Bec you’re invoking something or other. You may not be interested in the gods of London, but they’re interested in you.
And where gods live there are knacks, and money, and rackets. Halfway-house devotional murderers, gunfarmers and self-styled reavers. A city of scholars, hustlers, witches, popes and villains. Criminarchs like the Tattoo, those illicit kings. The Tattoo had run with the Krays, before he was Tattoo, but really you couldn’t leave your front door unlocked. Nobody remembered what his name had been: that was part of what had happened to him. Whatever nasty miracle it was had en-dermed him had thrown away his name as well as his body. Everyone knew they used to know what he was called, including him, but no one recalled it now.
“The one who got him like that was smart,” Dane said. “It was better when he was around, old Griz. I used to know some of his guys.”
There was a many-dimensional grid of geography, economy, obligation and punishment. Crime overlapped with faith—“Neasden’s run by the Dharma Bastards,” Dane said—though many guerrilla entrepreneurs were secular, agnostic, atheist or philistine ecumenical. But faith contoured the landscape.
“Who’s Goss and Subby?” Billy said. He sat guarded between them, looking from one to the other. Dane looked down at his own big fists. Moore sighed.
“Goss and Subby,” Moore said.
“What’s their …?” Billy said.
“Everything you can think of is what.”
“Badness,” Dane said. “Goss sells his badness.”
“Why did he kill that guy? In the cellar?” Billy said.
“The preserved man,” the Teuthex said. “If that was his handiwork.”
Billy said, “That Tattoo thought I stole the squid.”
“That’s why he was hunting you,” Dane said. “See? That’s why I had that familiar watching you.”
“You preserved it, Billy. You opened the door and found it gone,” Moore said. Pointed at him. “No wonder Baron wanted you. No wonder the Tattoo wanted you, and no wonder we were watching.”
“But he could tell I didn’t,” Billy pleaded. “He said I had nothing to do with anything.”
“Yeah,” said Dane. “But then I rescued you.”
“We got you out, so we’re allies,” Moore said. “So you are his enemy now.”
“You’re under our protection,” said Dane. “And because of that you need it.”
“How did you take the Architeuthis?” Billy said at last.
“It wasn’t us,” said Moore quietly.
“What?” But it was a relic. They would fight for it, surely, like a devout of Rome might fight for a shroud, a fervent Buddhist might liberate a stolen Sura. “So who?”
“Well,” said Moore. “Quite.
“Look,” he said. “You have to persuade the universe that things make sense a certain way. That’s what knacking is.” Billy blinked at this abrupt conversational twist, that word unfamiliarly verbed. “You use whatever you can.”
“Snap,” said Dane. He clicked his fingers, and with the sound came a tiny fluorescent glow in the air just where the percussion had been. Billy stared and knew it was not a parlour trick. “That’s just skin and hand.”
“You use what you can,” Moore said, “and some what-you-cans are better than others.”
Billy realised that Dane and his priest were not, in fact, changing the subject.
“A giant squid is …” Billy petered out but he was thinking, Is powerful medicine, a big thing, a massive deal. It’s magic, is what it is. For knacking. “That’s why it’s been taken. That’s why that tattoo wants it. But this is craziness,” he added. He couldn’t stop himself. “This is craziness.”
“I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?”
“Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen,” Dane said.
“And what,” Moore said, “if a large part of the reason they’re so tenacious is that they’re perfectly accurate?” He waited, and Billy said nothing. “This is all perfectly real. The Tattoo wants that body, Billy, to do something himself, or stop someone else doing something,” Moore said.
“All these things have their powers, Billy,” he said intensely. “‘There are plenty of currents on the way down deep’ is what we’d say. But some go deeper, quicker, than others. Some are right.” He smiled not like someone joking.
“What would someone do with it?” Billy said.
“Whatever it is,” Dane said, “I’m against it.”
“What wouldn’t they?” Moore said. “What couldn’t they? With something that holy.”
“That’s why we need to get out there,” Dane said. “To find it.”
“Dane,” said Moore.
“It’s a duty of care,” Dane said.
“Dane. We need understanding, certainly,” Moore said.