Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

smiled uncertainly at Suzie. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to put everything on hold for a while. Sweetie. Big trouble in the Nightside. Now, I really would love to stop and help you clear up all this mess, but you know how it is when duty calls.”
    She looked at me dangerously. “I do not do housework!”
    But I’d already taken out the old gold pocket-watch that used to belong to Walker. I opened the lid and activated the Portable Timeslip inside, and just like that I was off and travelling through the void, on my way to save the Nightside, one more time.

TWO
    You’ve Either Got or You Haven’t Got Soul
    The pocket-watch locked onto Julien Advent’s location and took me straight to him. I have no idea how it does that, but I’m growing increasingly convinced that there’s something else inside the gold pocket-watch, apart from the Portable Timeslip. And one of these days I’m going to dig it out with a butter-knife. Walker did so love to keep his little secrets. I arrived in the main bar of the Adventurers Club, where heroes from all over the worlds gather, to test themselves against the challenges of the Nightside. I have never been invited to become a member.
    I spent a few moments shaking my head gently until all the bits settled back into place again. Travelling through the Portable Timeslip’s interdimensional short cut is never easy. It’s dark in there, darker than any night, and cold enough to chill the soul. There are voices in that dark, voices not in any way human, calling out to be freed, promising anything, pleading, threatening terrible things. But then, you can get that walking down any street in the Nightside. A bad trip, though, in every sense. How did Walker stand it? He always appeared out of nowhere, looking cool and calm and collected, as though he were out for a stroll. I had a strong feeling I’d arrived looking like someone who’d just been thrown out of the drunk tank.
    I shook the last of the darkness out of my head and looked round. It had been a while since I’d been allowed into the Adventurers Club bar, and I was already rehearsing how many terribly expensive drinks I could demand before I was asked to leave. The place was exhaustingly spectacular and downright lousy with luxury, and the bar itself was a work of art fashioned from gleaming mahogany and brightly polished glass and crystal. Stacked in obsessively neat rows behind the bar was every kind of booze you’ve ever dreamed of and a few that would haunt your nightmares.
    But what really caught my attention was how empty the place was. Normally, you couldn’t move for heroes and warriors and would-be legends, fighting for a place at the bar and complaining bitterly over the bartender’s inflexible rules when it came to extending credit. This time there was no crowd, no bartender; only a whole lot of silence. You could almost hear the wine aging. And half-way down the bar, Julien Advent sat perfectly poised on a tall bar-stool, drinking pink champagne. With his little finger properly extended, of course.
    Julien Advent: tall, dark, and handsome in the old style, the great Victorian Adventurer who fell through a Timeslip in the nineteenth century and emerged in the Nightside in the nineteen sixties. And didn’t appear to have aged a day since. Julien is the real deal, a real hero and a complete gentleman. He tends not to approve of me, or my methods—except when he needs me to do something no-one else can. We’re friends, sometimes despite ourselves. I walked over to him, looked briefly but longingly at the bottles behind the bar, so near and yet so far, and nodded to Julien.
    “You could offer me a drink, you know. I could be persuaded.”
    “No, you couldn’t,” he said calmly. “You don’t have time.”
    “Oh hell,” I said. “It’s one of those cases, is it? And where is everybody, anyway?”
    “Out and about,” said Julien. “Doing their best to keep a lid on things. Since Walker died, so very suddenly and unexpectedly, the news has shot round the Nightside. And a great many not-at-all-nice people have been running wild, taking advantage. Seeing what they can get away with until Walker’s replacement steps up to dispense law and justice and general beatings. That’s you, by the way. But since you weren’t immediately available, I deputised everyone in the Club and sent them out into the streets to restore order, by any means necessary, and slap down anyone who looked like getting