Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth

“I don’t see any protections…”

  I grinned. “Of course not. That’s how good they are.”

  I was bluffing, but they had no way of knowing that. And they didn’t dare risk being discovered.

  “John Taylor,” Larry said slowly. “How is it that you are here? Did you bring yourself back from the dead, too?”

  “Time travel,” I said briskly. “For me, Lilith has only just happened. The War hasn’t started yet. I’m here looking for answers, and advice.”

  “Let me kill him,” said Count Video. “He has to die. For what he did, he has to die!”

  “Yes,” said Larry. “But not now. Not here.”

  Annie made the Count sit down by the fire again. King of Skin was still shivering in his corner, in a spreading pool of urine, crying childish tears. It hurt me to see him that way. I’d never liked him, but I always respected him. Annie Abattoir and Jessica Sorrow stood before me, on either side of Larry Oblivion. They looked at me like I was a ghost, some horrid spectre at the feast, some ancient evil from their worst nightmares. And maybe I was.

  “My brother Tommy fought on your side,” Larry said finally. “In the great War against Lilith. He trusted you, even though he had good reason not to. And when they struck him down you just stood there, and watched him die, and did nothing to help.”

  I spread my hands helplessly. “You’re judging me over something I haven’t even done yet. And may never do…That’s why I’m here. I need you to tell me what I have to do to prevent all this happening.” They stared back at me, unconvinced. I took a step forward. When dealing with Enemies, it’s all about confidence, or at least the appearance of it. I gestured at the great haunch of meat burning over the fire. It smelled really bad. “You seem to be preparing dinner. Do you mind if I join you? There’s nothing like struggling to avoid the Apocalypse to give you an appetite. What are we having?”

  Larry snorted, amused despite himself. “That…is one of Lilith’s children. Pretty much all there is left to eat, these days. Apart from the bodies. There are still a lot of dead people left over from the War, but we haven’t been reduced to cannibalism. Not yet. Oh yes, they’re still lying around, decades after the War. Nothing decays any more, you see. Except the buildings. All kinds of strange energies were released during the final days of your struggle with your mother. And now all the natural processes are…out of order. Existence follows new rules now. Sometimes we don’t feel the need to eat or drink for days or even weeks at a time. And we don’t sleep. Bad dreams can take on a life of their own, these days.”

  “It’s hard to keep track of time any more,” said Jessica, in a voice like a shell-shocked child’s. “There’s no way of measuring it, you see. There are no days, the night never ends, and watches don’t work even though there’s nothing wrong with them. Perhaps you and Lilith broke Time, during the War…” She cocked her head to one side, like a bird, still fixing me with her direct, unblinking gaze. “How did you know where to find us?”

  “My gift,” I said. “And a little help from an angel.”

  Her mouth twitched briefly. “You always did move in exalted circles, John.”

  “Heaven and Hell have abandoned us,” Annie Abattoir said harshly. “Nothing left to fight over, any more. Do you know who we are? Why we stay together? Why we still struggle to survive, in this worst of all possible worlds?”

  “Yes,” I said. My mouth was suddenly dry. “You’re my Enemies. You’ve been trying to kill me ever since I was born, striking back through Time, to kill me before I do…whatever it is I do that brings about the destruction of the Nightside.”

  “And the world,” Larry said flatly. “Don’t think this is just London. There’s nothing else.”

  “We had to do it,” said Jessica. “It was…”

  “Oh please!” I said. “Don’t you dare say It was nothing personal! You and your Harrowing have hounded me all my life! I’ve never been able to feel safe, feel secure, because I could never know when your bloody assassins would appear suddenly out of nowhere, killing everyone in their path for a chance to get at me! You made my life a living Hell!”

  “You made the world a living Hell,” said Count Video. “Everything we’ve done is justified by what you did.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet!”

  “But you will, John,” said Jessica. “You will.”

  I made myself control my temper. I was here for their help. And there was still one question I hadn’t asked. Something I had to know.

  “Where’s Suzie?” I said. “Where’s my Shotgun Suzie?”

  Larry looked a little surprised. “You expected her to be here?”

  “She tried to kill me,” I said. The words hurt, but I forced them out. “She told me she was one of you. That’s why I came here, through Time, for information. The future isn’t set in stone. This doesn’t have to happen. Tell me what you know. The things only you know.”

  “She volunteered, to be made into one of our assassins,” said Larry. “You do know she volunteered, to be made over into…what we made her?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She told me. We never did believe in keeping secrets from each other.”

  Jessica hugged her teddy bear tightly, resting her chin on its battered head. “She never came back. We assumed you killed her, like all our other agents. What did happen to her, John?”

  “Merlin ripped off her arm,” I said steadily. “The one with the Speaking Gun attached to it. Then she disappeared. She was still alive, the last time I saw her. I had hoped…she’d made it back here.”

  “No,” said Annie. “We haven’t seen her. We have to assume she’s lost to us. Another death on your conscience, Lilith’s son.”

  “He has no conscience,” said Count Video. “He’s not human. Not really. Why should he have human feelings?”

  “I was human enough to get past your defences,” I said.

  “Then we’ll have to tighten them up,” said Larry.

  I looked at Jessica. “I see you still have your teddy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You found him for me. I remember. He brought me back to life, and sanity.”

  “I’m glad I could help,” I said.

  She shook her head slowly. “I’m not. This world would be so much easier to bear if I was still crazy. Still safely mad.”

  “Ah well,” I said. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  “Especially in the Nightside,” she said.

  And we both managed a small smile, just between the two of us.

  “So,” I said, looking around me, “this is the end of the world, and it’s all my fault. Now tell me why. Tell me what happened.”

  “You started it” said Larry Oblivion. “When you came back to the Nightside after five years away. That wasn’t supposed to happen. We went to a lot of trouble to orchestrate the events that drove you out—working behind the scenes, always through agents who never knew whom they were serving. It took a lot of our strength and power, but since we’d had so little success in trying to kill you…we were ready to try anything else. You were supposed to be so traumatised by events that you would flee to London, and the normal world, and never return. We were so sure we’d succeeded, at last. But nothing changed here, and when Annie investigated why, she got a vision of you returning anyway. So we used the creature that pretended to be a house on Blaiston Street, and set a trap for you. If you were going to come back to the Nightside, we wanted it to be on our terms.”

  “But if it hadn’t been for the house, I never would have come back,” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Jessica. “Meddling with Time is an uncertain business. Sometimes I think the whole universe runs on irony. By interfering, we created a rod for our own backs and the seed of our own destruction. Doesn’t it make you want to spit?”

  “And once you returned, events proceeded with predictable inevitability,” said Annie Abattoir. “By insisting on searching for the truth about your mother, though everyone warned you against it, you set in place th
e chain of events that led to the War between your forces and hers. The two of you destroyed the Nightside by fighting over it, like two dogs with a single bone, because neither of you would allow the other to control it. Between you, you sucked all the life out of the world, draining it dry to power greater and greater magics, for your precious War.”

  “You squandered your own people,” said Larry. “Throwing them into the fray, again and again. Nothing mattered to either of you, except winning. And so the War went on, until you both ran out of people to throw at each other, and there was no-one left but you and Lilith.”

  “You killed each other,” said Count Video, still staring into the fire. “Using the Speaking Gun. But by then it was far too late. The damage had been done.”

  “That’s why we retrieved the Gun and bonded it to Suzie,” said Jessica. “Even though the process nearly destroyed us. Because it was the only weapon we were sure would destroy you. She screamed like the damned when we fitted it to her, but she never once flinched away. Poor Suzie. Brave Suzie.”

  And then all our heads whipped round, and we fell silent, as we heard something impossibly huge and heavy dragging itself by, outside. We all stood very still, listening. Even King of Skin stopped whimpering in his corner. The whole house shook with each dragging movement, then the sounds moved on, fading away into the night. We all slowly relaxed. No wonder my Enemies were so diminished. To have to live like this, all the time, never free from fear, never knowing when they might be discovered and killed…Not unlike the life they made for me, really. But it was hard for me to feel any real sense of revenge, or satisfaction. No-one should have to live like this.

  “All that remains of Humanity now,” said Jessica, “is small groups like us. Those who survived the War by hiding, like frightened mice in their holes. We’re still hiding, hanging on, surviving, doing what we can. Hoping against hope…for a miracle. But we haven’t heard anything from the other groups for months now, and when we call out, no-one answers. So perhaps…we’re all that’s left. The last Redoubt of Humanity, pinning all our hopes on the death of one man.”

  “Who would have thought it would come down to the likes of us, to be Humanity’s last hope,” said King of Skin sadly, from his corner.

  We all looked at him, waiting, but he had nothing else to say. He still wouldn’t look at me. But at least he’d stopped crying.

  “Outside, all that lives now are the last few remnants of Lilith’s children,” said Larry Oblivion. “Mutated and monstrous, and quite mad. Roaming the ruins, killing everything they find, including each other. I sometimes wonder if they even know the War is over. They won’t last much longer. The energies loosed during the War, by you and your mother, are still abroad in the night, changing everything, mutating everything. Soon enough they’ll all be gone…and so will we, and what’s left of the world will belong to the insects.”

  “But now I’m here,” I said forcefully. “And we’ve talked, and that changes everything.”

  “Does it?” said Jessica.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have to believe that. And so do you. It’s our only hope. Humanity’s only hope. Use your power. Send me back into the Past, back to the time I came from. And I promise you I’ll find a way to stop Lilith that doesn’t involve raising an army. There won’t be any War, to cause all this.”

  “You want us to trust you?” said Count Video. “Trust the man who damned us all?”

  “Why should we believe in you?” said Larry. “Why should we trust in you, John Taylor, Lilith’s son?”

  “Because your brother Tommy did,” I said. “Even though he had good reason not to.”

  Count Video rose abruptly to his feet, turning to face me. “We could kill you,” he said. “Now you’re here, finally, in our grasp. We could kill you, even if it meant all our deaths. It might be worth it, to know you were dead. And then maybe we could all rest peacefully.”

  “Do you want revenge, or do you want to stop the War?” I said. “If I die, here and now, who’s going to stop Lilith? You must know she plans to remake the Nightside in her own image, kill everyone who stands against her, and remake Humanity into something more pliable, to serve her all her days. I think I’d rather be dead, than that. I’m the only chance you’ve got of stopping Lilith. Of stopping this. If I can find a way to bring her down, without fighting a War…that has to be more important than revenge. Doesn’t it?”

  In the end, they only argued for about ten minutes before reluctantly agreeing. Annie Abattoir opened a vein in her arm, and used the blood to draw a pentacle on the floor, while the others worked together to raise what power remained to them. Jessica Sorrow used her teddy bear as a focus for the right place and time. Count Video swept his hands back and forth, leaving sparkling energy traces on the air, weaving description theory and binary magics, while his necrotech sparked and sputtered on his wrinkled flesh. King of Skin stood tall and proud, doing what he was born to do, evoking powerful magics with ancient Words of Power. And Larry Oblivion took it all in, his undead body the conduit for the terrible energies they were raising, absorbing all the punishment so the others could concentrate on the Working.

  Annie Abattoir gestured sharply with her bloody arm, and I stepped inside the pentacle. She closed the pattern with a final flourish, and the spell ignited. The crimson lines of the pentacle blazed with power, and the world outside it began to grow dim and insubstantial to me.

  And then King of Skin lifted his head, his eyes huge. “They’re here!” he cried. “They followed Taylor here! They broke through our defences, and we were so preoccupied with Taylor we didn’t even notice! They’re here!”

  Monsters came crashing through all the walls at once. Huge brutish forms with eager eyes and dripping mouths. Long claws and taloned hands ripped through stone and brick and plaster, while something dark and leathery smashed a hole through the ceiling. The floor jarred upwards and split apart, as a great eye looked up through the widening chasm. My Enemies ignored them all, concentrating on the Working that would send me back through Time. A barbed tentacle shot down from the ceiling and wrapped itself around Count Video. Blood spurted from his mouth as his ribs collapsed, but he still fought to pronounce the last few Words of Power. A bone spike transfixed Annie Abattoir, gutting her, but still she stood and would not fall.

  I faded away, falling back through Time, and that was the last I saw of them. Had the Beasts really followed me to their hiding place? Had I brought their deaths about, after all?

  No. I could still save them. Save everyone. I would find a way. That was what I did.

  EIGHT

  While I Was Away

  I came back to fire and screams, and the thunder of buildings falling. The street was full of rubble and overturned vehicles, and there were bodies everywhere. A shop-front blew out in a soundless explosion, glass fragments flying on the air like shrapnel. I hunkered down, arms over my head, and stared quickly about me. There was fighting going on all around, mad-eyed mobs attacking each other with spells and weapons and anything that came to hand. Fires burned to every side, consuming the few buildings still standing. The air was thick with smoke, and heavy with the stench of burned flesh and spilled blood. I’d come back to a war zone.

  For the first time that I could remember, all traffic on the road had stopped. The way was blocked with blazing wrecks, crashed vehicles, and piled-up cars. Some of them had bodies in them, while others leaked blood and similar fluids. A lightning bolt slammed down only a few feet away from me, buckling the pavement, and I headed for the nearest cover. I scurried over to the broken hulk of an overturned ambulance and crouched down beside it, pressing hard against its blood-smeared side. I could just make out its dying whispers, fluttering on the edges of my mind, as the vehicle’s animating spirit dissipated. I’ve been good…I’ve been good…I’m scared…. Theambulance coughed once, then was silent. All around me, the fighting raged back and forth.

  I sighed heavily. Some days you can’t turn your back for even a mo
ment, without everything going to hell.

  It would seem Lilith had started the War without me. I peered around me, trying to make out landmarks or details through the thick drifting smoke, while various combatants ran back and forth, screaming garbled war cries. After a while, I realised I was back in Uptown, in the heart of Clubland. Or at least, what was left of it. Half of it was already demolished, and there was a firestorm raging at the end of the street. Several of the buildings were burning hotter and brighter than any earthly flames should. Dark figures came and went in the smoke, and only some of them were human. Winged shapes soared by overhead, flapping huge membraneous wings, and none of them were angels.

  Some people were trying to help. Staff from the various clubs sprayed the roaring flames with fire extinguishers that probably hadn’t been tested in years. Magics sparked and flared on the grimy air, and a water elemental burst up out of several manholes to drench those buildings closest to it. A group of Christian Commandos chanted a blessing over a fire hose, and used the high-pressure holy water as a weapon against the more sorcerous blazes. Stone golems strode unflinchingly into burning buildings past saving, and pulled them down, using the weight of the rubble to smother the flames. Sometimes the golems came out again, and sometimes they didn’t. All around me, famous clubs with old and honoured names were already gone, reduced to cinders and blackened frames.

  A large group of naked men and women, armed with axes and knives and machetes, their ungainly bodies daubed with blood and woad and ashes, came stalking down the ruined street like they owned it. They struck out at everyone they passed, and carried severed heads on poles, all the while howling praises to their god Lugh, and the glories of destruction. They all had mad, happy eyes and broad smiles. Yet many of them were still wearing wristwatches, which was a bit of a give-away that they weren’t quite as primitive as they were affecting. Well, I thought, I’ve got to start somewhere.

  I rose from behind the dead ambulance and strode forward to confront the mob. They stumbled to a ragged halt, almost falling over each other. I got the impression it had been some time since anyone had done anything but take one look at them and run away screaming. Their leader fixed me with his best mad stare, and started screaming something nasty about blasphemers, and I walked right up to him and kicked him square in the balls. I put a lot of strength and all my displeasure at what had happened into that kick, and it actually lifted him a few inches into the air before dropping him to his knees. His eyes got very big, and though his mouth was working, not a sound came out of it. He looked like he’d be pretty busy for some time, trying to get some or indeed any air back into his lungs, so I turned my attention to the crowd before me. They looked at their fallen leader, then back at me, and some actually started to shuffle their feet guiltily.