“Marcus, ain’t it?” Dane said.
“I know you?” The young man’s voice was impressively steady.
“We need to come in, Marcus. Got to speak to your crew.”
“Appointment?”
“Knock on the door behind you, there’s the boy.” But at all the noise the door opened preemptively. Billy heard swearing.
“Fitch,” Dane said, raising his voice. “Londonmancers. No one wants trouble. I’m putting my weapon away.” He waved it so the watchers could see. “I’m putting it away.”
“Dane Parnell,” someone said in an ancient voice. “And that would be Billy Harrow with you. What are you here for, Dane Parnell? What do you want?”
“What does anyone want with the Londonmancers, Fitch? We want a consultation. Couldn’t exactly prearrange, now, could we?”
There was a long hesitation and a laugh. “No, I suppose you couldn’t exactly call ahead. Let them in, Marcus.”
Inside it was a management lounge. World of Leather sofas, a drinks machine. Make-do shelving covered with manuals and paperbacks. A cheap carpet, workstations, lever-arch files. A window at ceiling height emitted light and the sight of legs and wheels passing on the pavement outside. There were several people within. Most were fifty or over, some much younger. Men and women in jackets and ties, boilersuits, scuffed sportswear.
“Dane,” said a man in their midst. He was so old, his skin such a welter of creases and dense pigment, it was impossible to tell his ethnicity. He appeared to be dark grey. Cement-coloured. Billy remembered his mad-sounding voice from the Teuthex’s recording.
“Fitch,” Dane said respectfully. “Saira,” to a woman beside him, in her late twenties, a tough-looking well-dressed Asian woman crossing her arms. The Londonmancers did not move. “I’m sorry about how we came in. I was… We don’t know who’s watching us.”
“We heard…” Fitch said. His eyes were very open, and they moved all the time. He licked his lips. “We heard about you and your church and we’re terribly sorry, Dane. It’s a shame, an awful shame.”
“Thanks,” said Dane.
“You’ve been a friend of London. If there’s anything…”
“Thank you.”
A friend of London. More backstory, Billy thought.
“No you mustn’t,” Fitch said. “Hesitate. And your friend…?”
“We have to be fast, Fitch. We can’t be out.”
“I know what you’re doing, you know,” Fitch said, with a trace of humour. “Trap us in vows.”
“Confidentiality,” Saira said.
“I need you to be secret, yeah, but I need a seeing, as well… And I can rely on your-”
“You know what we’re going to tell you,” Saira said. Her voice was startlingly posh. “Have we been at all quiet with warnings, recently? Why’d you think we’re low on numbers? Some of us are a bit futuresick.”
“When have we ever taken sides, Dane?” Fitch said.
The Londonmancers had been there since Gogmagog and Corineus, since Mithras and the rest. Like their sibling chapters in other psychopoli, the Paristurges (Dane had carefully pronounced it to Billy French-wise, pareetourdzh), the Warsawtarchs, the Berlinimagi, they had always been ostentatiously neutral. That was how they could survive.
Not custodians of the city: they called themselves its cells. They recruited young and nurtured hexes, shapings, foresight and the diagnostic trances they called urbopathy. They, they insisted, were just conduits for the flows gathered by streets. They did not worship London but held it in respectful distrust, channelled its needs, urges and insights.
You couldn’t trust it. It wasn’t one thing, for a start-though it also was-and it didn’t have one agenda. A gestalt metropole entity, with regions like Hoxton and Queen’s Park cosying up to the worst power, Walthamstow more combatively independent, Holborn vague and sieve-leaky, all of them bickering components of a totality, a London something, seen.
“No one’ll give us a straight answer about what’s coming,” Billy said.
“Well it’s hard to see,” said Fitch. “Except for it’s bloody… Just the thing of it. I can see something.” Billy and Dane looked at each other. “Alright then. You want a reading. You want to know what’s going on? Saira, Marcus. Let’s take Dane and Billy to see what we can see.”
OUTSIDE THE WIND WHIPPED AT THEM. “YOU KNOW WE’RE HUNTED?” Billy whispered to Saira.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think we got that.” She smoked with the offhand elegance that reminded him of the girls he had been unable to get with at school.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“I was thinking about a friend of mine, and his girlfriend.” It was true. “I can’t even…” Billy looked down. “He died, it was that that got me here, and I can’t help, I’m thinking about her, about what she’s…” It was the truth. “I wish I could tell her, she doesn’t even know he died.”
“You miss him.”
“God yes.”
Marcus lugged a heavy bag. “I know you’d rather be indoors, Dane,” Saira said, “but you know how this works.”
Dane watched the skies and the buildings. He kept his hand in his bag on his weapon. They went between glass fronts and banks, beside sandwich shops, into the deeps of the City of London. They kept off the main places full of pedestrians, suited workers.
Saira was looking at Billy sideways. He was not really watching where they were going. He was not keeping his eyes open, as he knew he should. He was just at that moment, in that second, all wrapped up in the misery of it, of what had happened. He followed the sound of his companions’ footsteps.
“Fitch,” Saira said. She spoke to him quietly.
Dane listened. “We ain’t got time,” he said.
They emerged into a more main road, by a red postbox. Billy was watching now, bewildered, as Fitch put his hands on it, at belly-height, as if feeling for an unborn child. He strained. He looked to Billy as if he was having a shit.
“Quick,” he said to Billy. “It won’t last forever.”
“I don’t…”
“You want to say something to your friend’s friend,” Saira said to him quietly.
“What?”
“Look at what you’re carrying. Talk to her.”
What is this bollocks? Billy thought. Saira’s face was carefully neutral, but the kindness angered him. Not her fault, he knew that. I’m not going through this charade, he thought.
“It’ll make you feel better,” she said. “This isn’t Hoxton. You’re alright to do this here.”
London as therapy, was it? It was everything else, why not that too? Why was Dane not racing them on? Billy was exasperated, and turned, but there was Dane, merely waiting. In the open, exposed, rushed for time, waiting for Billy to do this, like he thought it was a good idea.
It’s not like I’m going to cry, Billy thought, but that thought was a bad idea, and he had to turn away. Toward the postbox. He walked toward it.
A pretty drab metaphor, such obvious correspondences; here he was about to pass on a message through the city’s traditional conduits. He felt absurd and resentful, but he still could not look at those waiting for him, and he could still think only of Leon, and, some mediated guilt, of Marge. There were passersby, but no one watched. He stared into the darkness of the postbox’s slot.
Billy leaned in. He put his mouth to it. London as therapy. He whispered into the box: “Leon…” He swallowed. “Marge, I’m sorry. Leon’s dead. Someone killed him. I’m doing what I can to… He’s dead. I’m sorry, Marge. You stay out of this, alright? I’m doing what I can. Look after yourself.”