the Tattoo, and I thought he had these buggers’ backing. Something’s going nuts.”
The station was all afaddle with the crisis, and it was not so hard for a mouse to run room to room uninterrupted, looking for and at last finding signs of FSRC involvement—religious pieces, books one would not normally associate with the police. At Collingswood’s desk, CD cases of several Grime artists.
“There’s got to be something,” Wati said. “Come on.” He was exhorting himself, not his escort.
The mouse walked Wati on all the papers they could find. A laborious ambulatory notetaking. Wati was not altogether surprised when he heard voices approaching. “Go,” he said. “Go go!” But the mouse walked one last paragraph, so when the FSRC officers entered, they saw her scuttling from Vardy’s desk.
Collingswood moved at shocking speed, not like a human. She dropped to her haunches and lurched sideways, keeping the tiny animal now running for the space between a filing cabinet and the wall in her line of sight. Vardy and Baron had still not moved. Collingswood spat a word that made the mouse go plastic-stiff skidding with momentum to the back of the little runnel, where the animal lay immobilized as Collingswood shuffled toward her. She still bit-gripped Wati.
“Mouse! Mouse! Come on!”
“Help me with this fucking cabinet,” Collingswood yelled at her sluggish colleagues, and at last they shifted their arses and began to tug it.
“Mouse, you better move,” Wati said. He felt statues beyond the walls that he might, from here on the nonblocked side of the magic caul, jump to. But he muttered and muttered at the mouse, until she regained enough of herself to crawl from Collingswood’s fingers. “Get into the fucking wall,” said Wati, and the mouse made it excruciatingly around a corner of architecture while Collingswood swore.
THE MOUSE DRAGGED HERSELF THROUGH THE WALLS, AT LAST TO deliver the doll to the cool air outside. “Thank you,” Wati said. “You okay? Good work. Thanks. There’s, look, there’s some food over there.” Remains of kebab. “Get that down you. Thanks. Big time. You’ll be alright, now?”
The mouse nodded, and Wati skittered through a few statues to where Billy and Dane waited for the news of Jason that he would have to give.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
“GOSS AND SUBBY.”
“It was Goss and Subby.”
“Holy fucking Kraken. Goss and Subby.”
Goss and Subby, Goss and Subby, names both names and barks of outrage at those so named. They had been that way since year who-bloody-knew? Certainly for centuries the bereaved, the beaten, the tortured had shouted those names in aftermaths.
Billy and Dane were aboveground, in a neglected tower, a folly thrown up on a terrace by some exuberant Camden architect. As everything closed in and they ran out of Dane’s hidden, fake flats, they retreated to chambers above the city and below it. This one was empty and light and dust-clogged. They sat in striae of particulate.
“And it was all the names of old associates on the desks?” Dane said at last.
“Yeah,” said Kirk-Wati. “Whoever was with Grisamentum when he was around.”
“Oh, he’s around,” Billy said.
“Well. You know what I mean. It was all people who’d been with him. Necros, doctors, pyros.”
“Names?” Dane said.
“A geezer called Barto. Ring any bells? Necromancer, according to the notes I saw. Byrne obviously. Someone Smithsee someone. A guy called Cole.”
“Cole. Wait a moment,” said Dane.
“What?” Billy said.
“Cole’s a pyro.”
“I couldn’t see,” said Wati. “All we got was a university, some notes. Why? You know him?”
“I know his name. I remember it from when Griz died. I heard it then. He’s a pyro.” He looked at Billy’s uncertainty. “A firesmith.”
“Yeah, I get that, but why …”
“From when Grisamentum was cremated. Supposedly. But … he works with fire.”
It was fire that ate up everything at the end. It was fire and a secret scheme from Adler, a minor man, a player in the rubble of Grisamentum’s organisation, with unknown intentions, connected to this other one.
“Where is Grisamentum?” Billy said.
“We don’t know. You know that. Wati can’t—”
“It’s more than where, though, isn’t it? You said you don’t see any reason?”
“For him to burn the world? No. No. I don’t get what his plans were at all, but they weren’t that.” They were uncertain enough not to join him, still.
“We’ll find out,” Billy said. “Let’s go find out what Cole is in all this.” He stood, pushing through the layered air. He looked down at the cars. “What the bloody hell is going on out there?”
THE TATTOO WAS GOING ON. HIS HIRED GUNS RAGED AND VIOLATED