Nightside 09 - Just Another Judgement Day

will stop the Walking Man?” said Chandra.
    “No. But then, his god is bigger than everyone else’s god.”
    “I am a khalsa,” said Chandra. “I do not believe . . . that this Walking Man can do anything that I cannot.”
    “You can believe anything you like, on the Street of the Gods,” I said. “But that doesn’t necessarily make it true.”
    There was the sudden sound of loud and angry confrontation, from further down the Street. I started running again, with Chandra pounding along behind me. He was in better shape than I, but he was carrying more weight, so I kept a comfortable lead. I felt a very definite need to encounter situations or Beings before Chandra did. He had a disturbing tendency to say exactly what he was thinking, and that can get you into a whole lot of trouble on the Street of the Gods.
    Lots of other people were running right alongside me, including a whole bunch of tourists with their cameras at the ready. We do love our free entertainment in the Nightside, especially if it promises to be dramatic, violent, and quite spectacularly bloody. And given that this involved the Walking Man, it promised to be all three. He was standing quite calmly in the middle of the Street, his long duster hanging open to reveal the guns still holstered on his belt. He was surrounded by proponents of a whole bunch of belief systems, singing the praises of their gods and denouncing the Walking Man as a heretic, an unbeliever, or worse still, a fake prophet. Even more were shouting insults from the safety of their church doors. And yet, nobody wanted to get too close to him. Even the fiercest of believers, the most fanatical wide-eyed extremists, could sense the power and the threat of the Walking Man. Even standing still, he was more frightening and more dangerous than any of the Beings on the Street of the Gods.
    You just knew it.
    I pushed my way through the crowd surrounding the Walking Man, and most people only gave me a quick glance before getting out of my way. Probably because they were curious to see what I was going to do. My name moved swiftly through the crowd, along with a sense of Now we’re going to see something . . . Chandra Singh stuck close behind me. I was huffing and puffing from the run, and he wasn’t even out of breath. And then the Walking Man opened his mouth to speak, and everyone fell silent.
    “You aren’t gods,” he said, in a calm but still loud and carrying voice. “You’re spiritual con men, confidence tricksters offering false faith and false hope. Is there a greater sin?”
    “Even false hope is better than none,” I said. “Especially in a place like the Nightside.” Everyone around me fell back to what they clearly hoped was a safe distance. The Walking Man looked at me, and I met his gaze firmly. I needed to get him talking, try to reason with him, before the horror I sensed hanging on the air erupted into bloody murder. There had to be a way to reach him. Before all hell broke lose.
    The Walking Man did me the politeness of considering my words for a moment, then shook his head. “No. All of... this is just a distraction from the true God, the real God, and a real state of grace. God is God, and none of these pretenders can be allowed to continue in their offences. There’s no room for mercy when souls are at stake.”
    “What are you going to do?” I said bluntly. “Fight your way into all the churches and temples, drag the gods out into the Street, and shoot them all in the head? Even if you could do that, which I rather doubt, there are so many of them, you’d still be at it years from now.”
    “I have faith,” said the Walking Man. “And faith can move mountains, never mind a false Church or two.” He stopped and glared across the Street at a grimy stone edifice. “I mean, come on, look at that. The Temple of the Unspeakable Abomination. Who in their right mind would want to worship that ?”
    “Someone looking for an unfair advantage, probably,” I said. “It’s all about the deals you can make on the Street of the Gods. Faith is currency here, with valuable prizes to be won by the faithful. You can win good fortune, bad cess to your enemies, transformation or immortality, and everything in between, if you make the right kind of deal with the Being of your choice. Though the price will almost certainly be your soul, or someone else’s. And I don’t see that you’re in any position to protest. You made a deal, didn’t you? To put your