“Damn it,” Billy said. “Wati.” There was nothing more, and their time was up. Billy beckoned and crept forward, and Dane crouched with him on the balcony below the factory’s high window, looking down within at the last preparations of Grisamentum.
Chapter Seventy-Four
THE CHAMBER SWARMED WITH PAPER. IN PLANES AND SHREDS, torn-up pieces, flitting with purpose, all smeared with ink. Below them the room was scattered with old machinery, the remains of printing presses and cutters. Walkways circled at several levels. Billy sighted the core of gunfarmers remaining.
There was Byrne, scribbling notes, looking down and arguing, writing Grisamentum’s response to her in himself. By a huge pile of torn-off hardcovers, technicians fiddled with gears, ignoring the chaos, pressing soaked paper pulp in a hydraulic machine and collecting the dirt-coloured off-run.
“It’s the library,” Billy said. The soaked, shredded kraken library, rendered to its ink. He pointed through the glass.
All that antique knowledge poured over with solvent, the inks seeped out of the pages where they had been words. Some pigment must be the remains of coffee, the dark of age, the chitin of crushed beetles. Even so, the juice they were collecting was the distillate of all kraken knowledge. And Billy saw, there, presiding over the rendering, on a raised dais, in a great big plain pail, the bulk of Grisamentum. His sloshing liquid body.
Dane shoved into the glass and made some enraged noise. He was radiating cold.
“He’s going to add it to himself,” Billy said. “Or himself to it.” It would be rich, that liquid print. A liquid darkness that had been all the Architeuthis secrets, homeopathically recalling the shapes it had once taken, the writing, the secrets it had been. Metabolise that, and Grisamentum would know more about the kraken than any Teuthex ever had.
“Speed this up!” They could hear Byrne through the glass. Like the glass was thinning to help them. “There’s time to finish this. We can track down the animal, but we’ve got to get the last of the knowledge down. Quick.” The paper stormed as if a whirlwind filled the room.
A high-flying scrap at the top of the rustling column flattened itself against the glass beside Billy and Dane. The ink on it regarded them. A still second. It plummeted back through the paper vortex. The rest followed, the swirl falling through its own centre.
“Come on!” shouted Billy. He kicked the glass into the room and fired through the paperstrom, but no beam came out. He threw the dead phaser at the giant inkwell full of Grisamentum.
There were shots, and one, two of the Krakenists who had fought their way in fell. Dane did not move. Billy heard a percussion and a damp smacking into Dane’s body. A new wound in Dane’s side oozed black blood. Dane looked at Billy with abyssal eyes. He smiled not very human. He made himself bigger.
Billy grabbed for the pistol in Dane’s belt, and the papers bombed him. Some came at him as a biting skull. He swung the bleach bottle he carried and sent a spray of the stuff in a curve like a spreading-out sabre. It depigmented where it landed. He could smell bleach amid the gun smell, the same ammoniac scent as that of Architeuthis.
Screams. A Krakenist was being devoured by a flock of Grisamentum stains shaped playfully murderous into a paper tiger. Billy caught Dane’s eye. They looked something at each other. Dane vaulted the fence, his wound not slowing him at all. He fell fast, but not at gravity’s idiot control. The paper tried to disrupt him, but he twisted as he fell. He fired and killed an engineer. He sprayed bleach on his way down, streaming it through papers that instinctively flinched away, at Grisamentum.
His aim was predator perfect. But Byrne stepped into the way. She took the liquid across her front. It cut colour like an invert Pollock assault, her clothes fading under the spattered line. She shoved an old-fashioned perfume nebuliser into Dane’s face and squeezed the bulb.
Billy clenched. He closed his fist, tightened his stomach, tensed everything he knew how to tense. Nothing happened. Time did not pause. Byrne sprayed dark vapour into Dane’s face.
Dane staggered. His face was wet with dark grey. A billow of Grisamentum into him. Dane could not help breathing him in.
He retched, tried to puke Grisamentum out. Billy aimed at Byrne with Dane’s pistol, which he had no idea how to use, but in any case she dipped her fingers right into Grisamentum and shook them in front of her. The air around her closed, and when he fired his bullet ricocheted off nothing.
Dane was down. His body rilled. Grisamentum filled him, shaped himself on the Dane’s alveoli. Wrote bad spells on the inside of Dane’s lungs. Billy watched Dane die.
THE PAPERS ENCASED BYRNE IN AN ARGUMENTATIVE FLURRY, LIKE feeding birds.
“You’re sure?” Billy heard her say.
She poured the last of the dark liquid pulped from the Krakenist library into Grisamentum. He swirled. It must be giving him psychic indigestion to do this so fast, but he needed the final teuthic wisdom. He had to understand his quarry. Byrne stirred him and flicked the dipstick all around her. The papers eddied faster as the pigment splashed them. Older dried-up blots of Grisamentum were overlaid with less ignorant stains.
“It has to be close,” Byrne shouted. “Find it and send some of you back here to tell me where. I’ll bring the rest of you. Go!”
Dane had thank God stopped moving. Billy wanted to rally the last of the krakenbit, to destroy the gunfarmers and paper-swirl monsters. But he saw the chaos, his side’s rout, in the chamber. He climbed back out of the window.
Outside, Londonmancers and antibodies stood off against gunfarmers and a devil of inky paper. Littering the ground were bodies, and spots of troubled perspective where London functions had fallen. Krakenbit wheezed like fish in air, or lay still, brine dripping from their bodies. Billy saw one still fighting, with, at last, his left hand replaced with a twenty-foot hunting limb, which he dragged and flailed.
“Saira!”
She smiled to see him, even as she shook with war. She tugged a bit of London claylike into a police riot shield, crouched behind it, crossed the combat to him.
“Billy.” She even hugged him. “What’s happening?” He shook his head. “Dane?” she said. He shook his head. Her eyes went very wide. Billy began to shake.
“Disaster,” he said at last. “We couldn’t get close. He’s just, he’s doing the last of the knowledging now. Where’s my guardian angel, eh?” He was striving to speak to his headache again, as he had the last time the angel was near, but this time it was only pain.
“Billy …” It was Wati, groping to vague consciousness in his pocket. Billy said his name.
“He’s alive?” Saira said. There was a massive sound. From the building’s roof, a flock of black-stained papers streamed batlike out. They rampaged across the sky.
“He’s going,” Wati said. “He’s …”
“They’re covered in him; he can knack them more,” Billy said. “He doesn’t care. We forced his hand. He’s going all out. He’s looking for the kraken, and when he’s found it, Byrne’s going to milk it, and …” They looked at each other. “Can you find them? Get a message to the lorry?”
“They’re Londonmancers.” Saira nodded. “And so am I.”
“Tell them to get out of here. Tell them to go … Wait.” Billy held out the Kirk figure, its little plastic eyes watching him. Billy thought and thought, as fast as he could. “Wati.”
“Yeah,” the Kirk said.
“We’ve got as long as it takes for Grisamentum to find the lorry,” Billy said. “And you saw how many of him there are. Wati, I know you’re hurt, but can you wake up? Can you hear me?” No answer. “If he doesn’t wake up,” he said to Saira, “we’ll have to try to go ourselves, but—”
“Where?” Wati said. “Go where?”
“How are you?”
“Hurt.”
“Can you … can you travel?”
“Don’t know.”
“You got here.”
“This doll … used it so much it’s like a chair shaped
to my bum.”
“Wati, what happened?”
There was silence. “I thought I was dead. I thought your friend Marge was … It was Goss and Subby.” Billy waited. “I can feel her. Still. Now. I can feel her because she’s got the dust of my old body all over her hands. I can sniff that.”
“She was in Hoxton.”
“… She must have … she got away from Goss and Subby.” Even exhausted, Wati’s voice was awed.
“Can you get to her?”
“That body’s gone.”
“She wears one.” Billy grabbed the front of his shirt where a pendant would be. “Can you use the dust to find her? Can you try?”
“Where’s Dane?”
The fighting continued, the noise of arcane murder. “They killed him, Wati,” Billy said.
At last, Wati said, “What’s the message?”
Saira whispered things into London’s ears, cajoled and begged it, even aghast as it must be that night, to pass a message to her onetime teacher in the lorry. “All we’ve got is speed,” Billy said to her, and told her where to send them. She moulded the wall and made a patch of it an urban hedge, through which she pushed, out into the street.
Billy took some seconds of solitude, as alone as he could be in the dregs of that fighting and that noise. He stared back at the building where his friend had died. Billy wished he knew how to make whatever tentacle-imitating sign wished a killed soldier of the krakens peace. Billy shut his eyes tight and swallowed and said Dane’s name and kept his eyes closed. That was the ceremony he invented.
Chapter Seventy-Five
HOW COULD YOU KEEP SOMETHING THE SIZE OF A LORRY HIDDEN from the skies? Fitch’s indecision protected him awhile: unable either to commit to his fighting sisters and brothers or to desert them, he had stayed less than a mile away and ordered the vehicle into a tunnel, and there in the orange striplight under the pavement had put on the hazard lights as if stalled. And waited, while refugees from that night surged past in their cars. When Saira sent her message, it, London, did not have far to go to pass it on.
While over their head scudded the inked scout selves of Grisamentum, she and Billy ran toward the vehicle’s hide, past birdlime streaks and posters for albums and exhibitions. Come meet us, she had said. We need you. Shamed, Fitch had the engine gun and the lorry lurch out of its burrow into the surveilled streets.
The paper helixed plughole out of the dark sky and mobbed the lorry. It pushed through them. They were sentient, but the papers had the feeding-frenzy throng of multitude predators, mothlike butting themselves against the windscreen. When it met Saira, Billy and the few Londonmancers and squidly loping krakenbit who had been able to run, the vehicle was thronged with excited paper.
Dear God, Billy thought, at the thought of what the appalled locals must think they saw from behind their curtains. Close to him were two Londonmancers and two krakenbit still morphing into teuthic midway forms. They whipped their limbs and sprayed the last of their bleach. Fitch threw open the back and yelled at them to enter. With the unity of a school of fish, the papers gusted back toward the factory.
“They’re going to get Byrne and the rest of himself,” Billy said. “They’re going to come for us now they know where we are. We have to go.”
“But where?” Fitch said.
“Drive,” said Billy. “We’re meeting someone.”
“SO WHAT DO YOU RECKON?” COLLINGSWOOD SAID TO HER COMMANDEERED assistant.
“About what?” he said. They were the same rank. He did not call her ma’am. But he went where she told him to and did as she said.
“What now? Got any burglaries?” She laughed. They drove through a little rain, through sliding, dark and lit-up streets where people still lounged by twenty-four-hour shops while others ran from unholy gang fights.
“Don’t know,” he said.
“Let’s just get back to the bloody office.”
Marge felt safe in the car. She watched Paul. His face was anguished but resigned. He did not speak. His tattoo spoke. Marge could hear its smothered rage, its terror, in wordless growling from under his shirt.
“It’ll be alright,” she said to him foolishly.
She heard another tiny mumbling. She looked about. The words came from her neck.
Marge blinked. She looked at Collingswood, who continued to tease her colleague. Marge touched her little crucifix. At the contact of her dirty fingers the voice came again, a little stronger. “Hey,” it said.
The silver Jesus whispered. Marge looked away into the violent night streets, into what she had gathered might be the end of the world. And here came this messenger.
“Hey,” she whispered herself, and raised the crucifix. Paul watched her. She focused on the tiny bearded face.
“Hey,” it said again.
“So,” she said. “What’s the word from heaven?”
“Wha?” the metal Christ said. “Oh right. Funny.” It coughed. “Put me to your ear,” it said. “Can’t talk loud.”
“Who are you?” she said. Collingswood was watching her in the mirror, now.
“It’s Wati again,” he said. “I got a message, so listen.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“So did I. Don’t wash your hands. Billy needs you to do something.”
“What’s up back there?” Collingswood said. “Who you chatting to?”
Marge held up her finger so peremptorily Collingswood actually obeyed. The tiny chained Messiah whispered to her, for a long time. Marge nodded, nodded, swallowed, said “yeah” as if at a telephone call. “Tell him yeah.” Finally she let the crucifix dangle back below her neck.
She sighed and closed her eyes, then looked at Collingswood. “We have to go somewhere. We have to pick someone up.” Paul sat up. The other officer looked backward nervously.
“Yeah …” Collingswood said thoughtfully. “Not very clear on the whole police prisoner thing, are you?”
“Listen,” Marge said slowly. “You want to take us in? Take us in. But look around and listen to me.” There was a helpful scream of fighting from some nearby street. Marge gave it a moment. “I’ve just been given a job to do, by Billy. You know Billy? And by this little guy on my necklace who I just saw killed by the most evil, terrifying bastard. Who was out for me.
“Now, I’ve been given this job on the grounds that it might be the one thing that stops the end of the world. So. Do you think your arrest report can wait a couple of hours? Where do you want to go on this?”
Collingswood kept staring at her. “Goss and Subby,” Collingswood said.
“You know them, then.”
“I’ve had my tangles,” Collingswood said.
“There you go then.”
“Wati just had his own little barney with them?”
“He’s told me where to go, and what to do.”
“How about you tell me what he said, and we can have a chat about it?” Collingswood said.
“How about you fuck off?” Marge said without rancour. She sounded as tired as she was. “Look around and tell me if you think we’ve got time to waste. How about—look, I’m just throwing this out there. How about we save the world first, and then you arrest us?”
There was silence within the car. Above them was the excited mourning of the siren. “I tell you what, boss,” the other officer, the young man driving, said suddenly. “I like her plan. I’m for that.”
Collingswood laughed. Looked away and up into the sky over London where clouds wriggled. “Yeah,” Collingswood said. “Might be nice to see tomorrow. You never know. But then,” she said, and wagged her finger at Marge and Paul, “we are definitely taking you in. So what’s the plan?”
“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?” SAID MO OUTSIDE HER HOUSE, HER broom held up like a weapon. Trees shuddered. Marge held the crucifix out at her. “I’m not a vampire,” the woman said.
“No, for God’s sake,” Marge said. “You know Wati? We’re Dane’s friends.”
“Jesus bollocks,”
said Collingswood to Mo. “Am I going to have to police brutality you? Let us in and listen.”
“We’re here for Simon,” Marge said in the hallway.
“That’s a bad idea. Simon’s still haunted.”
“Tough,” said Collingswood.
“We’re down to the last one.” One tenacious dead self. Mo hesitated. “He needs rest.”
“Yeah,” said Marge. “I need a holiday in the Maldives. And needs must.”
“She ain’t wrong,” Collingswood said. “I’m with the prisoner here on this.”
Simon looked up at their entry. He was in a dressing gown and pyjamas. He held a ball of squeaking fur.
“We’re friends of Billy and Dane,” Marge said.
Simon nodded. From the air came a faint wrathful ghostly melisma. He shook his head. “Sorry about that,” he said.
“Message,” Marge said. “We need you to move something. For Billy. Don’t look at me like that …”
“But … I can’t. That’s why I’m here. This … it’s like an addiction,” Simon said. “The knack’s like a drug. I can’t go down that road again, I …”
“Bullshit,” said Wati, faint but audible.
“Let me lay it out for you.” Paul spoke, for the first time. He coughed. There was a groaning from his back, and Simon’s ghost responded in moaning kind. Paul scratched himself hard against the doorframe until his back was silent.
“I just done in the most dangerous piece of shit you can imagine by the most horrible method I ever had to use to do anything,” he said. “Wati said you got into this because you was paid to and you might’ve saved the world. If Griz’d got what he wanted earlier … So thank you. For that. But you are going to help. Knacking ain’t a drug. What did for you was dying and not noticing you’d died, again and again.