We knew each other. A bit. Ships that passed in the night and kept on going. We didn’t approve of each other, but we had been known to work together, occasionally. When no-one else would do.
Walker invited her to sit down at his table, and immediately the footman was there to pull her chair out for her, then push it back in again. Bad Penny accepted the attention as her due, but did deign to favour him with a flashing smile; and the footman did everything but wriggle like a puppy.
“You needn’t bother with a menu,” Walker said calmly to the footman. “The lady isn’t stopping.”
Bad Penny pouted. “Wouldn’t eat here if you paid me, darling. I do have my standards.”
Walker waved the footman away, and he disappeared reluctantly. I leaned out a little way from Julien’s table, to hear them more clearly. Bad Penny worried me; but then, she always did, even when she was supposedly on my side. Julien watched me, amused, but continued with his dinner. As editor of the Nightside’s only daily newspaper, the Night Times, he knew he’d get a good story out of me eventually.
I was just a bit surprised that Bad Penny was working for Walker. He was usually more subtle than that. Bad Penny, on the other hand, would work for anyone with enough money, on anything from espionage to assassination. Whether she was working on the side of Good or Evil had honestly never mattered to her; as she was only too happy to point out, gold has no provenance. She had no personal preference either way, nor any ethics worth the mentioning. She was utterly amoral and quite cheerful about it. I knew she’d occasionally done the Authorities’ dirty work in the past, when they felt the need for a little distance or deniability. (Strictly pro bono, in return for which they agreed to turn a blind eye to some of her more notorious activities. Business as usual, in the Nightside.)
“I do hope this isn’t about a honey trap, darling, because I don’t do those any more,” she said flatly to Walker. “They’re just too easy, my dear; there’s no challenge in it. Been there, done that, starred in the video. These days I prefer to specialise in cunning thefts, daring exploits, and just a touch of the good old-fashioned ultraviolence now and again, to keep the blood flowing.”
“And a little discreet blackmail,” said Walker. “To keep your coffers full.”
Bad Penny batted her long eyelashes at him. “A girl has to live. And I never was very good at investments. All I have to do is mention that I’m thinking of finally writing my memoirs, and you’d be surprised how fast the cheques come flooding in. Now, what is it you want me to do, Walker? Something frightfully nasty, no doubt.”
“You were listening to my little chat with John Taylor.”
“Well yes, but I can’t honestly say it made much sense to me.”
“I want you to take care of Taylor.”
Bad Penny looked at him sharply. “Now you’re going to have to be just a little more specific than that, darling.”
“I want you to do whatever it takes to prevent him from completing his mission. I want him off his present case, and I don’t care how you do it.”
“So…dear John is no longer under your protection?”
“No,” said Walker. “Can you take him?”
“Of course, darling! He’s just a man.”
“Distract him. Divert him. Do whatever you think necessary. But, if all else fails, you are authorised to eliminate him.”
“I get to kill John Taylor?” said Bad Penny. “Oh, result, darling! This will absolutely make my reputation!”
“If all else fails,” Walker said sternly, but Bad Penny wasn’t listening.
“How shall I kill thee, let me count the ways…That Shotgun Suzie thinks she’s so hot. I’ll show her!”
I decided it was time to leave. Hell hath no fury like a woman you really shouldn’t have slept with.
FIVE
All Answers Become Clear, in Time.
I’d only just sneaked out of that august establishment and snobs’ central, the Londinium Club, when my cell phone rang. (It plays the theme from the Twilight Zone TV show. What else?) I hauled the phone out of my coat pocket and looked at it suspiciously. It very rarely rang, partly because only a very few people have my number, but mostly because they all knew better than to use it for anything less than a real run for the hills emergency. The line is not secure. Not only is there never any shortage of people potentially listening in, sometimes they actually join in the conversation. There’s also the problem of pop-in advertising, intrusions from other dimensions, and the occasional possession of the phone by pervert demons with a thing about technology. I have to admit I’m not even sure how cell phones work in the Nightside, well out of reach of the everyday world’s satellites and relay stations. (Though at least that means my enemies can’t use Global Positioning to find me.) I’ve always assumed the cell phone system is supported by heavy-duty sorcery, but I have absolutely no idea who might be providing it, or why. Or when they’re going to get around to charging for it. All things that would worry me, if I were the worrying sort.
I always screen my calls (after an unfortunate incident with a dead ex-girl-friend), and I relaxed slightly as I discovered the caller was Alex Morrisey. The owner and bartender of the oldest bar in the world, Strangefellows, Alex was one of the few people in the Nightside entitled to call me at any time. We were friends, sort of, which got him points for courage if nothing else. And since he’d never called me before in his life, I decided I’d better take the call. At first there was only silence at the other end, then a faint whispering of sound that might have been a wind blowing, far away. I said Alex’s name twice, and when he finally spoke his voice sounded harsh, strained, under pressure.
“John. You have to come to Strangefellows. You have to come right now. It’s urgent.”
“Alex? What’s the matter? You sound really rough. Are you okay?”
“I can’t keep him out! The whole bar is reverting! The Past is breaking in everywhere! It feels like dying…”
The phone went dead, buzzing uselessly in my ear. I shut it down and put it away. I hate being interrupted in the middle of a case, but Alex sounded like he was in real trouble, and the bar itself was under threat. I had to do something. I’m very fond of that bar. Of course, the odds favoured it being some kind of trap, with Alex as the bait. All my best interests were screaming at me, and you don’t tend to survive long in the Nightside without developing instincts you can trust. Walker might have had Bad Penny transported to the bar, to lie in wait for me. It was the kind of thing he’d do. So, when in doubt, depend on the element of surprise. Getting all the way across the Nightside to Strangefellows would take quite some time, whatever method I chose, more than enough time for my putative enemy to set up all kinds of booby-traps and nasty surprises. But with a little lateral thinking I could be there in moments, and maybe catch my enemy with their pants down.
A certain image of Bad Penny filled my mind, but I pushed it firmly aside.
I reached into another coat pocket and took out my special Club Membership Card. It was very special; Alex only had five made, to my knowledge. I tapped it thoughtfully against my chin, considering. They might be expecting me to use the Card…or relying on me thinking that, so as to avoid me using it…but that way madness lies. Concentrate on the matter at hand. The Card was simple embossed pasteboard, a rich cream in colour, bearing the name of the bar in dark Gothic script, and beneath that the words YOU ARE HERE, in bloodred lettering. All I had to do was press my thumbprint against the scarlet lettering, and the magic stored in the Card would immediately transport me right into the bar. Zero travelling time, and the added advantage of bypassing the watched front door. (They couldn’t know about the Card. Hardly anybody knew about the Card.) In the end, all that mattered was that Alex needed my help. So I pressed my thumb down firmly, and the Card activated.
It leapt out of my hand, so fast it practically burned my fingertips, and hung on the air in front of me, shimmering with unearthly light and throbbing with stored energies. Alex always be
lieved in putting out for the full package. The Card suddenly grew to the size of a door, and I pushed it open and walked through. And as quickly as that I was standing in Strangefellows bar. The door slammed shut behind me, and the Card was just a card in my hand again.
I glanced quickly about me, braced for any kind of trouble or attack, ready for anything except what I saw. The bar was deserted, and transformed. The low fog of early mornings covered the floor from wall to wall, grey as a shroud, swirling slowly. The air was bitterly cold, and my breath steamed before me. I could barely feel the floor beneath my feet, as though it was far away in some other distance or dimension. A wind was blowing heavily outside the bar, beating against the walls. It surged and roared, and there were voices in it. Not human voices. I’d heard this kind of wind before, announcing the breakthrough of a Timeslip, one of those brief glimpses of past or future. When the Time Winds blew, even the greatest Powers shuddered and looked to their defences. Their arrival was always a bad sign. A sign that Time was currently out of joint.
The bar was utterly empty. Not a customer anywhere. The bar only closes when Alex is off duty, and if he had been off duty, the Card wouldn’t have admitted me. But here I was, alone in a room I barely recognised. The bar itself, that long slab of polished mahogany at the rear of the room, was gone, along with all the booze and accumulated trophies that were usually piled up behind it. In its place was a huge screaming face, made out of wicker. It looked big enough to burn people alive in. The expression on the green wicker face was one of horror. I shuddered suddenly, and it had nothing to do with the cold. On the phone, Alex had said the bar was reverting…Could this be an earlier version of the oldest bar and drinking house in the world?
I moved slowly forward, the ground fog tugging at my legs. Everywhere I looked there were overturned tables and chairs, sticking up like dark islands in the grey mists. Whatever customers were present when all this started must have left in a hurry. I had a pretty good idea why. The biggest clue to what was going on stood in the middle of the bar, dominating the room, and I stopped to study it from a cautious distance. A huge oak tree stood tall and firm, its trunk wide and gnarled, looking as though it had always been there, though I had never seen it before. Thick roots plunged down into the floor, and presumably on down into the cellars. Heavy branches thrust up through the high ceiling. There were no leaves, but the bar’s two bouncers, Lucy and Betty Coltrane, had been strung up on the tree trunk, held in place by thick strands of ivy and mistletoe. They’d been battered unconscious, the blood still drying on their bruised faces. They were large, muscular women, with warrior’s hearts; they would have gone down fighting. I reached out to tug at the ivy, to try and free them, and the thick strands stirred threateningly. I withdrew my hand, and they grew still again. I swore dispassionately. I knew what had happened here. Who had to be behind this.
“All right, Merlin,” I said. “Show yourself.”
A pentacle flared into life on the floor, right in front of the screaming wicker face, forming line by line, glowing with the blue-white glare you sometimes see in lightning strikes over graveyards. There was a growing tension on the air, as that old enchanter Merlin, Architect of Camelot, the Devil’s only begotten Son, Merlin Satanspawn himself, rose unhurriedly up through the pentacle to stand before me, with his familiar cold and arrogant smile. Merlin had been dead for centuries, his body buried in the cellars under the bar not long after the fall of Logres; but being dead didn’t necessarily stop you from being a major player in the Nightside. Merlin was dead, but very definitely not departed.
An awful lot of what Alex had said on the phone made sense now. All the changes in the bar were artifacts of Merlin’s time, and the man himself could only manifest by possessing, or rather pushing aside, Alex Morrisey, latest in a very long line of owner/bartenders bound to Strangefellows by a geas almost as old as the bar itself. Merlin rarely appeared in person these days, to everyone’s relief, and when he did, it meant bad news for everyone.
Merlin ran one hand caressingly over the screaming wicker face, perhaps savouring old memories, then he turned the full force of his attention on me. He was tall and wiry and utterly naked, his corpse-pale skin decorated from throat to toe with unpleasant Celtic and Druidic tattoos. Beneath the curling signs of power, his dead flesh was blotchy and discoloured with rot and the various stages of decay. Even Merlin’s awful will couldn’t fully hold back the ravages of Time. His long grey hair fell down past his bony shoulders in thick convoluted knots, packed and stuffed with clay. His heavy brow supported a crown of mistletoe, unhealthily green and red with poisonous berries. His face was long and heavy-boned, ugly with character, and two flickering fires burned in his empty eye-sockets. (They say he has his father’s eyes.) And in the middle of his chest the old, old wound that had never healed, still showing broken bone and ruptured muscle, where the heart had been torn right out of him.
Merlin Satanspawn, perhaps the most powerful sorcerer of all time, still continuing through his own implacable will. Old and bad and dangerous to know.
“We’re seeing far too much of each other,” I said. “People will start to talk.”
“Insolent as ever, John Taylor,” said Merlin, in a voice like grinding iron, thick with an accent no-one had used in over fifteen hundred years.
“You made Alex call me, before you took him over.”
“Of course. It was necessary that you come here. There are things that must be said, words that must be spoken. You have set a thing in motion, and even I cannot See where it will lead.”
My first impulse on hearing that was to turn and run like hell. When Merlin started plotting, even the other Powers and Dominations remembered urgent appointments elsewhere. But I couldn’t abandon Alex, and I was curious as to what Merlin had to say. Besides, I was pretty sure that even if I did leg it, Merlin would just drag me back again.
“All right,” I said, doing my best to sound calm and casual. “Let’s talk. What’s brought you back this time? Been having bad dreams?”
“The dead don’t dream,” said Merlin. “For which I am on occasion grateful.”
I looked significantly around at the changed bar. “Why the redecorating?”
“This bar is old, older even than I. There are those who say it’s very nearly as old as the Nightside itself. I used to come here, now and again, as an escape from the overwhelming goodness of Camelot. You’d be surprised at some of the great names who’ve drunk here, down the ages. Heroes and villains and all creatures great and small. This…is one of the very few places that ever felt like home to me. That’s why I had my body buried here.” He looked around him, taking in the changes, smiling unpleasantly as the flames in his eye-sockets danced. “Ah, memories…”
“Can we please get on with this?” I said. “So I can have Alex back?”
“He is of no importance. He only exists that he might serve me. I bound his family and his line to this bar, long and long ago, just so that I could be sure of having someone of my blood here, that I could manifest through when necessary.”
“Hold everything,” I said. “Your blood? I thought Alex was supposed to be descended from Uther Pendragon, and Arthur?”
Merlin laughed. “From the Pendragon? No, boy; there’s nothing of Kings in Alex Morrisey. He is mine, of my line, descended from my dear betrayer, the witch Nimue. He belongs to me.”
I bit down hard on an angry retort. I couldn’t afford to get him mad at me. Better just to get this over with as quickly as possible.
“Why did you call me here, Merlin? What do you want from me?”
A huge iron throne materialised behind Merlin, a memory made real by the power of his awful will. It was a roughly fashioned thing, all strength and power and no grace, the black metal scored with runes and sigils that seemed to move when I wasn’t looking at them directly. What little of them I could read made me glad I couldn’t make out the rest. Merlin sat down without looking back and settled onto his sombre throne like a dragon cu
rling up on a mound of skulls. His pale flesh showed starkly against the dark metal. He smiled on me like a favoured son, showing aged brown teeth. I didn’t smile back.
“You have a new case, John Taylor. You have been engaged to discover the true beginnings of the Nightside, by one of the Transient Beings, no less. I knew this almost as soon as you did. I have psychic alarms set in place all across the Nightside, primed to inform me immediately if such a thing should occur. You set off the alarm in the Londinium Club. I was a Member, long ago.”
Why does that not surprise me? I thought.
“This is not just another case,” said Merlin. “By agreeing to undertake it, you have set in motion a thing that cannot be stopped, caused ripples in Space and Time, alerted all kinds of Powers who have waited long and long for this to happen. Old forces are awakening, in and outside the Nightside, to aid or stop you. More than you can imagine is at stake here. There was a time I would have killed you out of hand, to prevent this thing from happening. Good and bad will die, terrible forces will clash by night, and nothing will ever be the same again. But perhaps it is time for the truth to come out, at last. Perhaps it is time for a new thing to be born, out of the death of the old…” He brooded silently for a moment. “I brought you here, John Taylor, to tell you what I know. To set you on your way. Perhaps because I do not know the origins of the Nightside, and it irks me that for all my strength and power there are still things I cannot See. I want to know.”
Hex and the City Page 9