Collingswood saw the motorcade of Grisamentum’s last troops. She appeared to consider her options. The other officer ran. “You cheeky little fucker,” she shouted at his back as he went. She jabbed the air in his direction, and his legs tangled and he went down hard enough to break his nose, but she turned away as he scrambled back to his feet and continued running. She let him go.
“You’re welcome to try to arrest Griz if you want, Collingswood,” Billy said. “Fancy that?”
“I do fancy that yeah, actually, blood.” Not that she was moving.
Saira hesitated. Simon was helping Fitch into the lorry. “Let’s get out of here,” Billy said. Marge and Paul scrambled in too, the vanguard of the papers harassing Paul in confused habitual animosity, thinking he was his adornment. Billy, Saira and even Collingswood wordlessly moved toward the lorry, but they had left it too late. Byrne was close, and she was directing two cars of gunfarmers toward the big vehicle.
“Shit,” said Saira, judging the distance. She caught Billy’s eye a moment. He nodded minutely and she indicated the lorry to go. It lurched from the kerb, its rear door flapping, a bewildered Londonmancer and Marge still leaning from its back, Marge shouting in protest as they left the others behind. But they were gone, around a corner, gone. Simon wailed, held out his hands like a baby. Billy grabbed him and hauled him away.
Saira kneaded the wall beside them and gave it a mossy weathered gateway. They got in out of sight. They hunkered by the wall of the sea-house and crept as Byrne and Grisamentum’s crew came near, ready to scatter into the streets the moment angry papers careened around them.
“They must be going spare,” Billy said.
“Fine bunch of mates you have,” Collingswood said.
“They left without us,” Simon said, loudly enough that Billy pinched his mouth shut.
“They didn’t have any choice,” Saira said. “I told them to. I’ll find them…”
They heard a loud slam. The wall faintly shook.
“What the hell?” Saira said. She and Billy stared at each other. The noise came again. “Oh my God,” Saira said. “He couldn’t be so stupid… The sea?”
Would he? They crept to the corner and looked.
The land could never defeat the sea. As Canute had illustrated for his fawning courtiers, tides are implacable. Even Tattoo, bluster notwithstanding, had known to duck that confrontation. It was just an inevitable rule.
But rules were what Grisamentum wanted to rewrite.
Scratch out the writing on the wall, rewrite the rules, rework the blueprint, using the inks stored in the ocean itself. Would he stop this now? All he needed was tonight.
This was why when Billy peered around the edge of brick, he saw the papers corkscrewing in impatience, he saw Byrne carrying a big bottle of her boss protectively, he saw gunfarmers on guard, and he saw their colleagues kicking and kicking like thugs and police at the front door.
The redoubt of the ocean in residence in London, this house was encircled in thalassic knacks. But part of its defence was the certainty that it would never be needed, and now the attack was backed by the unremitting focused hex attention of Grisamentum. Byrne squirted him with a turkey baster into the lock mechanism, onto the hinges. This close to his becoming, he was cavalier with the stuff of his substance. He wrote weakening spells on the innards of the keyhole. One more onslaught of boots.
“No no,” said Billy, trying very much to think of something, to gather a plan, but a gunfarmer stepped up and slammed his boot at the door, and it flew open. It flew open and threw the man aside, and with it came an onrush piston of water, a giant brine fist.
SEAWATER EXPLODED INTO THE SCRUBBY FRONT GARDEN, SKITTLING gathered attackers. From the top of the house down, the windows imploded. Sea slicked into the road, bringing its inhabitants. Weeds piled. Fauna was dragged into the street, coming dying to rest. Jellies, hagfish, fat deepwater creatures twitching and doleful between the bare trees. A person-sized blind shark gaped pale jaws, hopelessly biting at a car. In other houses, people began to scream.
Gunfarmers picked themselves up. They kicked fish from their feet, pulled wracks and weeds from their sodden suits. Byrne and the ink went in.
“What do we do? What do we do?” Simon said. “What do we do?” He was collapsed onto his knees.
“Get it out of there,” Billy said. “Send it anywhere.” Simon closed his eyes.
“I can’t, I… They’ve moved it. My bearings are screwed, I can’t get a lock on.”
“Your lot’ll be here soon, won’t they?” Saira said to Collingswood.
“And what the fuck are they supposed to do?” Collingswood said urgently.
“What do we do?” Saira said.
With the library he had imbibed, Grisamentum knew kraken physiology. He could have Byrne undeath-magic it just back enough to life to coax its flesh into a fear reaction, for its sepia cloud. That was all, Billy thought, he needed to do.
“Saira,” Billy said, calm. “Come with me.”
“Baron,” Collingswood was saying into her phone. “Baron, bring everyone.” She gesticulated angrily-wait a minute-but did nothing to stop Billy as he climbed the rear of the house, helping Saira after him. Billy looked down into the garden littered with building rubble and rubbish.
“Get us in,” he said to Saira.
She pushed at the rear wall, moulding the bricks, pressing them into flatness and transparency, making a window. Faded to glass clarity they could see through a film of undersea slime into a small bathroom. Saira opened the window she had made. She shivered with more than cold; she was shaking violently. She made as if she would crawl in and hesitated.
“Fuck’s sake,” said Collingswood below them, and snapped her phone shut. She shook her head as if at a friend’s unfunny joke. She pushed her hands apart and rose, not in a leap but an abrupt dainty dangling, up through the impossible twelve feet or more to land on the ledge by Saira and Billy.
Billy and Saira stared at her. “You,” she said to Saira, “wuss-girl, get down there and hold wuss-boy’s hand. You,” she said to Billy, “get in there and tell me what’s what.”
IT WAS FREEZING WITHIN. THE STINK WAS ASTONISHING, FISH AND rot.
They stood in a typical London-house bathroom: stubby bath with shower, sink and toilet, a tiny cupboard. The surfaces were white tiled under layers of grey silt, green growth, sponges and anemones reduced to lumps in the sudden air. The floor was inch-deep in water full of organisms, some still slightly alive. By the door was a half-grown sunfish-a huge, ridiculous thing-dead and sad. The bathtub brimmed with a panicking crowd of fish. Something splashed in the toilet bowl. The infiltrators held their hands to their faces.
Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps. Creatures from the top floors where the pressure was gentle and skylights illuminated the water.
Shouted orders were audible. Billy set out through the flopping drowning. He steadied himself on banisters interwoven with kelp.
In the kitchen there was a sea-softened door into the living room. The floor was littered with broken crockery. In the sink an octopus floundered. Billy watched it but felt no kinship. He could hear muffled noises from the next room.
“There’s quite a bloody few of them,” Collingswood said.
“We have to get in there,” Billy whispered. They stared at each other. “We have to.” She kissed her teeth.
“Give me a second, Billy,” she said. “Alright? You understand?”
“What are you…?” He started to say. She raised an eyebrow. He nodded, readied the pistol he had taken from Dane.