Did Collingswood’s less specialist colleagues think it was an endless day and night of causeless burglary, ferocious muggings and dangerous driving? Perhaps they might allow themselves to think here and there in terms of gang fights, muttered about Yardies or Kosovans or whatever, even with the reports of what she knew must be refugees from the Tattoo’s workshop-women and men shambling nude and altered, with lightbulbs, diodes, speakers and oscilloscope screens in them-horrifying everyday citizens who could only tell themselves for so long that they witnessed an art event.

Collingswood leaned on the wall and smoked while her companion zipped through the city looking for trouble like a pig for truffles, so that she could do something to look after London. It was better than nothing, she thought. Really? she asked herself, and, Yeah, really, she answered back.

THE WORLD LURCHED AGAIN. REELED, IN THE WAS PUNCHED SENSE, rather than the dancing. Marge felt it. She had not gone home since the foiled Armaggedons. There were places to stay if you didn’t much care. She did not know if she had a home left, and if she did she assumed it was not safe anymore, that she had been brought back into the attention of the dying city.

You say it best, hmm hmm it best. Boyzone was not one of her iPod-devil’s favourites, but it was muttering its version into her ears gamely enough. This was the track that had kept her safe in the brief moment when she had felt a hungry mammal consciousness of one of the gods notice her.

She was in an arriviste corner of Battersea, where late bars stayed open and proudly displayed doctored B-movie posters, and she could feel the bang bang of dance bass through doors, through the pavement and her feet. There were lights in the windows of offices, people working late as if in a month’s time they would still have a job and the world would still revolve. Gangs outside fast-food restaurants and cafés that pottered along as if it were not after midnight, their premises abutting the alleys that were the conduits to the other city that, over the incompetent supernatural impersonation of Ronan Keating, Marge could hear.

The littler streets were as lit as the main ones, but they were furtive. A landscape of degenerating knackery, violence and eschatological terror. Marge would swear she could hear shots, metres, only metres from where laughing hipsters drank.

She was beyond fear, really. She just drifted, she just went. Trying to ride out the night, which felt to her like a last night.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

SOME HOSPITALS WERE KNOWN TO BE FRIENDLY, TO ASK NO questions about odd wounds and sicknesses. There were quiet wings, where you could get treatment for lukundoo, for jigsaw disease, where no one would be put out if a patient spasmed out of phase with the world. The worst wounded of the Londonmancers were delivered, with whispered warnings that the bullets inside them might hatch.

Dane was lashed in place on the lorry roof like some Odysseus. He was pushed, lit up and darkened by the lorry’s passage. Dane held his Kirk and waved it, called Wati’s name. He made it an aerial. It was a long time until Wati found it.

“Oh God, Dane,” the figurine suddenly said.

“Wati, where’ve you been?” Dane hammered on the hatch. Billy looked through. The wind made him blink. Around him the city, like something fat, staggered toward a heart attack. The statuette coughed as if it had something caught in its nonexistent throat, as if its nonexistent lungs were bruised. “You heard about the Londonmancers?”

“Oh man,” Wati said. “I been, oh, God. They beat us, Dane. They brought in scabs. Goss and Subby are back.”

“They’re fighting you?” Billy said. “Even without the Tattoo around?”

“Most of the Tattoo’s guys must be screwed,” Dane said. “But if Goss and Subby’re still at it…”

“Griz’s got gunfarmers working for him.”

“It is,” Dane said. “It is him bringing the war. Grisamentum… Why the Londonmancers?”

“Wait,” Wati said. “Wait.” Coughing again. “I can’t move like I should. That’s why it took me so long to find you.”

“Take it easy,” said Dane.

“No, listen,” Wati said. “Oh God, Dane, no one’s told you, have they? It ain’t just the strike or the London Stone. There’s no neutrals now.”

“What do you mean?”

“It weren’t just the Londonmancers. They went for your people too.”

“What?” said Dane.

“What?” said Billy. That ostentatious assault of Fitch’s comrades, as if it were meant to be seen. “Who? Goss and Subby? Who’ve they-?”

“No. Gunfarmers. For the Krakenists. They attacked your church.”

DANE STOLE A CAR. HE WOULD NOT LET ANYONE BUT BILLY COME with him.

“They didn’t even have anyone out there,” Dane kept saying, slamming his hands on the dash. “They kept their heads down. How could anyone…? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was the only one, and I’m not…”

“I don’t know.”

A little crowd was outside the community church. Tutted at the smouldering from the windows, the broken glass, the obscene graffiti that now covered it.

“Hooligans.” “Awful.” Dane shoved through them and inside. The hall was smashed up. It was very much as it would be had the perpetrators been a rampaging group of fools. Dane went through the junk room and pulled the hatch open. Billy could hear how he was breathing. There was blood in the corridors below.

There, in that buried complex, were the ruins left by the real attack. Very different from the foolish display above.

Throughout the halls were bodies. They were punctured and blood-sodden, hosts for grubbing little bullets. There were those who looked killed in other ways-by bludgeons, suffocation, wetness and magic. Billy walked as if in a slowed-down film, through carnage. The ruined bodies of Dane’s erstwhile congregation lay like litter.

Dane stopped to feel pulses, but without urgency. The situation was clear. There were no sounds but their footsteps.

Desks had been ransacked. As well as mud, in a few places on the floor were trampled origami planes, like the one that had alerted Dane to Grisamentum’s attention. Billy picked up two or three of the cleanest. On each folded dart was the remain or smudge of a design in grey ink-a random word, a symbol, two sketched eyes.

“Grisamentum,” he said. “It’s him. He sent them.” Dane looked at him without any sign of emotion.

In the church, before the altar, was the bullet-ruined body of the Teuthex. Dane made no sound. The Teuthex lay behind the altar, reaching for it with his right hand. Dane gently held the dead man. Billy left him alone.

Like arrows drawn on the floor, more fallen planes pointed in higgledy-piggledy direction to the library. Billy followed them. When he pushed open the library door, he stopped, at the top of the shaft of shelves, and stared.

He walked back to where Dane mourned. He waited as long as he could bear. “Dane,” he said. “I need you to see this.”

The books were gone. Every single book was gone.

“THIS MUST BE WHAT THEY CAME FOR,” DANE SAID. THEY STARED into the empty word-pit. “He wanted the library.”

“He’s-Grisamentum must be researching the kraken,” Billy said.

Dane nodded. “That must be why… Remember when he wanted us to join him? That’s why. Because of what I know. And you. Whether you know it or not.”

“He’s taken it all.” Centuries of dissident cephalopod gnosis.

“Grisamentum,” Dane whispered.

“It is him,” Billy said. “Whatever it is, it is his plan. He’s the one who wants the kraken, and he wants to know everything about it.”

“But he doesn’t have it,” Dane said. “So what’s he going to do?”

Billy descended the ladder. There was blood from something on his glasses. He shook his head. “He can’t read even a fraction of these. It would take centuries.”

“I don’t know where he is.” Dane made fists and raised them and could only lower them again. “The last time I even saw him was…” Dane did not smile. “Just before his funeral.”