an exiled people. Their pope murdered before his altar. But in that burrow at that moment, sifting through the rubbish of the dead, Dane was the last man on earth.
Where was the light coming from? There were some bulbs not smashed, but the grey illumination in the corridors seemed greater than those little sepia efforts. The blood everywhere looked black. Billy had heard moonlight made blood look black. He met the eyes of one of the paper planes. It regarded him. Its paper fluttered again, unblown.
“It’s trying to get away,” he said. “Why would they … he … why would he actually come here, not just issue orders? He’s watching. See how thin this pen is? Remember how careful Byrne was with the papers she wrote on? How she swapped pens? So she could scrape the ink off again. There can only be so much of him.”
“Why would he do this?” Dane shouted. Billy still looked at the fallen paper’s eyes.
“I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out. So my question is, how do we interrogate ink?”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
THEY WORKED IN THE LORRY. SAFER THAN IN WHAT WAS SUDDENLY a sepulchre. Billy had all the planes he could find, all with blood and mud torn off, so it was only ink that stained them.
The kraken overlooked them. Dane prayed to it. While the Londonmancers muttered and looked at Dane, suddenly bereft like them, Billy soaked the paper in distilled water, pulped it and squeezed it out. Paul watched him, his back, his tattoo, to the wall. Billy extracted the weak-tea-coloured water and boiled off a little excess. The liquid rilled away from him in a way not right.
“Be careful,” said Saira. If the ink was Grisamentum, perhaps each drop of him was him. Perhaps each had all his senses and his thoughts and a little portion of his power.
“She scraped him off each time she got him back and remixed him,” Billy said. Each separate pipette full added back to Grisamentum’s bottled consciousness. Why else would there be these eyes? The ink must know what all those rejoined drips of him had known. “I guess they’ve got to husband him.” He was finite. Every order he wrote, every spell he became, his communications were him, and eroded him. If he was all written up, there would be only ten thousand little Grisamenta on scraps, each enough to be perhaps a magic postcard in some pathetic way.
When Billy was done there was a thimbleful, more than a drop but not much more. He dipped a needle into it. Dane stood, made a devotional sign, joined them. He glanced up. Wati hibernated through the union’s defeat in a doll strapped on the vehicle’s roof. Billy rifled through the papers he was using, scraps from his bag, all manner of odds and ends.
“Is this going to work?” Saira said.
“Works for Byrne,” Billy said. “Let’s see.”
“Are we actually finally going to find out what his plans are?”
Billy kept his eyes on Dane’s. He put the needle to the paper and dragged his hand, without looking, across the page. He drew a line, only a line.
“Oy,” Billy said. “Grisamentum. Pay attention.” He drew another line, and a third, and this last time suddenly it spasmed like a cardiogram, and there was writing. UP YOURS, the writing wrote. Tiny scratchy font. Billy redipped the needle.
“Let me,” Dane whispered, and Billy waved him back.
“You aren’t thinking straight,” Billy whispered to the little residue at the bottom of the container. “You’re probably a bit foggy. You must be a bit dilute, a bit mucky. Your little brain must be … little.” He held a pipette over the ink.
“We can dilute you a bit more. Does alcohol sting? We’ve got some lemon juice. We’ve got some acid.” Billy would swear the tiny pool flinched at that. The pigment that was Grisamentum swilled in the cup.
“What are you doing?” Billy said to the ink.
“My people …” Dane said.
Billy dipped, scratched, wrote. FUCK YOU.
“Right,” said Billy. He dipped the needle in bleach, and then into the ink. A tiny amount: this had to be a delicate kind of attack. The colour twitched, left a little fade. Billy mixed it, dragged the needle again.
BASTARDS, Grisamentum wrote in itself.
“What are you doing?” Billy said.
FUCK YOU.
“Where’s the rest of you?” Billy said.
FUCK U.
Billy dripped in more bleach and the ink rolled. “We’re not going to pour you down the sink. You don’t get to dissipate painlessly with rats and turds.” He held the