Wati the rebel did not reply. Continued up from the underlands. It’s a long way, whichever death you take. Occasionally Wati the retro-eschatonaut might look at those approaching and, hearing a name, or seeing a remembered resemblance, say to the new-deads’ surprise, Oh I met your father (or whomever) miles back, until generations of the dead told stories of the wrong-walker trudging out of a redundant heaven, and debated what sort of seer or whatever he was and considered it good luck to bump into him on their final journey. Wati was a fable told by the long- to the new-dead. Until, until, out he came, through the door to Annwn or the pearly gates or the entrance to Mictlan (he wasn’t paying attention), and here. Where the air is, where the living live.

In a place where there was more to do than journey, Wati looked and saw relations he remembered.

With some somatic nostalgia for his first form he entered the bodies of statues. He saw orders given and received, and it fired him up again. There was too much to do, too much to rectify. Wati sought out those like he had been. Those constructed, enchanted, enhanced by magic to do what humans told them. He became their organiser.

He started with the most egregious cases: magicked slaves; brooms forced to carry water buckets; clay men made to fight and die; little figures made of blood and choiceless about what they did. Wati fomented rebellions. He persuaded knack-formed assistants and servants to stand up, to insist to themselves that they were not defined by their creators or empowerers or the magic scribbles stuck under their tongues, to demand compensation, payment, freedom.

There was an art. He watched organisers of peasant revolts and communard monks, machine-wreckers and Chartists, and learned their methods. Insurrection was not always suitable. Though he retained a hankering for it, he was pragmatist enough to know when reforms were right for the moment.

Wati organised among golems, homunculi, robotish things made by alchemists and made slaves. The mandrakes born and bonded under gallows and treated like discardable weeds. Phantom rickshaw drivers, their hours and pay mysterious and pitiful. Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation.

Wati spread his word among brutalised familiars. That old droit de prestidigitateur was poison. With the help of Wati’s rage and the self-organised uncanny, quids pro quo were demanded and often won. Minimums of recompense, in energy, specie, kind or something. Magicians, anxious at the unprecedented rebellions, agreed.

As the last but one century died, the New Unionism took London and changed it, and inspired Wati in his unseen side of the city. In their dolls and toby jugs, he learned from and collaborated with Tillett and Mann and Miss Eleanor Marx. With a fervour that resonated hard in the strange parts of the city, the hidden layers, Wati declared the formation of the UMA, the Union of Magicked Assistants.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“SO WATI’S PISSED OFF WITH YOU.”

“There’s a strike on,” Dane said. “Total knack stoppage. That’s why they’re picketing places where conditions are bad.”

“And they are at the BL?”

Dane nodded. “You would not believe it.”

“What’s it all about?”

“It started small,” Dane said. “These things always do. Something about the hours some magus was making his ravens work. It didn’t look like it would kick off, but then he tries to play hardball, so there’s a sympathy strike at a box factory where the robots are unionised-they got minds in a mageslick, few years ago-and the next thing you know…” He slapped the dashboard. “Whole city’s out.

“It’s the first big thing since Thatcher. And nothing gets the knack-smiths more antsy. Everyone in the UMA’s out, it’s solid. And then I had an emergency. I knew you was being watched. I knew you were, and I had to track you, because I didn’t know what you had to do with the whole god thing. The kraken being took. I didn’t even know what your deal was, I didn’t know if you were in on anything, or had some plan or what. But I knew you were tied up with it. And I couldn’t keep an eye on you twenty-four/seven, so I had to organise a short-term binding with that little sod.”

“The squirrel?”

“The familiar.” Dane winced. “I been strikebreaking. And Wati got word. I don’t blame him being pissed off. If he can’t trust his friends, you know? There’s all dirty tricks. People are getting hurt. Someone got killed. A journo writing about it. No one knows for sure it’s connected, but of course it’s connected. You know? So Wati’s edgy. We have to sort this. I want him on our side. We do not want to be on the shitlist of all the pissed-off UMA in London.”

Billy looked at him. “It’s not just that, though.” He took off and put back on his glasses.

“No it ain’t,” Dane said. “I’m not a scab. I didn’t have time…” He slumped in his seat. “Alright. It wasn’t just that. I was worried if I went and asked for dispensation, the union wouldn’t say yes. They might not think it was serious enough. And I needed it. I had to have more eyes, and something that could get places fast. And you should be happy I did or you’d have been took to Tattoo’s workshop.

“The bastard is I never use familiars.” He shook his head, repeatedly. “It was just crap luck. It was just crap, crap luck, the timing.”

WATI MOVED IN ELDRITCH LEAPFROGGING, STATUE TO STATUE, figure to figurine, consciousness momentarily in each. Just long enough to see through the stone eyes in a horse rider in a park; wooden eyes on a Jesus outside a church; plastic eyes in a discarded clothes model; taking bearings, feeling to the limits of his range, some scores of metres, briefly considering each potential figure within his arc, choosing the most suitable according to criteria, transferring his thinks-node into that next human-made head.

He met Dane and Billy in the café in the back streets near Holborn, where for years the plaster mannequin of a fat chef had held up fingers in an “O” meaning delicious right next to an outside table, so where, if Dane and Billy put up with the chill, huddling over coffees, Wati could en-statue close enough to converse with them. They hunkered against the cold and the possibility of being seen. Dane looked repeatedly around them.

“Like I say, Dane, this better be good,” the Wati-chef said through a motionless openmouthed smile. Its accent remained-Cockney plus the New Kingdom?-but the voice was choky, now, and clogged-sounding.

“Wati, this is Billy,” said Dane. Billy greeted the statue. He greeted a statue and disguised his awe. “He’s what this is all about.” Dane cleared his throat. “You can feel it, right, Wati? The sky, the air, all this shit. History ain’t working. Something’s coming up. That’s what this is about. I bet you can feel it. Between statues.”

There was silence. “Maybe,” said Wati. Was it gusting he sensed? Billy wondered. A dislocation? Something foreboding in that inter-effigial unspace? “Maybe.”

“Alright. Well then. You heard… the kraken got took?”

“’Course I did. The angels can’t shut up about it. I even went to the museum,” Wati said. No lack there of the bodies in which he could be. He could rush around the interior of the hall in a whirlwind of entities, skimming, skipping from animal to stone animal. “The phylax is screaming in the corridors. It’s walking, you know. It’s looking for something, it’s on a trail. You can hear it at night.”

“What’s this?” Billy said.

“The angels of memory,” Dane said.

“What are…?” said Billy, then stopped at Dane’s shaken head. Alright, he thought, we’ll get back to that.

“It’s all screwed up,” Wati said.

“It is,” Dane said. “We need to find the kraken, Wati. No one knows who took it. I thought it was the Tattoo, but then… He took Billy. Was going to do him. And the way he was talking… Most people think it was us.” He paused. “The church. But it weren’t. They ain’t even looking for it. When the kraken went, this thing underneath it all started rising.”