The Truth

blood…covered with zer blood…zer blood…”
    “Quick!” said Sacharissa, pushing past William. “Mister Goodmountain, you hold his arms!” She waved at the dwarfs. “I was ready for this! Two of you hold his legs! Dozy, there’s a huge blutwurst in my desk drawer!”
    “…Let me valk in sunshine, living not in vein…” Otto crooned.
    “Oh, my gods, his eyes are glowing red!” said William. “What shall we do?”
    “We could try cutting his head off again?” said Boddony.
    “That was a very poor joke, Boddony,” Sacharissa snapped.
    “Joke? I was smiling?”
    Otto stood up, the cursing dwarfs hanging off his sparse frame.
    “Through thunderstorm and dreadful night, ve will carry on zer fight…”
    “He’s as strong as an ox!” said Goodmountain.
    “Hang on, maybe it would help if we joined in!” said Sacharissa. She fumbled in her bag and produced a slim blue pamphlet. “I picked this up this morning, from the mission in Abattoirs Lane. It’s their songbook! And”—she started to sniff again—“it’s so sad, it’s called ‘Walking in Sunshine’ and it’s so—”
    “You want us to have a singsong?” said Goodmountain, as the struggling Otto lifted him off the ground.
    “Just to give him moral support!” Sacharissa dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “You can see he’s trying to fight it! And he did lay down his life for us!”
    “Yes, but then he picked it up again!”
    William bent down and took up something from the wreckage of Otto’s iconograph. The imp had escaped, but the picture that it had painted was just visible. Perhaps it’d show—
    It wasn’t a good one of the man who’d called himself Brother Pin; his face was just a white blob in the glare of the light that humans couldn’t see. But the shadows behind him…
    He looked closer.
    “Oh, my gods…”
    The shadows behind him were alive.

    It was sleeting. Brother Pin and Sister Tulip slid and slithered through the freezing drops. Behind them, whistles were blowing in the murk.
    “Come on!” Pin yelled.
    “These —ing sacks are heavy! ”
    There were whistles blowing off to one side now, too. Mr. Pin wasn’t used to this. Watchmen shouldn’t be enthusiastic, or organized. He had been chased by watchmen before, when plans hadn’t quite worked out. Their job was to give up at the second corner, out of breath. He felt quite angry about that. The watchmen here were doing it wrong .
    He was aware of an open space to one side of him, full of damp swirling flakes. Below him there was a sluggish sucking noise, like a very bad digestion.
    “This is a bridge! Chuck ’em in the river!” he commanded.
    “I fort we wanted to find—”
    “Doesn’t matter! Get rid of all of ’em! Right now! End of problem!”
    Sister Tulip grunted a reply, and skidded to a halt at the parapet. The two whining, yapping sacks went straight on over.
    “Did that sound like a —ing splash to you?” said Sister Tulip, peering through the sleet.
    “Who cares? Now run! ”
    Mr. Pin shivered as he sped on. He didn’t know what had been done to him back there, but he’d felt like he’d walked over his own grave.
    He felt he had more than just watchmen after him. He speeded up.

    In reluctant but marvelous harmony, because no one could sing like a group of dwarfs, even if the song was “May I Suck of Water Pure,” * the dwarfs seemed to be calming Otto down.
    Besides, the horrible black emergency blutwurst had finally been produced. For a vampire this was the equivalent of a cardboard cigarette to a terminal nicotine addict, but it was at least something he could get his teeth into. When William finally tore his gaze away from the horror of the shadows, Sacharissa was mopping Otto’s brow.
    “Oh, vunce again I am so ashamed, vhere can I put my head, it’s so—”
    William held up the picture.
    “Otto, what’s this?”
    In the shadows were mouths, screaming. In the shadows were eyes, wide. They didn’t move while you watched them, but if you looked at the picture a second time you got a feeling that they weren’t quite in the same place.
    Otto shuddered.
    “Oh, I used all zer eels I had,” he said.
    “And—?”
    “Oh, they’re awful ,” breathed Sacharissa, looking away from the tortured shadows.
    “I feel so wretched,” said Otto. “Obviously they vere too stronk—”
    “Tell us, Otto!”
    “Vell…the iconograph does not lie, you have heard zis?”
    “Of course.”
    “Yes? Vell…under stronk