“You really want to bring the Lord of Thorns into this? There’d be smiting everywhere and nowhere safe to hide.”
“All right, all right! You think of something! Where would the Sun King want to go next, in the Nightside? Who does he know here, apart from you?”
“Ah . . . There was someone,” Julien said slowly. “Someone he knew, back in our Haight-Ashbury days. A woman . . .”
“Of course!” I said. “There’s always a woman! Who is she?”
“She was the Goldberry to his Tom Bombadil,” said Julien. “His first real love and his first true passion, back in the Summer of Love. She was called Princess Starshine then, when she walked alongside the Sun King. She had power, too, briefly, from being so close to him. But when the time came, the Sun King didn’t take his Princess Starshine into the White Tower with him. He left her outside, with the others. After the Tower vanished, she waited and waited for it to reappear. She was the last to give up hope and the last to leave.”
“And she’s here, now, in the Nightside?”
“Has been for years. She’s a doctor, at the Hospice of the Blessed Saint Margaret. I know that because the Night Times helps raise funds to keep it going. No National Health Service here, unfortunately. If the Sun King knows she’s there, I think he’d go there. For old times’ sake. If . . . there’s anything left of the man I remember.”
“If you want to bring a man down, go through the woman he loves,” I said, rubbing my hands together happily. “Good thinking, Julien.”
“I used to be such a good man, once,” he said sadly.
“So did the Sun King,” I said. “And look where that got him.”
SEVEN
All Kinds of Miracles
When we finally stepped out of the alcove in the Garden wall and back into the Land of Down and Outs, I was surprised to see a long black limousine already there, waiting for us. It looked more than a little out of place in the kind of area where the words appalling and disgusting take on whole new and very extreme meanings. I took a quiet look around, but the locals had all disappeared, presumably to sleep off their recent feast. Julien Advent was already opening the back door of the limousine. I stayed right where I was and gave him my very best meaningful cough. Julien looked back and gave me his best urbane smile.
“I called for the car. My stomach has had more than enough of travelling by Portable Timeslip, while many of my nerves are currently on strike for better working conditions. You represent the Authorities now, John, and are fully entitled to all the little perks that go with your new position.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But this goes on your expense account, not mine.”
Julien smiled briefly. “You’re learning. Now get in, so I can shut the door. We’re letting all the ambience in.”
I slid into the back seat, and Julien followed me in quickly. The door shut itself after him, hardly making a sound. I leaned back in the richly padded seat and let loose a great sigh of pleasure as my muscles were finally able to relax. Julien picked up the interior phone and told the driver where to go. A uniformed chauffeur, of course, though I quickly realised that chauffeuse was more correct. A tall and elegant young lady in a white leather uniform, complete with a peaked white leather cap, over a platinum blonde buzz cut. She nodded briefly to Julien, without looking back.
“Sure thing, chief. Buckle up; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
A glass partition slid up, separating us from the driver. Presumably because Julien knew there were all sorts of questions I wanted to ask about how she and Julien knew each other. You can never have too much gossip. Julien had already opened up the interior bar, revealing a sparkling area full of crystal decanters. He helped himself to a glass of very good brandy, and I helped myself to a decanter. Julien gave me a reproving look. I grinned at him, and toasted him with the decanter.
“Any snacks in there? Chief?”
“No,” said Julien, very firmly, and he shut the bar quickly before I could go rooting around in it. “But the limousine does come equipped with an ejector seat for those passengers who’ve outstayed their welcome. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
I drank some really good brandy, straight from the decanter, and Julien winced. I think sometimes I’m a bit too much for his delicate sensibilities. Probably because I don’t possess any. He made a point of not looking in my direction as he picked up the interior phone again and contacted the news desk at the Night Times, to catch up with what had been happening in his absence. He listened for a while, then frowned and put the phone on speaker, so I could hear what he was hearing. It appeared that Brilliant Chang had already turned in his piece on what had gone down at the Ball of Forever, and I had come out of it surprisingly well. The voice at the other end of the phone read out some of the choicer bits, managing to sound both shocked and scandalised while enjoying himself immensely. Julien nodded.
“I’m going to have to write a special editorial on the passing of King of Skin when I get back. Doing him justice will be a challenge.”
“Will you be mentioning in passing that one of the co-founders of the new Authorities was actually a major serial killer, who wrapped himself in the living skins of his victims?” I said innocently.
“The Night Times stands for the truth,” Julien said stiffly. “Just not all the truth, all the time. In cases like this, it can be better to let the truth come out a bit at a time, so as not to . . . overwhelm people. On the other hand, we can’t hold some things back for fear of being scooped. You did say Bettie Divine was there . . . Damn. I’m going to have to try and balance the good with the bad. King of Skin did do admirable things, in his time. He did help found the new Authorities, and you might remember that he fought alongside us during the Lilith War. A lot of innocent people are only alive today because he put his life on the line to protect them.”
“Innocent?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “In the Nightside?”
“You know what I mean.”
“King of Skin only took on Lilith’s armies because they were destroying his own personal playground,” I said, letting the empty decanter drop onto the floor at my feet. Somebody should have refilled it; I’d only got a few drinks out of the damned thing. I sighed, feeling suddenly tired. Contemplating the endless ambiguities of the Nightside can take a lot out of you. “Just because the enemy of your enemy is your ally, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s your friend,” I said.
The voice at the other end of the speaker-phone asked, rather nervously, if he should continue, and Julien told him to get on with it. Possibly I wasn’t the only one who was feeling tired. We listened silently as the voice did its best to hit the high spots of what was happening in the Nightside. Apparently someone had dumped a whole bunch of piranha into a private swimming pool because someone had blackballed their membership bid. No-one had ever seen so many people leave a pool so quickly. They then turned the heating all the way up, broiled the piranha, and ate the lot. There was a metaphor for the Nightside in there somewhere, but I was too tired to work it out. Someone else had opened the wrong kind of book in the H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Library, and now there was a whole new building standing in the same place, the Linda Lovecraft Library of Spiritual Erotica. Explorers in protective suits were currently investigating the new contents. And something really unpleasant had possessed the lady news-reader of the local television station, on air, right in the middle of a broadcast. It had her saying really nasty and untruthful things for some time before anyone noticed. She had to be wrestled out of her seat and dragged off air, all the time speaking in tongues and swivelling her head round and round. Which is a really bad thing to do when you’re projectile vomiting something very like pea green soup. I had to smile. You’d think a Nightside television station would have enough sense to keep an exorcist on staff for emergencies like this. Some savings really are false economies.