“You know there ain’t much stuff going on at the moment,” Collingswood said. “With everyone scared shitless of the UMA. So whatever trails get left would stick out more. You saw the piggy.” She shook the lead. “Well, I mean, you didn’t, but you know what I mean. Bloody nothing. So what’s the story? This Leon geezer part of something?”
“Doubtful,” Baron said. “From everything we can get he’s absolutely nothing. Just some typical everyday tosser.” He made a brrrr sound with his lips. “If he’s got anything to do with the kraken he’s been in deep cover for God knows how long. I think he’s just got snagged.” Collingswood listened for text-thoughts. She felt for her brief familiar sniffing the faint para-scent trails of what magery was in that street.
“Well, poor little sod,” she said.
“Quite. I doubt we’ll see him again. Or Billy.”
“Unless Billy’s our villain.” They pondered. “Did you hear what Vardy was going on about this morning?”
“Where is that man?” Baron said. “What’s he up to?”
Collingswood shrugged. “I dunno. He said something about chasing up Adler’s religious life.”
“Did he have one?”
“I dunno, guv. I’m not the one chasing. But did you hear what he said this morning? About the Krakenists?”
There were rumours already, of course, about all aspects of the theft, the murder, the mysteries. Nothing could stop rumours moving faster than horses. It was part of Baron’s and Collingswood’s job to overhear them. Vardy’s theological snitches had told him, and he had told his colleagues, that there were whispers of the shunning of high-profile worshippers in the teuthic church.
There was also, still, that growing apocalypse mutter.
It was a seller’s market for relics right then. Who could doubt that religion and organised crime were linked? As the bishops of one secret Catholic order asked whenever questions of business ethics arose, was Saint Calvi martyred to teach us nothing?
“So do we still think it’s definitely godders did this?” Collingswood said. She sniffed. “Krakenists or whatnot? Or is it maybe just fucking crooks?”
“Your guess,” Baron said, “is as good as mine. Fact it’s probably considerably better.”
“I’m still getting bollock all from snitches,” Collingswood said. She sniffed again.
“Whoa,” Baron said. “You’re … here.” He handed her a tissue. Her nose was bleeding.
“Oh you little fucking wankface,” Collingswood said. She pinched the top of her nose. “You cuntbandit.”
“Jesus, Kath, you alright? What’s all that?”
“It’s just tension, boss.”
“Tense? On a beautiful day like this?” She glared at him. “What’s got your goat?”
“Nothing. It’s not like that. It’s just …” She raised her hands. “It’s all this. It’s the fucking Panda.”
Through a meandering chain of half-arsed jokes, that was the name Collingswood and Baron had given the end on the edge of things. The end for which even the most tentatively apocalyptic faith was preparing. The magic reek of it had Collingswood, as a knack-smith, on edge: toothached, crampy, unsettled. She had been referring to that fearful approaching whatever-it-was repeatedly, until Baron had suggested giving it a shorthand. It had started as Big Bad Wolf, from where it had quickly become Sausage Dog, and ultimately Panda. The nickname did not help Collingswood feel any better about it.
“Whatever it is has to do with the fucking squid,” she said. “If we knew who’d taken the bugger …”
“We know who the top suspects are. Certainly if anyone in the office asks.” The devout might pay a lot for the corpse of a god. The FSRC listened and fished, ho ho, for word of the secretive Church of God Kraken. But the disappearance might be a more profane, though knacked and abnatural, crime. And that would be a complication.
Bureaucracies turf-war. The FSRC were the only officers in the Met who were anything other than blitheringly inadequate to deal with the eldritch nonsense of knackery. They were the state’s witches and hammers of witches. But their remit was a historical quirk. There were no Wizardry Squads in the UK Police. No SO21 to police Crimes of Magic. The Flying Squad did not. There was only the FSRC, and technically they were not concerned with the powers of ley lines, charmed words, invoked entities, et cetera—they were a cult squad, specifically.
In practice of course it was staffed by and kept watch on all those with questionable talents. FSRC computers were loaded with occult hexware and abgrades (Geas 2.0, iScry). But the unit was obliged to maintain appearances by describing all its work in terms of the policing of religion. They had to take care, if they concluded that it was purely secular abcriminality behind the Architeuthis disappearance, to stress what links they could with London’s heresiarchs. Otherwise they would lose jurisdiction. Without cult-games at the heart of the squidnapping, it would be handed over to some brusque unsubtle unit—Serious Crime, Organised Crime. Antiquities.
“God preserve us,” Collingswood said.
“Just hypothetically,” Baron said. “Between you and me. If this is crims, not godsquadders, you know who our top suspect is.”
“Tat-fucking-too,” said Collingswood.
Baron’s phone went. “Yeah,” he said into it. He listened and stopped walking. He looked sick, and sicker, and old.
“What?” Collingswood said. “What, boss?”
“Alright,” he said. “We’ll be there.” He shut the phone. “Goss and Subby,” he said. “I think they found out that Anders gave them to us. Someone … Oh, bugger me. You’ll see.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
WHEN BILLY WOKE HE REALISED THAT HIS DREAMS HAD BEEN nothing but the usual cobbled-together fag-ends of meaning.
Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?
He knew he was at war now. Billy stepped out into it. It wasn’t his city anymore, it was a combat zone. He looked up at sudden noises. He was a guerrilla, behind Dane. Dane wanted his god; Billy wanted freedom and revenge. Whatever Dane said, Billy wanted revenge for Leon and for the loss of any sense of his own life, and being at war with the Tattoo gave him at least a tiny chance for that. Right?
They were simply disguised. Hair flattened out for Billy, teased up for Dane. Dane wore a tracksuit; Billy was absurd in clothes stolen from the imaginary student. He blinked like the escapee he was, watched Londoners hurrying. Dane took a couple of seconds to open a new car.
“You got some magic key?” Billy said.
“Don’t be a twat,” Dane said. He was just using some criminal finger technique. Billy looked around the vehicle’s interior—there was a paperback, empty water bottles, scattered paper. He hoped with a hopeless sense of fret that this theft would not hurt someone he would like, someone nice. It was a pitiful equivocation.
“So …” Billy said. Here he was, in the trenches. “What’s the plan? We’re taking it to them, right?”
“Hunting,” Dane said. “We have leads to follow. But this is dangerous? I’m … Now I’m rogue you and me need some help. It ain’t true we got no allies. I know a few people. We’re going to the BL.”
“What?”
“The British Library.”
“What? I thought you wanted us to keep a low profile.”
“Yeah. I know. It ain’t a good place for us.”
“So why …”
“Because we have a god to find,” Dane snapped. “Alright? And because we need help. It’s a risk, yeah, but it’s mostly beginners’ territory. People who know what they want go other places.”
There was magery there, he said, but strictly newbie. For serious stuff you looked elsewhere. A deserted swimming pool in Peckham; the tower of Kilburn’s Gaumont State, no longer a cinema nor a bingo hall. In the meat locker of an Angus Steak House off Shaftsbury Avenue were the texts powerful enough to shift position when the librarians w
ere not looking, which were said to whisper lies they wanted the reader to hear.
“Keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, watch and learn, show respect,” Dane said. “And don’t forget we’re hunted, so you see anything, tell me. Keep your head down. Be ready to run.”
It rained, briefly. When it rains, Dane quoted his grandfather, it’s a kraken shaking the water off its tentacles. When the wind blows, it’s the breath from its siphon. The sun, Dane said, is a glint of biophosphor in a kraken’s skin.
“I keep thinking about Leon,” Billy said. “I need to … I should tell his family. Or Marge. She should know …” It was nearly too heavy to articulate his feelings like that, and he had to stop speaking.
“You ain’t telling no one,” Dane said. “You ain’t talking to no one. You stay underground.”
The city felt like it was hesitating. Like a bowling ball on a hilltop, fat with potential energy. Billy recalled the snake unhinging of Goss’s jaw, bones jostling and a mouth with precipitous reconfiguration a doorway. Dane drove past a small gallery and a dry cleaners, a market collection of junk, tchotchkes in multiplicity, urban twee.
• • •
IN FRONT OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY, IN THE GREAT FORECOURT, A little crowd was gathered. Students and other researchers, laptops clutched, in trendy severe spectacles and woolly scarves. They were gaping and laughing.
What they stared at was a little group of cats, walking in a complicated quadrille, languidly purposeful. Four were black, one tortoise-shell. They circled and circled. They were not scattering nor squabbling. They described their routes in dignified fashion.
Far enough away to be safe but still startlingly close were three pigeons. They strutted in their own circle. The paths of the two groups of animals almost overlapped.
“Can you believe it?” said one girl. She smiled at Billy in his foolish clothes. “You ever seen such a well-behaved bunch? I love cats.”
Most of the students, after a minute or two of amused watching, went past the cats into the library. There were a very few among the crowd, though, who looked not in humour but consternation. None of these men or women entered. They did not cross the stalked lines. Though it was early and they had only just arrived, on seeing the little gathering they would leave.
“What’s going on?” said Billy. Dane headed to the centre of the forecourt, where a giant figure waited. He was uneasy being out. He looked constantly to all sides, led Billy with a kind of cringing pugnacity toward the twenty-foot statue of Newton. The imagined scientist hunched, examining the earth, his compass measuring distance. A tremendous misunderstanding, it seemed, Blake’s glowering ecstatic grumble at myopia mistranslated by Paolozzi as splendid and autarch.
A broad man stood by the figure, in a puffy jacket and woolly hat and glasses. He carried a plastic bag. He looked to be muttering to himself. “Dane,” someone said. Billy turned, but there was no one in earshot. The hatted man waved at Dane, warily. His bag was full of copies of a left-wing newspaper.
“Martin,” said Dane. “Wati.” He nodded to the man, and the statue. “Wati, I need your help—”
“Shut your mouth,” a voice said. Dane stepped backward in obvious shock. “I will talk to you in a sodding minute.”
It spoke in a whisper, with a unique accent. It was between London and something bizarre and unplaced. It was a metal whisper. Billy knew it was the statue that spoke.
“Uh, okay,” the man with the newspapers said. “You’ve got stuff to do, I’m going to split. I’ll see you Wednesday.”
“Alright,” the statue said. Its lips did not move. It did not move at all—it was a statue—but the voice was whispered from its barrel-sized mouth. “Tell herself I said hi.”
“Alright,” the man said. “Later. Good luck. Solidarity to that lot.” He glanced at the cats. A nod good-bye to Dane, and one to Billy too. The man left a paper between Isaac Newton’s feet.
Dane and Billy stood together. The statue stayed heavily sat. “You come to me?” it said. “To me? You have got some nerve, Dane.”
Dane shook his head. He said quietly, “Oh, man. You heard …”
“I thought there’d been a mistake,” the voice said. “I got told, and I was like, no, that’s not possible, Dane wouldn’t do that. He’d never do that. I put a couple of watchers on your place to get you off the hook. Understand? How long I known you, Dane? I can’t believe you.”
“Wati,” said Dane. He was plaintive. Billy had never heard him like this before. Even arguing with the Teuthex, his pope, he had been surly. Now he wheedled. “Please, Wati, you have to believe me. I had no choice. Please hear me out.”
“What do you think you can say to me?” the Newton said.
“Wati, please. I ain’t saying what I done was right, but you owe me to at least listen. Don’t you? Just that?”
Billy looked between the hunching metal man and the kraken-cultist. “You know Davey’s café?” the statue said. “I’ll see you there in a minute. And as far as I’m concerned it’s to say good-bye, Dane. I just can’t believe you, Dane. I can’t believe you were scabbing.”
Noiselessly, something went. Billy blinked.
“What was that?” he said. “Who’ve we been talking to?”
“An old friend of mine,” Dane said heavily. “Who’s rightly pissed off. Rightly. That fucking squirrel. Idiot I am. I didn’t have time, I didn’t think I could risk it. I was racing.” He looked at Billy. “It’s your bloody fault. Nah, mate, I’m not really blaming you. You didn’t know.” He sighed. “This is …” He gestured at the statue, now empty. Billy did not know how he knew that. “That was, I mean, the head of the committee. The shop steward.”
Readers approached the library, saw the little groups of animals, laughed and continued or, those who looked as if they understood something, hesitated and left. The presence of the circling creatures barred them.
“You see what’s going on,” Dane said. Miserably he ran his hands over his head. “That is a picket line, and I am in trouble.”
“A picket? The cats and birds?”
Dane nodded. “The familiars are on strike.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
FROM THE ELEVENTH DYNASTY, THE DAWN OF THE MIDDLE Kingdom, many centuries before the birth of the man Christ, the better-off dwellers by the Nile were concerned to maintain their quality of life, in death.
Were there not fields in the afterworld? Did the crops of the nightlands, the farms of each of the hours of the night, not need harvesting and tending? Were there not households and the tasks that would mean? How could a man of power, who would never work his own land while alive, be expected to do so dead?
In the tombs, by their mummied masters, the shabtis were placed. They would do it.
They were made to do it. Created for those specifics. Little figures in clay or wax, stone, bronze, crude glass, or the glazed earthware faience, dusted with oxide. Shaped at first in imitation of their overlords like tiny dead in funeral wrappings, later without that coy dissembling, made instead holding adzes, hoes and baskets, integral tools cut or cast as part of their mineral serf bodies.
The hosts of figurines grew more numerous over centuries, until there was one to work each day of the year. Servants of, workers for the rich dead, rendered to render, to perform what had to be done in that posthumous mode of production, to work the fields for the blessed deceased.
Each was inscribed at its making with the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead. Oh shabti, allotted me, their skins read. If I be summoned or decreed to do any work which must be done in the place of the dead, remove all obstacles that stand in the way, detail yourself to me to plough the fields, to flood the banks, to carry sand from east to west. “Here I am,” you shall say. “I shall do it.”
Their purpose was written on the body. Here I am. I shall do it.
THERE IS NO KNOWING BEYOND THAT MEMBRANE, THE MENISCUS OF death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustwor
thy glimpses—that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.
We gather, we intuit or think we have heard and understood, that there was effort in that place. There in Neter-Khertet, the flickered, judged dead of the kingdom had been trained into belief, strong enough to shape their post-death life into something like a cold unstable mimicking of their splendid eschatology. A vivid tableau imitated in stones, electricity and gruel. (What function of that post-dead stuff coagulated and thought itself Anubis? What Ammit the Heart-eater?)
For centuries the shabtis did what they were tasked. Here I am, they said in the dark unsound, and cut the uncrops, and harvested them, and channelled the not-water of death, carried the remembrance of sand. Made to do, mindless serf-things obeying dead lords.
Until at last one shabti paused by the riverbank-analogues, and stopped. Dropped the bundled shadow-harvest it had cut, and took the tools it was built carrying to its own clay skin. Effaced the holy text it had been made wearing.
Here I am, it shouted in what passed there for its voice. I shall not do it.
“IT NAMED ITSELF WATI,” DANE SAID. “‘THE REBEL.’ HE WAS MADE IN SetMaat her imenty Waset.” He said the strange place carefully. “Now called Deir el-Medina. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses Three.”
They were in a new car. There was something giddying about the new accoutrements they ferried with each theft: the different toys, books, papers, debris ignored on each back seat.
“The royal tomb-builders weren’t paid for days,” Dane said. “They downed tools. About 1100 BC. They were the first strikers. I think it was one of them builders that built it. The shabti.”
Carved by a rebel, that ressentiment flowing through the fingers and the chisel and defining it? Made by the emotions that made it?
“Nah,” said Dane. “I think they watched each other. Either Wati or his maker learnt by example.”
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