Kraken

Chapter Forty

BILLY STARED AT SIMON’S ANGRY DEAD SELVES. DID SIMON FEEL the guilt they laid on him, the culpability for countless unintentional suicides? What an original sin.

At last Wati returned into a statuette of an Argelian dancer. “Open the door,” he said. Outside, a harassed-looking woman waited carrying a coiling ram’s horn.

“Dane,” she said, entered. “God almighty, what’s been going on here?”

“Mo’s the best I know,” Wati said. “And no one knows her…”

“Are you an exorcist?” Billy said. The woman rolled her eyes.

“She’s a rabbi, you moron,” said Wati. “Simon couldn’t give a shit one way or the other.”

“I’ve seen legion possession before,” Mo said. “But never… God almighty they’re all him.” She walked through the ghost corona and murmured to Simon gently. “I can try something,” she said. “But I’ve got to get him back to the temple.” She shook the shofar. “This won’t cut it.”

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children. Wati was on watch, circling through figures a mile around. Dane, Billy and Mo watched the moaned malice of Simon’s haunters.

“We have to go,” Wati said suddenly from a foot-high McCoy.

“Too early,” Dane said. “It’s not even midnight…”

“Now,” Wati said. “They’re coming.”

“Who do you…?”

“Christ, Dane! Move! Goss and fucking Subby!”

And everyone moved.

“TATTOO’S THOUGHT LIKE US,” WATI SAID AS THEY GRABBED THEIR stuff and hauled poor Simon in his ghost-cloud. “He’s tracked Simon down. His knuckleheads are coming. And Goss and Subby are with them.

“Some are in the main stairs. The rest are close. Goss and Subby are close.”

“Any other way out?” Dane said. Wati was gone, back.

“If there is there’s no statues by it.”

“Must be one at the back,” Billy said. “A fire escape.”

“Take a figure,” Wati said. “I’m going to get Goss and Subby off you.”

“Wait,” Dane said, but Wati was gone. Billy grabbed the phaser, the auction catalogue, a plastic Kirk. There was no one in the corridor. Dane hustled them round corners. Mo and Billy dragged Simon in a blanket that inadequately hid his tormentors. They heard the lift arriving. Dane raised his speargun and motioned Billy and Mo away.

“Down,” he said, pointing at the fire escape. “Mo, don’t let them see you. Billy, don’t let them see her.” He ran toward the lift.

“HUFF HUFF HUFF, EH SUBBY?”

Goss was jogging. Not very intensely, and with an exaggerated comic wobble of the head. Behind him came Subby with the same motion, unselfconsciously.

“The rest of the bears are just over the stream,” Goss said. “Once we cross the magic bridge we can help ourselves to all the honey. Huff huff huff.” There were two or three more turns between him and the base of the tower. Goss looked the length of the dark street. At a junction with a cul-de-sac were a band of battered dustbins. A moment of hard wind sent a full bin-bag falling, sent the bins wobbling, jostling among themselves, as if they were trying to shift away from Goss’s attention.

“Remember when Darling Bear and Sugar Bear came home with the Princess of Flower Picnics?” Goss said. He clenched and unclenched his fingers. He smiled, pulling back his lips from his teeth carefully and completely and biting the air. Subby stared at him.

“Billy, shift.”

At those faint words Goss stopped.

“Shut it, Dane.”

Whispered London voices. They were just off the street, in one of the darknesses that abutted it.

“He’s nearby,” said a voice. And from farther away came an answer, Shhh.

“Subby Subby Subby,” whispered Goss. “Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we’re silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.”

He put his finger to his lips and creep-creeped out of the main road into the alley where the voices were. Subby followed him in the same tippy-toe, into the shadow where someone was muttering.

THE LIFT DOORS OPENED, AND BILLY, LOOKING BACK FROM THE FIRE escape, saw three dark-dressed figures in motorcycle helmets. Dane had his weapon up. There was a percussion.

“Go,” said Wati-Kirk from Billy’s pocket, and “Go,” said Dane without looking back. Billy and Mo dragged Simon down the stairs.

“What about Dane?” Billy kept saying. But Wati was gone again.

It was many floors down. Adrenalin was all that stopped Mo and Billy collapsing under Simon’s weight. They heard scuffles, muffled by walls, above them. Billy felt a horrid crawl of ghosts on his skin as Simon’s tormentors swept through him. When at last they reached the ground floor Billy was gasping, almost retching.

“Don’t fucking stand there,” said the little Kirk in his pocket. “Move.” A random man at his front door stared at the ghosts of Simon in bewilderment so great he was not even scared. Billy and Mo barrelled toward the elevator shaft and the front door beyond it, but it opened and there were two of Tattoo’s men. Grey cam gear, dark-visored helmets, reaching for weapons.

Mo cried out and threw up her hands. Billy stood in front of her and fired the phaser.

He didn’t panic. He had time to reflect for an instant on how calm he was, that he was raising the weapon and pressing the firing stud.

There was no recoil. There was that kitsch sound, that line of light, punching into the chest of the man at the front and flaring in a bruise of light across him as he flew back. The second man was running at Billy in expert zigzag, and Billy shot several times and missed, scorching the walls.

Mo was screaming. Billy threw out his hand. The man stopped hard as if he had run into something. He bounced against nothing visible. The man butted the nothing with his helmet, with an audible percussion.

Billy did not hear the lift arrive or its doors open. He only saw Dane step out behind the Tattoo’s man and swing his empty speargun hard at that featureless motorcycle helmet, in a curve like a batsman’s. The man went down, his pistol skittering away. His helmet flew off.

His head was a head-sized fist. It clenched and unclenched.

It opened. Its huge palm was face-forward. As the man rose it clenched again. Dane punched him hard on the back of his hand-head. The attacker fell again.

“Come on,” Dane said.

They ran a twisting route to Mo’s car, and they helped her lay the shivering ghost-delirious Simon inside. Tribble whickered. “I can’t promise.”

“See what you can do,” Dane said. “We’ll find you. Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “And they don’t know me. Even if…” She looked uncertain. There had been no eyes.

“Go, then. Go.” Dane patted the roof of her car as if releasing it. When she had gone he felt the handles of car doors near them until he found by finger-intuition one he liked, and had it open.

“What are they?” Billy said. “Those men?”

“The knuckleheads?” Dane started the car. There were screams behind them. “Takes a certain sort.” He was exhilarated. “There are advantages. You’ve got to like fighting. You should see them naked. Well, you shouldn’t.”

“How do they see?” They sped into night. Dane glanced at Billy. Grinned and jiggled in his seat and shook his head.

“God, Billy,” he said. “The way your mind works.”

“Right.” It was Wati, back in the Kirk again. “Put some distance between us and Goss and Subby.”

“You genius,” Dane said. “What did you do?”

“Just helps to be able to do voices. I’ll be one second.”

Dane accelerated. He waggled the speargun with his left hand. “This is shit,” he said. “I’ve never had to… We’re going to need more than this. It was crap. I need a new weapon.”

GOSS STOOD STILL AS A BONE. HE LISTENED.

“This is a blind, you see, Subby,” he said. “I’m wondering where Sparklehorse went.”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” said a voice from the crude figure on the roof’s vertex. “You got had, is what, you psychopath motherfucker.” That came from a comedy-frog-shaped eraser discarded by the kerb.

And from a windowbox of long-dead plants, the voice of a little plastic diver: “Good night.”

“Well,” said Goss, in the silence after Wati left. “Well, Princess Subby. Would you look at that? What a fiddly tra la.”

THEY WERE OVER THE RIVER. WITH WATER BETWEEN THEM AND that awful fight ground, Dane guided the car to a silent space behind lockups, mean garages at the bottom of a tower. He turned off the engine and they sat in the dark. Billy felt his heart slow, his muscles relax one by one.

“This is why we should go in with him,” Dane said. “We can’t take that sort of shit on our own.”

Billy nodded slowly. The nod mutated until it was a shake of the head. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Billy said.

He closed his eyes and tried to think. He looked into the black behind his own eyes as if it was the black of the sea. He tried to reach down into it, for some deep intuition. He could reach, and feel, nothing. He sighed. He drummed his fingers on the window in frustration. The touch of the glass cooled his fingertips. Not an idea, but a focus, a sense of where to look. He opened his eyes.

“The guy,” he said. “In the bottle, the guy I found. Where’s he in all this?”

“I don’t know,” Dane said. “That’s the problem, we don’t know who he is.”

“Uh…” said Wati. “That ain’t true.”

“What?” Dane said to the tiny figure.

“I told you, when that officer-thing grabbed me, it sort of bled. Bits of info and stuff that went into it. I think I remember feeling… I knew who…” Wati probed his sore spots for information. “Adler,” he said. “That was his name, the geezer in the bottle.”

“Adler?” Dane said. “Al Adler?”

“Who is he?” Billy said. “Was he? A friend?”

Dane’s face went through a run of feelings. “Not exactly. I met him but I never… Al Adler was a tuppenny nothing until he got in with Grisamentum.” They looked at each other. “He turned into a fixer. He ran stuff for Gris.”

“What happened to him after Grisamentum disappeared?” Billy said.

“I thought he was off drinking himself to death or something. He was totally Grisamentum’s man. I met him like once just after the funeral, I thought he was losing it. He was yammering about the various people he’d been working with because of his boss, how exciting blah blah. Total denial.”

“No.” Billy looked away and spoke out of the car window, through the glass into the garage’s shadows. “He wasn’t propping up any bars anywhere. He was doing something that got him killed, in the museum, on the night the kraken went. What if he’s been working for Grisamentum all this time?”

“There was something,” Wati said. “It was like…” He interpreted the bruises of the police-thing. “It was like it was, he’d been there for a long time. Since before you knew him. He was done before he was born.”

“How does that…?” Billy said.

“Oh, time,” Dane said. “Time time time. Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon. Al got turned into a memory, didn’t he?” He beat out a pattern on the dashboard. With his tension came little flexes of whatever small arcane muscles he had, and bioluminescence pulsed in his fingertips with each contact.

“Alright,” Dane said finally. “He’s involved. We’ve got Simon, we’ve got a lead. We have to find out who hired him. I need to steal a phone and I need to get begging with Jason Smyle. The chameleon you asked about once. He’ll help us. Me.”

“Yeah,” said Billy. “You know what we’re going to find out, though, right? It’s him. Grisamentum. He’s behind this. He’s got the kraken.” He turned back to face his companions. “And for whatever reason, he wants us too.”

Chapter Forty-One

EVERYONE WITH AN EAR TO THE CITY KNEW GOSS AND SUBBY were back. Goss, about whom they said he didn’t keep his heart in him, so he’s not afraid of anything; and Subby, about whom what can you say? Back for yet another last job. There was a lot of that going around. This time the Tattoo was their paymaster, and the job was something to do with the disappearance of the kraken-yes, the squidnapping-which the Tattoo either had or had not engineered, depending which rumour was preferred.

Whether he had or not, he was on the hard hunt. It was not enough, it seemed, that he ordered his corps of strange self-loathing fist-headed thugs and controlled his altered and ruined punisheds, who stumbled trailing their mechanical flexes, their electric additions, from hole to hole, relaying orders and mindlessly gathering information. Now he had Goss and Subby and the rest of the worst of London’s mercs looking for Dane Parnell who-did you hear?-got chucked out of the Krakenists.

According to the complex lay of the theopolitical land, allegiances and temporary affiliations were made for a war that everyone felt was about to start. It was all something to do with a curdling that everyone could feel.

Tattoo sought his pariahs. He sent one of his bust machine-people to ask the worst of his bloodprice operators whether they had any news for him. He made sure it was well known that he had made this particular overture. A strategy of terror. That’s right. We’re that bad.

JEAN MONTAGNE WAS THE SENIOR SECURITY GUARD ON DUTY AT THE entrance to London’s second-most-swish auction house. He was forty-six. He had moved to the city from France nearly two decades previously. Jean was a father of three, though to his great regret he had little contact with his oldest daughter, whom he had fathered when he was much too young. Jean was an accomplished Muay Thai fighter.

He had been in charge of his shift-group for several years, and had proved his abilities when the occasional crazy had tried to enter, hunting some artefact or other being priced within, usually insisting it was theirs and had been illicitly taken. Jean was careful and polite. He recognised every employee in the place by face, he was pretty sure, and knew a good proportion of them by name.

“Morning.” “Morning.” “Morning, Jean.” “Morning.”

“What’s…?” The man for whom the entry gate stuck was smiling up at him in apology, holding up his card.

“Hi there, morning,” Jean said. The man was early forties, thin, with neat receding hair cut short. “Wrong ID,” Jean said. The guy worked in acquisitions, he thought. Mike, he thought his name was. The man laughed at his mistake. He was holding a credit card.

“Sorry, don’t know what I’m doing.” He patted the pockets of his suit in search.

“Here,” said Jean, and buzzed Mike, or actually he thought Mick, in, to acquisitions. Or accounts. “Have a good one, bring that card next time.”

“Got it,” said the man. “Cheers.” He walked toward the lifts, and Jean did not feel any qualms about the interaction at all.

MADDY SINGH WAS THE OFFICE MANAGER OF THE SALES FLOOR. SHE was thirty-eight, well dressed, gay in a not-strictly-out-but-not-denying-it way. She liked watching ballet, particularly traditional.

“Morning.”

She looked at the man coming toward her.

“Hi,” she said. She knew him, rooted in her mind for his name.

“I need to check something,” he said. Maddy no longer spoke to her brother, because of a huge bust-up they’d had.

The man smirked, raised his right hand, split his fingers between the middle and ring fingers.

“Live long and be prosperous.”

“Live long and prosper,” she corrected. He was called Joel, she was pretty sure, and he was in IT. “Come on, make Spock proud.” Maddy Singh hated cooking, and lived off high-end convenience food.

“Sorry,” he said. “I need to check some details on our Trekkie sale, the names of some buyers.”

“The geek bonanza?” she said. “Laura’s dealing with that stuff.” She waved to the rear of the room.

“Cheers,” said Joel, if that was his name, made the sign again in good-bye, as everyone in the office had been doing for weeks, some struggling to get their fingers in the right position. “I never was a good Klingon,” he said.

“Vulcan,” said Maddy over her shoulder. “God, you’re bloody hopeless.” She thought about the man not at all, ever again in her life.

“L AURA.”

“Oh, hi.” Laura looked up. The man by her desk worked in HR, if she remembered correctly.

“Quick favour,” he said. “You’ve got the bumph from the Star Trek auction, right?” She nodded. “I need a list of buyers and sellers.”

Laura was twenty-seven, red-haired, slim. She was severely in debt, had investigated bankruptcy proceedings on the Internet. She had a predilection for hip-hop that amused and slightly embarrassed her.

“Right,” she said, frowned, poked around on her computer. “Um, what’s that about then?” He couldn’t be HR, she must have misremembered: a payment-chaser, obviously.

“Oh, you know,” he said, shook his head and raised his eyebrows to show how long-suffering he was. Laura laughed.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can imagine.” Laura was considering going back to do a master’s in literature. She pulled up files. “Were you at the sale?” she said. “Did you dress up?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Colour me all beamed up.”

“Do you need all of them?” she said. “I have to have authorisation, you know.”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully. “I should probably get them all, but…” He chewed his lip. “Tell you what,” he said. “If you call upstairs you can get confirmation from, you know, John, and maybe print me off the lot, but there’s no hurry. In the meantime, though, could you just give me the details of lot 601?”

Laura click-clicked. “Alright,” she said. “Can I get back to you about the others in a couple of hours?”

“No hurry.”

“Ooh, anonymous buyer,” she said.

“Yeah, I know, that’s why I need to find out who he was.”

Laura glanced at the familiar face. “Alright then. What are you checking?” She wound backward through the spools of anonymity.

“Oh lord,” he said. He rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask. Problems problems. We’re on it, though.” She printed. The man picked up the sheet, waved thanks and walked away.

“HERE HE COMES,” DANE SAID.

He loitered with Billy by a newspaper vendor. Jason Smyle, the proletarian chameleon, crossed the road. Here he came, folding and unfolding a piece of paper.

Jason still plied his knack as he came, and the people he passed were momentarily vaguely sure they knew him, that he worked in the office a couple of desks along, or carried bricks in the building site, or ground coffee beans like them, though they couldn’t remember his name.

“Dane,” he said. Hugged him hello. “Billy. Where’s Wati? He here?”

“Strike duty,” Dane said.

Jason was a function of the economy. His knack deshaped him, he was not specific. He was abstract, not a worker but a man-shape of wage-labour itself. Who could look that gorgon in the face? So whoever saw him would concretise him into their local vernacular. Which made him impossible to notice.

If Smyle had not existed London and its economy would have spat him out, budded him like a baby. He would find an unoccupied desk, play solitaire or shuffle paperwork, and at the end of the day ask Human Resources for a cash advance on his paycheque, which unorthodox request would cause consternation, but largely because though they were sure they knew him they couldn’t find his file, so they would loan the money from petty cash and make a note.

Smyle could do commission work too, or favours for friends. The residue still clung to him, so Billy, knowing it was not the case, looked at him and had a sense that Jason worked in the Darwin Centre, was maybe a lab tech, maybe a biologist, something like that.

“Here.” Jason handed over the printout. “That’s the buyer of your laser gun. I’m serious, what I said, Dane. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you’d been… you know, that you and the church… I’m glad I could help. Whatever you need.”

“I appreciate it.”

Jason nodded. “You know how to get me,” he said. He got on a passing bus for free, because the driver knew they worked in the same garage.

Dane unfolded the paper slowly as if for a drumroll. “You know what it’s going to say,” Billy said. “We just don’t know why yet.”

It took several seconds for them to make sense of what they were reading. A collection of information-price paid, percentages, relevant addresses, dates, original owner, and there, marked to indicate that it was anonymised in other contexts, the name of the buyer.

“It ain’t, though,” said Dane. “It ain’t Grisamentum.”

“Saira Mukhopadhyay?” read Billy. He knew how to pronounce it. “Saira Mukhopadhyay? Who the hell is that?”

“Fitch’s assistant,” Dane said quietly. “That posh one. She was there when he read the guts.” They looked at each other.

Not Grisamentum, then. “The person who bought this gun, and knacked it, and used it to buy Simon’s services…” Billy said. “A Londonmancer.”

Chapter Forty-Two

THERE WAS A HUBBUB IN BILLY’S HEAD ALL NIGHT. HE WOULD hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton’s head got in the way, was kraken.

His sinking was interrupted. He settled into something invisible. Glass walls, impossible to see in the black sea. A coffin shape in which he lay and felt not merely safe but powerful.

Then a cartoon, that he recognised, that long-loved story of bottles dancing while a chemist slept, and not a cephalopod to be seen, then for a moment he was Tintin was what he was, in some Tintin dream, and Captain Haddock came at him corkscrew in hand because he was a bottle, but nothing could get at him and he was not afraid, then he was with a brown-haired woman he recognised as Virginia Woolf if you please ignoring the squid at her window, which looked quite forlorn, powerless and neglected, and she was telling Billy instead that he was an unorthodox hero, according to an unusual definition, and he was in some classical land and it was all a catastrophe, a fiasco, the word came, but if it was why did he feel strong? And where was the motherfucking kraken now? Too idle to get into his head, eh? And who was this peeping from behind the gently smiling Modernist, at two different heights? Bad as the intimations of war? One grin and one thoughtless empty face? And a little inslide closer, cocky shuffle skip of scarecrow legs, finger to nose and a one-nostril jet of tobacco exhaust? Hallo there old cock! Subby, Goss, Goss and Subby.

He woke hard. It was early, and his heart continued with its performance and he sat up sweating in the sofa-bed. He waited to calm down but he did not. Dane sat by the window, the curtain pulled back so he could spy on the street. He was not looking down into it but at Billy.

“It’s not you,” he said. “You’re not going to feel any better.”

Billy joined him. The window was open a tiny bit, and he knelt and sucked up cold air. Dane was right, he did not much calm down. Billy gripped the windowsill and put his nose on it, like a kilroy graffito, and stared into the dim. There was absolutely nothing to see. Just fade-edge puddles of orange light and houses made of shadow. Just bricks and tarmac.

“You know what I want to know,” Billy said. “The Tattoo’s men. Not just with the hands. The radio-man, too.” Dane said nothing. Billy let the cold air go over him. “What’s all that about?”

“Say what you mean.”

“Who are they?”

“All sorts,” Dane said. “There are people out there who’d rather be tools than people. The Tattoo can give them what they want.”

The Tattoo. You wouldn’t say “charming”-that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo’s brutal enticement. I’ll make use of you. Want to be a hammer? A telephone? A light to show up secret knack bullshit? A record player? Get into that workshop, mate.

You have to be an outstanding psychologist to terrorise, blandish, to control like that, and the Tattoo could sniff the needy and post-needy surrendered. That was how he did it. He was never just a thug. Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

“So it wasn’t Grisamentum who took it,” Billy said. Dane shook his head and did not look at him. “… But we’re not going to go in with him.”

“There’s too much…” Dane shook his head again after a long time. “I don’t know. Not without knowing more… Al’s got some dog in this fight, and he was Grisamentum’s man. I don’t know who to trust. Except me.”

“Did you always work for the church?” Billy said abruptly. Dane did not look at him.

“Ah, you know, we all have our, you know…” Dane said. “We all have our little rebellions.” Whether sanctioned rumspringas or disavowed crises of faith. Begging chastity and continence, but not yet. “I was a soldier. I mean-in the army.” Billy looked at him in mild surprise. “But I came back, didn’t I?”

“Why did you?”

Dane turned his gaze full on Billy. “Why’d you think?” he said. “Because krakens are gods.”

BILLY ROSE. AND HE FROZE. LEGS CROOKED, BUT AFRAID TO MOVE, so that he would not lose this view, this angle through the window, that suddenly provoked something.

“What is it?” Dane said.

Good question. The street, yes, the lights, yes, the bricks, the shadows, the bushes turned into shaggy dark beasts, the personlessness of the late night, the unlitness of the windows. Why did it brim?

“Something’s moving,” Billy said. Close to the edges of the city some storm was coming toward them. The clouds’ random rush was just random, but through the window they looked like self-organising ink, like he was watching a secret, that he had an insight into whatever metropolitopoiesis was happening. He had no such thing. How could he with those inadequate eyes? It was just the glass that gave him anything, any glimmer, a refracted glance of some conflict starting.

THOUSANDS OF LONDONERS WOKE AT THAT MOMENT. MEMORY versus the inevitable, going at it, that will play havoc with your sleep patterns. Marge woke, vividly aware that something new had happened. Baron woke, and said as he did, “Oh, here we bloody go.” Vardy had not been asleep in the first place.

Closer to Billy than either of them would have imagined, Kath Collingswood was staring out of her window too. She had sat up at exactly the same second as Billy. The glass of her window helped her not at all, but she had her own ways to make sense of things.

It was obvious, suddenly, that the fake ghosts she had put together had been beaten. She hauled out of bed. No one was with her: she was in her Snoopy nightshirt. Her skin was crawling every which way. Horripilations with interference patterns. London was grinding against itself like an unset broken bone.

“So what are we going to fucking do?” she said, aloud. She did not like how small her voice was. “Who’m I going to call?”

Something easy, something she could get info from without too much trouble. Didn’t have to be tough or clever. Best if it wasn’t. She flicked through a pad by her bed, where she made notes of various summonings. A spaceape, all writhing tentacles, to stimulate her audio nerve directly? Too much attitude.

Alright, a real snout again, then, worthy of the name. She plugged in her electric pentacle. She sat in concentric neon circles, in various colours. This was a pretty, garish conjuration. Collingswood read bits and bobs from the relevant manuscript. The tricky bit with this technique was not getting the summons to work: it was to not summon too much. She was just reaching for one particular little spirit, not the head of its herd.

It did not take long. Everything was raring to go, that night. She barely had to dangle a notional bucket of psychic swill, and with exploratory snorts and gleeful screams, buffeting the edges of her safe space, manifesting as a flitting porcine shade, in came the swinish entity she had enticed away from a herd of such in the outer monstrosity, introduced to London and taught to answer to Perky.

kollywood, it grunted. kollywood food. Not much but a darkness in the air. It had no corkscrew tail, and as if in compensation it spiralled tightly itself, and rooted around the room, sending Collingswood’s tat gusting all over.

“Perky,” she said. She shook a bottle of leftover spiritual scraps. “Hello again. Nummy treat. What’s going on?”

num num, Perky said. num the num.

“Yeah you can num it but first you got to tell me what’s happening.”

scared, Perky grunted.

“Yeah, it’s a bit scary tonight, isn’t it? What’s been happening?”

scared. anglis out. sooss don tell.

“Anglis?” She struggled with impatience. There was no point getting pissy with this amiable greedy thing. It was too thick to mind-fuck. The pig-presence flitted to her ceiling and gnawed the light cord. “I won’t tell. Anglis, Perky?”

ess. ess anglis run fight come member not footer.

Yes. Something had come in, or out, for a fight. Member? Members? Membership? Footer?

Oh fuck right. Collingswood stood still in her sparking pentacle. Remember, and future. Remembrance versus some future. Anglis. The anglis, of course, were angels. The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They’d gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly. No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combatants. The war had just got meta.

“Cheers, Perky,” she said. She unstoppered the container and flicked it so the invisible contents sprayed out of the protected circle. The pig went racing around, licking and champing and slobbering in dimensions where, happily, Collingswood did not have to clean up.

Now she knew it was only Perky the cautions were overkill, and she stepped out of the angles of electrostatic protection and switched them off. “Have fun,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t mess shit up too much, and don’t nick anything when you go.”

kay kollywood byby thans for num.

Collingswood ran her hands through her hair, put on a minimum of makeup, her roughed-up uniform, and went through the deeply threatening city. “Broomstick’s at the garage,” she said to herself more than once. The joke was so old, so flat as to be meaningless. Saying it as if everything was all normal was a very slight comfort.

“You can’t smoke in here,” the taxi driver told her, and she stared at him, but couldn’t even muster enough to wither him. She put the cigarette out. She did not light up again until she was in the FSRC wings of the Neasden Police Station.

You would have had to be a more adept adept than Collingswood to have even approximated some sight of what was going on, loomingly, totally, above everything. Various long-snoozing London gods had been woken up by the clamour, were stretching and trying to assert pomp and authority. They had not yet realised that no Londoners gave two shits about them anymore. The thunder that night was dramatic, but it was just the grump of past-it deities, a heavenly “What the bloody hell’s all this noise?”

The real business was going on in the streets, on another scale. Few of the guards, earthly or unearthly, in any of London’s museums, could have said why they suddenly felt so extremely afraid. It was because their memory palaces were unprotected. Their angels walked. The guardians of all the living museums came together, bar one still rogue on its own mission. The angels hunted the incoming end, that closed-down future. If they tracked it down they intended to mash it up.

VARDY WAS ALREADY IN THE OFFICES. COLLINGSWOOD THOUGHT HE looked unruffled by the night, no blearier or more rushed than he ever did. She hung from the doorframe. She was slightly taken aback by the, if anything, even more unwelcome than usual look that he gave her.

“Fucking hell, rudeboy,” she said. “What’s up with you? Apocalypse rattled your cage?”

“I’m not sure what this is,” he said, scrolling through some website. “But it’s not apocalypse yet. Of that I’m fairly certain.”

“Just a manner of speaking.”

“Oh, I think it’s more than that. I think the word to keep in mind here is ‘yet.’ What brings you here?”

“What do you fucking think? The not-yet apocalypse, squire. You know what’s going on? The memory guards are out looking to smack someone up. Those fuckers ain’t supposed to leave the museums. I want to see if I can work out what’s going on. Whatever just changed. What do you reckon?”

“Why not?”

“Fuck, you know, sometimes, seriously, sometimes you just wish you lived in a city where it wasn’t all this craziness and this and that. I mean I know some of this lot are just villains, you know, just bad boys, but it all comes down to the god stuff in the end. In London. It does, though. Every, single, time. And that, man, what are you going to say.” Collingswood shook her head. “Fucking mad weak shit. Arks and dinosaurs and virgins, fuck knows. Give me a robbery, man. Except they do, innit?”

“‘Mad weak shit?’” Vardy swung back his chair and looked at her with some queasy combine of dislike, admiration and curiosity. “Really? That’s what it stems from, is it? You’ve got it all sorted out, have you? Faith is stupidity, is it?”

Collingswood cocked her head. Are you talking to me like that, bro? She couldn’t read his head-texts, of course, not those of a specialist like Vardy.

“Oh, believe me, I know the story,” he said. “It’s a crutch, isn’t it? It’s a fairy tale. For the weak. It’s stupidity. See, that’s why you’ll never bloody be good enough at this job, Collingswood.” He waited as if he’d said too much, but she waved her hand, Oh do please carry the fuck on. “Whether you agree with the bloody predicates or not, Constable Collingswood, you should consider the possibility that faith might be a way of thinking more rigorously than the woolly bullshit of most atheists. It’s not an intellectual mistake.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s a way of thinking about all sorts of other things, as well as itself. The Virgin birth’s a way of thinking about women and about love. The ark is a far more bloody logical way of thinking about the question of animal husbandry than the delightful ad hoc thuggery we’ve instituted. Creationism’s a way of thinking I am not worthless at a time when people were being told and shown they were. You want to get angry about that bloody admirable humanist doctrine, and why would you want to blame Clinton. But you’re not just too young, you’re too bloody ignorant to know about welfare reform.”

They stared at each other. It was tense, and weirdly slightly funny.

“Yeah but,” Collingswood said cautiously. “Only, it’s not totally admirable, is it, given that it’s total fucking bollocks.”

They stared some more.

“Well,” Vardy said. “That is true. I would have to concede that, unfortunately.” Neither of them laughed, but they could have done.

“Right,” Collingswood said. “Why are you here? What are those files?” There were papers everywhere.

“Well…” Vardy seemed hesitant. He glanced at her. “You recall our rather peculiar note from the sky? I have a thought about who it might be.” He closed one of the folders so she could see its title.

“Grisamentum?” she said. “He died.” She sounded suitably uncertain.

“Indeed.”

“Baron was at the funeral.”

“Sort of. Yes.”

“So was it the Tattoo, right?” Collingswood said. “Who did him in?”

“No. People thought so but no. He was just sick, is all, so he’d been talking to doctors, necromancers. We got hold of his medical records, and I can tell you he most certainly had cancer and it most certainly was killing him.”

“So… why d’you think this was him?”

“Something about the style. Something about finding Al Adler after all this time. Something about the word emerging that several monsterherds have been approached for some big commission. Remember his…?”

“No, I don’t remember dick, I wasn’t around.”

“Well, he was always a traditionalist.”

“So who are all this lot?” Collingswood said. She pointed at the details of some academic, some physicist called Cole, some doctor, Al Adler, Byrne.

“Associates. Connected in one way or another to his ahem funeral ahem. I’m thinking I might revisit them. I have a few ideas I’d like to chase up. All this has got me thinking. I’ve been having various ideas tonight.” He smiled. It was alarming. “I do wonder if any of them might have a clue about all this. All this.” He glanced beyond the walls, at the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future.

Chapter Forty-Three

“ALRIGHT.” WITH EXPERT SPEED AND A MINIMUM OF FILTHSPILLAGE, Dane emerged from a skip. He had a bust cup, a radio full of mould, half a suitcase. Billy stared at them. “What it is, if we got this seen to-there are people who can clean this up right, you know-we might be able to use this to-”

To what? The cup, it seemed, to carry some elixir that needed just this container-the radio to tune in to some opaque flow of decayed information or other-the suitcase to contain things that could otherwise not be carried. Dane struggled to articulate it. He kept reiterating that they needed equipment, if this was what they were facing.

Apparently, Billy thought, he lived now in a trite landscape. Deep enough below the everyday, Billy realised with something between awe and distaste, a thing has power, moronically enough, because it’s a bit like something else. Want to hex up briars, what else should you throw behind you but an old comb? All it took was a way with such cute correspondences.

“The Londonmancers don’t take sides,” Dane said. “That’s their whole thing.”

“Maybe Saira’s gone rogue,” Billy said. “Doing this alone.”

“I need a new gun,” Dane said repeatedly. The battle of Star Trek Tower had left him raging at his armaments. Whatever the specifics of this fight around them, seemingly between Grisamentum and the Londonmancers, he lacked firepower. With Wati’s help, anonymising the request, Dane sent a request to London’s arms dealers. Because someone out there had the psychic megatonnage of the fucking Architeuthis in their stockpile.

At the stub-end of Wandsworth Common he took delivery of a weapon, left under a particular set of bushes like some fabled baby. There were passersby but none close enough to see, and in any case, like most Londoners now, they moved furtively and quickly most of the time, as if they were at the park against their will.

Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.

It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just…” “I’ve got really good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected pistonpunk might ask her elders, “but wouldn’t it be useful to…?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.

With a little more propagandist verve, the Church of God Kraken might have issued its fighters FN P90s, say, or HK53s, and explained with sententious sermon-logic how the rate of fire made the fanning vectors of bullets reach out like tentacles, or that the bite of the weapon was like that of a squid beak, or some such. As an excommunicant, Dane was no longer restrained. What he dug out of the earth where it had been delivered was a heavy handgun.

They did not know how many charges the phaser had, so Billy did not use it to practice. “I know what we can do,” Dane said. He took them to amusement arcades, pushing through crowds of teens. Billy spent hours going from machine to screaming machine, firing plastic pistols at incoming zombies and alien invaders. Dane whispered advice to him on stance and timing-marksman words, soldier-insight among these play deaths. The sneers of watching youths decreased as Billy’s skills grew.

“Done well, man,” one boy said as Billy defeated an end-of-level boss. It was all disproportionately exhilarating. “Yes!” Billy whispered as he succeeded in missions.

“Alright, soldier,” Dane said. “Nice one. Killer.” He dubbed Billy a member of various violent sects. “You’re a Thanicrucian. You’re a Serrimor. You’re a gunfarmer.”

“A what?”

“Watch the screen. Bad bastards, once upon a time. Raised guns like fighting dogs. Let’s get you shooting like them. Pay attention.”

From Time Cops to the latest House of the Dead to Extreme Invaders, so Billy wouldn’t learn the looped attack patterns. Marines and soldiers learned with such machines, Dane told him. Juba the Baghdad sniper went from zero to his deadly skill set using these. And these pretend guns had no recoil, no weight, no reloading-just like the phaser. Their limited realism made them paradoxically perfect practice for the real, ridiculous weapon Billy had come into.

Billy kept asking about the knuckleheads he might face. How do they eat? How do they see? How do they think?

“That’s not the issue,” Dane said. “The world can always finesse details. And who’d choose it? Always people ready to do that kind of thing.”

SO THEY KNEW WHAT BAIT HAD GOT SIMON PORTING. THEY NEEDED to talk to Saira.

What’s the point of the theological turn? Is godness a particularly resilient kind of grubbiness? Maybe the turn is like an ultraviolet torch at a crime scene, showing up spattered residue on what had looked clean ground. You don’t know who to trust. Grisamentum’s postal box was not a Royal Mail address, nor the service of any other carrier they knew. The postcode did not look quite regular. Some hush-hush Trystero carrier?

“It must get to him,” Billy said.

“Yeah but not by the usual bloody routes.” There would be no staking out the mail drop.

“How’s Simon?” Billy said.

“Alright. I was there earlier,” said Wati, from a Victorian statue. “I mean, not really. Mo’s good with him though.”

“What about the Londonmancer?” Dane said.

“I got as close as I could. She don’t look like she even has a home. She sleeps in that building. Near the stone.”

“Alright,” said Dane. “We’ll have to get her there, then. Wati, help me out. I’m trying to teach our boy some stuff about things.” Billy heard the grinding sound of glass at the fringe of his consciousness. It had been a while. He waited, trying to understand it as a message.

“Alright, so…” he said eventually, when they passed a locksmith and he noticed something on display in the window. He remembered Dane’s lesson at the bins, and stared at the miniature door to which various different on-sale handles had been attached, for show. “Alright so if you got hold of that,” he said, “and did whatever to it, put it into a wall. Then you could, I bet you could…”

“There you go,” Wati said from inside next to it, from a gargoyle door knocker. “You could use each different one of them handles to open it into somewhere else. Too small though. All you could do’s stick your arm through.”

These revelations into a paradigm of recusant science, so the goddamn universe itself was up for grabs, were part of the most awesome shift in vision Billy had ever had. But the awe had been greatest when he had not understood at all. The more they were clarified, the more the kitsch of the norms disappointed him.

“There.” There was a key embedded in the tarmac. It had been dropped when the surface was still soft and then had been run over or toughly trodden in. Anxious clubbers and nightwalkers passed them.

“So,” Billy said, “if we could get it to work, with a bit of knacking, we could use that to, like, travel from place to place?”

Dane looked at him. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and it’s going to be pretty hairy,” he said. “Let’s get somewhere we can put our heads down.” They were nearly out of safe houses. He looked at Billy suspiciously. “How come you figured you could make the key work that way?”

Because, Billy thought, it’ll, oh, unlock the way.

Chapter Forty-Four

MARGE’S PROBLEM, WHEN SHE ASKED ON HER BULLETIN BOARDS where she should go, “as a noob in all this,” to learn what London really was, was not too few but too many suggestions. A chaos of them. She had winnowed with a few questions, and had raised the issue of the cults. The issue, tentatively, of the church of the squid. A few false leads, and she came back again and again to the message that said: “cult collectors old queen almagan yard east london.”

Down this way London felt like a city to which Marge had never been. She had thought the docklands all cleared out, bleached with money. Not this alley in gobbing distance of the Isle of Dogs, though. These felt like moments from some best-forgotten time burped back up, an urban faux pas, squalor as aftertaste.

Where the fuck am I? She looked again at her map. To either side were warehouses scrubbed and made flats for professionals. A channel of such buildings was parted as if grudgingly, an embarrassed entrance onto a cul-de-sac of much grubbier brick and potholed pavement. A few doors, a pub sign swinging. THE OLD QUEEN, it said in Gothicky letters, and below it a pinch-faced Victoria in her middle years.

It was the middle of the day. She’d have thought twice about walking into that streetlet at night. Her shoes got instantly filthy on its puddly surface.

The small pub bottle-glass window made the light inside seem dingy. A jukebox was playing something from the eighties, which as always with tracks from that decade registered in her head as a test. She hesitated: “Calling All the Heroes,” It Bites. Grizzled drinkers muttered at each other, in clothes the same colours as everything else. People glanced up at her, back down again. A fruit machine made a tired electronic whoop.

“Gin and tonic.” When the man brought it she said, “Friend of mine told me some collectors meet here.”

“Tourist?” he said.

“No. Sounds up my street, is all. I was wondering about joining.” The man nodded. The music changed. Soho, “Hippychick.” Whatever happened to Soho?

“Fair enough. Be a bastard of a tourist to get here, anyway,” he said. “They ain’t in yet. Normally sit over there.”

She took her place in the corner. The customers were subdued. They were men and women of all ethnicities and ages but a generally obscured air, as if the room had been painted with a dirty paintbrush. A woman drew in her spilt drink. A man talked to himself. Three people crowded around a table in one corner.

I think I’ll have my next birthday here, she thought coldly. The music wandered on: “Funky Town,” the Pseudo Echo version. Holy shit, “Iron Lung,” Big Pig. Kudos for that, but you can’t catch me with these. You’ll have to up your game-Play Yazz, “The Only Way Is Up”-and then you’ve got me for my wedding party.

She watched the woman draw pictures on her tabletop, now and then adding little splashes of her beer to the picture. The woman looked up and thoughtfully sucked the dirty beer from her finger. Marge looked down, revolted. On the table the beer picture continued to self-draw.

“So what you been in?”

Marge stared. Two men in their forties or fifties swaggered suspiciously toward her. One man’s face was set and impossible to read: the other, who spoke, changed expressions like a children’s entertainer.

“Say that again?”

“Brian says you want to play. What you offering? You scratch my soul, you know, I’ll scratch yours. Tit for tat, darling. So what you been in? We all like a bit of theology here, love, no need to be shy.” He licked his lips. “Give us an afterlife, go on.”

“Sorry,” she said slowly. “I didn’t mean to be misleading. I’m here because I need some help. I need some information and someone told me… I need to ask you some questions.”

There was a pause. The man who had said nothing remained quite impassive. He straightened slowly, turned and walked out of the pub, putting his untouched drink down on the counter as he went.

“Fucking bloody Nora,” said the other quietly. “Who the fuck you think you are? Coming in here…”

“Please,” Marge said. The desperation in her voice surprised even her, and stopped him speaking. She kicked out the chair opposite, gestured him to sit. “Please, please, please. I really need help. Please sit down and listen to me.”

The man did not sit, but he waited. He watched her. He put a hand on the back of the chair.

“I heard that someone…” she said. “I heard that maybe one of you knows something about the squid cult. You know the squid’s gone, right? Well, so’s my lover. Someone took him. And his friend. No one knows where they are, and it’s something to do with this, and I need to talk to them. I need to find out what’s going on.”

The man tipped on his heels. He scratched his nose and glowered.

“I know some things,” Marge said. “I’m in this. I need help for myself, too. You know…” She lowered her voice. “You know Goss and Subby? They came and hassled me.” The man opened his eyes wide. He sat then, and leaned toward her. “So I need to find the squid people because they’re sending people like that to bloody terrorise me…”

“Keep it quiet,” he said. “Goss and buggeryfucking Subby? Holy bloody Ram’s bollocks, girl, it’s a wonder you’re still walking. Look at you.” He shook his head. Disgust or pity or something. “How’d you even get here? How’d you find this place?”

“Someone told me about it…”

“Marvellous, isn’t it? Someone bloody told you.” He shook his head. “We go to all the trouble. No one’s even supposed to know this blahdclat place exists.” He used the patois adjective, though he was white and his accent snarlingly Cockney. “This is a secret street, mate.”

“It’s right here,” she said, and waved her map.

“Yeah and that should be the only place it is. D’you know what a trap street is? You know how hard it is to sort out that sort of thing?” He shook his head. “Listen, love, this is all beside the point. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I told you why I came…”

“No. I mean, if Goss and Subby are after you, you should not be here. If you got left alive it’s just because they din’t care about you, so for Set’s sake don’t get them caring about you.”

“Please just tell me about the squid cult. I have to find them…”

“‘Squid cult.’ What are you like? Which you talking about? Khalkru? Tlaloc? Kanaloa? Cthulhu? It’s Cthulhu, ain’t it? Always is. I’m just fucking with you, I know what you’re talking about. Church of God Kraken, isn’t it?” He looked around. “They ain’t nothing to do with Goss and Subby. Say what you like about the teuthists, doll, they don’t run with that kind of company. Don’t happen. Let me tell you something. I don’t think they know what’s up any more’n you do. It ain’t them took the kraken. Too holy for them to touch, or something. But they ain’t even looking for it, if you can believe that.”

“I don’t care about any of that. I just want to know what happened to Leon and Billy.”

“Sweetheart, whatever it is going on it’s all much too prickly for my bloody taste. None of us has gone anywhere near the teuthies since this kicked off. We’ll keep it nice and bloody simple, thank you very much indeed. Spider-gods, Quakers, Neturei Karta, that sort of shit’ll do me. Alright, maybe you don’t get as many points for those scriptures, but…”

“I don’t understand.”

“Nor should you, deario. Nor should you.”

“I heard you knew something about these people…”

“Alright listen,” he said. He chopped the tabletop with his hand. “We ain’t going to have this conversation. I ain’t going down this road.” He sighed at her expression. “Now look. I already told you everything I know, which is bugger-all, granted, but that’s because that’s what the Kraks know. If you’re…” He hesitated. “You won’t thank me for helping you know. Helping.” He sighed. “Look if you really want to get yourself into this shit-and I do mean shit because that’s what you’ll end up in-there are people you should talk to.”

“Tell me.”

“Alright look. Jesus, girl, is this your first time on this side of things?” He sank all of his drink in one impressive swallow. “Rumours. Tattoo done it, Grisamentum’s back and done it, no one done it. Well that’s no help. So if I wanted to find out, and I do not, I’d think about who else might have claim on something like that? And think it’s their business?”

He waited for an answer. Marge shook her head.

“The sea. I bet you the sea might have ideas. Wouldn’t surprise me if the bastard ocean might have a little something to do with all this. Stands to reason, right? Taking back what’s its? Render unto sea, sir.” He cackled. Marge closed her eyes. “And if it didn’t, probably wishes it had and has a clue who did.”

“I should talk to the sea?” Marge said.

“God, woman, no need to sound so miserable about it. What, all of it? Talk to its ambassador. Talk to a flood-brother. Up at the barrier.”

“Who are…”

“Now now.” He wagged his finger no. “That’s your bloody lot, alright? You’ve done well enough to get here. If you insist on getting eaten you can go a bit further; it ain’t my job to walk you through. I don’t need that on my conscience, girl. Go home. You won’t, will you?” He blew out his cheeks. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your boy, alright? And for what it’s worth, which in my professional opinion isn’t a bloody lot, I’ll pray for you.”

“Pray to what?” Marge said. He smiled. The jukebox played “Wise Up Sucker” by Pop Will Eat Itself.

“Fuck it,” the man said. “Tell you what. What’s the point collecting stuff you don’t use? I’ll pray to all of them.”

Chapter Forty-Five

“SO SIMON’S DOING ALRIGHT,” DANE SAID. “GETTING OVER GHOSTS.”

“So Wati said,” Billy said. “He coming?”

“Strike’s not going well,” Dane said. “He’s a touch bloody busy.”

It was early daylight and they were near where the London Stone throbbed. Between buildings. Dane made little military hand motions the meanings of which Billy did not know. He followed Dane up onto a low wall, a complicated dance between cameras.

On their way Dane had told opaque teuthic homilies. Kraken did not steal fire from any demiurges, did not shape humans from clay, did not send baby kraken to die for our sins. “So Kraken was in the deep,” Dane had said. “Was in the deep, and it ate, and it took it, like, twenty thousand years to finish its mouthful.”

Is that it? Billy did not insist on exegesis.

Dane moved faster and more gracefully than a man of his bulk should. Billy found this climb easier than the last one, too. He could see only roofs in all directions, like a landscape. They descended toward an internal yard full of cardboard boxes softened by rain into vaguely vectoral brown sludge.

“This is where they come to smoke. Take out your weapon,” Dane said. He held his pistol.

The first person out was a young man, who caned a cigarette and sniggered into his mobile phone. The second a woman in her forties with some stinking rollup. There was a long wait after that. The next time the door opened, it was Saira Mukhopadhyay, wrapped in smart scarves.

“Ready,” Dane whispered. But she was not alone. She was chatting to an athletic guy lighting a Silk Cut. “Arse,” said Dane.

“I’ll take him,” Billy whispered. “We haven’t got long,” Billy said. They could hear the conversation.

“Alright,” Dane said. “Do you know how to… set your phaser to stun?” They couldn’t help it: they giggled. Billy pushed his glasses up his nose. He could not have made this jump a few weeks before, phaser in his hand, a pitch down into a hard but controlled landing. He stood and fired. The big man spun across the yard and went down in the rubbish.

Here was Dane dropping beautifully behind Saira. She heard him, but he was already on her. He backhanded her into the bricks. She braced herself. Where her fingers clenched, they squished the bricks as if they were Plasticine.

Saira hissed, literally hissed. Dane smacked her again. She looked at him with blood on her lip. It had been easy to forget that for Dane this was sacred fervour.

“Steady, man,” Billy said.

“Not many people could port something that size out of there,” Dane said. “But you know that. We know who got it out of there, and we know what you dangled to make him do it. I don’t like it when someone steals my god. It gets me all fucking twitchy. What did you do? What did Al Adler have to do with all this? The end of the world’s coming, and I want to know what you did with my god.”

“You know who you’re bloody talking to?” she said. “I’m a Londonmancer…”

“You’re living a dream. The London heart stops beating, you know what’s going to happen? Fuck all. London don’t need a heart. Your mates know what you been doing?”

“That’s enough.”

Fitch had entered the yard. They stared at him as he closed the door behind him. He stood by Saira, in the path of Dane’s weapon.

“You think I should be in a museum,” he said. “Might be. But museum pieces have their uses, right, Billy? You’re almost right about me, Dane. See, when you don’t have the knack you used to, you’re no threat. So people tell you things.”

“Fitch,” said Dane. “This is between me and Saira…”

“No it is not,” Fitch said. He squared all pugnacious, then withered. “She just handled the money. You want to know what happened, talk to me.”

“I SHOUT,” HE SAID, “AND THE OTHERS’LL BE HERE.”

Things flew overhead. Edgy birds. He glanced at them, and from where Billy stood, the perspective looked wrong.

“You took it?” Dane said.

“If you were still a Krakenist, I’d not be talking to you,” Fitch said. “But you aren’t, and I want to know why. Because you’ve got him.” He nodded at Billy. “And he’s the one who knows what’s going on.”

“I do not,” Billy said. “Not this again.”

“Why don’t you want the Krakenists to know what’s going on?” said Dane. “We… they… ain’t London’s enemies.”

“I know how they want to get rid of their holies. And I know where that sort of thing leads.”

“What? They aren’t even looking for it, let alone getting rid of it,” Billy said.

“I wish you was right, Fitch, but you ain’t,” Dane said. “The church ain’t doing anything.”

“Why do you want the kraken?” Fitch said. “I’ve got no business seeing anything in the guts these days. They just sit there squelching. But there it was. Fire. First time since I don’t know how long, and oh my London what I did see.”

“What’s Al Adler in this?” Billy said.

“Why did you take it?” Dane whispered.

Fitch and Saira looked at each other. Saira shrugged. “I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

“It was his fault,” Fitch said. He whined. Billy could tell the old man was relieved to break his vow. “It was him started it. Coming here with his plans, and the burning at the end of it.”

“Al? You said he was superstitious,” Billy said to Dane. “So-he came for a reading. But no one liked what they saw.”

“Tell us,” Dane said, his voice shaking, “everything.”

ADLER HAD COME TO THE LONDONMANCERS WITH A RIDICULOUS, audacious plan. He was going to steal the kraken. He was not afraid to say so in that hallowed confessional: Fitch, not judging, unshocked even at that stage by the enormous crime to come, bound to confidentiality by oaths in place since the Mithras temple, split the city’s skin to see what might happen.

“There’s no way Al thought of that job,” Dane said.

A courtesy, a formality. Fitch expected to see nothing, as he had for years. What he saw was fire.

The burning end of it all. Burning what it couldn’t burn, taking the whole world.

And after? Nothing. Not a phoenix age, not a kingdom of ash, not a new Eden. This time, for the first time, in a way that no threatened end had ushered in before, there was no post-after.

“Most of the Londonmancers don’t know anything about this,” Saira pled. They could not have been expected to overturn their vows like their leader and his best lieutenant had done. “It was obvious Al was just a front guy. Hardly criminal genius, was he?”

“What did you tell him?” Billy said.

Fitch waved. “Some waffle. We had to decide what to do fast.”

“Couldn’t you have told him not to do it?” Billy said. Everyone looked at him. That wasn’t the point at all. You didn’t alter plans on the basis of a Londonmancer reading, any more than you picked a spouse on the basis of a fairground palm reader’s wittering. “Why would he want to end everything?” said Billy.

“I’m not sure he did,” said Fitch carefully.

The plan might have set in motion something of its own. Ineluctable, final, unintended consequences. How bad does it have to be to make a Londonmancer break a millennium of honour and intervene? This bad is how bad.

“So you had to get in there first to stop him setting it off,” said Billy in some kind of wonder. “You had to presteal it.”

“That auction was coming up.” Saira shrugged. “We needed Simon-bait. It wasn’t that hard to find an armsmith to knack it. Dane… we didn’t know when this was going to happen.”

“We had to move when we moved,” Fitch said. “Understand-everything burns and nothing happens again, if they got the kraken. When Adler told me, everything changed.”

Simon performing his game, whispering phrases from his TV show, arriving in the dark of the Darwin Centre with an assiduously replicated fade-in like glitter in water, to “take coordinates,” and with a flex of power disaggregating the kraken and himself in a stream of particles, energy, particles again.

“So what happened to Adler?” Billy said. Saira met his eye. Fitch did not.

“A place like that,” Saira said. “It’s guarded. You can’t just walk in.”

“You cold bastards,” Dane said finally.

“Oh, please,” said Saira. “I don’t take that from assassins.”

“You used him as bait,” Billy said. “Told him whatever to keep him… no, for the timing, you sent him in.”

“Simon would never have got in and out,” Fitch wheedled. “We didn’t know the angel would… we just needed to distract it.” The angel of memory, the mnemophylax, swooping in on Al, as Simon beamed the bewildered would-be burglar in. Not as if the wrecked Trekkie was innocent of that death, either. Turned out there was at the very least one culpable homicide he really did have on his hands.

“And while it’s dealing with him, you took the kraken out.” Billy shook his head. “That raises the second issue. You did all this to stop this fire, right?” He raised his hands. “Well, you showed us the guts. We all know what the sky feels like. So what went wrong?”

A long quiet. “It didn’t work,” Saira said. She shook her head and opened and closed her mouth.

Billy laughed unpleasantly. “You saw what would happen if it was stolen. So you stole it to stop it being stolen. But by stealing it you stole it. And set it off.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Fitch said.

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” Dane said. “You are going to take me to my god.”

Chapter Forty-Six

THE PIGEONS’ BELLIES WERE MISBEHAVING AGAIN, AND THE revolting results of these anxieties featured as quirky news filler. Other urban ructions were growing harder to ignore by selective banalising notice. Fuel would hardly burn in domestic fireplaces. There was nervous speculation about atmospheric conditions. Every flame was grudging. As if there were a limited amount of it available; as if it were being hoarded; saved up for something.

Also, oh yes, people were disappearing. There are no civilians in war, no firewalls between the blessedly ignorant and those intimately connected to networks, markets of crime and religiosity. And Londoners, even those determinedly mainstream, were disappearing. Not in that mythical without-a-trace way, but with the most discomfiting remnants: one shoe; the shopping they had been going to get but had not yet bought sitting in a bag by their front door; a graffito of the missing where they were last seen. You may not have known what was happening, but that something was happening was not plausibly deniable.

BILLY AND DANE HADN’T DONE BADLY. THE CARE OF THEIR MOVEMENTS; the camouflage Dane dragged behind them with little shuffled hexes, second nature for a man of his training; the disguises, ridiculous but not ineffective; Dane’s soldier care: all these had kept them from collectors’ eyes for days, which when you’re the target of by some way the largest collection of bloodprice talent to be assembled on a single job in London for a whole pile of years, isn’t nothing.

For a creditable time, those stalkers had been frustrated. The tallyho of the urban hunt sounded like a parping fart in the latest hours, as they rode unorthodox horses over roofs, making locals think there had been very brief very heavy rain, and tracked down bugger-all. The vaguely cowboy gunslingers had failed to run them down. Londoners slept badly, as their internal nightlands were infiltrated by eyeless snuffling beasts that lolloped through their sex reveries and parental angsts, dreamhounds sent out by hunters at their most dangerous when they slept. They could not sniff their quarries either.

The hunters fought among themselves. More than once they faced murderous confrontations with figures that seemed part of some other agenda, that were come and gone too fast to make sense of in any political schema of which anyone knew. Men who disappeared when seen, men and women accompanied by shuffling monster shadows.

The gangs and solitary freelancers seeded the city with rewards: anything for a harvest of hints. With all his care, nous and skill, Dane could not stand in the way of all the snips, momentary glances, overheard words-all the stuff that registered not at all on passersby, but that the best hunter could winkle out of someone who did not even know they were withholding, could collate and aggregate.

“I’M GOING INSIDE,” FITCH SAID. “THE REST OF THE LONDONMANCERS need to see me. And we’ll have to find a way to get him onside, now.” He indicated the man Billy had shot.

“You got to let me go back in, Dane,” he said. “You want to get them worried?”

Dane raised his weapon as if he did not know what to do with it, and gritted his teeth.

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered.

“We didn’t know what you wanted to do with it,” Fitch said. “Or we would have said.”

“We didn’t know if we could trust you,” Saira said. “You know how some Muslims get rid of Qur’an pages? They burn them. That’s the holiest method. Whatever’s coming is after burning the whole world down, starting with the squid. And it’s still out there. We thought that might be your plan.”

“You thought I’d end the world?” Dane said.

“Not deliberately,” Fitch said, in a strange reassurance. “By accident. Trying to set your god free.”

Dane stared at them. “I ain’t going to burn shit,” he said levelly. “Take me to it.”

And we can tell you what we know, Billy thought. That Grisamentum’s still alive.

“There’s things need preparing,” Fitch said. “Protections. Dane, we can work together. We can be in this together.” He was eager now. How long had he been bending under this?

“We ain’t short of offers,” Dane said. “Everyone wants to work with us.”

“There’s things we need to know,” Saira said. “There’s got to be something about this kraken. That’s why we need you,” she said to Billy. “You’re the squid man. This is perfect. If we can work out what it is about this one, maybe we can stop it.”

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered. He heard the grind of glass. “I think I do, Dane.”

THAT WAS HOW THE TWO OF THEM ENDED ALONE IN THE YARD, while the Londonmancers returned inside, to mum normality for a few more hours.

“What if they…?” Dane said as they waited.

Billy said, “What? Run? They can’t disappear their whole operation. Tell someone? The last thing they want is anyone to know what they did.”

“What if they…?”

“They need me,” Billy said.

They wedged the door closed so frustrated smokers would find another place to go. “Wait,” Saira had told them. “When we’re done here, we’ll go.” They sky went dark over hours.

“Soon,” said Dane. What impeccable timing, what a perfect jinx: as he said that, there was the glass noise, in Billy’s head. Knowledge came with it. He stood.

“Someone’s coming,” he said.

“What?” Dane stood. “Who?”

“I don’t know.” Billy held his temples. What the fuck? “Jesus.” His headache was talking to him. “I just know they’re coming. I don’t think they know where we are. Not exactly. But they’re close and they aren’t friends.”

Dane looked around the yard. Grind grind. “They’re getting closer,” Billy said.

“They can’t find us here,” Dane said. “They can’t know the Londonmancers are in on this. We can’t lead them to God.” He grabbed a metal shard and ground into the wall the words BACK ASAP. Written in scratches among scratches.

“Up,” he said. Made his hands a sling and pushed Billy back onto the roof. They scuttled under the arriving night, back down drainpipes and corporate fire escapes, to the main streets of the city, close to deserted now. This was the worst for them, being almost the only people in a street. Every lamplight was like a spotlight. Billy could hardly think through the noise of glass.

“You hear a noise?” Dane said. “Like glass?”

No one else was supposed to hear it! There was no time. There was another sound now. Running feet. CCTV cameras spun, twinkled their lights, looked every which way. From around a corner came men.

Billy stared. They wore a raggedy new romance of costumes. He saw punk stylings, top hats, pantaloons and tube tops, powdered wigs. Their faces were quite ferocious. Billy raised his phaser.

As they came the attackers’ bad knacks waxed, and the streetlamps they passed glowed too bright, changed colour, snapped one by one into blacklight, so the men’s white cuff-frills and reflective cat’s-eye flourishes glowed. Billy could see stitched on their clothes many-armed tags, some kind of profligate mutant swastikas. The men hissed like moon monkeys.

Dane and Billy shot. There were so many flamboyant figures. Billy shot again. He waited for them to shoot back, but they held whips, blades. Darkness encroached, overtook the attackers and hid them. There were no lights in any window, no glimmer from any office. There was only one last orange streetlight still burning, a lighthouse now, at which Billy stared as the men came.

Dane went back to back with him. “They want us alive,” Dane whispered.

“Alive yes for discussion,” someone said. “Someone wants to pick your brains.” There were laughs at that. “Alive, but limbs and eyes are optional. Come on now and you can keep them.”

“There’s always the workshop,” someone else said.

“There is the workshop,” the first voice said. Obscured by the unnatural dark. Billy fired at random, but the shot illuminated only itself. “He does love his workshop. What will you be?”

“Be ready,” Dane whispered.

“For what?” the voice said. A whip kinked out of the shade and wrapped around Billy’s leg, sticking where it touched like a gecko foot, yanking him off his feet and out of the circle of last light. Down on the tarmac Billy opened his mouth to shout, but there was that glass grinding, much louder than he had ever heard it before. His head was full of communicative pain. Something came. It whirled.

Bone arms windmilling. There was a clack of teeth, vivid empty eyes. Finger bones punctured meat like fangs. The thing arrived with incomprehensible motion, too fast. It punch-punched stiff-fingered, leaving blood, ripping the throats of two, three, five of the attackers, so they screamed and fell pissing blood.

Billy kicked off the whip. He crawled back. The interceder rocked at the edge of the light.

It was a skull on the top of a giant jar. A huge glass preserving bottle, of the type that Billy had for years been filling with preservative and animal dead. This one was nearly five feet high, full of flesh slough and clouding alcohol. On its glass lid was a shabby human skull liberated, Billy absolutely knew, from one of the cupboards of remains in the Natural History Museum. It snapped its teeth. Where the rim met the lid the flaring glass served as shoulders, and the thing raised two fleshless taloned arms taken from bone boxes, humerus, ulna radius, clacking carpals and those sharpened phalanges.

The angel of memory.

The jar-angel rolled on its round base, oscillate-rocking forward. It punched again and killed again, and with a tiny incline of the skull-head opened its lid. A dandy man froze. He was motionless, then not there at all, and Billy saw more meat shreds in the jar. The bounty hunters scattered. There was a flat sound. Dane was down and motionless. Billy was too far, and the lasso or whatever it was that had Dane by the neck went taut, and Dane was dragged into the dwindling shadow the swastika-wearing men had brought with them.

Billy fired twice, but he could see nothing of them, and Dane was barely visible anymore. Billy grabbed Dane’s gun. “Here!” he shouted to his glass rescuer, and he heard it wobble and roll toward him. The attackers hurled half-bricks and iron as they retreated.

A lucky heavy piece took the cylinder full on. The jar-angel smashed. The guard of the museum’s memory burst. Its bones went dead among the chemical slick and glass shards.

Billy raised his phaser in one hand, gun in the other. But the attackers did not come back. He ran in the direction Dane had been dragged, but the darkness retreated quicker than he moved, and when it was gone he was alone. The corpses were still there, the glass scintillas, the skull of what had saved him. Dane was gone.

As always when a quiet holed the city, a dog barked to fill it. Billy walked through the ruined remains of his rescuer, left preservative footprints. He sat heavily and held his head by the dead, in the doorway of a sandwich bar.

That was where he was when the Londonmancers found him-nothing so dramatic could take place so close to the London Stone without them knowing it. He could see them at the limits of his vision, but they would not come closer, would not breach their neutrality, which only a few of them could have known was already fucked.

It must have been one of them who got word to Wati, who came into the toy Billy still carried, so the voice came from his pocket. “Billy, mate. Billy. What happened? We better go, Billy. We’ll get him back. But right now we better go.”