Kraken (50 page)

“Jesus,” Billy said. Cars passed. What did they see? A gang fight? Teenagers? Nothing? The police were surely on their way.

“Let’s split,” said Dane.

Two apocalypse figures clashed over the waste while their followers squabbled murderously. The god-functions struggled, an unusual storm.

“They’re late,” said Dane, retracing his way along the underside of a bridge.

“Who?”

“Whoever’s going to stop this.” Dane tutted.

“Wait,” grumbled Billy. “I want to see the apocalypses fighting.” But Dane snapped at him to come, so Billy sulkily turned his back on the celestial battle and continued through the crawl space. At the edges of the clearing, other figures had appeared. “Who are they?” he said.

“Some chosen one’s party,” Dane said without looking. “’Bout bloody time.”

Somewhere nearby, Billy supposed, Baron, Collingswood and his to-have-been colleagues were carting the wounded and dead to secret hospitals. Whoever saved the city would extinguish these little Götterdämerungen.

“Did you hear something?” Billy said.

More of those gustings, the things that moved like plastic? Yes, but something else too. Below them were animal calls, whimpering, the cough of foxes.

“We’ve been smelt,” Dane said urgently. Things rose from the alley. A composite thing incoming. Pigeons, grey clubfooted London birds, moving in frantic flock through whatever haze-hide Dane had knacked, made dove calls in panicked aggression. The pigeons bombed them with bursts of clawed and feathered dirt.

“There,” Billy heard.

“S
hit
, Cole’s burn, it marked us,” Dane said. “Come
on.”

Something rose out of the below. A shaking cracked the concrete. The screws that bolted their walkway began to undo.

“Jesus!” Billy shouted. “They’re going to drop us.”

They descended at the first ladder, in just-controlled falls. Someone’s forces were coming toward them. Billy and Dane skirted the battleground, past startled hedge wizards and junior prophets. The birds still harassed them, taking some saurian aggregate shape.

T
HINGS WERE MOST BLOODY DEFINITELY NOT TAKING THE DESIRED
shape. She’d always known this plan was a bit of a long shot, but she’d gone along in good faith. It didn’t seem stupid, it was worth a shot. Collingswood, still almost stamping from Marge’s ridiculously expert evasion—
whose skills you freeloading, mate?
—had not expected her and Vardy’s pet endings to run away with them.

She yelled at the officer partnered with her to come on, yelled into her hidden mouthpiece for Baron’s suggestions and orders, but whether it was static, magic or his anxiety there was only silence. If he was issuing commands she had no idea what they were. She did not know where to find him. The knowledge that a few other scattered police cells watched this unfolding did not comfort her. If
she
was having a time of it …

“Get your fucking arse here!” The young man tried to obey her. He wasn’t SO19. No firearms. She’d complained at the time. What was he supposed to do, carry her bag? All he was really doing was staring at the warring sky.

“… Tattoo … incon … can’t tell … bloody …” said Baron, or some Baron-aping airwave-dwelling thing. She’d dealt with
that
before.

“Boss, where
are
you?” She wouldn’t say she agreed with Baron about it to his face, but she could bloody well have wished Vardy hadn’t disappeared on this of all bloody nights, too.

“… too is here,” he said. “Tattoo is here.”

D
ANE HEADED FOR THE LABYRINTH OF
L
ONDON
. H
E AND
B
ILLY
were shepherded, brilliantly, by the pigeons they thought they were evading. At a little square overlooked by unlit houses and guarded by leafless trees, men and women in municipal uniforms stepped out of the shade. They wore leaf-blowers, engines on their backs, hoses to gust fallen leaves from pavements. They aimed their contraptions like ludicrous guns. They sent whirling gusts of leaves toward Dane and Billy.

“What the hell is this?” said Billy. The leaves slapped him. The blowers were moving in careful formation, the leaf-mass taking whirlwinding shape like a bait-ball corralled by sharks. The men and women ran about each other, a puppeteer collective. The leaves they sculpted with their air machines took the rough shape of a man, three metres high, in tree-muck swirls.

“Monsterherds,” Dane said. Flicks of the machines, and the man’s head was a bull’s. The horns were tubes of leaf. “Get out of here, go.”

The men and women made the figure reach. It nearly closed its big leaf-gust fingers on Dane, but he evaded. The minotaur made of air and leaves slammed its whirlwind fist and cracked the paving stones. No mnemophylax came this time. Billy shot, and his phaser beam did nothing but send a few leaves flying. Dane said, “Byrne.”

Grisamentum’s vizier was a suspended arachnid on a wall. Her face was vividly outraged. She leapt and came after them, straight through the minotaur, which reconstituted the hole of her.

Dane headed back toward the flyovers, where spectators scattered as the pounding leaf-figure appeared. “Wait,” shouted Billy abruptly. He took a moment’s bearings, took several turns.

Dane yelled, “What are you doing?” but followed him, as the leaf beast, Byrne and the monsterherds came behind them.

At a new brick alley, Billy found what he was looking for. Facing them where the streetlet ended in rubbish, staring at Dane and Billy with unreadable emotion, was the punk man.

The Tattoo himself, his entourage, the guards who held the Tattoo-bearer still, were facing the other way, watching the last mopping-up operations in the arena. The man opened his mouth and stared at Billy and Dane, but did not speak.

Then came the gust of leaves and the shouts of Byrne, and a moment’s hush, and Billy and Dane were standing right between the Tattoo and Byrne, representative of Grisamentum, the Tattoo’s oldest, greatest enemy.

T
HE
T
ATTOO HEARD THE SHOCK NOISES OF THE MAN WHO BORE IT,
and shouted for his entourage to turn, and to turn him. The two forces stared at Dane and Billy, and at each other. Were those police sirens in some not-near-enough street? Billy thought. Were those the shouts of state functionaries on their way? No matter. The ’herders made the leaf minotaur stand and paw the ground. Billy could feel, like an animal running between Byrne and the Tattoo, a question—
maybe we should focus on these two
?—but the whole shape of London had been cut by their enmity for years. It was a logic too strong to set aside, as Billy had hoped. So the warriors of the Tattoo and Byrne and Grisamentum’s monsterherds closed on each other.

The autumn-coloured leaf figure ran, at its ’herders’ expert motions, into several smaller versions of the same bull-head man, lurching with windblown grace into the fight. The knuckleheads carried knives and slashed without effect at the leaves, which gripped them in temporary leaf-claws made solid. Dane smashed a helmet with a shot from his gun. The figure fell, the giant clutching hand of its head visible behind the broken dark glass. Dane ducked a leaf-arm blow and pulled Billy out of the way. His weapon click-clicked. They crouched by rubbish at the fight’s edge.

“Look,” said Billy. The tattooed man shivered in his oversized jacket while his guards faced the leaves and the gang fight took their attention. Billy and Dane looked at each other.

Billy decided. He ran, and spasmed, and time stuttered and glass broke. His phaser blasted one guard away. Dane followed him and grabbed the tattooed man, who stared in terror so great it was overwhelming to see.

“Go!” Dane and Billy pulled him with them—half hostage, half rescue—across to the dirtland where the last bodies lay for collection. There were police, now, figures shouting absurd arrest threats from and into the darkness, maybe slinging spells of some kind that could that night only sputter around like sodden fireworks. The man in leather swung almost like a child between Dane’s grip and Billy’s. He whispered. Below those noises another sound was audible, the growling, the rage and threats of the Tattoo beneath his jacket.

PART SIX
INKLINGS

Chapter Sixty-Three

W
AS THAT IT
? W
ERE THEY IT, PERHAPS
M
ARGE SHOULD SAY?
There were two, after all, weren’t there?

Not that what Marge had seen wasn’t impressive and strange and something that wouldn’t have floored her a few weeks before. Only that she had been hoping for revelation, and revelation came there none.

So what was it she’d seen? She was unsure. She had, after her escape from Collingswood, been rather far from the epicentre while whatever had happened had happened. Some of it had been—whatever it was she was going to say instead of magic: the way some of the people she had noticed moved, those dusty vague humans in the scrubland; the somethings she had never quite glimpsed above and around the sweeps of concrete road; her own repeated slippery moonwalk escapes from the attention of other tourists of finality. And there was the sweep of autumnal sky colours that really could, that really might be dramatic little storms.

There was nothing to do with squid, that she could see, and whatever the micropolitics had been, they had been opaque to her. She was no wiser, and frankly a little awe-numb by now.

So what now?

•   •   •

“W
HAT’S YOUR NAME?”

At very last the man spoke.

“Paul.”

Cleaned up of the muck and blood that stained him, Paul was a thin man in his forties or fifties. When lucid he was cowed.

“Hush, hush, wait,” Billy and Dane said to him as he shook in their grip, as they skulked in hiding. “They’re going to come
find
me,” he kept saying. And during all that careful calming of him was the intervention of the Tattoo. The voice came continuously. Threats, insults, commands from the tattoo mouth on Paul’s skin.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” the Tattoo screamed. “Unfuckinghand me you little
shits
or I will kill you where you stand.”

They could not think for his bilious spiel. Dane held Paul and they removed his jacket. From his back, expressions passing in ink tides, bad-magic animation, the Tattoo snarled. It sneered. It looked side to side at Dane and Billy.

“Fucking
clowns,”
it said. It puckered its lips and made spit noises. No spit came out of the black-ink pretend hole of its mouth, only that sound of disgust. “You think this is it? You think Goss can’t taste where I’ve been? Look at this cunt’s feet.” They were a little bloody. The Tattoo began to laugh.

“Goss isn’t here,” Billy said.

“Oh, don’t you worry, Goss and Subby’ll be back. Where’s your bastard commie friend?” They said nothing. “His plan’s going up in piss and so are you, soon as they’re back. You’re all going to die.”

“Shut up,” said Dane. He kneeled by the vivid black-outlined features. “What do
you
want the kraken for? What’s your plan?”

“You worthless little snail-worshipping turd, Parnell. You’re so fucking bad at that you got kicked out of your church.”

“What do you know about Cole?”

“I won’t insult your intelligence with
if you let me go now I’ll let you live
, because I totally won’t.”

“I can hurt you,” Dane said.

“No, you can hurt Paul.”

That shut them up. Billy and Dane looked at each other. They looked at Paul’s skin.

“Shit,” whispered Billy.

“Oy Paul,” the Tattoo shouted. “When we’re out of here I’m going to have my boys fucking
sand
your feet off. Hear me, boy? You keep your mouth shut if you want any teeth, if you want a tongue, if you want lips or a fucking jaw.”

They wound parcel tape around Paul’s midriff. He stayed still to let them. The Tattoo spat spitlessly and cursed them. He tried to chew on Paul, but it was only the motion of ink under the skin. Paul sat patient as a fussed-over king. Billy silenced the Tattoo, and taped also over its eyes, that glared at him until all obscured. Paul had other tattoos. Band names, symbols. They all behaved—motionless but for his muscles.

“I’m sorry,” Billy said to Paul. “You’ve got a bit of a hairy chest—we should’ve shaved you first. That’ll hurt to get off.” Beneath the tape, the
mmm-mmm
mutterings continued awhile.

That was how they brought him, with them, to the god.

“Why would you
bring
him here?” Saira said.

The kraken in its tank in the truck watched them deadly. Londonmancers surrounded them. There were more of them than previously—the insider cabal had spread, as secrets like this will not behave. They left behind “to hold the fort” the supposed mainstream of their antique tribe, now a truncated and confused remnant. Every one of the Londonmancers in the lorry was staring aghast at their unwanted captive. Billy and Dane had tracked them, worked out their route with the tiny satnav and gone ahead to intercept them. It had been a difficult journey, fearful that they were chased at every step by some or other power in the city’s war.

The Londonmancers would not relax the charms they had to keep Wati from the lorry. Billy was enraged on his behalf, but the strike spirit had been agitated, in any case, had needed to circulate, to fight against another last strike crisis. “Just give me a doll or something on the roof,” he said. “Just something.”

“We need to find Grisamentum,” Billy had said. “He’s got to be—”

And Wati had said, “I’ll do what I can, Billy. I’ll do what I can. There’s things I have to …”

Where could Grisamentum be?
Much of the city was still in denial about the fact that he was anywhere at all other than heaven or hell, but there was no way the monsterherds and Byrne’s strange intercession, that terrible knacked gang fight, could be finessed out of facticity. London knew who was back. It just didn’t know where, why or how, and no amount of cajoling of even the most eagerly treacherous or venal set of the city’s streets, grifters or apocalypse chancers would reveal anything.