Nightside 02 - Agents of Light and Darkness

own pre-emptive strike in first.”
    “The Collector hired you?” I said. “I didn’t think you had any use for money any more?”
    “I don’t,” said Razor Eddie. “His payment was the current location of the Warriors of the Cross. I’d been looking for those bastards for some time. They’d been hauling teenage runaways off to their hidden base and brainwashing them, then sending them out to act as spies, and honey to trap more kids. They were going to be the cannon fodder of the Crusade.”
    “So the Collector definitely has the Unholy Grail now?” I said.
    “Put it into his hands myself. Ugly thing. But more and more it seemed to me that he is not a fit person to have such a thing. I can’t touch him. I gave my word. But I never said anything about you. So you come to me, and I’ll tell you where the Collector is hiding out these days. Then you can take the damned thing away from him and put it somewhere safe. Sound good to you?”
    “Best thing I’ve heard all day. Where are you, Eddie?”
    “Back at the Warriors of the Cross’s hideout, having a bit of a look round for anything else of interest.”
    “You mean looting,” I said.
    He chuckled dryly. “Old habits die hard. You know Big Sergei’s Warehouse, on Kaynek Avenue?”
    “I know it. Be with you in twenty minutes. You do know that there are angels in the Nightside, from Above and Below, kicking the crap out of anyone they even suspect has any connection with the Unholy Grail?”
    “I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me,” said Razor Eddie. He hung up.
    I put my mobile away, and turned to Suzie. She looked as calm and composed as usual, ice-cold and perfectly poised. I filled her in on the parts of the conversation she’d missed, and she frowned.
    “Why couldn’t he just tell you where the Collector is over the phone?”
    “Because you never know who might be listening,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a secure line in the Nightside. You know Big Sergei’s place?”
    “Can’t say I do.”
    “He’s Russian mafioso. You want it, he can get it for you. Guns and armor a specialty, which is presumably why the Warriors of the Cross went to him. You’ll like him, Suzie, if Razor Eddie’s left anything of him.”
    “You know all the best people, Taylor. Let’s go. I want to get this case over with.”
    “Suzie…”
    “Let’s go.”
    So we went, together, once more side by side.

Death Comes Suddenly

    S uzie and I hurried through largely deserted streets, while fires burned all across the Nightside, like warning balefires set against the dark. The air was thick with smoke and drifting ashes, and the smell of bodies burning. Buildings exploded, blown apart by angelic light, like party favors in Hell. There were so many angels flying overhead now that they blocked out most of the light from the moon and the stars. Most of the street-lights were smashed. The Nightside was at its lowest ebb, illuminated mostly by the leaping flames of its own destruction. Suzie and I stuck to the shadows and sprinted through the shifting pool of light. The streets seemed eerily still and quiet without the usual massed traffic rushing endlessly past, but everyone who could leave the Nightside was long gone by now, and no-one outside was stupid enough to come in.
    Angels had come to the Nightside, from Above and Below, and the night had never seemed so dark.
    Down in Time Tower Square, some of the area’s major players had come out into the streets, out into the open, to make a last stand against the invading forces. Suzie and I watched from the shadows of a recessed doorway and hoped not to be noticed. The Lord of Thorns stood proudly with his staff of power, cut from the Tree of Life itself. Lightning crackled around him, and he laughed like a crow on a battlefield as angels wheeled away rather than meet his baleful gaze. Count Video leaned casually against a lamp-post, wrapped in static and shifting plasma lights, his pale skin studded with silicon nodes and sorcerous circuitry. He sniggered nastily as his long-fingered hands weaved binary magic, rewriting reality with applied description theory and insane mathematics, and the angels couldn’t get anywhere near him. King of Skin slouched into the Square, his eyes bright with glory, undoing probabilities with his terrible glamour. And Bloody Blades, reeking of sweat and musk and awful appetites, snorted and stamped his great hooves impatiently as he waited for one of the