There was the punk man in his eyeholed leather jacket. Two of the men in crash helmets held him, in an alley overlooking the field of fighting. He stared in the opposite direction from it, at nothing, at dark streets, while the Tattoo spectated.
“Jesus,” Billy said. “Where’s Goss and Subby?”
“If they’re here…” Dane said. The Siddharthists were putting together a rough altar, carrying out secret ceremonies. “Wati?” But Wati was on rounds again. “If whatever this ‘animal church’ is doesn’t pitch up, we’re gone.”
There was a flash behind the night clouds, silent. It etched cloud contours. The air felt pressed down and the cars kept howling. From the altar was an unpleasant shining. “Here it comes,” said Dane.
All the way over them all, the cloud moved fast. It took shape. Church-sized clots of it evanesced, leaving-it was not mistake-a lumpy anthropoid outline in night-matter, a man shape crude as a mandrake root, a great cruciform figure over the city.
Billy stopped breathing. “If this is the end,” he said at last, “it’s nothing to do with the burning… What do we do?”
“It’s not our business.” Dane was calm. “There’ll be no shortage of people trying to put that out. If it’s just some piddling apocalypse, we needn’t worry.”
Then the earth in the dead space, the ugly dusty bushes and debris, rose. Men and women stood out of their camouflage and came quickly forward.
“They were there all along,” Dane said. “Well played. So who are they?”
THOSE COME FROM THEIR HOLES WERE IN LEATHER, BELTS CROSSED bandolier over their chests. They surrounded the Jesus Buddhists. The cloud-man loomed.
“Shit,” Dane said. He turned to Billy. “Waste of our time,” he said in a flat voice. “That’s the Brood. Nothing to do with a kraken. Different animal.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Nothing to see here.”
“… We knew it was a long shot,” Billy said.
From their power base in Neasden, the SV Brood were devoted to a wargod polecat ferret. Its uncompromising ontology ultimately precluded its iteration as one deva among many in the Hinduism from which it was doggedly self-created, and the Brood had become monotheists of a more reductive sort. The Brood’s inspiration in southern India, their predilection for fighting forms of Kerala, gave the Christos Siddharthans a peg for prejudice: they screamed “Tamils!” as the Brood approached, as if it were a derogatory term. They brought out pistols.
“Bugger this,” whispered Dane. “Ferretists versus racists. This is not the end of the world.”
Could you really feel the hand of destiny while pointing a Glock? The Siddharthists would not let chivalry stand in the way of their Buddhist rage. They fired. Broodists fell and the others leapt, unwinding their metallic belts. They were urumis, whip-swords, blades metres long, ribbon-thin and knife-edged, that they lashed in the crooked agile poses of kalaripayat, opening their enemies’ saffron clothes in ragged vents, drawing red lines so fast it took seconds for the victims to scream.
A sinuate mustelid presence coiled and uncoiled out of dust and nothing in the wasteland. “Red thoughts white teeth!” chanted the Brood. “Red thoughts white teeth!” (This long-promised ferret eschatology had been endlessly distant, until the probing and knacked prodding of the FSRC had helped midwife the cult’s little Ragnarok. All to flush out who was where.)
“Jesus,” Billy said. Cars passed. What did they see? A gang fight? Teenagers? Nothing? The police were surely on their way.
“Let’s split,” said Dane.
Two apocalypse figures clashed over the waste while their followers squabbled murderously. The god-functions struggled, an unusual storm.
“They’re late,” said Dane, retracing his way along the underside of a bridge.
“Who?”
“Whoever’s going to stop this.” Dane tutted.
“Wait,” grumbled Billy. “I want to see the apocalypses fighting.” But Dane snapped at him to come, so Billy sulkily turned his back on the celestial battle and continued through the crawl space. At the edges of the clearing, other figures had appeared. “Who are they?” he said.
“Some chosen one’s party,” Dane said without looking. “’Bout bloody time.”
Somewhere nearby, Billy supposed, Baron, Collingswood and his to-have-been colleagues were carting the wounded and dead to secret hospitals. Whoever saved the city would extinguish these little Götterdämerungen.
“Did you hear something?” Billy said.
More of those gustings, the things that moved like plastic? Yes, but something else too. Below them were animal calls, whimpering, the cough of foxes.
“We’ve been smelt,” Dane said urgently. Things rose from the alley. A composite thing incoming. Pigeons, grey clubfooted London birds, moving in frantic flock through whatever haze-hide Dane had knacked, made dove calls in panicked aggression. The pigeons bombed them with bursts of clawed and feathered dirt.
“There,” Billy heard.
“Shit, Cole’s burn, it marked us,” Dane said. “Come on.”
Something rose out of the below. A shaking cracked the concrete. The screws that bolted their walkway began to undo.
“Jesus!” Billy shouted. “They’re going to drop us.”
They descended at the first ladder, in just-controlled falls. Someone’s forces were coming toward them. Billy and Dane skirted the battleground, past startled hedge wizards and junior prophets. The birds still harassed them, taking some saurian aggregate shape.
THINGS WERE MOST BLOODY DEFINITELY NOT TAKING THE DESIRED shape. She’d always known this plan was a bit of a long shot, but she’d gone along in good faith. It didn’t seem stupid, it was worth a shot. Collingswood, still almost stamping from Marge’s ridiculously expert evasion-whose skills you freeloading, mate?-had not expected her and Vardy’s pet endings to run away with them.
She yelled at the officer partnered with her to come on, yelled into her hidden mouthpiece for Baron’s suggestions and orders, but whether it was static, magic or his anxiety there was only silence. If he was issuing commands she had no idea what they were. She did not know where to find him. The knowledge that a few other scattered police cells watched this unfolding did not comfort her. If she was having a time of it…
“Get your fucking arse here!” The young man tried to obey her. He wasn’t SO19. No firearms. She’d complained at the time. What was he supposed to do, carry her bag? All he was really doing was staring at the warring sky.
“… Tattoo… incon… can’t tell… bloody…” said Baron, or some Baron-aping airwave-dwelling thing. She’d dealt with that before.
“Boss, where are you?” She wouldn’t say she agreed with Baron about it to his face, but she could bloody well have wished Vardy hadn’t disappeared on this of all bloody nights, too.
“… too is here,” he said. “Tattoo is here.”
DANE HEADED FOR THE LABYRINTH OF LONDON. HE AND BILLY were shepherded, brilliantly, by the pigeons they thought they were evading. At a little square overlooked by unlit houses and guarded by leafless trees, men and women in municipal uniforms stepped out of the shade. They wore leaf-blowers, engines on their backs, hoses to gust fallen leaves from pavements. They aimed their contraptions like ludicrous guns. They sent whirling gusts of leaves toward Dane and Billy.
“What the hell is this?” said Billy. The leaves slapped him. The blowers were moving in careful formation, the leaf-mass taking whirlwinding shape like a bait-ball corralled by sharks. The men and women ran about each other, a puppeteer collective. The leaves they sculpted with their air machines took the rough shape of a man, three metres high, in tree-muck swirls.
“Monsterherds,” Dane said. Flicks of the machines, and the man’s head was a bull’s. The horns were tubes of leaf. “Get out of here, go.”
The men and women made the figure reach. It nearly closed its big leaf-gust fingers on Dane, but he evaded. The minotaur made of air and leaves slammed its whirlwind fist and cracked the paving stones. No mnemophylax came this time. Billy shot, and his phaser beam did nothing but send a few leaves flying. Dane said, “Byrne.”