Wati went for hours, then a day. He would not respond to any whispers to figurines held out of the vehicle. Was it a retreat, a surrender he was negotiating?
They kept Paul comfortable. They had no trouble with food. Stop for a moment and Saira would dig her hands into the brickwork of an alley corner, knead like clay, and the bricks might go from being a buckle of scaffolding to a key ring and keys to at last a bag of takeaway.
Twice they unwound the tape from the Tattoo’s mouth, in reasonless hope that he would say something incriminating or helpful or illuminating. Everything should be falling into place now, in the presence of this malevolent player, and it was not. The Tattoo remained silent. It was wildly unlike him. But for a certain moue of ink face lines, you might have thought him uncharmed.
“He’s still got troops out there,” Paul said. Desperate little rearguard actions. Knuckleheads in half-assaults/half-defences, against traditional enemies, forced to take their own initiatives, the very thing they had strived so hard to avoid. People mindlessly showing secrets, knuckleheads fighting for them, winning some and dying, falling, their leather armours ripped, their helmets shattered, little dwarf-hand replacing their cocks and balls suddenly visible, meat-echoes of their head-hands. “Maybe Goss and Subby are back.”
Fitch screamed. The lorry lurched. Not in response to the sound of him—the Londonmancer driving could not have heard him—but because of something striking at the driver as it struck at Fitch, in that same instant. Fitch screamed.
“We have to go back,” he said, again and again. Everyone was up. Even Paul had jumped up, ready for whatever this was. “Back, back, back at the heart,” Fitch said. “I heard a …” In the twanging of aerials, in the cry from the city. “Someone’s come for them.”
THEY HAD TO TAKE THE LORRY OUT OF ITS AVOIDANCE CIRCLE along streets it barely fit through, so tight Billy could tell the driver knacked to keep them from crashing. They passed violence everywhere, occult and everyday. Police and ambulances and aimlessly meandering fire engines, the buildings that had gone up and the callouts themselves charring out of memory, so midway en route no firefighter could remember what they were out for. The lorry came as close as it could go to the tumbledown sports shop where the London Stone was homed. They heard more sirens and they heard shots.
There were a few pedestrians on the street, but far too few for what was still not yet night. Those out moved like what they were—people in a regime at war. There was police tape around the building. Armed officers waving them back, cauterising the area.
“We can’t get through,” Billy said. But he was with the Londonmancers. As if these alleys they ducked into would deny them, as if the alleys wouldn’t switch back and kink obligingly for Fitch and Saira and their comrades now they weren’t hiding and didn’t care if the city noticed. So they led Dane and Billy running like scarpering schoolkids down some bricky cul-de-sac that tipped them with architectural abruptness into a corridor within that ugly place, near the London heart, where there was battle, still.
The police would not enter a free-fire zone. From the Londonmancers’ lair in the corridor of shop fronts, two dark-dressed figures emerged. They held pistols, and were shooting behind them as they came. Dane kicked in the door of an empty shop, and Billy dragged Saira and the others inside out of their range. Fitch sat heavily and wheezed.
“Get off me,” Saira said. She was straining to make the plastic stuff of London into something deadly, pressing her fingers on what had been a bit of wall and was becoming that other part of London, a pistol. She was shaking, brave and terrified. The men fired, and two Londonmancers still in the hallway flew backward.
The men wore dark suits, hats, long coats—assassin-wear. Billy fired and missed, and the blast from his phaser was crackling and unconvincing. It was winding down. A blast from Dane’s gun hit one man but did not kill him and set him snarling.
Clattering shapes came out of the store doorway behind them. There were composite things, made of city. Paper, brick, slate, tar, road sign and smell. One’s motion was almost arthropod, one more bird, but neither was like anything. Legs of scaffold tubes or girder, wood-splinter arms; one had a dorsal fin of broken glass in cement, cheval-de-frise. Billy