Attuned as she had become to the light’s rhythm, she was immediately aware of a last, sudden change. She grabbed for the Morse code legend and dripped tears on it. This last phrase the streetlamp repeated only twice. STAY, she read, AWAY.
Whickering with miserable breaths, moving as if through viscous stuff, Marge went to her computer and began to research. It did not occur to her for any time at all to obey the last injunction.
Chapter Thirty-Five
PAPER DRIFTED ABOVE LONDON.
It was night. Scraps spread out from One Canada Square, Canary Wharf. A woman stood at the tip of the rooftop pyramid, the apex of that nasty dick of a building. It would have been easier for her to gain access to BT Tower, but here she was forty-seven metres higher. Knack-topography was complicated.
BT Tower’s time had passed. There was a point she could remember when the minaret with its ring of dishes and transmitters had kept London pinned down. For months it had kept occult energies tethered in place when bad forces had wanted to disperse them. The energies of six of London’s most powerful knack-users-combined with the thoughts of comrades in Krakow, Mumbai and the questionable township of Magogville-had been focused along the shaft of the tower and shot in a tight burst that had evaporated the most powerful UnPlaced threat for seventy-seven years.
And had the building had any thanks? Well yes, but only from those very few who knew what it had done. BT Tower was an outdated weapon now.
Canary Wharf had been born dying: that was the source of its unpleasant powers. In those bankrupt nineties when its upper floors had been empty, their lucred desolation had provided a powerful place for realitysmithing. When at last developers moved in, they were bewildered by the remains of sigils, candle-burns and bloodstains resistant to bleaching that would be found again if the unbelievably fucking ugly carpets were ever lifted.
The woman stood by the always-blinking light-eye on the tower’s point. She swayed in the wind without fear. She was buffeted, blinked away tears of chill. She reached into her bag and brought out paper aeroplanes.
She threw them over the edge. They arced, their folds aerodynamicking them through the dark, streets lighting them from below. The planes caught thermals. Busy little things. They rose toward the moon like moths. The planes went hunting, above the level of the buses, dipping into the lampshine.
They went on whims-London hunches. Turning at turnings, round roundabouts, going one way up one-way streets. By the West-way one corkscrewed over-under-over the great raised road in what could not be anything but pleasure.
Many were lost. A miscalculated pitch and one might come to a sudden stop in a chain-link fence. An attack by a confused London owl, paper released to fall in scrap to the pavements. One by one, eventually, they turned over the roofs, lighting out for the territories-not from where they had come, but for their home.
By then the woman who had sent them out was there for them. She had crossed the city herself, more quickly and by quotidian means, and she waited. She caught them, one by one, over hours. She took a blade to each, scraping, or cutting from it, as closely as she could, the message on it. She gathered a pile of words. Unpapered writing lay beside her in strange chains.
THE PLANES THAT DID NOT MAKE IT HOME ACCELERATED THEIR own decomposition in gutters, but they could not make it instantaneous. There was arcane litter.
“Hello Vardy.” Collingswood entered the poky FSRC office. “Where’s Baron? Bastard’s not answering his phone. What you doing?” He was making notes by his computer. “Vardy, you reading lolcats?” She peered over the edge of his computer screen. He looked at her without warmth. “‘I can has squid back?’” she said. “Noooo! They be stealin my squid!”
“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”
“And yet, eh?” she said. “And fucking yet.” She dragged. He looked at her with calm dislike. “What a state of the world, eh?” she said.
“Well, quite.”
Collingswood called Baron again and again demanded to his voice mail that he get back to her ASAP. “So, found anything out?” she said. “Who’s behind our rubbery robbery?”
Vardy shrugged. He was logged into the secret chatrooms frequented by the magically and cultically inclined. He typed and peered. Collingswood said nothing. Stayed exactly where she was. He failed to ignore her. “There’s all sorts of whispers,” he said at last. “Rumours about Tattoo. And there are people I’ve not seen before. Usernames I don’t know. Muttering about Grisamentum.” He glanced at her thoughtfully. “Saying it’s all since he died that everything’s gone wrong. No more counterweight.”
“Is Tattoo still off radar?”
“Hardly. He’s all over the bloody radar, but that’s another version of the same problem, I can’t find him. From what I can gather he has… shall we say subcontracted agents? freelancers?… out there looking for Billy Harrow and his pal, that Krakenist dissident.”
“Billy, Billy, you little heartbreaker,” Collingswood said. She tapped her nails on the desk. They had tiny pictures painted on them.
“Anything’s possible right now, it looks like,” Vardy said. “Which doesn’t help us very much. And behind it all, I don’t know… there’s still all that…” He made big, vague motions. “Something exciting.” He did actually sound excited. “Something big, big, big. There’s a vigour to this particular hetting up. It’s all speeding up.”
“Well before you do your voodoo trance”-Collingswood put a photocopy in front of him-“check out this shit.”
“What is it?” He leaned over the unfolded message. He read what was on it. “What is this?” he said slowly.
“Whole bunch of paper planes. All over the shop. What is it? Any idea?”
Vardy said nothing. He looked closely at the tiny script.
Outside, in one of the innumerable dark bits of the city, one of the planes had found its quarry. It saw, it followed, it came up after two men walking quietly and quickly through canalside walks somewhere forgettable. It circled; it compared; it was, at last, sure; it aimed; it went.
“WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT LONDONMANCER STUFF?” BILLY SAID. “What they saw. Doesn’t seem like we got anything new.”
Dane shrugged. “You heard them, same as me.”
“Like I say, nothing new.”
“It was them who first saw it. We had to try.”
“But what do we do about it?”
“We don’t do nothing about it. What’s it? Let me tell you something.” Dane’s grandfather, he said, had been there for the worst of more than one fight. When the Second World War ended the great religious conflicts of London did not, and the Church of God Kraken had brutally engaged with the followers of Leviathan. Baleen hooks versus leathery tentacle-whips, until Parnell senior raided the Essex tideland and left Leviathan’s vicar on earth dead. His body was found stuck all over with remoras, dead too, hanging like fishy buboes.
These singsong stories, these stories turned into pub anecdotes, in the tone of an amiable, drunken bullshitter, were the closest Dane came to displays of faith.
“Nothing cruel to it, he told me,” Dane said. “Nothing personal. Just like it would’ve been down in heaven.” Down in dark, freezing heaven, where gods, saints and whales fought. “But there was others that you wouldn’t have expected.” A bloody battle against the Pendula, against the hardest core of Shiv Sena, against the Sisterhood of Sideways-“‘and that ain’t easy, Son,’” Dane quoted his grandfather, “‘what when wall is all gone floors and you’re falling longways parallel to the ground. Know what I did? Nothing. I waited. Made those lateral harpies come to me. The movement that looks like not moving. Heard of that? Who made you, boy?’”