“Well, there you go.”
“But it was…” It was still in the tank. It was still dead and bottled.
The night opened up as they turned onto a main street, an avenue of neon, crudely drawn illuminated fried chicken and the three globes of pawnbrokers. “You did well, Billy. Clem’s no pushover. He’ll get out of there before long. Where’d you learn to fight?”
“He was about to kill me.”
“You did well, man.” Dane nodded.
“Something happened. And it was to do with the dream.”
“Well, that’s what I’m saying.”
“When I woke up nothing was moving.”
“Not even a mouse?”
“Listen. The world. It was all…”
“Like I said, mate,” Dane said. “I ain’t a priest. Krakens move in mysterious ways.”
It didn’t feel like the kraken moving, Billy thought. Something was doing something. But it didn’t feel like the kraken, or any god.
Chapter Thirty-One
WORD GOT AROUND. IT DOES THAT. A CITY LIKE LONDON WAS always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. There’d be all those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there’d be quite contrary tendencies.
There, there was no state worth shit, no sanctions but self-help, no homeostasis but that of violence. The specialist police dipped in, and were tolerated as a sect or offhandedly killed like cack-handed anthropologists. “Oh, here we go, FSRC again,” wink wink stab stab.
Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, by all means-London had its social bandits-but that was fact.
So when a power put out word it was looking for a hunt-and-fetch, that was like police-band radio-an announcement of forthcoming law and order. “Tattoo? Seriously? He’s got plenty of his own muscle. What’s he employing outsiders for?”
The last time was when he had stopped being human and become the Tattoo, when Grisamentum had trapped him in a prison of someone else’s flesh. “Whoever brings me Grisamentum’s head has the run of the city,” was what he had said then. When renowned personhunters who’d taken up that commission were found ostentatiously dead, the enthusiasm for it had ebbed. The Tattoo had gone unrevenged.
Now a new situation. Anyone up for a job?
They met in a nightclub in Shepherd’s Bush, its doors roped off behind a “Private Party” sign. It had been a long time since the last trade-fair. The gathered bountymen and -women cautiously and courteously greeted each other, no one breaking protocol, the market-peace of the room. If they met in the course of competing for their quarry, whatever it was, then, sure, there would be blood, but just then they sipped drinks and ate the nibbles provided, and it was all “How was Gehenna?” and “I heard you got a new grimoire.”
They had checked their weapons; a pebble-skinned man guarded a cloakroom of Berettas, sawn-off shotguns, maggot-whips. They gathered in little groups according to micropolitics and magic allergies. Perhaps two-thirds of the people in the room could have walked down any high street without causing consternation, if in some cases they changed their clothes. They wore every kind of urban uniform and ranged in ethnicity across the whole of London’s variety.
There was a whole slew of skill-sets in the room: miracle-sniffing, unwitchery, iron blood. Some of those present worked in teams, some alone. Some had no occult skills at all, were only extraordinarily lucky with contacts and good at everyday soldierly expertises like killing. Of the others, there were those who would disguise themselves when they left this congenial atmosphere: the miasmic entities drifting at head-height like demon-faced farts would reenter their hosts; the huge woman dressed in a reverse-polarity rainbow would reinstitute her little glamour and be a teenager in a supermarket uniform again.
“Who’s here?” Muttered censuses. “He’s got everyone. Nu-Thuggers, St. Kratosians, the lot.”
“No gunfarmers.”
“Yeah, I heard they were in the city. Not here, thank God. Maybe they’re on another gig. Tell you who is here. See the bloke over there?”
“The twat dressed like a new romantic?”
“Yeah. Know who he is? A Chaos Nazi.”
“No!”
“Shit you not. All limits out the window, obviously.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that…”
“We’re here now. Might as well see what’s on the table.”
THERE WAS A COMMOTION ON THE STAGE. TWO OF THE TATTOO’S enforcers stepped forward in their uniform of jeans and jackets, wearing helmets as they always did, not speaking. They cracked their knuckles and swung their arms.
Between them was a ruined man. He was slack-mouthed and empty-eyed; not so much balding as threadbare, his scalp pitiably tufted. His skin looked like rotting, soaked wood. He walked in tiny little steps. Protruding from his shoulder like some grotesque pirate parrot was a boxy CCTV camera. It clicked and whirred, and swivelled on its stalk in the man’s flesh. It scanned the room.
The nude man would have kept walking, fallen from the edge of the stage, but one of the helmeted guards held out an arm and stopped him a foot from the edge. He swayed.
“Gentlemen,” he said suddenly, in a deep staticky voice. His eyes did not move. “Ladies. Let’s get to business. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours. They’re true. The following are the facts. One. The kraken lately stored in the Natural History Museum has been nicked. By persons unknown. I have my suspicions, but I’m not here to feed you ideas. All I’d say is the people you think are dead have a habit of not being, especially in this bloody city. I’m sure you’ve noticed. No one should’ve been able to get that thing out. It was guarded by an angel of memory.
“Two. There was a man in my custody, name of Billy Harrow. Knows something about this. I didn’t think he did, but more fool me. He did a bunk. That’s not alright with me.
“Three. Word is that Mr. Harrow was aided in his unacceptable bunk-doing by one Dane Parnell.” A murmur went around the room. “Long-time stalwart of the Church of God Kraken. Now, Dane Parnell has been excommunicated.” The muttering got a lot louder. “From what we gather, the whys of that have something to do with his making Billy Harrow his bumboy.
“Four. There’s something badly bollocksed up with the universe right now, as I’m sure you know, and it’s something to do with this squid. So. Here’s the commission.
“I want war. I want terror.
“I want, in descending order: the kraken, or any sign of it; Billy Harrow-alive; Dane Parnell-couldn’t give a shit. Let me stress that I do not give a tinker’s shit what you do on the way. I do not want anyone to feel safe as long as I don’t have what I want.
“Now…” The voice in the sick man’s throat got crafty. “I’m going to pay a stupid amount for this. But cash on delivery only. This is no-win-no-fee. Take it or leave it. I can tell you, though, that anyone who delivers the kraken will not have to work again. And Billy Harrow’ll give you a good couple of years off.” The camera scanned the room again. “Questions?”
The swastika-wearing man in mascara texted a set of exclamation marks to a comrade. A renegade Catholic priest fingered his dog collar. A shaman whispered to her fetish.
“Oh, shit.” The voice came from a mild-looking young man in a shabby jacket whose creative gunplay would astonish most people who met him. “Oh shit.” He bolted. The man hunted by empathic homing, an annoying side effect of which, in his case, was an allergy to other people’s greed (not, he regularly thanked Providence, his own). The gust of venality that had gone through the room at that moment was strong enough that he never had any hope of reaching the toilets before vomiting.