Nightside 06 - Sharper Than a Serpents Tooth

this!"
    "I need to make use of some of your items," I said, declining to enter a conversation I knew wasn't going to go anywhere useful. "I need to catch up on what's been happening in the Nightside, while I was away."
    "Well, I don't know about that, Mr. Taylor… you don't actually have a line of credit with us, and in the current circumstances…"
    "Charge it to Walker," I said.
    The shop's owner brightened immediately. "Oh, Mr. Walker! Yes, yes, one of my most valued customers. You're sure you have his… well, of course you do! Of course! No-one ever takes Mr. Walker's name in vain, eh? Eh? I'll just put it all on his bill…"
    He bustled away, and I followed him through an inconspicuous door into a hall of mirrors. They hung in uneven rows on the two walls, with no obvious means of support. They were long and tall, round and wide, in silver frames and in gold, and one by one they opened themselves to me, to show me visions of the recent past.

    I saw Lilith burst out of the Street of the Gods, at the head of an army of her monstrous children and maddened followers. I watched as she commanded them to kill every living thing who wouldn't bow down and worship her and swear eternal loyalty to her cause. I heard her order them to destroy every building and structure in her path. Burn it all down, she said. I won't be needing it. And I wouldn't let myself look away as the mirrors showed me bloody slaughter, ancient buildings crumbling, flames rising into the night sky, death and destruction on an almost inconceivable scale. The bodies piled up as people ran screaming through the wreckage of their lives.
    I saw Walker, working desperately to organise resistance from the safe haven of Strangefellows bar. Hidden and protected, for the moment, by Merlin Satanspawn's defences. Someone had healed Walker of the injuries he'd taken on the Street of the Gods, but his face was gaunt with stress and fatigue, and there were heavy dark shadows under his eyes. For the first time in all the time I'd known him, he didn't look confident. I watched and listened as he tried again and again to contact the Authorities, to summon the armed forces that had always backed him up in the past. But no-one ever answered him. He was on his own.
    I ordered the mirror before me to concentrate on a specific time and place: on what Walker was doing the day before I arrived back in the Nightside. The mirror narrowed its focus and showed me.

    Walker sat at a table pushed right up against the long bar in Strangefellows, poring over reports brought to him by a series of runners, deathly tired men and women only kept going by duty and honour and the pills Walker passed out by the handful. Walker looked in really bad shape; but still he studied his reports and gave orders in a calm, unhurried voice, and his agents went straight back out into the night again, to do what was needed.
    The bar had the look of a place under siege. It was dark and overcrowded, with people sitting slumped at tables or on the floor, nursing their drinks and their hurts and their remaining strength. A healer was running a rough-and-ready clinic in one corner, doing meatball sorcery on the worst wounds to get people on their feet, so they could be sent out again. The floor was stained with blood and other fluids. People were coming and going all the time, and most of them had that driven, damned, defeated look in their faces. A few were sleeping fitfully on pushed-together mattresses, twitching and crying out miserably in their sleep.
    An unseen band was playing the old Punk classic "He Fucked Me with a Chainsaw and It Felt Like a Kiss." Which was worrying. Alex only ever plays Punk when he's in a really bad mood, and then wise men check their change carefully and avoid the bar snacks. Alex was behind the bar, as usual, making Molotov cocktails out of his reserve stock and complaining loudly about having to use some of his better vintages. He comforted himself by adding a splash of holy water to every bottle, to give the mixture that little extra bite. Alex had a particularly unpleasant sense of humour when he put his mind to it.
    Betty and Lucy Coltrane stood poised in the centre of the bar, their bulging muscles distended, each of them holding a really vicious-looking shillelagh carved out of blackthorn root and covered in deeply etched runes. Now and again some poor damned fool would force his way past Merlin's defences and teleport blindly into the bar, hoping to impress Lilith