Nightside 06 - Sharper Than a Serpents Tooth by Simon R. Green Read Free Book Online Page A

something wrong with the dimensional barriers."
    "I don't like the sound of that, Eddie."
    "I'm not too keen on it myself. Someone has strengthened the dimensional barriers, from the outside. No prizes for guessing who."
    Cathy hugged my arm tightly. "How does he know things like that?"
    "I find it better not to ask," I said. "Eddie, I… Eddie, why are you frowning? I really don't like it when you frown."
    "Something's… changed," he said, his voice stark and flat. He looked around him, and we all did the same. The night seemed no different, cold and still and quiet, the graves unmoving and undisturbed under the gaudy starlight. But Eddie was right. Something had changed. We could all feel it, like the tension that precedes the breaking storm.
    "You achieved something, with that spell of yours," Eddie said to Sandra. "It's still trying to work, undischarged in the cemetery atmosphere. It's not enough to affect the dead, but…"
    "What do you mean, 'but'?" I said. "You can't stop there!"
    "She's disturbed Something," said Razor Eddie. "It's been asleep a long time, but now it's waking… and it's waking angry."
    We moved closer together, staring about us and straining our ears against the silence. The atmosphere in the graveyard was changing. There was a sense of potential on the air, of something about to happen, in this place where nothing was ever supposed to happen. Suzie turned her shotgun this way and that, searching in vain for a target.
    "What am I looking for, Eddie?" she said calmly. "What lives in this dimension?"
    "I told you. Nothing lives here. That's the point."
    "Could the dead be rising up after all?" said Tommy.
    "It's not the dead," Sandra said immediately. "I'd know if it was that."
    "It's coming," whispered Razor Eddie.
    The ground rose sharply beneath our feet, toppling us this way and that. Headstones collapsed or lurched to one side, and the great mausoleums trembled. My first thought was an earthquake, but all around us the graveyard earth was rising and falling, lifting like an ocean swell. We all scrambled onto our feet again, finding things to cling to for support.
    "There were rumours," said Sandra Chance, "of a Caretaker, set to guard the graves."
    "I never heard of any Caretaker," said Razor Eddie.
    "Yes, well, just because you're a god doesn't mean you know everything," said Sandra.
    And that was when the graveyard dirt burst up into the air from between the rows of graves, great fountains of dark wet earth shooting up, high into the chilly air. It rained down all around us, forming itself into rough shapes. Dark, earthy human shapes, with rough arms and legs, and blunt heads with no faces. Golems fashioned out of graveyard dirt. They started towards us, slow and clumsy with the power of earth, closing in on us from every direction at once. The ground grew still again, save for the heavy thudding of legs with no feet.
    Suzie opened up with her pump-action shotgun. She hit everything she aimed at, blowing ragged chunks of earth out of the heavy lumbering figures, but it didn't slow them down. Not even when she blew their heads off. Sandra chanted Words of Power and stabbed at the advancing earth golems with an aboriginal pointing-bone, and none of it did any good at all. Razor Eddie darted forward, moving supernaturally quickly. Several of the earth figures just fell apart, sliced through again and again. But for every golem that fell, a dozen more rose out of the graveyard earth and headed our way with silent, implacable intent.
    I heard muttering beside me. Tommy Oblivion was using his gift to try to convince himself he was somewhere else, but it seemed Walker's dimensional barriers were too strong even for him. Cathy pulled a Kandarian punch dagger from the top of her knee-length boot, and moved to watch my back. She knew her limitations. Sandra was reduced to throwing things from her belt pouches at the approaching golems. None of them did any good.
    "I'll have Walker's balls for this!" she