or invoking of spirits; the three old friends simply closed their eyes and concentrated, and a powerful presence filled the whole bar, beating on the air. There was a feeling of something caught on the edge, struggling to be free, to be finished. And after more than thirty years the three old friends stepped effortlessly back into their old roles, meshing like the parts of a powerful engine that had forgotten just how much it could do. Raw magic sparked and flared on the air around them, and the Babalon Working was up and running again, as though they'd never been away.
But almost immediately another presence forced its way into the bar, slamming through Merlin's defences. A door appeared in a wall where there had never been a door before, a ragged hole in the brickwork like a mouth or a wound, and stretched out beyond it was a narrow corridor, impossibly long. It led off in a direction I couldn't identify, which had nothing to do with left and right, up and down, that my mind couldn't deal with or accept, except simply as Outside. And down that awful corridor, slowly but inexorably, a single figure came walking. It was too far off in that unacceptable distance to see clearly, but I knew who it was, who it had to be. Lilith knew what we were up to, and she was coming to stop us.
Merlin came forward to stand before the corridor, staring down it and blocking the way. He looked… smaller, diminished. He raised his dead grey hands, already spotted with decay, and traced vivid shapes on the air, living sigils that spat and shimmered with discharging energies. He forced old and potent Words out of his ruined mouth, summoning up ancient forces and terrible creatures with the authority of his terrible name, but nothing happened. The Princes of Hell were more afraid of Lilith than they were of him. Merlin tried to open up interspatial trapdoors under Lilith's feet, to drop her into some other, dangerous dimension, that she'd have to fight her way back from…but Lilith just walked right over them, as though they weren't there. And perhaps for her, they weren't. She was Lilith, imprinted on the material world by an effort of her own will, and he was only a dead sorcerer. Step by step she drew nearer, smiling her awful smile, despite everything Merlin could do to stop her, or even slow her down. And, finally, she stepped out into the bar, and the corridor disappeared behind her, the wall just a wall again.
"Hello, Merlin," she said. "What a fuss you made. Anyone would think you weren't glad to see me. And after I went out of my way to find a nice present to bring you." She held up her left hand, and showed him a dark necrotic mass of muscle tissue. He knew what it was immediately, and made a sound as though he'd been hit. Lilith laughed prettily. "Yes, it's your long-lost heart, little sorcerer. That's what I've been doing all these years, since I had to give up being a wife and a mother. I knew I had to find your heart before you did, because you were the only one who might have stood a chance against me. If only you'd been whole. Merlin Satanspawn, born to be the Antichrist, but you didn't have the nerve. By the way, I spoke with your father recently, and he's still really mad at you."
"Give me my heart," said Merlin.
"It was very well hidden," said Lilith. "You wouldn't believe when and where I finally found it."
"What do you want from me?" said Merlin.
"That's more like it," said Lilith, smiling on Merlin like a teacher with a slow pupil. "You can have your heart back, Merlin. All you have to do is bow down to me, kneel at my feet, and vow on your unholy name to worship me all your days."
Merlin laughed abruptly, a flat ugly sound, and Lilith reacted as though he'd spat in her face. "Kneel to you?" said Merlin, and his voice was full of amused contempt. "I only ever knelt to one person. And you're not fit to polish his armour."
Lilith's left hand convulsed, crushing the decaying heart into crimson-and-purple pulp. Merlin cried out once and collapsed, the magic that had sustained him for centuries torn away in a moment. He curled up in a ball on the floor, withering and falling in on himself as the