Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth Read online

  “My masters and my mistresses,” he said, in a calm, cold, and utterly hopeless voice. “The revels now are ended.”

  The watching crowd grew loudly agitated, crying out in awe and shock and wonder at the unexpected sights before them. They argued amongst themselves as to what it all meant, and zealots struck out at those nearest with fists and harsh words. No-one likes to admit they may have backed a losing horse. The quicker-thinking in the crowd were already kneeling and crying out praises to Lilith. The prophesiers of doom, those persistent grey creatures with their hand-made signs saying THE END IS NIGH seemed most put out. They hadn’t seen this coming. Lilith smiled at them.

  “You are all redundant now. I am the End you have been waiting for.”

  More shadows, blasted into crumbling brickwork, more fading echoes of startled screams.

  Lilith looked unhurriedly about her, considering the various divine forms gathered before her, in all their shapes and incarnations, and they all flinched a little under that thoughtful gaze, even if they didn’t remember why. She made them feel nervous, unworthy, on some deep and primal level. As though she knew something they had tried very hard to forget, or, if never known, had somehow always suspected.

  “I am Lilith,” she said finally. “First wife to Adam, thrown out of Eden for refusing to acknowledge any authority but mine own. I descended into Hell and lay down with demons, and gave birth to monsters. All my marvellous children—the first to be invited to dwell in my Nightside. You are all my children, or descendants of my children. You are not gods, and never were. It takes more than worship to make you divine. I made you to be splendid and free, but you have grown small and limited down the many years, seduced by worship and acclaim, allowed yourselves to be shaped and enslaved by the imaginations of humanity. Well, playtime is over now, children. I am back, in the place I made for us, and it’s time to go to work. I’ve been away too long, and there is much to be put right.

  “I have been here for some time, watching and learning. I walked among you, and you knew me not. You’ve been playing at being gods for so long you’ve forgotten you were ever anything else. But you owe your existence and loyalty to me. Your lives are mine, to do with as I please.”

  The Beings and Forces and Powers looked at each other, stirring uneasily. It was all happening so fast. One minute they were being worshipped as divine, and the next…Some of them were beginning to remember. Some shook their heads in hopeless denial, even as tears ran down their faces. Some didn’t take at all kindly to being reminded of their true origins and obligations, and shouted defiance. And quite a large number were distinctly resentful at finding out they weren’t gods at all and never had been. The watching worshippers retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance, and let the gods argue it out amongst themselves. The argument was getting quite noisy, if not actually raucous, when Lilith silenced them all with a single sharp gesture.

  “You,” she said, pointing to a single figure at the front of the pack. “I don’t know you. You’re not one of mine. What are you?”

  The Engineer stared calmly back at her, while everyone else edged away from him. He was squat and broad and only vaguely humanoid, with blue steel shapes piercing blue flesh, and long strips of bare muscle tissue held together with bolts and springs. Steam hissed from his naked joints, his eyes glowed like coals, and if you got close enough you could hear his heart ticking. He was surrounded and protected by a group of gangling metal constructions, of intricate design and baroque sensibilities, though whether they were the engineer’s worshippers or his creations was unclear.

  “I am a Transient Being,” said the Engineer, in a voice like metal scraping against metal. “A physical incarnation of an abstract idea. I am immortal because I am a concept, not because I have your unnatural blood in my ancestry. The world has become so much more complex since your time, Lilith. All of this…is none of my business. So I’ll leave you to get on with it.”

  He turned and walked sideways from the world, disappearing down a direction most of those present couldn’t even comprehend, let alone identify, and in a moment he was gone. The steel-and-brass constructions he left behind collapsed emptily, so much scrap metal littering the ground. Lilith stood silent for a moment, nonplussed. That hadn’t been in the script. Emboldened by the Engineer’s defiance, some of the Beings stepped forward to confront Lilith.

  “We heard you were banished,” drawled the Splendid, leaving a shimmering trail behind him as he moved. “Forced out of the world you made, by those you trusted and empowered.”

  “Thrust into Limbo,” said La Belle Dame du Rocher, in her watery voice. “Until some damned fool let you out, let you back into the Nightside to trouble us again with bad dreams of our beginnings.”

  “Some say you’ve been here for years,” said Molly Widdershins, showing her stained and blocky teeth in something that was only nominally a smile. “So where have you been hiding, all this time?”

  “Not hiding,” said Lilith, and the chill in her voice made them all fall back a pace. “I’ve been…preparing. So much to do, and so many to do it to. And then, of course, I had to produce a new child, and see to his education. He is mine, body and soul, even if he doesn’t realise it yet. My dearest darling John Taylor.”

  The name rumbled through the crowd, from worshippers and worshipped alike, and not in a good way. Many shifted uneasily, and aspects flickered on and off in the crowd like heat lightning. The Splendid opened his perfect mouth to protest further, and Lilith reached out and touched him lightly on the forehead. He cried out in shock and horror as his life energy was ripped right out of him, to feed Lilith’s endless hunger. She sucked him dry in a moment, watching calmly as he crumpled and shrivelled up before her, all his power nothing more to her than a drop in her ocean. The Splendid blinked out and was gone, as though he had never been. Lilith smiled about her.

  “Just a little illustration of my mood, so everyone knows where they stand. I may be your mother, but I won’t abide over-familiarity. Now, where are those who banded together to betray me, so very long ago? To banish me from my own creation? Step forward, that I might look upon your faces once again.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause, then the Devil’s Bride stepped forward reluctantly, the conjoined twin in the hump on her back peering over her shoulder. “They’re all gone, mistress,” said the little twin, in a sweet seductive voice. “Long and long ago. They killed each other, or were brought down, or grew irrelevant to the modern world and just faded away. There’s only one left that we know of. Its original name is lost to us. We call it the Carrion in Tears, and it is quite insane.”

  She darted back into the safety of the crowd, while others pushed forward the Carrion in Tears, a huge body of rotting flesh, red and black and purple, with jagged ends of bones protruding from suppurating flesh. Forever decaying, never dying, quite mad. It snapped at the world with broken teeth, dull grey in muddy scarlet flesh, and its cloudy eyes were fixed and staring.

  “It incorporates dead things into itself,” volunteered Molly Widdershins. “They keep it going. Make it strong.”

  “And this…has followers?” said Lilith.

  “Of a kind,” said Molly.

  “Proof, if proof were needed, that some people will worship absolutely anything,” said Lilith. “As long as it has the stink of immortality about it.”

  Some of the Carrion in Tears’ worshippers were thrust forward through the crowd, to face Lilith. They dressed in soiled rags and torn plastic, with grime artfully smeared across their faces. The oldest among them raised his head proudly and stood defiantly before Lilith.

  “We worship it because it shows us the truth. The real world is filth and rot, pollution and corruption. Our god shows us the dirty truth behind the pretty face. When all else is fallen into ruin, our god will remain, and we will be with him.”

  “No you won’t,” said Lilith. “You offend me even more than he does.” And she killed them all, with a glance.


  The Carrion in Tears didn’t notice. It was too busy digesting a dead angel it had noticed lying by its foot. Inch by inch, the dead angel was sucked into the Being’s corrupt flesh and absorbed. The smell was awful, and even other Beings looked away. The Carrion in Tears straightened up abruptly, as the last lingering traces of the angel’s divine energies surged through it, and shocked the slumbering mind awake. It cried out, a thick choking sound of horrid awareness, and fixed Lilith with its staring eyes.

  “You! This is all your fault! See what has become of me! Look at what driving you out did to me!”

  “I see it,” Lilith said calmly. “Fair punishment, I’d have said, for a traitor and a fool.”

  “It was necessary,” said the Carrion in Tears, but it sounded tired, as though repeating an old, worn-out argument. “And now you’re back, and it was all for nothing. I told them, but they wouldn’t listen…Kill me if you want. I don’t care. I was beautiful once, and adored…I don’t recognise this Nightside. You won’t either. It’s all changed. It’s moved on and left us behind.”

  “Killing you would be a mercy, in your current state,” said Lilith. “But what the hell. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

  She absorbed all its living energies in a moment, then made a moue of distaste with her night-dark mouth as the Carrion in Tears vanished into her. “Nasty,” she said to the silent crowd. “But I promised myself that I’d kill all of my old enemies who survived, and I always keep my word. Now, step forward, my children. The original productions of my young and lusty flesh.”

  She called for them by their original names, and again there was a long pause. Finally, a mere handful of Beings made their way to the front of the crowd to face their long-forgotten mother. First was the Harlequin, who knelt before her in his chequered finery and bowed his masked head to her.

  “I am here, mother dear, though much-changed by time and circumstance. I allowed myself to be shaped by fashion and fad, but still I survive, and still I dance. I would like to think that you could still see something in me that you would recognise.”

  “I change, too, when I must,” said the Incarnate, bowing elegantly to Lilith. He was young and pretty, dressed in an immaculate white suit of impeccable cut, his noble face attractively androgynous under a white panama hat. “The details change, but I go on, worshipped and adored. At present I am a pop sensation, singing for my supper, and teenage girls worship my image on their bedroom walls. I am the Thin White Prince, and they love my music and they love me. Don’t you, my little doves?”

  A pack of fierce young girls surrounded him, dressed just like him, their overly made-up faces sullen and aggressive. You could see in their faces that he was more than life itself to them, and they would die for him in a moment. Some actually spat and hissed at Lilith, sensing a threat to their beloved idol. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

  “I know,” said the Thin White Prince. “But one takes one’s adoration where one can find it.”

  And finally, there was Bloody Blades. He crouched uncertainly before Lilith, snorting and quivering, held in place by ancient instinct. He was huge and hairy, with hooves and horns and terrible clawed hands. He stank of sweat and musk and uncontrolled appetites. He glowered at Lilith with stupid, crafty eyes, attracted by her femininity but cowed by the sheer power he sensed in her.

  “There’s not much left of Bloody Bones,” said Harlequin. “He’s been reduced to a purely animal nature, a god of wild actions and transgression without conscience. There are always men and women ready to worship the beast within. There are those who say he did this to himself, quite deliberately, to free his needs and appetites from the tyranny of reason.”

  “How very depressing,” said Lilith. “From all the thousands who spilled from my fecund loins, only three remain? And all of you so much less than I made you to be.”

  She killed them all, contemptuously, sucking in their life energies, then murdered all of the Incarnate’s child followers with a casual wave of her hand, just to be thorough. Her power beat on the air like a storm that sweeps all before it, and the assembled crowd quailed under her cold gaze.

  “It’s time,” said Lilith, and all those present shuddered at the power in her voice. “Time for you to choose which side you’re on. I’m back, ready to remake the Nightside in my own image, to restore it to what I originally intended it to be. It was never meant to be this…small, shabby thing. I will make the Nightside glorious again, and you with it. Unless you choose to stand against me, in which case no-one will even remember your names.”

  Beings and Forces and Powers glanced at each other uneasily, and there was much muttered conversation. The main gist of it was that they liked things the way they were. They liked being gods, being worshipped and feared and adored. They liked being rich and famous and revered. (And if these were all very human things for a god to value, no-one said so.) Give all this up, to see their world and their very selves remade according to Lilith’s whim? Unthinkable. And yet…she was Lilith. No-one doubted that. Greater than the Nightside and destroyer of those who only thought themselves to be gods. In the name of survival, it might be wise to go along…for a while…and hope some opportunity might arise where they could rid themselves again of this unwanted matriarch. And so the argument went this way and that, while Lilith waited patiently, amusing herself by killing people at random if they didn’t look respectful enough. And in the end, it was left to one of the more modern manifestations, Abomination Inc, to step forward and speak first.

  Ever since the law decided that corporations were, technically speaking, both persons and immortal, it was inevitable that one would grow large and powerful enough to be worshipped as a god. Abomination Inc manifested itself through a crowd of faceless worker drones, all dressed exactly the same. Grey men in grey suits, they spoke in chorus.

  “We are a god of this time. It suits us, and we are suited to it. Why should we give up all that we are, and that we intend to be? We have no reason to believe that you have our best interests at heart.”

  Next up were the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Chain-saw. Terrifying figures in stark black and white, these nuns were dogmatists first and foremost, and modern dogmatists at that. They cursed and abused Lilith in rich, vibrant voices and defied her with awful threats.

  Others stepped forward, representing the modern religions of a modern world, but already other voices were rising in the crowd to shout them down. Older voices, remembering old ways, and lesser voices seeing hope in a changed future. And so, just like that, the god war started. Beings and Forces and Powers went head to head, aspects clashing like mighty engines in the night, while strange energies boiled on the still air. And as above, so below, with whole armies of the faithful going for each other’s throats. Hot and vicious murder ran up and down the Street of the Gods, sucking everyone in, and bodies piled up as blood flowed thickly in the gutters.

  Lilith rose gracefully into the starry sky, looking down upon what she had brought about, and laughed aloud to see such slaughter done in her name. She encouraged those of her children who followed her to kill their brothers and sisters who didn’t, and encouraged their followers to fight and riot and delight in the death of their enemies. She wanted them to get a taste for it. There would be much more of this, when they went out into the Nightside. But for now, murdering their fellows would help to bind the survivors more closely to her.

  She walked in glory down the Street of the Gods, treading the air high above the conflict that surged back and forth, while lesser beings raged beneath her. Wherever she passed, churches and temples and cathedrals juddered and shook themselves to pieces, and were swallowed up by the ground breaking apart beneath them. Lilith was sending them all to Hell, by the direct route. Gods and followers caught within these sanctuaries, too scared to come out and face Lilith, died screaming.

  “There shall be no other gods but me,” said Lilith, her voice rising effortlessly above the roars and screams and ho
wls of the violence below. “All who live in the Nightside shall worship only me. This is my place, and I am all you need to know.”

  And that was when Walker showed up. He came strolling casually down the Street of the Gods, in his smart city suit, and everything slowed to a halt as word of his progress went ahead of him. People and Beings stopped fighting, backing away from each other and from him. They withdrew to the sidewalks and watched silently as he passed by, not even acknowledging their presence. Beings and Forces and Powers stopped doing distressing things to each other and stood still, waiting to see what would happen. A slow sullen silence fell across the bloody Street, and the god war stopped. All of this, simply because Walker had come to the Street of the Gods.

  He brought no backup with him, no bodyguards, specialised operatives, or armed forces. His presence was enough to calm and intimidate all those around him. Gods and their followers looked sheepishly at the destruction they’d wrought, like children caught in the act of doing something naughty. Because this was Walker, the Voice of the Authorities, whose word was law. The single most implacable force in the Nightside. He finally came to a halt, looking up at Lilith standing on the air. They considered each other for a while, then Walker smiled and tipped his bowler hat to her. Walker had style. Lilith dropped elegantly down to stand on the bloody Street before him, and if he was aware of her nakedness or the sexuality that burned in her like a furnace, he gave no sign of it. He looked around at the scattered bodies, the burning churches, then at the watching gods and their followers, none of whom could meet his gaze.

  “That’s quite enough of that,” he said crisply, not looking at anyone in particular, though everyone just knew he was talking to them. “Never seen such a mess. You will stop this nonsense immediately and start clearing up. You wouldn’t want me to get upset, would you?”

  Some of the gods and their congregations were already backing away, muttering excuses and apologies, and in some cases actually trying to hide behind each other. They all knew the names and legends of those poor unfortunates who’d upset Walker in the past, and the terrible things that had happened to them. But all that stopped as Lilith addressed Walker in a loud and carrying voice that had not the slightest trace of fear or unease in it. If anything, she seemed…amused.