The Devil's Detective (28 page)

It was below the uniform. Someone had cleaned it inexpertly and streaks of mud and Summer's blood were still ingrained into the seams and thickly welded joints of metal, but it felt good and solid and heavy in his hand. Using the bed as a support, he raised himself to standing and turned to face the door. It was now impossible to tell which screams were coming from outside the room and which were from the Genevieves inside. Some of the young men had climbed out of their beds, were scrabbling for their clothes. One—Parry, he thought—had managed to push his bed toward the door and was shouting at the others to do the same. The lanterns above them were swinging back and forth, creating shifting black and orange shadows through which the pink and brown bodies of the ward's inhabitants flashed and jittered. More of them were dragging and pushing their beds, upturning them at the door, the frames and mattresses forming an untidy pile. It looked fragile and insubstantial.

Fool raised his gun and pointed it at the barrier and the door beyond, shouting. It took several moments, but eventually most of the Genevieves fell to quietness and he said, “Good. Stay quiet, get behind me. Those who can walk, help those who can't.” He hoped that whatever it was beyond the door would lose the smell of him, be unable to find him, but he doubted it. As if to confirm his suspicion, the voice came again, like air being forced through mud. “I still smell you, Fool! I know your smell, I know where you are!”

Fool was halfway down the room now, naked, arm outstretched and gun shaking in his hand, some of the young men shuffling behind him. Others were still in their beds, left by the others, and all of them yammered and cried and screamed. Their noise felt like a physical thing, unsettling Fool's vision and balance with its sheer intensity.

There was another terrible scream from outside, ascending above the others, rising to a pitch that made it impossible to tell whether the screamer was male or female. It ended with a snapping and a sound like drinking and then more of that loose, rumbling laughter.

The door rattled, hard.

“Here we are,” said the voice from outside, almost conversational, and the door crashed in the frame, banging open and then rebounding from the makeshift barrier. Something beyond the door howled in fury and the door crashed open again, this time torn loose from its hinges and driven into the bed frames and mattresses. The barrier shifted violently, tumbling apart in a rattle of metal, and then the speaker was in the room with them.

It had to fold itself through the door, and it tore away more of the frame as it entered, the wood dragged loose from the walls by its broad shoulders. Its torso was huge, barrel-like, the head on it shaggy with tufts of hair and two curling, vicious horns, its eyes glowing furnace red. It was covered in long, greasy hair that stood out from it and danced as it moved.

“Fool!” it cried and then sent an impossibly long limb snaking out to grasp one of the bed-bound patients, and Fool suddenly realized he had seen the thing before, that it had been the huge spiderlike demon in the crowd in Crow Heights. A clawed hand tightened on the boy's ankle and yanked, dragging him back toward the demon, swinging him so that
he struck the metal bed frames before being drawn against the demon's body. The Genevieve hit the flesh of the torso and his screams suddenly became muffled. There was a terrible, brief sizzle and then he dissolved against the demon's flesh, the hair wrapping around him and piercing his flesh, drawing on it, some of him crumbling away to nothing and the rest falling to the floor in a thick, splattering stream. The demon roared with laughter and lashed out again, this time taking a Genevieve from the other side of the room.

“Fool,” it cried again as the second Genevieve hit it and sizzled away to nothing, “I'm here for you!” Fool had a moment's awful clarity, seeing the thing's body bloated with the dissolved remains of people from the Iomante and wondering whether Drow was in there, and then he fired.

The shot went high, blowing a chunk out from the thin wall behind the demon. It dropped to a crouch and scuttled forward like some huge spider, scattering bed frames and mattresses, and then rose up in front of Fool as his next bullet formed and he fired a second time. This time, the bullet tore into the demon's belly, releasing a foul odor and a spray of dark, thick liquid that steamed where it hit the floor. The demon lurched sideways, dropped back down into a crouch, and sprang toward Fool. He had a nightmare glimpse of it, limbs outstretched and hair rippling as it arced through the air toward him, its face distorted by pain, and then he dropped and it went over him. He tried to roll but was clumsy with stiffness, instead doing little more than crashing over. Splinters dug into his skin as he twisted around, trying to see where the thing was.

It had landed in front of the knot of Genevieves at the back of the room and carried on toward them, encircling them with its scrawny arms and drawing them in. Fool fired again, not caring what he hit, and the tip of one of the demon's horns disintegrated into dust and fragments. It yowled, spinning about and down and scuttling again. It rushed toward Fool, its mouth wide in a grin that exposed teeth the size and color of human skulls. Fool loosed another shot and one of the demon's eyes exploded, the red glow extinguished in a winking mess of flesh and pus. It screamed, shouting Fool's name as he threw himself sideways and it passed him, one limb missing him by inches.

The demon hit one of the beds, its occupant screaming once before being absorbed into its skin and hair with a noise like fat hissing on a
griddle. It thrashed around, tangling itself in a swathe of muslin and the blankets from the bed, coming to an unsteady halt. Its limbs were shorter now, pulled in and trembling, facing Fool. The bullet hadn't formed in his gun yet. Fool was defenseless, scrambling backward in the hope of buying himself another second. Someone was screaming; it might have been him, he couldn't tell.

“You come to our home without invite and demand we tell you things,” hissed the demon, “and expect us to simply allow this? You kill our brothers? Challenge the Bar-Igura in their own boardinghouse? You are human, Fool, less than nothing.” It opened its mouth wider. Drool spilled from it, landing on the floor and beginning to smoke.

“Rhakshasas isn't here to protect you now, human,” it said. “I'm going to enjoy this.”

It sprang.

Fool fired, not at the demon but above it. His bullet tore through the lantern hanging from the ceiling, shattering its glass walls and tearing open the reservoir of oil. Liquid fire rained down onto the demon, soaking into the muslin and thin woolen blankets wrapped around it. The fabric caught the flames and sucked at them hungrily, and by the time the demon hit the floor it was burning brightly, writhing. Fool pulled the trigger again but nothing happened. The demon screeched, jerking spastically across the floor, leaving a trail of guttering flames behind it. Fool managed to stand, fired again, and this time the gun boomed, shooting into the blazing, writhing mass.

“Get out,” he shouted, waving at the young men. They began to run, still screaming; Fool grabbed Parry as he passed and said, “Help the ones in the beds. Now!” Turning back to the demon, he fired again.

Its original shape was gone into the heart of fire now, an uneven black mass at the conflagration's center. A limb emerged, groped blindly across the floor toward Fool, dug into the wood, and then pulled, dragging the burning demon toward him. Despite the fire, it managed to speak, the voice even more distorted, spitting the words out on balls of flame. “You will die, tiny shit,” it said, “tiny human nothing.”

Fool felt the heat from the burning demon, could still hear screaming from throughout the Iomante, and raised his gun. He pointed it at the
demon's head, now a ball of bright yellow flames out of which a single red eye still gleamed.

“All the demons of Hell will see you dead,” the burning thing said. Its eye swelled and ruptured, its contents immediately becoming steam and evaporating.

“Fuck them,” said Fool and pulled the trigger.

At some point, Fool had lost track of time. He had assumed that it was daytime, late afternoon or early evening, but the middle of the night was a receding memory when he emerged from the burning Iomante, and it had started raining.

Hell's storms were frequent and vicious, torrential downpours that soaked the streets and created cold tributaries that ran between the buildings and slithered against the bases of walls. It turned the streets to slicks of mud and stones, the water flooding down them. People were swept away by Hell's storms, caught up by water that carried so much mud and dirt that it was rumored to be like being struck by liquid stone. “Rumors,” he said aloud, not caring who heard him distractedly. “Always rumors.”

The rain fell in huge drops, hitting the ground hard enough to fragment and jump up against the downpour, and Fool's visibility was reduced to mere feet, breaking down the movement around him to little more than the shift of gray shapes without distinct form. The water caught the light from the fire and held it, a dull orange glimmer; despite the rain's heaviness, the Iomante burned fiercely. Clouds of steam rose over it as the rain hit the fire, billowing and sizzling up into the night sky and creating ghostlike, featureless faces that peered down on Fool.

He was still naked, sitting on the rough stone curb that marked the edge between the footpath and the roadway, arms wrapped around his legs and head tilted back. Somewhere in the chaos, he had dropped his gun and lost the bandages that had been wrapped around his chest, and the dark bruises and scabs stood out in stark contrast to his pale skin.
One of them had cracked and strings of blood ran down over his ribs. Fool's cheek was sore, stinging when the rain hit it.

Getting out of the Iomante had been a journey of scrambling and heat, dragging terrified Genevieves through thick black smoke that was alive with sparks and licking tongues of fire. As he went, the trail of men and then women following him grew larger as they picked up more and more desperate, terrified patients. Some carried others, some limped, some cried, some screamed, and some were grimly silent.

The demon had caused other fires through the building, knocked other lanterns over in its search for Fool, and the various conflagrations searched for each other as he had searched for an exit. Some doors he opened led into more wards, filled with smoke or fire and cowering people; some opened to flames and heat. Some were so hot when he placed his hand against the wood that he left them shut.

How many had died in the building, he didn't know; lots, probably. In one of the rooms he had seen a blackened tangle of bodies, still feeding the fires, the smoke pouring off them stinking of roasting meat and burned hair. Screams came from all around them, but which were human and which were the sounds of air expanding through rupturing and burning wood, he didn't know. His journey had been mostly random, since he had no idea where the exits or entrances were, and he had been reduced to simply guessing. At least once, he had ended up in a dead-end corridor and had then struggled to turn his group of terrified followers around, to get them to go back. His memories were jumbled, fragmentary, and contradictory. Had he found a room filled with glass jars, the contents of which were boiling, sending the stoppers exploding out of splintering necks in clouds of spraying liquid and steam? Had he stepped over the corpse of a Mary that was already being feasted on by two tiny things, demons that were already burning but ignoring the flames in the scavenging? He didn't know. He knew only that the Iomante was burning and that if he stopped moving, he would burn, too.

Finding the exit had been luck more than judgment. A descent down a narrow, smoke-filled staircase had brought Fool to a wide foyer, its entrance doors smashed across the floor. With black air escaping from the stairway's throat behind them, Fool had fallen into the air outside,
gasping, and had vomited violently, spewing out smoke and not much else. People milled around him, some banging into him, as he thought about fire and demons and vomited again. His ribs hurt; his whole body hurt.

Something in the Iomante exploded and sent a clenched fist of fire into the air. The hospital's roof collapsed inward with a roar, the beams holding for a moment longer, outlined against the fires like a skeleton before they, too, buckled and crumbled. What was left of the building was mostly a framework of walls barely containing the flames within; the windows were ragged squares of orange and red and yellow and the doorway that Fool had emerged from was now filling with fire. Most of the Genevieves and Marys who had escaped the Iomante had run; those who remained had gathered into a crowd and were watching the building burn. More people joined them, coming down from the Houska, which was only a few hundred feet away. They reminded Fool of the Sorrowful, gathered watching and waiting and hoping, although for what, he had no idea.

“This is the second uniform you've lost, Fool,” said a voice from his side. “You need to be more careful.”

“Hello, Elderflower,” said Fool without looking around. Fool had expected Elderflower to arrive; the little bureaucrat seemed to have the ability to turn up anywhere, walking out of the darkness or the light with equally delicate footsteps.

“What a few days you're having, Thomas,” said Elderflower. “Chasing murderers, being attacked, quelling riots, and then rescuing a group of scared humans from a burning building. And you appear to have killed another demon, Thomas, not some street-dweller, no, an old one! There hasn't been a human who's done that in a generation, Thomas, in two generations or ten or more, so I'm told. Possibly it has never been done before!”

“Should I be frightened?” asked Fool. “Should I be worrying about my safety, about more of them coming for me to take their revenge for my sheer fucking disobedience? I'm not. I don't have the energy. Tell them that, tell them from me to send who they want, I'll kill them or they'll kill me. Either way, fuck them.”