Teuthex. Dane made no sound. The Teuthex lay behind the altar, reaching for it with his right hand. Dane gently held the dead man. Billy left him alone.

Like arrows drawn on the floor, more fallen planes pointed in higgledy-piggledy direction to the library. Billy followed them. When he pushed open the library door, he stopped, at the top of the shaft of shelves, and stared.

He walked back to where Dane mourned. He waited as long as he could bear. “Dane,” he said. “I need you to see this.”

The books were gone. Every single book was gone.

“THIS MUST BE WHAT THEY CAME FOR,” DANE SAID. THEY STARED into the empty word-pit. “He wanted the library.”

“He’s-Grisamentum must be researching the kraken,” Billy said.

Dane nodded. “That must be why… Remember when he wanted us to join him? That’s why. Because of what I know. And you. Whether you know it or not.”

“He’s taken it all.” Centuries of dissident cephalopod gnosis.

“Grisamentum,” Dane whispered.

“It is him,” Billy said. “Whatever it is, it is his plan. He’s the one who wants the kraken, and he wants to know everything about it.”

“But he doesn’t have it,” Dane said. “So what’s he going to do?”

Billy descended the ladder. There was blood from something on his glasses. He shook his head. “He can’t read even a fraction of these. It would take centuries.”

“I don’t know where he is.” Dane made fists and raised them and could only lower them again. “The last time I even saw him was…” Dane did not smile. “Just before his funeral.”

“Why is it we don’t see him?” Billy said. “Only Byrne.”

“He’s hiding.”

“Yeah but even when there was… like when they fought the Tattoo. Tattoo was there. You’d think for a night like that Grisamentum would show in person. We know he must be desperate to get his hands on the kraken.”

“I don’t know,” Dane said. He ran his hand along the shelves. Billy was reading the strange words and examining the odd figures on the paper planes he had picked up. Dane descended, picking up dust on his trailing fingers. He turned and looked at Billy, who was still, and staring at the planes.

“Remember what you were saying about when Grisamentum died?” Billy said. “About when he was cremated?”

“No.”

“I just…” Billy stared into an ink blot. He moved it and kept staring at it. “This ink,” he said. “It’s greyer than you’d think,” he said. “It’s…” He looked up into Dane’s eyes.

“It was Cole did his cremation,” Dane said at last. He ascended.

“It was,” Billy said, staring at him. “Remember the kind of fires he deals in?” They stared at the paper. It riffled as if in a little wind. There was no little wind.

“Kraken,” whispered Dane, and Billy said, “Oh my Christ.”

WHEN GRISAMENTUM DISCOVERED HE WAS DYING IT WOULD HAVE offended him. There were no techniques to prevail against his own injurious blood. He was uninterested in an heir: his desire was never dynastic but to rule.

History was punctuated with women and men who had by grit forced their ghost-selves back to continue their business, who had wedged their minds out into host after host, who had by simple doggedness failed to die. But these were not Grisamentum’s knacks. Byrne was good, her expertise indispensable, her commitment to the project swiftly personal, but she could not unwind death itself. Only filigree it, in certain ways.

“Christ, he must have made… other arrangements,” Billy said.

He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?

Was it when he decided on the spectacle of cremation that something had occurred? Perhaps he was writing the order of the service. Perhaps scribbling instructions to Byrne he began to stare at the pen he held, the paper, the black ink.

“Pyros, he was talking to,” Billy said. “And necros. What if Byrne wasn’t remote-talking to him at all, when we saw her? Remember how she wrote?” He unfolded the little eyes. “Why are there paper planes here? Remember how he found us in the first place? Why’s this ink grey?”

Grisamentum had burnt alive, in that temporally and psychically knacked variant of memory fire, that mongrel of expertise, the pyros’ and Byrne’s, her deadist insights. But he had not quite died. He had never died. That was the point.

After hours of it, after the mourners had left, he would have been collected. He was ash. But he never quite died. He was safe from his illness-he had no veins for it to poison, no organs for it to ruin. Byrne (her name a sudden joke) must have taken him, charcoal-coloured in his urn, ground any last black bone shards and carbon into powder. Mixed him into the base he had had prepared: gum, spirit, water, and rich knack.

Then she must have dipped her pen into him, closed her eyes, dragged the point across her paper. To see the thin line jag into scrappy calligraphy, a substance learning itself, she gasping in loyalty and delight as the ink self-wrote: hello again.

“WHY’S HE DONE ALL THIS?” DANE SAID. HE STARED AT THE PAPER. It stared inkly back. “Why does he want the world to burn? Because he did? Revenge on it all?”

“I don’t know.” Billy was gathering the paper planes. He held one up. The word on it was Poplar. On another Binding. Another said Telephone. In super-thin writing. All incorporating two little scribbled eyes. This was the remnant of honour, nostalgic for spurious legendary times.

Was it always a lie, Billy thought? Had this neutrality-breaching killer always been so savage? Had something happened to make him the purveyor of this? The vastness of this murder.

Dane went from room to ruined room and gathered bits of Krakenist culture, accoutrements here and there, weapons. There must have been some of the Krakenist congregation out, on errands, having their lives, who would find out soon what had happened to their religion. Like the last of the Londonmancers they were now an exiled people. Their pope murdered before his altar. But in that burrow at that moment, sifting through the rubbish of the dead, Dane was the last man on earth.

Where was the light coming from? There were some bulbs not smashed, but the grey illumination in the corridors seemed greater than those little sepia efforts. The blood everywhere looked black. Billy had heard moonlight made blood look black. He met the eyes of one of the paper planes. It regarded him. Its paper fluttered again, unblown.

“It’s trying to get away,” he said. “Why would they… he… why would he actually come here, not just issue orders? He’s watching. See how thin this pen is? Remember how careful Byrne was with the papers she wrote on? How she swapped pens? So she could scrape the ink off again. There can only be so much of him.”

“Why would he do this?” Dane shouted. Billy still looked at the fallen paper’s eyes.

“I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out. So my question is, how do we interrogate ink?”

Chapter Sixty-Eight

THEY WORKED IN THE LORRY. SAFER THAN IN WHAT WAS SUDDENLY a sepulchre. Billy had all the planes he could find, all with blood and mud torn off, so it was only ink that stained them.

The kraken overlooked them. Dane prayed to it. While the Londonmancers muttered and looked at Dane, suddenly bereft like them, Billy soaked the paper in distilled water, pulped it and squeezed it out. Paul watched him, his back, his tattoo, to the wall. Billy extracted the weak-tea-coloured water and boiled off a little excess. The liquid rilled away from him in a way not right.

“Be careful,” said Saira. If the ink was Grisamentum, perhaps each drop of him was him. Perhaps each had all his senses and his thoughts and a little portion of his power.

“She scraped him off each time she got him back and remixed him,” Billy said. Each separate pipette full added back to Grisamentum’s bottled consciousness. Why else would there be these eyes? The ink must know what all those rejoined drips of him had known. “I guess they’ve got to husband him.” He was finite. Every order he wrote, every spell he became, his communications were him, and eroded him. If he was all written up, there would be only ten thousand little Grisamenta on scraps, each enough to be perhaps a magic postcard in some pathetic way.

When Billy was done there was a thimbleful, more than a drop but not much more. He dipped a needle into it. Dane stood, made a devotional sign, joined them. He glanced up. Wati hibernated through the union’s defeat in a doll strapped on the vehicle’s roof. Billy rifled through the papers he was using, scraps from his bag, all manner of odds and ends.

“Is this going to work?” Saira said.

“Works for Byrne,” Billy said. “Let’s see.”

“Are we actually finally going to find out what his plans are?”

Billy kept his eyes on Dane’s. He put the needle to the paper and dragged his hand, without looking, across the page. He drew a line, only a line.

“Oy,” Billy said. “Grisamentum. Pay attention.” He drew another line, and a third, and this last time suddenly it spasmed like a cardiogram, and there was writing. UP YOURS, the writing wrote. Tiny scratchy font. Billy redipped the needle.

“Let me,” Dane whispered, and Billy waved him back.

“You aren’t thinking straight,” Billy whispered to the little residue at the bottom of the container. “You’re probably a bit foggy. You must be a bit dilute, a bit mucky. Your little brain must be… little.” He held a pipette over the ink.

“We can dilute you a bit more. Does alcohol sting? We’ve got some lemon juice. We’ve got some acid.” Billy would swear the tiny pool flinched at that. The pigment that was Grisamentum swilled in the cup.

“What are you doing?” Billy said to the ink.

“My people…” Dane said.

Billy dipped, scratched, wrote. FUCK YOU.

“Right,” said Billy. He dipped the needle in bleach, and then into the ink. A tiny amount: this had to be a delicate kind of attack. The colour twitched, left a little fade. Billy mixed it, dragged the needle again.

BASTARDS, Grisamentum wrote in itself.

“What are you doing?” Billy said.

FUCK YOU.

“Where’s the rest of you?” Billy said.

FUCK U.

Billy dripped in more bleach and the ink rolled. “We’re not going to pour you down the sink. You don’t get to dissipate painlessly with rats and turds.” He held the pipette over the glass. “I will piss in you and then bleach you so you dissolve. Where is the rest of you?”

He wrote. The penmanship was ragged. FUCKERS.

“Alright,” said Dane. “Bleach that murdering bastard.”

WAIT. Billy scratched. INK FACTRY. CLOSED.

Billy looked at Saira. Dane whispered to the toy he carried, though Wati was not in it. “Why take all the books?” He dipped more bleach again.

RESERCH.

“How can he read them all?” said Dane. “Research? Why does he care anyway? What in the name of God has all this been about?”

It was Grisamentum’s plan that started the countdown to the fire to come. Kicked everything into motion. Only by the superstition of Adler, one of the few who knew his boss still lived in that intermediate ashy way, had the Londonmancers found out about the scheme. Grisamentum’s intended theft had made them intervene, against their own oaths, because they could not have that burning.

“Why,” whispered Billy, “do you want to burn it?”

DONT CRAZY WHY?

“So what is it?” Billy said.

“What’s he doing?” Fitch said. “Why did he even want the kraken?”

CANT U GUESS?

The ink wrote that, forcing the needle unexpectedly to the paper and scribbling with Billy’s hand. Billy redipped.

MAGIC.

ONLY I CAN BE.

“Okay,” said Billy after seconds of silence. “Does anyone understand this?”

“Why’s he saying this?” Dane said. “You’re not even bleaching him.”

“He’s crowing,” said Paul, suddenly. Billy nodded.

“Bleach the motherfucker,” said Dane. “Just on principle.” Billy dipped the bleach-tipped needle and the ink swilled to get away.

NO NO BE ITS MAGC ONLY I CAN. NO 1 ELS IN LONDONN CN BE.

“He’s losing it,” Saira said.

“Ink,” Billy said.

THEY STARED AT HIM.

“That’s what he means,” Billy said. “That’s what no one else in London can be. The kraken’s ink. Anyone else might be able to use it, but Grisamentum can be it.”

Such a magic beast. Alien hunter god in its squiddity. Englassed. Knowing how this stuff worked, Billy thought. It had the biggest eyes-so all-seeing. Bastard of myth and science, specimen-magic. And what other entity, possessing those characteristics, being that thing, had the means to write it all down?

“Jesus,” Billy said. “This has always been about writing. What do you mean?” he said to the ink. “How does it work?”

CAN B IT CAN WILL BE INNNK

It was too gone, too bleached and limited, that little drip of Grisamentum, to answer. Alright. Analogies, metaphors, persuasion-this, Billy knew, was how London did it. He remembered watching Vardy gnosis up, from will, and Billy decluttered his mind and tried to mimic him.

So.

With script, a new kind of memory, grimoires and accounts. Traditions could be created, lies made more tenacious. History written down sped up, travelled at the speed of ink. And all the tedious antique centuries before we were ready, the pigment was stored for us in the cephalopod containers-motile ink, ink we caught and ate and let run down and stain our chins.

Oh, what, he thought, it was camouflage? Please. Architeuthis lives in the aphotic zone: what purpose would the spray of dark sepia serve in a world without light? It was there for other reasons. We just would not get the hint, not for millennia. We didn’t invent ink: ink was waiting for us, aeons before writing. In the sacs of the deepwater god.

“What could you do with kraken ink?” Dane said. Not scornful-breathless.

“What can you be with it?” Billy corrected.

The very writing on the wall. The logbook, the instructions by which the world worked. Commandments.

“But it’s dead,” Billy said.

“Come on, look at Byrne, he’s worked with thanatechs before,” Dane said. “All he needs is to wake its body up, just a little bit. For a little bit of ink. All he has to do is milk it.”

It would not take so much to bring that preserved kraken an interzone closer to life. Thanks to Billy and his colleagues there was no corruption, after all, no rot to cajole backward, which was always the hardest battle for necrosmiths. A threshold-life would be enough to stimulate the ink sacs.

“But why would he burn it?” Saira said. “Why the burning?”

“His plan sets it in motion,” said Fitch at last. “That’s all we know.”

“Maybe it’s to do with his crew,” Billy said. “It must be him has Cole’s daughter. Maybe it’s out of his control. What are you doing with the girl?” He said the last sentence loudly to the ink spot. “What are you doing with Cole’s daughter?” He shook it to wake it.

WAT?? ALK? NO GIRLL INK

“Bleach it away,” said Saira. Billy wrote an alarming jagged line, and the words IS TATOO IS U? An arrow. Pointing at Paul. Paul stood.

“Hey,” said Billy. “Why do you have the girl?” He wrote in tiny print again. TA2 NO CATCH YOU YES. HELO

“That’s enough,” Billy said. A couple more meaningless scrawls, the words came again, and this time fast.

WHAT WILL THEY DO 2 U?

“What? Do what?” Billy wrote, looking away. “What’s he talking about?”

“Wait wait,” shouted Fitch, and Billy pulled the nib up and looked at what he had written.

THEY HAVE U & TA2. WONT LET YOU LIV I PRTECT U QIK

“What…?” “Wait…” “Is that…?” Everyone was sounding it out.

They have you. Paul was standing. And Tattoo. Dane was beside him. They won’t let you live.

Billy stared at Saira and Fitch. I protect you, Grisamentum was telling Paul. Quick.

“Hold on, now,” Fitch said.

“What?” said Billy.

“Wait,” Dane said. “He’s messing with you.” He looked at Fitch. Paul moved faster than Billy would have thought he could. Paul snatched the container of ink and the papers on which Grisamentum had written from Billy’s hand. Grabbed scissors from a table. He backed to the lorry door.

Billy looked at Fitch’s face, and did not try hard to stop Paul.

“Look,” Fitch said. “See? It’s stirring between us all.”

“Alright,” said Dane. He stood between Paul and the Londonmancers. “Let’s calm down…”

Billy lowered the needle and wrote with the last of what was on the needle. “Don’t,” said Fitch, but Billy ignored him and read out loud.

“‘Why would they let you live?’”

Billy caught Dane’s eye. A recognition sparked between them that the tiny fuggy-minded drop of Grisamentum had a point.

BILLY SWUNG HIS PHASER AT THE LONDONMANCERS. THEY DID NOT know it was empty, or almost. He doubted it would fire. “Look,” said Saira. She stood in a pugilist’s pose, but glanced at Fitch. “This is bullshit.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Fitch said. He stammered, “No one intends any, no one has any… why would we…?”

“You…” whispered Paul. “He’s right.” He moved back against the door.

“Wait,” shouted Fitch, but even as his last able-bodied Londonmancers stepped forward, Dane came to meet them.

“Back,” said Billy, standing by Dane, now. Protecting Paul. “What the hell are you planning?” he said.

The lorry reached a stop sign, or a red light, or a hazard, or just stopped, and Paul did not hesitate. He opened the back so there was a glow of headlights in from behind them lurching side to side, as perhaps some glimpse of kraken was granted a startled motorist. Too fast to be stopped, Paul was down, gone, out of the lorry, ink and papers in his hand, slamming the door closed.

“Shit!” said Dane. He fumbled, but the lorry, its driver unaware, was speeding up. When Dane at last got the door open again, it had moved some way off and Paul was gone.

“We have to find him,” Billy said. “We have to…” To bring him back to the Londonmancers, to Fitch, who had not made a full denial of the ink’s allegation. Billy hesitated. Dane had taken a right old time opening that door.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

“YOU LET HIM GO,” FITCH SAID. “WE HAD THE TATTOO AND YOU LET him go.”

“Do not give me this shit,” Billy said. “You shut your face. Paul is not the Tattoo.”

“We weren’t going to let you kill him, Fitch,” Dane said.

“We weren’t going to kill him.”

“We saw you,” Billy said. “Couldn’t even meet his eye. Don’t come the innocent, we know what you did to Adler.”

“Anyone could get hold of Paul and then we’re all in trouble,” Fitch said. “I have no intention of hurting him, but I make no apology for keeping all options open.”

“All options open?” Billy more or less screamed.

“What?” Saira said to Fitch.

“We had one of the two kings of London right here,” Fitch said. He trembled. “Responsible for God knows how much. We had to be ready to secure the situation. What could we do?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Saira said. “We’re not murderers.”

“Such drama.” Fitch tried to look unrepentant.

“You weren’t going to let him go,” said Billy. “Don’t you think he’d had enough of being someone else’s property?”

“There was a debate to be had,” Fitch said.

“I imagine,” Billy said, “Paul would have disagreed strongly with those who proposed the motion that his incarceration or death were the least bad option. I bet he’d have strongly seconded those who leaned toward not that.”

“Now would you all listen?” Fitch said. “Paul knows where we are.”

“What are you talking about?” Billy said. He gestured beyond the trailer. “I don’t know where we are and I’m there.”

“He knows how we travel; he’s seen the vehicle. If the Tattoo gets the better of him again, and it did it before, then it’ll gather its strength and forces and then we are in serious trouble. We have to assume we’re compromised.”

IT COULD HAVE GONE NIGHT TO NIGHT, SKIPPING DAY ALTOGETHER, was how long it seemed to have been dark. Paul did not mind. He liked it that way. He manoeuvred away from sounds, breathed deep and tracked whatever London silence he could find. He was panicked, exhilarated. It was the first time for many years that he had walked without chaperone and threat, that he decided which way he was going.

So which way was he going? He kept running for a long time. There were many people running that night, he learnt. He glimpsed them at junctions, at roundabouts, escaping whatever sort of catastrophes chased them.

Despite years of effort to numb himself from the acts ordered and committed by the ink on his back (memories of murders committed behind him, the screams of those close by he did not see die), Paul had picked up various criminal tips. How could he not? He knew that most escapees were recaptured because they underestimated how far they needed to get away before they slowed, so he just kept running.

He held his hand closing the ink’s container. He felt the liquid bite his thumb when it splashed it. It was too weak for anything else. He knew he would be sought not only by the Londonmancers, but by the Tattoo’s old employees, missing their boss. He knew he would be found.

Goss and Subby would be hunting. Buy them and you bought them. They would be raging to get back into the service of the illustration he wore.

Paul would be crippled, this time. He knew he would be blinded, boxed without limbs, forced to swallow vitamined gruel without the tongue that would not be left him.

He slowed at very last. He did not feel tired. He looked carefully around him.

“Is it driving you crazy?” he whispered, so only his own skin could hear. “Not knowing what’s going on?” Blind and mute. “You must be able to feel I’m running.”

He heard breaking glass. He felt knacked percussions that the news would probably nervously report as Molotov cocktails. Paul vaulted iron railings into a scrub-filled corner between streets, a green oversight too small to be a park. Huddled runaway animal out of sight of the estates, he lay in shrubbery and thought.

The Tattoo stayed quiet. At last Paul stood. It really did: the Tattoo was still. He put the tiny container he had grabbed in front of him. He stared at it as if he might throw in his lot with this adversary of his tormenting skin, as if he might collaborate with Grisamentum. He watched the ink watch him.

He whispered to it. “Thanks for the offer,” he said. “Thanks. For, you know. Warning me. And saying that you’d take care of me. Thanks. Do you think I’m going to let you run me instead?”

He stood. He unzipped his fly and urinated messily into the tiny pot, dissipating and spattering the tiny self of the ash king of London, pissing him away. “Fuck you,” he whispered. “Fuck you too. Fuck you as much as him.”

When he was done there was only his urine in the bottle. He took out the paper on which Billy’s hand had let Grisamentum write himself. Helpful wind moved the last clinging leaves so a streetlamp could shine on it directly. Paul looked through every piece he had. He put together bits of information about Billy from these remnants from Billy’s bag. Patchwork detectiving. He worked things out.

One sheet he kept hold of. He sat, his back to the railings, and read and reread it many times. He folded it and put it to his head and thought and thought.

At last, treading the streets again in his shabby Converse he found a phone box. He went through a thicket of front organisations reversing charges and taking their cuts, even then, that night, before connecting to the number on the paper. It was voice mail.

“I have the leaflet you put out here,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Is that Marge? I have your leaflet. I know where Billy is. Do you want to meet? I know it’s all going weird tonight, but it’s now or it’s not going to happen. I’ll wait here. Here’s the number. Call me when you get this.” He gave it. “I need you to pick me up, and I need you to come now. I’ll tell you everything.”

Finally, but hesitantly, the Tattoo twitched. The movement was, by chance or not, in time with a horrible twitch in history. Everyone felt that. A heating up, a smoulder and disappearance. History was scorching.

“DID YOU FEEL THAT?” FITCH SAID.

If Paul surrendered to what he wore and the Tattoo regrouped and came back for them, they were done. The Londonmancers agreed. Or perhaps Paul might even collaborate with Grisamentum, the little drips he carried, take them back to the rest of the liquid criminal, in which case it was all finished, too.

“What kind of team-up would that be?” Billy said.

No one heard him over the overlapping arguments. Fitch shouting at Dane and Billy for letting Paul go, then lapsing into muttering. Dane growling back in a truly scary way, then giving up suddenly and sticking his head out of the trapdoor or window and whispering to Wati, who if he woke in the doll said nothing anyone else could hear. Londonmancers shouting at Fitch, despite who he was, at the plan they could still hardly believe he might have countenanced. Saira saying nothing.

“There’s just too many dangers,” Fitch said. “He’s not stable. The Tattoo’s back out there, now. First thing it can, it’s going to be making for Goss and Subby. You understand? Then they’ll come for us… and it’s not just us who’ll die.”

They could not let it happen. They had to keep the kraken safe from the burning approach.

“What did we say in front of him?” someone said.

“I don’t know,” Fitch said. “We have to take the kraken somewhere safe.”

“Where do you fucking propose?” Dane said. “It’s starting.”

“Don’t you understand?” Saira said. “We could only keep this safe so long as no one knew it was us, and no one knew where we were. Well, the worst two people in the world know, now.”

Chapter Seventy

PAUL AND MARGINALIA SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER. WHERE THE fuck to begin?

She would not risk answering any of her phones anymore, but she checked her messages, and she had arrived after many hours in her cheap car. She had sneaked back to her flat for it and come for him. Paul had watched it arrive, pulling slowly like some sea-carriage through sunken streets. It was quiet in the London corner he had found.

She had parked metres away from him under a different lamp. She had waited and waited and when he did not run for her or do anything other than wait, too, she had beckoned. Marge wore headphones. Paul could hear a tiny tinny yattering voice from them, but she seemed to be able to hear him reasonably over it. “Drive,” he had said. “I’ll keep you out of sight.”

They had driven around and around the night. She followed his directions. He’d listened to his ink parasite; he knew how to have her drive a sigil. “Here,” he said. “Turn.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s places it’s hard to find us.”

He directed her a long way through London, sticking to rear alleys, intricate convolutes. “Where was it?” he muttered, nodding at memories. At last to an underground carpark at the entrance to some swanky flats. Between pillars in the dark they stared at each other.

Paul looked at her. Marge looked at the ruin-faced man. He was agitated. He was a man, she thought, with plans.

“Where are we?”

“Hoxton.”

“I don’t even know what to ask you…” she said. “I don’t know what to-”

“Me too.”

“Who are you? What’s your story?”

“I got away.”

Silence. Marge kept her grip on the stun-gun Taser thing she had got hold of. You could get anything. He looked at it.

“Why you talking to me?” she said. “Where are you in all this?”

“I know a friend of yours, I think…”

“Leon?” The hope was ebbing from her voice before the end of the word. “Not Leon…”

“I don’t know who that is,” he said gently.

“Billy?”

“Billy. He’s with the Londonmancers. He’s with the squid.”

“Did he send you?”

“Not exactly. It’s complicated.” He spoke as if unpracticed at it.

“Tell me.”

“Let’s both.”

Over hours she gave him what small details she had, descriptions of her altercations with Goss and Subby, which made him wince and nod. He said he would tell her his story, and said that he was doing so, but what came out was a soup of specifics, names, images that made little sense. She listened, though she never removed her earphones, and did not learn anything she could make sense of. At the end of it, she understood only that Billy was way deep in something, and that the sense of something ending was not a paranoia of hers.

“Why did you find me?”

“I think we can help each other,” Paul said. “See, I want to get a message back to the Londonmancers, and to Dane and Billy, but I’ve got good reason not to think they’ll play straight. Not with me. Dane and Billy I don’t know. I don’t know about them. But I need them to listen to me too because I got plans. When I saw your paper, I thought, Oh, she knows Billy. I remembered I heard about you. He’ll play straight with her, I thought.”

“You want me to be a go-between?”

“Yeah. I got access to… It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve got access to some… powers that they want. But I need protection. From them. And other stuff too. I can make them a deal. But they might think they’ve got reason not to trust me. I’ve not been myself. I’m being chased.”

“You’re the one that knows where they are, I don’t have any idea, I told you, they haven’t contacted me, even though they’ve got my number…”

“Billy was trying to protect you. Don’t think too hard of him. But you can still get a message to him. Like I say he’ll trust you.” He met her eye, looked around.

“How? Got a number?”

“Hardly. I mean through the city. The Londonmancers’ll get that.”

“… I got a message through the city myself, once.” He looked closely at her when she said that. “From Billy.”

“Is it?” he said quietly. “Did you? Noise? Light? Brick Braille?”

“Light.” He smiled quickly and rather beautifully at that.

“Light? Did he? Yeah. Perfect, then, light.” He stepped out of the car and Marge followed. “Already a little connection then, between you. Makes this easier.” He peered toward the bins, toward the shadows, then pointed-“Look”-at a fluttering bulb in the concrete roof, one among several, but one about to fail. “Give you an idea the way it comes on and off?”

“Oh,” Marge said. She almost whispered. “That’s how this all started.”

He smiled tightly again. “Don’t need to know where Billy is. By now, I got no idea. But the Londonmancers always listen to it. The city’ll pass a message to them. Yeah, I know Morse Code. I learned all kinds of things these past few years. All kinds of useful things. Do you trust me?” He stood in full view, put his arms a tiny bit out, to show her he held nothing. “I can do him a deal. We can help each other. And he wants to see you. You can ask him to come to you.”

B ILLY, SHE WROTE, IT’S MARGE MEET ME.

“He’ll think it’s a trap,” she said. Paul shook his head.

“Maybe. He might have a pootle around to check if it’s you.” A momentarily humorous saint. “Maybe he’ll just come. He’s worried about you.” Is he? she thought. “Tell him something secret if you want. So he knows it’s you.” She wrote Leon’s middle name. She wrote the address of the carpark where they were. Paul translated it into the longs and shorts of Morse and transcribed dots and dashes under the letters. She was the one getting Billy a message, he told her. It was her message, he told her, to her friend, her way.

If Paul was out to kill her, she thought, this was the longest way around to do it. She stood on her bonnet as her companion crooned, done have to be rich la la to be my girl. She untwisted the fluorescent bulb enough to break the connection.

Paul said, “Dash dot dot dot,” and so on. Screwing and unscrewing the bulb, she shed its light and darkness in a not-very-expert, she hoped legible, coded message, for the city to pass on, tap-tapping London, entrusting the metropolis with her information like a vast concrete-and-brick telegraph machine.

You never know, she thought. Worked before.

DANE WOULD NOT LET LONDONMANCERS REENTER THE RUINED rooms of the kraken church to which he returned. They were not sure of their relationship to him nor he of his to them anymore-were they allies, still? Wati, traumatised and almost unconscious, could not breach the still-extant barriers. Only Billy came with Dane. When they descended, there were others there, though. The last scattered Krakenists, come home, in mourning.

Around the same number as there had been for the service that Billy had witnessed, but that had been just a regular Sabbath, a sermon: this was the last gathering in the world. Those lapsed, busy, usually too tainted by secularism and the exhaustions of everyday life to attend with the regularity the faith they professed would prefer were all here.

A couple of those muscular young men, though most of the enforcers of devotion had been guards, and guarding, and were gone. Mostly these were unremarkable men and women of all types. The end of a church.

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.

What was squiddity but otherness, incomprehensibility. Why would such a deity understand those bent on its glory? Why should it offer anything? Anything at all?

The krakens’ lack of desire for recompense was part of what, their faithful said, distinguished them from the avaricious Abrahamic triad and their quids pro quo, I’ll take you to heaven if you worship me. But even the kraken would give them this transmutation, this squid pro quo, by the contingencies of worship, toxin and faith.

“Twenty krakenbit is not nothing. It’s down to us, now. We have to bring the night,” Dane said. “Bring it on and rule it. And it ain’t just us, is it? There’s the Londonmancers and the London antibodies. They’ll piss and moan, but. Well, we’re going in, so they’ve got two choices. Be part of that, or try to disappear. Good luck with that. Fuck Fitch, talk to Saira. She’ll do it.”

“Why are you telling me to-” Billy stopped. “You really think you can take on Grisamentum?”

“Let’s have a little last crusade, eh?”

“You think this’ll win it for us? You think you can take him?”

“Come on,” Dane said.

Billy had learnt about the rules of this sort of landscape. He hesitated, but there was no getting away from what he thought he knew.

“This…” he said. “It’ll kill you, won’t it?” He said it quietly. He pointed at the beak.

Dane shrugged. Neither of them spoke for seconds.

“It’ll change us,” Dane said at last. “I don’t know. We weren’t meant to be vessels for that kind of power. It’s a glorious way to go, but.”

Billy tried to work out what to say. “Dane,” he said. He stared at those impossibly huge bite-parts. “I’m begging you not to do this.”

“Billy.”

“Seriously, you can’t… You have to…” There was so little crazy fervour to Dane. Okay, not counting those incredible facts of what he did, and why he did it, his demeanour was everyday. A very English faith. And it was as shocking to discover about him as it would have been about the polite and subdued-dressed congregation of any country church, that he, and they, would die for their belief.

“Wait,” said Billy. “What if you fail? If you fail, that’s our last line down.”

“Billy, Billy, Billy.” Dane did not care if the world survived.

“Tomorrow night, Billy,” Dane said. “I know where Grisamentum is.”

“How?”

“There aren’t that many old ink plants in the city, mate. I sent Wati around when he was last awake. There’s statues most places.”

“They can’t have been so stupid, can they, to leave them there…?”

“No, but they’re pretty much everywhere, so where there’s none in a place, nowhere for Wati to go, that kind of gap is information. Tells him something. Someone’s making an effort to keep him out. I know where Grisamentum is, and he won’t be expecting dick. Tomorrow, Billy.”

When they emerged Saira was waiting for them aboveground. “At last,” she said. She was antsy, looking around and swallowing. A young Londonmancer was with her. The police would come sometime, though there were other things taking their time, and a vandalised community church was a very low priority right then. “Billy, you got a message.”

“What did you say?”

“It came through the city. Bax heard it. It’s from your friend. Marge.”

“Marge? What are you talking about? Marge?”

“She got back to us,” Saira said. “She answered. The same way you got a message to her. Through the city.”

That pitched Billy back to that odd little Londonmancer intercession, his message to Marge whispered into the darkness of the post. That he’d hardly thought of since. It abruptly shamed him that he had thought it some therapeutic performance to make him feel better. Perhaps it had been that as well, but could he have been so trite and unliteral as to doubt that it was, as described, a message? And if she got it, why would he think Marge would, as he had adjured, stay away?

With something like vertigo, he thought of all she must have been doing, how many things she must have gone through and seen, to get her to this point, where she was able to send him this word, this way. Without, he thought, a Dane to lead her. And with her partner dead. The hunt for the facts of which must surely have been what got her here. His message must have started that journey. He closed his eyes.

“I wanted to keep her out of it,” he said, a last disingenuousness. He apologised to her, silently. She was in it, and more power to her. “Christ, what’s been happening? What did she say?”

“She told you to meet her,” the man Bax said. “She’s in a carpark, in Hoxton. She’s with Tattoo.”

“What?” Billy said. Dane stuttered to a stop.

“Actually that is not quite what she said,” Saira said. “What she said was that she was with Paul. She said he had a proposition.” Billy and Dane looked at each other.

“What the hell’s she been doing?” Billy said. “How’s she mixed up with him?”

“You sure she wasn’t witch to start with?” Dane said.

“I’m not sure of anything,” Billy said. “But I don’t… I don’t see how, I don’t think she…”

“Then she’s going to get killed,” Dane said.

“She’s… Shit,” said Billy.

“If it’s really her,” Dane said.

“She said to tell you ‘Gideon’,” Saira said.

“It’s her,” he said. He shook his head and shut his eyes. “But why would she be with him? Where’s Wati?”

“Here, Billy.” Wati sounded exhausted. He was in a little fisherman figure made by one of the children of the churchgoers, lying on a windowsill. A man made of toilet rolls and cotton wool. He looked at Billy out of penny eyes.

“Wati, did you hear that? Can you get there?” Billy said. He tried to speak gently, but he was urgent. “We need to see if this is real. If it’s her. She might not have any idea what she’s getting into, and that name means it either is her or it’s someone who got it from her.”

“What’s he doing?” Dane said. “Why’s Paul-or the Tattoo-drawing attention to himself? He must know everyone from Griz to Goss and Subby are after him.”

“He wants something. She even said so. We get there he might have a knife to her throat,” Billy said. “He’s not going to negotiate toothless. Maybe he’s holding her hostage. Maybe he’s holding her hostage and she doesn’t even know.” Billy and Dane looked at each other.

“Paul didn’t look in shape to do much when he left,” Saira said.

“Wati, can you get to her?” Billy said.

“There may not even be any bodies there for me,” Wati said.

“There’s a doll in her car. And she wears a crucifix,” Billy said. There was a silence.

“Wati,” Dane said. “Listen to yourself. You sound rough.”

“I’ll see,” Wati said. He was gone. Limping from figure to figure across London.

FITCH SAID THEY SHOULD HIDE. ONE LONDONMANCER, GIDDY AT his own heresy, suggested they leave the city.

“Let’s just drive!” he said. “Up! To Scotland or whatever!” But there was no certainty that Fitch, for example, so much a function of the city, could even live for very long beyond its limits. Billy imagined himself on the motorways, becoming expert at the ungainly swing of the trailer, pulling the preserved squid through the damp English countryside and on into Scottish hills.

“Griz’d find us in ten seconds.” He would. There was something about the surrounds of slate, the angles of the turns that kept them hidden, even if it was a trap too. The city bent just enough that the Londonmancers stayed out of sight. An organic reflex.

If they left they would be nude. A giant squid in a lorry, heading north between hedgerows. Fuck’s sake, everything sensitive within ten miles would start to bleed.

“We’re going to do it this way,” Billy said. “Dane’s way.” He did not look at him. “Because he isn’t going to change his mind, and this way we can stop guessing whether it’s the last night, because we’ll know it is. And Dane’s going to do it, whatever the rest of us do.”

Saira was of his party-the warmakers. He could tell she was afraid, but still, that was her vote. Crisis forced the Londonmancers into democracy. Billy smiled at Saira, and she swallowed and smiled back.

Chapter Seventy-One

WRAPPERS SURROUNDING THEM, MARGE AND PAUL SHIFTED IN their seats. They had been sat for very many hours in the car. Marge recharged the iPod and tried to remain stoic about the increasingly grating warble of her protector.

“What are you listening to?” Paul asked her, finally. It had taken him long enough. She ignored his question. They ate trash calories, ducking below window-level on the few occasions they thought they heard someone approaching. Paul ground his back against the seat as if an insect bit him.

“What’s your story?” Marge said. Maybe calmed down he might be more comprehensible.

“I got tangled up with all this stuff years ago.” That was all he would say.

More hours. Right then, that carpark was where Marge had lived forever. Emotions and surprise had a hard time getting in to that carpark. So she could merely sit.

It was not silent. All buildings whisper. This one did it with drips, with the scuff of rubbish crawling in breezes, with the exhalations of concrete. Long into dead time, there was another breath at last, a tiny breath. From the kewpie figure dangling above Marge’s dash. She turned her iPod down.

“Paul,” the little figure said, in a man’s tiny voice. “And you must be Marge.”

“Wati,” said Paul. “Marge,” Paul said, “this is Wati.” He spoke carefully. It had been a long time since he had said anything. Marge said nothing. She looked at the doll and waited. “Where’s everyone else?” Paul said.

“What are you offering, Paul?” the doll said. “What’s going on? Will you come back?”

“Wait,” Marge said. To the figurine. “Are you… Are you with Billy? Where is he?”

“Billy can’t come,” it said. “There’s a spot of bother going on.” What a sad laugh it gave. “He says hi, by the way. He’s very worried about you. Didn’t expect to hear from you. He’s sort of concerned about… your man here. I don’t think you know everything about him that might be helpful. Paul, what is it you want to say to us?”

“Oh, you know, you know, Wati, now you’re here I don’t even know what to say,” Paul said. “I have so much to say, I don’t even-I’ve been having plans, you see.” He spoke fast, a wordspill. Marge stared at him. He was quite suddenly like this. “What do I want? Wati, I want you to split, I think, and bring, bring Billy. I want you to…” He paused. “You know what happened, Wati. What the Londonmancers had planned? They were ready to kill me. You know that? You think that’s okay?”

“We don’t know for sure they planned anything, Paul. But where do we go now? What do you want?”

“They were…”

“Where’s the little bits of Grisamentum?” Wati said. “It was in a bottle, weren’t it?” Paul made a face and waved his hand: It’s nowhere, it’s nothing. “Where do we go now?”

“I don’t go anywhere, Wati, but you should,” Paul said, urgently. “You should go. Get Billy and Dane and the Londonmancers.”

“I’m here to hear you out,” Wati said.

It was only now, hearing this strange discussion over the muttering awful music in her ears, that Marge’s chest felt suddenly tight as she had the thought, the wonder, if what she heard was a hostage negotiation, about her.

“You go, Wati,” Paul said. “Go on now.”

“No don’t,” said a new voice. “Not now, really don’t.” It was a voice Marge knew. Two people were approaching, in and out of the light pools by the cars. A man and a boy. “Now’s we’re all together it’s time for us to really fix those threads once and for all. The party’s tonight, after all, and everybody’s coming.”

GOSS AND SUBBY.

Oh my dear sweet Lord.

The leerer and his empty-faced boy. They came out of blackness. Trench coats spattered with gore and dirt, swaggering in shadow. Every few breaths, cigaretteless Goss breathed out smoke.

Marge made a mewling noise. She reached for them, but her car keys were gone. She whimpered. She could not breathe. She turned up the iPod violently, so her ears were full of a stupid crooning rendition of TLC’s “No Scrubs” so loud it hurt her. One earpiece fell out. She clawed around the floor for the keys.

“Run,” Wati whispered from the tiny cutesy figure. “I’ll get help.” And he was gone-Marge felt him go.

But though Wati had spoken quietly, she heard Goss say as he walked stiff and twitchy out of nowhere into that place, “Will you though, my best fellow? Will you really?”

She saw Goss hold up what looked like a handle of stone. A figure in clay, degraded by millennia. “Hello, boss-carrier,” he said to Paul. “You’ve got something of mine on your person. I suppose what we should say is you’ve got something of which I’m its. Looking for help, are you? Waiting on the bluff for the cavalry? Round you go, Subby, Son.”

Marge scrabbled to get away, but here was the boy Subby staring right in at her as I dun wun no scrubs no scrubs no scrubs warbled in one ear. She cried out and jerked away from him. Goss stood by the other door.

“Hello, boss!” he shouted. He reached over Paul and yanked the iPod from Marge’s lap, and she moaned and her hands twitched and clutched as nothing stopped him, as there was no skip of escape, no hesitation, as the trembling voice continued from the receding headphones, and Goss without looking hurled it away from him and it shot too fast an impossible distance away across the concrete cavern and shattered out of sight.

“How you doing under there, boss?” Goss shouted at Paul. “What d’you reckon? Has old Wati had his minute?” He looked at his wrist, as if he wore a watch, and stretched out the hand that held that ruined figure.

(Wati was flickering fast, his manifestation a little discorporeally crippled, limping, like some fast-running three-legged dog. Quick quick! In ceramic bust, general on a horse, plastic pilot in a travel agent doll doll gargoyle puppet across miles back to where the Krakenist remnants and the Londonmancers waited, hauling his exhausted self into the doll one of them carried, shouting breathlessly, “Goss and Subby! They’re there, they’ve ambushed Paul and Marge, they’re going to-” And then as his companions looked appalled at the little plastic man Wati suddenly and violently receded from them, hauled back hard as) Goss yanked the old shape as if angling or starting a motor or pulling muck from a drain. There was an inrush, a gasp, the slap of a soul hitting stone, and Wati came slamming back into the thing Goss held.

“Blimey! Nearly brought your dolly back with you with that one!” Goss said. “Recall this old thing?” He wagged the statue. Camouflaged by collapse, but there were shoulders, a head of some remnant stump kind. The clay memory of a mouth, from which Wati wordlessly shouted. “Recall this old thing, Wati my boy?” Goss said. “Do you know, do you effing know how many bleeding ages it took us to track this little gewgaw down, all the way over in the sands? How do you like my tan?”

The shabti. Of course. The first body, from which Wati was born. Swiped from a museum or from its interment in a tomb. Wati screamed, pulled and pulled to rip himself from the threads that kept his soul in that slave body, but it snagged him. Maybe reoriented, with a few minutes to gather himself and focus his class-rage into more rebel-magic, he might have wriggled free.

“Events have rather done a runner on us, Wati, old pal,” Goss said, as Wati bellowed in his tiny pebble voice. Goss held him head down. “You were quite a little scamp. Let’s wrap you up tight. Time for bed.” He dropped to his knees. Wati screamed. Goss raised the shabti above the concrete and stabbed it down, and shattered it into grit and dust.

Wati’s voice went out.

There was one less presence in the chamber. All around London, members of the defeated Union of Magicked Assistants stopped what they were doing and gasped and looked up and howled.

GOSS KICKED THE SHABTI POWDER. HE WINKED AT SUBBY.

“Thing is, Paul,” Goss said, and crouched by the passenger door. “Hallo, girlie! Long time. We been here a long time, waiting, to see who you’d get to turn up. Because. Thing is. Do you think we don’t hear the messages that get sent through London? Do you think you can try to talk to your friends and we won’t hear? Chat chat chat through the lights.” He shook his head.

“Now, young squire, what I’m keen to do, very keen, is have a little chinwag with my boss man. So. Get out of the car. Take off your jacket and your shirt. Unwind whatever the tish it is you got keeping his nibs shtum. And let me have a word. Alright? Because it’s all going a bit fiddly out here.”

With little fear noises Marge gritted her teeth and tried to shove out and through Subby, but he pushed back much stronger than he looked. Paul opened his own door and stepped out. Marge tried to tell him no. She grabbed for him and tried to pull the door closed.

“Back off a second, Goss,” Paul said. His voice was perfectly steady. Goss obeyed him. Paul took off his jacket. “Let me ask you something, Goss,” Paul said. “Watch her, Subby! Keep her in the car.” He was taking off his shirt. “Think about it,” Paul said. “Do you think I could live with your boss for however many years it is, and not know where you could listen in? Not know that if I send a Londonmancer a message via Southwark, it’ll get there, but that Hoxton’s always been a traitor? Why d’you think I sent them word from here? I knew you’d get it.”

Shirtless in the cold, his skin was all-over goose bumps. Wound around him like a shit-coloured girdle was parcel tape. A little sound came from behind him. Paul took Marge’s car keys from his pocket and threw them into the dark. He glanced at Goss and then at Subby. “I wanted you to get the message so I could deliver her to you.”

Marge’s insides went quite hollow. She folded away from him.

“I was kind of hoping I could deliver the others too. And they might still come, especially if Wati got word to them before you…” He made reeling motions. “And then they’re yours.”

Marge crawled across the gear stick, through the open passenger door. The two men and the boy watched her with what looked like mild interest. She crept and stumbled away.

“What’s all this about, Paul?” Goss said. He sounded genuinely intrigued. “When am I going to talk to the boss? Do let’s undo you.”

“Yeah. In a second. But I wanted you to hear this, and I wanted him to hear. From me. You listening?” he shouted to his own skin. “I want you, and him, to know that I’m offering you a deal. I’m not stupid-I knew you’d find me. So. No more locking me up like a, a zoo thing. We work together. That’s the deal now. And this is a goodwill offering.” He pointed at Marge. “I know you want Billy. Well, there’s Billy-bait.”

Air felt like it was clotting in Marge’s windpipe as she crawled.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said to her. “But you don’t know what it’s been like. There was no way I was going to get away.”

He took scissors from his pocket and tore the plastic-and-glue carapace from himself. His skin was red beneath it. “Did you get all that, you?” he said. “You’ve still got time to fix this situation. Grisamentum’s gone to war-he’s got some mad plan-but I can tell you where the squid is. Do we have a deal?”

Paul turned, so that his back faced Marge. In her already-horror she was not even surprised to see the malevolent tattoo on his back raise its eyebrows at her.

“Maybe,” it said.

Paul turned to her again. Goss and Subby stared at him. Goss was admiring. Marge was on her hands and knees on the carpark floor, in Wati’s dust, and moving as fast as she could when she could not breathe and her heart shook her.

“Oy, turn back, I want to see,” the voice of the Tattoo said.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Paul said. “We’re partners now. Look.” He waited another second. “She’s getting away.” He pointed, and glanced at Goss, who clicked his tongue, and strode round the car after Marge.

“Where are you off to, you little bantam?” He chuckled. She managed to stand, and ran, but within a few metres he was with her. He grabbed her by the hair. She let out a sound like nothing she could have imagined. He hauled her.

On the other side of the car Paul and Subby watched him. “What’s going on? Turn around,” the voice from Paul’s back bleated.

“Hey, there’s one other thing I worked out in my time, Goss,” Paul called to him, and held up the scissors. “I worked out what this thing is.” He patted Subby. “I worked out where you keep your heart.”

A moment cracked. Marge saw Goss way in front of her before she even realised he had let go. She saw him running. She glimpsed a look on his face so aghast it almost made you wince to see it, almost you could sob for it if you weren’t held in still-split time. But no matter how fast he moved Goss was too far away, even with the moments Paul had wasted with that taunt, to get between the scissors and Subby.

Paul brought the blades double-dagger into Subby’s neck. Quick repeated punches. Blood, and the boy’s mindless face did not move except that his eyes widened. Paul stabbed hard. The blood that spattered him was very dark.

Subby dropped to his knees, looking quizzical. “What? What? What’s happening?” the Tattoo foolishly demanded, just like a child.

Goss screeched and screamed and howled. He collapsed midleap. The scissors quivered, embedded in Subby’s neck. Paul shuddered. Goss sprawled across the car bonnet, puking up his own much brighter blood.

“No no no no no no.” He whined and drummed his heels and stared in outrage at the dying boy-thing.

“Do you think,” Paul said-while “what? what’s happening? what?” the Tattoo kept saying-“that I would work with you?” Paul pulled the scissors from Subby’s neck, pushed them back again. Subby looked from side to side and closed his eyes. Goss screamed and bubbled and kicked and drooled sudden smoke and could not stand. Screamed.

“Do you think I would let you come anywhere near me?” Paul said to him. “Did you think I’d collaborate with you? Do you think I’d let you be the muscle for this purebred scum evil motherfucker on my back? Did you think I wouldn’t kill you?” Paul spat at the dying Goss. Spat at the ground in front of him. “You’ve got this flesh basket to hold what makes you tick, and you think that’ll stop me? Goss, stop up your noise. It is time for you to go to hell and take your poor fucking empty little life-carrier with you.”

Subby was immobile. The blood was coming out of him slower. Goss wheezed and gurgled and looked as if he was trying to level some good-bye curse, but as Subby died with closing eyes, he died too. His last breath went without smoke.

And whatever else was happening-

in times and places all over-

unmentionably many-

that going out-

that finishedness-

rippled-

was very felt-

and every one of London’s bullied and terrified were for a metamoment, from 1065 to 2006, all in their own instants and entangled for a blink, in every awful situation, every little room where they were head-flushed, thumbscrewed, decried, name-debased, taunted, punched, sneered at, the foil of brutality, for a moment just then, for one instant, which might not save them but which would at the very least be a tiny comfort, for always, felt better-felt joy.

PAUL WATCHED GOSS GO.

“What’s happening? What’s happening? What? What?” the Tattoo said. Paul ignored it. Marge ignored it.

She watched without motion, holding her head where Goss had hurt her. When Subby died-as if he was a “he,” as if it were more than a box with a face-he mouldered away. He crumbled into a disgustingness, and then that crumbled too, into nothing, leaving only a heart, a man’s unbeating heart too big for Subby’s chest.

Goss did not crumble. Goss lay there like the dead man he was.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said to her, at last.

“I needed him to trust me,” Paul said. “He never would have left Subby alone otherwise.” They stared at each other. The Tattoo screamed, forced to stare into the parking lot darkness where nothing was happening.

“What did you do?” the Tattoo said.

“I knew they’d find me,” Paul said. “And I could never take him. This was all I could think to do. I knew they’d hear what we said if we sent it from here, and I needed them to listen in and come. Can you help me cover him? Him.” He raised his arms. “The Tattoo.”

He said, “I didn’t mean that to happen to Wati. I’m sorry. I thought Goss and Subby would get here first. Well, they did, but I didn’t think they’d hide and wait. I tried to persuade him to leave.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Anything.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. Let me tell you what I can.”

Chapter Seventy-Two

THEY KNEW-PAUL EXPLICITLY, MARGE BY THE INSTINCTS SHE was accruing-that that was hardly the end of it as far as London went. For them, though, it had been an epoch-ending execution. They sat where they had fallen, talking a little, but often just sitting and breathing in Goss-and-Subbyless air. Paul kicked Goss’s heart across the concrete.

When Goss died, the lights in the garage had dimmed twice and gone up again in a hip-hip-hooray, in object joy. Colours changed and shadows moved as emissaries from various courts-seelie, unseelie, abseelie, paraseelie-passed through to check out the spreading rumour. A few ghosts that Marge did not see but felt as movements of sad warmth. With a squee, a pigness passed her. It was not long after that that they heard a car.

Without a siren but with lights whirling a police car bumped down the ramp and to them. Three officers emerged, their batons out, pepper spray and Tasers out, their hands overfull of weapons. Their terror was quite obvious. After a pause, out of the car in a smart sweep, her clothes and hair jouncing, leaking smoke from one corner of her mouth, a cigarette bobbing from the other, her eyes narrow and turning her head a little, splendid as Boudicca, was Collingswood.

She stared at Paul, put one hand out, took her Taser from her belt. She looked at Marge, raised an eyebrow and nodded in recognition. She chirruped and whistled, and stroked the air as if it were a piglet’s head.

Collingswood smacked her lips. “Fucking fucking fuck me,” she whispered. She smiled an utterly beautiful smile. “It’s true. You really did. Fuck me. Finally. Oh… my… gosh. We could do with a bit of good news tonight.”

“I told you there was stuff going on with me,” Marge said.

“And look,” said Collingswood. “Slap my naughty knuckles for making the wrong call. And it’s you.” She said that to Paul. “Well, I mean not you but you. Fucked if I know what’s the point tonight, but you got to do what you can, right? Come on then.” She motioned the two of them up. They obeyed.

“What is this?” Marge said. She sounded mild, not outraged-curious.

“Give me a minute I’ll come up with a bunch of stuff to charge you with,” Collingswood said. “Basically, the gist of it is, you’re coming with me. Might as well salvage something. You too.” She looked at Paul. He stood meekly enough. He looked side to side as something invisible circled him. “I don’t want any trouble. From you or from, y’know. Your passenger. For fuck’s sake, don’t you want to get out of all this?” she said.

Yes, thought Marge. Really. Collingswood nodded at her. The officer did not need her sensitivities to read that answer. “Come on then,” she said. “Bloody star, you.”

Paul slumped, walked toward the car too, then abruptly raced past Collingswood and her fumbling officers, toward the exit. He knocked her as he went, so she staggered and dropped her cigarette.

“Naughty fucking naughty,” she shouted. “Tase the bastard.” One of the officers missed, but another got Paul in the back, in his unseen Tattoo, with the electricity-spitting wires. Paul shrieked and fell, spasming.

“Stop, stop!” shouted Marge. “Don’t you know who he is, don’t you know what he’s…? He can’t face being locked up anymore, that’s why-”

“Boohoo,” said Collingswood. “Do I look like I give a shit?” She stood over Paul as he strained to breathe. In truth she did look like she gave a little of a shit. She wore an expression not of regret, exactly, but of troubled irritation, as if the paper in the photocopier had run out.

“No one’s out to fuck you up,” she said to him. “Will you stop it?” A swiney scream screamed in dimensions close enough for Marge to hear it, and receded. “Now you scared off Perky,” Collingswood said. “Get him in the car,” she shouted at her men. “If there’s still London in the morning, we’ll see what we do.”

All the cops were as ineffective as keystones, hauling the moaning Paul toward the car. The thought came to Marge that she could run. It was followed by the knowledge that she would not. She walked after them, as she had been told.

The arrest, the invitation, was enticing. After all that work she had done, everything she had faced, police tea, a holding room, someone else making the running. I, Marge thought as she settled into the back, offered her shoulder as a pillow for Paul’s still lolling head, am bloody tired.

“You two are walking home,” Collingswood was saying to her officers. “Only room for one more. I wasn’t expecting arrests. But seeing as Baz took the shot, he gets the gig.” The other two grumbled. “Fuck, you are a wet pair. Look on the bright side: you’ll both be burned out of history by morning, so never mind, eh?” She got in. “Baz. Station. Let’s ensconce our little charges, then see what else is going on.”

I really am, thought Marge, extremely tired. Paul raised his head and opened his mouth, but Collingswood switched her finger at him in the mirror, and nothing came out. Marge wished he had got away.

“WHERE’S WATI?” DANE SHOUTED. “WHAT’S HAPPENED TO HIM?”

“Marge was…” Billy said. “You heard what Wati said just before…” His words ebbed out, and he shook his head and covered his eyes. Dead, or hostage at very least.

“Wati!” Dane shouted and raged. “Again! Another! Kraken!”

They had, contemptuous almost, evaded the police tape without breaking stride, and were back in the kraken church. The last Krakenists queued like obedient children by the huge beak in the temple.

The Londonmancers were in the lorry, winding through suburbs nearby. Fitch and some of his last followers were in a strange situation. Disapproving this strategy of war, they were nonetheless tied to it, dependent on its success now that it would happen. So having lost the argument they could only aid those who had won. An extreme cabinet responsibility. They would deliver Londonmancers willing to fight to the battleground.

The Krakenists had only legends to go on, as to what would happen to them when they went to this war, altar-altered, newly dragooned into an army. A dreg regiment. Cars were ready for the afflicted blessed, those about to be bitten. The Krakenists were wishing each other good-bye. After these embraces, they would drive across London to an old ink factory-in awkward silence? Listening to the radio?

Strong kraken-cultists held the mouthpart, bracing themselves to each side. They were audibly praying.

“Is that all of them?” Billy said.

Dane nodded. Few of the last of the church had taken much persuasion. Billy looked at Dane.

“You are going too,” Billy said.

“Yeah.”

“Dane…” Billy shook his head and closed his eyes. “Please… Can I persuade you not to?”

“No. Is everything ready?” Dane said. A worshipper. “Then let’s do this.”

Chapter Seventy-Three

BILLY WATCHED THE LAST-EVER KRAKEN MASS. HE SAT AT THE back of the church. He watched tears and heard benedictions. Dane was faltering, but with grace, repeating the liturgies he had not been part of for a long time. The shepherdless flock herded themselves. Billy shifted in his seat and fiddled with the phaser in his pocket.

The congregation sang hymns to torpedo-shaped, many-armed gods. At last Dane said, “Right then.”

Some of the volunteers tried to smile as they made a line. One by one they placed their hand at the point of the kraken jaw. The hinge-men would very carefully scissor the great bite together on their skin. Twice the hook of the jaw tore worse wounds than intended and made the faithful cry out. Mostly the snips were precise-the skin broke, there was a little blood.

Billy waited for drama. The bitten seemed clumsy and large, seemed to cram the cavelike hall. They embraced each other and held their bleeding hands. Dane, the last one, put his own hand in the jaws and had his congregation bite them down. Billy made no reaction at all.

The plan was simple or stupid. They did not have the time, numbers or expertise for sophistication. They had one advantage and only one, which was that Grisamentum did not know they knew where he was, or that they were coming. All they had was that surprise. A one-two, misdirect and real attack. Anyone who thought for more than one second must realise that what came first was a diversion. So they would not give them that second.

They had a few pistols, swords, knacked things of various designs. They did not know what Grisamentum was, now. En-inked on paper, in liquid? He’d avoided death once already. Fire might dry him out, but it would leave his pigment behind. Bleach, then. He had seemed scared of it. They carried bottles. Their most important weapon a household cleanser. Some wore plant sprayers filled with it like bulky pistols on their belts.

“Come on then,” Billy said at last to Dane. He led him to the car. It was he who drove, now. Didn’t even need directions, and drove like a man who knew what he was doing. Billy looked out of the window. He did not look at Dane: he did not want to see changes. He glanced into all the dark streets they passed; he kept hoping that the angel of memory would come, but there was no glass-and-bone figure under the swaying, leafless trees, the canopies of London’s buildings, no skull and jar rolling among the small night crowd. There were running people, small fires.

“Christ,” Billy said. He wished that Wati raced ahead from figure to figure, returned to the hula girl on the car dashboard.

He parked near the factory compound Dane had shown him on the map, by metal gates black with rust. Others of the attacking party parked elsewhere, in studiedly random patterns, sauntered into position. Billy put his finger to his lips and looked at Dane in warning. Sirens were audible, but not as many as the signs of fires and the sounds of violence would suggest were necessary. The parents of London would have their children at home that night, be lyingly whispering to them that everything would be alright.

“Where do you reckon the Tattoo’s most loyal troops are now?” Dane said. “The fist-heads and the, the people from the workshops?” He was sweating. His eyes were wide.

“Fighting,” Billy said.

Out into the strange warm night. Some of the fitter Londonmancers followed. Saira’s war party. Out of sight they climbed the layered walls of the building and sidled along the architecture. They watched the factory as if it might do something.

Behind the wall was a forecourt where a derelict car lorded over weeds. The factory sat surrounded by that emptiness. Nothing moved that they could see. There was perhaps a slight diminution of the darkness in one of the big windows overlooking nothing. The wall they were on led like a spine to the building itself: they need not touch the ground. Billy pointed at a few of the following fighters, pointed where he wanted them to go.

Even if Wati had been there he could not have spied for them: the clay figures on the roof, Billy saw, were smashed up. Grisamentum’s court had blinded their architecture. Billy took the little Kirk figure from his pocket. He held it up as he had done many times since the shabti’s awful lurching recall and whispered Wati’s name. Again, nothing.

Billy pointed. Dane sighted along a rifle he had taken from the kraken armoury, at tiny motion on the building’s roof. A man, putting his hands on railings and leaning out toward him.

“He’s seen us,” Billy said.

“He’s not sure yet,” Dane whispered. His weapon bucked. The man dropped, silently.

“Wow,” Billy said.

“Shit,” said Dane. He was trembling.

“We don’t have long now,” Billy said.

The krakenbit were emerging from their cars, moving with strange ungainliness. As they came forward, their diversion arrived.

THE LONDONMANCER ATTACKERS CAME AS AGREED, WITH DRAMA. An army of masonry. Those few left whose knack was to wake the city’s defences had done what they could do. They had sent their alarums in parachemicals, waves of pathogen anxiety. They stimulated immune response in the factory grounds. Birthing of brick angles; emerging from hollows in boscage; unwinding from the ruined car; London’s leucocytes came on in attack.

One was ambulant architecture; another a trash marionette; another a window onto another part of the city, a monster-shaped hole. They moved across urban matter, niche-filling and/or huge. Their footsteps made the sounds of barking dogs and braking cars. One threw back its head-analogue and shouting a war shout that was the puttering-engine call of a bus.

It threw open the compound doors. The bravest Londonmancers ran in. They raised weapons, or goads with which to direct their giant cellular charges. There was movement behind the factory windows.

Emerging from side doors and from behind dustbins came gunfarmers, murmuring fertility prayers as they shot. A canine shape of discarded paper leapt from a window. For seconds Billy thought it was blown by monsterherds, but there was no one to gust it. Each shred of paper in that wolf totality was ink-stained.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Dane. That’s him. He’s all over them.” Enough of Grisamentum’s ink presence was on each piece to knack his motion. He was profligate now, impatient at the edge of his intended apotheosis. The ink-paper wolf jumped onto a screaming Londonmancer, and the paper teeth tore her as if they were bone.

“Oh Christ,” Billy said. “Time to move.” He aimed his phaser and crawled.

Below him in the wall a stretch of crumbled brick changed, was pressed into new shape, become an ancient door with a long-broken lock so it could be pushed open. Saira came in and bit her lip and stood aside, and the krakenbit came in behind her. Billy saw those nipped by the squid god.

They were stronger than they had any right to be. They picked up masonry and hurled it. They were misshapen and changing. Tides moved on them; their muscles fluttered in directions they had not been made to take. “Christ,” he whispered. He fired a weak whining jolt at the building, a wild distraction as he stared.

One man was growing Architeuthis eyes, fierce black circles taking up each side of his head, squeezing his features between them. A woman bulged, her body become a muscular tube from which her limbs poked, absurd but strong. A woman streaked across the distance, jetted by her new siphon, moving through air as if it were water, her hair billowed by currents in the sea miles off. There was a man with arms raised to display blisters bursting and making themselves squid suckers, another with a wicked beak where he had had a mouth.

They tore at the gunfarmers and through the swirl of inked paper. Bullets ripped them, and they roared and bit and smashed back. The suckered man looked hopefully at the inside of his arms. The marks were blebbing into little vacuums, but arms his arms remained. Billy watched him. It was awesome, yes, but.

But was it a godly tease that none of the krakenbit had tentacles?

Dane was not newly shaped. Only, he looked back at Billy and his eyes were all pupil now, all dark. He had no hunting arms.

“Billy.” A tiny voice from Billy’s plastic man.

“Wati!” Billy snapped to draw Dane’s attention. He waved the figure. “Wati.”

“… Found you,” the voice said, and coughed again. Faded out.

“Wati…”

After seconds of silence, Wati said, “First thing I did ever that was mine was un-be that body that got made. Could do it again. They caught me off guard, is all. I just got to…” The rude reanchoring in that doll of exploitation had hurt him terribly. “This was the only place I could find. Been in it so much.” He was half-awake, at best, from the no-soul’s-land between statues where he had been in coma. He drifted back into silence.

“Damn it,” Billy said. “Wati.” There was nothing more, and their time was up. Billy beckoned and crept forward, and Dane crouched with him on the balcony below the factory’s high window, looking down within at the last preparations of Grisamentum.

Chapter Seventy-Four

THE CHAMBER SWARMED WITH PAPER. IN PLANES AND SHREDS, torn-up pieces, flitting with purpose, all smeared with ink. Below them the room was scattered with old machinery, the remains of printing presses and cutters. Walkways circled at several levels. Billy sighted the core of gunfarmers remaining.

There was Byrne, scribbling notes, looking down and arguing, writing Grisamentum’s response to her in himself. By a huge pile of torn-off hardcovers, technicians fiddled with gears, ignoring the chaos, pressing soaked paper pulp in a hydraulic machine and collecting the dirt-coloured off-run.

“It’s the library,” Billy said. The soaked, shredded kraken library, rendered to its ink. He pointed through the glass.

All that antique knowledge poured over with solvent, the inks seeped out of the pages where they had been words. Some pigment must be the remains of coffee, the dark of age, the chitin of crushed beetles. Even so, the juice they were collecting was the distillate of all kraken knowledge. And Billy saw, there, presiding over the rendering, on a raised dais, in a great big plain pail, the bulk of Grisamentum. His sloshing liquid body.

Dane shoved into the glass and made some enraged noise. He was radiating cold.

“He’s going to add it to himself,” Billy said. “Or himself to it.” It would be rich, that liquid print. A liquid darkness that had been all the Architeuthis secrets, homeopathically recalling the shapes it had once taken, the writing, the secrets it had been. Metabolise that, and Grisamentum would know more about the kraken than any Teuthex ever had.

“Speed this up!” They could hear Byrne through the glass. Like the glass was thinning to help them. “There’s time to finish this. We can track down the animal, but we’ve got to get the last of the knowledge down. Quick.” The paper stormed as if a whirlwind filled the room.

A high-flying scrap at the top of the rustling column flattened itself against the glass beside Billy and Dane. The ink on it regarded them. A still second. It plummeted back through the paper vortex. The rest followed, the swirl falling through its own centre.

“Come on!” shouted Billy. He kicked the glass into the room and fired through the paperstrom, but no beam came out. He threw the dead phaser at the giant inkwell full of Grisamentum.

There were shots, and one, two of the Krakenists who had fought their way in fell. Dane did not move. Billy heard a percussion and a damp smacking into Dane’s body. A new wound in Dane’s side oozed black blood. Dane looked at Billy with abyssal eyes. He smiled not very human. He made himself bigger.

Billy grabbed for the pistol in Dane’s belt, and the papers bombed him. Some came at him as a biting skull. He swung the bleach bottle he carried and sent a spray of the stuff in a curve like a spreading-out sabre. It depigmented where it landed. He could smell bleach amid the gun smell, the same ammoniac scent as that of Architeuthis.

Screams. A Krakenist was being devoured by a flock of Grisamentum stains shaped playfully murderous into a paper tiger. Billy caught Dane’s eye. They looked something at each other. Dane vaulted the fence, his wound not slowing him at all. He fell fast, but not at gravity’s idiot control. The paper tried to disrupt him, but he twisted as he fell. He fired and killed an engineer. He sprayed bleach on his way down, streaming it through papers that instinctively flinched away, at Grisamentum.

His aim was predator perfect. But Byrne stepped into the way. She took the liquid across her front. It cut colour like an invert Pollock assault, her clothes fading under the spattered line. She shoved an old-fashioned perfume nebuliser into Dane’s face and squeezed the bulb.

Billy clenched. He closed his fist, tightened his stomach, tensed everything he knew how to tense. Nothing happened. Time did not pause. Byrne sprayed dark vapour into Dane’s face.

Dane staggered. His face was wet with dark grey. A billow of Grisamentum into him. Dane could not help breathing him in.

He retched, tried to puke Grisamentum out. Billy aimed at Byrne with Dane’s pistol, which he had no idea how to use, but in any case she dipped her fingers right into Grisamentum and shook them in front of her. The air around her closed, and when he fired his bullet ricocheted off nothing.

Dane was down. His body rilled. Grisamentum filled him, shaped himself on the Dane’s alveoli. Wrote bad spells on the inside of Dane’s lungs. Billy watched Dane die.

THE PAPERS ENCASED BYRNE IN AN ARGUMENTATIVE FLURRY, LIKE feeding birds.

“You’re sure?” Billy heard her say.

She poured the last of the dark liquid pulped from the Krakenist library into Grisamentum. He swirled. It must be giving him psychic indigestion to do this so fast, but he needed the final teuthic wisdom. He had to understand his quarry. Byrne stirred him and flicked the dipstick all around her. The papers eddied faster as the pigment splashed them. Older dried-up blots of Grisamentum were overlaid with less ignorant stains.

“It has to be close,” Byrne shouted. “Find it and send some of you back here to tell me where. I’ll bring the rest of you. Go!”

Dane had thank God stopped moving. Billy wanted to rally the last of the krakenbit, to destroy the gunfarmers and paper-swirl monsters. But he saw the chaos, his side’s rout, in the chamber. He climbed back out of the window.

Outside, Londonmancers and antibodies stood off against gunfarmers and a devil of inky paper. Littering the ground were bodies, and spots of troubled perspective where London functions had fallen. Krakenbit wheezed like fish in air, or lay still, brine dripping from their bodies. Billy saw one still fighting, with, at last, his left hand replaced with a twenty-foot hunting limb, which he dragged and flailed.

“Saira!”

She smiled to see him, even as she shook with war. She tugged a bit of London claylike into a police riot shield, crouched behind it, crossed the combat to him.

“Billy.” She even hugged him. “What’s happening?” He shook his head. “Dane?” she said. He shook his head. Her eyes went very wide. Billy began to shake.

“Disaster,” he said at last. “We couldn’t get close. He’s just, he’s doing the last of the knowledging now. Where’s my guardian angel, eh?” He was striving to speak to his headache again, as he had the last time the angel was near, but this time it was only pain.

“Billy…” It was Wati, groping to vague consciousness in his pocket. Billy said his name.

“He’s alive?” Saira said. There was a massive sound. From the building’s roof, a flock of black-stained papers streamed batlike out. They rampaged across the sky.

“He’s going,” Wati said. “He’s…”

“They’re covered in him; he can knack them more,” Billy said. “He doesn’t care. We forced his hand. He’s going all out. He’s looking for the kraken, and when he’s found it, Byrne’s going to milk it, and…” They looked at each other. “Can you find them? Get a message to the lorry?”

“They’re Londonmancers.” Saira nodded. “And so am I.”

“Tell them to get out of here. Tell them to go… Wait.” Billy held out the Kirk figure, its little plastic eyes watching him. Billy thought and thought, as fast as he could. “Wati.”

“Yeah,” the Kirk said.

“We’ve got as long as it takes for Grisamentum to find the lorry,” Billy said. “And you saw how many of him there are. Wati, I know you’re hurt, but can you wake up? Can you hear me?” No answer. “If he doesn’t wake up,” he said to Saira, “we’ll have to try to go ourselves, but-”

“Where?” Wati said. “Go where?”

“How are you?”

“Hurt.”

“Can you… can you travel?”

“Don’t know.”

“You got here.”

“This doll… used it so much it’s like a chair shaped to my bum.”

“Wati, what happened?”

There was silence. “I thought I was dead. I thought your friend Marge was… It was Goss and Subby.” Billy waited. “I can feel her. Still. Now. I can feel her because she’s got the dust of my old body all over her hands. I can sniff that.”

“She was in Hoxton.”

“… She must have… she got away from Goss and Subby.” Even exhausted, Wati’s voice was awed.

“Can you get to her?”

“That body’s gone.”

“She wears one.” Billy grabbed the front of his shirt where a pendant would be. “Can you use the dust to find her? Can you try?”

“Where’s Dane?”

The fighting continued, the noise of arcane murder. “They killed him, Wati,” Billy said.

At last, Wati said, “What’s the message?”

Saira whispered things into London’s ears, cajoled and begged it, even aghast as it must be that night, to pass a message to her onetime teacher in the lorry. “All we’ve got is speed,” Billy said to her, and told her where to send them. She moulded the wall and made a patch of it an urban hedge, through which she pushed, out into the street.

Billy took some seconds of solitude, as alone as he could be in the dregs of that fighting and that noise. He stared back at the building where his friend had died. Billy wished he knew how to make whatever tentacle-imitating sign wished a killed soldier of the krakens peace. Billy shut his eyes tight and swallowed and said Dane’s name and kept his eyes closed. That was the ceremony he invented.

Chapter Seventy-Five

HOW COULD YOU KEEP SOMETHING THE SIZE OF A LORRY HIDDEN from the skies? Fitch’s indecision protected him awhile: unable either to commit to his fighting sisters and brothers or to desert them, he had stayed less than a mile away and ordered the vehicle into a tunnel, and there in the orange striplight under the pavement had put on the hazard lights as if stalled. And waited, while refugees from that night surged past in their cars. When Saira sent her message, it, London, did not have far to go to pass it on.

While over their head scudded the inked scout selves of Grisamentum, she and Billy ran toward the vehicle’s hide, past birdlime streaks and posters for albums and exhibitions. Come meet us, she had said. We need you. Shamed, Fitch had the engine gun and the lorry lurch out of its burrow into the surveilled streets.

The paper helixed plughole out of the dark sky and mobbed the lorry. It pushed through them. They were sentient, but the papers had the feeding-frenzy throng of multitude predators, mothlike butting themselves against the windscreen. When it met Saira, Billy and the few Londonmancers and squidly loping krakenbit who had been able to run, the vehicle was thronged with excited paper.

Dear God, Billy thought, at the thought of what the appalled locals must think they saw from behind their curtains. Close to him were two Londonmancers and two krakenbit still morphing into teuthic midway forms. They whipped their limbs and sprayed the last of their bleach. Fitch threw open the back and yelled at them to enter. With the unity of a school of fish, the papers gusted back toward the factory.

“They’re going to get Byrne and the rest of himself,” Billy said. “They’re going to come for us now they know where we are. We have to go.”

“But where?” Fitch said.

“Drive,” said Billy. “We’re meeting someone.”

“SO WHAT DO YOU RECKON?” COLLINGSWOOD SAID TO HER COMMANDEERED assistant.

“About what?” he said. They were the same rank. He did not call her ma’am. But he went where she told him to and did as she said.

“What now? Got any burglaries?” She laughed. They drove through a little rain, through sliding, dark and lit-up streets where people still lounged by twenty-four-hour shops while others ran from unholy gang fights.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“Let’s just get back to the bloody office.”

Marge felt safe in the car. She watched Paul. His face was anguished but resigned. He did not speak. His tattoo spoke. Marge could hear its smothered rage, its terror, in wordless growling from under his shirt.

“It’ll be alright,” she said to him foolishly.

She heard another tiny mumbling. She looked about. The words came from her neck.

Marge blinked. She looked at Collingswood, who continued to tease her colleague. Marge touched her little crucifix. At the contact of her dirty fingers the voice came again, a little stronger. “Hey,” it said.

The silver Jesus whispered. Marge looked away into the violent night streets, into what she had gathered might be the end of the world. And here came this messenger.

“Hey,” she whispered herself, and raised the crucifix. Paul watched her. She focused on the tiny bearded face.

“Hey,” it said again.

“So,” she said. “What’s the word from heaven?”

“Wha?” the metal Christ said. “Oh right. Funny.” It coughed. “Put me to your ear,” it said. “Can’t talk loud.”

“Who are you?” she said. Collingswood was watching her in the mirror, now.

“It’s Wati again,” he said. “I got a message, so listen.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“So did I. Don’t wash your hands. Billy needs you to do something.”

“What’s up back there?” Collingswood said. “Who you chatting to?”

Marge held up her finger so peremptorily Collingswood actually obeyed. The tiny chained Messiah whispered to her, for a long time. Marge nodded, nodded, swallowed, said “yeah” as if at a telephone call. “Tell him yeah.” Finally she let the crucifix dangle back below her neck.

She sighed and closed her eyes, then looked at Collingswood. “We have to go somewhere. We have to pick someone up.” Paul sat up. The other officer looked backward nervously.

“Yeah…” Collingswood said thoughtfully. “Not very clear on the whole police prisoner thing, are you?”

“Listen,” Marge said slowly. “You want to take us in? Take us in. But look around and listen to me.” There was a helpful scream of fighting from some nearby street. Marge gave it a moment. “I’ve just been given a job to do, by Billy. You know Billy? And by this little guy on my necklace who I just saw killed by the most evil, terrifying bastard. Who was out for me.

“Now, I’ve been given this job on the grounds that it might be the one thing that stops the end of the world. So. Do you think your arrest report can wait a couple of hours? Where do you want to go on this?”

Collingswood kept staring at her. “Goss and Subby,” Collingswood said.

“You know them, then.”

“I’ve had my tangles,” Collingswood said.

“There you go then.”

“Wati just had his own little barney with them?”

“He’s told me where to go, and what to do.”

“How about you tell me what he said, and we can have a chat about it?” Collingswood said.

“How about you fuck off?” Marge said without rancour. She sounded as tired as she was. “Look around and tell me if you think we’ve got time to waste. How about-look, I’m just throwing this out there. How about we save the world first, and then you arrest us?”

There was silence within the car. Above them was the excited mourning of the siren. “I tell you what, boss,” the other officer, the young man driving, said suddenly. “I like her plan. I’m for that.”

Collingswood laughed. Looked away and up into the sky over London where clouds wriggled. “Yeah,” Collingswood said. “Might be nice to see tomorrow. You never know. But then,” she said, and wagged her finger at Marge and Paul, “we are definitely taking you in. So what’s the plan?”

“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?” SAID MO OUTSIDE HER HOUSE, HER broom held up like a weapon. Trees shuddered. Marge held the crucifix out at her. “I’m not a vampire,” the woman said.

“No, for God’s sake,” Marge said. “You know Wati? We’re Dane’s friends.”

“Jesus bollocks,” said Collingswood to Mo. “Am I going to have to police brutality you? Let us in and listen.”

“We’re here for Simon,” Marge said in the hallway.

“That’s a bad idea. Simon’s still haunted.”

“Tough,” said Collingswood.

“We’re down to the last one.” One tenacious dead self. Mo hesitated. “He needs rest.”

“Yeah,” said Marge. “I need a holiday in the Maldives. And needs must.”

“She ain’t wrong,” Collingswood said. “I’m with the prisoner here on this.”

Simon looked up at their entry. He was in a dressing gown and pyjamas. He held a ball of squeaking fur.

“We’re friends of Billy and Dane,” Marge said.

Simon nodded. From the air came a faint wrathful ghostly melisma. He shook his head. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“Message,” Marge said. “We need you to move something. For Billy. Don’t look at me like that…”

“But… I can’t. That’s why I’m here. This… it’s like an addiction,” Simon said. “The knack’s like a drug. I can’t go down that road again, I…”

“Bullshit,” said Wati, faint but audible.

“Let me lay it out for you.” Paul spoke, for the first time. He coughed. There was a groaning from his back, and Simon’s ghost responded in moaning kind. Paul scratched himself hard against the doorframe until his back was silent.

“I just done in the most dangerous piece of shit you can imagine by the most horrible method I ever had to use to do anything,” he said. “Wati said you got into this because you was paid to and you might’ve saved the world. If Griz’d got what he wanted earlier… So thank you. For that. But you are going to help. Knacking ain’t a drug. What did for you was dying and not noticing you’d died, again and again.

“Tomorrow you can do whatever you want. But London owns you now. Understand? One more thing needs porting. You don’t even have to beam yourself, no more snuffing it. You are going to do this. I’m not even saying please.”

Chapter Seventy-Six

THE LORRY ROARED ON, IN PLAIN SIGHT, HARASSED BY A HARD core of inked papers that stayed in its slipstream to track its breakneck journey.

“We’re not going to lose them,” Saira said. She was driving now. “Just got to get there fast and do the job. They can’t take us, not this few. It’s when the rest of Grisamentum arrives we’re in trouble.”

Finally they reached the street Billy remembered. It was still all quiet, as if there were no war. People looked from houses at them and hurriedly away. Saira braked by the last, dim house.

“Are we here?” Fitch said. The trailer was stinking and crowded. The last Londonmancers waited by the dead kraken. “Why are we here? What’s the sea going to do?”

The papers rose, a malevolent little covey, circled. Fuck you, Billy mouthed, as they gusted over the roofs and away. “They’re fetching the rest of him,” he said. “Come on, come on.” He froze at approaching blue lights. A police car tore toward them and rubber-burned to a stop. Collingswood emerged, and Billy opened his mouth to yell at Saira to drive, but he heard Marge’s voice.

“Billy!” she almost screamed. She got out and stared at him. “Billy.” He ran for her, and they held on to each other a long time.

“Look,” said Collingswood. “It’s beautiful, innit?”

“I’m so sorry,” Billy said to Marge. “Leon…”

“I know,” she said. “I know. I got your message. And I got your other message. Look, I brought him.” Sitting in the car by Paul was Simon Shaw.

WHEN FITCH SAW PAUL, HE STARTED, AND OPENED HIS MOUTH BUT obviously did not know what to say. The other Londonmancers looked uneasily between the two. Fitch tried again to speak, and Paul just shook his finger no. “We got nothing to talk about,” Paul said. “Not while he’s on his way.” He pointed. Circling like a blown leaf was a single scrap of Grisamentum. “He’s coming, so let’s get this done.”

There would almost be a showdown between Grisamentum and the Tattoo, Billy thought, at last. But it would, rather, be between Grisamentum and Paul. Whatever Fitch’s plans had been or now were, Billy realised, Paul was not afraid of him anymore.

“Billy,” Collingswood said. “Mate. What the shit have you been up to?” She winked at him. “If you didn’t want the job you should’ve just said no, fuck’s sake.”

“Officer Collingswood,” he said. Found himself grinning at her for a second. She pursed her lips.

“What’s the plan then, geezer?”

“Come on,” Billy said. “Let’s move. You ready?” Simon looked terrified but nodded. They opened the lorry so he could stare at the kraken’s tank. Metabolise its position in his head. “Good man,” Billy said. “You know what’s going to happen?”

Billy had prepared his case in writing. It was a long and detailed message, which he had sealed in a glass bottle. “Shall we?” he said to Saira and Simon. “We need its permission.”

“And bearings,” Simon said. “I told you, I can’t do it without pretty precise bearings.”

Billy tapped the bottle. “I said all that. It’s in there. Don’t panic.”

The message in the bottle begged.

YOU SAID THE KRAKEN WAS NO LONGER YOURS. PLEASE, YOU HAVE TO help us. Even if it’s not one of yours, for the sake of the city where you’ve been for however long, please, we are asking you to use your neutrality and your power like when you helped against the Nazis. We need a safe place. We all heard about how the Tattoo wouldn’t face you that time, and we need that sort of clout again.

Everything is at stake, Billy had written. We just need to get past this night. And protect it. We are desperate. He pushed the message into the letter box.

They stood quietly in the dark. A man rode by them on a bike, with squeaking pedal-strokes. Fitch and the Londonmancers waited. The last krakenbit hid their teuthic tumourous amendations in the lorry. The sea inside the house did not answer the bottle for a long time.

“What’s happening?” Simon whispered.

“We can’t stick around forever,” Saira whispered.

Billy raised his hand, to rap the window, with a sense of blasphemy, when he was preempted. Something knocked instead from the inside. A slow beat through the curtain. A lower corner of the cloth moved. It was pulled slowly back.

“It’s showing us,” Billy said. “So you can see for coordinates, Simon. Do what you need to do.”

“Bloody hell,” said Saira. “I guess that’s permission.”

The curtain retreated from a corner of darkness. There was nothing visible behind it, until from deep within that dark came motions-insinuations in the pitch. They came closer, halting inches behind the glass. Staring out from the dim light that streetlamps shone into the room were tiny translucent fish.

Their ventral fins thrummed. They regarded Billy with see-through eyes. A suddenness came, a quick thing, viper-mouth agape, and the little fish were gone. The curtains gently eddied.

Lights came on in the dark room. The lights were moving. They came up on a grotto. A room full of sea. A living room, sofa, chairs, pictures on the walls, a television, lamps and tables, sunk in deep green water, investigated by fish and weeds. Those lights were the pearl tint of bioluminescent animals.

A living room, furnishings interrupted with coral, grazed on by sea cucumbers. The tassels of a lampshade moved with current, and an anemone waved its feathery stingers in filigree echo. Fish moved throughout, ghost-lit by themselves and their neighbours. Fingernail-sized things, arm-thick eels. By a sunken hi-fi riveted with barnacles, a fist-sized light moved like a long-armed metronome. The tick-tock light made Billy stare.

“Have you got it?” he said to Simon, with effort. “What you need?”

“I’ll have to move the water out, just before, in the right shape,” Simon murmured. He stared and itemised to himself according to the strange techniques he had perfected.

“Done,” he said. A moray glided from some dark, coiled around the sofa leg, tugged it into a new position, to make space for what was coming. “Okay,” Simon said. He closed his eyes, and Billy heard in the air around them the muttering of Simon’s last imbecilic vengeful ghost.

“He knows what I’m doing,” Simon said. “He thinks I’m going myself. He’s trying to stop me murdering me again.” He even smiled.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

THERE WAS THE NOISE OF PAPER. “THEY’RE HERE!” FITCH LEANED from the lorry. “Grisamentum! He’s coming!”

“Are you ready?” Billy said.

“They’re coming,” shouted Fitch. The air of the street was filling with papers. They investigated front gardens. They came at the lorry, staring with ink-blot eyes.

“Whatever the bloody hell you are going to do I suggest you do it,” Collingswood said.

Simon went to the kraken’s tank and put his hands on it. He closed his eyes. Headlights moved across the face of houses. There was the familiar prickling sound, the sequin glimmer. It faded up and down, and the tank was no longer there.

THERE WAS A RUMBLING FROM THE HOUSE. A BURP OF WATER SPILLED from the letter slot. With no tank to brace him, Simon fell to his knees.

“Big,” he muttered. He looked up and smiled. His ghost howled.

The kraken was in the embassy of the sea. Billy and Simon and Saira stared at each other.

“Did we…?” said Saira.

“It’s done,” said Billy.

“Congratufuckinglations,” Collingswood said. “Now will you please get in sodding prison?”

“It’s safe,” Billy said. The paper raged and raged around them. Cars came closer and stopped. Papers began to batter them angrily, pelleting into missiles. Paul shifted his chest out, as if he, not the picture he bore, were the ink’s enemy. Billy heard a voice he recognised. Byrne shouting “Goddammit!” from somewhere, as she approached and saw the empty lorry. “Time to go,” he said.

Collingswood saw the motorcade of Grisamentum’s last troops. She appeared to consider her options. The other officer ran. “You cheeky little fucker,” she shouted at his back as he went. She jabbed the air in his direction, and his legs tangled and he went down hard enough to break his nose, but she turned away as he scrambled back to his feet and continued running. She let him go.

“You’re welcome to try to arrest Griz if you want, Collingswood,” Billy said. “Fancy that?”

“I do fancy that yeah, actually, blood.” Not that she was moving.

Saira hesitated. Simon was helping Fitch into the lorry. “Let’s get out of here,” Billy said. Marge and Paul scrambled in too, the vanguard of the papers harassing Paul in confused habitual animosity, thinking he was his adornment. Billy, Saira and even Collingswood wordlessly moved toward the lorry, but they had left it too late. Byrne was close, and she was directing two cars of gunfarmers toward the big vehicle.

“Shit,” said Saira, judging the distance. She caught Billy’s eye a moment. He nodded minutely and she indicated the lorry to go. It lurched from the kerb, its rear door flapping, a bewildered Londonmancer and Marge still leaning from its back, Marge shouting in protest as they left the others behind. But they were gone, around a corner, gone. Simon wailed, held out his hands like a baby. Billy grabbed him and hauled him away.

Saira kneaded the wall beside them and gave it a mossy weathered gateway. They got in out of sight. They hunkered by the wall of the sea-house and crept as Byrne and Grisamentum’s crew came near, ready to scatter into the streets the moment angry papers careened around them.

“They must be going spare,” Billy said.

“Fine bunch of mates you have,” Collingswood said.

“They left without us,” Simon said, loudly enough that Billy pinched his mouth shut.

“They didn’t have any choice,” Saira said. “I told them to. I’ll find them…”

They heard a loud slam. The wall faintly shook.

“What the hell?” Saira said. She and Billy stared at each other. The noise came again. “Oh my God,” Saira said. “He couldn’t be so stupid… The sea?”

Would he? They crept to the corner and looked.

The land could never defeat the sea. As Canute had illustrated for his fawning courtiers, tides are implacable. Even Tattoo, bluster notwithstanding, had known to duck that confrontation. It was just an inevitable rule.

But rules were what Grisamentum wanted to rewrite.

Scratch out the writing on the wall, rewrite the rules, rework the blueprint, using the inks stored in the ocean itself. Would he stop this now? All he needed was tonight.

This was why when Billy peered around the edge of brick, he saw the papers corkscrewing in impatience, he saw Byrne carrying a big bottle of her boss protectively, he saw gunfarmers on guard, and he saw their colleagues kicking and kicking like thugs and police at the front door.

The redoubt of the ocean in residence in London, this house was encircled in thalassic knacks. But part of its defence was the certainty that it would never be needed, and now the attack was backed by the unremitting focused hex attention of Grisamentum. Byrne squirted him with a turkey baster into the lock mechanism, onto the hinges. This close to his becoming, he was cavalier with the stuff of his substance. He wrote weakening spells on the innards of the keyhole. One more onslaught of boots.

“No no,” said Billy, trying very much to think of something, to gather a plan, but a gunfarmer stepped up and slammed his boot at the door, and it flew open. It flew open and threw the man aside, and with it came an onrush piston of water, a giant brine fist.

SEAWATER EXPLODED INTO THE SCRUBBY FRONT GARDEN, SKITTLING gathered attackers. From the top of the house down, the windows imploded. Sea slicked into the road, bringing its inhabitants. Weeds piled. Fauna was dragged into the street, coming dying to rest. Jellies, hagfish, fat deepwater creatures twitching and doleful between the bare trees. A person-sized blind shark gaped pale jaws, hopelessly biting at a car. In other houses, people began to scream.

Gunfarmers picked themselves up. They kicked fish from their feet, pulled wracks and weeds from their sodden suits. Byrne and the ink went in.

“What do we do? What do we do?” Simon said. “What do we do?” He was collapsed onto his knees.

“Get it out of there,” Billy said. “Send it anywhere.” Simon closed his eyes.

“I can’t, I… They’ve moved it. My bearings are screwed, I can’t get a lock on.”

“Your lot’ll be here soon, won’t they?” Saira said to Collingswood.

“And what the fuck are they supposed to do?” Collingswood said urgently.

“What do we do?” Saira said.

With the library he had imbibed, Grisamentum knew kraken physiology. He could have Byrne undeath-magic it just back enough to life to coax its flesh into a fear reaction, for its sepia cloud. That was all, Billy thought, he needed to do.

“Saira,” Billy said, calm. “Come with me.”

“Baron,” Collingswood was saying into her phone. “Baron, bring everyone.” She gesticulated angrily-wait a minute-but did nothing to stop Billy as he climbed the rear of the house, helping Saira after him. Billy looked down into the garden littered with building rubble and rubbish.

“Get us in,” he said to Saira.

She pushed at the rear wall, moulding the bricks, pressing them into flatness and transparency, making a window. Faded to glass clarity they could see through a film of undersea slime into a small bathroom. Saira opened the window she had made. She shivered with more than cold; she was shaking violently. She made as if she would crawl in and hesitated.

“Fuck’s sake,” said Collingswood below them, and snapped her phone shut. She shook her head as if at a friend’s unfunny joke. She pushed her hands apart and rose, not in a leap but an abrupt dainty dangling, up through the impossible twelve feet or more to land on the ledge by Saira and Billy.

Billy and Saira stared at her. “You,” she said to Saira, “wuss-girl, get down there and hold wuss-boy’s hand. You,” she said to Billy, “get in there and tell me what’s what.”

IT WAS FREEZING WITHIN. THE STINK WAS ASTONISHING, FISH AND rot.

They stood in a typical London-house bathroom: stubby bath with shower, sink and toilet, a tiny cupboard. The surfaces were white tiled under layers of grey silt, green growth, sponges and anemones reduced to lumps in the sudden air. The floor was inch-deep in water full of organisms, some still slightly alive. By the door was a half-grown sunfish-a huge, ridiculous thing-dead and sad. The bathtub brimmed with a panicking crowd of fish. Something splashed in the toilet bowl. The infiltrators held their hands to their faces.

Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps. Creatures from the top floors where the pressure was gentle and skylights illuminated the water.

Shouted orders were audible. Billy set out through the flopping drowning. He steadied himself on banisters interwoven with kelp.

In the kitchen there was a sea-softened door into the living room. The floor was littered with broken crockery. In the sink an octopus floundered. Billy watched it but felt no kinship. He could hear muffled noises from the next room.

“There’s quite a bloody few of them,” Collingswood said.

“We have to get in there,” Billy whispered. They stared at each other. “We have to.” She kissed her teeth.

“Give me a second, Billy,” she said. “Alright? You understand?”

“What are you…?” He started to say. She raised an eyebrow. He nodded, readied the pistol he had taken from Dane.

“If I’ve got all this right… Spill him,” she said. “Alright, Billy? Don’t be a loser all your life.” She pursed her lip and threw a sign with her fingers, something from a music video. “East side,” she said.

She stepped back into the corridor toward the living room’s main door. He heard her do something, some knack, some noise, some unnatural percussion. He heard the door open, a commotion, “Keep them out!” in Byrne’s voice, the stamp of footsteps toward her ingress and out of the door. Billy kicked open the other rotting entrance, his weapon raised.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

INTO THE GROTTO, THE SEA’S FRONT ROOM. BILLY WAS ABSOLUTELY calm.

He emerged with a burst of wall-stuff. There were the coralline constructions, the brine-stained everything, big fish lying still. In a corner was a huge sagging body, something he could not work out, though he saw eyes see him from a meat heap. The gunfarmers had left the room to hunt Saira.

There was the kraken in its tank, now emptied of all but a thin layer of preserver. There was Byrne, some bad-magic book under her arm, the bottle of Grisamentum in her hand. A huge syringe jutted from the kraken’s skin. Byrne was tickling, stimulating the dead animal in some obscene-looking way.

The kraken was moving.

Its empty eye-holes twitched. The last, brine-dilute Formalin swilled as the animal turned. Its limbs stretched and untwined, too weak still to thrash, its skin still scabrous and unrejuvenated, but the kraken was alive, or not-dead. It was zombie. Undead.

In panic at the sudden end of its death, it was spurting dark black-brown-grey ink. It spattered against the inside of its tank, and pooled in that last liquid in which the kraken lay.

Billy saw Byrne go for the syringe. He saw her move. He fired. The container of Grisamentum exploded.

BYRNE SCREAMED AS GLASS, INK AND BLOOD FROM HER LACERATED hand erupted across her front, fell through her fingers. Ink spattered across the floor, dissipated in the currents of the emptying house. A gunfarmer reentered and stared at Byrne and the ink-slick down her front. Billy roared a triumphant haaa! and stepped back through into the kitchen.

“Collingswood!” he shouted.

“What?” he heard. Billy glanced through the doorway and saw the kraken move.

“You got him?” Collingswood shouted.

“I did,” Billy gasped in delight. “I spilt him, he’s-”

Byrne was whispering into the tank. She was dripping, squeezing the ink that drenched her top into the kraken’s ink.

“Shit,” said Billy. He stared. “How much…”

The world answered him.

How much of Grisamentum does he need to merge with the kraken ink? To take it into him?

The world showed him: not much.

PLENTY OF GRISAMENTUM WAS RAGING IN WORDLESS LIQUIDITY AS the slosh of footprints dispersed him. But wrung out by his vizier was a small glassful of him, bloated with Krakenist knowledge from his hungry learning, squeezed into the tank. He swilled and bonded. He mixed with the kraken’s ink, ink also, the two inks one new ink, and changed.

The liquid in the tank began to bubble. The zombie squid flopped and wriggled and butted up against the Perspex. Its ink effervesced.

Billy fired at the tank, urgently. He punctured it right through, breaking off sections, and his bullets hit the dense body of the kraken. The liquid within did not flow from the holes. It held its tank-shape against gravity. A presence gathered into swirl-self out of the conjoined inks, burned man and kraken-writ. A voice made of bubbling laughed.

The dark liquid rose. A pillar, a man-shape that laughed and pointed. That raised both arms.

And started to rewrite rules.

So the wall that hid Billy disappeared. It did not fall down, did not evaporate, did not crumble but instead simply had not been there, was un. The kitchen was all part of the living room now, sinkless and cutleryless, full of lounges and bookshelves, wet with remnant sea.

The pistol in Billy’s hand was gone. Because Grisamentum wrote that there were no guns in that room. “Oh Jesus,” Billy managed to say, and the ink of Grisamentum wrote no across his consciousness. Not even God: he was the very rules God wrote. The gunfarmers stumbled. Byrne was laughing, was rising into the air, tugged by the boss she loved.

Billy felt something very dangerous and forlorn settle, the closing of something open across everything, as history began to flex at someone else’s will. He felt something get ready to rewrite the sky.

The ink gathered into a globe, hovering above the tank. Threads from it took word-shape and changed things. Writs in the air.

The kraken looked at Billy with its missing eyes. It moved. Spasmed. Not afraid, he saw, not in pain. Bottling it up. Bottling it up. Where was his angel? Where his glass-container hero?

This is a fiasco. He might almost have laughed at that strange formulation. It was the catastrophe, the disaster, the, the word was weirdly tenacious in his head, fiasco.

He opened his eyes. That word meant bottle.

It’s all metaphor, Billy remembered. It’s persuasion.

“It’s not a kraken,” he said. The ink-god did not hear him until he said it again, and all the attention in the world was, amused, upon him. “It’s not a kraken and it’s not a squid,” Billy said. The eyeless thing in the tank held his gaze.

“Kraken’s a kraken,” Billy said. “Nothing to do with us. That? That’s a specimen. I know. I made it. That’s ours.”

A troubled look went across Byrne’s face as she spun on her axis. Bottle magic, Billy thought. The ink shuddered.

“Thing is,” Billy said, in abrupt adrenalized bursts, “thing is the Krakenists thought I was a prophet of krakens because of what I’d done-but I never was. What I am-” Even if by mistake; even if a misunderstanding, a joke gone wrong; even if a will-this-do; how are any messiahs chosen? “What I am is a bottle prophet.” An accidental power of glass and memory. “So I know what that is.”

There was a sink by Billy again, and the wall was coming back, a few inches of it. The bottled kraken wheezed from its siphon. The wall grew.

“It’s not an animal or a god,” Billy said. “It didn’t exist until I curated it. That’s my specimen.”

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

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

Billy was standing.

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

“It’s ours,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Seventy-Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No Vardy?” Billy said.

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

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

“Enough of your shit, Kath,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell?” Billy whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let me go,” Billy said.

“Baron, wait,” Collingswood said.

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

“Boss,” said Collingswood. “Give them a second.”

“What makes everything stop?” Saira said. “Fire, the squid, the…”

Billy stared, and thought, and remembered. Things he had heard and seen, moments, from weeks and weeks before.

“You end to start again,” he said. “From the beginning. So you burn backward. This isn’t an end… This is a rebooting.”

“Get out,” Baron said. “Shift, Harrow.”

“How?” said Saira to Billy.

“Burn out whatever set us in the wrong direction. If you want to run a different program. Oh my God, this was never about the poor squid… it was a bystander. We started this. You did. Fitch kept saying it got closer, the harder you lot tried to protect it. You brought it to attention.” There was a straining sound. Everyone looked up. That was the sky stretching, ready to break into flames.

“How far to the Darwin Centre?” Billy said. “How far to the museum?”

“Four, five miles,” Collingswood said.

“Get out,” Baron, uselessly, said.

“It’s too far… Baron, can you send a message to… You need to get someone…”

“Shut up or I will pepper-spray you,” Baron said. “I’m sick of this.”

“Boss, shut up,” Collingswood said. She shook her head. Pointed, and Baron blinked in outrage, suddenly unable to speak. “What you saying, Harrow?”

Something new had walked when the Londonmancers had learnt of Grisamentum’s plan, when Al Adler had indulged the traditions and respect his boss had taught him and gone for a supposedly useless reading. The new thing had grown stronger into itself when the kraken was taken and the alternatives narrowed. But it was after that that the memory angels had gone for it, that its sentience, its meta-selfhood, had become great enough.

“Why’s the angel of memory not here?” Billy said. “It’s supposed to be my guardian angel, right? It wants to protect me, right, and to beat this bloody prophecy, right? So why isn’t it here? What’s it got to do that’s more important?”

Billy knew exactly where he had been when that last phase had begun, and what he had been showing to whom. He knew what was the concatenate development that had made the sea, that soup of life, what it was, and why it had sensed it was under threat. He knew what was happening, and why, and at whose hand, and he could not get anyone else where they needed to be, and he could not explain fast enough.

He needed to be at the Darwin Centre, now. “Oh, God,” he breathed, and slumped, then stood up straight. The anglerfish had stopped moving. Billy silently said good-bye to everything.

“Simon,” he said. “Simon,” he ordered. “You know the bearings of the Darwin Centre. The heart of it. Get me there, now. Now.”

Simon hesitated. Baron strained and failed to speak. “But you know what that means. That’s how I…”

“Put. Me. There.” Simon would not disobey that voice. Billy tried quickly to catch everyone’s eye. Saira half understanding, stricken. Simon, miserable at committing murder again. Baron actually shouting, quite unheard. Collingswood nodded at him, like a soldier saying good-bye.

There was the shimmered static sound, a muffled cry as Billy made a noise, the last thing he would ever do, as light enveloped him from the inside, faded out and he was gone, and Baron was tugging at nothing.

Chapter Eighty

AND THE SMELL OF THE SEA (SEEMED TO) EBB, SUDDENLY replaced with chemical. Light shimmied in front of Billy’s eyes, different from how it had (not) been in his eyes a moment before. He knew he remembered nothing, that these were rather images he was born with. But he would not think about that now.

He was inside of the tank room, in the Darwin Centre. Across from him, beyond two rows of steel tanks, was Vardy. Who turned.

Billy had time to see that the work surface in front of Vardy was littered with vials, tubes and beakers, liquids bubbling, electric cells. He had time to see that Vardy was aiming a pistol at him, and he dropped. The bullet went above him, bursting a thigh-high bottle of long-preserved monkeys. They slumped as reeking preservative sprayed. Billy strained against the handcuffs that still (so to speak) constrained him. He stayed below the level of the steel and crawled. Another shot. Glass and Formalin littered the floor ahead of him, and an eviscerated dolphin baby flopped in his path.

“Billy,” said Vardy, his voice grim, terse, as ever, just the same. It could be a statement, a greeting, a curse. When Billy tried to creep closer another bullet ruined another specimen. “I’ll kill you,” said Vardy. “The angel of memory couldn’t stop me, you’re certainly not going to.”

There was a jabbering, a tiny high-pitched mouthing-off. Through cracks between furniture, Billy saw on the side a tiny raging figure. It was the mnemophylax-a bottle-of-Formalin body, bone arms and claws, a skull head, snapping like a guard dog. It was under a bell jar. Vardy had not even bothered to kill it. It had come and gone so many times, had emerged and been dissipated so often, it was tiny. A finger-sized glass tube that might have been used to contain one insect, and its limbs must have been, what, mouse legs? The skull that topped it was from some pygmy marmoset or something. It was a joke, a little animate failure like a cartoon.

“What did you do with the pyro?” Billy called.

Vardy said. “Cole’s right as rain. Did exactly as I asked-wouldn’t you, if you had it patiently explained that your daughter was in my protective custody?”

“So you got what you needed. Time-fire.”

“Between the two of them, I did.” Vardy fired again and ruined an eighty-year-old dwarf crocodile. “Been trying versions out and I think we’re good. Stay where you are, Billy, I can hear every move you make.”

“Kata…”

“Katachronophlogiston. Shut up, Billy. It’ll be finished soon.”

Billy huddled. It was him who had given Vardy the idea. The prophecy had given rise to itself. It had snared him and Dane and his friends because they had paid it attention like it was a disease, a pathological machine. He cursed it without sound. That was what the angel of memory had been fighting, that certitude, struggling for the fact of itself. So long as it fated, fate didn’t care what it fated. There was a clink as the phylax jumped up and down and banged its tiny skull head on the underside of the jar that jailed it.

The noise of porting came again. The shadows and reflections shifted. The Architeuthis in its tank had returned to the place from where it had been stolen. Billy stared at it. Again, the eyeless thing seemed to try to look at him. It wriggled its coiling zombie arms. What the fuck? Billy thought.

“You brought it to life?” Vardy said. “Whatever for?”

“Vardy, please don’t,” Billy said. “This won’t work, this’ll never work. It’s over, Vardy, and your old god lost.”

“It may not,” Vardy said. There was the noise of combustion from his workstation. “Work. It may not. But it may. You’re right-he did lose, my god, and I cannot forgive the cowardly bastard for that. Nothing bloody ventured, say I.”

“You really think they’re that powerful? That symbolic?” Billy crept on.

“It’s all a matter of persuasion, as perhaps by now you know. It’s all a matter of making an argument. That’s why I wasn’t too bothered by Griz. Is that where you’ve been, with him? With a category error like that in his plan…” He shook his head. Billy wondered how long ago Vardy had insighted what Grisamentum had in mind, and how. “Now, these things were the start of it. They’re where the argument started.”

Billy crept close to the real targets of the time-fire, the real subject of the predatory prophecy. Not and never the squid, which had only ever been a bystander, caught up by proximity. Those other occupants of the room, in their nondescript cabinet, like any other specimen, exemplary and paradigmatic. The preserved little animals of Darwin’s Beagle voyage.

THIS WAS A FIERY REBOOTING. UPLOADING NEW WORLDWARE.

He had remembered Vardy’s melancholy, the rage in him, and what Collingswood had once said. She was right. Vardy’s tragedy was that his faith had been defeated by the evidence, and he could not stop missing that faith. He was not a creationist, not any longer, not for years. And that was unbearable to him. He could only wish that his erstwhile wrongness had been right.

Vardy did not want to eradicate the idea of evolution: he wanted to rewind the fact of it. And with evolution-that key, that wedge, that wellspring-would all those other things follow, the drably vulgar contingent weak godlessness that had absolutely nothing going for it at all except, infuriatingly, its truth.

And he was persuaded, and was trying to persuade the city and history, that it was in these contemplated specimens, these fading animals in their antique preserve, that evolution had come to be. What would evolution be if humans had not noticed it? Nothing. Not even a detail. In seeing it, Darwin had made it be, and always have been. These Beagle things were bloated.

Vardy would burn them into un-having-been-ness, unwind the threads that Darwin had woven, eradicate the facts. This was Vardy’s strategy to help his own unborn god, the stern and loving literalist god he had read in texts. He could not make it win-the battle was lost-but he might make it have won. Burn evolution until it never was and the rebooted universe and the people in it might be, instead, created, as it and they should have been.

It only happened that night because Billy and his comrades had made it that night, had provoked the end-war, and this chaos and crisis. So Vardy had known when he had to act.

“It won’t work,” Billy said again, but he could feel the strain in time and the sky, and it seemed very much as if it would work. The bloody universe was plastic. Vardy held a Molotov cocktail.

“Look,” said Vardy. “Bottle magic.” Filled with the phlogiston he had coerced Cole to make, with his daughter’s untutored help, at threat of his daughter’s life. A combusting tachyon flame. It roared with inrushing sound, illumined Vardy’s face.

He brought it closer, and its glow lit the pickled frogs within a jar. They shifted. They shrank in the time-blistering warmth, tugged their limbs into their trunks. They became more paltry, ungainly long-tailed legless tadpoles. He held the flame so it licked the glass of their jar, and after a second of warming it burst into sand and sent the tadpoles spraying. They reversed and undid their having been and shrank as they fell, and never were, and nothing hit the floor.

Vardy turned to the shelf of Darwin’s specimens and raised his arm.

Billy struggled to his feet. He could think only, Not like this. He would try to spill the fire. Perhaps it would reverse the life cycle of the heavy-duty floor, rubbers separating, the chemicals racing back to elemental forms. But his hands were behind him and he was far too far away.

“No!” Billy wheezed, bleeding.

The shadows shed by fire danced over labels handwritten by Charles Darwin. Billy sprawled flat like a mudfish. With a bark of religious joy, Vardy threw the time-flaming missile.

IT FLEW AND TURNED AS IT FLEW. BILLY’S ARMS WERE TRAPPED. BUT there were other arms aplenty in that room.

The undead specimen Architeuthis shot out its long hunting limbs all the way across the room, from far away. A last predation. It caught the bottle. Took it from the air.

Vardy stared. Vardy screamed in rage.

The time-fire was touching the Architeuthis’s skin, and was burning. The zombie squid’s second hunting arm whipped Formalin-heavy up, around Vardy’s waist with a thwack. It coiled him in. It whipped the bottle toward its mouth. Vardy howled as its shorter arms spread to receive him.

Vardy screamed. The time-fire was roaring, and spreading. The squid was shrinking. Vardy’s arms and legs were shortening.

The squid looked at Billy. He could never put into precise words what it was in that gaze, those sudden eyes, what the bottled specimen communicated to him, but it was a fellowship. Not servility. It did not obey. But it did what it did deliberately, offered it up and looked at him in good-bye.

The time-fire shrank it further, cleared the deadness from its skin, made it smooth. A selfless selfishness. Without evolution, what would it and its siblings be? The deep gods were not this thing’s siblings: it let itself be taken for the sake not of kraken but of the exemplae, all these specimens around them, of all shapes, these bottled science gods.

The tank was roaring with fire. The flesh was burning younger. There was a last flurry of combat. Silhouetted in the glow, Billy saw a baby screaming adult fury at the little arm-length squid that encoiled it. Both were on fire. Then both, still wrestling, were hot embryos, that intertwined and stilled in grotesque protoplasmic détente, and were burning gone.

The sides of the tank fell in, into smouldering crystals of ore and chemical and then atoms before they could even shatter.

Chapter Eighty-One

THE LAST OF THE BURNING EBBED AWAY. THE LIGHT OF FIRE WAS gone. Only the glow of fluorescent bulbs.

Something a little rucked

singed and melted

and

There was an inrush growth rejig. An imperfect healing but healing. A huge, epochal sealing. London reskinned. Fire scorched and then went out.

And there was Billy in the new skin, there in time. There was a Billy. Billy breathing out from something, and he breathed in, shook with release. He was in a room.

DARWIN’S SPECIMENS WERE SAFE. BILLY TOUCHED THEM, ONE BY one, stretching out his tethered hands behind him. He ran his fingers along the steel surface where no Architeuthis had ever been. The tiny mnemophylax watched from under its bell jar. Its bone head tracked his movements.

Nothing had gone. Billy thought that very exactly.

Billy knew with a strange precision that in all his recent adventures, the specificities of which were slightly vague, no giant cryptid animal had ever been here in this room. The angel of memory rolled on its tiny base and shook its skull head. Billy laughed and was not sure why. There was a pyromancer who was alive and waiting for his daughter, because there was no one nor had there ever been who could have blackmailed him with her. Time felt a little raw. The threat that Billy had defeated in this room, and it had been baleful, had neither involved anyone, nor existed. He laughed.

The sky was different. Billy could feel it beyond the roof. Different from how it had not been. The strain was gone. The end of the world, a true finish, was only one very unlikely possibility among many.

There were details missing. Billy was canny enough by now, after everything, to know what that might mean. There was a burn scar in history. There was still a smell of burning. Billy was definitely descended from simians and ultimately from fish in the sea.

He met the gaze of the mnemophylax across the room, eye socket to eye. Though it had no face to crease he would have said it smiled back. It wriggled and wrote with its tiny fingers on the inside of its glass-he could not tell what. It opened and closed its mouth. It was memory. It shook its head. It put its hair’s-breadth fingerbone to its nonexistent lips. Its tiny bones fell, its skull settled into nothing, it became a test tube and some specimen rubbish.

Billy sat on the steel where no great mollusc had been. He sat as if he were a specimen. He wondered what searing thing had not been overcome. He waited for whatever would happen, whoever would find him.

It was Baron and Collingswood who came, at last, into the room. They were not missing any colleague, Billy thought, carefully. They’d never had a third in their crew, though they stood often a little close together, a little close to a wall, as if they would be framed with another presence. They recalled enough, and they knew that something had happened, had finished.

Billy stood and waved with his handcuffed arms. The cops picked over the ruins of glass, spilt preservative, scattered specimen remains, scattered by no one.

“Billy,” Baron said.

“It’s okay now, I think,” Billy said. They stared at each other a while. “Where’s Simon?”

“He went,” Collingswood said.

Baron and Collingswood muttered together. “Fuck this,” Collingswood said. She undid Billy’s locks.

“What’s the crime?” Baron said to Billy. “You nearly came to work for me. What animal?” he said. “There’s never been one here.” He jerked his thumb at the door. “Piss off,” he said, not unfriendly.

Billy smiled slowly. “I wouldn’t have been-,” he started to say. Collingswood interrupted.

“Please,” she said. “Please just sod off. You were offered a job a while back and you said no.”

“Whatever the circumstances,” Baron said.

“We may be a man down,” Collingswood said, “but we were always a man down.” She sniffed. Looked at him thoughtfully. “Burns don’t heal pretty,” she said. “Always a little melty-looking scar. You can’t fuss about that sort of shit, Billy.”

Billy held out his hand. Baron raised an eyebrow and shook it. Billy turned and looked at Collingswood, standing at the edge of the room. She waved at him.

“Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy,” she said. She smiled and winked at him. “You and me, eh? What didn’t we do?” She blew him a quick kiss. “See you around,” she said. “Till next apocalypse, eh. I know your bloody type, Billy. Be seeing you.” She nodded farewell. He did not disobey.

BILLY WALKED THE CORRIDORS, ROUTES HE KNEW INTIMATELY, THAT he had not walked for weeks. He mooched. He left the Darwin Centre and reentered a night still frenetic with fights, thefts and heretic prophecies, but increasingly, epically sheepish, uncertain of its own anxieties, unsure as to why it felt like a final night, when clearly it was not and never had been.

In the tank room, Baron was scribbling in his notebook.

“Right,” he said. “Honest to bloody blimey I’ve got no idea how we’re going to write this up,” he said. “Shall we, Collingswood?” He spoke briskly and did not meet her eye.

She paused before she answered him.

“I’m putting in for a transfer,” she said. She met his shocked eyes. “Time there was another FSRC cell, ‘boss. Boss.’” She air-quoted. “I’m going for promotion.” Collingswood smiled.