“Do you think I would let you come anywhere near me?” Paul said to him. “Did you think I’d collaborate with you? Do you think I’d let you be the muscle for this purebred scum evil motherfucker on my back? Did you think I wouldn’t kill you?” Paul spat at the dying Goss. Spat at the ground in front of him. “You’ve got this flesh basket to hold what makes you tick, and you think that’ll stop me? Goss, stop up your noise. It is time for you to go to hell and take your poor fucking empty little life-carrier with you.”
Subby was immobile. The blood was coming out of him slower. Goss wheezed and gurgled and looked as if he was trying to level some good-bye curse, but as Subby died with closing eyes, he died too. His last breath went without smoke.
And whatever else was happening—
in times and places all over—
unmentionably many—
that going out—
that finishedness—
rippled—
was very felt—
and every one of London’s bullied and terrified were for a metamoment, from 1065 to 2006, all in their own instants and entangled for a blink, in every awful situation, every little room where they were head-flushed, thumbscrewed, decried, name-debased, taunted, punched, sneered at, the foil of brutality, for a moment just then, for one instant, which might not save them but which would at the very least be a tiny comfort, for always, felt better—
felt joy.
PAUL WATCHED GOSS GO.
“What’s happening? What’s happening? What? What?” the Tattoo said. Paul ignored it. Marge ignored it.
She watched without motion, holding her head where Goss had hurt her. When Subby died—as if he was a “he,” as if it were more than a box with a face—he mouldered away. He crumbled into a disgustingness, and then that crumbled too, into nothing, leaving only a heart, a man’s unbeating heart too big for Subby’s chest.
Goss did not crumble. Goss lay there like the dead man he was.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said to her, at last.
“I needed him to trust me,” Paul said. “He never would have left Subby alone otherwise.” They stared at each other. The Tattoo screamed, forced to stare into the parking lot darkness where nothing was happening.
“What did you do?” the Tattoo said.
“I knew they’d find me,” Paul said. “And I could never take him. This was all I could think to do. I knew they’d hear what we said if we sent it from here, and I needed them to listen in and come. Can you help me cover him? Him.” He raised his arms. “The Tattoo.”
He said, “I didn’t mean that to happen to Wati. I’m sorry. I thought Goss and Subby would get here first. Well, they did, but I didn’t think they’d hide and wait. I tried to persuade him to leave.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Anything.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. Let me tell you what I can.”
Chapter Seventy-Two
THEY KNEW—PAUL EXPLICITLY, MARGE BY THE INSTINCTS SHE was accruing—that that was hardly the end of it as far as London went. For them, though, it had been an epoch-ending execution. They sat where they had fallen, talking a little, but often just sitting and breathing in Goss-and-Subbyless air. Paul kicked Goss’s heart across the concrete.
When Goss died, the lights in the garage had dimmed twice and gone up again in a hip-hip-hooray, in object joy. Colours changed and shadows moved as emissaries from various courts—seelie, unseelie, abseelie, paraseelie—passed through to check out the spreading rumour. A few ghosts that Marge did not see but felt as movements of sad warmth. With a squee, a pigness passed her. It was not long after that that they heard a car.
Without a siren but with lights whirling a police car bumped down the ramp and to them. Three officers emerged, their batons out, pepper spray and Tasers out, their hands overfull of weapons. Their terror was quite obvious. After a pause, out of the car in a smart sweep, her clothes and hair jouncing, leaking smoke from one corner of her mouth, a cigarette bobbing from the other, her eyes narrow and turning her head a little, splendid as Boudicca, was Collingswood.
She stared at Paul, put one hand out, took her Taser from her belt. She looked at Marge, raised an eyebrow and nodded in recognition. She chirruped and whistled, and stroked the air as if it were a piglet’s head.
Collingswood smacked her lips. “Fucking fucking fuck me,” she whispered. She smiled an utterly beautiful smile. “It’s true. You really did. Fuck me. Finally. Oh … my … gosh. We could do with a bit of good news tonight.”
“I told you there was stuff going on with me,” Marge said.
“And look,” said Collingswood. “Slap my naughty knuckles for making the wrong call. And it’s you.” She said that to Paul. “Well, I mean not you but you. Fucked if I know what’s the point tonight, but you got to do what you can, right? Come on then.” She motioned the two of them up. They obeyed.
“What is this?” Marge said. She sounded mild, not outraged—curious.
“Give me a minute I’ll come up with a bunch of stuff to charge you with,” Collingswood said. “Basically, the gist of it is, you’re coming with me. Might as well salvage something. You too.” She looked at Paul. He stood meekly enough. He looked side to side as something invisible circled him. “I don’t want any trouble. From you or from, y’know. Your passenger. For fuck’s sake, don’t you want to get out of all this?” she said.
Yes, thought Marge. Really. Collingswood nodded at her. The officer did not need her sensitivities to read that answer. “Come on then,” she said. “Bloody star, you.”
Paul slumped, walked toward the car too, then abruptly raced past Collingswood and her fumbling officers, toward the exit. He knocked her as he went, so she staggered and dropped her cigarette.
“Naughty fucking naughty,” she shouted. “Tase the bastard.” One of the officers missed, but another got Paul in the back, in his unseen Tattoo, with the electricity-spitting wires. Paul shrieked and fell, spasming.
“Stop, stop!” shouted Marge. “Don’t you know who he is, don’t you know what he’s …? He can’t face being locked up anymore, that’s why—”
“Boohoo,” said Collingswood. “Do I look like I give a shit?” She stood over Paul as he strained to breathe. In truth she did look like she gave a little of a shit. She wore an expression not of regret, exactly, but of troubled irritation, as if the paper in the photocopier had run out.
“No one’s out to fuck you up,” she said to him. “Will you stop it?” A swiney scream screamed in dimensions close enough for Marge to hear it, and receded. “Now you scared off Perky,” Collingswood said. “Get him in the car,” she shouted at her men. “If there’s still London in the morning, we’ll see what we do.”
All the cops were as ineffective as keystones, hauling the moaning Paul toward the car. The thought came to Marge that she could run. It was followed by the knowledge that she would not. She walked after them, as she had been told.
The arrest, the invitation, was enticing. After all that work she had done, everything she had faced, police tea, a holding room, someone else making the running. I, Marge thought as she settled into the back, offered her shoulder as a pillow for Paul’s still lolling head, am bloody tired.
“You two are walking home,” Collingswood was saying to her officers. “Only room for one more. I wasn’t expecting arrests. But seeing as Baz took the shot, he gets the gig.” The other two grumbled. “Fuck, you are a wet pair. Look on the bright side: you’ll both be burned out of history by morning, so never mind, eh?” She got in. “Baz. Station. Let’s ensconce our little charges, then see what else is going on.”
I really am, thought Marge, extremely tired. Paul raised his head and opened his mouth, but Collingswood switched her finger at him in the mirror, and nothing came out. Marge wished he had got away.
“WHERE’S WATI?” DANE SHOUTED. “WHAT’S HAPPENED TO HIM?”
“Marge was …” Billy said. “You heard what Wati said just before …” His words ebbed out, and he sho
ok his head and covered his eyes. Dead, or hostage at very least.
“Wati!” Dane shouted and raged. “Again! Another! Kraken!”
They had, contemptuous almost, evaded the police tape without breaking stride, and were back in the kraken church. The last Krakenists queued like obedient children by the huge beak in the temple.
The Londonmancers were in the lorry, winding through suburbs nearby. Fitch and some of his last followers were in a strange situation. Disapproving this strategy of war, they were nonetheless tied to it, dependent on its success now that it would happen. So having lost the argument they could only aid those who had won. An extreme cabinet responsibility. They would deliver Londonmancers willing to fight to the battleground.
The Krakenists had only legends to go on, as to what would happen to them when they went to this war, altar-altered, newly dragooned into an army. A dreg regiment. Cars were ready for the afflicted blessed, those about to be bitten. The Krakenists were wishing each other good-bye. After these embraces, they would drive across London to an old ink factory—in awkward silence? Listening to the radio?
Strong kraken-cultists held the mouthpart, bracing themselves to each side. They were audibly praying.
“Is that all of them?” Billy said.
Dane nodded. Few of the last of the church had taken much persuasion. Billy looked at Dane.
“You are going too,” Billy said.
“Yeah.”
“Dane …” Billy shook his head and closed his eyes. “Please … Can I persuade you not to?”
“No. Is everything ready?” Dane said. A worshipper. “Then let’s do this.”
Chapter Seventy-Three
BILLY WATCHED THE LAST-EVER KRAKEN MASS. HE SAT AT THE back of the church. He watched tears and heard benedictions. Dane was faltering, but with grace, repeating the liturgies he had not been part of for a long time. The shepherdless flock herded themselves. Billy shifted in his seat and fiddled with the phaser in his pocket.
The congregation sang hymns to torpedo-shaped, many-armed gods. At last Dane said, “Right then.”
Some of the volunteers tried to smile as they made a line. One by one they placed their hand at the point of the kraken jaw. The hinge-men would very carefully scissor the great bite together on their skin. Twice the hook of the jaw tore worse wounds than intended and made the faithful cry out. Mostly the snips were precise—the skin broke, there was a little blood.
Billy waited for drama. The bitten seemed clumsy and large, seemed to cram the cavelike hall. They embraced each other and held their bleeding hands. Dane, the last one, put his own hand in the jaws and had his congregation bite them down. Billy made no reaction at all.
The plan was simple or stupid. They did not have the time, numbers or expertise for sophistication. They had one advantage and only one, which was that Grisamentum did not know they knew where he was, or that they were coming. All they had was that surprise. A one-two, misdirect and real attack. Anyone who thought for more than one second must realise that what came first was a diversion. So they would not give them that second.
They had a few pistols, swords, knacked things of various designs. They did not know what Grisamentum was, now. En-inked on paper, in liquid? He’d avoided death once already. Fire might dry him out, but it would leave his pigment behind. Bleach, then. He had seemed scared of it. They carried bottles. Their most important weapon a household cleanser. Some wore plant sprayers filled with it like bulky pistols on their belts.
“Come on then,” Billy said at last to Dane. He led him to the car. It was he who drove, now. Didn’t even need directions, and drove like a man who knew what he was doing. Billy looked out of the window. He did not look at Dane: he did not want to see changes. He glanced into all the dark streets they passed; he kept hoping that the angel of memory would come, but there was no glass-and-bone figure under the swaying, leafless trees, the canopies of London’s buildings, no skull and jar rolling among the small night crowd. There were running people, small fires.
“Christ,” Billy said. He wished that Wati raced ahead from figure to figure, returned to the hula girl on the car dashboard.
He parked near the factory compound Dane had shown him on the map, by metal gates black with rust. Others of the attacking party parked elsewhere, in studiedly random patterns, sauntered into position. Billy put his finger to his lips and looked at Dane in warning. Sirens were audible, but not as many as the signs of fires and the sounds of violence would suggest were necessary. The parents of London would have their children at home that night, be lyingly whispering to them that everything would be alright.
“Where do you reckon the Tattoo’s most loyal troops are now?” Dane said. “The fist-heads and the, the people from the workshops?” He was sweating. His eyes were wide.
“Fighting,” Billy said.
Out into the strange warm night. Some of the fitter Londonmancers followed. Saira’s war party. Out of sight they climbed the layered walls of the building and sidled along the architecture. They watched the factory as if it might do something.
Behind the wall was a forecourt where a derelict car lorded over weeds. The factory sat surrounded by that emptiness. Nothing moved that they could see. There was perhaps a slight diminution of the darkness in one of the big windows overlooking nothing. The wall they were on led like a spine to the building itself: they need not touch the ground. Billy pointed at a few of the following fighters, pointed where he wanted them to go.
Even if Wati had been there he could not have spied for them: the clay figures on the roof, Billy saw, were smashed up. Grisamentum’s court had blinded their architecture. Billy took the little Kirk figure from his pocket. He held it up as he had done many times since the shabti’s awful lurching recall and whispered Wati’s name. Again, nothing.
Billy pointed. Dane sighted along a rifle he had taken from the kraken armoury, at tiny motion on the building’s roof. A man, putting his hands on railings and leaning out toward him.
“He’s seen us,” Billy said.
“He’s not sure yet,” Dane whispered. His weapon bucked. The man dropped, silently.
“Wow,” Billy said.
“Shit,” said Dane. He was trembling.
“We don’t have long now,” Billy said.
The krakenbit were emerging from their cars, moving with strange ungainliness. As they came forward, their diversion arrived.
THE LONDONMANCER ATTACKERS CAME AS AGREED, WITH DRAMA. An army of masonry. Those few left whose knack was to wake the city’s defences had done what they could do. They had sent their alarums in parachemicals, waves of pathogen anxiety. They stimulated immune response in the factory grounds. Birthing of brick angles; emerging from hollows in boscage; unwinding from the ruined car; London’s leucocytes came on in attack.
One was ambulant architecture; another a trash marionette; another a window onto another part of the city, a monster-shaped hole. They moved across urban matter, niche-filling and/or huge. Their footsteps made the sounds of barking dogs and braking cars. One threw back its head-analogue and shouting a war shout that was the puttering-engine call of a bus.
It threw open the compound doors. The bravest Londonmancers ran in. They raised weapons, or goads with which to direct their giant cellular charges. There was movement behind the factory windows.
Emerging from side doors and from behind dustbins came gunfarmers, murmuring fertility prayers as they shot. A canine shape of discarded paper leapt from a window. For seconds Billy thought it was blown by monsterherds, but there was no one to gust it. Each shred of paper in that wolf totality was ink-stained.
“Jesus,” Billy said. “Dane. That’s him. He’s all over them.” Enough of Grisamentum’s ink presence was on each piece to knack his motion. He was profligate now, impatient at the edge of his intended apotheosis. The ink-paper wolf jumped onto a screaming Londonmancer, and the paper teeth tore her as if they were bone.
“Oh Christ,” Billy said. “Time to move.” He ai
med his phaser and crawled.
Below him in the wall a stretch of crumbled brick changed, was pressed into new shape, become an ancient door with a long-broken lock so it could be pushed open. Saira came in and bit her lip and stood aside, and the krakenbit came in behind her. Billy saw those nipped by the squid god.
They were stronger than they had any right to be. They picked up masonry and hurled it. They were misshapen and changing. Tides moved on them; their muscles fluttered in directions they had not been made to take. “Christ,” he whispered. He fired a weak whining jolt at the building, a wild distraction as he stared.
One man was growing Architeuthis eyes, fierce black circles taking up each side of his head, squeezing his features between them. A woman bulged, her body become a muscular tube from which her limbs poked, absurd but strong. A woman streaked across the distance, jetted by her new siphon, moving through air as if it were water, her hair billowed by currents in the sea miles off. There was a man with arms raised to display blisters bursting and making themselves squid suckers, another with a wicked beak where he had had a mouth.
They tore at the gunfarmers and through the swirl of inked paper. Bullets ripped them, and they roared and bit and smashed back. The suckered man looked hopefully at the inside of his arms. The marks were blebbing into little vacuums, but arms his arms remained. Billy watched him. It was awesome, yes, but.
But was it a godly tease that none of the krakenbit had tentacles?
Dane was not newly shaped. Only, he looked back at Billy and his eyes were all pupil now, all dark. He had no hunting arms.
“Billy.” A tiny voice from Billy’s plastic man.
“Wati!” Billy snapped to draw Dane’s attention. He waved the figure. “Wati.”
“… Found you,” the voice said, and coughed again. Faded out.
“Wati …”
After seconds of silence, Wati said, “First thing I did ever that was mine was un-be that body that got made. Could do it again. They caught me off guard, is all. I just got to …” The rude reanchoring in that doll of exploitation had hurt him terribly. “This was the only place I could find. Been in it so much.” He was half-awake, at best, from the no-soul’s-land between statues where he had been in coma. He drifted back into silence.