Nightingale lament

and angels' urine, and things that only look like cars but are always hungry.

A pack of headless bikers tried to crowd the sedan chair with their choppers, but the operating poltergeist flipped them away like poker chips. The roaring traf­fic gave us a bit more room after that, and it wasn't long at all before we were cruising through Uptown. You could almost smell the excitement, above the blood, sweat, and tears. Nowhere does the neon blaze more brightly, neon noir and Technicolor temptation, the sleazy signs pulsing like an aroused heartbeat. You can bet the lights here never even dimmed during the recent power outages. Uptown would always have first call on whatever power was available. But even so, it's always that little bit darker here, in the world of three o'clock in the morning, where the pleasures of the night need never end, as long as your money holds out.

You can find the very best restaurants in Uptown, featuring dishes from cultures that haven't existed for centuries, using recipes that would be banned in saner places. There are even specialised restaurants, offer­ing meals made entirely from the meats of extinct or imaginary animals. You haven't lived till you've tasted dodo drumsticks, roc egg omelettes, Kentucky-fried dragon, kraken sushi surprise, chimera of the day, or basilisk eyes (that last entirely at your own risk). You can find food to die for, in Uptown.

Bookshops contain works written in secret by fa­mous authors, never intended to be published. Ghost­ written books, by authors who died too soon. Volumes on spiritual pornography, and the art of tantric murder. Forbidden knowledge and forgotten lore, and guide­books for the hereafter. One shop window boasted a new edition of that infamous book The King in Yel­low, whose perusal drove men mad, together with a special pair of rose-tinted spectacles to read it through.

People bustled through the streets, following the lure of the rainbow neon. Scents of delicious cooking pulled at the nose, and snatches of beguiling music spilled from briefly opened doors. Long lines waited patiently outside theatres and cabaret clubs, and crowded round newstands selling the latest edition of the Night Times. More furtive faces disappeared into weapons shops, or brothels, where for the right price you could sleep with famous women from fiction. (It wasn't the real thing, of course, but then it never is, in such places.) Uptown held every form of entertainment the mind could conceive, some of which would eat you alive if you weren't sharp enough.

And nightclubs, of every form and persuasion. Music and booze and company, all just a little hotter than the consumer could comfortably stand. Some of the clubs go way back. Whigs and Tories argue poli­tics over cups of coffee, then sit down to wager on demon-baiting matches. Romans recline on couches, pigging out on twenty- course meals, in between trips to the vomitorium. Other clubs are as fresh as today and twice as tasty. You'd be surprised how many big stars started out singing for their supper in Uptown.

The streets became even more thickly crowded as the sedan chair carried me deep into the dark heart of Uptown. Flushed faces and bright eyes everywhere, high on life and eager to throw their money away on things they only thought they needed. In and among the fevered punters, the people who earned their liv­ing in the clubs and nightspots of Uptown rushed from one establishment to another, working the sev­eral jobs it took to pay their rent or quiet their souls. Singers and actors, conjurers and stand-up comedians, strippers and hostesses and specialist acts - all of them thriving on a regular diet of buzz, booze, and bennies. And walking their beats or standing on cor­ners, watching it all go by, the ladies of the evening with their kohl-stained eyes and come-on mouths, the twilight daughters who never said no to anything that involved hard cash.

This still being the Nightside, there were always hidden traps for the unwary. Smoke-filled bars where lost weekends could stretch out for years, and clubs where people couldn't stop dancing, even when their

feet left bloody marks on the dance floor. Markets where you could sell any part of your body, mind, or soul. Or someone else's. Magic shops that offered wonderful items and objects of power, with absolutely no guarantee they'd perform as advertised, or even that the shop would still be there when you went back to complain.

There were homeless people, too, in shadowed doorways and the entrances of alleyways, wrapped in shabby coats or tattered blankets, with their grubby hands held out for spare change. Tramps and vagabonds, teenage runaways and people just down on their luck. Most passersby have the good sense to drop them the odd coin or a kind word. Karma isn't just a concept in the Nightside, and a surprising num­ber of street people used to be Somebody once. It's al­ways been easy to lose everything, in the Nightside. So it was wise to never piss these people off, because they might still have a spark of power left in them. And because it might just be you there, one day. The wheel turns, we all rise and fall, and nowhere does the wheel turn faster than in Uptown.

The sedan chair finally dropped me off right out­side Caliban's Cavern. I checked the meter, added a generous tip, and dropped the money into the box pro­vided. No-one ever cheats the poltergeists. They tend to take it personally and reduce your home to its orig­inal components while you're still in it. The chair moved off into the traffic again, and I studied the nightclub before me, taking my time. People flowed impatiently around me, but I ignored them, concen­trating on the feel of the place. It was big, expensive, and clearly exclusive, the kind of place where you couldn't get in, never mind get a good table, unless your name was on someone's list. Caliban's Cavern wasn't for just anybody, and that, of course, was part of the attraction. Rossignol's name blazed above the door in Gothic neon script, giving the times of her three shows a night. A sign on the closed front door made it clear the club was currently in between shows and not open for business. Even the most upmarket clubs have to take time out to freshen the place up in between sets. A good time for someone like me to do a little sneaking around. But first, I wanted to make sure this wasn't a setup of some kind.

I have enemies who want me dead. I don't know who or why, but they've been sending agents to try and kill me ever since I was a child. It has something to do with my absent mother, who turned out not to be human. She disappeared shortly after my father dis­covered that, and he spent what little was left of his life drinking himself to death. I like to think I'm made of harder stuff. Sometimes I don't think about my missing mother for days on end.

I studied the crowd bustling around and past me, but didn't spot any familiar faces. And the sedan chair would have let me know if someone had tried to fol­low us. But the case could be nothing more than a way of bringing me here, so that I could be ambushed. It's happened before. The only way to be sure there were no hidden traps was to use my Sight, my special gift that lets me find anything, or anyone. And that was dangerous in itself. When I open up my third eye, my private eye, my mind burns very brightly in the end­less night, and all kinds of people can see me and where I am. My enemies are always watching. But I

needed to know, so I opened up my mind and Saw the larger world.

Even in the Nightside there are secret depths, hid­den layers, above and below. I could See ghosts all around me, running through their routines like shim­mering video loops, moments trapped in Time. Ley lines blazed so brightly even I couldn't look at them directly, crisscrossing in brilliant designs, plunging through people and buildings as though they weren't really there. In the passing crowds, dark and twisted things rode on people's backs - obsessions, hungers, and addictions. Some of them recognised me and bared needle teeth in defiant snarls to warn me off. Giants walked in giant steps, towering high above the tallest buildings. And flitting here and there, the Light People, forever bound on their unknowable missions, occasionally drawn to this person or that for no obvi­ous reason, but never interfering.

But what really caught my third eye were the lay­ers of magical defences surrounding Caliban's Cav­ern. Intersecting strands of hexes, curses, and anti-personnel runes covered every possible way in and out of the club, all of them positively radiating maleficent energies. This was heavy-duty, hard-core protection, way out of the range of even the most tal­ented amateurs. Which meant someone had paid a pro a small fortune, just to protect an up-and-coming singing sensation. However, none of those defences were targeted specifically at me, which argued against this being a trap. I shut down my Sight and looked thoughtfully at the closed door before me. As long as I didn't use magic, the defences couldn't see me, so ... I'd just have to think my way past them.

Luckily, most magical defences aren't very bright. They don't have to be. I grinned, stepped forward, and knocked firmly on the door. A staggeringly ugly face rose before me, forming itself out of the wood of the door. The varnish cracked loudly as the face scowled at me. Wooden lips parted, revealing large jagged wooden teeth.

'Forget it. Go away. Push off. The club is closed between acts. No personal appearances from the artistes, no autographs, and no, you don't get to hang around the stage door. If you want tickets, the book­ing office will be open in an hour. Come back then, or not at all. See if I care.'

Its message over, the face began to subside back into the door again. I knocked again on the broad forehead, and the face blinked at me, surprised.

'You have to let me in,' I said. 'I'm John Taylor.'