Kraken (36 page)

“What’s Al Adler in this?” Billy said.

“Why did you take it?”
Dane whispered.

Fitch and Saira looked at each other. Saira shrugged. “I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

“It was his fault,” Fitch said. He whined. Billy could tell the old man was relieved to break his vow. “It was him started it. Coming here with his plans, and the burning at the end of it.”

“Al? You said he was superstitious,” Billy said to Dane. “So—he came for a reading. But no one liked what they saw.”

“Tell us,” Dane said, his voice shaking, “everything.”

A
DLER HAD COME TO THE
L
ONDONMANCERS WITH A RIDICULOUS,
audacious plan.
He was going to steal the kraken
. He was not afraid to say so in that hallowed confessional: Fitch, not judging, unshocked even at that stage by the enormous crime to come, bound to confidentiality by oaths in place since the Mithras temple, split the city’s skin to see what might happen.

“There’s no way Al thought of that job,” Dane said.

A courtesy, a formality. Fitch expected to see nothing, as he had for years. What he saw was fire.

The burning end of it all. Burning what it couldn’t burn, taking the whole world.

And after? Nothing. Not a phoenix age, not a kingdom of ash, not a new Eden. This time, for the first time, in a way that no threatened end had ushered in before, there was no post-after.

“Most of the Londonmancers don’t know anything about this,” Saira pled. They could not have been expected to overturn their vows like their leader and his best lieutenant had done. “It was obvious Al was just a front guy. Hardly criminal genius, was he?”

“What did you tell him?” Billy said.

Fitch waved. “Some waffle. We had to decide what to do fast.”

“Couldn’t you have told him not to do it?” Billy said. Everyone looked at him. That wasn’t the point at all. You didn’t
alter plans
on the basis of a Londonmancer reading, any more than you picked a spouse on the basis of a fairground palm reader’s wittering. “Why would he want to end everything?” said Billy.

“I’m not sure he did,” said Fitch carefully.

The plan might have set in motion something of its own. Ineluctable, final, unintended consequences. How bad does it have to be to make a Londonmancer break a millennium of honour and intervene? This bad is how bad.

“So you had to get in there first to stop him setting it off,” said Billy in some kind of wonder. “You had to
presteal
it.”

“That auction was coming up.” Saira shrugged. “We needed Simon-bait. It wasn’t that hard to find an armsmith to knack it. Dane … we didn’t know when this was going to happen.”

“We had to move when we moved,” Fitch said. “Understand—
everything burns and nothing happens again
, if they got the kraken. When Adler told me, everything changed.”

Simon performing his game, whispering phrases from his TV show, arriving in the dark of the Darwin Centre with an assiduously replicated fade-in like glitter in water, to “take coordinates,” and with a flex of power disaggregating the kraken and himself in a stream of particles, energy, particles again.

“So
what happened to Adler?”
Billy said. Saira met his eye. Fitch did not.

“A place like that,” Saira said. “It’s guarded. You can’t just walk in.”

“You cold bastards,” Dane said finally.

“Oh, please,” said Saira. “I don’t take that from assassins.”

“You used him as bait,” Billy said. “Told him whatever to keep him … no, for the timing, you sent him in.”

“Simon would never have got in and out,” Fitch wheedled. “We didn’t know the angel would … we just needed to distract it.” The angel of memory, the mnemophylax, swooping in on Al, as Simon beamed the bewildered would-be burglar in. Not as if the wrecked Trekkie was innocent of that death, either. Turned out there was at the very least one culpable homicide he really did have on his hands.

“And while it’s dealing with him, you took the kraken out.” Billy shook his head. “That raises the second issue. You did all this to stop this fire, right?” He raised his hands. “Well, you showed us the guts. We all know what the sky feels like.
So what went wrong?”

A long quiet. “It didn’t work,” Saira said. She shook her head and opened and closed her mouth.

Billy laughed unpleasantly. “You saw what would happen if it was stolen. So you stole it to stop it being stolen. But by stealing it you stole it. And set it off.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Fitch said.

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” Dane said. “You are going to take me to my god.”

Chapter Forty-Six

T
HE PIGEONS’ BELLIES WERE MISBEHAVING AGAIN, AND THE
revolting results of these anxieties featured as quirky news filler. Other urban ructions were growing harder to ignore by selective banalising notice. Fuel would hardly burn in domestic fireplaces. There was nervous speculation about atmospheric conditions. Every flame was grudging. As if there were a limited amount of it available; as if it were being hoarded; saved up for something.

Also,
oh yes
, people were disappearing. There are no civilians in war, no firewalls between the blessedly ignorant and those intimately connected to networks, markets of crime and religiosity. And Londoners, even those determinedly mainstream, were disappearing. Not in that mythical without-a-trace way, but with the most discomfiting remnants: one shoe; the shopping they had been going to get but
had not yet bought
sitting in a bag by their front door; a graffito of the missing where they were last seen. You may not have known what was happening, but that something was happening was not plausibly deniable.

B
ILLY AND
D
ANE HADN’T DONE BADLY
. T
HE CARE OF THEIR MOVEMENTS
; the camouflage Dane dragged behind them with little shuffled hexes, second nature for a man of his training; the disguises, ridiculous but not ineffective; Dane’s soldier care: all these had kept them from collectors’ eyes for days, which when you’re the target of by some way the largest collection of bloodprice talent to be assembled on a single job in London for a whole pile of years, isn’t nothing.

For a creditable time, those stalkers had been frustrated. The tallyho of the urban hunt sounded like a parping fart in the latest hours, as they rode unorthodox horses over roofs, making locals think there had been very brief very heavy rain, and tracked down bugger-all. The vaguely cowboy gunslingers had failed to run them down. Londoners slept badly, as their internal nightlands were infiltrated by eyeless snuffling beasts that lolloped through their sex reveries and parental angsts, dreamhounds sent out by hunters at their most dangerous when they slept. They could not sniff their quarries either.

The hunters fought among themselves. More than once they faced murderous confrontations with figures that seemed part of some other agenda, that were come and gone too fast to make sense of in any political schema of which anyone knew. Men who disappeared when seen, men and women accompanied by shuffling monster shadows.

The gangs and solitary freelancers seeded the city with rewards: anything for a harvest of hints. With all his care, nous and skill, Dane could not stand in the way of all the snips, momentary glances, overheard words—all the stuff that registered not at all on passersby, but that the best hunter could winkle out of someone who did not even know they were withholding, could collate and aggregate.

“I
’
M GOING INSIDE
,” F
ITCH SAID
. “T
HE REST OF THE
L
ONDONMANCERS
need to see me. And we’ll have to find a way to get him onside, now.” He indicated the man Billy had shot.

“You got to let me go back in, Dane,” he said. “You want to get them worried?”

Dane raised his weapon as if he did not know what to do with it, and gritted his teeth.

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered.

“We didn’t know what you wanted to do with it,” Fitch said. “Or we would have said.”

“We didn’t know if we could trust you,” Saira said. “You know how some Muslims get rid of Qur’an pages? They burn them. That’s the holiest method. Whatever’s coming is after burning the whole world down, starting with the squid. And it’s still out there. We thought that might be your plan.”

“You thought
I’d
end the world?” Dane said.

“Not deliberately,” Fitch said, in a strange reassurance. “By accident. Trying to set your god free.”

Dane stared at them. “I ain’t going to burn shit,” he said levelly. “Take me to it.”

And we can tell you what we know
, Billy thought.
That Grisamentum’s still alive
.

“There’s things need preparing,” Fitch said. “Protections. Dane, we can work together. We can be in this together.” He was eager now. How long had he been bending under this?

“We ain’t short of offers,” Dane said. “Everyone wants to work with us.”

“There’s things we need to know,” Saira said. “There’s
got
to be something about this kraken. That’s why we need you,” she said to Billy. “You’re the squid man. This is
perfect
. If we can work out what it is about
this
one, maybe we can stop it.”

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered. He heard the grind of glass. “I think I do, Dane.”

T
HAT WAS HOW THE TWO OF THEM ENDED ALONE IN THE YARD,
while the Londonmancers returned inside, to mum normality for a few more hours.

“What if they …?” Dane said as they waited.

Billy said, “What? Run? They can’t disappear their whole operation. Tell someone? The last thing they want is anyone to know what they did.”

“What if they …?”

“They need me,” Billy said.

They wedged the door closed so frustrated smokers would find another place to go. “Wait,” Saira had told them. “When we’re done here, we’ll go.” They sky went dark over hours.

“Soon,” said Dane. What impeccable timing, what a perfect jinx: as he said that, there was the glass noise, in Billy’s head. Knowledge came with it. He stood.

“Someone’s coming,” he said.

“What?” Dane stood. “Who?”

“I don’t know.” Billy held his temples. What the fuck? “Jesus.” His
headache
was talking to him. “I just know they’re coming. I don’t think they know where we are. Not exactly. But they’re close and they aren’t friends.”

Dane looked around the yard. Grind grind. “They’re getting closer,” Billy said.

“They can’t find us here,” Dane said. “They can’t know the Londonmancers are in on this. We can’t lead them to God.” He grabbed a metal shard and ground into the wall the words
BACK ASAP
. Written in scratches among scratches.

“Up,” he said. Made his hands a sling and pushed Billy back onto the roof. They scuttled under the arriving night, back down drainpipes and corporate fire escapes, to the main streets of the city, close to deserted now. This was the worst for them, being almost the only people in a street. Every lamplight was like a spotlight. Billy could hardly think through the noise of glass.

“You hear a noise?” Dane said. “Like glass?”

No one else was supposed to hear it! There was no time. There was another sound now. Running feet. CCTV cameras spun, twinkled their lights, looked every which way. From around a corner came men.

Billy stared. They wore a raggedy new romance of costumes. He saw punk stylings, top hats, pantaloons and tube tops,
powdered wigs
. Their faces were quite ferocious. Billy raised his phaser.

As they came the attackers’ bad knacks waxed, and the streetlamps they passed glowed too bright, changed colour, snapped one by one into blacklight, so the men’s white cuff-frills and reflective cat’s-eye flourishes glowed. Billy could see stitched on their clothes many-armed tags, some kind of profligate mutant swastikas. The men hissed like moon monkeys.

Dane and Billy shot. There were so many flamboyant figures. Billy shot again. He waited for them to shoot back, but they held whips, blades. Darkness encroached, overtook the attackers and hid them. There were no lights in any window, no glimmer from any office. There was only one last orange streetlight still burning, a lighthouse now, at which Billy stared as the men came.

Dane went back to back with him. “They want us alive,” Dane whispered.

“Alive yes for discussion,” someone said. “Someone wants to pick your brains.” There were laughs at that. “Alive, but limbs and eyes are optional. Come on now and you can keep them.”

“There’s always the workshop,”
someone else said.

“There is the workshop,” the first voice said. Obscured by the unnatural dark. Billy fired at random, but the shot illuminated only itself. “He does love his workshop. What will you be?”

“Be ready,” Dane whispered.

“For what?” the voice said. A whip kinked out of the shade and wrapped around Billy’s leg, sticking where it touched like a gecko foot, yanking him off his feet and out of the circle of last light. Down on the tarmac Billy opened his mouth to shout, but there was that glass grinding, much louder than he had ever heard it before. His head was full of communicative pain. Something came. It whirled.

Bone arms windmilling. There was a clack of teeth, vivid empty eyes. Finger bones punctured meat like fangs. The thing arrived with incomprehensible motion, too fast. It punch-punched stiff-fingered, leaving blood, ripping the throats of two, three, five of the attackers, so they screamed and fell pissing blood.

Billy kicked off the whip. He crawled back. The interceder rocked at the edge of the light.

It was a skull on the top of a giant jar. A huge glass preserving bottle, of the type that Billy had for years been filling with preservative and animal dead. This one was nearly five feet high, full of flesh slough and clouding alcohol. On its glass lid was a shabby human skull liberated, Billy absolutely knew, from one of the cupboards of remains in the Natural History Museum. It snapped its teeth. Where the rim met the lid the flaring glass served as shoulders, and the thing raised two fleshless taloned arms taken from bone boxes, humerus, ulna radius, clacking carpals and those sharpened phalanges.