I got up from the headstone, unhurriedly, and waited for him to come to me. I can honestly say it never even occurred to me to run, to use my gift to get away, even though that would have been the sane thing to do. He stopped at the very edge of the gravel path and stared at me as though he’d never seen me before. He hefted the shining razor; and it occurred to me that the razor’s magics shouldn’t work here, in the face of so many defensive magics. Instead, it glared more fiercely than I’d ever seen before. Fuelled by the rage of the god who held it. Eddie held it up, so I could get a good look at the killing thing.
“I am a god,” he said, in his ghostly whispering voice. “People tend to forget that the Punk God of the Straight Razor isn’t just a title. I take my power with me, wherever I go. I exist to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. I have never allowed anything to get in my way.”
“You won’t even give an old friend the benefit of the doubt?” I said, standing very still.
“The friend I thought I had, the man I thought I knew, would never have murdered Julien Advent in cold blood.”
“I didn’t!”
“Liar.” Razor Eddie smiled at me slowly. “What a long, strange road it’s been, John. Sometimes friends, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. Typical enough, I suppose, for the Nightside. And now here we are, ready to go head to head, like in the prophecy . . . You should have listened, John. Dagon is never wrong about these things.” His smile slowly widened into a cold and remorseless thing. “All these years we’ve danced the dance, circling around each other . . . You must have known it would come to this, eventually. You must have wondered, which one of us would win, in a fight to the death?”
“No,” I said. “I can honestly say, the thought never crossed my mind.”
“Liar,” said Eddie, almost fondly.
“Eddie,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “For Julien Advent. Who never once approved of me, and quite right, too.”
He launched himself at me while he was still speaking, an old trick, but I was ready for that; and we went fighting up and down the gravel path, through the cold grey silence of the cemetery. And the fog swirled around us like the disturbed waters where sharks are circling with bad intent.
I knew I couldn’t face his razor, so I kept falling back before it, dodging and ducking where necessary. The brightly shining blade sliced clean through the top of a headstone, when I put it between myself and Eddie; and the blade hacked off the top corner in a moment, cutting through solid stone like it was paper. I kept moving, darting this way and that, trying to stay alive long enough to come up with some kind of strategy. He wasn’t even trying, yet. He was playing with me. So, when in doubt, raise the stakes. I stepped deliberately off the gravel path, into and among the graves, daring Eddie to follow. I could See the hidden dangers, but he couldn’t, for all his Punk Godness. He didn’t even hesitate. He stepped off the gravel path and straight onto a land mine.
The explosion was deafeningly loud on the quiet, and a great cloud of pulverised stone and earth filled the air. Bits of gravel rained down like shrapnel. And Razor Eddie came walking forward out of the dust cloud, like a wolf out of hiding. Untouched and unscathed, like the murderous force he was. I kept backing away, and he kept coming after me; and the ground between us erupted, as a rock golem, a clumsy, misshapen thing, twelve feet tall and more, with a featureless face and huge fists like mauls, rose out of the dark earth between us to confront him. It went for Razor Eddie, and he moved so quickly he was only a blur. His razor flashed like lightning, sparking on the air, everywhere at once. And when Razor Eddie stopped moving, the rock golem was gone, leaving only piles of scattered rock pieces to show where it had been. Very small, finely cut rock pieces. Razor Eddie smiled at me, and a cold hand clutched my heart.
I retreated further into the cemetery, being very careful where I put my feet, hiding among the looming mausoleums and family crypts. Razor Eddie came after me, cutting his way through a forest of tombstones and carving the sad faces off sculpted angels because they got in his way. I was still thinking furiously. I could have killed him. I’m pretty sure I could have found a way to kill him. Eddie had his razor, but I had all kinds of weapons, and a lifetime’s supply of dirty tricks. But he was still my friend, in his own strange, cold way, and I didn’t want to kill him. So I did what I always do, when I’m backed into a corner—improvise with extreme prejudice.
I goaded him into rushing me. “Getting old, Eddie! Getting soft and slow. Getting past it!”
He rushed forward as I finally stood my ground. And at the last moment I whipped off my white trench coat and threw it over Razor Eddie. It wrapped itself around him as he crashed to a halt, blinded and confused, fighting the coat’s enveloping folds and getting nowhere. Now, my coat has enough nasty magics and awful protections built into it that it could probably have won the fight on its own; but to be on the safe side, I picked up a chunk of stone that Eddie had sliced off a tombstone, and hit him over the head with it.
Eddie slumped to his knees, but he didn’t stop struggling, so I hit him again, putting all my strength and weight into it. The impact jarred my hand and arm painfully, and Eddie fell forward onto the ground between the graves and lay still. I took my coat back off him, and put it back on again.
“Don’t try and kid me you’re dead,” I said finally. “I might have rattled your brains a bit, Mr. high-and-mighty Punk God of the knife with attachment for getting stones out of horses’ hooves, but you don’t get taken out of the game that easily.”
I kicked his straight razor away from him, and his head came up immediately, to fix me with a cold dark glare. Blood ran thickly down the side of his face.
“Leave that alone!” he said. “Damn you, John. You only won by cheating, and you know it!”
“You always were a bad loser, Eddie,” I said. “The operative word is won. So I suggest you take a nice little rest until you’ve got all your marbles together again. Don’t try and follow me. Or I might have to do something more permanent to you.”
“I will find you!”
“No you won’t,” I said. “Good-bye, Eddie.”
I used my gift to find the tear he’d made in Space and Time with his razor, to let himself into the cemetery dimension. It was still there. I could See it clearly, hanging on the air over the gravel path. The wounds Razor Eddie makes in the world take time to heal. I moved quickly back between the graves and onto the path, pushed the sides of the gap apart, and squeezed up my eyes against the bright flare of light that fell through into the grey cemetery world. I looked back, just in time to see Razor Eddie stretch out one hand and the straight razor fly through the air to slap into his palm. Definitely time to be going. I stepped through the gap and back into the Nightside, letting the tear close behind me. I used my gift to find a way to close and seal it permanently, so he couldn’t come straight after me, and only then looked around to see where I’d ended up. I was pretty much where I’d expected, in the street outside the Necropolis itself. Ugly great building; a hulking brick monument to our continuing fascination with death.