“Hello,” she said. “Perhaps we haven’t met. Hi. My name’s Saira Mukhopadhyay, I’m a Londonmancer. London’s my job.”

“You remember them?” Billy said.

“I don’t, but the city does. A bit. It knows something’s up. The burn’s not perfect. The… skin’s puckered, sort of. I remember remembering one of them. But they were never here. We’ve checked records. Never there. There was a fire-engine farting around the day Grisamentum’s must have gone up. The firemen were just driving around, didn’t know why they were supposed to be there.”

“It’s Cole’s thing, it’s got to be,” Dane said slowly. “Who is it getting him to… Where’s that paper? The one that was in the book?” Billy gave it. “Here. ‘Katachronophlogiston.’ Look.”

“Burning stuff right out of time,” Billy said. “Yeah. So, who and why?”

“He might know,” Saira said. “He knows more than us.” She stared at Paul. Indicated his back. A long, unhappy pause. “He might know stuff about Cole. Might not even know he does.” They waited, they hesitated. They tried to think of interrogator’s tricks.

Paul spoke. “Don’t,” he said. “He won’t… I can tell you.” He was so quiet they thought they had misheard, until he said it again. “I can tell you. Why he wants it. What he wants it for. I can tell you everything.”

“IT WAS A TATTOOIST IN BRIXTON,” HE SAID. “I CAME IN TO HAVE A big, you know, Celtic cross on my back, but not only black and white-I wanted greens and stuff too, you know, and it was going to take hours. I always rather do that in one go-I can’t get my head around loads of sessions, you know, it’s all or nothing for me; it was always that way.” No one interrupted him. Someone brought him a drink that he drank without looking anywhere other than the nowhere at which he was staring.

“I knew it was going to hurt, but I’d got drunk even though you ain’t supposed to. I been to that tattooist before. We’d talked, so he knew a bit about me. About the people I knew, about what I did, that sort of thing, you know? I think he was saying what he’d been told, because I think he was like searching for candidates.

“He asked if I minded him having this other bloke there, who was like another tattooist, he said, and they were comparing designs, and I said no, I didn’t care. He wasn’t much like a tattooist, I thought. I don’t know what I meant. I was too drunk, though, to care.

“He watched while the guy did me, and he was like giving him advice. He kept going into a back room. I think we know what was in there? Who I mean I should say.” He gave a horrible sad little pretend laugh. This was not the story they had hoped for, but who could interrupt him?

“They kept showing me my back in the mirror. The tattooist was giggling every time he did, but the other bloke wasn’t-he was all quiet about it. They must’ve done something to the mirror. Because when I looked in it, it was a cross. It looked fine. I don’t know how they did that.

“The second day I unwrap the bandages to show a friend, and she’s like, “I thought you was going to get a cross.” I thought she meant it was too finickety. I didn’t even look at it. It was a little while after that, when the scabs came off, that it woke up.”

It had been Grisamentum overseeing the design. And there in that back room, imprisoned and diminished over the hours, the man who then became the Tattoo. What an arcane gang hit. Not a murder-these men were too baroquely cruel for that-but a banishing, an imprisonment. Perhaps it had been blood colouring the ink. Certainly some essence, call it soul, drained from the man and left a man-shaped meat husk behind.

PAUL HAD WOKEN TO THE MUTTERINGS FROM HIS SKIN. THERE WAS no one in his bed but him. The voice was muffled.

“What did they do? What did they do?” That was what Paul first heard. “What did those fuckers do to me?”

When at very last he unwound his bandages the glam had faded and Paul saw the real tattoo. Two shocks in immediate succession: that what he wore was a face; and much worse-much much worse, much greater, quite shattering-that it was moving.

The face was shocked too. It took minutes for it to understand what had happened to it. It terrorised Paul. It began to tell him what to do.

He had not eaten. “I need you healthy,” said the tattoo on his back. “Eat, eat, eat,” until Paul ate. It had him test his strength. It appraised him like a trainer. He told it to leave him alone, that it did not exist. Of course he went to a doctor and demanded to know how it might be removed. The Tattoo stayed motionless, so the doctor assumed Paul was merely an agitated drunk who had taken against his hideous design. There would be a very long waiting list, she told him. For cosmetics.

Paul attempted home-grown removals with sandpaper, but each time he, screaming, failed, the Tattoo screaming with him. It had him return to the tattooist’s shop, but the proprietor was long gone.

He covered it, but such muffling would never last. When the gags fell the Tattoo would shout when he was out in the street, curse him and mock him. It shouted filthy slurs, swear words and racist names, trying, with success sometimes, to have Paul beaten up. “Hush now,” it would whisper to him afterward. “Hush. Just do what I say, never need happen again.”

It sent him to mages’ speakeasies. It made him connections, whispering to him the code words necessary to get in, had him sotto voce describe the clientele, or turn and let the Tattoo glance through his thin shirt, so the Tattoo would know who was where and direct Paul to those he knew.

“Borch,” it would say, when Paul sat down backward at the tables across from startled operators. “Ken.” “Daria.” “Goss.” “It’s me. Look. It’s me.”

Grisamentum’s intent must have been to exile him into that mobile skin prison where he would be powerless, carried by a host who hated him, tormented with bodilessness until his weak bearer died. But the Tattoo sent Paul to find his associates. He drew them back into his orbit. He sent Paul to secret stashes of money, used them to buy the services of magicians and underworld knowers-how. The Tattoo had only his voice and mind, but it was enough to grow his empire again.

Among the first jobs he carried out while on Paul’s body was to track down and execute the tattooist who had trapped him. Paul did not see it-he had his back to the butchery, of course-but he could hear it. It was not quick nor quiet. He shook as blood spattered the back of his legs, held in place by the first of his followers the Tattoo had had made into fistmen.

The Tattoo wanted to ignore Paul. It would let him eat what he wanted, read, watch DVDs with headphones on while the Tattoo did business. Paul might have been granted evenings out, trips to the cinema, sex. But after his first escape attempt the relationship hardened. After his second, the Tattoo had warned that one more would result in his legs being amputated, with anaesthetic an open question.

The Tattoo was plotting his revenge. But as he auditioned assassins, he heard the stories: Grisamentum had been dying anyway.

“WHY DOES THE TATTOO WANT THE KRAKEN?” FITCH SAID. PAUL stared at the bottled god.

“He doesn’t know,” he said. “He just clocked that someone else wanted it. So he wants it first.” Paul shrugged. “That’s all. That’s his plan. ‘Don’t let anyone else get it.’ He might as well burn it…” Paul did not acknowledge the looks that occasioned. “I know who you are,” he said to Billy and Dane. “I heard everything he was saying.”

“Look,” said Billy to Fitch. “We’re here. We’ve got it. We’re protecting it. We’re not going to let it burn, and that’s what kicks it off. Now we’ve got one of the big players. The whole… burning should be getting a lot less probable, right?” The Londonmancers had been future-hunting frantically. Fitch grinding pavements at every snatched stop; rushed ambulomantic walks to see what the twists of city nudge-nudged; ailuromancy over light-footed cats; the readings of dust and chance London objects. “This must’ve all helped, right?”