the mysterious Larry Oblivion and his impossible exploits made sense now. He’d been using the wand to bring Time to a halt, while he kept moving. Very useful little toy, that. Of course no-one ever suspected, because wands were so passé, these days. Everyone had just assumed he had a gift like mine, or his brother Tommy’s.
And then Larry looked up sharply from adjusting his silk tie, as something far worse than a pack of minor godlings came crashing down the street towards him with murder on its mind. It was thirty feet tall if it was an inch, a giant mechanical apparatus stamping down the street on giant multijointed steel legs. It was all bits and pieces pressed into use and held together by unknown forces, all kinds of metal revolving around glowing sources of power. Everything about it shouted brute force. It was roughly humanoid, with mismatched arms and legs and a bulging brass head with two huge eyes that glowed red as hellfire. It had a long jagged slit for a mouth, its rising and falling edges sharper than any teeth.
It swung down the street with long ungainly steps, swaying from side to side, stamping the living and the dead to pulp under its heavy steel feet. Its long arms ended in fists as big as wrecking balls, and it struck out casually at every building it passed, smashing through stone and brick with equal ease. The ground shook with its every step. I had no idea what it was, god or construct or some mechanical ideal run by an animating spirit. The Spirit of Crap Robots Past, perhaps.
Certainly Larry Oblivion didn’t look at all impressed by the huge clunky thing as it tramped and crashed its way down the street towards him. Everyone else hurried to get out of its path, at least partly because it didn’t look too steady on its flat steel feet, but Larry just shot his immaculate white cuffs, brushed an invisible fleck of dust from one shoulder, and stood his ground. He waited until the huge construct was practically on top of him, then he gestured almost negligently with his wand, and disappeared. The massive contraption reared back, roaring like a deep bass steam whistle, swivelling its great brass head back and forth in search of its elusive prey.
A blur of motion surrounded the metal thing, swift glimpses of something appearing and disappearing too fast to be tracked, then bits of the construct began flying off in all directions. It took Larry Oblivion less than five minutes to dismantle the metal construct and reduce it to its component parts. Larry reappeared next to the detached brass head and kicked it down the street like an oversized football. I’m pretty sure people would have cheered, if there’d been anybody left to witness it.
Larry checked his suit carefully for signs of stress, then continued down the street.
The next mirror showed me King of Skin, slouching down a wide thoroughfare in all his sleazy glory, looking proud and potent and confident. His eyes were bright with a terrible aspect as he sallied forth, undoing probabilities and spreading nightmares through the power of his awful glamour. Even through the distance of the mirror, I still couldn’t stand to look at King of Skin directly. These were his glory days, and he was still a Power to be reckoned with. Even following his progress out of the corner of my eye was almost too much to bear. Look at him for too long and I started to see… unbearable things. When King of Skin walked abroad, wrapped in his glamour, everyone saw what they feared most, and his power reworked probability to make those nightmares real, and solid. No man can stand to face his own nightmares, made flesh and blood. Hideous things manifested around King of Skin as he slouched along, the dreadful King with his dreadful Court.
He went where he would in the besieged city, surrounded by awful shapes, rich with terrible significance for those who saw them, like the monsters we see in the dark bedrooms of our childhood. They reared and roared and swaggered in the night, attacking everything within reach, broken free at last from the restraints of unreality. King of Skin went where he pleased, and all the Powers and Forces and Beings of Lilith’s court ran screaming from him. King of Skin smiled and sniggered and continued on his way.
Until someone dropped a building on him, from a safe distance. He disappeared under a mountain of rubble, and although I watched the mirror for a long time, I didn’t see him again.
Although I knew I would, in a certain, terrible future.
By now I’d exhausted all the mirrors. The scenes they showed me became hazy and blurred, and some couldn’t even muster the strength to show me my own reflection. I tried the crystal balls, but their range was very limited, and half of them had gone opaque from the traumas of what they’d witnessed. Reluctantly, I moved on to the scrying pools. They weren’t much to look at, just a selection of simple stone grottos in an underlit room, each holding pools of clear water. I knelt beside the first pool, pricked my thumb with a prepared dagger, and let three big fat drops of blood fall into the water. Scrying is old magic, with old prices and penalties. The clear water swallowed up my blood without taking on the faintest tinge of red, but the ripples kept spreading and spreading, until finally the pool focused in on what I wanted to see, and then the ripples cleared to show me an image almost painfully bright and clear.
Razor Eddie, the Punk God of the Straight Razor, walked through what was left of the Street of the Gods, and if he was at all affected by the destruction around him, the burned-out churches and demolished temples, it didn’t show in his sharp, pinched face. A thin intense presence wrapped in a filthy old greatcoat, he strolled unconcerned past the bodies of dead gods and didn’t give a damn.
A crowd of spiked and pierced zealots looked up from desecrating a sacred grove as Razor Eddie approached, and they swaggered out into the Street to block his way, laughing and calling out suggestively to him. They didn’t know who he was, the fools. When he showed no fear of them, or any intention of doing something amusing, like running or begging for his life, the zealots grew sullen and angry, and sharp objects appeared in their hands. They were vultures, feeding on the carrion left behind by Lilith’s crusade, hyped up on adrenaline and bloodlust and religious fervour.
They went to meet Razor Eddie with torture and horror and murder on their minds, laughing and squealing with delight, and the Punk God of the Straight Razor walked right through them. When he came out the other side they were all dead, nothing left of them but a great pile of severed heads. None of them had any eyes. I don’t know how he did it. No-one does. Eddie might be an agent of the good these days, but even the good looks the other way sometimes. Razor Eddie is a mystery as well as a god, and he likes it that way.
He looked round interestedly at a sudden loud clattering sound, and a huge creature something like a millipede came writhing and coiling up out of the ruins of an ancient temple. It was impossibly huge and seemingly without end, its vast shiny bulk propelled along by thousands of stubby little legs. Hundreds of yards of it came hammering along the Street towards Razor Eddie, easily a dozen feet wide and made up of curving segments of shimmering carborundum, gleaming dull red in the light of a hundred simmering fires. It darted forward impossibly quickly, its bulging head covered with rows of compound eyes, its complicated mouth parts clacking expectantly. It could sense the power in Razor Eddie, and it was hungry. I don’t know what it was. Some old nameless god from out of the depths, perhaps, no longer worshipped by anything but the worms of the earth.
Razor Eddie went forward to meet it, frowning slightly as though considering an unfamiliar problem. His pearl-handled straight razor was in his hand, shining bright as the sun. The creature reared up, its blunt head rising high above the surrounding buildings, then it slammed down again and snatched up Razor Eddie in its pincered mouth. Razor Eddie struggled briefly, his arms pinned helplessly to his sides, and the giant millipede swallowed him whole. He was there one moment, and gone the next. The millipede tossed back its carapaced head, and a series of slow ripples passed down the bulging throat as it gulped Razor Eddie down. The great head nodded a few times, as though satisfied, then it continued on its way down the Street of the Gods.
Only to pause, just a few yards later. Its head swayed uncertainly back and forth, its mouth parts clacking loudly, then it screamed like a steam geyser as its belly exploded outwards. The gleaming segments cracked and splintered and blew apart as Razor Eddie cut his way out from the inside. The huge millipede curled and writhed and slammed back and forth, demolishing buildings all around it, smashing stone and concrete and pounding the rubble to dust in its agonies, but still it couldn’t escape from the awful, remorseless thing that was killing it. In the end, Razor Eddie strolled unhurriedly away from the wreckage of the dead god, ignoring the last spastic twitches of the cracked and broken body. He was smiling slightly, as though considering even more disturbing things he intended to do to his fellow gods.
Another pool, another three drops of bloods, another vision. Those of Walker’s agents not strong enough to take on Lilith’s offspring, or enter maddened mobs single-handed, had banded together to take on smaller targets, doing what they could to make a difference. Sandra Chance, the consulting necromancer, stabbed about her with her aboriginal pointing-bone, and wherever she pointed it, people crashed convulsing to the ground and did not
