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Collingswood thought of Vardy, and what came to her mind was a tug of anger and concern comingled. You better be okay, she thought. And if you are, I’m fucking livid with you. Where the fuck are you? I need to know what this is.
Although—did she? Not really. It would not have made a great deal of difference.
She had spent some hours watching CCTV footage. Like radiographers, the FSRC knew what to look at, how to make sense of what shadows, which filters to switch on to bring which whats to the fore. What was artefact on the electric image and what a witch really breaking the world.
Rumours and scabby video came through of two figures who did not attempt to stay hidden. Goss and Subby. Goss completely unperturbed by all the salvos against him, unfussed by damage, killing offhandedly. “Where’s my boss?” he demanded of those he crippled, the few not murdered attested. “I’ve counted to a hundred over by the wall and it’s time to go in for tea and he’s still in the garden somewhere, Aunty’s getting tetchy,” and so on. After a strange and blessed absence, he was manifesting with his mute boy all over the place.
Did Collingswood’s less specialist colleagues think it was an endless day and night of causeless burglary, ferocious muggings and dangerous driving? Perhaps they might allow themselves to think here and there in terms of gang fights, muttered about Yardies or Kosovans or whatever, even with the reports of what she knew must be refugees from the Tattoo’s workshop—women and men shambling nude and altered, with lightbulbs, diodes, speakers and oscilloscope screens in them—horrifying everyday citizens who could only tell themselves for so long that they witnessed an art event.
Collingswood leaned on the wall and smoked while her companion zipped through the city looking for trouble like a pig for truffles, so that she could do something to look after London. It was better than nothing, she thought. Really? she asked herself, and, Yeah, really, she answered back.
THE WORLD LURCHED AGAIN. REELED, IN THE WAS PUNCHED SENSE, rather than the dancing. Marge felt it. She had not gone home since the foiled Armaggedons. There were places to stay if you didn’t much care. She did not know if she had a home left, and if she did she assumed it was not safe anymore, that she had been brought back into the attention of the dying city.
You say it best, hmm hmm it best. Boyzone was not one of her iPod-devil’s favourites, but it was muttering its version into her ears gamely enough. This was the track that had kept her safe in the brief moment when she had felt a hungry mammal consciousness of one of the gods notice her.
She was in an arriviste corner of Battersea, where late bars stayed open and proudly displayed doctored B-movie posters, and she could feel the bang bang of dance bass through doors, through the pavement and her feet. There were lights in the windows of offices, people working late as if in a month’s time they would still have a job and the world would still revolve. Gangs outside fast-food restaurants and cafés that pottered along as if it were not after midnight, their premises abutting the alleys that were the conduits to the other city that, over the incompetent supernatural impersonation of Ronan Keating, Marge could hear.
The littler streets were as lit as the main ones, but they were furtive. A landscape of degenerating knackery, violence and eschatological terror. Marge would swear she could hear shots, metres, only metres from where laughing hipsters drank.
She was beyond fear, really. She just drifted, she just went. Trying to ride out the night, which felt to her like a last night.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
SOME HOSPITALS WERE KNOWN TO BE FRIENDLY, TO ASK NO questions about odd wounds and sicknesses. There were quiet wings, where you could get treatment for lukundoo, for jigsaw disease, where no one would be put out if a patient spasmed out of phase with the world. The worst wounded of the Londonmancers were delivered, with whispered warnings that the bullets inside them might hatch.
Dane was lashed in place on the lorry roof like some Odysseus. He was pushed, lit up and darkened by the lorry’s passage. Dane held his Kirk and waved it, called Wati’s name. He made it an aerial. It was a long time until Wati found it.
“Oh God, Dane,” the figurine suddenly said.
“Wati, where’ve you been?” Dane hammered on the hatch. Billy looked through. The wind made him blink. Around him the city, like something fat, staggered toward a heart attack. The statuette coughed as if it had something caught in its nonexistent throat, as if its nonexistent lungs were bruised. “You heard about the Londonmancers?”
“Oh man,” Wati said. “I been, oh, God. They beat us, Dane. They brought in scabs. Goss and Subby are back.”
“They’re fighting you?” Billy said. “Even without the Tattoo around?”
“Most of the Tattoo’s guys must be screwed,” Dane said. “But if Goss and Subby’re still at it …”
“Griz’s got gunfarmers working for him.”
“It is,” Dane said. “It is him bringing the war. Grisamentum … Why the Londonmancers?”
“Wait,” Wati said. “Wait.” Coughing again. “I can’t move like I should. That’s why it took me so long to find you.”
“Take it easy,” said Dane.
“No, listen,” Wati said. “Oh God, Dane, no one’s told you, have they? It ain’t just the strike or the London Stone. There’s no neutrals now.”
“What do you mean?”
“It weren’t just the Londonmancers. They went for your people too.”
“What?” said Dane.
“What?” said Billy. That ostentatious assault of Fitch’s comrades, as if it were meant to be seen. “Who? Goss and Subby? Who’ve they—?”
“No. Gunfarmers. For the Krakenists. They attacked your church.”
DANE STOLE A CAR. HE WOULD NOT LET ANYONE BUT BILLY COME with him.
“They didn’t even have anyone out there,” Dane kept saying, slamming his hands on the dash. “They kept their heads down. How could anyone …? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I was the only one, and I’m not …”
“I don’t know.”
A little crowd was outside the community church. Tutted at the smouldering from the windows, the broken glass, the obscene graffiti that now covered it.
“Hooligans.” “Awful.” Dane shoved through them and inside. The hall was smashed up. It was very much as it would be had the perpetrators been a rampaging group of fools. Dane went through the junk room and pulled the hatch open. Billy could hear how he was breathing. There was blood in the corridors below.
There, in that buried complex, were the ruins left by the real attack. Very different from the foolish display above.
Throughout the halls were bodies. They were punctured and blood-sodden, hosts for grubbing little bullets. There were those who looked killed in other ways—by bludgeons, suffocation, wetness and magic. Billy walked as if in a slowed-down film, through carnage. The ruined bodies of Dane’s erstwhile congregation lay like litter.
Dane stopped to feel pulses, but without urgency. The situation was clear. There were no sounds but their footsteps.
Desks had been ransacked. As well as mud, in a few places on the floor were trampled origami planes, like the one that had alerted Dane to Grisamentum’s attention. Billy picked up two or three of the cleanest. On each folded dart was the remain or smudge of a design in grey ink—a random word, a symbol, two sketched eyes.
“Grisamentum,” he said. “It’s him. He sent them.” Dane looked at him without any sign of emotion.
In the church, before the altar, was the bullet-ruined body of the Teuthex. Dane made no sound. The Teuthex lay behind the altar, reaching for it with his right hand. Dane gently held the dead man. Billy left him alone.
Like arrows drawn on the floor, more fallen planes pointed in higgledy-piggledy direction to the library. Billy followed them. When he pushed open the library door, he stopped, at the top of the shaft of shelves, and stared.
He walked back to where Dane mourned. He waited as lo
ng as he could bear. “Dane,” he said. “I need you to see this.”
The books were gone. Every single book was gone.
“THIS MUST BE WHAT THEY CAME FOR,” DANE SAID. THEY STARED into the empty word-pit. “He wanted the library.”
“He’s—Grisamentum must be researching the kraken,” Billy said.
Dane nodded. “That must be why … Remember when he wanted us to join him? That’s why. Because of what I know. And you. Whether you know it or not.”
“He’s taken it all.” Centuries of dissident cephalopod gnosis.
“Grisamentum,” Dane whispered.
“It is him,” Billy said. “Whatever it is, it is his plan. He’s the one who wants the kraken, and he wants to know everything about it.”
“But he doesn’t have it,” Dane said. “So what’s he going to do?”
Billy descended the ladder. There was blood from something on his glasses. He shook his head. “He can’t read even a fraction of these. It would take centuries.”
“I don’t know where he is.” Dane made fists and raised them and could only lower them again. “The last time I even saw him was …” Dane did not smile. “Just before his funeral.”
“Why is it we don’t see him?” Billy said. “Only Byrne.”
“He’s hiding.”
“Yeah but even when there was … like when they fought the Tattoo. Tattoo was there. You’d think for a night like that Grisamentum would show in person. We know he must be desperate to get his hands on the kraken.”
“I don’t know,” Dane said. He ran his hand along the shelves. Billy was reading the strange words and examining the odd figures on the paper planes he had picked up. Dane descended, picking up dust on his trailing fingers. He turned and looked at Billy, who was still, and staring at the planes.
“Remember what you were saying about when Grisamentum died?” Billy said. “About when he was cremated?”
“No.”
“I just …” Billy stared into an ink blot. He moved it and kept staring at it. “This ink,” he said. “It’s greyer than you’d think,” he said. “It’s …” He looked up into Dane’s eyes.
“It was Cole did his cremation,” Dane said at last. He ascended.
“It was,” Billy said, staring at him. “Remember the kind of fires he deals in?” They stared at the paper. It riffled as if in a little wind. There was no little wind.
“Kraken,” whispered Dane, and Billy said, “Oh my Christ.”
WHEN GRISAMENTUM DISCOVERED HE WAS DYING IT WOULD HAVE offended him. There were no techniques to prevail against his own injurious blood. He was uninterested in an heir: his desire was never dynastic but to rule.
History was punctuated with women and men who had by grit forced their ghost-selves back to continue their business, who had wedged their minds out into host after host, who had by simple doggedness failed to die. But these were not Grisamentum’s knacks. Byrne was good, her expertise indispensable, her commitment to the project swiftly personal, but she could not unwind death itself. Only filigree it, in certain ways.
“Christ, he must have made … other arrangements,” Billy said.
He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?
Was it when he decided on the spectacle of cremation that something had occurred? Perhaps he was writing the order of the service. Perhaps scribbling instructions to Byrne he began to stare at the pen he held, the paper, the black ink.
“Pyros, he was talking to,” Billy said. “And necros. What if Byrne wasn’t remote-talking to him at all, when we saw her? Remember how she wrote?” He unfolded the little eyes. “Why are there paper planes here? Remember how he found us in the first place? Why’s this ink grey?”
Grisamentum had burnt alive, in that temporally and psychically knacked variant of memory fire, that mongrel of expertise, the pyros’ and Byrne’s, her deadist insights. But he had not quite died. He had never died. That was the point.
After hours of it, after the mourners had left, he would have been collected. He was ash. But he never quite died. He was safe from his illness—he had no veins for it to poison, no organs for it to ruin. Byrne (her name a sudden joke) must have taken him, charcoal-coloured in his urn, ground any last black bone shards and carbon into powder. Mixed him into the base he had had prepared: gum, spirit, water, and rich knack.
Then she must have dipped her pen into him, closed her eyes, dragged the point across her paper. To see the thin line jag into scrappy calligraphy, a substance learning itself, she gasping in loyalty and delight as the ink self-wrote: hello again.
“WHY’S HE DONE ALL THIS?” DANE SAID. HE STARED AT THE PAPER. It stared inkly back. “Why does he want the world to burn? Because he did? Revenge on it all?”
“I don’t know.” Billy was gathering the paper planes. He held one up. The word on it was Poplar. On another Binding. Another said Telephone. In super-thin writing. All incorporating two little scribbled eyes. This was the remnant of honour, nostalgic for spurious legendary times.
Was it always a lie, Billy thought? Had this neutrality-breaching killer always been so savage? Had something happened to make him the purveyor of this? The vastness of this murder.
Dane went from room to ruined room and gathered bits of Krakenist culture, accoutrements here and there, weapons. There must have been some of the Krakenist congregation out, on errands, having their lives, who would find out soon what had happened to their religion. Like the last of the Londonmancers they were now an exiled people. Their pope murdered before his altar. But in that burrow at that moment, sifting through the rubbish of the dead, Dane was the last man on earth.
Where was the light coming from? There were some bulbs not smashed, but the grey illumination in the corridors seemed greater than those little sepia efforts. The blood everywhere looked black. Billy had heard moonlight made blood look black. He met the eyes of one of the paper planes. It regarded him. Its paper fluttered again, unblown.
“It’s trying to get away,” he said. “Why would they … he … why would he actually come here, not just issue orders? He’s watching. See how thin this pen is? Remember how careful Byrne was with the papers she wrote on? How she swapped pens? So she could scrape the ink off again. There can only be so much of him.”
“Why would he do this?” Dane shouted. Billy still looked at the fallen paper’s eyes.
“I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out. So my question is, how do we interrogate ink?”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
THEY WORKED IN THE LORRY. SAFER THAN IN WHAT WAS SUDDENLY a sepulchre. Billy had all the planes he could find, all with blood and mud torn off, so it was only ink that stained them.
The kraken overlooked them. Dane prayed to it. While the Londonmancers muttered and looked at Dane, suddenly bereft like them, Billy soaked the paper in distilled water, pulped it and squeezed it out. Paul watched him, his back, his tattoo, to the wall. Billy extracted the weak-tea-coloured water and boiled off a little excess. The liquid rilled away from him in a way not right.
“Be careful,” said Saira. If the ink was Grisamentum, perhaps each drop of him was him. Perhaps each had all his senses and his thoughts and a little portion of his power.
“She scraped him off each time she got him back and remixed him,” Billy said. Each separate pipette full added back to Grisamentum’s bottled consciousness. Why else would there be these eyes? The ink must know what all those rejoined drips of him had known. “I guess they’ve got to husband him.” He was finite. Every order he wrote, every spell he became, his communications were him, and eroded him. If he was all written up, there would be only ten thousand little Grisamenta on scraps, each enough to be perhaps a magic postcard in some pathetic way.
When Billy was done there was a thimbleful, more than a drop but not much more. He dipped a needle into it. Dane stood, made a devotional sign
, joined them. He glanced up. Wati hibernated through the union’s defeat in a doll strapped on the vehicle’s roof. Billy rifled through the papers he was using, scraps from his bag, all manner of odds and ends.
“Is this going to work?” Saira said.
“Works for Byrne,” Billy said. “Let’s see.”
“Are we actually finally going to find out what his plans are?”
Billy kept his eyes on Dane’s. He put the needle to the paper and dragged his hand, without looking, across the page. He drew a line, only a line.
“Oy,” Billy said. “Grisamentum. Pay attention.” He drew another line, and a third, and this last time suddenly it spasmed like a cardiogram, and there was writing. UP YOURS, the writing wrote. Tiny scratchy font. Billy redipped the needle.
“Let me,” Dane whispered, and Billy waved him back.
“You aren’t thinking straight,” Billy whispered to the little residue at the bottom of the container. “You’re probably a bit foggy. You must be a bit dilute, a bit mucky. Your little brain must be … little.” He held a pipette over the ink.
“We can dilute you a bit more. Does alcohol sting? We’ve got some lemon juice. We’ve got some acid.” Billy would swear the tiny pool flinched at that. The pigment that was Grisamentum swilled in the cup.
“What are you doing?” Billy said to the ink.
“My people …” Dane said.
Billy dipped, scratched, wrote. FUCK YOU.
“Right,” said Billy. He dipped the needle in bleach, and then into the ink. A tiny amount: this had to be a delicate kind of attack. The colour twitched, left a little fade. Billy mixed it, dragged the needle again.
BASTARDS, Grisamentum wrote in itself.
“What are you doing?” Billy said.
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