Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

back when I was being an ordinary private eye. I thought I had him run to ground and cornered until he said a Word I’d never heard outside the Nightside, and the Green Door appeared before him. He hurried through it, and the Door vanished before I could reach it. And I ... turned round and went home because I was determined not to get involved in cases of the weird and uncanny any more.
    I heard later that the Knights executed the guy. Because he wasn’t worthy of their sanctuary.
    But things were different now. I wasn’t afraid to use my gift any more. I reached deep inside me, concentrating, and my inner eye, my private eye, slowly opened ... and there was the Green Door, right before me. It could hide from my Sight but not from my gift. My sole inheritance from my Biblical Myth mother. The Door itself looked stubbornly real and ordinary: flat green paint over featureless wood, with no handle, no bell, not even a knocker or a keyhole. It was, in fact, a Door that suggested very firmly that either you knew how to get in, or you had no business even trying.
    I tested the Green Door with my gift, searching out its secrets, and it didn’t take me long to discover the magical mechanisms that operated it. Very old, very simple, and very well protected. My gift could find them but not reach them. Which was frustrating. So I gave the Door a good kick on general principles, hurt my toe, and walked round in little circles for a while. I glared at the Green Door and seriously considered carving chunks out of it with Excalibur. However, since I’d come all this way to ask the London Knights a favour, open assault on their property probably wasn’t the best first impression I could be making. So, when everything else fails, try diplomacy. I put away my gift, dropped my Sight, and addressed the blank street wall in calm, civilised, and very polite tones. While studiously ignoring those passersby who wondered why I was talking to myself.
    “Hello, London Knights. I’m John Taylor. From the Nightside. I need to talk to you concerning something that’s a lot more in your line of work than mine. If it helps, Julien Advent vouches for me. If it doesn’t, I never met the man. Look, this really is something you want to know about. It’s Arthurian as all hell, and the words deep shit and approaching fan should be taken into consideration.”
    Still nothing. Arrogant bunch of pricks. I was considering the soothing properties of giving the wall another good hard kick when, almost without realising it, my hand rose and took a firm hold on the invisible hilt rising behind my shoulder. And the moment my bare flesh made contact with the ancient bone ... old, old words came to me.
    “I bear Excalibur, the Sword of Morning, the Hand of Albion. In the name of the Lady who has granted me her power, and in the name of the man who last wielded it, the once-and-future King, I demand audience with the last defenders of Camelot.”
    And the Green Door was suddenly there before me, very real and very solid, as though it always had been there and always would. I took my hand away from Excalibur’s hilt, and the Green Door opened slowly before me, retreating silently and not at all invitingly—revealing only an impenetrable darkness beyond. I took a deep breath, held my chin up, and walked right into it. Never let them think they’ve got you cowed, or they’ll walk right over you. The darkness swallowed me up, cold and limitless, and I barely had time to wonder whether I’d made a terrible mistake when a blast of light dispelled the darkness, and just like that I was standing in the entrance hall to a medieval castle.

    Which was pretty much what I’d been expecting. The London Knights are firmly steeped in tradition. I looked cautiously about me. There was no-one round to greet me, or any signs of human habitation at all. Only great towering walls of a rich creamy white stone, spotlessly clean, without any trace of decoration. The whole place could have been built the day before. Every separate stone in the massive walls had been set so tightly and so perfectly together that no mortar was needed. And that takes real skill and expert measurement.
    I appeared to have the whole great open space to myself. No-one there, and not even any windows or arrow slits through which I could be observed. I took a quick look behind me, but of course the Green Door was gone, replaced by a blank and very real wall. There was an open archway straight