What was squiddity but otherness, incomprehensibility. Why would such a deity understand those bent on its glory? Why should it offer anything? Anything at all?

The krakens’ lack of desire for recompense was part of what, their faithful said, distinguished them from the avaricious Abrahamic triad and their quids pro quo, I’ll take you to heaven if you worship me. But even the kraken would give them this transmutation, this squid pro quo, by the contingencies of worship, toxin and faith.

“Twenty krakenbit is not nothing. It’s down to us, now. We have to bring the night,” Dane said. “Bring it on and rule it. And it ain’t just us, is it? There’s the Londonmancers and the London antibodies. They’ll piss and moan, but. Well, we’re going in, so they’ve got two choices. Be part of that, or try to disappear. Good luck with that. Fuck Fitch, talk to Saira. She’ll do it.”

“Why are you telling me to-” Billy stopped. “You really think you can take on Grisamentum?”

“Let’s have a little last crusade, eh?”

“You think this’ll win it for us? You think you can take him?”

“Come on,” Dane said.

Billy had learnt about the rules of this sort of landscape. He hesitated, but there was no getting away from what he thought he knew.

“This…” he said. “It’ll kill you, won’t it?” He said it quietly. He pointed at the beak.

Dane shrugged. Neither of them spoke for seconds.

“It’ll change us,” Dane said at last. “I don’t know. We weren’t meant to be vessels for that kind of power. It’s a glorious way to go, but.”

Billy tried to work out what to say. “Dane,” he said. He stared at those impossibly huge bite-parts. “I’m begging you not to do this.”

“Billy.”

“Seriously, you can’t… You have to…” There was so little crazy fervour to Dane. Okay, not counting those incredible facts of what he did, and why he did it, his demeanour was everyday. A very English faith. And it was as shocking to discover about him as it would have been about the polite and subdued-dressed congregation of any country church, that he, and they, would die for their belief.

“Wait,” said Billy. “What if you fail? If you fail, that’s our last line down.”

“Billy, Billy, Billy.” Dane did not care if the world survived.

“Tomorrow night, Billy,” Dane said. “I know where Grisamentum is.”

“How?”

“There aren’t that many old ink plants in the city, mate. I sent Wati around when he was last awake. There’s statues most places.”

“They can’t have been so stupid, can they, to leave them there…?”

“No, but they’re pretty much everywhere, so where there’s none in a place, nowhere for Wati to go, that kind of gap is information. Tells him something. Someone’s making an effort to keep him out. I know where Grisamentum is, and he won’t be expecting dick. Tomorrow, Billy.”

When they emerged Saira was waiting for them aboveground. “At last,” she said. She was antsy, looking around and swallowing. A young Londonmancer was with her. The police would come sometime, though there were other things taking their time, and a vandalised community church was a very low priority right then. “Billy, you got a message.”

“What did you say?”

“It came through the city. Bax heard it. It’s from your friend. Marge.”

“Marge? What are you talking about? Marge?”

“She got back to us,” Saira said. “She answered. The same way you got a message to her. Through the city.”

That pitched Billy back to that odd little Londonmancer intercession, his message to Marge whispered into the darkness of the post. That he’d hardly thought of since. It abruptly shamed him that he had thought it some therapeutic performance to make him feel better. Perhaps it had been that as well, but could he have been so trite and unliteral as to doubt that it was, as described, a message? And if she got it, why would he think Marge would, as he had adjured, stay away?

With something like vertigo, he thought of all she must have been doing, how many things she must have gone through and seen, to get her to this point, where she was able to send him this word, this way. Without, he thought, a Dane to lead her. And with her partner dead. The hunt for the facts of which must surely have been what got her here. His message must have started that journey. He closed his eyes.

“I wanted to keep her out of it,” he said, a last disingenuousness. He apologised to her, silently. She was in it, and more power to her. “Christ, what’s been happening? What did she say?”

“She told you to meet her,” the man Bax said. “She’s in a carpark, in Hoxton. She’s with Tattoo.”

“What?” Billy said. Dane stuttered to a stop.

“Actually that is not quite what she said,” Saira said. “What she said was that she was with Paul. She said he had a proposition.” Billy and Dane looked at each other.

“What the hell’s she been doing?” Billy said. “How’s she mixed up with him?”

“You sure she wasn’t witch to start with?” Dane said.

“I’m not sure of anything,” Billy said. “But I don’t… I don’t see how, I don’t think she…”

“Then she’s going to get killed,” Dane said.

“She’s… Shit,” said Billy.

“If it’s really her,” Dane said.

“She said to tell you ‘Gideon’,” Saira said.

“It’s her,” he said. He shook his head and shut his eyes. “But why would she be with him? Where’s Wati?”

“Here, Billy.” Wati sounded exhausted. He was in a little fisherman figure made by one of the children of the churchgoers, lying on a windowsill. A man made of toilet rolls and cotton wool. He looked at Billy out of penny eyes.

“Wati, did you hear that? Can you get there?” Billy said. He tried to speak gently, but he was urgent. “We need to see if this is real. If it’s her. She might not have any idea what she’s getting into, and that name means it either is her or it’s someone who got it from her.”

“What’s he doing?” Dane said. “Why’s Paul-or the Tattoo-drawing attention to himself? He must know everyone from Griz to Goss and Subby are after him.”

“He wants something. She even said so. We get there he might have a knife to her throat,” Billy said. “He’s not going to negotiate toothless. Maybe he’s holding her hostage. Maybe he’s holding her hostage and she doesn’t even know.” Billy and Dane looked at each other.

“Paul didn’t look in shape to do much when he left,” Saira said.

“Wati, can you get to her?” Billy said.

“There may not even be any bodies there for me,” Wati said.

“There’s a doll in her car. And she wears a crucifix,” Billy said. There was a silence.

“Wati,” Dane said. “Listen to yourself. You sound rough.”

“I’ll see,” Wati said. He was gone. Limping from figure to figure across London.

FITCH SAID THEY SHOULD HIDE. ONE LONDONMANCER, GIDDY AT his own heresy, suggested they leave the city.

“Let’s just drive!” he said. “Up! To Scotland or whatever!” But there was no certainty that Fitch, for example, so much a function of the city, could even live for very long beyond its limits. Billy imagined himself on the motorways, becoming expert at the ungainly swing of the trailer, pulling the preserved squid through the damp English countryside and on into Scottish hills.

“Griz’d find us in ten seconds.” He would. There was something about the surrounds of slate, the angles of the turns that kept them hidden, even if it was a trap too. The city bent just enough that the Londonmancers stayed out of sight. An organic reflex.

If they left they would be nude. A giant squid in a lorry, heading north between hedgerows. Fuck’s sake, everything sensitive within ten miles would start to bleed.

“We’re going to do it this way,” Billy said. “Dane’s way.” He did not look at him. “Because he isn’t going to change his mind, and this way we can stop guessing whether it’s the last night, because we’ll know it is. And Dane’s going to do it, whatever the rest of us do.”