by Simon Green
Lord Screech stepped forward, suddenly seeming more arrogant, noble, and inhuman than ever. All the troopers’ guns moved to follow him. Walker leaned on his umbrella and gave Screech his full attention.
“Hold hard and stand amazed,” said the elf, in a carrying, sonorous voice. “I hold all answers here, and it is I who must bar confusion. Let it be known by all that I am not Lord Screech, Pale Prince of Owls, but yet still an elf of great renown and vital importance.”
“You’re not who you claimed to be?” said Walker. “Really, you do amaze me. An elf who lies—who would have thought it? I don’t give a damn who you really are; just give me the damned Peace Treaty. Or we can take it from your cold dead fingers, if you prefer. Guess which I’d enjoy most?”
I looked at Screech. “Who are you? And why do I know I’m not going to like the answer?”
“Maybe you’re psychic,” said the elf, with a smile and a wink.
His glamour disappeared like a cut-off song, and the whole world seemed to shake and reassemble itself, as Lord Screech gave way to the real elf, and his true form. I think we all gaped, just a little. In place of the typically tall and slender Lord Screech, we were now faced with an elf almost twice as tall as any of us, but bent over by a hunched back that pulled one shoulder down and forward, ending in a withered arm and a clawed hand. The rest of his form was smooth and supple as a dancer, but his hair was grey, his flesh was the colour of old bone, and two elegant horns thrust up from his heavy brow. He wore a pelt of some animal fur that blended into his own hairy torso, and his legs ended in cloven hooves. He was noble and elegant and almost unbearably inhuman. He grinned widely, his deep-set eyes full of mischief.
“Of course,” I said. “I should have known. The only elf that is not perfect. Puck.”
“Indeed,” he said, in a cold, lilting voice. “Who else but I, that wild rover of the speckled night, could pass freely between two elven Courts and yet pay allegiance to none? Loved by both, trusted by neither, able to speak and hear the things no other elf could be suffered to know? I am Puck, that merry wanderer of the Nightside, and I have led you all in a sweet and merry dance, to suit mine own purposes. I do not have the Peace Treaty, Lord Walker. I never did. Another elf has it, one of lesser renown but great craft, and he has passed quietly and unobserved through the Nightside, hidden and protected behind a most powerful glamour, while I have been so very visible, alongside the infamous John Taylor, holding your attention all this while. That other elf has now gone through the Osterman Gate with the Peace Treaty, and my part in this game is done. Be a good loser, good Walker.”
Walker considered this for a long moment, while I reminded myself, yet again, Never trust an elf.
“I could still have you shot,” said Walker. “If only on general principles.”
“You could try,” said Puck. “But even if you did somehow succeed, you would but provide the one common cause that could unite all elves to go to war with the Nightside. I may not be perfect, but I am still royal; and an insult done to me is an insult to all the Fae.”
“Oh, get out of here,” said Walker, smiling just a little. “Before I run you all in for loitering with intent.”
He turned his back and strode away, waving at his troopers to accompany him. I felt like shouting after them as to who was going to dismantle their bloody big barricade; but I thought I’d pushed my luck enough for one day. I turned to Puck.
“I really don’t like elves,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to,” said Puck. “Merely marvel at our cunning and be dazzled by our brilliance.”
“You want a slap?” I said.
“Never trust an elf,” said Ms. Fate. “They always have their own agenda.”
“Well, quite,” said Puck.
“That’s it,” said Ms. Fate. “I am out of here. I let my lovely car be ruined because of you! I risked my life for you!”
“Of course,” said Puck. “That’s what humans are for.”
I really thought I was going to have to stand between them, for a moment. Ms. Fate glared at me.
“I’ll be waiting for my cut of your fee. And the next time you need a ride, call somebody else.”
She stomped back to the Fatemobile, threw herself through the space where the door used to be to slip behind the steering wheel, fired up the engines, and roared away. I considered Puck thoughtfully.
“So,” I said. “Here we are. Mission accomplished, more or less. Now tell me what you promised I need to know.”
“Something bad is coming to the Nightside,” said Puck, and there was something in his eyes, in his voice. If he hadn’t been an elf, I would have said he was afraid. “Something very old, and very powerful. You’ll know the name when I say it, but in this at least, trust me when I tell you that it is not what you think it is, and never was. You must find it and make it yours, John Taylor. Or everything you have done will have been for nothing.”
“Why?” I said. “What’s coming? What is it, damn you?”
He leaned forward, to whisper the name.
“Excalibur.”
THREE
Familiar Faces, Come Round Again
I headed for home, via the Underground. I must have been looking more than usually grumpy, because everyone gave me lots of room. A few of Walker’s security people were still hanging around the station entrance, but they made a point of looking the other way. I ended up sitting in a carriage on my own, indulging myself in a quiet brood. At least the trains are always on time in the Nightside. Supposedly because if a train does arrive late, the System Controller takes it out the back and shoots it, to put all the other trains in a properly motivated frame of mind.
I still didn’t feel like going home, so I went to Strangefellows, the oldest bar in the world; where everybody knows your game. Not actually the sleaziest bar in creation, but pretty damned close. It was just another night in Strangefellows. The Witches of Woking were out on a hen night, getting tipsy on Mother Superior’s Ruin and reanimating the bar snacks so that they scampered back and forth on the table before them. Someone had got the Water Witch of Harpenden drunk by sneaking up behind her liquid form and injecting it with a horse hypodermic full of neat gin. You could actually see the ripples running up and down her as she giggled, lurching splashily between the tables, watering everyone’s drinks in passing. At another table, two vaguely humanoid robots from some future time-line were sucking on batteries and farting static.
A young woman wearing far too much make-up was wailing for her demon lover, because he’d just dumped her and gone off with her best friend. A stone cherub from a nearby graveyard was checking its investments in the Financial Times, and frowning a lot. A newly reborn vampire was sitting sadly at a side-table, staring at the glass of wine before him, wine that he’d ordered but couldn’t drink. He was telling anyone who’d listen that he hadn’t wanted to come back as a vampire, that he’d tried so hard not to come back ... but he got so bored just lying in his coffin. So here he was now, with gravedirt still clinging to the good suit they’d buried him in, trying to come to terms with all the normal, everyday things he’d never be able to do again.
He didn’t need to worry. If he kept up the self-pity routine long enough, someone would ram a stake through him if only to shut him up.
I leaned on the bar, and waited for the barman to get around to serving me. Alex Morrisey owned and ran Strangefellows, and didn’t believe in being hurried. He was currently busy with a minor Norse deity at the other end of the long bar and was putting a lot of effort into ignoring me, but I was used to that. It was his little way of reminding me that I still hadn’t paid off my bar tab.
Beside me on the bar an upturned top hat juddered briefly, then a pale, elegant hand emerged, waggling an empty glass plaintively in request for a refill. The magician had been in there for some time now, and we still hadn’t figured out a way to get him out. Damn, that rabbit had been angry. Never do a magic trick with a pookah. Further down the bar, two white
-robed Sisters from the Order of Saint Strontium were getting stroppy over glowing Half-Life cocktails, and everyone else was giving them plenty of room. Any other bar would have banned them, but Alex liked having them around to irradiate some of the more elderly bar food.
I leaned patiently on the bar, glad of a chance to do a little quiet thinking. As cases go, the elven client’s had been particularly annoying. Chased half-way across the Nightside, attacked from all sides at once, and not a penny richer at the end of it. Just a word of warning, a name out of legend. Excalibur ... I supposed I shouldn’t be so surprised. Everything turns up in the Nightside eventually. Except ... Excalibur never had before. Why now, and where had it been all this time? I was pretty sure the Collector never had it, if only because he’d never have stopped boasting about it. Could the sword’s reappearance into history be connected to Merlin Satanspawn’s recent final death? Or could it be heading here through a Timeslip, direct from King Arthur’s time? The trouble with the Nightside is that it offers so many more possible answers to a question than anywhere else.
Excalibur.
It isn’t what you think it is, and it never was.
Sewer Man Jack arrived at the bar beside me, smelling strongly of several different colognes and spotlessly clean. It wasn’t his fault that a kind of awful psychic aroma seemed to hang around him anyway; but that’s what you get from working in the Nightside’s sewers. You wouldn’t get me down there on a bet. With all the weird sciences and strange magics fizzing and shaking and detonating all over the place, it’s hardly surprising so many failed experiments end up flushed down the sewers. Where they have been known to combine with the wildlife and kick them way, way up the evolutionary ladder. Which sometimes leads to the need for the Sanitary Brigade, with their really big guns and flame-throwers. Operatives like Sewer Man Jack get to earn their combat pay.
Sewer Man Jack’s party trick is to blow smoke rings. Only he does it by lighting his farts. And he wonders why he isn’t invited to more parties ...
“Busy night, John?” he said politely.
“You could say that,” I said. “Yourself?”
“Just finished dealing with another would-be Phantom of the Sewers. I blame that Lloyd Webber musical myself. Then there was the giant ants last month. Still, every time you think you’ve got it bad, someone’s always ready to tell you something worse. I was just chatting with the Sonic Assassin, outside the Time Tower. Word is, the Collector has thieved a whole new kind of time-travel device, from some far-future museum; a device that can project his consciousness into any person in the Past, Present, and Future. So now he can track down his precious rarities in complete anonymity. Must be very dispiriting, having everyone shoot at you the moment you show your face ...”
“So basically, anyone could be the Collector now,” I said. “That is seriously spooky. I just went through something similar with Dr. Fell. You can’t trust anyone to be who they claim any more. As if the Nightside wasn’t paranoid enough already ...”
Sewer Man Jack looked at me interestedly. “You finally had a run-in with Dr. Fell? What happened?”
“I happened—to him,” I said.
“You worry me sometimes, John,” Sewer Man Jack said sadly, and he moved away.
Alex Morrisey finally drifted my way and poured me a glass of wormwood brandy without waiting to be asked. I looked at it.
“What’s wrong now?” said Alex. “It’s a clean glass. Because I know you’re fussy about things like that.”
“Nothing wrong with the drink,” I said. “I was just wondering if I’m becoming predictable. Never a good idea, in the Nightside. Start falling into familiar routines, going to the same place, always ordering the same drink, and you can bet good money someone will figure out a way to take advantage.”
“Oh, shut up and drink your drink,” said Alex. “This bar already has a resident gloomy bugger, and it’s me.”
Alex was dressed all in black, as usual, in mourning for the way his life had turned out. He also wore a black beret, to hide his spreading bald patch, and designer shades, in the mistaken belief that they made him look cool. Alex was born miserable and hadn’t improved with age. He gave short measures, always got your change wrong, and mixed the most distressing cocktails in the world. Wise men avoided the bar snacks. On the other hand, he put up with people and behaviour that wouldn’t be tolerated for a moment anywhere else, and viciously enforced a general truce that made Strangefellows one of the few real neutral grounds in the Nightside.
Alex and I go way back. We’re friends, sort of. It’s complicated.
I pushed the wormwood brandy determinedly to one side. “What else have you got, Alex?”
“A fast-receding hair-line, lower-back pains, and you really don’t want to hear about my bowel movements.”
“I shall slap you in a moment, and it will hurt. I meant, do you have anything more interesting in the booze department that you might feel like recommending? I’m in the mood for something ... different.”
“Well, you could try the Valhalla Venom,” said Alex. “I got a job lot, cheap, because no-one in the Adventurers Club felt brave enough to try it. So far, everyone here has wimped out, too. I have a feeling it’s something to do with the way the bottles sweat blood.”
“Pour me a glass,” I said. “A big glass, with a lead-lined straw.”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “You’re in one of your moods again, aren’t you? Just sign this release form naming your next of kin while I open the bottle with my special long-handled tongs.”
The drink, when it arrived, turned out to be a pale amber liqueur. It didn’t seethe or try to eat its way through the glass, so I took a good sip. The liqueur rolled languidly across my tongue, and then hit me between the eyes with a half brick and mugged my taste-buds. It was like drinking a whole summer orchard at once. But after my trip to the Dragon’s Mouth this was strictly amateur hour. I took another good sip, and Alex smiled triumphantly out across the crowded bar.
“Look! He’s actually drinking it! Pay your bets!”
“It’s good,” I said. “Vicious, but good. Why not try a glass with me?”
“Because I’ve got more sense.” Alex leaned forward com panionably across the polished bar. “It’s coming to something when the most exciting thing in this bar is betting whether or not a new drink will make your head explode. It’s been really quiet here lately, and you know how dangerous that can be. There’s always something, of course ... minor things, like snakes getting into the Real Ale barrels and improving the flavour ... And there’s no rats in the traps, which mean something’s eating them again ...”
“How are you and Cathy getting on?” I said casually. “You know, my teenage secretary who is barely half your age, of whom I am inordinately protective?”
“Surprisingly well,” said Alex. “I keep waiting for the other thunderbolt to drop. I have a horrid suspicion I might actually be happy when she’s around, and I’m not used to happy.”
“She is a lot younger than you.”
“I know! Half the bands I like had split up before she was even born! And she’s never even heard of half the old television shows I watch on DVD. And she will insist on trying to cheer me up.”
I had to smile. “I could have told her that was a lost cause.”
“I don’t know,” said Alex. “There’s this thing she does in bed ...”
“Change the subject right now,” I said.
“All right. Have you seen the state of Agatha?” Alex gestured bitterly at his pet vulture, currently perched on top of the old-fashioned cash register, giving everyone the evil eye. “Look at the little slut. Twenty months pregnant, which is going it some for a vulture. God alone knows what she had sex with, or what she’ll eventually produce. There’s a pool going, if you want to lay some money down...”
And then he broke off and stared out across the bar, his jaw actually dropping. I turned to look, and winced. There are some people who, when they walk into a room, you k
now there’s going to be trouble. Alex’s ex-wife came striding through the packed bar with her usual intimidating attitude of complete self-confidence, not in the least bothered that she’d just entered the kind of place where most angels have more sense than to tread. She was tall, lean, and wore her power business outfit like a suit of armour. She had a hard-boned face that expert, understated make-up entirely failed to soften, under close-cropped platinum blonde hair. People got out of her way without even realising why they were doing it because she so clearly expected it of them. She slammed to a halt at the bar beside me, gave me a quick look over, and sniffed loudly.
“Hello, John. Been a while. You’re looking very yourself. But then, you never did have much ambition.”
“Hello, Agatha,” I said. “Not often you choose to grace us with your presence. What brings you to this low dive, all the way from the great counting-houses of the business sector? Did they give you time off for good behaviour?”
“That’ll be the day,” she said. “So, still playing at being a private detective?”
“And very successfully,” I said. “How about you? Still playing at being a human being?”
She gave me a cold, unblinking glare. “You always did take his side.”
“Hey,” I said, “I have to drink here. How’s your boy toy accountant?”
“Rodney is fine. Doing very well. Up for junior partner, actually. And he’s only three years younger than me. How’s your psycho gun-nut girl-friend?”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll tell Suzie you asked after her.”
Agatha’s cold, superior smile disappeared, and she turned abruptly away to give her full attention to Alex.
“Hello, Alex. Still determinedly down-market, I see. And still wearing black.”
“Only until someone comes up with a darker colour,” he said. “What are you doing here, Agatha? I didn’t think you liked people from your new life knowing where you came from.”