was still wrong. You could hear the not-ending of tension in the city, the continuance not of fights but of a particular kind of fights, the terror of it all.
Everything was still going to burn.
• • •
SAIRA SAT, DEFEATED. SHE HEFTED A CLUTCH OF BRICKS AND MORTAR anxiously, a wound torn from a wall. She kneaded it. In her hands and knack all the city’s separate scobs and bits and pieces were the plastic matter of London. She prodded and pulled at the bricks and they squelched silently into other bricks. She dug in her fingers and made the stuff into other Londonness—a mass of food wrappers, a knot of piping, a torn-off railing top, a car’s muffler.
“What now?” It was Saira who said it, at last, but it could have been any of them. She held out her hand and Billy pulled her up. Her hand was sticky with Londongrease.
“You remember Al Adler?” Billy said. “Who you killed?” She was too tired to wince. “Know who he was working for? Grisamentum.”
She stared at him. “Grisamentum’s dead.”
“No. He’s not. Dane … He’s not.” She stared. “What that has to do with anything I don’t know. But it was Adler who … started this. With you. And he was still with Grisamentum when he did. Place your bets whose plan it was.
“We know what’s happening’s close, now, and we know it starts when the squid burns,” he said. “So I suppose we have to keep trying. We just have to keep it safe. Maybe if we can do that, keep it unburnt past … the night … we’ll be okay. All we can do’s keep looking. The Tattoo’s got no reason to burn the world. Neither did Al. Neither does Grisamentum, whatever their plan was.” He shook his head. “It’s something else. We have to try to keep this thing safe.”
“Let’s go, then.” Everyone looked at Dane. It was the first thing he had said for a long time that was not muttered devotion to his dead god. He stood, looking reconfigured. “You keep it safe,” he said to Saira. “We can’t be here. We’re too dangerous. We’ll do the stuff you’re saying,” he said to Billy. “First we’re going to get Jason out.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
“WHAT DO WE DO?” BILLY SAID. CRASHING THE HIDEOUT OF dangerous violent nutcases they might get away with, but the state? It’s too risky, Fitch had said. You have to help us protect it, Saira had said. There’s nothing you can do, they had said.
“Give me the satnav,” Dane replied. “We ain’t leaving him behind.”
“And maybe we can find stuff out,” Billy had said. “They might have some better ideas than we do, Collingswood and Baron.”
Dane had stared at the dead squid and made some sign. “We can find you when we need to. You keep my god safe. And let us out now.”
Now they waited. “We have to get Wati in,” Dane said. He spoke quickly. “We need to know the lay of the land in that copshop before we go cracking in. Where is he?”
“You know they’ve got stuff in place,” Billy said. “He can’t get in. Anyway …” Wati, guilty at his disappearances from the struggle at hand, was still at hasty rallies. “He said he’d be back when he could.” He wanted to help, and he would again, but Don’t you know there’s a war on? A class war that pitted rabbits against conjurors used to getting away with a stick and the scrawniest carrot, between golems and those who thought scrawling an emet on a forehead granted them rights, or any fucking thing at all.
Where gargoyles or bas-relief figures were close enough, Wati would deliver rallying speeches to whatever strikers maintained interventions (homunculi creeping in the angles between wall and pavement, rooks staggering). What might pass as twists of wind were pickets of militant air elementals, whispering in gusty voices as quiet as breath, “Hell No We Won’t Blow!”
There were scabs and sympathisers. Wati heard all the rumours, that he had been targeted—old news that—and that people had been searching all over the world, literally, outside of London, for some leverage against him.
The situation wasn’t great. The grind of economics forced some back to work, shamefaced, shamesouled where their faces were carved and immobile, shamewavelengthed when they were vibrations of aether. Rushing in a statued path all over the city, Wati kept arriving at aftermaths. Picket after picket closed down by spectral police spells on obscure, antique charges pressed into innovative use.