Kraken

Chapter Fifty-Five

IT WAS VERY LATE. IT HAD BEEN A WHILE SINCE ANYONE HAD actually questioned Jason, let alone smacked him around. Collingswood had come into his cell from time to time, with a bad-dream loop of questions, but he had not seen her for hours.

Food and drink was pushed through the slot. His shouted requests for a phone, for attention, for bacon sandwiches were never answered. There was a chemical toilet in the corner of his cell that he had long since given up threatening to tell Amnesty International about. Without Collingswood or another realitysmith around to dampen his knack, his jailers all half-recognised him, knew they knew him, and given that he was not-could not be, look, he was in a cell-a colleague, reasoned that he had to be a career villain, and their behaviour to him had worsened.

When Jason heard footsteps, a whisper echoing in the hall, he did not expect whoever it was to slow or stop. But they did, right outside his cell, and unlocked his door.

An officer opened it. A man, framed in the doorway, staring in weird stillness. He looked grey and very sick. Someone was behind him. The officer was not looking at Jason. He stared at the wall above Jason’s head, swallowing, swallowing. There was someone behind him webbed with shadows shed by fluorescent lights. Whispering.

“Is it…?” Jason began, and ran out of what to say.

A child peered around the doorframe. A man behind him whispered into the policeman’s ear, leaning like a windblown tree into sight on one side of his escort, then swaying to the other, playful tick-tock, winking with his left then his right eye at Jason from behind the officer’s back.

“Christine!” the drab-coated man said to Jason. “Is it you?”

Jason knew who the man and the boy were then, and he flattened himself against the wall and began to scream.

“I KNOW!” SAID GOSS, STEPPING INTO THE ROOM, ESCORTING THE officer. Subby pushed the door closed behind them with the careful preciseness of a young child. Jason screamed and crawled backward on his bed.

The policeman was closing his eyes and weeping and whispering, “I’m sorry shhh I didn’t stop now I didn’t mean to please don’t please.”

“I know!” said Goss again.

“Stop it!” Goss giggled. “It’s a secret, you’ll ruin it, stop it!” He breathed out smoke.

He pushed the officer at Jason with a whispered word, and the man not even opening his eyes felt for Jason’s screaming mouth and blocked it with his hand and whispered, “Shhhh shhhh stop stop you have to you have to.” Jason ran out of breath to make sound behind the palm. The policeman and prisoner held onto each other.

Someone’s going to come, Jason thought, there are cameras, someone’s going to, but would Goss be here without crossing those ts? Dotting those is? He tried to scream again.

“You two are terrible,” said Goss. “You said we was meeting at the bus station, and then Mike came and I didn’t know where to look!” He sat on the bench and sidled up to Jason. “Hey,” he whispered shyly. He tapped the cop on the shoulder. The man whimpered. “Subby wants to show you something. He found a beetle. Go on and take a look, there’s a love.”

“Shhh, shhh,” the man kept saying, weeping from under closed lids. He took his hand from Jason’s mouth and Jason could not make a noise. Subby took the officer’s hand. The man shuffled at the child’s pace to the corner of the room and stood facing away from Goss and Jason, facing the cement angle.

“I was all over the place,” Goss said. “I was out on holiday. Got a nice tan. Was looking for stuff. Not seen the waiter? The waiting boy in the dollhouse? I had a present for him.” Goss put a finger to Jason’s lips.

“So,” he said. “Clarabelle said she fancies you.” He pushed his finger harder onto Jason’s face. Pushed him to the wall. “I said to her what? And she goes ‘Yeah, can you believe it?’” Pushed the lip into Jason’s teeth. Subby swung the policeman’s hand like they were going for a walk. “She’s going to be at the park tonight. Are you coming down later?” Goss split the skin so blood welled into Jason’s mouth. “Where’s Billy? Where’s Dane?”

“Oh God oh God I don’t know I swear Jesus…” Jason said. Goss did not move his finger, so Jason sputtered past it, sputtering his blood and spit onto Goss, who did not wipe himself. Goss pushed and pushed and Jason whined as his lip was ground against his top teeth. The policeman stood where Subby held his hand obediently facing away, whimpered and seemed to clutch the boy’s hand harder as if for comfort.

“Do you remember when she was in Geography with us and he kept nicking all the pens for the overhead projector?” Goss said. “I knew you liked her then. I know you did stuff for Dane, that’s why you’re here, where is he?” Pushed and Jason whined and then shrieked as with the crunching snap of a ruined pencil Goss pushed an incisor out of its socket so it dangled into his mouth.

“I don’t know I don’t know,” Jason said, “Billy called me, Jesus, please I don’t know…”

“I didn’t even know she was still in our year. Look at me. Look at me. You alright, Subbster? Are you looking after my little brother okay, mister?” Goss smiled and met Jason’s eyes. Kept his finger all blood-wet on Jason’s lips. “Clarabelle said she might bring Petra so we could all four of us go into town. Your friend took something I want back. Where is he? Otherwise I’m going to have to call off tonight.”

“Oh God I don’t know I don’t, listen, listen, he gave me a number, that’s all, there’s a number, I can tell you it…”

“Numbers rumpus schampers grampus orca Belinda. Where’s them lads? I think I can see what you want to say down in your mouth, shall I get it? Shall I get it? Shall I get it? Tell me or I’ll get it. Where is he? I’m going to get it. Where is he? I’ll squeeze it out of you, you rubber duck!”

“I swear, I swear…”

“I will! I’ll squeeze you till you squeak!” Goss began to push. Tooth roots creaked in Jason’s head, and he screamed again. The policeman in the corner exhaled shakily and did not look around. Goss put his other hand to Jason’s stomach.

“I will push if you don’t tell me, because I want it back. Hurry, I said to Clarabelle and Petra that we’d be there in an hour, so tell me tell me.”

Jason had nothing to tell him, so Goss kept pushing. The constable kept his eyes shut and gripped Subby’s hand and tried not to listen to Goss repeat and repeat his questions, heard the noises Jason made go from screams to short hard klaxon barks as much of aghastness as agony, liquid intrusion sounds and some retching animal wrongness and at the very last, nothing. After a long time a hff of effort and the dropping of liquid and the noise of something pushing through moistness. Clack clack. Something maraca-ed.

“What’s that?” Goss said. Clack clack. “You really don’t know?” Clack. “Alright then, if you’re sure.” Dragging.

“He doesn’t know.” Now Goss was up close to the policeman’s ear. “He told me. You can make him tell you too. Make him rattle his teeth. I’m much obliged for showing me where he was, you do a marvellous job, I’m ever so grateful. I remember when people used to care about the uniform, God love you, people had respect then.” The officer kept his eyes closed and did not breathe. “Give us Subby back then, you! Pop him up like a toaster!” Subby took his hand away. The man heard the door open and close. He stayed still for more than three minutes.

He opened his eyes such a tiny bit. No one hurt him, so he opened them again. He turned around. No one stood in the room. Goss and Subby were gone. The man wailed to see blood on the floor and meatlike Jason at his feet. There was a hole in Jason’s sternum. His neck was grossly thickened, burst from inside, his mouth wide open and the roof of his mouth grooved where finger holes were pushed into it, his tongue punctured by a hole for a thumb. Wear him and he could be made to talk, clack clack.

The last lingering of Jason’s knack went out, and recognition slipped from the room, and the officer went from screaming for someone he thought he knew to someone he realised he had never worked with, but who was still exactly as dead as he had thought.

Chapter Fifty-Six

THERE WAS A CHANGE IN THE AIR, SOMEONE COMING INTO THE penumbra of the London Stone, with the stone in mind. London always felt like it was about to end, like the world was over. But now more than ever. No, really, the city was muttering. Honest. Saira could sniff an encroachment, even without Fitch grabbing her and whispering the fact in agitation.

“Someone,” he kept saying.

Saira thought up various possibilities as she readied to face whatever it was. But though she had hoped to see him again, she was utterly confounded to emerge from the Londonmancer back rooms into the shop that fronted and protected them to face a bleary, exhausted, pugnacious Dane Parnell.

Billy stood behind him, phaser in his hand, Wati-filled doll in his pocket. Dane leaned against the doorway.

“Jesus Christ London!” she said. “Dane! What the hell are you…? You got away, thank God, we didn’t know, we were-”

“Saira,” he said. He sounded dead. He stared levelly.

“Dane, what are you doing, you could be seen, we have to get you out of sight…”

“Take me to the kraken.” Saira twitched and patted the air for him to quiet: most of her colleagues knew nothing. “Now,” he said.

“Alright,” she said, “alright, alright alright. I have to get Fitch. What happened, Dane? I have to-”

“Now. Now. Now. Now.”

OF COURSE BILLY AND WATI, WHO HAD FELT BILLY’S EMERGENCE from that protected Nazi zone and gushed into the doll he carried, had clamoured at Dane in relief and tried to make him rest.

“We have to get Jason too,” Billy said, and Dane nodded.

“We will,” he said. At least the police, cruel as they might be, would not, he thought, kill his friend. Not yet. “He was trying to find me?”

“Yeah.”

“We will. As soon as I’ve-” His words ended.

“Do you want to tell me?” Billy said. “What happened?”

And what kind of bleeding stupid question was that? he asked himself the moment it was out, into the quiet that followed. He said nothing as Dane said nothing and they only walked, and at last Dane said, “The Tattoo was there.”

“You saw him?”

“I couldn’t see nothing. But he was; I heard him. Talking through one of his things. He’s desperate. He’s under attack. Some of his business. From monsterherds. If he doesn’t know Grisamentum’s back he most certainly fucking suspects it by now.” His throat was untouched, but Dane croaked with the memory of damage, from the times it had been cut.

“What did he want to know from you?”

“Where the kraken is. Where you are.”

“Did you-?”

“No.” Dane said it with a kind of wonder. “No.”

“I thought they’d…”

“Yeah,” Dane said. “Yeah they did kill me,” he said. But he had come back. Even if it was by their malevolent interventions, Dane had come back. How many martyrs emerge from martyrdom’s other side?

“He can feel something,” Dane said. “Like we all can.” He closed his eyes, he stretched out his arms. “He knows the angels are walking…”

“I have to tell you about that,” Billy said.

“In a minute. It’s not just about wanting it for power anymore. He knows there’s an end and he knows it’s something to do with the kraken and he’s going insane because he thinks if he can get it maybe he can stop what’s happening. He can’t. He won’t. He’ll turn whatever’s happening into… something. We can stop whatever it is from happening.”

“The Londonmancers don’t seem to have managed that,” Billy said.

“No?” Dane turned to him, looking all new. “Maybe the universe has been waiting for me.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

So when they got to the Londonmancers, Dane said, simply, take me there now.

“WE HAVE TO BE CAREFUL,” SAIRA SAID.

“Now,” said Dane.

“You can’t be seen with us,” she said, and Billy laid his hand on Dane’s arm. Easy. A little rushed preparation. Saira and Fitch went in Fitch’s little car, leaving Dane to steal another to follow. They gave him a knack-fucked satnav, a little handheld unit into which Dane plugged a cloth scrap with one drip of Saira’s blood-she had cut herself right there, in front of him, good faith.

“Why would we try to get away from you?” she pleaded. “We need each other.”

Billy and Dane swept rubbish in their wake. They looked disguised by night, by how unremarkable they were. That fooled Billy not at all, and he kept his phaser up. “It’s only a matter of time before we get found again,” he said. “Where the hell are Goss and Subby?”

No one knew. They’d been and gone. Was that the end of it? No one believed that. But they were out of the city-that was obvious from the way everyone felt a little more oxygenated. We’re looking for something in far-off lands, is what Goss had supposedly said to someone they’d unaccountably left alive.

The satnav blinked at them and pointed them through streets, at Saira’s movement. “Look,” said Billy. “Watch her. Evasive manoeuvres.”

As they approached London’s edges Billy felt risingly strange. “Where is she going?” Wati said. He was clipped to peer from the top of Billy’s pocket.

“The sea couldn’t see it, or hear it,” Billy said. They turned onto the North Circular, the city ringroad, and traced a way out east. “They’re… Look, look.”

There was the car, stationary, and there, pulled over onto the hard shoulder, was a lorry. Large-not one of the really huge articulateds that filled streets like poured-in concrete, but big enough, way larger than most house-movers. There was some forgettable logo on its sides. They pulled in behind it and the rear doors opened minutely. Saira beckoned. She pulled the door to behind them as they hauled into the dark insides. Wati could not enter past repulsive fields. He whispered and went out away to his other front, his union war. The vehicle started again. Striplights came on.

Strapped in place in the trailer’s centre, cushioned and surrounded with thick industrial cording stretched to the edges and corners, holding it so it barely jostled on the steel table, was the tank. And in it, placid in its death-long bath, was the kraken.

THE LORRY VEERED A LITTLE, SENDING A LAP OF LIQUID UP THE tank’s inside. The movement clouded the preserving liquid. There were the knotted arms, the gone eyes. Architeuthis. Billy almost whispered hello.

A couple of other Londonmancers, more of the conclave within the already secretive sect, were there. There were tools. Microscopes, scalpels, computers loaded with biological modelling software and sluggish 3G connections. Centrifuges. Chairs, books, a cabinet of weapons, a microwave, chunks of masonry torn from London walls, bunks built into the truck’s sides.

Nothing moved a moment but the truck and the shreds of skin in Formalin. Of course it travelled, so as not to snag attention. A weight of animal godhead like that couldn’t but become meaning: stay fixed and people would notice. So it was escorted in a circle like an aging king. Its motion hid it, as must the scraps of gris-gris stuff, the offcuts, the accoutrements nailed or placed in the vehicle’s interior.

“Who’s driving?” Billy said. He turned.

Dane was on his knees. He knelt close to the tank. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. His hands were clasped. He was weeping.

EVEN THE LONDONMANCERS, USED TO STRANGE FERVOURS, STEPPED back. Dane murmured. He prayed half audibly. Billy could not hear what it was he said, but he remembered a snip that he had read in the teuthic canon, a phrase: Kraken, with your reaching, feeling the world to understand it, feel and understand me, your meaningless child, now.

The passion ran as long as it would run, and it was a long time. Dane opened weepy eyes. He touched the glass. “Thank you,” he said, again and again, to the tank. He stood at last.

“Thank you,” he said to the room.

“I can’t fucking believe you,” he screamed suddenly. “Why would you do this, why wouldn’t you tell me?” He slumped, and made a face that Billy realised he must have made when he was being tortured to death. “But you took care of, of, of it,” he said. “Of my god.”

DANE SANK AGAIN. POOR TORTURED MAN. HE PRAYED. BILLY PUT ON the long full-arm rubber gloves, like a vet’s, the Londonmancers provided. They-well, their little inner cabal-watched him.

He did not know exactly what he was looking for. He looked at Dane until Dane saw him do so and did not stop him or say anything, and with that permission Billy took off the lid and reached through the cold broth of dead cells and chemicals. He touched the specimen. It was dense, coldly and deadly dense.

We found you, he thought.

“What’s going on?” said Saira.

Billy clenched, but there was no twitch of time now. He pressed into the flesh to feel what he would feel. He ran his hands along it, parted its parts, gently, pressed his fingertips into the suckers that acned the dead animal’s limbs. It could not vacuum him, but the very shape of those pads stuck them for a moment to him, as if it were gripping, all dead as it was. He heard Fitch make some noise like huh. Then Fitch said, “I need… I need to read…”

“I don’t think you do,” Billy said, without turning. He pressed down. What’s this, then? he thought, but no knowledge crept in through his fingertips, his own inadequate ten tentacles. He shook his head: no haptic gnosis, no insight. There was nothing, no knowledge of what would happen, or why, or what it was of this fucking squid, this squid, why this squid? Why would it usher in the end?

Because it still would.

“I don’t think you need to be a seer to know that,” he said. “Cut open the city you’ll see the same thing.” He turned and held his arms up like a surgeon in a sterile field, as they dripped toxins. “I know we were hoping,” he said. “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” He nodded at Dane. “He’s come back from the dead for this, you know? That’s got to be written somewhere. Can’t tell me there’s no verses about that somewhere. And then you’ve got me. That’s two of us must be all over some scripture like a bloody rash, so you might think this’d change stuff.” He peeled off a glove. “But come on.” He shrugged. “It’s still the same.”

Maybe it was because it was a misunderstanding. He, Billy, had been chosen by the angel of memory for some stupid error, some misapprehended gag. Specimen magic, not the alien majesty of the benthic tentacular.

“Don’t matter,” Dane said, surprising him, as if he’d spoken aloud. “How’d you think messiahs get chosen?”

Dane was the real deal, had really gone into it and come out again, and his was real faith. One might have hoped that that was the end, the reuniting of faithful and faithee enough to heal the burning. That perhaps the Londonmancers-having failed to banish that finality by offering themselves as rescuers, believing finally that the intent of Billy and Dane was not to burn the thing themselves, handing control of the stranded deep god to its devotee and kind-of-sort-of prophet-might have averted the worst. But.

“Nothing’s changed,” Billy said. You did not, he was sure, need to be, as he was, a mistaken beloved of an angel to feel it. London was still wrong. You could hear the not-ending of tension in the city, the continuance not of fights but of a particular kind of fights, the terror of it all.

Everything was still going to burn.

SAIRA SAT, DEFEATED. SHE HEFTED A CLUTCH OF BRICKS AND MORTAR anxiously, a wound torn from a wall. She kneaded it. In her hands and knack all the city’s separate scobs and bits and pieces were the plastic matter of London. She prodded and pulled at the bricks and they squelched silently into other bricks. She dug in her fingers and made the stuff into other Londonness-a mass of food wrappers, a knot of piping, a torn-off railing top, a car’s muffler.

“What now?” It was Saira who said it, at last, but it could have been any of them. She held out her hand and Billy pulled her up. Her hand was sticky with Londongrease.

“You remember Al Adler?” Billy said. “Who you killed?” She was too tired to wince. “Know who he was working for? Grisamentum.”

She stared at him. “Grisamentum’s dead.”

“No. He’s not. Dane… He’s not.” She stared. “What that has to do with anything I don’t know. But it was Adler who… started this. With you. And he was still with Grisamentum when he did. Place your bets whose plan it was.

“We know what’s happening’s close, now, and we know it starts when the squid burns,” he said. “So I suppose we have to keep trying. We just have to keep it safe. Maybe if we can do that, keep it unburnt past… the night… we’ll be okay. All we can do’s keep looking. The Tattoo’s got no reason to burn the world. Neither did Al. Neither does Grisamentum, whatever their plan was.” He shook his head. “It’s something else. We have to try to keep this thing safe.”

“Let’s go, then.” Everyone looked at Dane. It was the first thing he had said for a long time that was not muttered devotion to his dead god. He stood, looking reconfigured. “You keep it safe,” he said to Saira. “We can’t be here. We’re too dangerous. We’ll do the stuff you’re saying,” he said to Billy. “First we’re going to get Jason out.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

“WHAT DO WE DO?” BILLY SAID. CRASHING THE HIDEOUT OF dangerous violent nutcases they might get away with, but the state? It’s too risky, Fitch had said. You have to help us protect it, Saira had said. There’s nothing you can do, they had said.

“Give me the satnav,” Dane replied. “We ain’t leaving him behind.”

“And maybe we can find stuff out,” Billy had said. “They might have some better ideas than we do, Collingswood and Baron.”

Dane had stared at the dead squid and made some sign. “We can find you when we need to. You keep my god safe. And let us out now.”

Now they waited. “We have to get Wati in,” Dane said. He spoke quickly. “We need to know the lay of the land in that copshop before we go cracking in. Where is he?”

“You know they’ve got stuff in place,” Billy said. “He can’t get in. Anyway…” Wati, guilty at his disappearances from the struggle at hand, was still at hasty rallies. “He said he’d be back when he could.” He wanted to help, and he would again, but Don’t you know there’s a war on? A class war that pitted rabbits against conjurors used to getting away with a stick and the scrawniest carrot, between golems and those who thought scrawling an emet on a forehead granted them rights, or any fucking thing at all.

Where gargoyles or bas-relief figures were close enough, Wati would deliver rallying speeches to whatever strikers maintained interventions (homunculi creeping in the angles between wall and pavement, rooks staggering). What might pass as twists of wind were pickets of militant air elementals, whispering in gusty voices as quiet as breath, “Hell No We Won’t Blow!”

There were scabs and sympathisers. Wati heard all the rumours, that he had been targeted-old news that-and that people had been searching all over the world, literally, outside of London, for some leverage against him.

The situation wasn’t great. The grind of economics forced some back to work, shamefaced, shamesouled where their faces were carved and immobile, shamewavelengthed when they were vibrations of aether. Rushing in a statued path all over the city, Wati kept arriving at aftermaths. Picket after picket closed down by spectral police spells on obscure, antique charges pressed into innovative use. Hired muscle in various dimensions.

“What happened?” Wati would cry, on emerging into a lion face made in mortar, to see a picket bust up, its members scattered or killed, two or three still there trying to fix themselves. They were tiny sexless homunculi made out of animal flesh. Several had been left just bone-flecked smears.

“What happened?” Wati said. “Are you okay?”

Not really. His informant, a man built of bird parts and mud, dragged a leg smudgelike. “Tattoo’s men,” he said. “Help, boss.”

“I ain’t your boss,” Wati said. “Come on now, let’s get you…” Where? He could not take him anywhere, and the animal-man-thing was dying. “What happened?”

“Knuckleheads.”

Wati stayed with him as long as he could bear. The Tattoo had been paid to close the strike down, and efforts were being stepped up. Wati went back to the dolls in Billy’s and Dane’s pockets. In agitation he trembled between the two as he spoke.

“We’re being attacked.” “The Tattoo…” “… and the police…” “… trying to finish it.”

“I thought they already were,” Billy said.

“Not like this.” “Not like this.”

“We made him angry,” Dane said slowly.

“By getting you out,” Billy said.

“He wants me back, and he wants you, and the kraken, and he’s getting at us through Wati. I heard him, while I was there. He’s desperate. He can feel everything speeding up, like we all can.”

“We have one of his knuckleheads, you know,” Wati said with the ghost of humour. “Got political after he joined. Got sacked, no surprise.”

“Wati,” said Billy. He glanced at Dane. “We need to get into the police station.”

“Where even are we?” Wati said. He had followed the aetherial ruts ground out from and back into this figure without even clocking his location. “Not that I can get in-they’ve got a barrier.”

“Near,” Dane said. They were in an alley out back of a café in the dark but for a fringe of streetlight. “It’s round the corner.”

“Jason’s inside,” said Billy.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Wati said.

“Wait,” Billy said. “Hold on. I’m thinking… how I first met Goss and Subby. It was the entrance that they had to get over. Collingswood didn’t make the whole place out of bounds.”

“It’s a lot easier to just guard a perimeter,” Dane said. “I get it.”

“So if we can get you past that…” Billy said.

WATI IN THE FOETAL, MOST INNER OF THE RUSSIAN DOLLS THAT Billy had snagged a long time ago, jogged in the mouth of his mouse escort, a longtime activist of the UMA. She had never spoken in twelve years of membership but was absolutely solid.

She was a big mouse, but the doll was still a big mouthful. The mouse was a speck of dark under headlights, disappearing under gates, up an incline of crumble, below unmoving cars and through cavities. “Alright, this is great,” Wati said. “Thanks. We’ll sort this out, don’t sweat it. We’ll sort this all out.”

Midway through the outer wall Wati felt a limit point, felt space try to keep him out, “Whoa,” he said, “I think there’s a…” But the mouse, little physical thing, felt nothing and ran on through, hauling Wati’s consciousness with her, straight on in, snapping through the block.

“Ow,” Wati said. “Shit, that was weird.”

The distinctive mutter of striplights. Wati was used to dramatic shifts of scale and perspective, to seeing from giant figures then lead miniatures. Right now the corridor was cathedral. He felt the pounding of an incoming human. The mouse waited under a radiator. Legs came past. Several officers. There was some emergency.

“Can you follow that lot?” Wati said in his small voice. “Careful now.” The mouse went after the earthquake footprints, down stairs, onto different carpet, into different lights. “He’ll be in a cell,” Wati whispered. The animal agent stuck to the shadows: crouched under the open door itself, of a cell around which the police were gathered. Near what was definitely blood.

“Oh fuck me sideways,” Wati whispered.

The mouse turned him slowly in its little mouth, so Wati’s eyes tracked up the mountain of dead body that lay on the cell’s bed, the red dead man. There were the FSRC. The other milling police shunned them. Among the bustle of voices two words rose to Wati’s attention. “Goss,” he heard, and “Subby.”

“Oh, no no no,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The mouse waited while he whispered miserable curses. “Okay. Okay. Let’s concentrate. Let’s find their office,” he said eventually. “See if we can get some information. Goss and Subby are with the Tattoo, and I thought he had these buggers’ backing. Something’s going nuts.”

The station was all afaddle with the crisis, and it was not so hard for a mouse to run room to room uninterrupted, looking for and at last finding signs of FSRC involvement-religious pieces, books one would not normally associate with the police. At Collingswood’s desk, CD cases of several Grime artists.

“There’s got to be something,” Wati said. “Come on.” He was exhorting himself, not his escort.

The mouse walked Wati on all the papers they could find. A laborious ambulatory notetaking. Wati was not altogether surprised when he heard voices approaching. “Go,” he said. “Go go!” But the mouse walked one last paragraph, so when the FSRC officers entered, they saw her scuttling from Vardy’s desk.

Collingswood moved at shocking speed, not like a human. She dropped to her haunches and lurched sideways, keeping the tiny animal now running for the space between a filing cabinet and the wall in her line of sight. Vardy and Baron had still not moved. Collingswood spat a word that made the mouse go plastic-stiff skidding with momentum to the back of the little runnel, where the animal lay immobilized as Collingswood shuffled toward her. She still bit-gripped Wati.

“Mouse! Mouse! Come on!”

“Help me with this fucking cabinet,” Collingswood yelled at her sluggish colleagues, and at last they shifted their arses and began to tug it.

“Mouse, you better move,” Wati said. He felt statues beyond the walls that he might, from here on the nonblocked side of the magic caul, jump to. But he muttered and muttered at the mouse, until she regained enough of herself to crawl from Collingswood’s fingers. “Get into the fucking wall,” said Wati, and the mouse made it excruciatingly around a corner of architecture while Collingswood swore.

THE MOUSE DRAGGED HERSELF THROUGH THE WALLS, AT LAST TO deliver the doll to the cool air outside. “Thank you,” Wati said. “You okay? Good work. Thanks. There’s, look, there’s some food over there.” Remains of kebab. “Get that down you. Thanks. Big time. You’ll be alright, now?”

The mouse nodded, and Wati skittered through a few statues to where Billy and Dane waited for the news of Jason that he would have to give.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

“GOSS AND SUBBY.”

“It was Goss and Subby.”

“Holy fucking Kraken. Goss and Subby.”

Goss and Subby, Goss and Subby, names both names and barks of outrage at those so named. They had been that way since year who-bloody-knew? Certainly for centuries the bereaved, the beaten, the tortured had shouted those names in aftermaths.

Billy and Dane were aboveground, in a neglected tower, a folly thrown up on a terrace by some exuberant Camden architect. As everything closed in and they ran out of Dane’s hidden, fake flats, they retreated to chambers above the city and below it. This one was empty and light and dust-clogged. They sat in striae of particulate.

“And it was all the names of old associates on the desks?” Dane said at last.

“Yeah,” said Kirk-Wati. “Whoever was with Grisamentum when he was around.”

“Oh, he’s around,” Billy said.

“Well. You know what I mean. It was all people who’d been with him. Necros, doctors, pyros.”

“Names?” Dane said.

“A geezer called Barto. Ring any bells? Necromancer, according to the notes I saw. Byrne obviously. Someone Smithsee someone. A guy called Cole.”

“Cole. Wait a moment,” said Dane.

“What?” Billy said.

“Cole’s a pyro.”

“I couldn’t see,” said Wati. “All we got was a university, some notes. Why? You know him?”

“I know his name. I remember it from when Griz died. I heard it then. He’s a pyro.” He looked at Billy’s uncertainty. “A firesmith.”

“Yeah, I get that, but why…”

“From when Grisamentum was cremated. Supposedly. But… he works with fire.”

It was fire that ate up everything at the end. It was fire and a secret scheme from Adler, a minor man, a player in the rubble of Grisamentum’s organisation, with unknown intentions, connected to this other one.

“Where is Grisamentum?” Billy said.

“We don’t know. You know that. Wati can’t-”

“It’s more than where, though, isn’t it? You said you don’t see any reason?”

“For him to burn the world? No. No. I don’t get what his plans were at all, but they weren’t that.” They were uncertain enough not to join him, still.

“We’ll find out,” Billy said. “Let’s go find out what Cole is in all this.” He stood, pushing through the layered air. He looked down at the cars. “What the bloody hell is going on out there?”

THE TATTOO WAS GOING ON. HIS HIRED GUNS RAGED AND VIOLATED trusts that had held for decades, all the way through everything, hunting for the quarry they had had and lost.

The Chaos Nazis were nothing, of course. Who was afraid of them now, drowned, screaming and up-fucked? The freelancers, the full-timer knuckleheads and others were happy to audition for the newly open position of lead bogeymen, and the UMA pickets were unwilling bit parts in these violent run-throughs and résumé-building attacks. Wati was gone from the room above Camden, back, gone, back, shoring up, fixing and failing.

“Tattoo’s gone fucking batshit,” Collingswood said. “What is he doing? Has anyone spoken to him?”

“Won’t talk,” said Baron. He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “We can’t bloody find him.”

“He doesn’t need our permission,” Vardy said. The three sat like a support group for the morose.

“Come on,” said Baron. “I don’t employ you two for your looks. Talk this out.”

“We’ve got the Tattoo declaring war,” Vardy said. “Sending Goss and Subby in here. Dealing with our prisoners.”

“And Dane and Billy sending people into my effing office,” Collingswood said.

“So it’s the office intrusion that particularly bothers you,” Baron said angrily. “It’s having people rummage around in the pens that really got your goat, Kath…”

She stared at him. “Yeah,” she said. “That and the thing with the horrible death thing.”

Another round of staring.

“No one gives a shit about us anymore,” Baron said. “We’re just in the middle. It’s bad for the soul, that sort of thing.”

“Christ, boss,” said Collingswood. “Perk the fuck up.”

“We’re not running buggery fuck,” Baron said. “Billy and Dane’ve got more going on than us.”

“This won’t do,” Vardy said. He blinked quickly, formulating. “Sitting here like something. Everyone running around around us. Let’s assert a bit of bloody authority. We need to start bringing people in. On our terms.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Baron said. “We don’t know where any of them are.”

“No. So. We have to do something about that. Now look, we know what they know. One, they know about the end. And two, they know it’s because the squid’s bloody gone. And three, that someone, somewhere out there, for some reason, is planning things that way. So what we need to do is get the mountain to come to Mohammed.”

Baron continued to stare. “Who’s Mohammed in all this?” he said. “And where’s the mountain?”

“I ain’t climbing fuck,” Collingswood said.

“We need to fish for them,” Vardy said.

“Is this, like, the mountain going fishing now?” Collingswood said.

“Jesus Christ, will you shut up?” Vardy shouted. She showed no shock, but Collingswood said nothing. “We need to dangle what they want, what they’re waiting for. What’s going to bring them out? Well, what brings everyone out?” He waited, theatrical.

Collingswood-a little tentative-said, “Ah. Apocalypse.”

“There you go,” Vardy said. “They’re waiting for an apocalypse. Let’s give them one.”

In London, Heresiopolis was always the draw. Some midnight-of-all or other was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to nothing, leaving relevant prophets cringing with a unique embarrassment as the sun rose. It was a very particular shame, that of now ex-worshippers avoiding each other’s eyes in the unexpected aftermath of “final” acts-crimes, admissions, debaucheries and abandon.

Believers tried to talk the universe into giving their version a go. Even small outlandish groupuscules might make headway in ushering in their End. The FSRC had a decent reputation for helping clear up these potentials. But Vardy’s point was that the most dramatic of these Armageddonim-London had had to grow used to such arcane plural forms-were events in a kind of society. Spectator sports. To miss one would be a realtheologikal faux pas.

They were means to gauge who was in the ascendant, which group on the wane. The shenanigans of putatively final nights were something between fieldwork and social gatherings.

Baron and Collingswood looked startled. “It won’t work,” Collingswood said. “No end’s going to be big enough to get people out at the moment, not with everything else going on. You’d have to cook up something pretty fucking dramatic. And people’ve got their ears to the ground, they’d know it wasn’t real. They wouldn’t turn up.”

“They’d certainly turn up if they thought it might be the end,” Vardy said. “Imagine if the one apocalypse you missed was the real one.”

“Yeah, but…”

“No, you’re right, we couldn’t fake it. We need to bump up some little one that no one would’ve noticed scheduled… Ha. I say ‘one.’ ‘Something big.’ For the times when one apocalypse isn’t enough, ha.” He stood, all bristling. “A list of the sects we have an in with.” He clicked his fingers. “Everyone’s heard about the kraken by now. Right? And they know that whatever it is that’s coming has something to do with it. Don’t they? They do.”

“What is it you’ve got in mind, bruv?” Collingswood said.

“Everyone’s waiting for the end of the world. Let’s get in there first and bring it to them. Like you say, we can’t fake it. We need proper rumours. So we’ll have to make it real. And we’ll have to get as many details right, so they think… We need to encourage certain rumours, and the closer to the truth the better. We probably can’t make it an octopus, but who do we know with an animal god? Who could we persuade to bring their apocalypse forward? Word’d get out.”

He began to go through his files. After a second, Collingswood joined him. Baron watched them and did not rise.

“Are you two out of your bonces?” he said. “You’re going to come up with an end-of-the-world party, just to get everyone together…”

“What about this lot?” Collingswood said. Vardy looked where she pointed.

“I don’t think we have the clout to persuade them,” he said. They continued looking.

“Them?”

“No.”

“Them?”

“… It’s nothing like a squid.”

“What are you even doing?” Baron said.

“Yeah, but if we get rumours out quick, it won’t matter, it’s a big animal,” Collingswood said. “That’s what people would hear.”

“Maybe,” Vardy said. “A problem occurs to me,” he said. He pointed at something on another sheet. Baron peered at whatever they were discussing. “There’s another one coming in soon. In and of itself who cares, but it’s got no animal stuff to it, and it’s going to be difficult to get their prophets to delay. Or if we have them too close together, no one’ll-”

“Just have them on the same day,” Collingswood said.

“What are you…?” Baron said, and Vardy hushed him with a glance. He looked as if he were about to pooh-pooh Collingswood’s suggestion, but a stare of quite astonishing delight came over him.

“Why not?” he said. “Why not? If we have the right, the right keywords to the rumours, even then, one little everyday Armageddon might hardly cut it. So long as enough people think it even might be an animal god thing. It’d certainly get people talking… Could be a surefire way of making our little bait even more…”

“Baity,” said Collingswood.

“Dramatic. Maybe. Imagine if there are two?”

He and Collingswood looked at each other, snorted, and nodded. “It won’t change the, the real deal,” Collingswood said. “But we don’t even know when… Step up, boss-man,” Collingswood said, to Baron, and patted his cheek affectionately.

“Alright,” said Vardy. “So we’ve not one but two prophecies to, um, chivvy. I’m going to make some calls.”

Chapter Fifty-Nine

A CHOLERIC DELEGATION CAME TO THE EMBASSY OF THE SEA. There was no possibility such a troop could bicker with such an antagonist and not be noticed, and noticed they were, and in the wake of that confrontation rumours went everywhere.

Mostly, they weren’t badly inaccurate. A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.

The truth was adequate drama. A motorcade arrived in the street. Man after man, a couple of women too, helmeted as if they rode motorbikes but emerging from cars, stationing themselves at each junction. Tinted glass obscuring finger faces. No one walked down the street while they were there.

From within the street’s houses people looked nervously at the people in helmets and the night outside. You did not have to have a grasp of the details, and they did not, to know in a carefully unverbalised way that that bloody end house had long been a problem. From the largest car came two more helmeted figures escorting a scrawny third. Punk-haired and terrified. His mouth was covered. The guards walked him between them to the front door.

“Turn round.” The man obeyed that voice. His jacket had holes cut in it, through which stared ink eyes. No avatars, no workshopped figures, no mouthpieces: the boss himself. “Your fucking eminence,” said the Tattoo. His voice was perfectly audible despite the clothes his bearer wore. Looking out at the street, away from the argument behind him, the Tattoo-bearer shivered.

“I heard you visited some contacts of mine. They were holding something for me and you sort of intervened yourself. And I ended up losing something I had expended a great goddamn lot of effort and money getting hold of. So what I’m here to do is ask one, is this actually true? And two, if it is, do you really want to go down this route? Want to go to war with me?”

Again nothing. After long seconds the Tattoo whispered, “Answer me, your oceanship. I know you can bastard hear me.” But no bottle, no message from the letter box. “You and your elemental whatever. You think I’m afraid of you? Tell me there was a misunderstanding. Can you even tell what’s going on? Nothing’s safe anymore. You can burn, same as the rest of us. I’m not scared of you, and whatever you think, you are not safe from war. Do you know who I am?”

The way that maleficent ink said those last words, that old-hat kitsch threat, made it something again. If you had heard it you might have shivered. But nothing happened in the sea’s house.

“Think I won’t fight you?” the Tattoo said. “Stay out of my business.”

Had the sea invaded the Tattoo’s own halls it would have been an insult too far, and whatever the cost-and the cost of war against an element was big-the Tattoo would have waged it. There would have been bombs lobbed into the waters, that exploded and left holes of nothing under traumatised waves. Brine-killing poisons. And even though the Tattoo could not have won, the sea’s interest and breach of neutrality might have spread the war.

But no one would count the attack on the despised and disavowed Nazis as meddling, and the Tattoo would find no allies. The downside of employing bogeymen. Which was why the sea had risked its actions. People doubtless knew it had been there, though it had assiduously withdrawn every molecule of saltwater from the caverns carved under the pavement, the new oceanic grottos, but no one admitted it.

“Tell me what you have to say for yourself,” the Tattoo said. “Kick backward,” he said to the body he was on, and the man clumsily did, but the blow connected with neither the door nor with anything. “Fuck with my business again it’s war,” the Tattoo said. “Car,” he said to his body, and the man walked jerkily to the vehicle. The Tattoo was raging because the sea faced it down. Even the Tattoo won’t face down the sea, people said afterward. No one’ll face down the sea. That word found its way all over.

ANOTHER QUEASY LURCH OF HISTORY. IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE, A stutter, a switch, the timeline two-by-foured onto another course that looked, smelt, sounded the same but did not feel it, not in its flesh. In the clouds was more of that strange rage, more fighting, memory versus foreclosure in a celestial punchup. Every blow reconfigured the bits in Londoners’ heads. Only the most perspicacious gathered something of the reasons for their little strokes, their confusions and aphasia: that it was a part of the war.

Marge was part enough now of the hinterland that she felt it. Her head was full of abrupt forgettings and jab recalls.

It was a last night for her already. Resentful of and exhausted by all the impossibles, she had responded, to their great surprise, to a final pitch from some of her friends. A small group from one of the galleries at which she had exhibited-two men, two women who showed together under a collective term, the Exhausteds, they had given themselves based on perceived shared concerns. Marge, on the basis of her art, had once been dubbed a fellow traveller, a semiexhausted, a Somewhat Tired.

She had stopped hearing from her work friends, but one or other of the Exhausteds had been calling her every couple of days, trying to encourage her out to a drink, to supper, to an exhibition of competitors at which they could all sneer. “It’s fucking good to see you,” said a woman called Diane. She made pieces from melted plastic pens. “It’s been ages.”

“I know, I know,” Marge said. “Sorry, I’ve been getting really crazy into the work.”

“Never need to apologise for that,” Bryn said. He painted portraits into fat books opened at random. In Marge’s opinion his work was total shit.

She had thought she would feel herself playing a role that evening. But their rambles from pub to arty pub pulled her back into the life she had thought long gone. She had only a slight sense of watching herself, of pretence, as they went past tattoo parlours and bookshops, cheap restaurants. Sirens of police and fire passed them in tremendous rushes.

“Did you hear about Dave?” they asked her about people she barely remembered. “What’s up with that business with the dealer you were talking about?” “I can’t even believe I had to move, my landlord’s a shit,” and various other bits.

“How have you been?” Bryn asked her at last, quietly, and she just shook her head and rolled her eyes you don’t want to know, as if at a deadline, a heavy workload, time lost track of. He did not push it. They went to a movie then a dubstep gig, shedding Bryn then a woman called Ellen as they went, a late supper, gossip and creative bollocking. London opened up.

Miracle on Old Compton Street: Soho was fucking lovely that night. Crowds danced bad salsa, still clubbing outside Blackwell’s bookshop. The cafés bustled onto pavements, and a stranger with a spare cappuccino turned down by some disdainful prospect handed it with a shrug to Marge, who almost rolled her eyes at the world’s performance, but drank it and enjoyed every sip. Empty temples of finance watched from the skyline: bad times were not yet quite there, and they could overlook with indulgent window eyes as Marge played with her friends and just was in London.

It got close to midnight and seemed to stay there. She drank with the Exhausteds remnants for a long endless late-night moment amid cheerfully gusting paper trash and the lights of cars shunting around zone one as if the world was not about to burn. Marge had an appointment in the early small hours.

“Alright you outrageous flower,” said Diane when the calendar finally turned. “It’s been lovely, and it’s been too bloody long, stop acting up.” She gave Marge a hug and descended into Tottenham Court Road Tube station. “Be well,” she said. “Get home safe.”

“Yeah,” said Marge to her back. I’ll do that. Since when had home been home? She took a taxi. Not to a ghost or trap street, of course: the driver’s very expertise, the knowledge that got him his cab, would have hidden it from him. She directed him instead to the closest main street to her destination, and from there walked to the little east-London shack.

It looked thrown up out of discarded walls, wood, wattle, daub and brick remnants, on a tiny street of such mix-bred buildings, where a man she had found, via a convoluted online route, waited for her.

“YOU ARE LATE,” HE SAID. INSIDE THE MUTT-MADE HOUSE THE rooms were drier, finer and more finished, more roomlike rooms than Marge would have thought. Amid mould-coloured upholstery, paintings the shades of shadows and books that smelt and looked like slabs of dust was a computer, a video-game console. The man in the hoodie was in his fifties. His left eye was obscured by what she thought for a second was some complex Cyberdog-style hat-glasses combination, but was, she realised, without even a flinch or a twist of the lips, these days, the metal escutcheon of a keyhole from a door, soldered or sutured to the orbit of his eye.

It was attached to face toward him. Everything he saw was glimpsed as through a keyhole. Everything he saw was an illicit secret.

“You’re late.”

“You’re Butler, right?” said Marge. “I know, what can you do? Traffic’s a swine.” She took money out of her bag, a roll in a rubber band. If the world doesn’t end, she thought, I’m going to be buggered for cash.

The air in the room eddied, like interruptions in her vision. Things that should not, like ashtrays and lamps, seemed to be moving a tiny bit. “Anyway,” she said. “It’s you who lives where no taxi driver can go.”

“You think this is tricky to find,” he said. “There’s an avenue in W-Five that’s only in the 1960s. You try getting back into that. Protection, right, as I recall? From what?”

“From whatever’s coming.”

“Steady on.” He smirked. “I’m not a magician.”

“Ha ha,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. I’ve been told to leave it alone and I’m not going to. I’m sure you know more than me about whatever, so you tell me what I need.”

The watcher-through-the-keyhole nodded and took the money. He counted it. “Could be djinn,” he said as he did. “Fire’s what’s coming. Maybe someone arsed them off.”

“Djinn?”

“Yeah.” He tapped the keyhole. “That’s the thinking. Fires, you know. Anything you remember never been there, all of a sudden?”

“What?” she said.

“Things are going up in fire and never been there.” When she looked no wiser he said, “There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I’ve seen it.” He tap-tapped his eyepiece again. “But ‘seen it’ butters no bleeding parsnips these days. That warehouse burnt down, and now it didn’t ever was there. The bath shop and the Pizza Hut are joined up now, and the only ash blowing around there’s a bit of charred never.

“Burnt out backward.” He headed into another room, raising his voice so she could still hear. “They can’t get it out of everyone’s head yet, but it’s a start. There’ll be more, bet you a thousand quid. Might be that’s what you’re up against.”

“Might be.”

“I mean we’re all up against it but most of us aren’t out hunting for trouble. Anyway that ain’t the only apocalypse right now. You’ll have a choice soon enough. Which is bloody ridiculous.” He returned and threw an iPod to Marge. It was scratched, well used. An older model.

“I’ve got one,” she said.

“Ha ha yourself. Put it on but don’t turn it on, not yet. Wait till you’re out there in the world.”

“What have I got? Bit of Queen?”

“Yeah, ‘Fat-Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Bicycle.’ I don’t know what you’re going up against any more than you, so this is a bit all-purpose and you better be gentle with it. It should give you a little bit”-he held his finger and thumb apart an inch-“if it is djinn, and a little bit if it’s herders, or gunfarmers or Chaos Nazis or anyone else up and about-you hear all bloody sorts-or whatever of your multiple-choice end-times is coming. But don’t push your luck.”

“What do you mean multiple choice?” she said.

“There’s two on the way, turns out, is what I hear. One of which may or may not be the fire. Can you Adam and Eve that? So to speak. Some animal Ragnarok plus some other awful bloody thing.”

“What do you mean, animal?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“In a minute. Listen.” He pointed at the machine he had given her. “You’ve got a little guardchord, is all. It’s in there. Swimming about in the noise, and if you listen to it it’ll keep you safe. A bit. So you better hope you like it and don’t let anyone else listen. If you sniff trouble play it. Just play it all the time, sod it. Keep the bloody thing charged. Keep it fed.”

“What does it eat?”

“Music, gods’ sake. Put some playlists on there. Make sure you give it what it likes.”

“How do I know?”

“Never had a pet? Work it out.”

“How strong is-?”

“Not bloody very. You’re flying blind, like we all are. It’s a lick and a prayer and a spit of goodwill, so don’t piss and moan.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Alright.”

“It might give you a bit of time to get away from whatever, is all. Think of it as a head start for when you run. ’Cause let’s face it, you’ll run.”

“What did you mean about the choice?” she said to the seeing man.

He shrugged. “There’s way too many ends-of-the-world to keep up with, but this is the first conjunction I can remember in a long while. Seems like it’s animals and puritans, this time. Right now with all this going on. Seems a bit-”

“Animals?”

“Some animal god, they reckon-that’s what you hear, that’s what I see.” Tap-tap on the keyhole. “We’ll find out soon enough. I might not miss this one. Takes more than an apocalypse to get me into town these days, but two…? Right now? You should, though. Miss it, I mean.”

“I can’t. That sounds like what… people’ve been waiting for. And anyway, what with my little…” She shook her iPod, and he his head.

“It’ll just give you time to run,” he said.

“About that,” she said. Her mouth moved, but no sound came for a moment. “One thing I might have to get away from… Can this, can the music-thing you… I might see Goss and Subby.”

She waited for those names to do their bad magic. For the man to gasp. He only looked sad and winced.

“I know,” he said. “Think you get to be on that sort of shitlist and people don’t hear? That’s why you should stay away.”

“This, though?” she said, raising the iPod. “It’ll help, if I do… if they…”

“Against them?” he said flatly. “That thing? No it won’t. It won’t do nothing.”

“Thanks for the warning,” she said at last. “I’ll be careful. Still if… if you could please give me the details of those, of the animal Armageddon… I think someone I know might be there.”

Chapter Sixty

ON THE CAMPUS OF THE SUBURBAN UNIVERSITY, BILLY AND Dane’s vaguely purposeful scruffiness was camouflage. It had not taken long at an Internet café to check which room was Professor Cole’s. They knew his office hours, too.

While they were online Billy had poked around to find and check Marge’s MySpace. He saw the picture of Leon, the call for help, the number that was not her number, must be some dedicated phone. It shocked him how much it made emotion fill him. He printed more than one copy.

“If this bloke’s such a powerful knacker,” said Billy, “why’s he work at Shitechester Central Poly? And is it not a bit nuts for us to go up against him?”

“Who said we was going up against anyone?” said Dane. “Is that the plan? We’re just looking for information.”

“We might. Like you said, it sounds like this might all be down to him. The fire, the everything. So what can we-”

“Yeah. I know. We might.”

Wati would not come. The strike was dying, and even now his first allegiance had to be to his members.

“We don’t have time to wait. We have to find out whatever there is to find out,” Dane said. “This is the first lead we’ve had. So yeah.” That long stare had come with him out of the basement. “We do what we have to, and we be ready.”

Every one of their moves now might plausibly be the last, but they could not do everything, could not take care of all business. They did their best, just in case there was an aftermath. Dane spoke to rabbi Mo, a quick connection through stolen phones. Simon was curing. They were purging him of all those angry ex-hims. “He’s drained and weak, but he’s getting better,” he said she had said. “Good.” As if it were likely that it would, ultimately, make a difference.

Billy and Dane waited in the corridor, forcing smiles when Cole’s secretary, a middle-aged woman, and the three students waiting glanced at them curiously. Cole must have protections. They had made what desperate plans they could. When at last the student who had been with the professor left the room, they walked to the head of the waiting line. “You don’t mind, do you?” Billy said to the young man in front. “It’s really important.”

“Hey, there’s like a queue?” the boy whined, but that was all he did. Billy wondered passing if he had been so feeble at that age.

They entered, and Cole looked up. “Yes…?” he said. He was a middle-aged man in an ugly suit. He frowned at them. He was cave-pale, and his eyes were shaded ridiculously dark. “Who…?” His stare widened and he stood, grabbing at the clutter on his desk as he came. Billy saw papers, journals, books open. A photo of a young girl in school uniform between Cole and a bonfire.

“Professor,” said Dane, smiling, holding out his hand. Billy closed the door behind them. “We had a question.”

Cole’s face went between expressions. He hesitated and took Dane’s hand in his shaking own. Dane twisted and pulled him down.

“I ain’t going to take him if we go knack to knack,” Dane had said when they prepared. “If he’s what we think. At the very least it sounds like he knows what’s going on, and just in case he is the burner… the only chance we’ve got is to be stupid, and brutal, and fucking base.”

Dane brought Cole’s body down beneath him, expelling the man’s breath and locking him into place. He struck Cole twice with the weapon he pulled from his pocket. The way he held him Cole could make no sound.

“Billy?” Dane said.

“Yeah.” Billy found two places in the doorway where there were drill holes. He gouged with the knife he had brought, uncovering a scrap of flesh and thin chains, a wire figurine. He could see no other magics. “Done,” he said.

“Exit?” Dane said. Billy went fast to the window.

“One floor down, onto grass,” he said. He aimed the phaser at the groaning Cole.

“Professor,” Dane said. “I’m sorry about this, genuinely, but I’ll do it again the second I think you’re knacking. We need you to answer some questions. What do you know about the kraken? It was you wanted to burn it, wasn’t it? Why?”

Billy riffled urgently through the papers on the desk with his non-gun hand. He went to the bookshelves, found the collection of books and papers by Cole himself: A Particle Physics Primer, offcuts, an edited volume on the science of heat. He took the latter and saw, behind it, a second row of works. A slim book, that he grabbed, that was also by Cole, that was called Abnatural Burnings. He took another look at the photograph of Cole and his daughter.

“Come on,” Dane said. Billy shoved the papers into a bag. “Could be this is all nothing,” Dane said. “We got to get you so you can’t do anything, in case it’s not nothing. You’re going to come with us, and if it turns out you’ve got bugger-all to do with it and we owe you an apology, then what can I tell you? We’ll apologise. What did you want with the kraken? Why burn everything?”

There was a noise. Cole was staring up at Billy. Dark smoke was coming out of his scalp. Dane sniffed at the burning.

“Oh piss…” he said. Cole was not looking at him. He was staring at Billy, holding his papers, his picture. “Shit…” The smoke came from Cole’s clothes now. Dane gritted his teeth. “Billy, Billy,” he said. “Go.”

Cole smouldered and Dane swore and scrambled off him, shaking his hot hands, and Cole rose onto all fours and bared his teeth in the smoke that coiled like mad hair around him.

“What have you done with her?” he shouted. Flames came out of his mouth.

Billy shot him. The inventy phaser-beam slammed him into unconsciousness and the smoke dissipated. They stared at him supine, in the sudden quiet.

“We have to move,” Dane said.

“Hang on, you saw him,” Billy said. “He thought we were-” There was a knock on the door behind him.

“Professor?”

“Window,” Billy said to Dane. “We got to go.”

But the door was shoved suddenly and sent Billy staggering. The secretary stood in the threshold, shadow coagulating around her raised hands. Billy fired at her, missed, as she ducked animal fast into the room. He tightened his gut, and time slowed for her, held an instant, and he fired again and sent her spinning.

Dane smashed the window and gripped Billy, cantripped. He pulled them out. His weak little knack slowed their fall by a second, still depositing them on the verge with a breathtaking smack, but without breaking bones. People stared at them from around the irregular quad. Billy and Dane rose and ran raggedly. A few braver and bigger men halfheartedly tried to get in their way, but at the sight of Dane’s face and the phaser Billy waved they got out of the way.

There was a shout. Cole leaned out of the window. He spat in their direction. The stench of burning hair swamped Billy and Dane as they ran, making them gag. They kept running, did not stop, out of the university grounds, back into the city proper and away.

“THAT WENT WELL,” BILLY SAID. DANE SAID NOTHING.

“You saw the picture?” Billy said.

“You still got it?”

“Why the hell would he want to end the world?” Billy said. “He’s not a nihilist. See the way he was looking at it?”

“Could be unintentional. Side effect. By-product.”

“Jesus, I hurt,” Billy said. “By-product of what? Burning the kraken? He sent Al to get it? Why’d he want to do that? Okay, maybe. But you heard what he said. Someone’s took her. He thought it was us. That’s part of this.”

In the boarded-up building they squatted, they went through the papers. They scanned the mainstream physics, but it was the arcana that gripped them.

“Look at this shit,” Billy said, turning the pages of Abnatural Burnings. He could not follow it, of course, but the abstracts of the essays-cum-experiments-cum-hexes gave glimpses. “‘Reversible ashes,’” he said. “Jesus. ‘Frigid conflagration.’” It was a textbook of alternative fire.

“What’s reversible ashes?” Dane said.

“If I’m reading this right, it’s what you get if you burn something with something called ‘memory fire.’” Billy read the conclusion. “If you keep them hot, they’re ashes: if they get cold again, they go back to what they were before.” There was endless fire, that burned without consuming-notorious, that one. Antifire, that burnt colder and colder, into untemperatures below absolute zero.

Papers were folded between the book’s pages, bookmarks. Billy read them. “‘Behave and you get her back. Prepare three charges of,” hold on, “katachronophlogiston. Delivery TBA.’” He and Dane looked at each other. “It’s like a ransom note. He’s making notes for his work on it.” Under the typed words were scrawled pen and pencil.

“I suppose using that as your pad would inspire your bloody researches,” Dane said.

“See what’s weird about this?” Billy said. He held out the photo. “Look. Look at it. The little girl’s in the middle, Cole to one side.” The two of them were smiling.

“It’s bonfire night, maybe.”

“No, that’s what I’m saying. Look.” The layout was skewed, the fire to the other side of the girl from Cole, very close, lighting them strangely. “He’s on one side of her and the fire’s on the other.” Billy shook it. “This isn’t a picture of the two of them, it’s the three of them. This is a family shot.”

Dane and Billy squinted at it. Dane nodded slowly.

“The djinns are freaking out, people reckon,” Dane said. “Maybe it’s got something to do with all this. This was a mixed marriage.”

“And now someone’s got his daughter. He thought it was us.”

“He’s obeying orders. Even if it’s his stuff behind the burning, this isn’t his plan, he’s just doing as he’s told.”

“His kid. Find the kidnapper…” Billy said.

“Yeah, which he thinks is us.”

DID THAT MEAN ANOTHER PURSUER? WELL. THEY HAD NEVER BEEN unhunted anyway. That was why they stayed well away from the kraken on its circling journey. No matter how out of sight the Londonmancers were, obscured by the matter of the city of which they were functions, Billy and Dane were the targets of the greatest personhunt in memory, and they could not risk bringing that sort of attention to the enjarred god. Dane prayed to it, quietly but visibly, quite unembarrassed. He hankered to be in its presence but would not endanger it-any more than it was already endangered, what with the whole end of the world.

The proximity of that worst horizon did not mean they should forget, as they did, the more everyday hunters and knackers after them for the Tattoo’s lucre. The drab and frightening fact of that came back to them that night, as they worked through Cole’s papers, auditioned theories as to who might be behind what terrible action done to Cole’s child, as they walked a dangerous walk to a dingy café where they could access the Internet. A commotion sounded in some alley near them.

“What’s that?”

“It’s…” A drone between the bricks. A bounty-hunting swarm, it sounded like, some baleful hive thinker coming at them for payment in evil apiary kind. Billy and Dane matched each other preparation for preparation. They checked weapons and clung close to the wall, got ready to fight or run while the moan came closer under the noise of the cars and the lorries only around the corner.

“Get onto the main road,” said Billy. “They going to send it out there?”

“Or under?” said Dane, nodding at a lid in the pavement. Billy weighed the options, but hesitated, because there was another sound coming. Dane and Billy heard a glass-and-bone rattle, the slide of a jar on the pavement.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “It’s still following. It’s back.” A quick warning in his head, in an articulate wave of pain. “It’s found me again.”

A bee-mass turned into their sight. Spread out like a chitin-cloud wall, blocking their exit, but through those insects another figure darkly was visible, roll-wobble-walking. There was an eddy among the bloodymoney bees and an inrush of air as a seal was cracked. The buzz faltered. A smoke of insects gushed like reversed film out of sight, like steam back into a kettle, like something, and there was nothing before Billy and Dane but the angel of memory.

It showed itself to Billy for approval, having saved him. The source of his glass and time clench; he, mistakenly, its test-tube prophet. Could it feel his guilt at not being what it thought? Being promised by nothing to no one? Its body was again a Formalin-filled bottle, in which, this time, floated hundreds of specks, evanescing bodies of the attacker. Its bone arms were bones, its head was made of bone.

But it was much reduced. It had been destroyed, probably more than once, on its exhausting treks to track and protect Billy. It had dissipated and reconstituted. This time it had made itself from some preserving jar less than half Billy’s height. This time its skull was an ape’s or a child’s.

It chattered at him from the dark of an alley. He raised his hand to it. Exhaustion came over it-Billy could feel the echo in his head-and it shivered. The glass-bottle-and-bone sculpture settled into a more natural and complete still as its fleshless arms fell from it to become rubbish, as its skull head toppled and rolled from its slanted lid to crack apart on the pavement. Only its jawbone stayed, held on the lid’s glass nub handle. Dissolving bees bobbed in its swill.

Maybe its presiding angel force was remaking itself in another yet-smaller bottle with a yet-smaller bone head, back at its museum nest, and it would set out on its journey again tracking the power it had given Billy, the trace of itself in him, to find him or be broken on the way and try again.

Dane and Billy went to another vagrant shelter. They were glad when it rained: it seemed to batten down the burning smell Cole had brought on them that would not quite go. Billy still smelt it when he slept. He smelt it through the water in which he sank in his dream. Warm, cool as the sea grew dark, cooler darker cold, then warm again. Through black he saw the dream-glow of swimming light things. He was falling into a city, a drowned London. The streets were laid out in glow, the streetlights still illuminated, each glare investigated by a penumbra of fish. Crabs as big as the cars they pushed aside walked the streets made chasms.

From towers and top floors waved random flags of seaweed. Coral crusted the buildings. Billy’s dream-self sank. There were, he saw, men and women, submerged pedestrians walking slow as flaneurs, window-shopping the long-dead long-drowned shops. Figures ambling, all in brass-topped deep-sea suits. Air pipes emerged from the top of each globe helmet and dangled up into the dark.

No cephalopods. Billy thought, This is someone else’s apocalypse dream.

But here it came, the intrusion of his own meaning, what he was here for. From the centre of the sunken London came a hot tide. The water began to boil. The walls, bricks, windows and slimy rotting trees began to burn. The fish were gusted away toward the drowned suburbs, the rusting cars and crabs were bowled by the force of what came. And here it came, bowling like a tossed bus the length of this street, this underwater Edgware Road, that skittered under the flyover and turned. The kraken’s tank.

It shattered. The dead Architeuthis slumped from it, dragged the pavement, its tentacles waving, its rubberising mantle thick and heavy and moving only with the tide, the gush, flailing not like a cephalopod predator but like the drifting dead god it was. The kraken and its tank shards scraped and cracked and disintegrated as the water rushed and heated and a subaquatic fire burned everything away.

ANOTHER INSIGHT DREAM? REALLY? BILLY WOKE FROM IT TO WATI’S voice. He was sweating from the hot black ocean. The smell of the burn Cole had sent was still on him. Wati had come back. He was in the Captain Kirk. Billy found his glasses.

“Here you are,” the toy said in the little plastic voice. “Something’s happening.”

“Yeah?” Dane said. “Really? We nearly got burnt alive by our only lead, yesterday, and we still don’t know what’s going on.”

“Maybe this’ll help,” said Wati. “Maybe this is it. Apocalypse.”

“We know that,” Billy said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Sorry,” said Wati. “That’s not what I mean. I mean there are two of them.”

Chapter Sixty-One

THE WIZARD WHO HAD SOLD HER THE PROTECTION HAD, IN A gruff way, been too kind to answer her question and tell her where to go, if he even knew. But knowing where to look, now, with her own online contacts and link trails, it was not too hard for Marge to find out when, and even hints of where, these competing, overlapping or collaborative apocalypses were due to occur. The Internet debates were over how to respond.

bottl whisky & head under covers

got 2 b squid this is it

C U all in L

“Jesus, really?” Marge said out loud.

have to go cant miss whole world there

It was not that she did not care if she lived or died: she cared about it a great deal. But it turned out that she would not play safe at any price-and who would have predicted that? There were more messages from her friends on her machine. This time she felt as if by not answering them she was less turning her back on than protecting them.

Leon, she thought. We’re going deeper. She had her iPod bodyguard. She needed a lay of the land. If everyone who was everyone in that heretic cityscape would be there, there were things she could learn. And if it was the squid behind it, if this animal thing was it, if as the insinuations insinuated this was the thing incoming, then she might find Billy.

Anyone up for going? she wrote. Keep each other safe? Go as team see wots wot?

I duno

no

no

u crazee???

Screw them, that didn’t matter. Billy might be there. She knew that Leon would not.

Marge loaded playlists onto the iPod. She grabbed them at almost random from her computer, a big mix, using up all the available memory. When she was out, now, she felt watched by the world, under threat, pretty much all the time. She went walking, and she went as it grew dark, before she put her earphones in. She pressed random play.

The streetlights shone at her through the haze of branches, woody halos. She walked through her nearest cheerful row of kebaberies, small groceries and chemists. A voice started in her ear, a tuneless, happy, piping voice, singing push push pushy push really really good pushy good, accompanied by the noise of a record player being turned on and off, and something hit with a stick.

Marge felt bewildered and instantly cosseted, wrapped in that tuneless voice. The iPod screen told her this was supposed to be Salt’ N Pepa’s “Push It.” She skipped forward. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” she read, and heard not the familiar orchestration and that magnificent, once-in-an-epoch growl but a little throat-clearing noise and the same reedy querulous asexual tones as before singing in the roughest approximation of the track they try make me to go to the rehab no no no no no. She heard the repeat-twanging of one guitar string.

The singer did not sound so enthusiastic this time, and the envelope around Marge cooled, as if a gust of air got in. She skipped, to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.” gimme she gimme money money. The little singer was happy again and Marge was safer.

The voice liked Run-DMC. Marge walked patiently through its incompetent renditions of old-skool hip-hop classics. It liked some of the Specials-this town town aaah ah this is a is ghost town, with a double-tempo clapping. It did not like Morrissey. To Marge’s horror, it raised an enthusiastic rorty voice during “Building a Mystery,” a guilty Sarah McLachlan track that she could not remember why she had.

“Jesus,” she said to the iPod. “If you’re into Lilith Fair I’d rather take my chances with Goss and Subby.”

But though it sulked a bit when she fast-forwarded out of that, she was able to raise the little singer’s happiness on a repeating loop of Soho’s “Hippychick,” the initial Smiths’ guitar sample of which it rendered with a warbling badadadada. She had not been able to get the song out of her mind since she had heard it in the hidden pub. There were worse noises to have to listen to.

Marge walked into the most unwelcoming estate she knew of in her neighbourhood. She stood for several minutes in the hollow at the centre of the high-rises, listening to her protective companion croon, waiting to see what it would do when whatever happened happened. But she was left perfectly alone. Once two passing children on their bikes called something, some incoherent tease, at her, then pedalled furiously off cackling, but that was all, and she felt silly and ashamed at treating herself like bait.

We’ll have to see when it comes to it, she thought. As she walked home, the sprite in her iPod chattered fighty fighty fighty powers that be, its take on Public Enemy.

The night after that, she went, alone as she had no other option, to an outskirt of the city, an imperfect roadway helix, that she had not had too much difficulty establishing would be the epicentre. She arrived early, and waited.

“LISTEN, ONE OF THESE TWO GODS IS SOME KIND OF ANIMAL,” WATI said. That brought them up short. “With that, and what with all these rumours about the djinn and the fire, and stuff, I can’t help wondering if this might be it.”

“An animal church keeping itself secret,” Billy said. “Dane?”

“It ain’t my lot,” Dane said slowly. “I know scripture.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time there’d been a split, would it, Dane?” Wati said. “Some new interpretation?”

“Could there be another squid church…?” Billy hesitated, but Dane seemed not offended. “Could there be another one out there? Could this be some other kraken apocalypse?”

“A cell?” Dane said. “Inside? Doing a deal with the djinn? Behind all this? But they don’t have the kraken. We know-”

“They don’t have it now,” Wati said. “We don’t know what their plans were. Or are. Just that they involve the squid and burning.”

“What if this is it?” Dane said. He was looking out at nothing. “What do we do?”

“Jesus,” Billy said. “We go, we find out, we stand in its way. We’re not going to sit here while the world ends. And if it’s nothing, we keep looking.”

Dane did not look at him. “I got nothing against the world ending,” Dane said quietly.

“Not like this,” said Billy at last. “Not like this. This isn’t yours.”

“I gave your message to the Londonmancers,” Wati said. “They’re keeping the kraken as far away from this as they can.” Because if this were, if this did intend, if an event can intend, to be it, to be the end, then the kraken must not be near enough to burn. That would seem to be what might send the universe up with it.

“Good,” said Billy. “But we don’t know what capabilities these people have.”

“It’s tonight?” Dane said. “Where did this even come from? We should’ve heard about this ages ago. It’s obviously proper, and things like that don’t just spring out of nowhere. There should’ve been tekel upharsins and shit. I guess everyone’ll be there to find out what it’s about. The church’ll be there too.”

“I think everyone will,” Wati said.

“A conjunction,” Dane said. “Been a long time.”

It was inevitable that from time to rare time, two apocalypses might clash, but people should have known about it in advance. In such situations, guardians of continuance-declared saviours, the salaried police and the enemies of whoever was declaring an end-would have not only to end the ends, but step in between the rival priests, each vying to rout a vulgar competing ruination that potentially stood in the way of their noble own.

DANE AND BILLY TREATED FENCES AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN barriers, walls as stairways, roofs as uneven floors. Billy wondered if his angel of memory would be where they went, how it might move across this terrain.

Around the lit-up trenches of streets, where police were. As they came closer to where rumour said the event or events would be, at the limits of vision, Billy glimpsed other of London’s occult citizens-its, what, unhabitants? Word of the locus had spread among the cognoscenti, by whispers, text message and flyer, as if the ends-of-the-world were an illegal rave.

A space between concrete sweeps of flyovers. Where the world might end was turp-industrial. Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads.

“We have to keep out of sight,” Dane whispered. “Let’s find out what’s going on, check who this is.” Wati muttered to him, coming and going from their pockets.

Seers were on the roofs. Billy saw them, silhouettes sitting with their backs to chimneys. He saw the fuddled air where some made themselves not visible. Dane and Billy clung to service ladders on flyovers’ undersides. They dangled, while cars and lorries illuminated the wasteland. “Be ready,” Dane said, “to get out of here.”

“COLLINGSWOOD, I MAY NOT FORCE YOU TO ALPHA LIMA FOXTROT, but if I ask you if you’re receiving me and you are I expect a bloody answer. I can hear you breathing.”

Collingswood made an on and on motion to the unhappy young officer in the car next to her. “Alright, Barone.” She said Bah Roany. She flicked the earpiece. No lapel radios. She, and the few officers seconded to the FSRC that night, were in mufti. She sat slouched in a beat-up car near the gathering ground. “Yes, coming through, big up to the Metropolitan Massive. Rewind. How’s it your end?”

“We can see some predictable players pitching up,” Baron’s crackling voice said. “Nothing from our lost boys yet. You not heard from Vardy, then?” Collingswood shucked as if his plaintiveness were a mosquito in her ear.

“Nah. Said he had to go see a professor. I told him he was one already, but apparently that wouldn’t do.” She looked around at the fag-end landscape, her head thrumming like a bad receiver, aware with near certainty and very swiftly when the few late-night passersby passed by whether they were innocent or guilty of knowledge about the sort of thing that was going on. Spectators hieing for hides. Twitchers if dooms were birds. Her companion stared as she laughed and nudged him, as if she had spoken that aloud.

“Where is the sod? Bit much given this was his idea,” Baron said into her skull.

She had quite enjoyed organising it. It had mostly been Vardy driving, suggesting what to suggest to whom, when and how, what rumours to seed on what bulletin boards, which implications to leave unsaid. She had been happy to cede that to him. She liked the tinkering, but the strategic overview he was welcome to.

Her own enquiries, in venues less epochally inclined than those where Vardy did his musings, closer to that everyday border between religion and murder, proceeded slowly. It was the gunfarmers she was trying to track down. No matter how bloody monkish they were, ultimately they got paid to kill people, and that meant, in some form or other be they ever so abstracted and magic, receipts. And where there was that sort of trail, there would be chatter, a smidge of which, slow though it still was, was wending into her shell-likes.

Collingswood kept only the most vague tabs on who Vardy was manipulating how: she simply did not care enough. Perhaps a part of her thought that wasn’t sensible, that she’d do well to learn that game, but, she thought, she would always be happy to subcontract to the Machiavellis of this city. What she liked doing was what she was good at. And what clues she had sowed about the questionable ends she and Vardy had cooked up were eminently, obviously persuasive. Soon, perhaps, she might do some arresting.

Collingswood said nothing to Baron. She could hear him keeping the connection open as if she would.

MARGE FINGERED HER CRUCIFIX AND IGNORED THE HUMMING tunes from her iPod, like the singing of a young child. Every few minutes people passed her, or she walked a little farther and passed them, talking into their phones and walking quickly, paying no attention to the scrubby afterthought waste where whatever it was was due to happen. Marge was watching the space, she would have said all alone, when a woman emerged from behind a lamppost too narrow to have hidden her.

Hey, the woman’s mouth shaped, but Marge could not hear her. The woman was in late middle age, in a stylish dark coat. Her face was sharp, her long hair styled, and all sorts of oddness about her. You’re here for this, she mouthed, and was abruptly much closer than she should have been with so few steps.

Marge turned up her iPod in fear. The tuneless singing enveloped her. Wait, the woman said, but the voice in the iPod made its way through “Eye of the Tiger” and it gusted Marge away, a London motion sped up and strange. It was all a bit unclear, but within moments she was in another place and the woman had gone. Marge gawped. She stroked her iPod thank you. She looked around and took up watch again.

WAS IT STARTLING THAT TWO RELIGIONS SHOULD NOT ONLY SHARE their last night, but commence the unravelling in the same spot? There had been repeated insistences of where the ends might occur, competing declarations, prophecies “examined more closely,” the venues growing closer until they met.

Representatives of many factions were near. Cult collectors took bets on the outcome; the vagrant magicians of London, many with familiars come crawling and defeated back as the strike entered its endgame, were ready to scavenge for shreds of power and energy that would be given off. “Oh no,” said Wati from Billy’s pocket, seeing his shamefaced members. “I have to… I need to make some rounds.”

It was depressing, Wati agust from figure to brickwork figure, whispering, cajoling, begging and blackmailing, pleading with members to stay away. His bodiless self was buffeted on such an excitable night. Gusty aether blew him into the wrong bodies. He circled the arena very fast. From the eyes of a discarded pencil-top robot Wati watched a woman shift with knacked escapology away from a collector. There was an air about her that drew him, and he would have gone closer, or into the figure she wore around her neck, but something started to happen.

“FUCKSNOT,” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. SHE LEANED FORWARD. A WOMAN continued her slow circumnavigation of the space. Collingswood made a little motion as if prying curtains a touch apart. A shaft of the night between them and the approaching woman grew momentarily lighter, a clearer line of sight. Collingswood peered and sighed and released her fingers and the dark came back.

The man beside Collingswood gawked at her. She did not look at him.

“Boss,” she said as if to air. “… Nah, boss, no sign of them, but I’m pretty sure who I did just see. Remember Leon’s lurve interest? She’s pitched up… Fuck should I know?… Well it’s her stupid fault, innit?” But as she said that last she was sighing, she was tugging on her plainclothes jacket and opening the door.

She pointed at her temporary partner. “Stay,” she said. “Good dog.” She was gone, turning up her collar, and he could hear her muttering as she approached the nervous-looking woman.

WATI WOULD HAVE GONE CLOSER, TOO, BUT FOR THE ARRIVALS. AT last, late, striding across the scrubland, in yellow jumpsuits, carrying equipment, looking side to side with pugnacity, came a group of shaven-headed men.

Chapter Sixty-Two

MARGE COULD NOT HEAR WHATEVER IT WAS THE NEW FIGURE suddenly approaching her said, not through the chatty, chirpy bad singing. She saw a young woman mouthing at her as she came closer with so much authority and swagger that Marge’s heart lurched and she turned up the iPod frantically. Space slipped. It lurched. The little voice in her ears shouted the excited chorus of a Belinda Carlisle track and the bricks around Marge rushed in tidal passing. She kept going, like a raft on white water, even laughing at herself while the motion still continued for so violent a reaction. How were you going to face whatever really bad was coming? She hadn’t realised how stretched taut and anxious she was about that promised finality.

It was as she was coming to rest, though the phrase felt odd in her head given that she had not moved-only the pavement below the walls beside and the slates above her-that the foot that had started descending in another place was yet to touch the ground, that she recognised the woman she had seen. That rude young constable.

WHO WAS SHOUTING IN FRUSTRATION AS THE MELTING-BUTTER residue of Marge’s presence sizzled away from before her. Her noise was interrupted, and she turned to spectate on the spurious event she had helped bring about.

“WHAT IS THAT?” BILLY SAID. THE NEWCOMERS WORE MILITARY boots, moved like soldiers. The roads beside the open space were half blocked by hoardings, and motorists who glanced down might take what they saw for council workers on some late-night necessary actions.

“Jesus Buddhists,” Dane said. “Nasty.” Dharmapalite supremacists, worshippers of Christos Siddhartha, amalgamed Jesus and Buddha of very particular shapes into one saviour, accentuating brutal identitarianism, a martial syncrex. Billy could hear a rhythm, a little chant as the figures came.

“What are they saying?” he said.

“Only one and a half,” said Dane. Only one and a half! Only one and a half! “It’s how many they’re going to kill. No matter how many they do.”

“What?”

They quoted the Mahavamsa, the reassurance to King Dutthagamani after he slaughtered thousands of non-Buddhists. “Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts.” One and a half was how many the Jesus Buddhists counted in the mass of dead after any of their depredations, according to careful religious accounting.

“Get ready.” Dane held his gun. “We don’t know what’s coming.”

Would the Siddharthans be stood up? Their apocalypse would win by default, but what then? The spectators just out of sight were there to see a godwar. Things too large to be birds, too faunal to be gusting rags of plastic, circled in the wind. End-times always came with harbingers, generated like maggots in dead flesh.

“Oh,” Dane whispered. “Look.”

In the lee of a big windowless wall was a gang of helmeted men. Surrounding another man. Billy was rinsed with adrenalin. The Tattoo. “He’s here like us,” Dane whispered. “To see what this is.”

There was the punk man in his eyeholed leather jacket. Two of the men in crash helmets held him, in an alley overlooking the field of fighting. He stared in the opposite direction from it, at nothing, at dark streets, while the Tattoo spectated.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Where’s Goss and Subby?”

“If they’re here…” Dane said. The Siddharthists were putting together a rough altar, carrying out secret ceremonies. “Wati?” But Wati was on rounds again. “If whatever this ‘animal church’ is doesn’t pitch up, we’re gone.”

There was a flash behind the night clouds, silent. It etched cloud contours. The air felt pressed down and the cars kept howling. From the altar was an unpleasant shining. “Here it comes,” said Dane.

All the way over them all, the cloud moved fast. It took shape. Church-sized clots of it evanesced, leaving-it was not mistake-a lumpy anthropoid outline in night-matter, a man shape crude as a mandrake root, a great cruciform figure over the city.

Billy stopped breathing. “If this is the end,” he said at last, “it’s nothing to do with the burning… What do we do?”

“It’s not our business.” Dane was calm. “There’ll be no shortage of people trying to put that out. If it’s just some piddling apocalypse, we needn’t worry.”

Then the earth in the dead space, the ugly dusty bushes and debris, rose. Men and women stood out of their camouflage and came quickly forward.

“They were there all along,” Dane said. “Well played. So who are they?”

THOSE COME FROM THEIR HOLES WERE IN LEATHER, BELTS CROSSED bandolier over their chests. They surrounded the Jesus Buddhists. The cloud-man loomed.

“Shit,” Dane said. He turned to Billy. “Waste of our time,” he said in a flat voice. “That’s the Brood. Nothing to do with a kraken. Different animal.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Nothing to see here.”

“… We knew it was a long shot,” Billy said.

From their power base in Neasden, the SV Brood were devoted to a wargod polecat ferret. Its uncompromising ontology ultimately precluded its iteration as one deva among many in the Hinduism from which it was doggedly self-created, and the Brood had become monotheists of a more reductive sort. The Brood’s inspiration in southern India, their predilection for fighting forms of Kerala, gave the Christos Siddharthans a peg for prejudice: they screamed “Tamils!” as the Brood approached, as if it were a derogatory term. They brought out pistols.

“Bugger this,” whispered Dane. “Ferretists versus racists. This is not the end of the world.”

Could you really feel the hand of destiny while pointing a Glock? The Siddharthists would not let chivalry stand in the way of their Buddhist rage. They fired. Broodists fell and the others leapt, unwinding their metallic belts. They were urumis, whip-swords, blades metres long, ribbon-thin and knife-edged, that they lashed in the crooked agile poses of kalaripayat, opening their enemies’ saffron clothes in ragged vents, drawing red lines so fast it took seconds for the victims to scream.

A sinuate mustelid presence coiled and uncoiled out of dust and nothing in the wasteland. “Red thoughts white teeth!” chanted the Brood. “Red thoughts white teeth!” (This long-promised ferret eschatology had been endlessly distant, until the probing and knacked prodding of the FSRC had helped midwife the cult’s little Ragnarok. All to flush out who was where.)

“Jesus,” Billy said. Cars passed. What did they see? A gang fight? Teenagers? Nothing? The police were surely on their way.

“Let’s split,” said Dane.

Two apocalypse figures clashed over the waste while their followers squabbled murderously. The god-functions struggled, an unusual storm.

“They’re late,” said Dane, retracing his way along the underside of a bridge.

“Who?”

“Whoever’s going to stop this.” Dane tutted.

“Wait,” grumbled Billy. “I want to see the apocalypses fighting.” But Dane snapped at him to come, so Billy sulkily turned his back on the celestial battle and continued through the crawl space. At the edges of the clearing, other figures had appeared. “Who are they?” he said.

“Some chosen one’s party,” Dane said without looking. “’Bout bloody time.”

Somewhere nearby, Billy supposed, Baron, Collingswood and his to-have-been colleagues were carting the wounded and dead to secret hospitals. Whoever saved the city would extinguish these little Götterdämerungen.

“Did you hear something?” Billy said.

More of those gustings, the things that moved like plastic? Yes, but something else too. Below them were animal calls, whimpering, the cough of foxes.

“We’ve been smelt,” Dane said urgently. Things rose from the alley. A composite thing incoming. Pigeons, grey clubfooted London birds, moving in frantic flock through whatever haze-hide Dane had knacked, made dove calls in panicked aggression. The pigeons bombed them with bursts of clawed and feathered dirt.

“There,” Billy heard.

“Shit, Cole’s burn, it marked us,” Dane said. “Come on.”

Something rose out of the below. A shaking cracked the concrete. The screws that bolted their walkway began to undo.

“Jesus!” Billy shouted. “They’re going to drop us.”

They descended at the first ladder, in just-controlled falls. Someone’s forces were coming toward them. Billy and Dane skirted the battleground, past startled hedge wizards and junior prophets. The birds still harassed them, taking some saurian aggregate shape.

THINGS WERE MOST BLOODY DEFINITELY NOT TAKING THE DESIRED shape. She’d always known this plan was a bit of a long shot, but she’d gone along in good faith. It didn’t seem stupid, it was worth a shot. Collingswood, still almost stamping from Marge’s ridiculously expert evasion-whose skills you freeloading, mate?-had not expected her and Vardy’s pet endings to run away with them.

She yelled at the officer partnered with her to come on, yelled into her hidden mouthpiece for Baron’s suggestions and orders, but whether it was static, magic or his anxiety there was only silence. If he was issuing commands she had no idea what they were. She did not know where to find him. The knowledge that a few other scattered police cells watched this unfolding did not comfort her. If she was having a time of it…

“Get your fucking arse here!” The young man tried to obey her. He wasn’t SO19. No firearms. She’d complained at the time. What was he supposed to do, carry her bag? All he was really doing was staring at the warring sky.

“… Tattoo… incon… can’t tell… bloody…” said Baron, or some Baron-aping airwave-dwelling thing. She’d dealt with that before.

“Boss, where are you?” She wouldn’t say she agreed with Baron about it to his face, but she could bloody well have wished Vardy hadn’t disappeared on this of all bloody nights, too.

“… too is here,” he said. “Tattoo is here.”

DANE HEADED FOR THE LABYRINTH OF LONDON. HE AND BILLY were shepherded, brilliantly, by the pigeons they thought they were evading. At a little square overlooked by unlit houses and guarded by leafless trees, men and women in municipal uniforms stepped out of the shade. They wore leaf-blowers, engines on their backs, hoses to gust fallen leaves from pavements. They aimed their contraptions like ludicrous guns. They sent whirling gusts of leaves toward Dane and Billy.

“What the hell is this?” said Billy. The leaves slapped him. The blowers were moving in careful formation, the leaf-mass taking whirlwinding shape like a bait-ball corralled by sharks. The men and women ran about each other, a puppeteer collective. The leaves they sculpted with their air machines took the rough shape of a man, three metres high, in tree-muck swirls.

“Monsterherds,” Dane said. Flicks of the machines, and the man’s head was a bull’s. The horns were tubes of leaf. “Get out of here, go.”

The men and women made the figure reach. It nearly closed its big leaf-gust fingers on Dane, but he evaded. The minotaur made of air and leaves slammed its whirlwind fist and cracked the paving stones. No mnemophylax came this time. Billy shot, and his phaser beam did nothing but send a few leaves flying. Dane said, “Byrne.”

Grisamentum’s vizier was a suspended arachnid on a wall. Her face was vividly outraged. She leapt and came after them, straight through the minotaur, which reconstituted the hole of her.

Dane headed back toward the flyovers, where spectators scattered as the pounding leaf-figure appeared. “Wait,” shouted Billy abruptly. He took a moment’s bearings, took several turns.

Dane yelled, “What are you doing?” but followed him, as the leaf beast, Byrne and the monsterherds came behind them.

At a new brick alley, Billy found what he was looking for. Facing them where the streetlet ended in rubbish, staring at Dane and Billy with unreadable emotion, was the punk man.

The Tattoo himself, his entourage, the guards who held the Tattoo-bearer still, were facing the other way, watching the last mopping-up operations in the arena. The man opened his mouth and stared at Billy and Dane, but did not speak.

Then came the gust of leaves and the shouts of Byrne, and a moment’s hush, and Billy and Dane were standing right between the Tattoo and Byrne, representative of Grisamentum, the Tattoo’s oldest, greatest enemy.

THE TATTOO HEARD THE SHOCK NOISES OF THE MAN WHO BORE IT, and shouted for his entourage to turn, and to turn him. The two forces stared at Dane and Billy, and at each other. Were those police sirens in some not-near-enough street? Billy thought. Were those the shouts of state functionaries on their way? No matter. The ’herders made the leaf minotaur stand and paw the ground. Billy could feel, like an animal running between Byrne and the Tattoo, a question-maybe we should focus on these two?-but the whole shape of London had been cut by their enmity for years. It was a logic too strong to set aside, as Billy had hoped. So the warriors of the Tattoo and Byrne and Grisamentum’s monsterherds closed on each other.

The autumn-coloured leaf figure ran, at its ’herders’ expert motions, into several smaller versions of the same bull-head man, lurching with windblown grace into the fight. The knuckleheads carried knives and slashed without effect at the leaves, which gripped them in temporary leaf-claws made solid. Dane smashed a helmet with a shot from his gun. The figure fell, the giant clutching hand of its head visible behind the broken dark glass. Dane ducked a leaf-arm blow and pulled Billy out of the way. His weapon click-clicked. They crouched by rubbish at the fight’s edge.

“Look,” said Billy. The tattooed man shivered in his oversized jacket while his guards faced the leaves and the gang fight took their attention. Billy and Dane looked at each other.

Billy decided. He ran, and spasmed, and time stuttered and glass broke. His phaser blasted one guard away. Dane followed him and grabbed the tattooed man, who stared in terror so great it was overwhelming to see.

“Go!” Dane and Billy pulled him with them-half hostage, half rescue-across to the dirtland where the last bodies lay for collection. There were police, now, figures shouting absurd arrest threats from and into the darkness, maybe slinging spells of some kind that could that night only sputter around like sodden fireworks. The man in leather swung almost like a child between Dane’s grip and Billy’s. He whispered. Below those noises another sound was audible, the growling, the rage and threats of the Tattoo beneath his jacket.