“Ask him what you want,” Byrne said.
“Where is he?” Billy said.
“It’s his writing,” Dane said.
“That’s hardly proof,” Billy said.
“Where are you?” Dane said. To the paper.
Near, Byrne wrote, without looking.
Billy blinked at this new thing, this remote-writing knack. “This proves nothing,” he whispered to Dane.
“Heard you were dead,” Dane said. There was no writing. “When we was here last, you were asking me to come work for you. Remember?”
Y.
“When I said I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t, and I asked you a question. Do you remember? What I said? The last thing I said to you before I went?”
Byrne’s hand hesitated over the paper. Then she wrote.
Said you’d never leave church, she wrote. Said: “I know who made me. Do you know who made you?”
“It’s him,” Dane said quietly to Billy. “No one else knew that.” The city broke the silence, with the coughing of a car, as if uncomfortable.
What broke you from the church? Byrne wrote.
“Different ideas,” Dane said.
You want your kraken.
“Dead, rotten and ruined?” Dane said. “Why d’you think I want it?”
Because you’re not the Tattoo.
“What exactly is your proposition?” Billy said. Dane stared at him.
We can find it, Byrne wrote. She kept looking up. She stared into the litter of stars, strewn like discards. Whoever has it has plans. No one takes a thing like that without plans. Not good.
Harrow you know more than you know, she wrote. She drew an arrow, pointing at him. Wherever he was, Grisamentum was pining for Billy’s opaque vatic insight.
“We have to think about this, Billy,” Dane said.
“Well he’s not the Tattoo,” Billy muttered to him. “I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn’t try to kill me to anyone who does. I’m funny that way. But…”
“But what?”
“There’s too much we don’t know.” Dane hesitated. He nodded. “We’re meeting Wati tomorrow. Let’s talk to him about it. He might have news-you know he’s been tracking shit down.” Billy felt, suddenly and vividly, as if he were underwater.
“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “We have to think.”
“Really,” Byrne said. She looked away from the sky and at him as her hand wrote Join us now.
“No disrespect. If it was you you’d do the same. We’re on the same side. We just have to think.”
Byrne’s hand moved over the paper, but no ink came from the pen. She pursed her lips and tried again. Eventually she wrote something and read it. She took out a new pen and wrote, in a different script, a postal box, a pickup spot. She gave it to Dane.
“Send us word,” she said. “But fast, Dane, or we have to assume no. Time’s running out. Look at the bloody moon.” Billy looked at the sliver of it. Its craters and contours made it look wormy. “Something’s coming.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
BILLY HAD ANOTHER DREAM AT LAST, THAT NIGHT. HE HAD BEEN feeling vaguely guilty at the lack of oneiric insights. But at last he had a dream worthy to be so called, rather than the vague sensations of cosseting dark, cool, glimmerings, heaviness, stasis and chemical stench that otherwise filled his nighttime head.
He had been in a city. In a city and racing up and over buildings, jumping over high buildings with one jump, making swimming motions to pass through the clear air above skyscrapers. He wore bright clothes.
“Stop,” he shouted at someone, some figure creeping from broken windows in a big warehouse, where police lights shone and there was the smoke of a fire billowing like a dark liquid in water. There was Collingswood, the young police witch, smoking, leaning against a wall, not looking at the crime behind her, eyeing Billy on his descent sardonically and patiently. She pointed the way he had come. She pointed back the other way and did not look round.
Billy sank gracefully through. Behind Collingswood he saw a robotic wizard mastermind nemesis look up, and Billy felt warm in the sun, knowing that his companion would come. He waited to see the muscly arms, the tentacles in their Lycra, come out from behind the building, his sidekick behind its mask.
But something was wrong. He heard a rumble but there were no uncoiling sucker arms, no grabbing ropy limbs, no vast eye like that of the tinderbox dog. There was, instead, a bottle. Behind the enemy. Its glass was dark. Its stopper was old and corroded into place, but uncorking. And he knew suddenly and with a kind of relief that it was not his sidekick, but that he was its.
When he woke Billy felt a different kind of guilt. At the kitsch of the dreams. He felt the universe, exasperated, was giving him an insultingly clear insight, that he was simply missing.
“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE?” BILLY SAID.
“You mean what my granddad said?” Dane said. “If you was good, maybe you come back in a god’s skin.” A chromatophore, a gushing colour cell. So krakens show emotion by the flexing of their devout dead. It was never the stories of sinking islands upsetting Vikings that Dane told.
Billy and Dane crossed the city with as much subterfuge as they could muster. By way of knacks, magic misdirection, an anti-trail of psychic un-bread crumbs. Billy relaxed a little when they entered the graveyard where they had their rendezvous. He walked between the rows of stone. His calm made little sense, he knew: whatever hunted them would do so among the dead as easily as among the living.
“Dane. Billy.” Wati spoke to them from a stone angel. “Sure you weren’t followed?”
“Fuck off, Wati,” Dane said mildly. “How’s the strike?”
“Struggling.” Wati circled in a clearing among the unkempt graves, speaking from one then another then another stone face. “To be honest, we got big trouble. I got attacked.”
“What?” said Dane. He took a solicitous step toward the moment’s contingent figure. “You okay? Who? How?”
“I’m alright,” Wati said. “I nearly wasn’t, but I’m alright now. It was police. It nearly got me. I got it though. The only good thing is I learnt a few things. It sort of oozed out of itself, is what.”
Billy turned slowly and looked at each of the angels. “We all had visitors,” Dane said. “You remember Byrne, Wati?”
“Grisamentum’s vizier? What about her?”
“We saw her, Wati.” The leaves of the ivy and the overlooking trees muttered. “Grisamentum’s still alive.”
Clouds bundled by, as if something was urgent. Billy heard some little animal rustling under the grass.
“You saw him?” Wati said.
“We spoke to him. It was him, Wati. He wants to work with us. To find it.” There were more graveside rustles.
“What did you tell him?”
“We said we’d think.”
“So what do you think?” After seconds of silence Wati said, from a new, saccharine child angel, “Billy, what do you think?”
“Me?” Billy cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”
“We need all the help we can get,” Dane said carefully.
“Yeah, but,” Billy said. The toughness of his own voice surprised him. “You think I’ve got knowledge I don’t even know about, right? Well, I don’t know why, but I don’t like it. Alright?”
“That’s not nothing, Dane,” said Wati at last.
“Listen,” he continued. “I’ve got stuff to tell you. You remember that list of the porters we reckon could’ve took the kraken? I been looking into it.” Wati’s voice that day was thin and marble. “Simon, Aykan, couple of others, remember?
“There’s skinny on all of them, you hear what they like, who they’re working for, what they’re good at and not good at, all that. If we thought of this you can bet your arse everyone else who knows about the kraken did, and they’re looking too: we heard from Aykan’s old flatmate that the cops tried to get hold of him. But they’re not thinking right. Simon’s the dark horse.”
“Simon Shaw retired,” Dane said.