She put the fountain pen on the paper. Dane stepped closer. He kept the speargun aimed at her. Byrne wrote. She did not take her eyes from Dane’s.
Hello, she wrote. The writing was the same as what had been on the paper plane, small and curled and dark grey. Long time.
“Ask him what you want,” Byrne said.
“Where is he?” Billy said.
“It’s his writing,” Dane said.
“That’s hardly proof,” Billy said.
“Where are you?” Dane said. To the paper.
Near, Byrne wrote, without looking.
Billy blinked at this new thing, this remote-writing knack. “This proves nothing,” he whispered to Dane.
“Heard you were dead,” Dane said. There was no writing. “When we was here last, you were asking me to come work for you. Remember?”
Y.
“When I said I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t, and I asked you a question. Do you remember? What I said? The last thing I said to you before I went?”
Byrne’s hand hesitated over the paper. Then she wrote.
Said you’d never leave church, she wrote. Said: “I know who made me. Do you know who made you?”
“It’s him,” Dane said quietly to Billy. “No one else knew that.” The city broke the silence, with the coughing of a car, as if uncomfortable.
What broke you from the church? Byrne wrote.
“Different ideas,” Dane said.
You want your kraken.
“Dead, rotten and ruined?” Dane said. “Why d’you think I want it?”
Because you’re not the Tattoo.
“What exactly is your proposition?” Billy said. Dane stared at him.
We can find it, Byrne wrote. She kept looking up. She stared into the litter of stars, strewn like discards. Whoever has it has plans. No one takes a thing like that without plans. Not good.
Harrow you know more than you know, she wrote. She drew an arrow, pointing at him. Wherever he was, Grisamentum was pining for Billy’s opaque vatic insight.
“We have to think about this, Billy,” Dane said.
“Well he’s not the Tattoo,” Billy muttered to him. “I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn’t try to kill me to anyone who does. I’m funny that way. But …”
“But what?”
“There’s too much we don’t know.” Dane hesitated. He nodded. “We’re meeting Wati tomorrow. Let’s talk to him about it. He might have news—you know he’s been tracking shit down.” Billy felt, suddenly and vividly, as if he were underwater.
“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “We have to think.”
“Really,” Byrne said. She looked away from the sky and at him as her hand wrote Join us now.
“No disrespect. If it was you you’d do the same. We’re on the same side. We just have to think.”
Byrne’s hand moved over the paper, but no ink came from the pen. She pursed her lips and tried again. Eventually she wrote something and read it. She took out a new pen and wrote, in a different script, a postal box, a pickup spot. She gave it to Dane.
“Send us word,” she said. “But fast, Dane, or we have to assume no. Time’s running out. Look at the bloody moon.” Billy looked at the sliver of it. Its craters and contours made it look wormy. “Something’s coming.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
BILLY HAD ANOTHER DREAM AT LAST, THAT NIGHT. HE HAD BEEN feeling vaguely guilty at the lack of oneiric insights. But at last he had a dream worthy to be so called, rather than the vague sensations of cosseting dark, cool, glimmerings, heaviness, stasis and chemical stench that otherwise filled his nighttime head.
He had been in a city. In a city and racing up and over buildings, jumping over high buildings with one jump, making swimming motions to pass through the clear air above skyscrapers. He wore bright clothes.
“Stop,” he shouted at someone, some figure creeping from broken windows in a big warehouse, where police lights shone and there was the smoke of a fire billowing like a dark liquid in water. There was Collingswood, the young police witch, smoking, leaning against a wall, not looking at the crime behind her, eyeing Billy on his descent sardonically and patiently. She pointed the way he had come. She pointed back the other way and did not look round.
Billy sank gracefully through. Behind Collingswood he saw a robotic wizard mastermind nemesis look up, and Billy felt warm in the sun, knowing that his companion would come. He waited to see the muscly arms, the tentacles in their Lycra, come out from behind the building, his sidekick behind its mask.
But something was wrong. He heard a rumble but there were no uncoiling sucker arms, no grabbing ropy limbs, no vast eye like