“Alright, mate, alright,” he said, seeing Billy’s face. “None of us know much about this. This is out of our league. When the kraken got took, the angel messed up badly. I had to know a little bit because I was in the Centre.”
The presence of a guard from the faithful could have been seen, and was by some, as disrespectful. Because the Architeuthis was already under an aegis, protected, along with every other specimen in the museum.
“What angel?”
“The mnemophylax is the angel of memory. There’s one in all the memory palaces. But this one screwed up.”
“What is it?”
“You think something like memory won’t grow spikes to protect it? That’s what angels are: they’re spikes.” Memory’s defences. Their content irrelevant: the fact of them, and their pugnacity, was all.
“The angel’s not letting this one go,” Wati said. “You pick this stuff up in the in-between. It’s raging. It feels like it failed.”
“It did fail,” Dane said.
What had failed was one of an old cabal abraded into existence out of the city’s curatorial obsession. Each museum of London constituted out of its material its own angel, a numen of its recall, mnemophylax. They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. In a city where the power of any item derived from its metaphoric potency, all the attention poured into their contents made museums rich pickings for knacking thieves. But the processes that gave them that potential also threw up sentinels. With each attempted robbery came the rumours of what had thwarted it. Battered, surviving invaders told stories.
In the Museum of Childhood were three toys that came remorselessly for intruders-a hoop, a top, a broken video-game console-with stuttering creeping as if in stop-motion. With the wingbeat noise of cloth, the Victoria and Albert was patrolled by something like a chic predatory face of crumpled linen. In Tooting Bec, the London Sewing Machine Museum was kept safe by a dreadful angel made of tangles and bobbins and jouncing needles. And in the Natural History Museum, the stored-up pickled lineage of the evolved was watched by something described as of, but not reducible to, glass and liquid.
“Glass?” Billy said. “I think I… I swear I’ve heard it.”
“Maybe,” said Dane. “If it wanted you to.”
But the squid had been taken, the angel defeated. No one knew the meaning of or penalty for that. Savants could feel an outpouring of alien regret. They said this ushered in something terrible. That the angels were stepping out of their corridors, beyond the remit that had thrown them up. They were fighting for memory against some malevolent certainty that walked the streets like the dead.
“It isn’t just some porter we’re looking for,” Wati said. “It’s someone who can take on an angel of memory and win.”
“Did they win, though?” Billy said. “You’re talking to the man who found a bloke in a jar.” They glanced at each other.
“We need more information,” Dane said.
“Go to the tellers,” Wati said. “The Londonmancers.”
“We know what they’ll say. You heard the recording. The Teuthex already spoke to them…” But Dane hesitated.
“Why won’t they shop us?” Billy said.
“They’re neutrals,” Wati said. “They can’t intervene.”
“The Switzerland of magic?” Billy said.
“They’re nothing,” Dane said. But he sounded hesitant again. “They were the first, weren’t they?”
“Yeah,” Wati said.
“It’s like they’re oracles again,” Dane said. “Maybe.”
“But isn’t it dangerous for them to see us? People could hear about it,” Billy said.
“Well,” Dane said. “There is one way to make them keep us secret.” He smiled. “If we’re going to see them anyway…”
In for a penny. How else could they have negotiated the power logics of London so long? Employ their services, and like doctors and Catholic priests the Londonmancers were committed to silence.
Chapter Thirty-Three
THERE ARE MANY MILLIONS OF LONDONERS, AND THE VERY GREAT majority know nothing of the other mapland, the city of knacks and heresies. Those people’s millions of everydays are no more everyday than those of the magicians. The scale of the visible city dwarfs that of the mostly-unseen, and that unseen is not the only place where there are amazing things.
At that moment, however, the drama was in the less-travelled metropolis. Nothing changed for most Londoners but for the onset of a wave of depression and anger, a bad intimation. That was not good and not nothing, certainly. But for those who lived in the city’s minority articulation things were growing daily more dangerous. The strike paralysed large sections of occult industry. The economy of gods and monsters was stagnating.
The journals of the secretive places-The Chelsea Picayune, Thames’ Unwater Notes, The London Evening Standard (not that one: the other, older paper of the same title)-were full of foreboding at millennial signs. Drug use reached record levels. Smack and Charlie, narcotics that user-mages squabbled with the knackless over in the mainstream capital; and more arcane fixes, the sweepings from ley lines and certain time-crushed places, the buzz of choice for dust-junkies, addicts of collapse and history, high on entropy. Inferior supply grew to meet demand, product ground up and adulterated by impatience, rather than genuine snortable ruins.
A group of mysterious independents intercepted a shipment of product the Tattoo was moving. No one got to trip on this degraded antiquity: they burnt, blew away and oil-fouled the goods, then disappeared, leaving holes in the bodies of the killed, and rumours of monstrous shapes coagulated out of city-matter.
Word spread on graffitied walls, on secret bulletin boards virtual and corporeal, corkboards in ignorable offices frequented by curious visitors you couldn’t be quite sure worked there, that Dane Parnell was exiled from the Church of God Kraken. What heresy or betrayal could he have committed? The church would say only that he had showed a lack of faith.
IT WAS EARLY DAYLIGHT. DANE AND BILLY WERE IN THE OPEN, NEAR the City of London. Dane twitched with nerves. His hands were in his pockets with his weapons.
“We need more information,” Dane had said.
Cannon Street, opposite the Tube. In the emptied remains of a foreign bank was a sports shop. Below posters of physically adept men was a glass-front cabinet and iron grille, behind which was a big chunk of stone. Dane and Billy watched the comings and goings a long time.
The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances. Trusting in that old rock was a quaint or dangerous tradition, depending on to whom you spoke. The London Stone was a heart. Did it still beat?
Yes, it still beat, though it was sclerotic. Billy thought he could feel it, a faint laboured rhythm making the glass tremble like dust in a bass line.
This had been the seat of sovereignty, and it cropped up throughout the city’s history if you knew where to look. Jack Cade touched his sword to the London Stone when claiming grievances against the king: that was what gained him the right to speak, he said, and others believed. Did he wonder why it had turned on him, afterward? Perhaps after the change in his fortunes, his head had looked down from the pike on the bridge, seen his quartered body parts taken for national gloating, and wryly thought, So, London Stone, to be honest I’m getting mixed messages here… Should I in fact maybe not lead the rebels?
But forgotten, hiding, camouflaged or whatever, the Stone was the heart, the heart was stone, and it beat from its various places, coming to rest at last here in an insalubrious sports shop between cricket equipment.
Dane took Billy through shadows. Billy could feel that they were, he was, hard to see. By an alley, bracing himself in a corner of brick and launching astonishingly up, Dane entered the tumbledown complex like some thickset Spider-Man. He opened the door for Billy. He led through scuffed passages behind the shop, by toilets and office rooms to where a young man in a Shakira hoodie loitered. He fumbled for his pocket, but Dane’s speargun was out, aimed straight at his forehead.