Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

everything you have done will have been for nothing.”
    “Why?” I said. “What’s coming? What is it, damn you?”
    He leaned forward, to whisper the name.
    “Excalibur.”

THREE
    Familiar Faces, Come Round Again
    I headed for home, via the Underground. I must have been looking more than usually grumpy, because everyone gave me lots of room. A few of Walker’s security people were still hanging around the station entrance, but they made a point of looking the other way. I ended up sitting in a carriage on my own, indulging myself in a quiet brood. At least the trains are always on time in the Nightside. Supposedly because if a train does arrive late, the System Controller takes it out the back and shoots it, to put all the other trains in a properly motivated frame of mind.
    I still didn’t feel like going home, so I went to Strangefellows, the oldest bar in the world; where everybody knows your game. Not actually the sleaziest bar in creation, but pretty damned close. It was just another night in Strangefellows. The Witches of Woking were out on a hen night, getting tipsy on Mother Superior’s Ruin and reanimating the bar snacks so that they scampered back and forth on the table before them. Someone had got the Water Witch of Harpenden drunk by sneaking up behind her liquid form and injecting it with a horse hypodermic full of neat gin. You could actually see the ripples running up and down her as she giggled, lurching splashily between the tables, watering everyone’s drinks in passing. At another table, two vaguely humanoid robots from some future time-line were sucking on batteries and farting static.
    A young woman wearing far too much make-up was wailing for her demon lover, because he’d just dumped her and gone off with her best friend. A stone cherub from a nearby graveyard was checking its investments in the Financial Times, and frowning a lot. A newly reborn vampire was sitting sadly at a side-table, staring at the glass of wine before him, wine that he’d ordered but couldn’t drink. He was telling anyone who’d listen that he hadn’t wanted to come back as a vampire, that he’d tried so hard not to come back ... but he got so bored just lying in his coffin. So here he was now, with gravedirt still clinging to the good suit they’d buried him in, trying to come to terms with all the normal, everyday things he’d never be able to do again.
    He didn’t need to worry. If he kept up the self-pity routine long enough, someone would ram a stake through him if only to shut him up.
    I leaned on the bar, and waited for the barman to get around to serving me. Alex Morrisey owned and ran Strangefellows, and didn’t believe in being hurried. He was currently busy with a minor Norse deity at the other end of the long bar and was putting a lot of effort into ignoring me, but I was used to that. It was his little way of reminding me that I still hadn’t paid off my bar tab.
    Beside me on the bar an upturned top hat juddered briefly, then a pale, elegant hand emerged, waggling an empty glass plaintively in request for a refill. The magician had been in there for some time now, and we still hadn’t figured out a way to get him out. Damn, that rabbit had been angry. Never do a magic trick with a pookah. Further down the bar, two white-robed Sisters from the Order of Saint Strontium were getting stroppy over glowing Half-Life cocktails, and everyone else was giving them plenty of room. Any other bar would have banned them, but Alex liked having them around to irradiate some of the more elderly bar food.
    I leaned patiently on the bar, glad of a chance to do a little quiet thinking. As cases go, the elven client’s had been particularly annoying. Chased half-way across the Nightside, attacked from all sides at once, and not a penny richer at the end of it. Just a word of warning, a name out of legend. Excalibur ... I supposed I shouldn’t be so surprised. Everything turns up in the Nightside eventually. Except ... Excalibur never had before. Why now, and where had it been all this time? I was pretty sure the Collector never had it, if only because he’d never have stopped boasting about it. Could the sword’s reappearance into history be connected to Merlin Satanspawn’s recent final death? Or could it be heading here through a Timeslip, direct from King Arthur’s time? The trouble with the Nightside is that it offers so many more possible answers to a question than anywhere