Although I knew I would, in a certain, terrible future.
By now I’d exhausted all the mirrors. The scenes they showed me became hazy and blurred, and some couldn’t even muster the strength to show me my own reflection. I tried the crystal balls, but their range was very limited, and half of them had gone opaque from the traumas of what they’d witnessed. Reluctantly, I moved on to the scrying pools. They weren’t much to look at, just a selection of simple stone grottos in an underlit room, each holding pools of clear water. I knelt beside the first pool, pricked my thumb with a prepared dagger, and let three big fat drops of blood fall into the water. Scrying is old magic, with old prices and penalties. The clear water swallowed up my blood without taking on the faintest tinge of red, but the ripples kept spreading and spreading, until finally the pool focused in on what I wanted to see, and then the ripples cleared to show me an image almost painfully bright and clear.
Razor Eddie, the Punk God of the Straight Razor, walked through what was left of the Street of the Gods, and if he was at all affected by the destruction around him, the burned-out churches and demolished temples, it didn’t show in his sharp, pinched face. A thin intense presence wrapped in a filthy old greatcoat, he strolled unconcerned past the bodies of dead gods and didn’t give a damn.
A crowd of spiked and pierced zealots looked up from desecrating a sacred grove as Razor Eddie approached, and they swaggered out into the Street to block his way, laughing and calling out suggestively to him. They didn’t know who he was, the fools. When he showed no fear of them, or any intention of doing something amusing, like running or begging for his life, the zealots grew sullen and angry, and sharp objects appeared in their hands. They were vultures, feeding on the carrion left behind by Lilith’s crusade, hyped up on adrenaline and bloodlust and religious fervour.
They went to meet Razor Eddie with torture and horror and murder on their minds, laughing and squealing with delight, and the Punk God of the Straight Razor walked right through them. When he came out the other side they were all dead, nothing left of them but a great pile of severed heads. None of them had any eyes. I don’t know how he did it. No-one does. Eddie might be an agent of the good these days, but even the good looks the other way sometimes. Razor Eddie is a mystery as well as a god, and he likes it that way.
He looked round interestedly at a sudden loud clattering sound, and a huge creature something like a millipede came writhing and coiling up out of the ruins of an ancient temple. It was impossibly huge and seemingly without end, its vast shiny bulk propelled along by thousands of stubby little legs. Hundreds of yards of it came hammering along the Street towards Razor Eddie, easily a dozen feet wide and made up of curving segments of shimmering carborundum, gleaming dull red in the light of a hundred simmering fires. It darted forward impossibly quickly, its bulging head covered with rows of compound eyes, its complicated mouth parts clacking expectantly. It could sense the power in Razor Eddie, and it was hungry. I don’t know what it was. Some old nameless god from out of the depths, perhaps, no longer worshipped by anything but the worms of the earth.
Razor Eddie went forward to meet it, frowning slightly as though considering an unfamiliar problem. His pearl-handled straight razor was in his hand, shining bright as the sun. The creature reared up, its blunt head rising high above the surrounding buildings, then it slammed down again and snatched up Razor Eddie in its pincered mouth. Razor Eddie struggled briefly, his arms pinned helplessly to his sides, and the giant millipede swallowed him whole. He was there one moment, and gone the next. The millipede tossed back its carapaced head, and a series of slow ripples passed down the bulging throat as it gulped Razor Eddie down. The great head nodded a few times, as though satisfied, then it continued on its way down the Street of the Gods.
Only to pause, just a few yards later. Its head swayed uncertainly back and forth, its mouth parts clacking loudly, then it screamed like a steam geyser as its belly exploded outwards. The gleaming segments cracked and splintered and blew apart as Razor Eddie cut his way out from the inside. The huge millipede curled and writhed and slammed back and forth, demolishing buildings all around it, smashing stone and concrete and pounding the rubble to dust in its agonies, but still it couldn’t escape from the awful, remorseless thing that was killing it. In the end, Razor Eddie strolled unhurriedly away from the wreckage of the dead god, ignoring the last spastic twitches of the cracked and broken body. He was smiling slightly, as though considering even more disturbing things he intended to do to his fellow gods.
Another pool, another three drops of bloods, another vision. Those of Walker’s agents not strong enough to take on Lilith’s offspring, or enter maddened mobs single-handed, had banded together to take on smaller targets, doing what they could to make a difference. Sandra Chance, the consulting necromancer, stabbed about her with her aboriginal pointing-bone, and wherever she pointed it, people crashed convulsing to the ground and did not rise again. When she’d exhausted the bone’s power she tossed handfuls of carefully pre-prepared graveyard dirt from the pouches hanging at her waist into the air, and all around her Lilith’s zealots fell choking, as though buried alive.
Annie Abattoir watched Sandra’s back. A huge muscular presence and a head taller than most, she stalked the night in her best opera gown, tearing people limb from limb, biting out their throats and cramming the flesh into her ravenous mouth. Her crimson smile dripped blood and gore.
The Nightside’s very own transvestite super-hero, Ms. Fate, the man who dressed as a super-heroine to fight crime, finally came into her own. She stamped and pirouetted through crowds of maddened zealots, felling them with vicious kicks and blows as she moved gracefully from one martial art to another. No-one could stand against her, and no-one could touch her. Now and again she’d throw handfuls of razor-edged shuriken where they would do the most good. She might not have been making a whole lot of difference in the great scheme of things, but at long last Ms. Fate was the dark avenger of the night he’d always wanted to be.
The three fighters roamed far and wide, combining their efforts to break up mobs, save those under threat, and do what they could for the wounded and the lost. Walker sent more of his agents to back them up, when he could spare them, but there were never enough to do more than slow Lilith’s advance into the Nightside. Scene followed scene in the pool’s clear water as Lilith’s growing army marched in triumph through burning streets and devastated districts. Everywhere Lilith went, people flocked to join her growing army—either because they fell under the spell of her powerful personality, or because they were desperate to be on the winning side…
or just because they were afraid Lilith’s people would kill them if they didn’t.
She walked up and down in the Nightside, and buildings exploded where she looked. Fires burned at her word, and the street cracked apart where she walked. Bodies piled up because there was no-one left to take them away, and people ran screaming or sat huddled in the doorways of burned-out homes, driven out of their minds by shock and suffering. The mad and the desolate staggered whimpering through streets they no longer recognised, retreating endlessly before Lilith’s advancing forces. Walker’s people did their best to guide Lilith away from those areas where she could do the most damage, by goading her with hit-and-run tactics, falling back just slowly enough that she would be sure to follow them.
Still the Nightside was a big place, much larger than its official boundaries suggested, and there was a limit to how much death and destruction even Lilith and her forces could bring about. Walker’s people set up roadblocks, barricaded narrow passageways, and set up distractions, trying to herd Lilith into areas they’d already evacuated. Lilith didn’t seem to care where she went, as long as she got to kill or destroy everything she saw. She knew sooner or later she’d reach the people and places that really mattered. She was in no hurry. For the moment, she was just playing, indulging herself. If she had an overall plan, Walker couldn’t see it.