“I ain’t going to take him if we go knack to knack,” Dane had said when they prepared. “If he’s what we think. At the very least it sounds like he knows what’s going on, and just in case he is the burner… the only chance we’ve got is to be stupid, and brutal, and fucking base.”
Dane brought Cole’s body down beneath him, expelling the man’s breath and locking him into place. He struck Cole twice with the weapon he pulled from his pocket. The way he held him Cole could make no sound.
“Billy?” Dane said.
“Yeah.” Billy found two places in the doorway where there were drill holes. He gouged with the knife he had brought, uncovering a scrap of flesh and thin chains, a wire figurine. He could see no other magics. “Done,” he said.
“Exit?” Dane said. Billy went fast to the window.
“One floor down, onto grass,” he said. He aimed the phaser at the groaning Cole.
“Professor,” Dane said. “I’m sorry about this, genuinely, but I’ll do it again the second I think you’re knacking. We need you to answer some questions. What do you know about the kraken? It was you wanted to burn it, wasn’t it? Why?”
Billy riffled urgently through the papers on the desk with his non-gun hand. He went to the bookshelves, found the collection of books and papers by Cole himself: A Particle Physics Primer, offcuts, an edited volume on the science of heat. He took the latter and saw, behind it, a second row of works. A slim book, that he grabbed, that was also by Cole, that was called Abnatural Burnings. He took another look at the photograph of Cole and his daughter.
“Come on,” Dane said. Billy shoved the papers into a bag. “Could be this is all nothing,” Dane said. “We got to get you so you can’t do anything, in case it’s not nothing. You’re going to come with us, and if it turns out you’ve got bugger-all to do with it and we owe you an apology, then what can I tell you? We’ll apologise. What did you want with the kraken? Why burn everything?”
There was a noise. Cole was staring up at Billy. Dark smoke was coming out of his scalp. Dane sniffed at the burning.
“Oh piss…” he said. Cole was not looking at him. He was staring at Billy, holding his papers, his picture. “Shit…” The smoke came from Cole’s clothes now. Dane gritted his teeth. “Billy, Billy,” he said. “Go.”
Cole smouldered and Dane swore and scrambled off him, shaking his hot hands, and Cole rose onto all fours and bared his teeth in the smoke that coiled like mad hair around him.
“What have you done with her?” he shouted. Flames came out of his mouth.
Billy shot him. The inventy phaser-beam slammed him into unconsciousness and the smoke dissipated. They stared at him supine, in the sudden quiet.
“We have to move,” Dane said.
“Hang on, you saw him,” Billy said. “He thought we were-” There was a knock on the door behind him.
“Professor?”
“Window,” Billy said to Dane. “We got to go.”
But the door was shoved suddenly and sent Billy staggering. The secretary stood in the threshold, shadow coagulating around her raised hands. Billy fired at her, missed, as she ducked animal fast into the room. He tightened his gut, and time slowed for her, held an instant, and he fired again and sent her spinning.
Dane smashed the window and gripped Billy, cantripped. He pulled them out. His weak little knack slowed their fall by a second, still depositing them on the verge with a breathtaking smack, but without breaking bones. People stared at them from around the irregular quad. Billy and Dane rose and ran raggedly. A few braver and bigger men halfheartedly tried to get in their way, but at the sight of Dane’s face and the phaser Billy waved they got out of the way.
There was a shout. Cole leaned out of the window. He spat in their direction. The stench of burning hair swamped Billy and Dane as they ran, making them gag. They kept running, did not stop, out of the university grounds, back into the city proper and away.
“THAT WENT WELL,” BILLY SAID. DANE SAID NOTHING.
“You saw the picture?” Billy said.
“You still got it?”
“Why the hell would he want to end the world?” Billy said. “He’s not a nihilist. See the way he was looking at it?”
“Could be unintentional. Side effect. By-product.”
“Jesus, I hurt,” Billy said. “By-product of what? Burning the kraken? He sent Al to get it? Why’d he want to do that? Okay, maybe. But you heard what he said. Someone’s took her. He thought it was us. That’s part of this.”
In the boarded-up building they squatted, they went through the papers. They scanned the mainstream physics, but it was the arcana that gripped them.
“Look at this shit,” Billy said, turning the pages of Abnatural Burnings. He could not follow it, of course, but the abstracts of the essays-cum-experiments-cum-hexes gave glimpses. “‘Reversible ashes,’” he said. “Jesus. ‘Frigid conflagration.’” It was a textbook of alternative fire.
“What’s reversible ashes?” Dane said.
“If I’m reading this right, it’s what you get if you burn something with something called ‘memory fire.’” Billy read the conclusion. “If you keep them hot, they’re ashes: if they get cold again, they go back to what they were before.” There was endless fire, that burned without consuming-notorious, that one. Antifire, that burnt colder and colder, into untemperatures below absolute zero.
Papers were folded between the book’s pages, bookmarks. Billy read them. “‘Behave and you get her back. Prepare three charges of,” hold on, “katachronophlogiston. Delivery TBA.’” He and Dane looked at each other. “It’s like a ransom note. He’s making notes for his work on it.” Under the typed words were scrawled pen and pencil.
“I suppose using that as your pad would inspire your bloody researches,” Dane said.
“See what’s weird about this?” Billy said. He held out the photo. “Look. Look at it. The little girl’s in the middle, Cole to one side.” The two of them were smiling.
“It’s bonfire night, maybe.”
“No, that’s what I’m saying. Look.” The layout was skewed, the fire to the other side of the girl from Cole, very close, lighting them strangely. “He’s on one side of her and the fire’s on the other.” Billy shook it. “This isn’t a picture of the two of them, it’s the three of them. This is a family shot.”
Dane and Billy squinted at it. Dane nodded slowly.
“The djinns are freaking out, people reckon,” Dane said. “Maybe it’s got something to do with all this. This was a mixed marriage.”
“And now someone’s got his daughter. He thought it was us.”
“He’s obeying orders. Even if it’s his stuff behind the burning, this isn’t his plan, he’s just doing as he’s told.”
“His kid. Find the kidnapper…” Billy said.
“Yeah, which he thinks is us.”
DID THAT MEAN ANOTHER PURSUER? WELL. THEY HAD NEVER BEEN unhunted anyway. That was why they stayed well away from the kraken on its circling journey. No matter how out of sight the Londonmancers were, obscured by the matter of the city of which they were functions, Billy and Dane were the targets of the greatest personhunt in memory, and they could not risk bringing that sort of attention to the enjarred god. Dane prayed to it, quietly but visibly, quite unembarrassed. He hankered to be in its presence but would not endanger it-any more than it was already endangered, what with the whole end of the world.
The proximity of that worst horizon did not mean they should forget, as they did, the more everyday hunters and knackers after them for the Tattoo’s lucre. The drab and frightening fact of that came back to them that night, as they worked through Cole’s papers, auditioned theories as to who might be behind what terrible action done to Cole’s child, as they walked a dangerous walk to a dingy café where they could access the Internet. A commotion sounded in some alley near them.