He knew this would not last more than another few seconds. He did not try to wake Dane, did not think there was time, nor that Dane would move if he tried. He took a step and felt air move again, heard the tiny shifting of the living world. The curtains wafted.

With astoundingly silent motion the intruder opened the window. He began to come through, a lumpy shape being born from the split between curtains. Billy grabbed him in a half-remembered judo hold, around his neck, rolled him onto the floor, choked him fast and hard. The man made tiny sounds. He rose onto all fours, braced and shoved, rising from prone to standing in an impossible corkscrew jump that crushed Billy into a wall.

The door to the bedroom opened and there was Dane, his fists clenched, dark as a man-shaped hole. He crossed the room in three freakishly nimble steps, smacked the incomer in his jaw, sending his head snapping backward. The man dropped, deadweight.

Billy clicked his fingers and caught Dane’s eye. He pointed down through the curtains: there’s another one. Dane nodded. He whispered, “Handcuffs in my bag. Gag him, lock him.”

Without drawing the curtains, Dane reached round their edges and began to pull the window open. The curtains gusted as cold air came in. There was a curt whisper and a thwack. One curtain jerked and shuddered around a new hole. An arrow jutted from the ceiling.

Dane vaulted through the window. Billy gasped. The big man dropped the two full storeys, twisting, landed low and silently in the building’s shrubby front garden. He went straight for the man, who ran with a bolt-gun in his hand. They went very fast into and back out of the streetlamp light. Billy tried to watch as he found the cuffs and locked the unconscious intruder to a radiator, stuffed a sock in his mouth and tied it in place with a pair of the invented woman’s tights.

The front door opened. Billy stood ready, but it was Dane who entered, breathing heavily, his belly shaking. “Get your shit.”

“Did you get him?” Billy said. Dane nodded. He looked grim. “Who are they?” Billy said. “Tattoo’s guys?” Dane went into the bedroom.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Ain’t he got a proper face? He’s not some walking machine, is he? Nah. That’s Clem. The other geezer’s Jonno. Say hello. Hello Clem,” he said to the gagged man. He swung his bag up. “Oops,” he said. “Looks like the Teuthex does know about some of these hideouts.” He gave an unhappy little laugh.

Clem met Dane’s eyes and breathed snottily into his gag. “Hey, Clem,” Dane said. “How you doing, mate? How’s everything? Going alright, mate? Good, good.” Dane went through Clem’s pockets. He took what money he found, Clem’s phone. In his pack he found another of those little spearguns.

“Krak’s sake, Clem, mate, look at you,” Dane said. “You put all this effort into getting me and you’re happy to sit there like lemons while someone walks off with God. I got a message for the Teuthex. Tell him this, alright, Clem? When he comes to pick you up, you give him this message, okay? You tell him he’s a disgrace. You all are. I’m not the one who’s exiled. I’m the one doing God’s work. I’m the church, now. It’s the rest of you who’s excofuckingmunicated. You tell him that.” He patted Clem’s cheek. Clem watched through bloodshot eyes.

“Where are we going to go?” Billy said. “If they know your safe houses, we’re screwed.”

“They know this one. I’ll have to keep more careful. I’ll stick to the newest ones.”

“And what if they know them too?”

“Then we’re screwed.”

“WHAT WOULD THEY DO TO US?” BILLY SAID. DANE DROVE THEM IN A newly stolen car.

“What would they do to you?” he said. “Lock you up. Make you tell them what you see at night. What would they do to me? Apostasy, mate. Capital crime.” He took the car past a canal, where rubbish scabbed the edges of a lock and the streetlights were cold and silver.

“What do they think they’re going to find out from me?”

“I’m not a priest,” Dane said.

“I’m not a prophet,” Billy said. Dane did not reply. “Why aren’t you asking me what I dream? Don’t you care?”

Dane shrugged. “What do you dream?”

“Ask me what I dreamed tonight.”

“What did you dream tonight?”

“I dreamed I was riding the Architeuthis like Clint Eastwood. In the Wild West.”

“Well, there you go.”

“But it was…” It was still in the tank. It was still dead and bottled.

The night opened up as they turned onto a main street, an avenue of neon, crudely drawn illuminated fried chicken and the three globes of pawnbrokers. “You did well, Billy. Clem’s no pushover. He’ll get out of there before long. Where’d you learn to fight?”

“He was about to kill me.”

“You did well, man.” Dane nodded.

“Something happened. And it was to do with the dream.”

“Well, that’s what I’m saying.”

“When I woke up nothing was moving.”

“Not even a mouse?”

“Listen. The world. It was all…”

“Like I said, mate,” Dane said. “I ain’t a priest. Krakens move in mysterious ways.”

It didn’t feel like the kraken moving, Billy thought. Something was doing something. But it didn’t feel like the kraken, or any god.

Chapter Thirty-One

WORD GOT AROUND. IT DOES THAT. A CITY LIKE LONDON WAS always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. There’d be all those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there’d be quite contrary tendencies.

There, there was no state worth shit, no sanctions but self-help, no homeostasis but that of violence. The specialist police dipped in, and were tolerated as a sect or offhandedly killed like cack-handed anthropologists. “Oh, here we go, FSRC again,” wink wink stab stab.

Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, by all means-London had its social bandits-but that was fact.

So when a power put out word it was looking for a hunt-and-fetch, that was like police-band radio-an announcement of forthcoming law and order. “Tattoo? Seriously? He’s got plenty of his own muscle. What’s he employing outsiders for?”

The last time was when he had stopped being human and become the Tattoo, when Grisamentum had trapped him in a prison of someone else’s flesh. “Whoever brings me Grisamentum’s head has the run of the city,” was what he had said then. When renowned personhunters who’d taken up that commission were found ostentatiously dead, the enthusiasm for it had ebbed. The Tattoo had gone unrevenged.

Now a new situation. Anyone up for a job?

They met in a nightclub in Shepherd’s Bush, its doors roped off behind a “Private Party” sign. It had been a long time since the last trade-fair. The gathered bountymen and -women cautiously and courteously greeted each other, no one breaking protocol, the market-peace of the room. If they met in the course of competing for their quarry, whatever it was, then, sure, there would be blood, but just then they sipped drinks and ate the nibbles provided, and it was all “How was Gehenna?” and “I heard you got a new grimoire.”

They had checked their weapons; a pebble-skinned man guarded a cloakroom of Berettas, sawn-off shotguns, maggot-whips. They gathered in little groups according to micropolitics and magic allergies. Perhaps two-thirds of the people in the room could have walked down any high street without causing consternation, if in some cases they changed their clothes. They wore every kind of urban uniform and ranged in ethnicity across the whole of London’s variety.

There was a whole slew of skill-sets in the room: miracle-sniffing, unwitchery, iron blood. Some of those present worked in teams, some alone. Some had no occult skills at all, were only extraordinarily lucky with contacts and good at everyday soldierly expertises like killing. Of the others, there were those who would disguise themselves when they left this congenial atmosphere: the miasmic entities drifting at head-height like demon-faced farts would reenter their hosts; the huge woman dressed in a reverse-polarity rainbow would reinstitute her little glamour and be a teenager in a supermarket uniform again.