Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

in the star-filled skies, looking down at the twisting, turning streets of the Nightside.
    So much light for so dark a place.
    Street-lights and neon signs, and all the blazing multi-coloured come-ons from a town where sin is always in season. Scientific and magical glows, sputtering and flaring and detonating in the night, as a thousand forbidden experiments ran their inevitable courses. The dazzling streaks and smears of light from cars and trucks and other things as they roared endlessly along the Nightside roads, never slowing, never stopping. Neon illuminations, gleaming defiantly from clubs and bars and emporiums, beckoning on men and women with empty hearts and overburdened wallets. Let a thousand poisoned flowers bloom, pushing back the dark with their harsh glamour.
    I sent my Sight flying over the Nightside, and it turned slowly beneath me, a city within a city, a world within a world. My Sight showed me the world as it really was and not as we would have it. Huge and transparent, their crowned heads scraping against the sky, the colossal Awful Ones went about their unknowable business, striding through solid buildings as though they weren’t even there. Long, sleek, bat-winged shapes soared through the chill upper air, flames leaping up from deep-set eyes and wide, fanged mouths. And wee-winged faeries came streaking through the night in shimmering flocks, speeding and darting back and forth in intricate patterns, leaving behind sparkling trails of sheer exuberance.
    But no matter where I went or where I looked, I couldn’t See the Collector or his lair. I looked up into the frigid glow of the huge oversized Moon that dominated the Nightside sky. The Collector had a base there once, hidden away deep under the Sea of Tranquility; but he hadn’t gone back. It isn’t easy, to look at the Moon in the Nightside. There is no man in the Moon in that pallid, cratered sphere. It’s so big, so overwhelming, the whole thing seems like one great senile face. And if that face had ever known anything worth knowing, it had forgotten it long ago.
    A thought occurred to me. Since the sun never has and never will shine in the Nightside, exactly what light is our oversized and eternally full Moon reflecting? A disturbing thought ... for another day.
    I looked down at the Nightside, spread out before me like the most seductive whore in the world. Promising everything and anything, her wide smile and inviting eyes hiding the cold calculation in her heart. The Collector belonged in a place like this, where we all know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The Collector could be richer than anyone if he’d only sell the smallest part of his magnificent collection. He could give up running and hiding and settle down in comfort. But he’d never give up his collection. It was all he had.
    The more I looked down, the more I could feel the Collector’s presence even if I couldn’t See him. He was there, somewhere. I looked down and down, and my Sight plunged suddenly through the packed streets and further on down, into the places below the Nightside. I ignored the World Beneath, and the subterranean galleries, and the worms of the Earth, following a trail I could sense, if not put a name to. My Sight led me on, like a hound hot on a scent. And all at once I knew where the Collector had gone to ground this time.
    The many tunnels and platforms and stations of the Underground rail system spread out spiralling before me, an endless series of branching and interconnecting tunnels, twisting and turning through the bedrock, sometimes diving dangerously deep. I could See travellers on their platforms, and trains roaring through their tunnels, blinking on and off as they dropped in and out of other-dimensional short cuts, to take them to places that weren’t really places. And there, hidden quietly away in the heart of the system, deep in the insanely complicated mess of new and old stations, was the Collector’s new secret lair.
    My first clue was heavy-duty magical shields where there shouldn’t have been any. My Sight drifted lightly through the defences, and immediately I Saw signs of life and power and arcane energies emanating from a shut-down station no-one had used in years. There are a great many stations in the Underground that no-one visits any more. Replaced or abandoned, or sealed off and forgotten because they’d become too dangerous, or disturbing. Just like the Collector, to hide his precious