Nightside 06 - Sharper Than a Serpents Tooth

that into a loft conversion. The bare-raftered room turned out to be a lot bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside, but that's a common spell in the Nightside, where living space is at a premium. The Beadle's living quarters were all hanging drapes and throw cushions, in assorted eye-dazzling colours, along with fresh flowers in tall vases, Andy Warhol prints on the walls, and delicate little china statuettes of wide-eyed kittens.
    Dead Boy headed immediately for the rack of wine bottles at the far end of the room, sampled several of them in an experimental sort of way, before finally settling for a thick blue liquor that seethed heavily against the containing glass. Personally, I wouldn't have used it for cleaning combs. Dead Boy took a long drink straight from the bottle, shuddered slightly, then grinned widely.
    "It takes a lot to affect you, when you're dead," he said cheerfully. "But this stuff's got a kick like one hundred and twenty per cent embalming fluid."
    I wrestled the bottle away from him and put it to one side. "Trust me," I said. "You really don't want to do what I've got in mind while you're drunk."
    "I hate it already," said Dead Boy.
    We arranged ourselves as comfortably as we could on the embroidered throw cushions, and I explained slowly and carefully just what it was I had in mind. First, I described in some detail the devastated future Nightside I'd seen in the Timeslip. The ruined buildings and the terrible silence, in which the only things moving were swarming mutated insects. Humanity was gone, and all the world was dead and cold. A future that was my fault, somehow. Julien and Dead Boy listened intently, drinking in the details. They'd heard rumours of what I'd seen, most of the Nightside had, but I'd never told anyone the whole story. And even now, I kept a few things to myself. They didn't need to know about the Razor Eddie I found there, the last living man in the world. They didn't need to know I killed him, with his own razor, as a mercy.
    Of course, when I finished my story they had to argue with me. They were far too sophisticated to believe in a single, unavoidable future. In Fate, or Destiny.
    "There are any number of potential time-lines, possible futures," said Julien, a little condescendingly. "None of them more certain than any other."
    "Right," said Dead Boy. "My own car comes from an alternate future that clearly has nothing to do with the one you described."
    "Once, that might have been true," I said. "But our future, the future our time-line is heading towards, is getting more certain all the time. I've… seen things. Signs, portents, details coming true despite everything I could do to avoid them. According to Old Father Time, the number of possibilities for our time-line is narrowing down, steadily decreasing to only one inevitable future."
    "Because of your mother," said Julien.
    "Yes," I said. "Because of Lilith. She's such a powerful Being that her mere presence here is enough to overturn the whole apple-cart and rewrite the rules of reality itself."
    I let them consider that for a while, then pressed on. They had to understand the background of my thinking, in order to appreciate what I intended to do.
    "I have become increasingly convinced," I said slowly, "that the War I'm supposed to start with Lilith and her followers could be the very thing that will bring about the destruction of the Nightside. That we'll tear the world apart, fighting over it. So I've decided I can't go any further, in good conscience, without better information. And the only people who can offer me that… are my Enemies. The people who've been sending their agents to kill me for as long as I can remember."
    Julien leaned forward eagerly. "You finally found out who they are?"
    "Yes," I said. "They're the last surviving major players of the devastated future, hiding out in the final stages of the War, sometime before my visit in the Timeslip. The few remaining heroes and villains, desperately sending their agents back into the Past, to kill me before I do… whatever it is I do, to damn everyone."
    Mien and Dead Boy looked at me, silenced by shock, by the staggering implications of what I'd just said.
    "Who… ?" said Julien.
    "Familiar names, familiar faces," I said. "You'd know them."
    (I didn't tell Julien Advent that he would become one of my Enemies, in that terrible future. Or that he would die trying to kill me, and his dead body would be made over into one of the awful