None of the correspondents would respond to her pleas for more information. She hunted their screen names on communities about cats, about spellcraft, about online coding and Fritz Leiber. She lurked on communities run by and for those who knew of the quieter London. They were full of rumours that did not help her.
Under a new name, she posted a query. hai nel kno wots go on w/skwid gt stole?? The thread she started did not last long. Most of the responses were trolling or nothing. There was, though, more than one that read: end of world.
IT WAS NOT WATI BUT A COMRADELY NUMEN THAT FOUND THE remains of the e-picket. The attackers had chased the half-leads they had extracted. The numen frantically sought Wati.
“Where is he?” it said. “We’re under attack!”
“He was in this morning.” The office manager was a woodenly shuffling kachina speaking in the Hispanic accent of the expat wizard who had carved it, though it had been made and recruited to the union in Rotherham. “We have to find him.”
Wati, in fact, was scheduling his picket visits around his other investigations. His probing had had results. Hence his visit to a minor, outlying centre of the strike, where dogs blockading a small rendering plant and part-time curse-factory were surprised and flattered by a visit from the leading UMA militant. They told him the state of the picket. He listened and did not tell them he was also there to look up a particular little presence he thought he had detected.
The strikers offered him a variety of bodies. They gathered a battered one-armed doll, a ceramic gnome, a bear, a bobble-head cricketer figure in their jaws, lined them up as if in some toy-town identity parade. Wati embedded in the cricketer. The wind made his outsized face bounce.
“Are you solid?” he asked.
“Almost,” one dog canine whimpered. “There’s one who says he’s not a familiar, he’s a pet, so he’s exempt.”
“Right,” Wati said. “Anything we can do for you?”
The strikers glanced at each other. “We’re all weak. Getting weaker.” They spoke London Dog, a barky language.
“I’ll see if I can siphon anything from the fund.” The strike fund was shrinking, of course, at a worrying rate. “You’re doing great stuff.”
The familiar Wati was looking for extracurricularly was, he thought, only a mile or two away. He groped through the thousands of statues and statuettes in range, selected a Jesus outside a church a few streets away, and leapt.
—And was intercepted. A shocking moment.
Out of the statue and something was in his way, an aetherial presence that grabbed his bodiless self spitting right sonny jim right sonny jim yore nicked you pinko cunt. It pinioned him in the no-place.
It was a long, a very long time since Wati had spent more than a fractional moment out of body, in that space. He did not know how to meta-wrestle, could not fight. All he knew how to do in that phantom zone was get out of it, which his captor would not let him do. you my son are comin with me dan to the station.
There was the reek of information, authority and cunning. Wati tried to think. He did not of course breathe, but he felt as if he were suffocating. The tough un-body of the thing holding him leaked the components that made it. As it choked him he learned random snippety things from its touch.
officer officer officer the thing said and Wati heard overseer and pushed back in rage. His recent route from the bobble-head was still astrally greased by his passage, and he clawed his way back into that tiny figure. Came slamming back into it and bellowed. The dogs looked round.
“Help me!” he shouted. He could feel the cop grab him, sucking at him, trying to winkle him out. It was strong. He clung to the inside of the doll.
“Get a brick,” he shouted. “Get something heavy. Grab me!” The nearest dog fumbled, picked the toy up. “When I say, you smash this motherfucker against the wall and you do it in one go. Understand?” The frightened dog nodded.
Wati braced, paused, then hauled the surprised attacker in with him, into the tiny figure. Wati looked through cheap eyes, crowded, feeling the bewildered officer jostling in the sudden shape.
“Now!” he shouted. The dog swung its heavy head and spat the doll at the bricks. In the tiniest moment before it touched the wall, Wati kicked out of it, shoving the police-thing back in, and pouring into a one-armed Barbie.
He heard the shattering as he slipped into his plastic person, saw shards of what had instants before been him go flying. With the percussion came a bellow of something dying. A burp of stink and strong feeling mushroomed and dissipated.
The dogs stared at the shards, at the raging woman-figured Wati.
“What was that?” one of them said. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Wati said. Psychic fingerprints had bruised him. “A cop. Sort of.” He felt his injuries, to see what he could learn from them and their residue. “Oh fuck me,” he said, prodding one sore spot.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
HE HAD BEEN A MAN OF VARIABLE AND VARIEGATED TALENTS. NO one would have called him a criminarch, though certainly he was not at all constrained by the technicalities of law. He was not a god, nor a godling, nor a warrior of any such. What he was, he always claimed, was a scholar. No one would have argued with Grisamentum over that.
His origins were obscure—“uninteresting,” he said—and somewhere between fifty and three hundred years back, depending on his anecdote. Grisamentum intervened according to his own ideas of how London should be, with which discriminations the forces of law and those in favour of a bit less murder were generally broadly sympathetic, according to his own knacks.
He was a man who won some hearts and minds. In contrast to the Tattoo, a relentless innovator of brutality for whom etiquette and propriety were useful for the shock they occasioned when being pissed on, Grisamentum valued the traditions of the London hinterland. He encouraged righteous behaviour among his troops, proper shows of respect to the city’s names.
He riffed, playfully of course but not as a joke, on the spurious remembrances of hinterLondon. It was long since the most fabulous of the bestiaries’ contents had walked, if they ever had, but rather than shrug and accept this postlapsarian cityscape of degraded knackery, he brought back into fashion the city’s monsterherds. Previously a rather ridiculous set of hobbyists, these invokers of a more maged past in the very matter of London—leaf minotaurs, rubbish manticoras, dogshit dragons—became his occasional troops. And with his passing, they had become again morris dancers of the supernatural, and nothing.
“It’s not like you thought he couldn’t die,” Dane said. “No such thing as immortal, no one’s an idiot. But it was a shock. When we heard.”
That Grisamentum was dying. He did not, as do so many little warlords, which in a terribly charming way he sort of was, obfuscate the facts of his case. He put out requests. He asked for help. He searched for a cure for whatever drab, lethal little disorder it was that had him.
“Who did this?” his partisans demanded in agony. They took no comfort from the fact that the truth appeared to be no one. Contingency and biology.
“He made quite a few deadists pretty rich,” Dane said.
“Deadists?”
“Thanatothurges. Had them in and out, knackers used to knacking stuff about death. People figured he was trying to find a way out of it. He wouldn’t be the first. But there’s only so much anyone can do. Met Byrne out of it, though. She was his lady. Gave him a bit of happiness, I thought, in the last year or two.”
“So?”
“So what? So he died. There was a funeral. A cremation, like a Viking thing. It was amazing, all like crazy fireworks. When he realised he was going he went from deadists to pyros. Djinn and people, Anna Ginier, Wossname Cole. When that pyre went up, boy, it was knacked, and that didn’t burn just like any fire.”
“You saw it?”
“We had a delegation. Like most of the churches.”
The fire scorching in every which way, burning out certain certainties, making holes
in things it had no business burning holes in, spectacular as a world of fireworks. The proximity of the venue—some treated chamber in some innocuous-looking bank or whatever—to Pudding Lane, the unusual nature of the fire and the reputations of the pyros that had prepared it had led to speculation that it had been a conduit, some knack-buggered spark scorching all the way back four-hundred-plus years, starting the Great Fire and burning a little hole for Grisamentum out of the present in which he was dying.
“Bullshit,” Dane said. “And anyway, whenever he went, he’d still have had the dying in him.” Because he had died, this man who had just sent a message.
“WHY NOW?” BILLY SAID. HE WALKED ALONGSIDE DANE—NOT A STEP behind him, as he might have done once. They were in Dagenham, in a street full of dirty and deserted buildings, where corrugated iron was almost as common a facade as brick.
“Listen to me, Dane,” Billy said. “Why are you in such a hurry? God’s sake.” He grabbed Dane and made him face him.
“I told you, no one except him knows we met …”
“Whether this is him or not, you don’t know what’s going on. And we’re supposed to be gone to ground. There’s a price on our heads. Wati’s meeting us tomorrow. Why don’t we wait, talk to him about this. You’re the one’s been telling me to think like a soldier,” Billy said.
Dane’s shoulders went up. “Do not,” he said, “tell me I’m not a soldier. What are you?”
“You tell me,” Billy said. They made an effort to keep their voices low. He took his glasses off and came closer. “What do you think I am? You haven’t asked me about my dreams for a while. Want to know what I’ve been seeing?” He had dreamed nothing.
“Of course we have to be careful,” Dane said. “But one of the most important players in London just come back from the dead. Out of nowhere. Why’s he been waiting? What’s he been doing? And why does he want to talk to me? We have to know, and we have to know now.”
“Maybe he was never dead. Maybe it’s him we’re looking for.”
“He was dead.”
“Demonstrably he wasn’t,” said Billy, putting his glasses back on. That did not follow. He had no idea how this worked. “How do you know he doesn’t want to kill you?”
“Why would he? I never did nothing against him. I worked with some of his boys. He never had a big crew, I knew them all. He knows the Tattoo’s after us, and those two … No love lost. Anyway,” he said, “we’re in disguise.” Billy had to laugh. They were in new uninteresting clothes, was all, from the latest safe house. “We’re going to have to do something about those glasses,” Dane said. “Total giveaway.”
“You keep away from my glasses,” Billy said. “If he’s been around all this time, and he’s not said anything to anyone … what’s changed now? You’re exiled. You can’t tell anyone he’s still alive. You’re a secret now, just like him.”
“We have to …” Dane was not a natural exile. Twice, three times he had referred to others of his ilk in the church. “Time was, when Ben was doing the same thing as me …” he had said. “There used to be this other geezer, and him and me …” Whatever he and him had done they did not anymore. Billy had seen those big men at the service; there was clearly muscle among the Krakenists. But there was a difference between a handy young devotee and an exonerated assassin. Dane was not old, but he was old enough to have been doing this for years, and these comrades he mentioned were all in the past. Something had happened to the church, Billy thought, in that time. A decline, maybe. You don’t self-exile out of nowhere.
Did teuthic agents retire? They had died, surely. The coterie of nonaligned colleagues like Wati and Jason from which Dane sought help, his half-friends–half-comrades, a network at odds with his lone squid status, did not share the absurd faith that drove him. Dane was the last of the squid agents and he was lonely. This revelation of relation to another power, a real power, with which he had history and allegiance, suddenly and unexpectedly revived, had snared him. Billy could only apply a little caution.
They were early to the rendezvous. It was a petrol station, closed down, boarded up, in a triangle of land between residential blocks and unconvincing light industry. The pumps were gone; the cement, striped with tire rubbings, was grown over.
“Stay close,” Dane said. They underlooked a flyover, and must be visible from the upper windows of the closest houses. Billy moved as Dane suggested, unfurtive, as if he had a normal job to do. That was how you disguised yourself in these places.
By the corner of the lot, behind engine remnants, was a passage over a low wall into the back streets. “That’s our route out, but it’s other stuff’s route in, too, so watch it,” Dane said. “Be ready to run like fucking fuck.”
The light dwindled. Dane did not attempt to be unseen, but he waited until a certain critical mass of darkness to take out his speargun. He held it dangling. As the sky turned a last flat dark grey, a woman climbed through the split in the fence and walked toward them.
“Dane,” she said.
She was in her forties, wearing an expensive coat, skirt, silver jewellery. Her greying hair was up. She carried a briefcase. “That’s her,” said Dane. “It’s Byrne.” He muttered urgently. “That’s her. The one came to work for Gris when he got sick. Sweet on him. Haven’t seen her since he died.”
Dane aimed the speargun from his hip. “Stop where you are,” he said. She eyed his unlikely weapon. “Stay there, Ms. Byrne,” he said. In the rubbly remaindered space, no one spoke for several seconds. Maybe half a mile off Billy heard the Dopplered wheeze of a train.
“Got to excuse me being a little jumpy,” Dane said at last. “I’m a bit shy these days, got a few problems …”
“Condolences,” the woman said. “We’ve heard that you and your congregation have had a falling out.”
“Right,” said Dane. “Yeah. Ta. Thanks for that. Long time. Bit of a turn-up your boss sending me a note.”
“Death isn’t what it used to be,” she said. She was posh.
“Right, right, right,” Dane said. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t we? We both know you didn’t bring him back. No disrespect, I’m sure you’re great at what you do, but. Not even Grisamentum or you could do that. Where is he? No offense, but it ain’t you I come to see.”
“It isn’t so much you he wants to see, Dane Parnell. Though it is about that god of yours.” She pointed at Billy.
I knew it, Billy thought, and had no idea where the thought came from or what it meant. He had expected nothing. There was silence. Billy scanned the surrounds, the silhouettes against bleak skies.
“What does your boss want?” Dane said. “Where is he? Where’s he been for the last God knows how many years?”
“We heard that the Tattoo’s sicced every bounty-hunter between here and Glasgow on your tail, for some tidy money,” Byrne said. “Your church wants you dead. And if that weren’t enough, you’ve got Goss and Subby coming after you.”
“We’re popular blokes,” Dane said. “Where did he go?”
“Look,” she said. “After that business with the Tattoo, it wasn’t as simple as we made it. It’s not that there was no comeback. He had … There were problems. And when we realised that Tattoo was still gunning for him—and that was a mess, we should have just killed him, that’s a lesson, don’t get creative with revenge—Grisamentum needed … some time. Some space. To heal. Look at it, Dane. No one knows he’s alive. Think what an advantage that is.
“You’ve felt all this.” She shrugged at the sky. “You can tell things are going wrong. Have been since your god was taken. Mr. Harrow, you were there. You were in the Centre. It was you who found it. And that’s not nothing.”
Was that grinding glass?
“The Tattoo’s after your god, Dane Parnell. He’s closing in. Listen to me.” For the first time there was urgency in her voice. “Why do you think you haven’t heard about Grisamentum for the last few years? You said it yourself. As far as London knows, he’s dead. That puts u
s in a good position. So don’t mess it up by telling anyone. You know and I know that whatever it is he wants it for, we can’t let the Tattoo get hold of the kraken.”
“Where is it?” Billy said.
“Yeah,” said Dane, without looking round. “Where is it? Billy thought you might have taken it.”
“Why would we want your god?” Byrne said. “What we want is the Tattoo not to get it. We don’t know who’s got it, Dane. And that makes me nervous. No one should have that kind of power. Certainly no one we don’t know about. You know as much about what’s going on as anyone. You two, I mean, with what’s in Mr. Harrow’s head. But we know things too. We all want the same thing. To find the kraken, and to stop the Tattoo getting anywhere near it.
“We want to work together.”
• • •
“OH, MAN,” DANE SAID AT LAST. HE LOOKED AROUND. “SHIT. WE should get out of sight,” he said to Billy. He turned back to her. “Grisamentum asked that once before,” he said. “Right here. I said no.”
“Not so,” Byrne said. “Last time he tried to persuade you to come to work for him. He’s sorry for that. You’re a kraken man—he knows it, I know it, you know it. That’s what this is about. We’re not pretending we don’t need your help. And you need ours. We’re suggesting we become partners.”
Dane stared at her until she spoke again. “Too much is going on, Dane. The angels are walking. We need to know why.”
Dane leaned back, his eyes still on Byrne, to whisper to Billy. “If this isn’t bullshit,” he said, “then it’s something. To work with Grisamentum? We got to think very seriously about this.”
“We don’t even know it is Grisamentum,” Billy said slowly.
Dane nodded. “Look,” he said louder. “This is all very flattering, but I haven’t even seen your boss. We can’t make this sort of decision like that.” We, thought Billy, with satisfaction.
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