“What do you mean?”
“It weren’t just the Londonmancers. They went for your people too.”
“What?” said Dane.
“What?” said Billy. That ostentatious assault of Fitch’s comrades, as if it were meant to be seen. “Who? Goss and Subby? Who’ve they-?”
“No. Gunfarmers. For the Krakenists. They attacked your church.”
DANE STOLE A CAR. HE WOULD NOT LET ANYONE BUT BILLY COME with him.
“They didn’t even have anyone out there,” Dane kept saying, slamming his hands on the dash. “They kept their heads down. How could anyone…? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I was the only one, and I’m not…”
“I don’t know.”
A little crowd was outside the community church. Tutted at the smouldering from the windows, the broken glass, the obscene graffiti that now covered it.
“Hooligans.” “Awful.” Dane shoved through them and inside. The hall was smashed up. It was very much as it would be had the perpetrators been a rampaging group of fools. Dane went through the junk room and pulled the hatch open. Billy could hear how he was breathing. There was blood in the corridors below.
There, in that buried complex, were the ruins left by the real attack. Very different from the foolish display above.
Throughout the halls were bodies. They were punctured and blood-sodden, hosts for grubbing little bullets. There were those who looked killed in other ways-by bludgeons, suffocation, wetness and magic. Billy walked as if in a slowed-down film, through carnage. The ruined bodies of Dane’s erstwhile congregation lay like litter.
Dane stopped to feel pulses, but without urgency. The situation was clear. There were no sounds but their footsteps.
Desks had been ransacked. As well as mud, in a few places on the floor were trampled origami planes, like the one that had alerted Dane to Grisamentum’s attention. Billy picked up two or three of the cleanest. On each folded dart was the remain or smudge of a design in grey ink-a random word, a symbol, two sketched eyes.
“Grisamentum,” he said. “It’s him. He sent them.” Dane looked at him without any sign of emotion.
In the church, before the altar, was the bullet-ruined body of the Teuthex. Dane made no sound. The Teuthex lay behind the altar, reaching for it with his right hand. Dane gently held the dead man. Billy left him alone.
Like arrows drawn on the floor, more fallen planes pointed in higgledy-piggledy direction to the library. Billy followed them. When he pushed open the library door, he stopped, at the top of the shaft of shelves, and stared.
He walked back to where Dane mourned. He waited as long as he could bear. “Dane,” he said. “I need you to see this.”
The books were gone. Every single book was gone.
“THIS MUST BE WHAT THEY CAME FOR,” DANE SAID. THEY STARED into the empty word-pit. “He wanted the library.”
“He’s-Grisamentum must be researching the kraken,” Billy said.
Dane nodded. “That must be why… Remember when he wanted us to join him? That’s why. Because of what I know. And you. Whether you know it or not.”
“He’s taken it all.” Centuries of dissident cephalopod gnosis.
“Grisamentum,” Dane whispered.
“It is him,” Billy said. “Whatever it is, it is his plan. He’s the one who wants the kraken, and he wants to know everything about it.”
“But he doesn’t have it,” Dane said. “So what’s he going to do?”
Billy descended the ladder. There was blood from something on his glasses. He shook his head. “He can’t read even a fraction of these. It would take centuries.”
“I don’t know where he is.” Dane made fists and raised them and could only lower them again. “The last time I even saw him was…” Dane did not smile. “Just before his funeral.”
“Why is it we don’t see him?” Billy said. “Only Byrne.”
“He’s hiding.”
“Yeah but even when there was… like when they fought the Tattoo. Tattoo was there. You’d think for a night like that Grisamentum would show in person. We know he must be desperate to get his hands on the kraken.”
“I don’t know,” Dane said. He ran his hand along the shelves. Billy was reading the strange words and examining the odd figures on the paper planes he had picked up. Dane descended, picking up dust on his trailing fingers. He turned and looked at Billy, who was still, and staring at the planes.
“Remember what you were saying about when Grisamentum died?” Billy said. “About when he was cremated?”
“No.”
“I just…” Billy stared into an ink blot. He moved it and kept staring at it. “This ink,” he said. “It’s greyer than you’d think,” he said. “It’s…” He looked up into Dane’s eyes.
“It was Cole did his cremation,” Dane said at last. He ascended.
“It was,” Billy said, staring at him. “Remember the kind of fires he deals in?” They stared at the paper. It riffled as if in a little wind. There was no little wind.
“Kraken,” whispered Dane, and Billy said, “Oh my Christ.”
WHEN GRISAMENTUM DISCOVERED HE WAS DYING IT WOULD HAVE offended him. There were no techniques to prevail against his own injurious blood. He was uninterested in an heir: his desire was never dynastic but to rule.
History was punctuated with women and men who had by grit forced their ghost-selves back to continue their business, who had wedged their minds out into host after host, who had by simple doggedness failed to die. But these were not Grisamentum’s knacks. Byrne was good, her expertise indispensable, her commitment to the project swiftly personal, but she could not unwind death itself. Only filigree it, in certain ways.
“Christ, he must have made… other arrangements,” Billy said.
He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?
Was it when he decided on the spectacle of cremation that something had occurred? Perhaps he was writing the order of the service. Perhaps scribbling instructions to Byrne he began to stare at the pen he held, the paper, the black ink.
“Pyros, he was talking to,” Billy said. “And necros. What if Byrne wasn’t remote-talking to him at all, when we saw her? Remember how she wrote?” He unfolded the little eyes. “Why are there paper planes here? Remember how he found us in the first place? Why’s this ink grey?”
Grisamentum had burnt alive, in that temporally and psychically knacked variant of memory fire, that mongrel of expertise, the pyros’ and Byrne’s, her deadist insights. But he had not quite died. He had never died. That was the point.
After hours of it, after the mourners had left, he would have been collected. He was ash. But he never quite died. He was safe from his illness-he had no veins for it to poison, no organs for it to ruin. Byrne (her name a sudden joke) must have taken him, charcoal-coloured in his urn, ground any last black bone shards and carbon into powder. Mixed him into the base he had had prepared: gum, spirit, water, and rich knack.
Then she must have dipped her pen into him, closed her eyes, dragged the point across her paper. To see the thin line jag into scrappy calligraphy, a substance learning itself, she gasping in loyalty and delight as the ink self-wrote: hello again.
“WHY’S HE DONE ALL THIS?” DANE SAID. HE STARED AT THE PAPER. It stared inkly back. “Why does he want the world to burn? Because he did? Revenge on it all?”
“I don’t know.” Billy was gathering the paper planes. He held one up. The word on it was Poplar. On another Binding. Another said Telephone. In super-thin writing. All incorporating two little scribbled eyes. This was the remnant of honour, nostalgic for spurious legendary times.
Was it always a lie, Billy thought? Had this neutrality-breaching killer always been so savage? Had something happened to make him the purveyor of this? The vastness of this murder.