“I don’t think you do,” Billy said, without turning. He pressed down. What’s this, then? he thought, but no knowledge crept in through his fingertips, his own inadequate ten tentacles. He shook his head: no haptic gnosis, no insight. There was nothing, no knowledge of what would happen, or why, or what it was of this fucking squid, this squid, why this squid? Why would it usher in the end?

Because it still would.

“I don’t think you need to be a seer to know that,” he said. “Cut open the city you’ll see the same thing.” He turned and held his arms up like a surgeon in a sterile field, as they dripped toxins. “I know we were hoping,” he said. “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” He nodded at Dane. “He’s come back from the dead for this, you know? That’s got to be written somewhere. Can’t tell me there’s no verses about that somewhere. And then you’ve got me. That’s two of us must be all over some scripture like a bloody rash, so you might think this’d change stuff.” He peeled off a glove. “But come on.” He shrugged. “It’s still the same.”

Maybe it was because it was a misunderstanding. He, Billy, had been chosen by the angel of memory for some stupid error, some misapprehended gag. Specimen magic, not the alien majesty of the benthic tentacular.

“Don’t matter,” Dane said, surprising him, as if he’d spoken aloud. “How’d you think messiahs get chosen?”

Dane was the real deal, had really gone into it and come out again, and his was real faith. One might have hoped that that was the end, the reuniting of faithful and faithee enough to heal the burning. That perhaps the Londonmancers-having failed to banish that finality by offering themselves as rescuers, believing finally that the intent of Billy and Dane was not to burn the thing themselves, handing control of the stranded deep god to its devotee and kind-of-sort-of prophet-might have averted the worst. But.

“Nothing’s changed,” Billy said. You did not, he was sure, need to be, as he was, a mistaken beloved of an angel to feel it. London was still wrong. You could hear the not-ending of tension in the city, the continuance not of fights but of a particular kind of fights, the terror of it all.

Everything was still going to burn.

SAIRA SAT, DEFEATED. SHE HEFTED A CLUTCH OF BRICKS AND MORTAR anxiously, a wound torn from a wall. She kneaded it. In her hands and knack all the city’s separate scobs and bits and pieces were the plastic matter of London. She prodded and pulled at the bricks and they squelched silently into other bricks. She dug in her fingers and made the stuff into other Londonness-a mass of food wrappers, a knot of piping, a torn-off railing top, a car’s muffler.

“What now?” It was Saira who said it, at last, but it could have been any of them. She held out her hand and Billy pulled her up. Her hand was sticky with Londongrease.

“You remember Al Adler?” Billy said. “Who you killed?” She was too tired to wince. “Know who he was working for? Grisamentum.”

She stared at him. “Grisamentum’s dead.”

“No. He’s not. Dane… He’s not.” She stared. “What that has to do with anything I don’t know. But it was Adler who… started this. With you. And he was still with Grisamentum when he did. Place your bets whose plan it was.

“We know what’s happening’s close, now, and we know it starts when the squid burns,” he said. “So I suppose we have to keep trying. We just have to keep it safe. Maybe if we can do that, keep it unburnt past… the night… we’ll be okay. All we can do’s keep looking. The Tattoo’s got no reason to burn the world. Neither did Al. Neither does Grisamentum, whatever their plan was.” He shook his head. “It’s something else. We have to try to keep this thing safe.”

“Let’s go, then.” Everyone looked at Dane. It was the first thing he had said for a long time that was not muttered devotion to his dead god. He stood, looking reconfigured. “You keep it safe,” he said to Saira. “We can’t be here. We’re too dangerous. We’ll do the stuff you’re saying,” he said to Billy. “First we’re going to get Jason out.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

“WHAT DO WE DO?” BILLY SAID. CRASHING THE HIDEOUT OF dangerous violent nutcases they might get away with, but the state? It’s too risky, Fitch had said. You have to help us protect it, Saira had said. There’s nothing you can do, they had said.

“Give me the satnav,” Dane replied. “We ain’t leaving him behind.”

“And maybe we can find stuff out,” Billy had said. “They might have some better ideas than we do, Collingswood and Baron.”

Dane had stared at the dead squid and made some sign. “We can find you when we need to. You keep my god safe. And let us out now.”

Now they waited. “We have to get Wati in,” Dane said. He spoke quickly. “We need to know the lay of the land in that copshop before we go cracking in. Where is he?”

“You know they’ve got stuff in place,” Billy said. “He can’t get in. Anyway…” Wati, guilty at his disappearances from the struggle at hand, was still at hasty rallies. “He said he’d be back when he could.” He wanted to help, and he would again, but Don’t you know there’s a war on? A class war that pitted rabbits against conjurors used to getting away with a stick and the scrawniest carrot, between golems and those who thought scrawling an emet on a forehead granted them rights, or any fucking thing at all.

Where gargoyles or bas-relief figures were close enough, Wati would deliver rallying speeches to whatever strikers maintained interventions (homunculi creeping in the angles between wall and pavement, rooks staggering). What might pass as twists of wind were pickets of militant air elementals, whispering in gusty voices as quiet as breath, “Hell No We Won’t Blow!”

There were scabs and sympathisers. Wati heard all the rumours, that he had been targeted-old news that-and that people had been searching all over the world, literally, outside of London, for some leverage against him.

The situation wasn’t great. The grind of economics forced some back to work, shamefaced, shamesouled where their faces were carved and immobile, shamewavelengthed when they were vibrations of aether. Rushing in a statued path all over the city, Wati kept arriving at aftermaths. Picket after picket closed down by spectral police spells on obscure, antique charges pressed into innovative use. Hired muscle in various dimensions.

“What happened?” Wati would cry, on emerging into a lion face made in mortar, to see a picket bust up, its members scattered or killed, two or three still there trying to fix themselves. They were tiny sexless homunculi made out of animal flesh. Several had been left just bone-flecked smears.

“What happened?” Wati said. “Are you okay?”

Not really. His informant, a man built of bird parts and mud, dragged a leg smudgelike. “Tattoo’s men,” he said. “Help, boss.”

“I ain’t your boss,” Wati said. “Come on now, let’s get you…” Where? He could not take him anywhere, and the animal-man-thing was dying. “What happened?”

“Knuckleheads.”

Wati stayed with him as long as he could bear. The Tattoo had been paid to close the strike down, and efforts were being stepped up. Wati went back to the dolls in Billy’s and Dane’s pockets. In agitation he trembled between the two as he spoke.

“We’re being attacked.” “The Tattoo…” “… and the police…” “… trying to finish it.”

“I thought they already were,” Billy said.

“Not like this.” “Not like this.”

“We made him angry,” Dane said slowly.

“By getting you out,” Billy said.

“He wants me back, and he wants you, and the kraken, and he’s getting at us through Wati. I heard him, while I was there. He’s desperate. He can feel everything speeding up, like we all can.”

“We have one of his knuckleheads, you know,” Wati said with the ghost of humour. “Got political after he joined. Got sacked, no surprise.”