A high-flying scrap at the top of the rustling column flattened itself against the glass beside Billy and Dane. The ink on it regarded them. A still second. It plummeted back through the paper vortex. The rest followed, the swirl falling through its own centre.
“Come on!” shouted Billy. He kicked the glass into the room and fired through the paperstrom, but no beam came out. He threw the dead phaser at the giant inkwell full of Grisamentum.
There were shots, and one, two of the Krakenists who had fought their way in fell. Dane did not move. Billy heard a percussion and a damp smacking into Dane’s body. A new wound in Dane’s side oozed black blood. Dane looked at Billy with abyssal eyes. He smiled not very human. He made himself bigger.
Billy grabbed for the pistol in Dane’s belt, and the papers bombed him. Some came at him as a biting skull. He swung the bleach bottle he carried and sent a spray of the stuff in a curve like a spreading-out sabre. It depigmented where it landed. He could smell bleach amid the gun smell, the same ammoniac scent as that of Architeuthis.
Screams. A Krakenist was being devoured by a flock of Grisamentum stains shaped playfully murderous into a paper tiger. Billy caught Dane’s eye. They looked something at each other. Dane vaulted the fence, his wound not slowing him at all. He fell fast, but not at gravity’s idiot control. The paper tried to disrupt him, but he twisted as he fell. He fired and killed an engineer. He sprayed bleach on his way down, streaming it through papers that instinctively flinched away, at Grisamentum.
His aim was predator perfect. But Byrne stepped into the way. She took the liquid across her front. It cut colour like an invert Pollock assault, her clothes fading under the spattered line. She shoved an old-fashioned perfume nebuliser into Dane’s face and squeezed the bulb.
Billy clenched. He closed his fist, tightened his stomach, tensed everything he knew how to tense. Nothing happened. Time did not pause. Byrne sprayed dark vapour into Dane’s face.
Dane staggered. His face was wet with dark grey. A billow of Grisamentum into him. Dane could not help breathing him in.
He retched, tried to puke Grisamentum out. Billy aimed at Byrne with Dane’s pistol, which he had no idea how to use, but in any case she dipped her fingers right into Grisamentum and shook them in front of her. The air around her closed, and when he fired his bullet ricocheted off nothing.
Dane was down. His body rilled. Grisamentum filled him, shaped himself on the Dane’s alveoli. Wrote bad spells on the inside of Dane’s lungs. Billy watched Dane die.
THE PAPERS ENCASED BYRNE IN AN ARGUMENTATIVE FLURRY, LIKE feeding birds.
“You’re sure?” Billy heard her say.
She poured the last of the dark liquid pulped from the Krakenist library into Grisamentum. He swirled. It must be giving him psychic indigestion to do this so fast, but he needed the final teuthic wisdom. He had to understand his quarry. Byrne stirred him and flicked the dipstick all around her. The papers eddied faster as the pigment splashed them. Older dried-up blots of Grisamentum were overlaid with less ignorant stains.
“It has to be close,” Byrne shouted. “Find it and send some of you back here to tell me where. I’ll bring the rest of you. Go!”
Dane had thank God stopped moving. Billy wanted to rally the last of the krakenbit, to destroy the gunfarmers and paper-swirl monsters. But he saw the chaos, his side’s rout, in the chamber. He climbed back out of the window.
Outside, Londonmancers and antibodies stood off against gunfarmers and a devil of inky paper. Littering the ground were bodies, and spots of troubled perspective where London functions had fallen. Krakenbit wheezed like fish in air, or lay still, brine dripping from their bodies. Billy saw one still fighting, with, at last, his left hand replaced with a twenty-foot hunting limb, which he dragged and flailed.
“Saira!”
She smiled to see him, even as she shook with war. She tugged a bit of London claylike into a police riot shield, crouched behind it, crossed the combat to him.
“Billy.” She even hugged him. “What’s happening?” He shook his head. “Dane?” she said. He shook his head. Her eyes went very wide. Billy began to shake.
“Disaster,” he said at last. “We couldn’t get close. He’s just, he’s doing the last of the knowledging now. Where’s my guardian angel, eh?” He was striving to speak to his headache again, as he had the last time the angel was near, but this time it was only pain.
“Billy…” It was Wati, groping to vague consciousness in his pocket. Billy said his name.
“He’s alive?” Saira said. There was a massive sound. From the building’s roof, a flock of black-stained papers streamed batlike out. They rampaged across the sky.
“He’s going,” Wati said. “He’s…”
“They’re covered in him; he can knack them more,” Billy said. “He doesn’t care. We forced his hand. He’s going all out. He’s looking for the kraken, and when he’s found it, Byrne’s going to milk it, and…” They looked at each other. “Can you find them? Get a message to the lorry?”
“They’re Londonmancers.” Saira nodded. “And so am I.”
“Tell them to get out of here. Tell them to go… Wait.” Billy held out the Kirk figure, its little plastic eyes watching him. Billy thought and thought, as fast as he could. “Wati.”
“Yeah,” the Kirk said.
“We’ve got as long as it takes for Grisamentum to find the lorry,” Billy said. “And you saw how many of him there are. Wati, I know you’re hurt, but can you wake up? Can you hear me?” No answer. “If he doesn’t wake up,” he said to Saira, “we’ll have to try to go ourselves, but-”
“Where?” Wati said. “Go where?”
“How are you?”
“Hurt.”
“Can you… can you travel?”
“Don’t know.”
“You got here.”
“This doll… used it so much it’s like a chair shaped to my bum.”
“Wati, what happened?”
There was silence. “I thought I was dead. I thought your friend Marge was… It was Goss and Subby.” Billy waited. “I can feel her. Still. Now. I can feel her because she’s got the dust of my old body all over her hands. I can sniff that.”
“She was in Hoxton.”
“… She must have… she got away from Goss and Subby.” Even exhausted, Wati’s voice was awed.
“Can you get to her?”
“That body’s gone.”
“She wears one.” Billy grabbed the front of his shirt where a pendant would be. “Can you use the dust to find her? Can you try?”
“Where’s Dane?”
The fighting continued, the noise of arcane murder. “They killed him, Wati,” Billy said.
At last, Wati said, “What’s the message?”
Saira whispered things into London’s ears, cajoled and begged it, even aghast as it must be that night, to pass a message to her onetime teacher in the lorry. “All we’ve got is speed,” Billy said to her, and told her where to send them. She moulded the wall and made a patch of it an urban hedge, through which she pushed, out into the street.
Billy took some seconds of solitude, as alone as he could be in the dregs of that fighting and that noise. He stared back at the building where his friend had died. Billy wished he knew how to make whatever tentacle-imitating sign wished a killed soldier of the krakens peace. Billy shut his eyes tight and swallowed and said Dane’s name and kept his eyes closed. That was the ceremony he invented.
Chapter Seventy-Five
HOW COULD YOU KEEP SOMETHING THE SIZE OF A LORRY HIDDEN from the skies? Fitch’s indecision protected him awhile: unable either to commit to his fighting sisters and brothers or to desert them, he had stayed less than a mile away and ordered the vehicle into a tunnel, and there in the orange striplight under the pavement had put on the hazard lights as if stalled. And waited, while refugees from that night surged past in their cars. When Saira sent her message, it, London, did not have far to go to pass it on.