officer officer officer the thing said and Wati heard overseer and pushed back in rage. His recent route from the bobble-head was still astrally greased by his passage, and he clawed his way back into that tiny figure. Came slamming back into it and bellowed. The dogs looked round.
“Help me!” he shouted. He could feel the cop grab him, sucking at him, trying to winkle him out. It was strong. He clung to the inside of the doll.
“Get a brick,” he shouted. “Get something heavy. Grab me!” The nearest dog fumbled, picked the toy up. “When I say, you smash this motherfucker against the wall and you do it in one go. Understand?” The frightened dog nodded.
Wati braced, paused, then hauled the surprised attacker in with him, into the tiny figure. Wati looked through cheap eyes, crowded, feeling the bewildered officer jostling in the sudden shape.
“Now!” he shouted. The dog swung its heavy head and spat the doll at the bricks. In the tiniest moment before it touched the wall, Wati kicked out of it, shoving the police-thing back in, and pouring into a one-armed Barbie.
He heard the shattering as he slipped into his plastic person, saw shards of what had instants before been him go flying. With the percussion came a bellow of something dying. A burp of stink and strong feeling mushroomed and dissipated.
The dogs stared at the shards, at the raging woman-figured Wati.
“What was that?” one of them said. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Wati said. Psychic fingerprints had bruised him. “A cop. Sort of.” He felt his injuries, to see what he could learn from them and their residue. “Oh fuck me,” he said, prodding one sore spot.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
HE HAD BEEN A MAN OF VARIABLE AND VARIEGATED TALENTS. NO one would have called him a criminarch, though certainly he was not at all constrained by the technicalities of law. He was not a god, nor a godling, nor a warrior of any such. What he was, he always claimed, was a scholar. No one would have argued with Grisamentum over that.
His origins were obscure-“uninteresting,” he said-and somewhere between fifty and three hundred years back, depending on his anecdote. Grisamentum intervened according to his own ideas of how London should be, with which discriminations the forces of law and those in favour of a bit less murder were generally broadly sympathetic, according to his own knacks.
He was a man who won some hearts and minds. In contrast to the Tattoo, a relentless innovator of brutality for whom etiquette and propriety were useful for the shock they occasioned when being pissed on, Grisamentum valued the traditions of the London hinterland. He encouraged righteous behaviour among his troops, proper shows of respect to the city’s names.
He riffed, playfully of course but not as a joke, on the spurious remembrances of hinterLondon. It was long since the most fabulous of the bestiaries’ contents had walked, if they ever had, but rather than shrug and accept this postlapsarian cityscape of degraded knackery, he brought back into fashion the city’s monsterherds. Previously a rather ridiculous set of hobbyists, these invokers of a more maged past in the very matter of London-leaf minotaurs, rubbish manticoras, dogshit dragons-became his occasional troops. And with his passing, they had become again morris dancers of the supernatural, and nothing.
“It’s not like you thought he couldn’t die,” Dane said. “No such thing as immortal, no one’s an idiot. But it was a shock. When we heard.”
That Grisamentum was dying. He did not, as do so many little warlords, which in a terribly charming way he sort of was, obfuscate the facts of his case. He put out requests. He asked for help. He searched for a cure for whatever drab, lethal little disorder it was that had him.
“Who did this?” his partisans demanded in agony. They took no comfort from the fact that the truth appeared to be no one. Contingency and biology.
“He made quite a few deadists pretty rich,” Dane said.
“Deadists?”
“Thanatothurges. Had them in and out, knackers used to knacking stuff about death. People figured he was trying to find a way out of it. He wouldn’t be the first. But there’s only so much anyone can do. Met Byrne out of it, though. She was his lady. Gave him a bit of happiness, I thought, in the last year or two.”
“So?”
“So what? So he died. There was a funeral. A cremation, like a Viking thing. It was amazing, all like crazy fireworks. When he realised he was going he went from deadists to pyros. Djinn and people, Anna Ginier, Wossname Cole. When that pyre went up, boy, it was knacked, and that didn’t burn just like any fire.”
“You saw it?”
“We had a delegation. Like most of the churches.”
The fire scorching in every which way, burning out certain certainties, making holes in things it had no business burning holes in, spectacular as a world of fireworks. The proximity of the venue-some treated chamber in some innocuous-looking bank or whatever-to Pudding Lane, the unusual nature of the fire and the reputations of the pyros that had prepared it had led to speculation that it had been a conduit, some knack-buggered spark scorching all the way back four-hundred-plus years, starting the Great Fire and burning a little hole for Grisamentum out of the present in which he was dying.
“Bullshit,” Dane said. “And anyway, whenever he went, he’d still have had the dying in him.” Because he had died, this man who had just sent a message.
“WHY NOW?” BILLY SAID. HE WALKED ALONGSIDE DANE-NOT A STEP behind him, as he might have done once. They were in Dagenham, in a street full of dirty and deserted buildings, where corrugated iron was almost as common a facade as brick.
“Listen to me, Dane,” Billy said. “Why are you in such a hurry? God’s sake.” He grabbed Dane and made him face him.
“I told you, no one except him knows we met…”
“Whether this is him or not, you don’t know what’s going on. And we’re supposed to be gone to ground. There’s a price on our heads. Wati’s meeting us tomorrow. Why don’t we wait, talk to him about this. You’re the one’s been telling me to think like a soldier,” Billy said.
Dane’s shoulders went up. “Do not,” he said, “tell me I’m not a soldier. What are you?”
“You tell me,” Billy said. They made an effort to keep their voices low. He took his glasses off and came closer. “What do you think I am? You haven’t asked me about my dreams for a while. Want to know what I’ve been seeing?” He had dreamed nothing.
“Of course we have to be careful,” Dane said. “But one of the most important players in London just come back from the dead. Out of nowhere. Why’s he been waiting? What’s he been doing? And why does he want to talk to me? We have to know, and we have to know now.”
“Maybe he was never dead. Maybe it’s him we’re looking for.”
“He was dead.”
“Demonstrably he wasn’t,” said Billy, putting his glasses back on. That did not follow. He had no idea how this worked. “How do you know he doesn’t want to kill you?”
“Why would he? I never did nothing against him. I worked with some of his boys. He never had a big crew, I knew them all. He knows the Tattoo’s after us, and those two… No love lost. Anyway,” he said, “we’re in disguise.” Billy had to laugh. They were in new uninteresting clothes, was all, from the latest safe house. “We’re going to have to do something about those glasses,” Dane said. “Total giveaway.”
“You keep away from my glasses,” Billy said. “If he’s been around all this time, and he’s not said anything to anyone… what’s changed now? You’re exiled. You can’t tell anyone he’s still alive. You’re a secret now, just like him.”
“We have to…” Dane was not a natural exile. Twice, three times he had referred to others of his ilk in the church. “Time was, when Ben was doing the same thing as me…” he had said. “There used to be this other geezer, and him and me…” Whatever he and him had done they did not anymore. Billy had seen those big men at the service; there was clearly muscle among the Krakenists. But there was a difference between a handy young devotee and an exonerated assassin. Dane was not old, but he was old enough to have been doing this for years, and these comrades he mentioned were all in the past. Something had happened to the church, Billy thought, in that time. A decline, maybe. You don’t self-exile out of nowhere.