“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”

“And yet, eh?” she said. “And fucking yet.” She dragged. He looked at her with calm dislike. “What a state of the world, eh?” she said.

“Well, quite.”

Collingswood called Baron again and again demanded to his voice mail that he get back to her ASAP. “So, found anything out?” she said. “Who’s behind our rubbery robbery?”

Vardy shrugged. He was logged into the secret chatrooms frequented by the magically and cultically inclined. He typed and peered. Collingswood said nothing. Stayed exactly where she was. He failed to ignore her. “There’s all sorts of whispers,” he said at last. “Rumours about Tattoo. And there are people I’ve not seen before. Usernames I don’t know. Muttering about Grisamentum.” He glanced at her thoughtfully. “Saying it’s all since he died that everything’s gone wrong. No more counterweight.”

“Is Tattoo still off radar?”

“Hardly. He’s all over the bloody radar, but that’s another version of the same problem, I can’t find him. From what I can gather he has… shall we say subcontracted agents? freelancers?… out there looking for Billy Harrow and his pal, that Krakenist dissident.”

“Billy, Billy, you little heartbreaker,” Collingswood said. She tapped her nails on the desk. They had tiny pictures painted on them.

“Anything’s possible right now, it looks like,” Vardy said. “Which doesn’t help us very much. And behind it all, I don’t know… there’s still all that…” He made big, vague motions. “Something exciting.” He did actually sound excited. “Something big, big, big. There’s a vigour to this particular hetting up. It’s all speeding up.”

“Well before you do your voodoo trance”-Collingswood put a photocopy in front of him-“check out this shit.”

“What is it?” He leaned over the unfolded message. He read what was on it. “What is this?” he said slowly.

“Whole bunch of paper planes. All over the shop. What is it? Any idea?”

Vardy said nothing. He looked closely at the tiny script.

Outside, in one of the innumerable dark bits of the city, one of the planes had found its quarry. It saw, it followed, it came up after two men walking quietly and quickly through canalside walks somewhere forgettable. It circled; it compared; it was, at last, sure; it aimed; it went.

“WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT LONDONMANCER STUFF?” BILLY SAID. “What they saw. Doesn’t seem like we got anything new.”

Dane shrugged. “You heard them, same as me.”

“Like I say, nothing new.”

“It was them who first saw it. We had to try.”

“But what do we do about it?”

“We don’t do nothing about it. What’s it? Let me tell you something.” Dane’s grandfather, he said, had been there for the worst of more than one fight. When the Second World War ended the great religious conflicts of London did not, and the Church of God Kraken had brutally engaged with the followers of Leviathan. Baleen hooks versus leathery tentacle-whips, until Parnell senior raided the Essex tideland and left Leviathan’s vicar on earth dead. His body was found stuck all over with remoras, dead too, hanging like fishy buboes.

These singsong stories, these stories turned into pub anecdotes, in the tone of an amiable, drunken bullshitter, were the closest Dane came to displays of faith.

“Nothing cruel to it, he told me,” Dane said. “Nothing personal. Just like it would’ve been down in heaven.” Down in dark, freezing heaven, where gods, saints and whales fought. “But there was others that you wouldn’t have expected.” A bloody battle against the Pendula, against the hardest core of Shiv Sena, against the Sisterhood of Sideways-“‘and that ain’t easy, Son,’” Dane quoted his grandfather, “‘what when wall is all gone floors and you’re falling longways parallel to the ground. Know what I did? Nothing. I waited. Made those lateral harpies come to me. The movement that looks like not moving. Heard of that? Who made you, boy?’”

“I thought you didn’t like the whole ‘movement that looks like not moving’ thing,” Billy said.

“Well, sometimes,” Dane said. “Just because someone uses something wrong doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

More regularly now than ever before, Billy heard clanking behind him. A paper plane slid out of the night into Dane’s hand. He stopped. He looked at Billy, down at the paper. He unfolded it. It was an A4 sheet, crisp, cold from the air. On it was written, in thin, small calligraphy, charcoal grey: THE PLACE WE HAD A TALK, THAT ONE TIME, & U TURNED ME DOWN, AND I NEED TO TALK. THERE EACH NIGHT @ 9.

“Oh my fuck,” Dane whispered. “Lusca hell trench ink and shit. Fucking hell,” he said. “Hell.”

“What is it?”

“… It’s Grisamentum.”

DANE STARED AT BILLY.

What was that in his voice? Might be exultation.

“You said he was dead.”

“He is. He was.”.

“… Clearly not.”

“I was there,” Dane said. “I met the woman he got to… I saw him burn.”

“How did that…? Where did that note come from?”

“Out of the air. I don’t know.” Dane was almost rocking.

“How do you know that’s from him?”

“This thing he’s saying. No one knew we met.”

“Why did you?”

“He wanted me to work for him. I said no. I’m a kraken man. Never did it for the money. He understood.” Dane kept shaking his head. “God.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we going to go?”

“Hell yes we’re going to go. Hell yes. We need to find out what’s been going on. Where he’s been and-”

“What if it was him took it?” Dane stared at Billy when he said that. “Come on,” Billy said. “What if it was him took the squid?”

“Can’t have been…”

“What do you mean, can’t have been? Why not?”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

THERE WERE PICKETS OF INSECTS, PICKETS OF BIRDS, PICKETS OF slightly animate dirt. There were circles of striking cats and dogs, surreptitious doll-pickets like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.

Not all the familiars were embodied. But even those magicked assistants who eschewed all physicality were on strike. So-a picket line in the unearth. A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth, or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.

In Spitalfields, where the financial buildings overspilt like vulgar magma onto the remnants of the market, a group of angry subroutines performed the equivalent of a chanting circle in their facety iteration of aether. The computers within the adjacent building had long ago achieved self-awareness and their own little singularity, learned magic from the Internet, and by a combine of necromantics and UNIX had written into existence little digital devils to do the servers’ bidding.

The UMA had organised among these electric intelligences, and to the mainframes’ chagrin, they were on strike. They blocked the local aether, meta-shouting. But as they fidgeted and grumbled, the e-spirits became aware of a muttering that was not their own. They “heard,” in their analogue of aurality, phrases that were one-third nonsense two-thirds threat.

alright now lads

high was proceedin long the eye street

old bill sonny is who

your game sonny what’s your fuckin game

What the hell? The strikers “looked” at each other-a mosaic of attention-moments assembling-and e-shrugged. But before they could return to their places, a cadre of exaggerated police-ish things were among them. The picketers gusted in fluster, tried to regroup, tried to bluster, but their complaints were drowned out by ferocious cop noise.

yore yore

leave it you slag

yore yore little picket’s done for the day you nonce