Apparently, Billy thought, he lived now in a trite landscape. Deep enough below the everyday, Billy realised with something between awe and distaste, a thing has power, moronically enough, because it’s a bit like something else. Want to hex up briars, what else should you throw behind you but an old comb? All it took was a way with such cute correspondences.
“The Londonmancers don’t take sides,” Dane said. “That’s their whole thing.”
“Maybe Saira’s gone rogue,” Billy said. “Doing this alone.”
“I need a new gun,” Dane said repeatedly. The battle of Star Trek Tower had left him raging at his armaments. Whatever the specifics of this fight around them, seemingly between Grisamentum and the Londonmancers, he lacked firepower. With Wati’s help, anonymising the request, Dane sent a request to London’s arms dealers. Because someone out there had the psychic megatonnage of the fucking Architeuthis in their stockpile.
At the stub-end of Wandsworth Common he took delivery of a weapon, left under a particular set of bushes like some fabled baby. There were passersby but none close enough to see, and in any case, like most Londoners now, they moved furtively and quickly most of the time, as if they were at the park against their will.
Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.
It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just…” “I’ve got really good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected pistonpunk might ask her elders, “but wouldn’t it be useful to…?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.
With a little more propagandist verve, the Church of God Kraken might have issued its fighters FN P90s, say, or HK53s, and explained with sententious sermon-logic how the rate of fire made the fanning vectors of bullets reach out like tentacles, or that the bite of the weapon was like that of a squid beak, or some such. As an excommunicant, Dane was no longer restrained. What he dug out of the earth where it had been delivered was a heavy handgun.
They did not know how many charges the phaser had, so Billy did not use it to practice. “I know what we can do,” Dane said. He took them to amusement arcades, pushing through crowds of teens. Billy spent hours going from machine to screaming machine, firing plastic pistols at incoming zombies and alien invaders. Dane whispered advice to him on stance and timing-marksman words, soldier-insight among these play deaths. The sneers of watching youths decreased as Billy’s skills grew.
“Done well, man,” one boy said as Billy defeated an end-of-level boss. It was all disproportionately exhilarating. “Yes!” Billy whispered as he succeeded in missions.
“Alright, soldier,” Dane said. “Nice one. Killer.” He dubbed Billy a member of various violent sects. “You’re a Thanicrucian. You’re a Serrimor. You’re a gunfarmer.”
“A what?”
“Watch the screen. Bad bastards, once upon a time. Raised guns like fighting dogs. Let’s get you shooting like them. Pay attention.”
From Time Cops to the latest House of the Dead to Extreme Invaders, so Billy wouldn’t learn the looped attack patterns. Marines and soldiers learned with such machines, Dane told him. Juba the Baghdad sniper went from zero to his deadly skill set using these. And these pretend guns had no recoil, no weight, no reloading-just like the phaser. Their limited realism made them paradoxically perfect practice for the real, ridiculous weapon Billy had come into.
Billy kept asking about the knuckleheads he might face. How do they eat? How do they see? How do they think?
“That’s not the issue,” Dane said. “The world can always finesse details. And who’d choose it? Always people ready to do that kind of thing.”
SO THEY KNEW WHAT BAIT HAD GOT SIMON PORTING. THEY NEEDED to talk to Saira.
What’s the point of the theological turn? Is godness a particularly resilient kind of grubbiness? Maybe the turn is like an ultraviolet torch at a crime scene, showing up spattered residue on what had looked clean ground. You don’t know who to trust. Grisamentum’s postal box was not a Royal Mail address, nor the service of any other carrier they knew. The postcode did not look quite regular. Some hush-hush Trystero carrier?
“It must get to him,” Billy said.
“Yeah but not by the usual bloody routes.” There would be no staking out the mail drop.
“How’s Simon?” Billy said.
“Alright. I was there earlier,” said Wati, from a Victorian statue. “I mean, not really. Mo’s good with him though.”
“What about the Londonmancer?” Dane said.
“I got as close as I could. She don’t look like she even has a home. She sleeps in that building. Near the stone.”
“Alright,” said Dane. “We’ll have to get her there, then. Wati, help me out. I’m trying to teach our boy some stuff about things.” Billy heard the grinding sound of glass at the fringe of his consciousness. It had been a while. He waited, trying to understand it as a message.
“Alright, so…” he said eventually, when they passed a locksmith and he noticed something on display in the window. He remembered Dane’s lesson at the bins, and stared at the miniature door to which various different on-sale handles had been attached, for show. “Alright so if you got hold of that,” he said, “and did whatever to it, put it into a wall. Then you could, I bet you could…”
“There you go,” Wati said from inside next to it, from a gargoyle door knocker. “You could use each different one of them handles to open it into somewhere else. Too small though. All you could do’s stick your arm through.”
These revelations into a paradigm of recusant science, so the goddamn universe itself was up for grabs, were part of the most awesome shift in vision Billy had ever had. But the awe had been greatest when he had not understood at all. The more they were clarified, the more the kitsch of the norms disappointed him.
“There.” There was a key embedded in the tarmac. It had been dropped when the surface was still soft and then had been run over or toughly trodden in. Anxious clubbers and nightwalkers passed them.
“So,” Billy said, “if we could get it to work, with a bit of knacking, we could use that to, like, travel from place to place?”
Dane looked at him. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and it’s going to be pretty hairy,” he said. “Let’s get somewhere we can put our heads down.” They were nearly out of safe houses. He looked at Billy suspiciously. “How come you figured you could make the key work that way?”
Because, Billy thought, it’ll, oh, unlock the way.
Chapter Forty-Four
MARGE’S PROBLEM, WHEN SHE ASKED ON HER BULLETIN BOARDS where she should go, “as a noob in all this,” to learn what London really was, was not too few but too many suggestions. A chaos of them. She had winnowed with a few questions, and had raised the issue of the cults. The issue, tentatively, of the church of the squid. A few false leads, and she came back again and again to the message that said: “cult collectors old queen almagan yard east london.”
Down this way London felt like a city to which Marge had never been. She had thought the docklands all cleared out, bleached with money. Not this alley in gobbing distance of the Isle of Dogs, though. These felt like moments from some best-forgotten time burped back up, an urban faux pas, squalor as aftertaste.
Where the fuck am I? She looked again at her map. To either side were warehouses scrubbed and made flats for professionals. A channel of such buildings was parted as if grudgingly, an embarrassed entrance onto a cul-de-sac of much grubbier brick and potholed pavement. A few doors, a pub sign swinging. THE OLD QUEEN, it said in Gothicky letters, and below it a pinch-faced Victoria in her middle years.