The crowd got up off their knees and quietly dispersed. None of them felt like arguing. I put the sword away, and its light snapped off. Night fell over my non-lawn again. Suzie stood beside me, her shotgun still ostentatiously at the ready.
“You don’t have the Voice,” she said quietly.
“No,” I said. “But they don’t know that.”
“They’re bound to find out. Eventually.”
“By then, I plan to be safely distant, in London Proper.”
My mobile phone rang. I’m still using the Twilight Zone ring tone. Some things feel right and natural. When I answered, Julien Advent was on the other end.
“John, you’re needed. Right now. Very urgently.”
“This really isn’t a good time, Julien,” I said. “I’m a bit busy at the moment.”
“No, you’re not. The Authorities have a mission for you. Did I mention how urgent this is?”
“You want to put me to work already?” I said. “Walker’s only been dead a few hours! I haven’t even officially accepted the position yet.”
“Yes, you have, as of right now. Don’t argue with me. This is the kind of problem only Walker could deal with; and since you’ve made that impossible, it’s your duty to take over. There’s trouble at the Mammon Emporium. Someone’s threatening to blow it up with a soulbomb. And that could threaten the whole existence of the Nightside. So stop arguing with me and get here fast. While there’s still a here to get to!”
Julien Advent, the legendary Victorian Adventurer, editor of the Night Times, and leader of the new Authorities, doesn’t often lose his temper.
“I’m on my way,” I said. I put the phone away and smiled uncertainly at Suzie. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to put everything on hold for a while. Sweetie. Big trouble in the Nightside. Now, I really would love to stop and help you clear up all this mess, but you know how it is when duty calls.”
She looked at me dangerously. “I do not do housework!”
But I’d already taken out the old gold pocket-watch that used to belong to Walker. I opened the lid and activated the Portable Timeslip inside, and just like that I was off and travelling through the void, on my way to save the Nightside, one more time.
TWO
You’ve Either Got or You Haven’t Got Soul
The pocket-watch locked onto Julien Advent’s location and took me straight to him. I have no idea how it does that, but I’m growing increasingly convinced that there’s something else inside the gold pocket-watch, apart from the Portable Timeslip. And one of these days I’m going to dig it out with a butter-knife. Walker did so love to keep his little secrets. I arrived in the main bar of the Adventurers Club, where heroes from all over the worlds gather, to test themselves against the challenges of the Nightside. I have never been invited to become a member.
I spent a few moments shaking my head gently until all the bits settled back into place again. Travelling through the Portable Timeslip’s interdimensional short cut is never easy. It’s dark in there, darker than any night, and cold enough to chill the soul. There are voices in that dark, voices not in any way human, calling out to be freed, promising anything, pleading, threatening terrible things. But then, you can get that walking down any street in the Nightside. A bad trip, though, in every sense. How did Walker stand it? He always appeared out of nowhere, looking cool and calm and collected, as though he were out for a stroll. I had a strong feeling I’d arrived looking like someone who’d just been thrown out of the drunk tank.
I shook the last of the darkness out of my head and looked round. It had been a while since I’d been allowed into the Adventurers Club bar, and I was already rehearsing how many terribly expensive drinks I could demand before I was asked to leave. The place was exhaustingly spectacular and downright lousy with luxury, and the bar itself was a work of art fashioned from gleaming mahogany and brightly polished glass and crystal. Stacked in obsessively neat rows behind the bar was every kind of booze you’ve ever dreamed of and a few that would haunt your nightmares.
But what really caught my attention was how empty the place was. Normally, you couldn’t move for heroes and warriors and would-be legends, fighting for a place at the bar and complaining bitterly over the bartender’s inflexible rules when it came to extending credit. This time there was no crowd, no bartender; only a whole lot of silence. You could almost hear the wine aging. And half-way down the bar, Julien Advent sat perfectly poised on a tall bar-stool, drinking pink champagne. With his little finger properly extended, of course.
Julien Advent: tall, dark, and handsome in the old style, the great Victorian Adventurer who fell through a Timeslip in the nineteenth century and emerged in the Nightside in the nineteen sixties. And didn’t appear to have aged a day since. Julien is the real deal, a real hero and a complete gentleman. He tends not to approve of me, or my methods—except when he needs me to do something no-one else can. We’re friends, sometimes despite ourselves. I walked over to him, looked briefly but longingly at the bottles behind the bar, so near and yet so far, and nodded to Julien.
“You could offer me a drink, you know. I could be persuaded.”
“No, you couldn’t,” he said calmly. “You don’t have time.”
“Oh hell,” I said. “It’s one of those cases, is it? And where is everybody, anyway?”
“Out and about,” said Julien. “Doing their best to keep a lid on things. Since Walker died, so very suddenly and unexpectedly, the news has shot round the Nightside. And a great many not-at-all-nice people have been running wild, taking advantage. Seeing what they can get away with until Walker’s replacement steps up to dispense law and justice and general beatings. That’s you, by the way. But since you weren’t immediately available, I deputised everyone in the Club and sent them out into the streets to restore order, by any means necessary, and slap down anyone who looked like getting ambitious.”
“I would have got round to it,” I said. “I’ve been a bit ... distracted.”
Julien studied me thoughtfully over the rim of his champagne glass. “There’s something different about you though I can’t put my finger on it.... Either way, it will have to wait. There’s trouble down at the Mammon Emporium. The biggest mall in the Nightside is in very great danger of going off bang. But first, John, I have to ask you ... Did you really have to kill Walker?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was necessary. He’d gone too far into the dark.”
Julien clearly heard something in my voice because he put his glass down on the bar and leaned forward on his bar-stool. “I never did understand what he saw in you, or you in him. You seemed to work well enough together, when you weren’t trying to kill each other. He respected you. I know that.”
“I respected him,” I said. “Best enemy I ever had.”
“He was more than that.”
“Of course. He was Walker.”
“Well,” said Julien, “he was dying, after all, and not in a good way. I suppose you could call his death a mercy killing.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think you could call it that.”
He waited expectantly, but I had nothing more to say. Let Walker take his secrets with him, the good and the bad. In the end, Julien nodded and picked up his glass again, which had mysteriously refilled itself with more pink champagne. One of the perks of Club membership.
“I’ll send some of my people to collect the body.”
“There is no body,” I said.
Julien raised an elegant eyebrow. “Hard core, John.”
“Where are the rest of the new Authorities?” I said. Not because I gave a damn but because I felt like changing the subject.