Nightside 06 - Sharper Than a Serpents Tooth

brass handle.
    "Ah yes," said the Doormouse, easing chummily in beside me. "Everyone notices those."
    "Can they really take you where it says they go?" I said.
    "That is a matter of some debate," the Doormouse admitted, crinkling his muzzle. "The theory's sound, and the mathematics quite clear. Certainly no-one who's gone through has ever come back to complain…"
    "Let us talk of other things," I said.
    "Yes, let's," said the Doormouse.
    He led us past other doors, some labelled in languages and ideographs even I couldn't identify. And I've been around. We finally came to a door labelled Necropolis. The Doormouse patted it affectionately with one padded paw.
    "I always keep this one charged up and at the ready for people who need to visit the Necropolis for a sad occasion. Much more dignified than fighting the traffic in a black Rolls Royce. This door will deliver you and the… lady, to right outside the main entrance."
    "Not inside?" I said sharply.
    "She's started growling again," said the Doormouse. "No, no, sir. Never inside! My doors lead only to exterior locations. If word got out that I was willing to provide access to the interiors of buildings, thus circumventing all usual security measures, you can be sure the Authorities would send Walker to shut me down. With prejudice. Now, sir, let us talk of the price."
    We haggled for a while, and he drove a really hard bargain for a mouse. We finally settled for an only moderately painful extortionate sum, which I paid with gold from the traveller's pouch Old Father Time had given me, when I travelled back in Time. The pouch was seemingly bottomless, and I'm pretty sure Time meant for me to give it back to him when I returned, but I fully intended to hang on to it until it was wrestled from my grasp. The Doormouse opened the door with a flourish, and Suzie and I stepped through into another part of the Nightside.

    The Necropolis looked just as I remembered it; big, dark, and supernaturally ugly. I'd been here not long ago, with Dead Boy, to clean up an incursion by Primal demons. Which meant that technically speaking the Necropolis staff still owed me a favour. How much weight that had, when set against Walker's publicly stated disapproval, remained to be seen.
    The Necropolis itself was a huge towering edifice of old brick and stone, with no windows anywhere and a long, gabled roof. The various owners had been adding exteriors to it for years, in a clashing variety of styles, and yet the building maintained a traditional aspect of gloom and depression. The one and only front door was a massive slab of solid steel, rimmed with silver, covered with deeply etched runes and sigils and a whole bunch of nasty words in dead languages. Two huge chimneys at the back pumped out thick black smoke from the on-site crematorium.
    The Necropolis serves all the Nightside's funereal needs. Any religion, any ritual, any requests, no matter how odd or distressing. Cash up front and no questions asked. People paid serious money to ensure that their dearly departed could rest peacefully in their graves, undisturbed and unmolested by any of the many magicians, necromancers, and creatures of the night who might profess an unhealthy interest in the helpless dead. And, of course, to ensure that the dead stayed dead and didn't turn up unexpectedly to contest the will. In the Nightside, you learn to cover all the bases. I considered the ugly, sprawling building before me. Cathy was being held there somewhere, very much against her will, and if she'd been harmed in any way, someone was going to pay for it in blood and horror.
    "Enough travelling," said Suzie Shooter. "I feel the need to kill someone."
    "Questions first," I said. "But if anyone doesn't feel like talking, feel free to encourage them in violent and distressing ways."
    "You know how to show a girl a good time, Taylor."
    "Except, your secretary isn't in there," said a calm, quiet, and very familiar voice.
    We both looked round sharply and there he was, Razor Eddie, the Punk God of the Straight Razor, standing unnaturally still in the pool of light from a nearby street-lamp. Even though he very definitely hadn't been there a moment before. Razor Eddie, a painfully thin presence wrapped up in an oversized grey coat held together by accumulated filth and grime. His hollowed face was deathly pale and streaked with grime, dominated by fever-bright eyes and a smile that had absolutely no humour in it. We walked over to him, and the