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