“Ah,” said Suzie. “That’s more like it. You always were easily distracted. Do you know where the sword is now?”
“Not yet. But I will. I need the right setting, and preparations, before I fire up my gift.”
“And then we’ll go get it,” Suzie said comfortably. “Will I by any chance get to kill a whole bunch of people?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said.
We strolled along, under the night sky that never ends, contemplating justice and violence. Wild things rode the night skies, starlight gleaming on their outstretched wings, while dangerous traffic thundered unceasingly up and down; and something foul and fierce went somersaulting over the vehicles, howling and cackling and spitting sparks in all directions. It was good to be back.
“So,” I said, “have you finished dealing with all the suddenly deceased persons who were cluttering up our property when I left?”
“All gone,” she said cheerfully.
“I won’t ask.”
“Best not to. But we’re going to have some really big flowers in the garden this time next year.”
“You hate flowers,” I said, amused.
“All right then, I’ll plant some fruit trees. I’ve always wanted to make my own jam.”
“You are an endless source of surprises to me,” I said solemnly. “Now, let us away to Strangefellows. I need to pick up something I left there with Alex, sometime back. Something I’d really hoped I’d never need to see again.”
And so Suzie and I came to Strangefellows, the oldest bar in the world, and still our favourite watering hole. Quite possibly the sleaziest and most disreputable drinking den in the whole of the Nightside, Strangefellows has the saving grace that no-one there will ever give a damn who or what you were. And most of my enemies are too scared to go in. The perfect place to drink and brood and plan revenges against a manifestly unfair and uncaring world. When Suzie and I clattered down the long, metal stairs into the great stone pit that was the bar proper, the background music was already playing Rick Wakeman’s King Arthur album. Just the bar owner’s little way of letting me know he knew what was going on. Alex Morrisey knows everything, except for when he doesn’t; and then he fakes it so convincingly that the world often changes to accommodate him. Because his gossip is always more entertaining than mere facts could ever be.
It was a pretty usual night, for Strangefellows. An unfrocked hair-stylist with a piercing through her left eye-ball was busy shaving complicated patterns into the thick body fur of a teenage werewolf. The things people will put themselves through to appear fashionable. Over in the large open fireplace, a pleasant fire was burning in a miniature Wicker Man, while a group of young business men in smart City suits, each with one eye missing, toasted bread against the flames before dipping it into a vat of steaming goat’s-cheese fondue. Alex must be trying to drive the bar up-market again. He’d have better luck with a chair and a whip. Two Japanese teenage girl vampires were draining the blood out of a resigned-looking goat through two straws, racing each other to the middle. And a quartet of fuzzy post-nuclear mutants were showing each other strange alien porn on the televisions they had implanted in their stomachs.
At the bar, the owner, bartender, and tall dark pain in the neck, Alex Morrisey, greeted Suzie and me with a sullen nod. Alex was born under a cloud, which surprised the midwife. He was the world’s first clinically depressed toddler, and has only got worse down the years. He only ever wears black, including shades and a beret, mixes the worst martinis in the world, doesn’t wash the glasses nearly often enough, and could gloom for the Olympics. Always check your change with Alex, and never ever try the bar snacks. You never know who they might have been. He glared at his pet vulture, Agatha, still perched menacingly on his old-fashioned till and still extremely pregnant. Alex put out a hand to pet her. The vulture fixed him with a malignant look, and Alex pulled his hand back.
“I’ve lost track of how many months that damned bird has been pregnant,” he said bitterly as he poured me my usual wormwood brandy and handed Suzie her bottle of Gordon’s Gin. “Has to be well over a year now. I think she’s going for the record. Still no idea what the hell she mated with, but it must have been something really brave. Wouldn’t surprise me if she ate him afterwards. Or even during. I’m hoping it wasn’t a phoenix. You can’t get good fire insurance in the Nightside.”
“That’s always been one of the big riddles,” I said. “If the phoenix is always born from the ashes of the previous phoenix, then who fired the first phoenix?”
Suzie stopped sucking at her gin bottle long enough to say “Prometheus,” unexpectedly.
Alex and I looked at her, then at each other, and shrugged pretty much in unison.
“What are you doing here, John?” said Alex. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided you were too good for us, now you’re off hobnobbing with the aristocracy. It’ll all end in tears. The London Knights ... Give me a slippery floor and a can-opener, and I could take the lot of them.”
“Pretty sure you couldn’t,” I said. “I’ve seen them fight. To be exact, I saw them take on a whole army of elves and make chutney out of them. And since they’re currently a bit annoyed with me ...”
“He lost Excalibur,” said Suzie.
“I’m getting it back!” I said quickly. “I’m here to use my gift, while you and Suzie run interference and keep the flies off. I can’t afford to be interrupted once I start concentrating.”
“All right,” said Suzie, setting down her half-empty bottle. “Anyone bothers us, I’ll shoot them quietly.”
“I’ll get a bucket and mop,” Alex said resignedly.
“Don’t pop off yet,” I said. “I need to discuss something with you.”
“Let’s start with your bar bill,” said Alex.
“You know I’m good for it. Listen, remember the ... object I left here with you after the Angel War? The thing I asked you to hide for me? And never mention to anyone?”
Alex lowered his sunglasses and studied me over them. “Are things really that serious?”
“Could be,” I said. “I have a strong feeling things could get extremely unpleasant, then a whole lot worse, before they even look like getting better.”
“Situation entirely bloody normal round here,” said Alex. “Hang on while I get my special gloves.”
He reached under the counter and pulled out a pair of woollen mittens, specially knitted for him by the Holy Sisters of Saint Strontium. Guaranteed to protect his hands from anything up to and including the Holy Sisters. Alex went to the back of the bar and very carefully brought down a slender bottle labelled ANGEL’S TEARS, in Alex’s own appalling handwriting. He set the bottle down gently on the bar before us and the liquor inside swelled slowly from side to side, shining with delicate silver light. Angel’s Tears was a particularly vicious and brutal liquor that could not only open the doors of perception inside your mind, but blow the doors right off their hinges. Alex could only keep the liquor in stock for so long, then he had to take it out, bury it in unconsecrated ground, and run like hell. Alex broke the heavy wax seal with extreme care and reached inside the bottle with a pair of delicate silver tongs. And from out of the concealing liquor, he pulled a single long feather.
It glowed faintly with its own light, a pure white feather of indescribable beauty and grace. It looked like the first, original feather, which all other feathers are based on. Alex laid it gently out on the bar counter, then put the bottle away. The feather lay there, utterly perfect, with not a drop of liquor on it. The Angel’s Tears had disguised its presence all this time but hadn’t been able to touch it. Because the feather was the real deal.
“Is that what I think it is?” said Suzie, after a moment.
“Yes,” I said. “A feather from an angel’s wing. I found a downed angel during the War. Brought down by really serious magics, with its wings ripped off and propped up on bricks. So to speak. I found the feather some distance away, in the gutter, and took it away w
ith me. Because I always thought the time would arrive when it would come in handy.”
“All right, it’s very pretty,” Suzie said grudgingly. “But what use is it? What can you do with it, apart from tickle someone to death?”
“According to the reading I’ve done on the subject, an angel’s feather can protect you from spiritual corruption,” I said. “And given that we’re almost certainly going to be dealing with Sinister Albion ...”
“You mean the living Merlin?” said Alex, up to the minute on news as usual and determined not to be left out of the conversation. “Merlin Satanspawn, more powerful than the Merlin we knew and nastier with it? Word is he’s here in the Nightside right now, looking for his missing King Artur.”
“Not just the living Merlin,” I said. “According to the London Knights, we also have to worry about one Prince Gaylord the Damned, Nuncio to the Court of King Artur. He’s here, too.”
“What’s so special about him?” said Suzie.
“I don’t know,” I said. “No-one knows. That’s what’s so worrying.”
“But ... it’s only a feather,” said Suzie.
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “It looks like a feather to our limited human senses because the reality of it is far too big for us to deal with. This came from a messenger of God, His will made manifest in the material world. It’s no more only a feather than an angel is just some guy with wings.”
“First Excalibur, then the London Knights, now an angel’s feather,” said Alex. “Going up in the world, John. Been a long time since anything so obviously good came into the Nightside ... We could probably get good money for this. And I mean serious money ...”
I picked the feather up and tucked it into my inside coat-pocket. My fingers tingled at the brief contact. “There are some things money can’t buy, Alex.”
“I know. That’s what credit is for.”
“What are you going to do with the feather, John?” said Suzie.
“Hang on to it,” I said. “And hope some of its essential goodness rubs off on me.”
“Good luck with that,” said Suzie. “Also, Alex, my bottle is empty.”
“Lot of people are talking about Excalibur,” said Alex as he handed Suzie a fresh bottle. “Mostly trying to figure out how the hell it ended up with you, John.”
“I am not worthy,” I said solemnly. “But, I have a special dispensation.”
Alex paused, thoughtfully. “When I was younger, and still believed I was descended from Arthur Pendragon, instead of Merlin Satanspawn, I used to dream of wielding Excalibur. What did it feel like?”
“Like I could do anything,” I said.
And that was when lightning slammed down into the bar. Huge jagged bolts of blue-white electricity, jumping from ceiling to floor to every metal object in the bar. Sparks jumped and exploded, crackling loudly on the air. I could feel the wild energies tingling on my bare skin, and my hair stood up. The air stank of ozone. The lightning slammed down again and again, filling the bar with brutal, merciless light. Tables and chairs caught fire. The floor suddenly cracked apart, a long, jagged line that ran from one end of the bar to the other, the crack widening and splintering as it tore itself apart. Everyone in the bar was running for the exit. Some were on fire. There was screaming and shouting and all the sounds of pain and horror. I put my back to the bar, and Suzie was right there at my side, shotgun at the ready.
The crack in the floor widened further still, becoming a crevice full of darkness. And up out of that bottomless darkness rose a huge iron throne, its heavy black metal carved and scarred with crawling unquiet runes. And sitting at his ease on that cold iron throne—Merlin Satanspawn of Sinister Albion. The greatest living sorcerer of a realm where evil had triumphed. He smiled on me as the throne came to a halt, hovering over the abyss; and it was not a human smile.
The living Merlin was tall, easily eight feet, and grossly fat from lifetimes of indulging his many appetites. Naked, his skin was flushed, stretched taut with heavy rolls of fat, and covered in ancient Celtic and Druidic tattoos. The designs were hard to make out, stretched and distorted by his huge shape. His face was wide, his arms and legs huge. His eyes were sunk deep into his skull, and his smile showed teeth yellowed with age. There was something in those eyes, and in that smile, that held me where I was like a mouse hypnotised by a snake. The knowledge in that stare, the centuries of experience, the sheer concentrated happy evil ...
Dried blood had caked under his long fingernails, and more was trapped in the heavy lines round his mouth. Goat’s horns curled up from his lowering forehead, and scarlet flames danced up from his eyes, rising and falling as his gaze moved this way and that. They say he has his father’s eyes ... And an inverted pentagram had been branded deep into his bare chest. No-one was going to steal this Merlin’s heart.
Simply sitting there, on his brutal throne, Merlin’s presence was overwhelming. He seemed to curdle the bar’s atmosphere and poison the air by being there. Merlin Satanspawn, the Devil’s only begotten son, the anti-Christ who’d corrupted and destroyed the greatest dream of all, to make his Sinister Albion.
Anyone else would have been helpless under his gaze. But I had an angel’s feather, Suzie had her shotgun, and Alex ... was Alex.
The bar’s muscular bouncers, Betty and Lucy Coltrane, had held their ground when everyone else ran. They stood poised together at the end of the bar, ready for action. They weren’t impressed by the living Merlin any more than they had been by the dead Merlin who used to manifest in Strangefellows. In fact, the Coltranes were famous for not being impressed by anyone. Which came in very handy when it came to chucking-out time. They looked to Alex for instructions, and he gestured urgently for them to stay put. Merlin turned his great head slowly to look at the two muscular young women, then he licked his lips slowly. Betty and Lucy both shuddered suddenly, despite themselves. Merlin raised one fat hand, and a rose appeared in it out of nowhere. He offered it to the two bouncers, and they both turned up their noses. Merlin laughed softly, a flat horrid sound with all the wickedness of the world in it. He brought the rose to his mouth and breathed on it, so it withered and died in a moment.
“Big deal,” said Alex, his voice steady. “I can do that most mornings. Of course, I am not a morning person.”
“Hush,” said Merlin. “Be still. I have come to the Nightside in search of my errant King. Pretty little Artur. He is mine, and I will have him again. I do enjoy this Nightside ... Love what you’ve done with the place. So delightfully uncomplicated, and unhypocritical when it comes to sin and temptation. I really must come again, when I have the time to properly indulge myself. I do like to play though I’m so big I usually break my toys ...”
“We’re not toys,” I said, fighting to keep my voice calm and casual and not in any way impressed. “You may be the big mover and shaker in your world, but we’ve seen better. And you’re not in your world now.”
“But my father is everywhere, in all worlds,” said Merlin. “And where he is, I have power. Do not think I am weak because I am out of my domain.”
He gestured lazily with one plump hand at Lucy Coltrane, and she cried out in pain as her back arched suddenly. Her breath came fast and panicked, her eyes full of horror. Merlin gestured again, and Lucy’s chest split apart in a flurry of blood and broken bone. Her heart ripped itself out of the great wound in her chest and flew across the intervening space to nestle into Merlin’s waiting hand. Lucy collapsed as all the strength went out of her, blood still spurting from the great wound between her breasts and spraying from her slack mouth with her last few gasps for breath. Betty was there to hold Lucy before she hit the floor, but Lucy was already dead, her wide eyes fixed and staring. Betty lowered her slowly to the blood-slick floor and sat there with her, hugging the dead body to her while she cried silent, angry tears. And Merlin Satanspawn brought the still-beating heart to his mouth and ate it greedily, stuffing the pulsing meat into his mouth. And when he was done, and he’d eaten every last
bit of it, he licked all the blood from his fingers like a small child with a treat.
I had to physically stop Suzie from giving him both barrels in the face. I grabbed her arm and held it firmly, pitting all my strength against hers. Even her specially made blessed and cursed bullets wouldn’t touch Merlin Satanspawn. And I wasn’t ready to lose my Suzie the way Betty had lost her Lucy. Suzie stopped fighting me abruptly, her furious gaze still fixed on Merlin. She lowered her shotgun and nodded briefly. Not giving up; just waiting for a better chance. Behind me, I could hear Alex breathing heavily. I knew he had all kinds of weapons and protections stashed away, but I hoped he had more sense than to try to use any of them. He and the Coltranes had been together for years, but this was no time for grand gestures. This was a time for cold thought, and plans, and eventually some very cold revenge, when the opportunity presented itself. Merlin smiled on us all.
“That wasn’t a demonstration of power. That was a little something to get your attention. This ... is the demonstration.”
And Lucy Coltrane sat bolt upright in Betty’s arms, drawing in a deep breath of air. The great wound in her chest was gone, her eyes were wide open, and she grabbed on to Betty with desperate hands as she fought to get her breathing back under control again. She had been dead, and now she was alive again; and Merlin Satanspawn chuckled happily.
“I am my father’s son, inflicted on the world to do his will; and I can do anything the Lamb could do.”
(And I remembered Jerusalem Stark saying that his new allies could bring his dead wife back to life. That he’d seen proof ...)
“What are you doing here?” I said to Merlin. “What do you want with us?”
“This place called to me. My magic tells me that this world’s Merlin spent time here.”
“Yes,” said Alex. “He was buried in the cellars under the bar. But he’s dead and gone now. You missed him.”
“Pity,” said the living Merlin. “I would have enjoyed showing him what he could have become. If only he’d had more ambition.” He considered Alex thoughtfully. “You’re of his line, though the blood has been diluted through many generations. I have no descendents ... I kill them all as soon as they appear. I have no use for ... competition. But, there’s some of me in you, boy. I could just eat you up ...”
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