more rigorously than the woolly bullshit of most atheists. It’s not an intellectual mistake.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s a way of thinking about all sorts of other things, as well as itself. The Virgin birth’s a way of thinking about women and about love. The ark is a far more bloody logical way of thinking about the question of animal husbandry than the delightful ad hoc thuggery we’ve instituted. Creationism’s a way of thinking I am not worthless at a time when people were being told and shown they were. You want to get angry about that bloody admirable humanist doctrine, and why would you want to blame Clinton. But you’re not just too young, you’re too bloody ignorant to know about welfare reform.”
They stared at each other. It was tense, and weirdly slightly funny.
“Yeah but,” Collingswood said cautiously. “Only, it’s not totally admirable, is it, given that it’s total fucking bollocks.”
They stared some more.
“Well,” Vardy said. “That is true. I would have to concede that, unfortunately.” Neither of them laughed, but they could have done.
“Right,” Collingswood said. “Why are you here? What are those files?” There were papers everywhere.
“Well …” Vardy seemed hesitant. He glanced at her. “You recall our rather peculiar note from the sky? I have a thought about who it might be.” He closed one of the folders so she could see its title.
“Grisamentum?” she said. “He died.” She sounded suitably uncertain.
“Indeed.”
“Baron was at the funeral.”
“Sort of. Yes.”
“So was it the Tattoo, right?” Collingswood said. “Who did him in?”
“No. People thought so but no. He was just sick, is all, so he’d been talking to doctors, necromancers. We got hold of his medical records, and I can tell you he most certainly had cancer and it most certainly was killing him.”
“So … why d’you think this was him?”
“Something about the style. Something about finding Al Adler after all this time. Something about the word emerging that several monsterherds have been approached for some big commission. Remember his …?”
“No, I don’t remember dick, I wasn’t around.”
“Well, he was always a traditionalist.”
“So who are all this lot?” Collingswood said. She pointed at the details of some academic, some physicist called Cole, some doctor, Al Adler, Byrne.
“Associates. Connected in one way or another to his ahem funeral ahem. I’m thinking I might revisit them. I have a few ideas I’d like to chase up. All this has got me thinking. I’ve been having various ideas tonight.” He smiled. It was alarming. “I do wonder if any of them might have a clue about all this. All this.” He glanced beyond the walls, at the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future.
Chapter Forty-Three
“ALRIGHT.” WITH EXPERT SPEED AND A MINIMUM OF FILTHSPILLAGE, Dane emerged from a skip. He had a bust cup, a radio full of mould, half a suitcase. Billy stared at them. “What it is, if we got this seen to—there are people who can clean this up right, you know—we might be able to use this to—”
To what? The cup, it seemed, to carry some elixir that needed just this container—the radio to tune in to some opaque flow of decayed information or other—the suitcase to contain things that could otherwise not be carried. Dane struggled to articulate it. He kept reiterating that they needed equipment, if this was what they were facing.
Apparently, Billy thought, he lived now in a trite landscape. Deep enough below the everyday, Billy realised with something between awe and distaste, a thing has power, moronically enough, because it’s a bit like something else. Want to hex up briars, what else should you throw behind you but an old comb? All it took was a way with such cute correspondences.
“The Londonmancers don’t take sides,” Dane said. “That’s their whole thing.”
“Maybe Saira’s gone rogue,” Billy said. “Doing this alone.”
“I need a new gun,” Dane said repeatedly. The battle of Star Trek Tower had left him raging at his armaments. Whatever the specifics of this fight around them, seemingly between Grisamentum and the Londonmancers, he lacked firepower. With Wati’s help, anonymising the request, Dane sent a request to London’s arms dealers. Because someone out there had the psychic megatonnage of the fucking Architeuthis in their stockpile.
At the stub-end of Wandsworth Common he took delivery of a weapon, left under a particular set of bushes like some fabled baby. There were passersby but none close enough to see, and in any case, like most Londoners now, they moved furtively