PART SIX. INKLINGS

Chapter Sixty-Three

WAS THAT IT? WERE THEY IT, PERHAPS MARGE SHOULD SAY? There were two, after all, weren’t there?

Not that what Marge had seen wasn’t impressive and strange and something that wouldn’t have floored her a few weeks before. Only that she had been hoping for revelation, and revelation came there none.

So what was it she’d seen? She was unsure. She had, after her escape from Collingswood, been rather far from the epicentre while whatever had happened had happened. Some of it had been-whatever it was she was going to say instead of magic: the way some of the people she had noticed moved, those dusty vague humans in the scrubland; the somethings she had never quite glimpsed above and around the sweeps of concrete road; her own repeated slippery moonwalk escapes from the attention of other tourists of finality. And there was the sweep of autumnal sky colours that really could, that really might be dramatic little storms.

There was nothing to do with squid, that she could see, and whatever the micropolitics had been, they had been opaque to her. She was no wiser, and frankly a little awe-numb by now.

So what now?

“W HAT’S YOUR NAME?”

At very last the man spoke.

“Paul.”

Cleaned up of the muck and blood that stained him, Paul was a thin man in his forties or fifties. When lucid he was cowed.

“Hush, hush, wait,” Billy and Dane said to him as he shook in their grip, as they skulked in hiding. “They’re going to come find me,” he kept saying. And during all that careful calming of him was the intervention of the Tattoo. The voice came continuously. Threats, insults, commands from the tattoo mouth on Paul’s skin.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” the Tattoo screamed. “Unfuckinghand me you little shits or I will kill you where you stand.”

They could not think for his bilious spiel. Dane held Paul and they removed his jacket. From his back, expressions passing in ink tides, bad-magic animation, the Tattoo snarled. It sneered. It looked side to side at Dane and Billy.

“Fucking clowns,” it said. It puckered its lips and made spit noises. No spit came out of the black-ink pretend hole of its mouth, only that sound of disgust. “You think this is it? You think Goss can’t taste where I’ve been? Look at this cunt’s feet.” They were a little bloody. The Tattoo began to laugh.

“Goss isn’t here,” Billy said.

“Oh, don’t you worry, Goss and Subby’ll be back. Where’s your bastard commie friend?” They said nothing. “His plan’s going up in piss and so are you, soon as they’re back. You’re all going to die.”

“Shut up,” said Dane. He kneeled by the vivid black-outlined features. “What do you want the kraken for? What’s your plan?”

“You worthless little snail-worshipping turd, Parnell. You’re so fucking bad at that you got kicked out of your church.”

“What do you know about Cole?”

“I won’t insult your intelligence with if you let me go now I’ll let you live, because I totally won’t.”

“I can hurt you,” Dane said.

“No, you can hurt Paul.”

That shut them up. Billy and Dane looked at each other. They looked at Paul’s skin.

“Shit,” whispered Billy.

“Oy Paul,” the Tattoo shouted. “When we’re out of here I’m going to have my boys fucking sand your feet off. Hear me, boy? You keep your mouth shut if you want any teeth, if you want a tongue, if you want lips or a fucking jaw.”

They wound parcel tape around Paul’s midriff. He stayed still to let them. The Tattoo spat spitlessly and cursed them. He tried to chew on Paul, but it was only the motion of ink under the skin. Paul sat patient as a fussed-over king. Billy silenced the Tattoo, and taped also over its eyes, that glared at him until all obscured. Paul had other tattoos. Band names, symbols. They all behaved-motionless but for his muscles.

“I’m sorry,” Billy said to Paul. “You’ve got a bit of a hairy chest-we should’ve shaved you first. That’ll hurt to get off.” Beneath the tape, the mmm-mmm mutterings continued awhile.

That was how they brought him, with them, to the god.

“Why would you bring him here?” Saira said.

The kraken in its tank in the truck watched them deadly. Londonmancers surrounded them. There were more of them than previously-the insider cabal had spread, as secrets like this will not behave. They left behind “to hold the fort” the supposed mainstream of their antique tribe, now a truncated and confused remnant. Every one of the Londonmancers in the lorry was staring aghast at their unwanted captive. Billy and Dane had tracked them, worked out their route with the tiny satnav and gone ahead to intercept them. It had been a difficult journey, fearful that they were chased at every step by some or other power in the city’s war.

The Londonmancers would not relax the charms they had to keep Wati from the lorry. Billy was enraged on his behalf, but the strike spirit had been agitated, in any case, had needed to circulate, to fight against another last strike crisis. “Just give me a doll or something on the roof,” he said. “Just something.”

“We need to find Grisamentum,” Billy had said. “He’s got to be-”

And Wati had said, “I’ll do what I can, Billy. I’ll do what I can. There’s things I have to…”

Where could Grisamentum be? Much of the city was still in denial about the fact that he was anywhere at all other than heaven or hell, but there was no way the monsterherds and Byrne’s strange intercession, that terrible knacked gang fight, could be finessed out of facticity. London knew who was back. It just didn’t know where, why or how, and no amount of cajoling of even the most eagerly treacherous or venal set of the city’s streets, grifters or apocalypse chancers would reveal anything.

“What would you rather we’d done?” Dane said to Saira.

“We don’t have much time,” Billy said.

“It’s coming,” Fitch said. “It’s suddenly closer. Much more certain. Something happened to make it… more near.”

“We’ve got the Tattoo,” Billy said. “Do you not get that?”

“We needed to get this poor sod off the streets as quick as,” Dane said. Paul sat still, looked at them all. He stared at the kraken in its stinking liquid, through its glass.

“Don’t show him that,” Paul whispered. They looked at him. He wiggled his shoulders to indicate who he meant.

“No one’s going to show him anything,” Billy said carefully. “Promise.”

“We’ve interrupted him,” Dane muttered to Saira and Fitch. “We can find out what his plans are.”

“His plans?” said Saira.

“He’s been trying to get hold of the kraken,” Billy said. He tapped Paul gently on the back.

“Oh, but it’s… look,” Saira said. “Whatever it is… it’s already happening,” she said. She actually mopped her forehead with whatever expensive scarf it was she was wearing. “The burning’s started.” In the last two days, two smallholdings had gone. Been burned, acts of strange arson. Self-cancelling. The memories of the destroyed buildings went almost, not quite but almost, as totally as the buildings themselves.

One had been part of the Tattoo’s empire, a kebab shop in Balham that doubled as a lucrative source of drug money, distilling down the third eyes extracted from and sold by the desperate. The other, a medium-scale jeweller in Bloomsbury, had historically had an association with Grisamentum. Both had gone, and according to most attempted recall, Saira said, there had never been either such place.

“You remember them, Dane?” Saira said.

“No.”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms. “You don’t.” The lorry lurched and she adjusted while Fitch staggered, his beard and hair wild. “You and everyone else.”

“So how do you know there was ever anything there?” Billy said. She stared at him.