I fixed him with my best cold stare. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Against me.”
“You’d really threaten an old friend, John?”
“If you were really a friend, I wouldn’t have to threaten you.”
“Dammit, John,” he said quietly. “Don’t do this to me. I can’t afford to have my body destroyed, and lose my grip on this world. Not with what’s waiting for me…”
“If Lilith isn’t stopped, the Hell she’ll make of the Nightside will be just as bad.”
“You’re a real piece of work, Taylor, you know that? All right, I’m in. But I know I’m going to regret this.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said.
“You’re not even safe being dead, these days,” Dead Boy said mournfully.
Five - Down in Dingley Dell
So,” said Dead Boy, “you’ve definitely got a plan?”
“Oh yes.”
“But you’re not going to tell me what it is?”
“It would only upset you.”
“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”
“If you like, but…”
“I won’t like that either?”
“Probably not.”
“If I wasn’t already dead, I think I’d probably be very depressed.”
I had to laugh. It felt good to have something to laugh about. We were walking through one of the less salubrious areas of the Nightside, where the neon signs fell away like uninvited guests at the feast, and even working street-lamps were few and far between. We had come to Rotten Row, and the people who lived there liked it dark. We’d been walking for a while, and even though Dead Boy couldn’t get tired, he could get bored, and downright cranky about it. He’d wanted to use his famous futuristic car, the gleaming silver sensation that drove itself out of a Timeslip from some possible future, and adopted Dead Boy as its driver. But I had to work on the assumption that Lilith had agents everywhere now, and they’d be bound to recognise such a distinctive car. And they might well have orders to attack it on sight, just in case Dead Boy was giving his old friend a lift. Nothing like having a Biblical myth for a mother to make you really paranoid. I wasn’t ready for a direct confrontation with Lilith’s people. Not yet. So Dead Boy and I walked together through increasingly dark and dingy back streets, in search of that great Victorian Adventurer, Julien Advent.
I’d already phoned the main offices of the Night Times, and the deputy editor had reluctantly confirmed that Julien wasn’t there. He might be the paper’s editor and owner now, but Julien still remembered the days when he’d been the Nightside’s leading investigative journalist. So every now and again he’d disappear for a few days on a personal assignment, without telling anyone where he was going. No-one could say anything because he always came back with one hell of a story. Julien did like to keep his hand in, and assure himself he was still an Adventurer at heart.
The deputy editor actually asked me if I knew where Julien was, because the whole paper was going crazy without him, trying to cover the huge story breaking on the Street of the Gods. Did I happen to know anything about what happened on the Street of the Gods? I admitted that I might know a thing or two, but that I would only talk to Julien. The deputy editor tried threats, insults, and bursting into tears before finally giving up on me and admitting that while Julien had turned off his mobile phone and pager, so he couldn’t be traced, he had been heard asking questions about some of the nastier sweatshops still operating in the Nightside.
And so Dead Boy and I had walked to the extremely low-rent district that was Rotten Row. There were fewer and fewer people around, and those on view had a distinctly furtive air about them. There were the homeless and beggars, ragged men in ragged clothes, with outstretched grimy hands and ripped paper cups for small change. There were things that stayed in the shadows so you couldn’t get a good look at them—possessed animals with glowing eyes and cancerous faces, and half-breed demons offering to sell you their bodies or blood or urine. Plus any number of hard-faced working girls with dead eyes, rent boys with scarlet lips, and speed freaks in alleyways ready to sell you any drug you had ever heard of. And darker things still, offering darker services.
Rotten Row, where dreams go to die, hope is a curse, and death is sometimes the kindest thing that can happen to you.
Long rows of dilapidated tenement buildings crouched sullenly on either side of a rubbish-strewn street. Half the street-lamps had been smashed, and sulphurous steam drifted up out of rusted metal grilles in the pavement. The tenement walls were stained black with soot and pollution and accumulated grime. Graffiti in a dozen languages, not all of them human, sometimes daubed in dried blood. Windows boarded up or covered over with brittle paper. Doors with hidden protections that would only open to the right muttered words. And inside every dark and overcrowded room in those ancient tenements, sweatshop businesses where really low-paid piece work was performed by people who couldn’t find work anywhere else. Or had good reason to stay hidden, off the books. The sweatshop owners took advantage of these desperate people, in return for “protecting” them. The sad part was that there was never any shortage of desperate people, ready and willing to be “protected.” The Nightside can be very dark, when it chooses.
Grim-faced enforcers sauntered casually out of alleyways and side streets to make their presence known to us. Dressed up as dandified gangsters, they wore guns and knives openly, and a few even had ideograms tattooed on their faces, marking them as low-rank combat magicians. Some had dogs with them, on reinforced steel chains. Seriously big dogs, with bad attitudes. Dead Boy and I strolled openly down the middle of the street, letting the enforcers get a good look at us. The dogs were the first to realise. They got one whiff of Dead Boy, and backed away whining and cringing. Their owners took one look at me and started backing away themselves. The enforcers huddled together in tight little groups, muttering urgently, then pushed one of their number forward to meet us.
He affected a nonchalant swagger that fooled no-one, least of all him, and finally came to a halt a more-than-respectable distance away. Dead Boy and I stopped and considered him thoughtfully. He was wearing a smart pin-striped suit, white spats, and a grey fedora. He had twin pearl-handled revolvers on his hips, and a pencil moustache on his scarred face. He gave us each a hard look, which he might have pulled off if he hadn’t been sweating so profusely.
And on a cold night, too.
“You here to cause trouble?” he said, in a voice so deep he must have had a third testicle tucked away somewhere.
“Almost certainly,” I said.
“Right, lads!” said the enforcer, glancing back over his shoulder to address the rest of the street. “Pick up your feet, we are out of here. This is Dead Boy and John bloody Taylor, and we are not being paid nearly enough to take on the likes of them. Everybody round to Greasy Joan’s café, where we will wait out whatever appalling things are about to happen.”
“You’ve heard of us,” said Dead Boy, sounding just a little disappointed.
“Too bloody right, squire. I signed on for security work and a little light brutality. Nothing was ever said about having to face living legends and death on two legs.
Behind him, the rest of the enforcers were rapidly melting away and disappearing into the distance at something only a little less than a dead run. I looked thoughtfully at the man standing before us, and his left eye developed a distinct twitch.
“You seem to have a lot of influence over your fellow thugs,” I said. “Who are you, exactly?”
“Union representative, squire. I look out for my boys, make sure they’ve all got health insurance, and I’d really like to run away after them, if that’s all right with you.”
I’d barely finished nodding before he’d turned and hurried away. There’s a lot to be said for a good, or more properly bad, reputation. One young enforcer was still standing in the middle of the street, looking a bit bewildered. He yelled after his union rep, who didn’t even look back.