“Hi,” she said. “I’m Tyno Helig.”
They hung just a little back. Their fists were clenched. The front man’s jaw worked with tension.
“Who,” he said, “are you? What the hell are you doing? You said you had a message?”
She could see his contradictory emotions. Rage, of course, that they should be discovered and outed at work, when they were in mufti. Rage that they should be mocked like this, their faith scorned, as she could see him think surely this must be. And yet, as well as that anger, wrestling with it, excitement. She recognised that little bastard hope. “What’s your message?” he said.
Her plan had worked, then. Tyno Helig, no person but a place: one of the sunken kingdoms, the Welsh Atlantis. That, she had thought, making her plan, should intrigue them. “Who are you?” the man said.
“Sorry for misleading you,” she said. “I needed to get you out. I’m sorry”—she hesitated for a second, but sod it, she was too tired not to piss people off—“this isn’t about your aspirational tidal wave. I have a question for you.”
The man raised his clenched fist to his head, as if he would hit himself, then suddenly grabbed her by the lapels. His companions crowded them, shielding them from others’ view. “Our what?” he whispered. “You have a question? Do you know who we are? You better start convincing me not to drown you. Do you know who we are?”
SHE HAD AN IDEA, YES. OUTRÉ BELIEFS WOULD KEEP CROPPING UP IN her researches. She had trawled around hard enough for the info.
The Communion of the Blessèd Flood. The rainbow, she gathered from some furtive online theologian, wasn’t a promise: it was a curse. The fall didn’t come when the first couple left the garden: all that was some ghastly prerapturous dreamtime of trials. What happened was that God rewarded his faithful with eventual holy rains.
Mistranslation, she had read. If what Noah, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim or the same figure by any other name had been told to build was a ship, why did the Torah not say so? Why was his ark not an oniyah, a ship, but a tebah—a box? Because it was built not to ride the waves God sent, but to move below them. History’s first submarine, in gopher wood, three hundred cubits long, travelling the new world of God’s promise. It harvested the meadows of kelp. But those chosen for the watered paradise had failed, and God had been wrathful and withdrawn the seas. That landscape of punishment was where we lived, exiled from the ocean.
The Communion of the Blessèd Flood prayed for the restoration of the wet. Marge read of their utopias, sunk not in ruination but reward: Kitezh, Atlantis, Tyno Helig. They honoured their prophets: Kroehl and Monturiol, Athanasius, Ricou Browning, and John Cage’s father. They cited Ballard and Garrett Serviss. They gave thanks for the tsunami and celebrated the melting of the satanic polar ice, which mockingly held water in motionless marble. It was a sacred injunction on them to fly as far and often as they could, to maximise carbon emissions. And they placed holy agents where they might one day help expedite the deluge.
So this little cell, working in what might seem the most blasphemous industry of flood-defence. They were biding their time. Blocking piddling little backtides and holding out for the big one. When that final storm surged, that sublime backwash came roaring from the deep, then, then they would throw their spanners in the works. And after the water closed on the streets like a Hokusai trapdoor the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood would live at last in the submerged London of which they dreamed.
And now her message. It was the end of the world, everyone knew that … maybe, they’d thought, it was theirs.
“Count yourself lucky no one’s messed with you till now,” Marge said. She pulled out of his grip. “I never even heard of you until a few days ago. Someone said you speak for the sea. And maybe you took the squid. You know what I’m talking about. I need to know … Someone who did something with that bloody thing did something to my man.”
“You’ve got face,” he said. “I’m not saying that buys you an out, but you’ve got something.”
“I told you, man,” said another. “Everything’s messed up.”
“It’s not face,” she said. “It’s just that I’m really tired, and I loved him. He was with Billy Harrow … Billy Harrow.” She said it again at his reaction. The man rolled his thick neck and glanced at the others.
“Harrow,” he said. “Harrow? He’s the one took the kraken, I thought. That’s what I heard. He’s like its prophet. He went with Dane Parnell, when he ran from the Krakenists. It’s them you want to talk to. They’re the ones took it.”
“No they’re not.” They stared at each other.
“Dane ran from his church when the kraken went, to join Harrow, so if they’ve got something to do with your bloke …”
“I’m telling you,” she said. “That isn’t what happened. I don’t know anything about Parnell, I don’t know much about much, but Billy Harrow did not take the squid. I had a pizza with him.” That made her laugh. “And I know it wasn’t him. I think he’s dead, anyway. And if he knew where Leon was, he’d tell me …” She shut up, at the memory of the on-off-on-off streetlamp. “He’d tell me,” she said slowly. “If he could.”
The man huddled with his companions. She waited. She could hear them in debate.
“Do you think,” she said suddenly, to her own mild surprise, “that I’d be messing around with you if I had any choice?” They blinked at her. “I don’t want any of this, I don’t want this bollocks, I don’t believe your crap, I don’t want a drowned world and I don’t want a squid to be the king of the universe and I don’t want to get involved in this crazy shit, and I don’t even think I’m ever going to get Leon back. I’m just tired and it turns out”—she shrugged to say who knew?—“it turns out I need to find out what happened. You telling me you’ve got no idea what’s going on? What is the use of you people.” She was tearing up a little bit, not weakly or weepingly but out of infuriation.
“Whoever it is been talking to you,” he said, and hesitated. “They don’t know what they mean. We don’t represent the sea, we don’t … How could we? That’s misinformation.”
“I don’t care …”
“Yeah, I do. People need to know. Stuff’s brewing. How do you know all this? Who’s helping you?”
“No one. Jesus.”
“I can’t do nothing for you.” He wasn’t speaking gently, but not aggressively either. “And I don’t talk for the sea.” He spoke with irritated care. Her impression was that this man devoutly wishing for the effacing of the world by water, the reconfiguration of all humanity’s cities by eels and weeds, the fertilizing of sunken streets with the bodies of sinners, was a decent enough guy.
“You need to be careful,” he said. “Stay out of trouble. You need protection. This is a dangerous town any time, and right now it’s mad. And you’re going to tread on toes. Get protection. You’re not wearing a damn thing, are you.” He clutched at his chest, where an amulet might hang. “You’ll get yourself killed. No good to your bloke that way, are you?”
She was going to say I’m not a child, but his brusque kindness unmanned her. “Leave this alone. And if you don’t, go to someone. Murgatroyd, or Shibleth, or Butler, or someone. Remember those names. In Camden, or in Borough. Tell them Sellar sent you.”
“Look,” she said. “Can you, can I take your number? Can I talk to you about all this? I need some help. Can I …?”
He was shaking his head. “I can’t help you. I can’t. I’m sorry. This is a bit of a busy time. Go on now.” He patted her shoulder, like she was an animal. “Good luck.”
Marge left that dogged landscape of Woolwich. She did not look back at the horrible flattened dome, all white as if sickly. Her best lead had gone nowhere. She had more to do. Perhaps she would, as he advised, seek protection.
HER BEST LEAD HAD GONE TO NOTHING, TRUE, BUT SHE HAD BEEN A lead herself, though Marge had not known it. The revelation that Billy Harrow, the mysterious kraken prophet, might not be the force behind the godling’s disappearance, w
as important.
The armies of the righteous needed to know. The sea needed to know.
Chapter Forty-Eight
JASON SMYLE, THAT PROLETARIAN CHAMELEON, LISTENED AS BILLY begged him to take out an unpaid commission.
“You’re Dane’s friend,” Billy said.
“Yeah,” Jason said.
“Do this for him,” Billy said.
Billy did not know where Jason was. They had no time to arrange a meet. He had given Wati the number of the phone he had—without much difficulty, even in the miserable aftermath of that assault—stolen. Wati found Jason and passed on the number.
“Do you understand what’s happened?” Billy said. “They took him. Chaos Nazis. You know what that means.” Billy felt as if he knew, too, as if this was where he had lived a long time. Dane, unlike him, had had no angelus ex machina watching.
“What do you want from me?” When he spoke, even down the line, Billy felt as if he knew Jason from somewhere.
“We need to find him, and we need to know what’s going on. There’s bad connections going on here. Listen.” Billy hooked the phone with his shoulder and swung through a tear in wire into a fenced-off yard. “These Nazis are being paid by the Tattoo. And his people are also the ones doing shit to Wati’s pickets. Along with the police.
“We need to know how deep those connections go. For all we know the cops might be holding Dane. They’re obviously in some sort of cahoots with the Tattoo, they must at least know where he is. So we need you. But even if we could find them you couldn’t walk into the Nazis, it wouldn’t work, right?”
“No,” said Jason. “They’re not paid, so it’s a nonstarter. They’re committed, and I can’t hide behind belief. That and proper knacking’ll screw me.”
“Right. So you need to go into Neasden Station and see what they’ve got on all this. Find out what you can. Jason, it’s Dane.”
“… Yeah,” Jason said. “Yeah.”
Though his voice had not admitted the possibility that Jason would refuse, Billy closed his eyes in relief. “Call me when you’re done, tell me what you can find out,” Billy said. “Thanks. You need to do this now, Jason. Thank you. We’ve got no idea where they are.”
“What are you …?”
“I’ve got some other stuff I need to find out about. Jason, please do this now. We need to find him.” Billy disconnected.
How do you walk away from a scene like that? All Billy had been able to do, in the cold quiet overlooked by big dead buildings, when Dane had been taken, was follow Wati’s voice. The rebel spirit had led him from his pocket and from what few figurines it could find in that awful empty sector.
Billy said, “The Londonmancers.”
“Keep it down, mate,” Wati had told him from some la-la Billy did not even see. “No one’s going to help us.” That inner core, Fitch and Saira and their little crew, the stunned man Billy had shot and unintentionally press-ganged, could not come to his aid. Billy had no safe houses, no hides.
“Oh bloody hell,” said Wati.
As if it weren’t in trouble enough, the UMA had to act as babysitter for this suddenly bereft little messiah. But Billy had not obeyed his injunction to raise the metal lid out of the street, with intricate finagling and a strength he had not had a few weeks before, to slip into the undercity. Instead, Billy had paused, clenched without clenching, and felt time hesitate and come back, moving like a shaken blanket. He had told Wati to come with him, rather, and gone and stolen a phone. He had taken the innermost doll of a Russian doll set from some shop, held it, not his foolish Kirk, though he had kept that, up to his eyes, and said to Wati, “Here’s what we need to do.”
“OF ALL THE LITTLE TOERAGS WE EVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH,” BARON said, “the bastarding Chaos Nazis are the ones I hate most.”
He stood between Collingswood and Vardy. He was scratching his face furiously, anxiously. They crowded around each other to look through the reinforced glass into a hospital room, where a bandaged man was shackled by tubes, and by shackles, to a bed. A machine tracked his heartbeat.
“You actually said ‘toerags,’” Collingswood said. “Are you auditioning for something?”
“Alright,” he said vaguely. He sniffed. “Arseholes.”
“Fuck’s sake, boss,” Collingswood said. “Up your game. Shitfoxes.”
“Bastards.”
“Spitfish, boss. Fucklizards. Little cuntwasps. Munching wanktoasters.” Baron stared at her. “Oh yeah,” Collingswood said. “That’s right. I got game. Say my name.”
“Tell me,” Vardy interrupted. “What precisely do we have from them? There were several of them, correct?”
“Yeah,” said Baron. “Five in various degrees of injuredness. And the dead.”
“I want to know exactly what they saw. I want to know exactly what’s happening.”
“You got ideas, Vardy?” Collingswood said.
“Oh, yes. Ideas I have. Too bloody many. But I’m trying to put all this together.” Vardy stared at the man in the bed. “This is the Tattoo. We heard he was employing headsmen. I wasn’t expecting it to be this lot.”
“Yeah, bit of a breach of protocol, isn’t it?” Baron said. “CNs are a bit out of polite company.”
“Has he worked with them before?” Collingswood said.
“Not that I know of,” Vardy said.
“Has Grisamentum?”
“What?” He looked at her. “Why would you say that?”
“Just I was looking at all them files on your desk, of Tat’s associates. And you’ve got Grizzo’s as well. I was wondering what’s that about?”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, true. Those two … They move in lockstep. Always did, while Grisamentum was around. Which as we now bloody know—are we agreed?—it appears he still is. Associates of one could well be associates of the other.”
“Why?” said Collingswood. “That don’t make no sense. They hated each other.”
“You know how this bloody works,” Vardy said. “Friends close, enemies closer? Bought off, turncoat, whatever?”
She wagged her head. “If you say so, blood. I don’t know,” she said. “Griz’s bunch lurved him, didn’t they. His crew were all mad loyal.”
“No one’s so loyal they can’t be bought,” said Vardy.
“I forgot what a mad bunch he was cavorting with in the end,” Collingswood said. “Griz. I was looking at them files.” Vardy raised an eyebrow at her. “Doctors, doctor-deaths … Pyros, too, right?”
“Yes. He did.”
“And you reckon some of them are working with the Tattoo now, right?” Vardy hesitated and laughed. That was not like him.
“No,” he said. “It turns out not. But no reason not to check.”
“So you’re still chasing them up?”
“Yes I bloody am. I’m chasing all of them, every lead, until I know for an absolute bloody certainty that they’re not involved in the squid thing, either with Grisamentum, or with the Tattoo. Or as independents. You do your job, I’ll do mine.”
“I thought your job’s to channel the spirit of nutty god-bothering and write up holy books.”
“Alright, you two,” Baron said. “Settle down.”
“Why the bollock can’t we find the squid, boss? Who’s got it? This is getting stupid.”
“Collingswood, if I knew that I’d be commissioner of the Met. Let’s at least try to map who’s who in this mayhem. So we’ve got the Chaos Nazis, our wanktoasters—thank you, Constable—among recent employees of the Tattoo. Along with everyone else in the city.”
“Not everyone,” Collingswood said. “There’s gunfarmers about, but they’re on some other dime. No one knows who, and no one’s feeling very safe about that.”
“Well that’s got to be our squidnapper, surely,” said Vardy. “So who’s paying them?”
“Can’t track it. They’ve gone into hush mode.”
“So get it out of them,” Baron said.
“Boss, what do you think I’m tryin
g to do?”
“Splendid,” said Baron. “It’s like a Zen koan, isn’t it? Is it better or worse if holy visionary shooters are fighting against us alongside Chaos Nazis, or against them and we’re in between? Answer that, my little bodhisattvas.”
“Can we please,” said Vardy, “establish what’s going on here with that chap? Did any of them tell us anything?”
“Certainly,” said Baron. “He had to finesse how quick I got him to roll over, so under guise of glorying in the chaos he would bring by terrifying me with the truth, a-blah-dy blah-dy blah, this little bugger sang like the most beautiful nightingale.”
“And?” said Vardy.
“And Dane Parnell is not having a good time of it. They snaffled our exile, sounds like. That much he saw”—he pointed through the window with his chin—“before passing out. Which leaves little lost Billy out on his tod in the city. Whatever will he do?”
“Yeah, but he ain’t exactly helpless, though, is he?” Collingswood said. “I mean, just pointing out …” She waved her hand at the savagely wounded man. “It ain’t as if Billy’s got nothing fighting his corner, is it?”
“Vardy,” said Baron. “Care to give us your opinion?” He made a big show of opening his notebook, as if he didn’t remember everything about the description he was about to give. “‘It was a bottle, policeman, you law-worm, we brought chaos to each other, you scum, etc …’” he read, deadpan. “I’m going to editorialise. I’ll trim the epithets and skip to specifics. ‘It was a bottle. A bottle that came at us. It bit with a skull. Its arms were bones. It was a real glass enemy.’ I like that last line, I have to say.” He put the notebook away. “So, Vardy,” he said. “You must have thoughts.”
Vardy had closed his eyes. He leaned against the wall and puffed out his cheeks. When at last he opened his eyes again he did not look at Baron or Collingswood: he stared intently through the window at the crippled Chaos Nazi.