Chapter Thirty-Three

THERE ARE MANY MILLIONS OF LONDONERS, AND THE VERY GREAT majority know nothing of the other mapland, the city of knacks and heresies. Those people’s millions of everydays are no more everyday than those of the magicians. The scale of the visible city dwarfs that of the mostly-unseen, and that unseen is not the only place where there are amazing things.

At that moment, however, the drama was in the less-travelled metropolis. Nothing changed for most Londoners but for the onset of a wave of depression and anger, a bad intimation. That was not good and not nothing, certainly. But for those who lived in the city’s minority articulation things were growing daily more dangerous. The strike paralysed large sections of occult industry. The economy of gods and monsters was stagnating.

The journals of the secretive places-The Chelsea Picayune, Thames’ Unwater Notes, The London Evening Standard (not that one: the other, older paper of the same title)-were full of foreboding at millennial signs. Drug use reached record levels. Smack and Charlie, narcotics that user-mages squabbled with the knackless over in the mainstream capital; and more arcane fixes, the sweepings from ley lines and certain time-crushed places, the buzz of choice for dust-junkies, addicts of collapse and history, high on entropy. Inferior supply grew to meet demand, product ground up and adulterated by impatience, rather than genuine snortable ruins.

A group of mysterious independents intercepted a shipment of product the Tattoo was moving. No one got to trip on this degraded antiquity: they burnt, blew away and oil-fouled the goods, then disappeared, leaving holes in the bodies of the killed, and rumours of monstrous shapes coagulated out of city-matter.

Word spread on graffitied walls, on secret bulletin boards virtual and corporeal, corkboards in ignorable offices frequented by curious visitors you couldn’t be quite sure worked there, that Dane Parnell was exiled from the Church of God Kraken. What heresy or betrayal could he have committed? The church would say only that he had showed a lack of faith.

IT WAS EARLY DAYLIGHT. DANE AND BILLY WERE IN THE OPEN, NEAR the City of London. Dane twitched with nerves. His hands were in his pockets with his weapons.

“We need more information,” Dane had said.

Cannon Street, opposite the Tube. In the emptied remains of a foreign bank was a sports shop. Below posters of physically adept men was a glass-front cabinet and iron grille, behind which was a big chunk of stone. Dane and Billy watched the comings and goings a long time.

The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances. Trusting in that old rock was a quaint or dangerous tradition, depending on to whom you spoke. The London Stone was a heart. Did it still beat?

Yes, it still beat, though it was sclerotic. Billy thought he could feel it, a faint laboured rhythm making the glass tremble like dust in a bass line.

This had been the seat of sovereignty, and it cropped up throughout the city’s history if you knew where to look. Jack Cade touched his sword to the London Stone when claiming grievances against the king: that was what gained him the right to speak, he said, and others believed. Did he wonder why it had turned on him, afterward? Perhaps after the change in his fortunes, his head had looked down from the pike on the bridge, seen his quartered body parts taken for national gloating, and wryly thought, So, London Stone, to be honest I’m getting mixed messages here… Should I in fact maybe not lead the rebels?

But forgotten, hiding, camouflaged or whatever, the Stone was the heart, the heart was stone, and it beat from its various places, coming to rest at last here in an insalubrious sports shop between cricket equipment.

Dane took Billy through shadows. Billy could feel that they were, he was, hard to see. By an alley, bracing himself in a corner of brick and launching astonishingly up, Dane entered the tumbledown complex like some thickset Spider-Man. He opened the door for Billy. He led through scuffed passages behind the shop, by toilets and office rooms to where a young man in a Shakira hoodie loitered. He fumbled for his pocket, but Dane’s speargun was out, aimed straight at his forehead.

“Marcus, ain’t it?” Dane said.

“I know you?” The young man’s voice was impressively steady.

“We need to come in, Marcus. Got to speak to your crew.”

“Appointment?”

“Knock on the door behind you, there’s the boy.” But at all the noise the door opened preemptively. Billy heard swearing.

“Fitch,” Dane said, raising his voice. “Londonmancers. No one wants trouble. I’m putting my weapon away.” He waved it so the watchers could see. “I’m putting it away.”

“Dane Parnell,” someone said in an ancient voice. “And that would be Billy Harrow with you. What are you here for, Dane Parnell? What do you want?”

“What does anyone want with the Londonmancers, Fitch? We want a consultation. Couldn’t exactly prearrange, now, could we?”

There was a long hesitation and a laugh. “No, I suppose you couldn’t exactly call ahead. Let them in, Marcus.”

Inside it was a management lounge. World of Leather sofas, a drinks machine. Make-do shelving covered with manuals and paperbacks. A cheap carpet, workstations, lever-arch files. A window at ceiling height emitted light and the sight of legs and wheels passing on the pavement outside. There were several people within. Most were fifty or over, some much younger. Men and women in jackets and ties, boilersuits, scuffed sportswear.

“Dane,” said a man in their midst. He was so old, his skin such a welter of creases and dense pigment, it was impossible to tell his ethnicity. He appeared to be dark grey. Cement-coloured. Billy remembered his mad-sounding voice from the Teuthex’s recording.

“Fitch,” Dane said respectfully. “Saira,” to a woman beside him, in her late twenties, a tough-looking well-dressed Asian woman crossing her arms. The Londonmancers did not move. “I’m sorry about how we came in. I was… We don’t know who’s watching us.”

“We heard…” Fitch said. His eyes were very open, and they moved all the time. He licked his lips. “We heard about you and your church and we’re terribly sorry, Dane. It’s a shame, an awful shame.”

“Thanks,” said Dane.

“You’ve been a friend of London. If there’s anything…”

“Thank you.”

A friend of London. More backstory, Billy thought.

“No you mustn’t,” Fitch said. “Hesitate. And your friend…?”

“We have to be fast, Fitch. We can’t be out.”

“I know what you’re doing, you know,” Fitch said, with a trace of humour. “Trap us in vows.”

“Confidentiality,” Saira said.

“I need you to be secret, yeah, but I need a seeing, as well… And I can rely on your-”

“You know what we’re going to tell you,” Saira said. Her voice was startlingly posh. “Have we been at all quiet with warnings, recently? Why’d you think we’re low on numbers? Some of us are a bit futuresick.”

“When have we ever taken sides, Dane?” Fitch said.

The Londonmancers had been there since Gogmagog and Corineus, since Mithras and the rest. Like their sibling chapters in other psychopoli, the Paristurges (Dane had carefully pronounced it to Billy French-wise, pareetourdzh), the Warsawtarchs, the Berlinimagi, they had always been ostentatiously neutral. That was how they could survive.

Not custodians of the city: they called themselves its cells. They recruited young and nurtured hexes, shapings, foresight and the diagnostic trances they called urbopathy. They, they insisted, were just conduits for the flows gathered by streets. They did not worship London but held it in respectful distrust, channelled its needs, urges and insights.