“I should talk to the sea?” Marge said.
“God, woman, no need to sound so miserable about it. What, all of it? Talk to its ambassador. Talk to a flood-brother. Up at the barrier.”
“Who are…”
“Now now.” He wagged his finger no. “That’s your bloody lot, alright? You’ve done well enough to get here. If you insist on getting eaten you can go a bit further; it ain’t my job to walk you through. I don’t need that on my conscience, girl. Go home. You won’t, will you?” He blew out his cheeks. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your boy, alright? And for what it’s worth, which in my professional opinion isn’t a bloody lot, I’ll pray for you.”
“Pray to what?” Marge said. He smiled. The jukebox played “Wise Up Sucker” by Pop Will Eat Itself.
“Fuck it,” the man said. “Tell you what. What’s the point collecting stuff you don’t use? I’ll pray to all of them.”
Chapter Forty-Five
“SO SIMON’S DOING ALRIGHT,” DANE SAID. “GETTING OVER GHOSTS.”
“So Wati said,” Billy said. “He coming?”
“Strike’s not going well,” Dane said. “He’s a touch bloody busy.”
It was early daylight and they were near where the London Stone throbbed. Between buildings. Dane made little military hand motions the meanings of which Billy did not know. He followed Dane up onto a low wall, a complicated dance between cameras.
On their way Dane had told opaque teuthic homilies. Kraken did not steal fire from any demiurges, did not shape humans from clay, did not send baby kraken to die for our sins. “So Kraken was in the deep,” Dane had said. “Was in the deep, and it ate, and it took it, like, twenty thousand years to finish its mouthful.”
Is that it? Billy did not insist on exegesis.
Dane moved faster and more gracefully than a man of his bulk should. Billy found this climb easier than the last one, too. He could see only roofs in all directions, like a landscape. They descended toward an internal yard full of cardboard boxes softened by rain into vaguely vectoral brown sludge.
“This is where they come to smoke. Take out your weapon,” Dane said. He held his pistol.
The first person out was a young man, who caned a cigarette and sniggered into his mobile phone. The second a woman in her forties with some stinking rollup. There was a long wait after that. The next time the door opened, it was Saira Mukhopadhyay, wrapped in smart scarves.
“Ready,” Dane whispered. But she was not alone. She was chatting to an athletic guy lighting a Silk Cut. “Arse,” said Dane.
“I’ll take him,” Billy whispered. “We haven’t got long,” Billy said. They could hear the conversation.
“Alright,” Dane said. “Do you know how to… set your phaser to stun?” They couldn’t help it: they giggled. Billy pushed his glasses up his nose. He could not have made this jump a few weeks before, phaser in his hand, a pitch down into a hard but controlled landing. He stood and fired. The big man spun across the yard and went down in the rubbish.
Here was Dane dropping beautifully behind Saira. She heard him, but he was already on her. He backhanded her into the bricks. She braced herself. Where her fingers clenched, they squished the bricks as if they were Plasticine.
Saira hissed, literally hissed. Dane smacked her again. She looked at him with blood on her lip. It had been easy to forget that for Dane this was sacred fervour.
“Steady, man,” Billy said.
“Not many people could port something that size out of there,” Dane said. “But you know that. We know who got it out of there, and we know what you dangled to make him do it. I don’t like it when someone steals my god. It gets me all fucking twitchy. What did you do? What did Al Adler have to do with all this? The end of the world’s coming, and I want to know what you did with my god.”
“You know who you’re bloody talking to?” she said. “I’m a Londonmancer…”
“You’re living a dream. The London heart stops beating, you know what’s going to happen? Fuck all. London don’t need a heart. Your mates know what you been doing?”
“That’s enough.”
Fitch had entered the yard. They stared at him as he closed the door behind him. He stood by Saira, in the path of Dane’s weapon.
“You think I should be in a museum,” he said. “Might be. But museum pieces have their uses, right, Billy? You’re almost right about me, Dane. See, when you don’t have the knack you used to, you’re no threat. So people tell you things.”
“Fitch,” said Dane. “This is between me and Saira…”
“No it is not,” Fitch said. He squared all pugnacious, then withered. “She just handled the money. You want to know what happened, talk to me.”
“I SHOUT,” HE SAID, “AND THE OTHERS’LL BE HERE.”
Things flew overhead. Edgy birds. He glanced at them, and from where Billy stood, the perspective looked wrong.
“You took it?” Dane said.
“If you were still a Krakenist, I’d not be talking to you,” Fitch said. “But you aren’t, and I want to know why. Because you’ve got him.” He nodded at Billy. “And he’s the one who knows what’s going on.”
“I do not,” Billy said. “Not this again.”
“Why don’t you want the Krakenists to know what’s going on?” said Dane. “We… they… ain’t London’s enemies.”
“I know how they want to get rid of their holies. And I know where that sort of thing leads.”
“What? They aren’t even looking for it, let alone getting rid of it,” Billy said.
“I wish you was right, Fitch, but you ain’t,” Dane said. “The church ain’t doing anything.”
“Why do you want the kraken?” Fitch said. “I’ve got no business seeing anything in the guts these days. They just sit there squelching. But there it was. Fire. First time since I don’t know how long, and oh my London what I did see.”
“What’s Al Adler in this?” Billy said.
“Why did you take it?” Dane whispered.
Fitch and Saira looked at each other. Saira shrugged. “I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.
“It was his fault,” Fitch said. He whined. Billy could tell the old man was relieved to break his vow. “It was him started it. Coming here with his plans, and the burning at the end of it.”
“Al? You said he was superstitious,” Billy said to Dane. “So-he came for a reading. But no one liked what they saw.”
“Tell us,” Dane said, his voice shaking, “everything.”
ADLER HAD COME TO THE LONDONMANCERS WITH A RIDICULOUS, audacious plan. He was going to steal the kraken. He was not afraid to say so in that hallowed confessionaclass="underline" Fitch, not judging, unshocked even at that stage by the enormous crime to come, bound to confidentiality by oaths in place since the Mithras temple, split the city’s skin to see what might happen.
“There’s no way Al thought of that job,” Dane said.
A courtesy, a formality. Fitch expected to see nothing, as he had for years. What he saw was fire.
The burning end of it all. Burning what it couldn’t burn, taking the whole world.
And after? Nothing. Not a phoenix age, not a kingdom of ash, not a new Eden. This time, for the first time, in a way that no threatened end had ushered in before, there was no post-after.
“Most of the Londonmancers don’t know anything about this,” Saira pled. They could not have been expected to overturn their vows like their leader and his best lieutenant had done. “It was obvious Al was just a front guy. Hardly criminal genius, was he?”
“What did you tell him?” Billy said.
Fitch waved. “Some waffle. We had to decide what to do fast.”
“Couldn’t you have told him not to do it?” Billy said. Everyone looked at him. That wasn’t the point at all. You didn’t alter plans on the basis of a Londonmancer reading, any more than you picked a spouse on the basis of a fairground palm reader’s wittering. “Why would he want to end everything?” said Billy.