Chapter Thirty-Eight

BILLY HAD ANOTHER DREAM AT LAST, THAT NIGHT. HE HAD BEEN feeling vaguely guilty at the lack of oneiric insights. But at last he had a dream worthy to be so called, rather than the vague sensations of cosseting dark, cool, glimmerings, heaviness, stasis and chemical stench that otherwise filled his nighttime head.

He had been in a city. In a city and racing up and over buildings, jumping over high buildings with one jump, making swimming motions to pass through the clear air above skyscrapers. He wore bright clothes.

“Stop,” he shouted at someone, some figure creeping from broken windows in a big warehouse, where police lights shone and there was the smoke of a fire billowing like a dark liquid in water. There was Collingswood, the young police witch, smoking, leaning against a wall, not looking at the crime behind her, eyeing Billy on his descent sardonically and patiently. She pointed the way he had come. She pointed back the other way and did not look round.

Billy sank gracefully through. Behind Collingswood he saw a robotic wizard mastermind nemesis look up, and Billy felt warm in the sun, knowing that his companion would come. He waited to see the muscly arms, the tentacles in their Lycra, come out from behind the building, his sidekick behind its mask.

But something was wrong. He heard a rumble but there were no uncoiling sucker arms, no grabbing ropy limbs, no vast eye like that of the tinderbox dog. There was, instead, a bottle. Behind the enemy. Its glass was dark. Its stopper was old and corroded into place, but uncorking. And he knew suddenly and with a kind of relief that it was not his sidekick, but that he was its.

When he woke Billy felt a different kind of guilt. At the kitsch of the dreams. He felt the universe, exasperated, was giving him an insultingly clear insight, that he was simply missing.

“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE?” BILLY SAID.

“You mean what my granddad said?” Dane said. “If you was good, maybe you come back in a god’s skin.” A chromatophore, a gushing colour cell. So krakens show emotion by the flexing of their devout dead. It was never the stories of sinking islands upsetting Vikings that Dane told.

Billy and Dane crossed the city with as much subterfuge as they could muster. By way of knacks, magic misdirection, an anti-trail of psychic un-bread crumbs. Billy relaxed a little when they entered the graveyard where they had their rendezvous. He walked between the rows of stone. His calm made little sense, he knew: whatever hunted them would do so among the dead as easily as among the living.

“Dane. Billy.” Wati spoke to them from a stone angel. “Sure you weren’t followed?”

“Fuck off, Wati,” Dane said mildly. “How’s the strike?”

“Struggling.” Wati circled in a clearing among the unkempt graves, speaking from one then another then another stone face. “To be honest, we got big trouble. I got attacked.”

“What?” said Dane. He took a solicitous step toward the moment’s contingent figure. “You okay? Who? How?”

“I’m alright,” Wati said. “I nearly wasn’t, but I’m alright now. It was police. It nearly got me. I got it though. The only good thing is I learnt a few things. It sort of oozed out of itself, is what.”

Billy turned slowly and looked at each of the angels. “We all had visitors,” Dane said. “You remember Byrne, Wati?”

“Grisamentum’s vizier? What about her?”

“We saw her, Wati.” The leaves of the ivy and the overlooking trees muttered. “Grisamentum’s still alive.”

Clouds bundled by, as if something was urgent. Billy heard some little animal rustling under the grass.

“You saw him?” Wati said.

“We spoke to him. It was him, Wati. He wants to work with us. To find it.” There were more graveside rustles.

“What did you tell him?”

“We said we’d think.”

“So what do you think?” After seconds of silence Wati said, from a new, saccharine child angel, “Billy, what do you think?”

“Me?” Billy cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”

“We need all the help we can get,” Dane said carefully.

“Yeah, but,” Billy said. The toughness of his own voice surprised him. “You think I’ve got knowledge I don’t even know about, right? Well, I don’t know why, but I don’t like it. Alright?”

“That’s not nothing, Dane,” said Wati at last.

“Listen,” he continued. “I’ve got stuff to tell you. You remember that list of the porters we reckon could’ve took the kraken? I been looking into it.” Wati’s voice that day was thin and marble. “Simon, Aykan, couple of others, remember?

“There’s skinny on all of them, you hear what they like, who they’re working for, what they’re good at and not good at, all that. If we thought of this you can bet your arse everyone else who knows about the kraken did, and they’re looking too: we heard from Aykan’s old flatmate that the cops tried to get hold of him. But they’re not thinking right. Simon’s the dark horse.”

“Simon Shaw retired,” Dane said.

“He did-that’s the point,” Wati said. “I was thinking about methods. Rebecca uses wormholes, but she needs a power source, and it leaves pissed-off particles. You said the police couldn’t find anything?”

“I don’t know what they were looking for,” Billy said. “But I heard them say there was no sign of anything.”

“Right,” said Wati from a Madonna. “Aykan uses Tay al-Ard, great method…”

“It’s the only kind of porting I’ll do,” said Dane.

“I don’t blame you,” said Wati. “But even if he could shift something as big as the kraken, some of the irfans would have felt it. Like you say, Simon hasn’t been on the scene. But here’s the thing: he does have a familiar.”

“I didn’t know,” Dane said.

“Honest truth is neither did I until one of the organisers reminded me. It ain’t like most assistants. Simon made sure it paid dues-it never had the mind for much, but it pushed a bit of energy our way to cover subs. He wasn’t bad to it. He loved the bloody thing. But we should still have had a connection, and no one could feel the link. I had to go hunting.

“I don’t know how long it’s been faddling around. Found the poor little fucker eventually, in a landfill. It’s only here because it trusts me.” What familiar didn’t?

“Here?” said Billy. “Here here?”

The statue whistled. From below a scraggy bush next to them there was a rustling, again.

“Jesus Christ,” said Billy. “What the hell’s that?”

Snuffling amid the cigarette butts and the ruins of food, a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair whimpered and whispered. There were no features, only a matting of dirt and sickly flesh.

“Oh what?” said Dane.

“He had it made from scratch,” Wati said. “It’s clotted out of him. His parings. He had a lifesmith clay it together. The fur’s from a vet: it’s dog, cat, all sorts.” The thing had no eyes, no visible mouth.

“What use is this hairball?” said Dane.

“None,” Wati said. “It’s not smart, it’s a rubbish guard, it doesn’t have the focus for knacks. He made it anyway. Out of him, so the poor little bastard has a link. A bit buggered, but you can still feel it. I don’t know what, but something scared Simon off working a couple of years ago. And judging from the mood of my little brother here, something’s happened more recently, too.

“You know what we found it doing?” The thing shivered, and Wati made the reassuring noise again. “It was gathering food-sort of folding itself over it to drag it. I think it’s for Simon. I think it’s been trekking for days to get stuff, trekking back with it. I think it’s on its own initiative.”

“Why would Simon want something like that?” Dane said, staring at the pitiable threadbare oddity.

“Well,” said the Wati-statue. “You know how Simon used to dress. Don’t you ever watch telly, Dane?”

“How did he dress?” said Billy.

“Pretend uniform,” Wati said. “Little sign on the chest.” His voice was arch.