“The mnemophylax is the angel of memory. There’s one in all the memory palaces. But this one screwed up.”
“What is it?”
“You think something like memory won’t grow spikes to protect it? That’s what angels are: they’re spikes.” Memory’s defences. Their content irrelevant: the fact of them, and their pugnacity, was all.
“The angel’s not letting this one go,” Wati said. “You pick this stuff up in the in-between. It’s raging. It feels like it failed.”
“It did fail,” Dane said.
What had failed was one of an old cabal abraded into existence out of the city’s curatorial obsession. Each museum of London constituted out of its material its own angel, a numen of its recall, mnemophylax. They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. In a city where the power of any item derived from its metaphoric potency, all the attention poured into their contents made museums rich pickings for knacking thieves. But the processes that gave them that potential also threw up sentinels. With each attempted robbery came the rumours of what had thwarted it. Battered, surviving invaders told stories.
In the Museum of Childhood were three toys that came remorselessly for intruders—a hoop, a top, a broken video-game console—with stuttering creeping as if in stop-motion. With the wingbeat noise of cloth, the Victoria and Albert was patrolled by something like a chic predatory face of crumpled linen. In Tooting Bec, the London Sewing Machine Museum was kept safe by a dreadful angel made of tangles and bobbins and jouncing needles. And in the Natural History Museum, the stored-up pickled lineage of the evolved was watched by something described as of, but not reducible to, glass and liquid.
“Glass?” Billy said. “I think I … I swear I’ve heard it.”
“Maybe,” said Dane. “If it wanted you to.”
But the squid had been taken, the angel defeated. No one knew the meaning of or penalty for that. Savants could feel an outpouring of alien regret. They said this ushered in something terrible. That the angels were stepping out of their corridors, beyond the remit that had thrown them up. They were fighting for memory against some malevolent certainty that walked the streets like the dead.
“It isn’t just some porter we’re looking for,” Wati said. “It’s someone who can take on an angel of memory and win.”
“Did they win, though?” Billy said. “You’re talking to the man who found a bloke in a jar.” They glanced at each other.
“We need more information,” Dane said.
“Go to the tellers,” Wati said. “The Londonmancers.”
“We know what they’ll say. You heard the recording. The Teuthex already spoke to them …” But Dane hesitated.
“They’re nothing,” Dane said. But he sounded hesitant again. “They were the first, weren’t they?”
“Yeah,” Wati said.
“It’s like they’re oracles again,” Dane said. “Maybe.”
“But isn’t it dangerous for them to see us? People could hear about it,” Billy said.
“Well,” Dane said. “There is one way to make them keep us secret.” He smiled. “If we’re going to see them anyway …”
In for a penny. How else could they have negotiated the power logics of London so long? Employ their services, and like doctors and Catholic priests the Londonmancers were committed to silence.
Chapter Thirty-Three
THERE ARE MANY MILLIONS OF LONDONERS, AND THE VERY GREAT majority know nothing of the other mapland, the city of knacks and heresies. Those people’s millions of everydays are no more everyday than those of the magicians. The scale of the visible city dwarfs that of the mostly-unseen, and that unseen is not the only place where there are amazing things.
At that moment, however, the drama was in the less-travelled metropolis. Nothing changed for most Londoners but for the onset of a wave of depression and anger, a bad intimation. That was not good and not nothing, certainly. But for those who lived in the city’s minority articulation things were growing daily more dangerous. The strike paralysed large sections of occult industry. The economy of gods and monsters was stagnating.
The journals of the secretive places—The Chelsea Picayune, Thames’ Unwater Notes, The London Evening Standard (not that one: the other, older paper of the same title)—were full of foreboding at millennial signs. Drug use reached record levels. Smack and Charlie, narcotics that user-mages squabbled with the knackless over in the mainstream capital; and more arcane fixes, the sweepings from ley lines and certain