should. Terrorised pushers of building-site dust. The Tattoo was gone, the dead Grisamentum was back, the balance of power was fucked, and the boroughs of London were Peloponnesea—as the world got ready to end, this was their great multivalent war.
“I need to …” Billy said, but what? He needed to what? He and Dane looked at each other.
Freelancers were rampaging. Puffed-up thugs with imperfectly learned knacks; consciousnesses born in vats, escapees from experiments; seconds-in-command of all kinds of minor ganglets decided that this was it!—their chance. The city was full of mercenaries carrying out long-delayed vendettas as the strike fell and the familiars came back to work, bit by defeated bit, on terrible, punitive terms.
Never mind, some thought, those in the worst circumstances. Only a few more days and we’ll all be gone forever.
Chapter Sixty-Five
ABSOLUTELY SOD-ALL WAS WHAT THEY HAD TO SHOW FOR THAT, Collingswood thought. Absolutely cack. It was obvious something big had happened. Not that she knew what it was yet: she’d pitched up at the site of some shitstorm or other, tasting familiar people in the air, tasting the very Billy and Dane they’d been there hoping to snatch, the knacks she threw out unpleasantly degrading in that atmosphere, slugs in salt. There was a shift, alright. Something had seesawed, and it was maddening and ridiculous how hard it was to work out what. And Baron and Vardy didn’t help.
That’s fucking it. Collingswood cooked up everything she had. Rang around and called in favours, sent out eager Perky on sniffing errands, stressed as shit by hurry, by whatever it was impending. Took, though she assiduously avoided reflecting on the fact, charge of the investigation. Seemed as if figures she’d never expected to hear from again, that she’d never faced herself but that were well known in the specialist police milieu, were back, or back again, or not dead, or pushing for the end of the world, or coming to get you.
This time it was her ignoring Baron’s calls for a bit. Working from home, from ley line—squatting cafés, with a laptop. Some stop-offs with contacts. “What are you hearing? Don’t give me that no one knows bollocks, there ain’t nothing no one knows nothing about.”
Because the one line of stories that kept coming, the one connection that made her think she still had it, in these winding-down times, concerned the gunfarmers. Whom she had officially mentally upgraded from rumour. Which she had done, she reminded herself later, scrabbling for pride in that wrecked time, before all those gathered hints reached her and critical massed into intuition, and she suddenly knew not only that the gunfarmers were about to attack, but where.
Holy shit. What? Why? That would have to wait. But still, Collingswood couldn’t stop herself thinking, If they’re being targeted they must’ve took it. Which meant the FSRC had even less of a clue than they thought they did.
“Boss. Boss. Shut up and listen.”
“Where are you, Collingswood? Where’ve you been? We need to talk about—”
“Boss, shut up. You have to meet me.”
She was shaking her head. The lurchingly sudden clarity of the intercepted intent staggered her. She knew she was good, but for her to get this kind of knowledge? They’ve given up hiding, they don’t care anymore.
“Meet you where? Why?”
“Because there’s about to be a big-ass attack, so bring backup. Bring guns.”
WOULD IT ESCAPE THE ATTENTION OF OCCULT LONDON THAT ON that night when small-scale apocalypse competition had been a wedge to crack the city open, Fitch and his Londonmancer cadre had been missing from the proximity of the London Stone? Could that be ignored?
“We’re on borrowed time,” Saira said. None of this could last. Those among the Londonmancer cadre who could obsessively parse the future—or, they reminded themselves to say, possible futures—from the safety of the trailer. Their job had become simple and minimal: keep the kraken out of the trouble until, up through and after the closing-in last day. To stop it being that day. That was all they could see to do. A new sacred duty.
“There was another one.” “Another two.” The Londonmancers, by agonising dream and memory interpretations interpreted the city’s history and burnlike blebs in its timeline, collected these new strange outriders, these architectural, temporal arson victims. “You remember that garage out by the gasworks? The really cool old Deco one?” “No.” “Well, that’s the point, it was never there anymore. But look.” A preserved postcard of the building, soot-stained and unstable-looking as it struggled gamely to exist, not to be