Chapter Seventy-Three

BILLY WATCHED THE LAST-EVER KRAKEN MASS. HE SAT AT THE back of the church. He watched tears and heard benedictions. Dane was faltering, but with grace, repeating the liturgies he had not been part of for a long time. The shepherdless flock herded themselves. Billy shifted in his seat and fiddled with the phaser in his pocket.

The congregation sang hymns to torpedo-shaped, many-armed gods. At last Dane said, “Right then.”

Some of the volunteers tried to smile as they made a line. One by one they placed their hand at the point of the kraken jaw. The hinge-men would very carefully scissor the great bite together on their skin. Twice the hook of the jaw tore worse wounds than intended and made the faithful cry out. Mostly the snips were precise-the skin broke, there was a little blood.

Billy waited for drama. The bitten seemed clumsy and large, seemed to cram the cavelike hall. They embraced each other and held their bleeding hands. Dane, the last one, put his own hand in the jaws and had his congregation bite them down. Billy made no reaction at all.

The plan was simple or stupid. They did not have the time, numbers or expertise for sophistication. They had one advantage and only one, which was that Grisamentum did not know they knew where he was, or that they were coming. All they had was that surprise. A one-two, misdirect and real attack. Anyone who thought for more than one second must realise that what came first was a diversion. So they would not give them that second.

They had a few pistols, swords, knacked things of various designs. They did not know what Grisamentum was, now. En-inked on paper, in liquid? He’d avoided death once already. Fire might dry him out, but it would leave his pigment behind. Bleach, then. He had seemed scared of it. They carried bottles. Their most important weapon a household cleanser. Some wore plant sprayers filled with it like bulky pistols on their belts.

“Come on then,” Billy said at last to Dane. He led him to the car. It was he who drove, now. Didn’t even need directions, and drove like a man who knew what he was doing. Billy looked out of the window. He did not look at Dane: he did not want to see changes. He glanced into all the dark streets they passed; he kept hoping that the angel of memory would come, but there was no glass-and-bone figure under the swaying, leafless trees, the canopies of London’s buildings, no skull and jar rolling among the small night crowd. There were running people, small fires.

“Christ,” Billy said. He wished that Wati raced ahead from figure to figure, returned to the hula girl on the car dashboard.

He parked near the factory compound Dane had shown him on the map, by metal gates black with rust. Others of the attacking party parked elsewhere, in studiedly random patterns, sauntered into position. Billy put his finger to his lips and looked at Dane in warning. Sirens were audible, but not as many as the signs of fires and the sounds of violence would suggest were necessary. The parents of London would have their children at home that night, be lyingly whispering to them that everything would be alright.

“Where do you reckon the Tattoo’s most loyal troops are now?” Dane said. “The fist-heads and the, the people from the workshops?” He was sweating. His eyes were wide.

“Fighting,” Billy said.

Out into the strange warm night. Some of the fitter Londonmancers followed. Saira’s war party. Out of sight they climbed the layered walls of the building and sidled along the architecture. They watched the factory as if it might do something.

Behind the wall was a forecourt where a derelict car lorded over weeds. The factory sat surrounded by that emptiness. Nothing moved that they could see. There was perhaps a slight diminution of the darkness in one of the big windows overlooking nothing. The wall they were on led like a spine to the building itself: they need not touch the ground. Billy pointed at a few of the following fighters, pointed where he wanted them to go.

Even if Wati had been there he could not have spied for them: the clay figures on the roof, Billy saw, were smashed up. Grisamentum’s court had blinded their architecture. Billy took the little Kirk figure from his pocket. He held it up as he had done many times since the shabti’s awful lurching recall and whispered Wati’s name. Again, nothing.

Billy pointed. Dane sighted along a rifle he had taken from the kraken armoury, at tiny motion on the building’s roof. A man, putting his hands on railings and leaning out toward him.

“He’s seen us,” Billy said.

“He’s not sure yet,” Dane whispered. His weapon bucked. The man dropped, silently.

“Wow,” Billy said.

“Shit,” said Dane. He was trembling.

“We don’t have long now,” Billy said.

The krakenbit were emerging from their cars, moving with strange ungainliness. As they came forward, their diversion arrived.

THE LONDONMANCER ATTACKERS CAME AS AGREED, WITH DRAMA. An army of masonry. Those few left whose knack was to wake the city’s defences had done what they could do. They had sent their alarums in parachemicals, waves of pathogen anxiety. They stimulated immune response in the factory grounds. Birthing of brick angles; emerging from hollows in boscage; unwinding from the ruined car; London’s leucocytes came on in attack.

One was ambulant architecture; another a trash marionette; another a window onto another part of the city, a monster-shaped hole. They moved across urban matter, niche-filling and/or huge. Their footsteps made the sounds of barking dogs and braking cars. One threw back its head-analogue and shouting a war shout that was the puttering-engine call of a bus.

It threw open the compound doors. The bravest Londonmancers ran in. They raised weapons, or goads with which to direct their giant cellular charges. There was movement behind the factory windows.

Emerging from side doors and from behind dustbins came gunfarmers, murmuring fertility prayers as they shot. A canine shape of discarded paper leapt from a window. For seconds Billy thought it was blown by monsterherds, but there was no one to gust it. Each shred of paper in that wolf totality was ink-stained.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Dane. That’s him. He’s all over them.” Enough of Grisamentum’s ink presence was on each piece to knack his motion. He was profligate now, impatient at the edge of his intended apotheosis. The ink-paper wolf jumped onto a screaming Londonmancer, and the paper teeth tore her as if they were bone.

“Oh Christ,” Billy said. “Time to move.” He aimed his phaser and crawled.

Below him in the wall a stretch of crumbled brick changed, was pressed into new shape, become an ancient door with a long-broken lock so it could be pushed open. Saira came in and bit her lip and stood aside, and the krakenbit came in behind her. Billy saw those nipped by the squid god.

They were stronger than they had any right to be. They picked up masonry and hurled it. They were misshapen and changing. Tides moved on them; their muscles fluttered in directions they had not been made to take. “Christ,” he whispered. He fired a weak whining jolt at the building, a wild distraction as he stared.

One man was growing Architeuthis eyes, fierce black circles taking up each side of his head, squeezing his features between them. A woman bulged, her body become a muscular tube from which her limbs poked, absurd but strong. A woman streaked across the distance, jetted by her new siphon, moving through air as if it were water, her hair billowed by currents in the sea miles off. There was a man with arms raised to display blisters bursting and making themselves squid suckers, another with a wicked beak where he had had a mouth.

They tore at the gunfarmers and through the swirl of inked paper. Bullets ripped them, and they roared and bit and smashed back. The suckered man looked hopefully at the inside of his arms. The marks were blebbing into little vacuums, but arms his arms remained. Billy watched him. It was awesome, yes, but.