A Hard Day's Knight Read Online Free PDF Page B

perfectly poised on a tall bar-stool, drinking pink champagne. With his little finger properly extended, of course.
    Julien Advent: tall, dark, and handsome in the old style, the great Victorian Adventurer who fell through a Timeslip in the nineteenth century and emerged in the Nightside in the nineteen sixties. And didn’t appear to have aged a day since. Julien is the real deal, a real hero and a complete gentleman. He tends not to approve of me, or my methods—except when he needs me to do something no-one else can. We’re friends, sometimes despite ourselves. I walked over to him, looked briefly but longingly at the bottles behind the bar, so near and yet so far, and nodded to Julien.
    “You could offer me a drink, you know. I could be persuaded.”
    “No, you couldn’t,” he said calmly. “You don’t have time.”
    “Oh hell,” I said. “It’s one of those cases, is it? And where is everybody, anyway?”
    “Out and about,” said Julien. “Doing their best to keep a lid on things. Since Walker died, so very suddenly and unexpectedly, the news has shot round the Nightside. And a great many not-at-all-nice people have been running wild, taking advantage. Seeing what they can get away with until Walker’s replacement steps up to dispense law and justice and general beatings. That’s you, by the way. But since you weren’t immediately available, I deputised everyone in the Club and sent them out into the streets to restore order, by any means necessary, and slap down anyone who looked like getting ambitious.”
    “I would have got round to it,” I said. “I’ve been a bit ... distracted.”
    Julien studied me thoughtfully over the rim of his champagne glass. “There’s something different about you though I can’t put my finger on it.... Either way, it will have to wait. There’s trouble down at the Mammon Emporium. The biggest mall in the Nightside is in very great danger of going off bang. But first, John, I have to ask you ... Did you really have to kill Walker?”
    “Yes,” I said. “It was necessary. He’d gone too far into the dark.”
    Julien clearly heard something in my voice because he put his glass down on the bar and leaned forward on his bar-stool. “I never did understand what he saw in you, or you in him. You seemed to work well enough together, when you weren’t trying to kill each other. He respected you. I know that.”
    “I respected him,” I said. “Best enemy I ever had.”
    “He was more than that.”
    “Of course. He was Walker.”
    “Well,” said Julien, “he was dying, after all, and not in a good way. I suppose you could call his death a mercy killing.”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t think you could call it that.”
    He waited expectantly, but I had nothing more to say. Let Walker take his secrets with him, the good and the bad. In the end, Julien nodded and picked up his glass again, which had mysteriously refilled itself with more pink champagne. One of the perks of Club membership.
    “I’ll send some of my people to collect the body.”
    “There is no body,” I said.
    Julien raised an elegant eyebrow. “Hard core, John.”
    “Where are the rest of the new Authorities?” I said. Not because I gave a damn but because I felt like changing the subject.
    “They’re ... not entirely comfortable with you yet,” said Julien. “My colleagues are currently upstairs, arguing over whether or not to accept you as our new representative. Walker wanted you, and I recommended you, but ...”
    “Yes,” I said. “But.”
    I remembered meeting these people before, in a devastated future Nightside, where they were the last human survivors, and my devoted Enemies. Doing their best to kill me in their past before I could bring about the terrible future they were living in. Time travel can really mess with your head. Just say no.
    Julien suddenly recognised the gold pocket-watch I was still holding in my hand. “How did you get that?”
    “Walker left it to me