“Meet you where? Why?”
“Because there’s about to be a big-ass attack, so bring backup. Bring guns.”
WOULD IT ESCAPE THE ATTENTION OF OCCULT LONDON THAT ON that night when small-scale apocalypse competition had been a wedge to crack the city open, Fitch and his Londonmancer cadre had been missing from the proximity of the London Stone? Could that be ignored?
“We’re on borrowed time,” Saira said. None of this could last. Those among the Londonmancer cadre who could obsessively parse the future-or, they reminded themselves to say, possible futures-from the safety of the trailer. Their job had become simple and minimal: keep the kraken out of the trouble until, up through and after the closing-in last day. To stop it being that day. That was all they could see to do. A new sacred duty.
“There was another one.” “Another two.” The Londonmancers, by agonising dream and memory interpretations interpreted the city’s history and burnlike blebs in its timeline, collected these new strange outriders, these architectural, temporal arson victims. “You remember that garage out by the gasworks? The really cool old Deco one?” “No.” “Well, that’s the point, it was never there anymore. But look.” A preserved postcard of the building, soot-stained and unstable-looking as it struggled gamely to exist, not to be snuffed in the burn-damaged timeline.
Wati went for hours, then a day. He would not respond to any whispers to figurines held out of the vehicle. Was it a retreat, a surrender he was negotiating?
They kept Paul comfortable. They had no trouble with food. Stop for a moment and Saira would dig her hands into the brickwork of an alley corner, knead like clay, and the bricks might go from being a buckle of scaffolding to a key ring and keys to at last a bag of takeaway.
Twice they unwound the tape from the Tattoo’s mouth, in reasonless hope that he would say something incriminating or helpful or illuminating. Everything should be falling into place now, in the presence of this malevolent player, and it was not. The Tattoo remained silent. It was wildly unlike him. But for a certain moue of ink face lines, you might have thought him uncharmed.
“He’s still got troops out there,” Paul said. Desperate little rearguard actions. Knuckleheads in half-assaults/half-defences, against traditional enemies, forced to take their own initiatives, the very thing they had strived so hard to avoid. People mindlessly showing secrets, knuckleheads fighting for them, winning some and dying, falling, their leather armours ripped, their helmets shattered, little dwarf-hand replacing their cocks and balls suddenly visible, meat-echoes of their head-hands. “Maybe Goss and Subby are back.”
Fitch screamed. The lorry lurched. Not in response to the sound of him-the Londonmancer driving could not have heard him-but because of something striking at the driver as it struck at Fitch, in that same instant. Fitch screamed.
“We have to go back,” he said, again and again. Everyone was up. Even Paul had jumped up, ready for whatever this was. “Back, back, back at the heart,” Fitch said. “I heard a…” In the twanging of aerials, in the cry from the city. “Someone’s come for them.”
THEY HAD TO TAKE THE LORRY OUT OF ITS AVOIDANCE CIRCLE along streets it barely fit through, so tight Billy could tell the driver knacked to keep them from crashing. They passed violence everywhere, occult and everyday. Police and ambulances and aimlessly meandering fire engines, the buildings that had gone up and the callouts themselves charring out of memory, so midway en route no firefighter could remember what they were out for. The lorry came as close as it could go to the tumbledown sports shop where the London Stone was homed. They heard more sirens and they heard shots.
There were a few pedestrians on the street, but far too few for what was still not yet night. Those out moved like what they were-people in a regime at war. There was police tape around the building. Armed officers waving them back, cauterising the area.
“We can’t get through,” Billy said. But he was with the Londonmancers. As if these alleys they ducked into would deny them, as if the alleys wouldn’t switch back and kink obligingly for Fitch and Saira and their comrades now they weren’t hiding and didn’t care if the city noticed. So they led Dane and Billy running like scarpering schoolkids down some bricky cul-de-sac that tipped them with architectural abruptness into a corridor within that ugly place, near the London heart, where there was battle, still.
The police would not enter a free-fire zone. From the Londonmancers’ lair in the corridor of shop fronts, two dark-dressed figures emerged. They held pistols, and were shooting behind them as they came. Dane kicked in the door of an empty shop, and Billy dragged Saira and the others inside out of their range. Fitch sat heavily and wheezed.
“Get off me,” Saira said. She was straining to make the plastic stuff of London into something deadly, pressing her fingers on what had been a bit of wall and was becoming that other part of London, a pistol. She was shaking, brave and terrified. The men fired, and two Londonmancers still in the hallway flew backward.
The men wore dark suits, hats, long coats-assassin-wear. Billy fired and missed, and the blast from his phaser was crackling and unconvincing. It was winding down. A blast from Dane’s gun hit one man but did not kill him and set him snarling.
Clattering shapes came out of the store doorway behind them. There were composite things, made of city. Paper, brick, slate, tar, road sign and smell. One’s motion was almost arthropod, one more bird, but neither was like anything. Legs of scaffold tubes or girder, wood-splinter arms; one had a dorsal fin of broken glass in cement, cheval-de-frise. Billy cried out at the mongrel urban things. One took hold with autumn-gutter fingers of the closest attacker and bit exactly as a rooftop bites. He screamed, but it sucked him, so he kicked as he was emptied. His colleague ran. Somewhere.
Both the shot Londonmancers were dead. Saira clenched her teeth. The predator city bits came toward her. “Quick,” Billy shouted, but she clicked her fingers as if at dogs.
“It’s alright,” she said. “They’re London’s antibodies. They know me.”
The immune system trilled and clattered. Another young Londonmancer joined Saira, and she did not look up. When Dane and Billy approached, the defence-things reared in complex ways, displayed cityness in weapons. Saira clucked and they calmed.
Inside the sports shop was a rubble of smashed fittings and bodies. Not all the Londonmancers left were quite dead. Most were, with bullet wounds in their heads and chests. Saira went from survivor to survivor.
“Ben,” she said. “What happened?”
“Men,” he said. His teeth chattered. He stared at his blood-sodden thigh.
The dark-suited men had entered. They had shot anyone who opposed them, with ferocious, astonishing guns. Of those left alive they had demanded, repeatedly, “Where’s the kraken?” They had heard the police come, but the police, following no-entry protocol, had sealed the attackers and attacked in together.
“We have to hurry,” Billy said to Dane. He waited, bided, as best he could, but he had to tell Saira to hurry too. She stared at him expressionless.
The attackers knew the secret Fitch and Saira and their treacherous comrades kept. But the rest of the Londonmancers they had come to butcher did not, had been the out-of-the-loop, the hard core of excluded, an unwitting camouflage left in place to pretend all was as it should be. Some were aware that they were being kept in a cloud of unknowing, but they had no knowledge of what that secret knowledge was. They did not understand the gunfarmers’ question. Which surely must be provoking to a killer. Some frantic seers had managed to provoke the antibodies into appearance, a little late.