“That’s disingenuous,” Paige said, speaking up. She’d found her voice. “There’s history to take into account. It wasn’t so long ago we were all getting sick and blaming it on humors or miasma. Human existence has sucked. My existence sucked-”
“And,” the Barber cut in, “I’m sorry to say that before the end of the night, it’ll turn out worse than you’ve ever conceived of.”
Paige’s mouth opened and closed, the words she’d been about to form drying out and withering on her tongue.
Come on, Paige, I thought.
“It got better,” she said, but her forward momentum had dissipated. “For so long, it was awful, flat-out toxic. But it got better. Humanity will keep advancing. The broken bone will heal.”
“No,” the Barber said. He fixed his dark non-eyes on her. “Your life only got better because you left it behind you. You threw yourself into the realm of Others, adoration of a centuries-old creature doomed to be among the last of her line. You threw yourself into studying her and how to be useful to her, and you abandoned your human life to do it. You’re a coward, Paige Thorburn. You live for balance, truth, justice and order, and you are none of these things.”
Paige tried to hold fast, but the doubt still crept into her expression.
“If I was a coward, would I be here?”
“Yes. Your particular brand of cowardice led you directly onto this path. To go anywhere else or do anything else would mean you had to return to your old life. I could spare you, I won’t, but I could. You still wouldn’t last the night. Where are you going to go, Paige Thorburn? You threw it all away for a creature that’s now dead.”
Dead. The word had a finality to it, a certainty.
She set her jaw, but the doubt had crept in enough that I couldn’t deny it. The pain.
The Barber looked at me. “You had the right idea. Attack with words. Establish the facts, then use them. If the tables were turned and you were the enemy, me as the one who didn’t know any better, it’s what I’d do. I can show you how fragile you are before I destroy you.”
“I know how fragile I am,” I said.
“You as a collective. Humans. Mortals and Others. I’m trying and apparently failing to convey that this has all been decided. I can see it, and I’m speaking out of the goodness of my heart, as Johannes Lillegard, because I want to spare you the disappointment. You can’t deny that this is reality.”
“I damn well can,” I said. “You pretend to know us all, but you’re badly underestimating Thorburn stubbornness.”
“Underestimating you? I made you,” he said.
Something in his voice made Rose’s heart skip a beat. An edge, a bit of a growl that did echo, responding to elements of this environment.
He went on, “You can’t tell me that all is well and that you have hope, when you’re planning to die. You intend to give up your existence to someone you well and truly know is a sad, lonely, shadow of yourself, devoid of passion. No. You have no place to say anything to me. If you try to win over any subtle powers that are listening, you’re going to fail badly. You have no ground to stand on.”
Why the fuck did he have to be able to talk, damn it?
“You shouldn’t-” Green started.
“Green,” I said, cutting her off.
She shot me a look.
“There’s no rush,” I said. “Don’t speak just because you feel you have to. Consider your words carefully.”
“What you mean,” the Barber said, “Is you don’t want to give up an easy third point of debate. If you challenge my perspective and I firmly establish that a third person has no grounds to make the challenge, I benefit.”
“There is that,” I said.
“He has no faith in you here,” the Barber told Green Eyes.
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Challenging me? Prove it, then,” he said. “The Barber is sworn to the Seal of Solomon. Johannes is a practitioner. If you would mark us as liars with a meaningful show of faith, we’ll be disadvantaged.”
He was right. The more meaningful the show, the greater the disadvantage.
But there was no meaningful action I could make that wouldn’t disadvantage us more. I could walk away, head down the stairs, and let her fight the Barber, I could give her the Hyena.
He’d already anticipated this much.
I spoke, instead, “When all of this is over, Green, I’m counting on you to look after Evan.”
“Paltry, as displays of faith go,” the Barber said. He didn’t even flinch. ”
“It’s good enough for me,” Green Eyes said. “I’m counting on him making it through this, and not dying at the end of the night. Even if he hates me for what I have to do to make it happen. He’ll be able to look after Evan himself.”
“I think that sentiment is enough answer to why you have no grounds to challenge me, you and Blake are birds of a feather, after all,” the Barber said. “Mags, I don’t think I even need to say anything to you, after the long conversations we’ve had. That only leaves Peter. Unless you think a goblin would be a better voice for humanity.”
He said Peter with such contempt.
I didn’t agree with the Barber, but I wasn’t the one he needed to sway. He was answering my attempt to challenge his legitimacy and now he challenged ours, and I was betting he was winning over anything that was listening. I hesitated to call them ‘spirits’, but they were. The building blocks of reality were tuned into this conversation. The words chosen, the way they were presented, and the effects they had were all factors.
He’d declared that victory for his side was inevitable, even if we won here. Humanity was instinctively helping his side, and each of us here had no ground to stand on if we wanted to say otherwise.
Except for Peter.
“It’s not like I really got to know you, but I don’t remember you being this big of a dildo when you weren’t playing host to some scissors-demon,” Peter said.
“Petty insults. A small mystery, how I didn’t lose my faith in humanity before the demon opened my eyes.”
“Fuck that,” Peter said. “Petty insults are an art. So is talking out your ass, and you’ve acknowledged that.”
“I can see straight through you, Peter Thorburn,” the Barber said. “Backward and forward. The benefit of an eye for ruin and having a practitioner’s Sight at the same time. Don’t even pretend that you have any faith in humanity. You dwell in the darker recesses of it, and you know deep down inside that when your charm fails you, you’ll plunge deeper still, to your own detriment.”
“Ouch,” Peter said, unflinching. “But who the fuck are you to decide that this is about the now? Because I think that’s the demon talking, not Johannes. There isn’t a single person here on this towertop who doesn’t look back at yesterday and think about how much it sucked. Sure. I might dwell in dark recesses of humanity today, but maybe I get to enjoy a certain girl’s more pleasant-”