King Rat shouted scornfully after him. Saul could not even hear what he said.
He felt blood well from the deep scratches on his face and he wiped himself as he began to run, surefooted despite the terrain. He threw himself at one of the walls which overlooked him, scrambled up its tender surface, slipping by those unadorned windows, leaving a long smear of blood and dirt on his way up the bricks.
He stared briefly behind him. King Rat sat forlornly on the hulking piles of cement. Saul turned away from him and set out over the top of London. He looked around him as he moved, and sometimes he stopped and was still.
On the top of a school, somewhere behind Paddington, he saw harsh security lights catching on billowing cobweb suspended below the railings topped the building. The fragile thing was empty an long deserted, but he lowered himself to the ground and stared around him. There were other, smaller webs below it, still inhabited, less visible without the accumulated dust of days.
He lowered his lips to these webs and spoke in a voice he knew sounded removed and intimate, like King Rat’s. The spiders were quite still.
‘I need you to do what I say, now,’ he whispered. ‘I need you to find Anansi, find your boss. Tell him I’m waiting for him. Tell him I need to see him.’
The little creatures were still for a long time. They seemed to hesitate. Saul lowered himself again.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘spread the word.’
There was another moment’s hesitation, then the spiders, six or seven of them, tiny and fierce, took off at the same moment. They left their webs together, on long threads, little abseiling special forces, disappearing down the side of the building.
Fabian drifted on waves.
He was stuck very deep in his own head. His body made itself felt occasionally, with a fart or a pain or an itch, but for the most part he could forget it was even there. He was conscious of almost nothing except perpetual motion, a tireless pitch and yaw. He was not sure if it was his body or only his mind which was lulled by the liquid movement.
There was a Drum and Bass backdrop to the hypnagogic rolling. The soundtrack never stopped, the same bleak, washed-out track that he had heard from Natasha’s stairs.
Sometimes he saw her face. She would lean over him, nodding gently in time to the beat, her eyes unfocused. Sometimes it was Pete’s face. He felt soup trickle down his throat and around his mouth, and he swallowed obligingly.
Most of the time he lay back and surrendered to the rocking motion in his skull. He could see almost anything when he just lay back and listened to the Jungle filtering from somewhere close by, twisting around him in a tiny dark room, oppressive, stinking of rot.
He spent a lot of time looking at his artwork in progress. He was not always sure it was there, but when he thought of it and relaxed into the beat, it invariably appeared, and then he would make plans, scribble charcoal additions in each corner. Changing this canvas was so easy. He could never quite remember the moment when he drew, but the changes appeared, bright and perfect.
He became more and more ambitious in his changes, going over old ground, rewriting the text at the centre of his piece. In no time at all it was changed beyond recognition, as smooth and perfect as computer graphics, and he stared at the legend he could not quite remember choosing. Wind City, it said.
Fabian swallowed the food he found in his mouth and listened to the music.
Natasha spent most of her time with her eyes closed. She didn’t need to open them at all. Her fingers knew every inch of her keyboard, and she spent her time playing Wind City, tweaking it, changing it in slight and subtle ways, to fit the exigencies of her mood.
Occasionally she would open her eyes and see with surprise that she stood in unfamiliar environs, that she was in the centre of a dim, stinking space, that Fabian danced horizontally, lying down nearby, food drying on his face, and that her keyboard was not in front of her after all. But when she tweaked Wind City, it changed anyway, it did what she wanted, so she closed her eyes and continued, her fingers flying over the keys.
Sometimes Pete would come and feed her, and she would play him what she had done, still with her eyes closed.
The rats had given up in fear and confusion. The great cadres that had set out earlier in the night had dried up, had slunk home to the sewers, but here and there the braver souls continued the search, as Saul had hoped they would.
In the streets of Camberwell they searched the catacombs of old churches. On the Isle of Dogs they ran past Blackwall Basin and scoured the decrepit business park. The rats worked their way along the great slit of the Jubilee Line extension, past vast hulking machines that tunnelled through the earth.
Their numbers dwindled. As the night wound on, more and more gave in to hunger and fear and forgetfulness. They could not work out why they were running so hard. They could no longer remember what their quarries looked like. One by one they slipped back into the sewers. Some fell prey to dogs and cars.
Soon there were only a very few rats left searching.
‘Little bird tell me you want talk to me, bwoy.’
Saul looked up.
Anansi descended from the bough of a tree above him. He moved elegantly, belying his size and weight, slipping smoothly down one of his ropes, utterly controlled.
Saul leaned back. He felt the cold weight of the gravestone behind him.
He was sitting quietly in a small cemetery in Acton. It was a tiny space that straddled the overland train line, tucked behind a small industrial estate. It was overlooked on all sides by ugly functionality, a set of grotesque flattened factories and suburban warehouses, uncomfortable in this residential zone.
Saul had wandered West London for a time and entered the graveyard to eat and rest, here amid the crammed urban dead.
The stones were nondescript, apologetic.
Anansi came to the ground silently a few feet from him, stalked past the low grey markers and crouched beside him.
Saul glanced at him, nodded in greeting. He did not offer Anansi any of the old fruit he had scavenged. He knew he would not take it.
Saul sat and ate. ‘Now was it really a little bird, Nansi?’ he asked mildly. ‘How is Loplop?’
Anansi jerked his head.
‘Him still screaming angry, bwoy. Him mad, too. Them can’t understand him, the birds dem. Him have lost a kingdom again, think you take it from him.’ Anansi shrugged. ‘So we no have no birds. Just my little spiders and the rats, and you and me.’
Saul bit into his bruised apple.
‘And Loplop?’ he asked, and paused. ‘And King Rat? They going to be there with us? They going to be there when we take him?’
Anansi shrugged again. ‘Loplop is nothing, whether him there or not. King Rat? You tell me, bwoy. He’s your daddy…’
‘He’ll be there,’ said Saul quietly.
The two sat for a while. Anansi rose presently and walked to the railing in front of them, looked over at the train-line below.
‘I’ve sent the rats to find the Piper,’ said Saul, ‘but they’ll fail. They’re probably all sitting stuffing their bellies right now. They’ve probably forgotten what it is I wanted them to do…’ He smiled humourlessly. ‘We’re going to face him on his terms.’
Anansi said nothing. Saul knew what he was thinking.
Anansi had to come to the Junglist Terror, because Saul would be there. Saul was the only chance he had to defeat the Piper, but he knew it was a tiny chance; he knew that he was walking into a trap, that by being there he was doing exactly what the Piper wanted. But he had no choice. Because if he were not there, Saul’s chances of defeating the Piper were even smaller, and if Saul failed, the Piper would have them all, the Piper would hunt Anansi down and kill him.