and junior prophets. The birds still harassed them, taking some saurian aggregate shape.
THINGS WERE MOST BLOODY DEFINITELY NOT TAKING THE DESIRED shape. She’d always known this plan was a bit of a long shot, but she’d gone along in good faith. It didn’t seem stupid, it was worth a shot. Collingswood, still almost stamping from Marge’s ridiculously expert evasion—whose skills you freeloading, mate?—had not expected her and Vardy’s pet endings to run away with them.
She yelled at the officer partnered with her to come on, yelled into her hidden mouthpiece for Baron’s suggestions and orders, but whether it was static, magic or his anxiety there was only silence. If he was issuing commands she had no idea what they were. She did not know where to find him. The knowledge that a few other scattered police cells watched this unfolding did not comfort her. If she was having a time of it …
“Get your fucking arse here!” The young man tried to obey her. He wasn’t SO19. No firearms. She’d complained at the time. What was he supposed to do, carry her bag? All he was really doing was staring at the warring sky.
“… Tattoo … incon … can’t tell … bloody …” said Baron, or some Baron-aping airwave-dwelling thing. She’d dealt with that before.
“Boss, where are you?” She wouldn’t say she agreed with Baron about it to his face, but she could bloody well have wished Vardy hadn’t disappeared on this of all bloody nights, too.
“… too is here,” he said. “Tattoo is here.”
DANE HEADED FOR THE LABYRINTH OF LONDON. HE AND BILLY were shepherded, brilliantly, by the pigeons they thought they were evading. At a little square overlooked by unlit houses and guarded by leafless trees, men and women in municipal uniforms stepped out of the shade. They wore leaf-blowers, engines on their backs, hoses to gust fallen leaves from pavements. They aimed their contraptions like ludicrous guns. They sent whirling gusts of leaves toward Dane and Billy.
“What the hell is this?” said Billy. The leaves slapped him. The blowers were moving in careful formation, the leaf-mass taking whirlwinding shape like a bait-ball corralled by sharks. The men and women ran about each other, a puppeteer collective. The leaves they sculpted with their air machines took the rough shape of a man, three metres high, in tree-muck swirls.
“Monsterherds,” Dane said. Flicks of the machines, and the man’s head was a bull’s. The horns were tubes of leaf. “Get out of here, go.”
The men and women made the figure reach. It nearly closed its big leaf-gust fingers on Dane, but he evaded. The minotaur made of air and leaves slammed its whirlwind fist and cracked the paving stones. No mnemophylax came this time. Billy shot, and his phaser beam did nothing but send a few leaves flying. Dane said, “Byrne.”
Grisamentum’s vizier was a suspended arachnid on a wall. Her face was vividly outraged. She leapt and came after them, straight through the minotaur, which reconstituted the hole of her.
Dane headed back toward the flyovers, where spectators scattered as the pounding leaf-figure appeared. “Wait,” shouted Billy abruptly. He took a moment’s bearings, took several turns.
Dane yelled, “What are you doing?” but followed him, as the leaf beast, Byrne and the monsterherds came behind them.
At a new brick alley, Billy found what he was looking for. Facing them where the streetlet ended in rubbish, staring at Dane and Billy with unreadable emotion, was the punk man.
The Tattoo himself, his entourage, the guards who held the Tattoo-bearer still, were facing the other way, watching the last mopping-up operations in the arena. The man opened his mouth and stared at Billy and Dane, but did not speak.
Then came the gust of leaves and the shouts of Byrne, and a moment’s hush, and Billy and Dane were standing right between the Tattoo and Byrne, representative of Grisamentum, the Tattoo’s oldest, greatest enemy.
THE TATTOO HEARD THE SHOCK NOISES OF THE MAN WHO BORE IT, and shouted for his entourage to turn, and to turn him. The two forces stared at Dane and Billy, and at each other. Were those police sirens in some not-near-enough street? Billy thought. Were those the shouts of state functionaries on their way? No matter. The ’herders made the leaf minotaur stand and paw the ground. Billy could feel, like an animal running between Byrne and the Tattoo, a question—maybe we should focus on these two?—but the whole shape of London had been cut by their enmity for years. It was