too much, and your body will actually turn into a Martian. And then everyone around you will rise up and club you to death because even the Nightside has its standards.
A couple of soft ghosts wandered through the thick air, hand in hand, looking for anything familiar. They were vague, indistinct, half-transparent, their very existence worn down and eroded by too much travelling in other dimensions. Human once, they had gone too far and seen too much, and now they could no longer remember how to find their way home, or even what home had been like. The details of their faces had grown smooth and doubtful, like the statues of cemetery angels worn down by time and the elements. The smoke ghosts drifted here and there, desperate for a familiar face or an accent, asking in their soft, distant voices of cities and peoples and worlds that no-one had ever heard of.
The patrons of the Dragon's Mouth flapped them away with heavy hands, or ignored them completely. The soft ghosts should have known better than to look for help here, but they were attracted to the altered states of consciousness like moths to a flame. One of them tugged gently at my sleeve, trying to attract my attention, but I shrugged it off. I'd spotted my elf.
I was heading straight for him when someone moved abruptly forward to block my way. I stopped short, because it was either that or walk right over him, then paused to consider the man before me. I knew who he was almost at once, though the years had not been kind. Carnaby Jones, the Wide-Eyed Boy, infamous dandy and free spirit of the old King's Road, had fallen far from what he once was. His T-shirt and jeans were clean enough, but he looked as if someone else had dressed him. His old muscular frame was gone, the flesh sunk right back to the bone, and his skin was a dull, unhealthy yellow. The skull showed clearly behind the taut skin of his face, his deep-set eyes were lost and murky, and his thin-lipped smile held all the malice in the world. He smelled bad.
I could still remember when the Wide-Eyed Boy had been the best and bravest.
'What do you want, Carnaby?' I asked politely.
He sniggered loudly. 'No time for old friends, John? Nothing to say to the old friend you abandoned and left behind? The one who brought you here, and taught you the ropes, and introduced you to pleasures you never knew existed?'
'I forgave you for that long ago,' I said. 'We're both different people now. Is that a tinge of purple I see in your eye-balls, Carnaby? Been injecting through the tear ducts because you've run out of veins? How could you have fallen so far?'
'Practice,' he said, his grin widening to show rotten teeth. 'You're looking good, John. Really. Very… healthy. What made you think you could just walk back in here and stroll amongst us with your nose in the air? You owe me, John. You know you do.'
'You want me to take you out of here, I'll do it,' I said. 'You want help, I'll get you the best there is.'
'I don't want anything from you! Except to see you pay for what you did.'
'What did I do, Carnaby?' I said patiently. 'You broke the rules, John! You got out! No-one's supposed to get out of here. That's the point.'
'I had help,' I said. 'Take my hand, Carnaby. Really. I mean it. The only one keeping you here is you.'
He looked at me sideways, still smiling his unpleasant smile. 'You got out, and now you're a big man in the Nightside. Oh yes, the news trickles down, even to places like this. Word is you're a rich man, too. So how about a little something, for an old friend? How about a hand-out, how about the shirt off your back, how about everything you've got!'
He was spitting the words out now, his whole wrecked body shaking with years of pent-up, carefully rehearsed spite and hatred. I sensed old Mother Connell stirring behind her table, and raised one hand to stop her. Because once upon a time the Wide-Eyed Boy really had been a friend of mine, had really had it in him to be the very best of us. Drugs don't just destroy who you are; they destroy all the people you might have been.
So I stepped forward, grabbed his bony head firmly with both hands, and held his gaze with my own. He tried to break away, but there was no strength left in him. He tried to look away, but I had him. I concentrated, and he cried out miserably as all the old scabs on his forearms broke open, and dark liquids oozed out and trickled down his arms. Everything he'd ever taken, every last nasty drop of it, ran out of him, and he cried like a baby at the loss of it. When I was finished I let him go, and he fell in a heap before me.
'There,' I said. 'You're clean. Free as a bird. So you can leave, or you can stay; it's all up to you. And don't say I never did anything for you.'
I left him there and headed for the elf.
He was sitting alone at a small table, smoking opium through a hollowed-out human thigh-bone. Just because he could. There was a circle of open space around him, despite the crowded conditions of the Dragon's Mouth, because even the kind of people who habituated a place like this didn't want anything to do with an elf.
Long and long ago, humans and elves lived together on the Earth, sharing its wonders and resources. But we never got on. There were battles and wars and horrible slaughters, and in the end we won by cheating; we outbred the pointy eared bastards. They gave up and left our world, walking sideways from the sun, moving their whole race to another world, another reality. The Sundered Lands. The few elves you see walking the world today are rogues, outlaws, remittance men. They live to screw us over because that's all they've got.
This particular elf watched me approach and lazily blew a perfect smoke ring at me. Followed by half a dozen increasingly complex smoke shapes, culminating in a great ship perched on a rising wave, complete with billowing sails and shaking rigging. But he was only showing off, so I ignored it. I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him, careful to keep the whole of the table between us.
'So,' said the elf, in a voice like a cat drowning in cream and loving every minute of it, 'here you are. Lilith's son.'
'Actually,' I said, 'I take more after my father. I'm John Taylor.'
'Of course. And you can address me as Lord Screech, Pale Prince of Owls.'
'But that's not your real name.'
'Of course not. To know the true name of a thing is to have power over it. But for the purpose of this transaction, Lord Screech will do.'
'Because the owls are not what they seem?'
'Quite.'
I looked him over. Screech was inhumanly tall and almost impossibly slender, with the usual slit-pupilled cat's eyes and sharp, pointed ears. His skin glowed like fine porcelain, so pale as to be almost colourless, and his quick smile showed pointed teeth behind the rose pink lips. He wore long oriental robes of a shimmering metallic green, complete with a stiff high collar that rose behind his head, and his long white hair had been swept up in tufts on either side of his elongated skull, like an owl's. I was tempted to make a Flock of Seagulls joke, but he wouldn't have got it.
And besides, it would have dated me.
'Why ask for me?' I said, directly.
'You have a reputation for arrogance, style, and occasional viciousness,' said Screech. 'You might almost have been an elf.'
'Now you're just being nasty,' I said. 'And why meet here, of all places?'
'Because I do so love to watch humans degrade themselves,' Screech said easily. 'Throwing their lives away for such pitiful rewards. No elf would ever lower himself to anything as small as this; even our sins have to be magnificent.'
'Tell me what you want,' I said. 'Or I'm out of here.'
'Always so impatient,' said Screech, laying aside his bone pipe. 'Always in such a hurry. Comes of being mortal, I suppose. Very well, Mr. Taylor, I shall talk, and you will listen, which is of course the proper state of affairs between elf and human. I am presently passing through the Nightside on a matter of importance. It is imperative I complete my journey without being stopped or in any way detained along the way. I am an emissary between the two warring factions of Faerie.'
'Hold everything,' I said, leaning forward despite myself. 'Go back, go previous; run that by me again. The Fae are at war with each other? When did that happen? And why haven't we heard about it?'
'Because it's none of your business.'
'It is now,' I said. 'Or you wouldn't need my help.'
'Life is imperfect,' said Screech.
