Kraken (45 page)

“What happened?” Wati would cry, on emerging into a lion face made in mortar, to see a picket bust up, its members scattered or killed, two or three still there trying to fix themselves. They were tiny sexless homunculi made out of animal flesh. Several had been left just bone-flecked smears.

“What happened?” Wati said. “Are you okay?”

Not really. His informant, a man built of bird parts and mud, dragged a leg smudgelike. “Tattoo’s men,” he said. “Help, boss.”

“I ain’t your boss,” Wati said. “Come on now, let’s get you …” Where? He could not take him anywhere, and the animal-man-thing was dying. “What happened?”

“Knuckleheads.”

Wati stayed with him as long as he could bear. The Tattoo had been paid to close the strike down, and efforts were being stepped up. Wati went back to the dolls in Billy’s and Dane’s pockets. In agitation he trembled between the two as he spoke.

“We’re being attacked.” “The Tattoo …” “… and the police …” “… trying to finish it.”

“I thought they already were,” Billy said.

“Not like this.” “Not like this.”

“We made him angry,” Dane said slowly.

“By getting you out,” Billy said.

“He wants me back, and he wants you, and the kraken, and he’s getting at us through Wati. I heard him, while I was there. He’s desperate. He can feel everything speeding up, like we all can.”

“We have one of his knuckleheads, you know,” Wati said with the ghost of humour. “Got political after he joined. Got sacked, no surprise.”

“Wati,” said Billy. He glanced at Dane. “We need to get into the police station.”

“Where even are we?” Wati said. He had followed the aetherial ruts ground out from and back into this figure without even clocking his location. “Not that I can get in—they’ve got a barrier.”

“Near,” Dane said. They were in an alley out back of a café in the dark but for a fringe of streetlight. “It’s round the corner.”

“Jason’s inside,” said Billy.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Wati said.

“Wait,” Billy said. “Hold on. I’m thinking … how I first met Goss and Subby. It was the entrance that they had to get over. Collingswood didn’t make the whole place out of bounds.”

“It’s a lot easier to just guard a perimeter,” Dane said. “I get it.”

“So if we can get you past
that
…” Billy said.

W
ATI IN THE FOETAL, MOST INNER OF THE
R
USSIAN DOLLS THAT
Billy had snagged a long time ago, jogged in the mouth of his mouse escort, a longtime activist of the UMA. She had never spoken in twelve years of membership but was absolutely solid.

She was a big mouse, but the doll was still a big mouthful. The mouse was a speck of dark under headlights, disappearing under gates, up an incline of crumble, below unmoving cars and through cavities. “Alright, this is great,” Wati said. “Thanks. We’ll sort this out, don’t sweat it. We’ll sort this all out.”

Midway through the outer wall Wati felt a limit point, felt space try to keep him out, “Whoa,” he said, “I think there’s a …” But the mouse, little physical thing, felt nothing and ran on through, hauling Wati’s consciousness with her, straight on in, snapping through the block.

“Ow,” Wati said. “Shit, that was weird.”

The distinctive mutter of striplights. Wati was used to dramatic shifts of scale and perspective, to seeing from giant figures then lead miniatures. Right now the corridor was cathedral. He felt the pounding of an incoming human. The mouse waited under a radiator. Legs came past. Several officers. There was some emergency.

“Can you follow that lot?” Wati said in his small voice. “Careful now.” The mouse went after the earthquake footprints, down stairs, onto different carpet, into different lights. “He’ll be in a cell,” Wati whispered. The animal agent stuck to the shadows: crouched under the open door itself, of a cell around which the police were gathered. Near what was definitely blood.

“Oh fuck me sideways,” Wati whispered.

The mouse turned him slowly in its little mouth, so Wati’s eyes tracked up the mountain of dead body that lay on the cell’s bed, the red dead man. There were the FSRC. The other milling police shunned them. Among the bustle of voices two words rose to Wati’s attention. “Goss,” he heard, and “Subby.”

“Oh, no no no,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The mouse waited while he whispered miserable curses. “Okay. Okay. Let’s concentrate. Let’s find their office,” he said eventually. “See if we can get some information. Goss and Subby are with the Tattoo, and I thought he had these buggers’ backing. Something’s going nuts.”

The station was all afaddle with the crisis, and it was not so hard for a mouse to run room to room uninterrupted, looking for and at last finding signs of FSRC involvement—religious pieces, books one would not normally associate with the police. At Collingswood’s desk, CD cases of several Grime artists.

“There’s got to be something,” Wati said. “Come on.” He was exhorting himself, not his escort.

The mouse walked Wati on all the papers they could find. A laborious ambulatory notetaking. Wati was not altogether surprised when he heard voices approaching. “Go,” he said. “Go go!” But the mouse walked one last paragraph, so when the FSRC officers entered, they saw her scuttling from Vardy’s desk.

Collingswood moved at shocking speed, not like a human. She dropped to her haunches and lurched sideways, keeping the tiny animal now running for the space between a filing cabinet and the wall in her line of sight. Vardy and Baron had still not moved. Collingswood spat a word that made the mouse go plastic-stiff skidding with momentum to the back of the little runnel, where the animal lay immobilized as Collingswood shuffled toward her. She still bit-gripped Wati.

“Mouse! Mouse! Come on!”

“Help me with this fucking cabinet,” Collingswood yelled at her sluggish colleagues, and at last they shifted their arses and began to tug it.

“Mouse, you better move,” Wati said. He felt statues beyond the walls that he might, from here on the nonblocked side of the magic caul, jump to. But he muttered and muttered at the mouse, until she regained enough of herself to crawl from Collingswood’s fingers. “Get into the fucking wall,” said Wati, and the mouse made it excruciatingly around a corner of architecture while Collingswood swore.

T
HE MOUSE DRAGGED HERSELF THROUGH THE WALLS, AT LAST TO
deliver the doll to the cool air outside. “Thank you,” Wati said. “You okay? Good work. Thanks. There’s, look, there’s some food over there.” Remains of kebab. “Get that down you. Thanks. Big time. You’ll be alright, now?”

The mouse nodded, and Wati skittered through a few statues to where Billy and Dane waited for the news of Jason that he would have to give.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

“G
OSS AND
S
UBBY.”

“It was Goss and Subby.”

“Holy fucking Kraken. Goss and Subby.”

Goss and Subby, Goss and Subby, names both names and barks of outrage at those so named. They had been that way since year who-bloody-knew? Certainly for centuries the bereaved, the beaten, the tortured had shouted those names in aftermaths.

Billy and Dane were aboveground, in a neglected tower, a folly thrown up on a terrace by some exuberant Camden architect. As everything closed in and they ran out of Dane’s hidden, fake flats, they retreated to chambers above the city and below it. This one was empty and light and dust-clogged. They sat in striae of particulate.

“And it was all the names of old associates on the desks?” Dane said at last.

“Yeah,” said Kirk-Wati. “Whoever was with Grisamentum when he was around.”

“Oh, he’s around,” Billy said.

“Well. You know what I mean. It was all people who’d been with him. Necros, doctors, pyros.”

“Names?” Dane said.

“A geezer called Barto. Ring any bells? Necromancer, according to the notes I saw. Byrne obviously. Someone Smithsee someone. A guy called Cole.”

“Cole. Wait a moment,” said Dane.

“What?” Billy said.

“Cole’s a pyro.”

“I couldn’t see,” said Wati. “All we got was a university, some notes. Why? You know him?”

“I know his name. I remember it from when Griz died. I heard it then. He’s a pyro.” He looked at Billy’s uncertainty. “A firesmith.”

“Yeah, I get that, but why …”

“From when Grisamentum was cremated. Supposedly. But … he works with
fire.”

It was fire that ate up everything at the end. It was fire and a secret scheme from Adler, a minor man, a player in the rubble of Grisamentum’s organisation, with unknown intentions, connected to this other one.

“Where
is
Grisamentum?” Billy said.

“We don’t know. You know that. Wati can’t—”

“It’s more than
where
, though, isn’t it? You said you don’t see any reason?”

“For him to burn the world? No. No. I don’t get what his plans were at all, but they weren’t that.” They were uncertain enough not to join him, still.

“We’ll find out,” Billy said. “Let’s go find out what Cole is in all this.” He stood, pushing through the layered air. He looked down at the cars. “What the bloody hell is going on out there?”

T
HE
T
ATTOO WAS GOING ON
. H
IS HIRED GUNS RAGED AND VIOLATED
trusts that had held for decades, all the way through everything, hunting for the quarry they had had and lost.

The Chaos Nazis were nothing, of course. Who was afraid of them now, drowned, screaming and up-fucked? The freelancers, the full-timer knuckleheads and others were happy to audition for the newly open position of lead bogeymen, and the UMA pickets were unwilling bit parts in these violent run-throughs and résumé-building attacks. Wati was gone from the room above Camden, back, gone, back, shoring up, fixing and failing.

“Tattoo’s gone fucking batshit,” Collingswood said. “What is he doing? Has anyone spoken to him?”

“Won’t talk,” said Baron. He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “We can’t bloody find him.”

“He doesn’t need our permission,” Vardy said. The three sat like a support group for the morose.

“Come on,” said Baron. “I don’t employ you two for your looks. Talk this out.”

“We’ve got the Tattoo declaring war,” Vardy said. “Sending Goss and Subby in
here
. Dealing with our prisoners.”

“And Dane and Billy sending people into
my effing office,”
Collingswood said.

“So it’s the office intrusion that particularly bothers you,” Baron said angrily. “It’s having people rummage around in the pens that
really
got your goat, Kath …”

She stared at him. “Yeah,” she said. “That and the thing with the horrible death thing.”

Another round of staring.

“No one gives a shit about us anymore,” Baron said. “We’re just in the middle. It’s bad for the soul, that sort of thing.”

“Christ, boss,” said Collingswood. “Perk the fuck up.”

“We’re not running buggery fuck,” Baron said. “Billy and Dane’ve got more going on than us.”

“This won’t do,” Vardy said. He blinked quickly, formulating. “Sitting here like something. Everyone running around around us. Let’s assert a bit of bloody
authority
. We need to start bringing people in. On our terms.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Baron said. “We don’t know where any of them are.”

“No. So. We have to do something about that. Now look, we know what they know. One, they know about the end. And two, they know it’s because the squid’s bloody gone. And three, that someone, somewhere out there, for some reason, is planning things that way. So what we need to do is get the mountain to come to Mohammed.”

Baron continued to stare. “Who’s Mohammed in all this?” he said. “And where’s the mountain?”

“I ain’t climbing fuck,” Collingswood said.

“We need to fish for them,” Vardy said.

“Is this, like, the mountain going fishing now?” Collingswood said.

“Jesus Christ, will you shut
up?”
Vardy shouted. She showed no shock, but Collingswood said nothing. “We need to dangle what they want,
what they’re waiting for
. What’s going to bring them out? Well, what brings everyone out?” He waited, theatrical.

Collingswood—a little tentative—said, “Ah. Apocalypse.”

“There you go,” Vardy said. “They’re waiting for an apocalypse. Let’s give them one.”

In London, Heresiopolis was always the draw. Some midnight-of-all or other was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to nothing, leaving relevant prophets cringing with a unique embarrassment as the sun rose. It was a very particular shame, that of now ex-worshippers avoiding each other’s eyes in the unexpected aftermath of “final” acts—crimes, admissions, debaucheries and abandon.

Believers tried to talk the universe into giving their version a go. Even small outlandish groupuscules might make headway in ushering in their End. The FSRC had a decent reputation for helping clear up these potentials. But Vardy’s point was that the most dramatic of these Armageddonim—London had had to grow used to such arcane plural forms—were events in a kind of society. Spectator sports. To miss one would be a
realtheologik
al faux pas.

They were means to gauge who was in the ascendant, which group on the wane. The shenanigans of putatively final nights were something between fieldwork and social gatherings.

Baron and Collingswood looked startled. “It won’t work,” Collingswood said. “No end’s going to be big enough to get people out at the moment, not with everything else going on. You’d have to cook up something pretty fucking dramatic. And people’ve got their ears to the ground, they’d know it wasn’t real. They wouldn’t turn up.”

“They’d certainly turn up if they thought it might be
the
end,” Vardy said. “Imagine if the one apocalypse you missed was the real one.”

“Yeah, but …”

“No, you’re right, we couldn’t fake it. We need to bump up some little one that no one would’ve noticed scheduled … Ha. I say ‘one.’ ‘Something big.’ For the times when one apocalypse isn’t enough, ha.” He stood, all bristling. “A list of the sects we have an in with.” He clicked his fingers. “Everyone’s heard about the kraken by now. Right? And they know that whatever it is that’s coming has something to do with it. Don’t they? They do.”