small rendering plant and part-time curse-factory were surprised and flattered by a visit from the leading UMA militant. They told him the state of the picket. He listened and did not tell them he was also there to look up a particular little presence he thought he had detected.
The strikers offered him a variety of bodies. They gathered a battered one-armed doll, a ceramic gnome, a bear, a bobble-head cricketer figure in their jaws, lined them up as if in some toy-town identity parade. Wati embedded in the cricketer. The wind made his outsized face bounce.
“Are you solid?” he asked.
“Almost,” one dog canine whimpered. “There’s one who says he’s not a familiar, he’s a pet, so he’s exempt.”
“Right,” Wati said. “Anything we can do for you?”
The strikers glanced at each other. “We’re all weak. Getting weaker.” They spoke London Dog, a barky language.
“I’ll see if I can siphon anything from the fund.” The strike fund was shrinking, of course, at a worrying rate. “You’re doing great stuff.”
The familiar Wati was looking for extracurricularly was, he thought, only a mile or two away. He groped through the thousands of statues and statuettes in range, selected a Jesus outside a church a few streets away, and leapt.
—And was intercepted. A shocking moment.
Out of the statue and something was in his way, an aetherial presence that grabbed his bodiless self spitting right sonny jim right sonny jim yore nicked you pinko cunt. It pinioned him in the no-place.
It was a long, a very long time since Wati had spent more than a fractional moment out of body, in that space. He did not know how to meta-wrestle, could not fight. All he knew how to do in that phantom zone was get out of it, which his captor would not let him do. you my son are comin with me dan to the station.
There was the reek of information, authority and cunning. Wati tried to think. He did not of course breathe, but he felt as if he were suffocating. The tough un-body of the thing holding him leaked the components that made it. As it choked him he learned random snippety things from its touch.
officer officer officer the thing said and Wati heard overseer and pushed back in rage. His recent route from the bobble-head was still astrally greased by his passage, and he clawed his way back into that tiny figure. Came slamming back into it and bellowed. The dogs looked round.
“Help me!” he shouted. He could feel the cop grab him, sucking at him, trying to winkle him out. It was strong. He clung to the inside of the doll.
“Get a brick,” he shouted. “Get something heavy. Grab me!” The nearest dog fumbled, picked the toy up. “When I say, you smash this motherfucker against the wall and you do it in one go. Understand?” The frightened dog nodded.
Wati braced, paused, then hauled the surprised attacker in with him, into the tiny figure. Wati looked through cheap eyes, crowded, feeling the bewildered officer jostling in the sudden shape.
“Now!” he shouted. The dog swung its heavy head and spat the doll at the bricks. In the tiniest moment before it touched the wall, Wati kicked out of it, shoving the police-thing back in, and pouring into a one-armed Barbie.
He heard the shattering as he slipped into his plastic person, saw shards of what had instants before been him go flying. With the percussion came a bellow of something dying. A burp of stink and strong feeling mushroomed and dissipated.
The dogs stared at the shards, at the raging woman-figured Wati.
“What was that?” one of them said. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Wati said. Psychic fingerprints had bruised him. “A cop. Sort of.” He felt his injuries, to see what he could learn from them and their residue. “Oh fuck me,” he said, prodding one sore spot.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
HE HAD BEEN A MAN OF VARIABLE AND VARIEGATED TALENTS. NO one would have called him a criminarch, though certainly he was not at all constrained by the technicalities of law. He was not a god, nor a godling, nor a warrior of any such. What he was, he always claimed, was a scholar. No one would have argued with Grisamentum over that.
His origins were obscure—“uninteresting,” he said—and somewhere between fifty and three hundred years back, depending on his anecdote. Grisamentum intervened according to his own ideas of how London should be, with which discriminations the forces of law and those in favour of a bit less