The Devil's Detective (31 page)

“Balthazar,” he was shouting, “do something!”

“What is there to do, Information Man?” said Balthazar, his voice audible even over the screaming. He came to the fence, the column of his fire dwindling to nothing, his entire body gleaming, throwing light out, his wings open and flapping. With each flap, air barreled past Fool, shaking him, and Balthazar rose several inches off the ground and then drifted back down.

“I control my own flames, not those of others,” the angel said, and then a vast blue glow leaped up from the crowd.

It crashed across the square rapidly, expanding out from the tight presses of the Sorrowful at the exits, turning the fires into capering, shifting formless blue pools, turning the demons into cold nightmares and the Sorrowful into bleached, featureless things. It came at Fool fast, a wall exploding across the square, and hit him hard, tearing him from the fence. It sounded like a hurricane, like all the screams Fool had ever heard meshed into one stretched and ringing thunderclap, accompanying him along his brief journey to the ground, and as the jolt of impact slammed into him it shrieked louder. It burned his eyes, was visible even
when he clenched them shut, raging into him. Images filled his mind, disconnected and multiplying, of Hell seen from above, from
outside
, of a wall that was the only wall, of countless souls pressed together in the oceans of Limbo with no breath and no self and no hope but that they might gain flesh and be Elevated, and Fool screamed and screamed and screamed.

The light lasted only a moment; it was the worst moment Fool had ever had.

When it was gone, when his eyes no longer burned and the pressure within his skull had dropped to something like normal, Fool stopped screaming. His throat was raw and he spat, seeing pink streaks of blood in his spittle, another injury to add to his list. He rolled over onto his back and then sat up. Balthazar was standing next to him, his head tilted back and his mouth open as though tasting the air.

“Did you feel them, Information Man Fool?” asked Balthazar. “All those souls? All flying free together, all released?”

“Was that what it was?” asked Fool.

“Of course,” said Balthazar. “God was here, for just a moment, Information Man, traveling with the souls on their release.” Fool, remembering the images within the light, said nothing. Instead, he stood and looked across the square.

Fires still burned, had spread into some of the buildings that lined the square and gave it its edges. Corpses littered the ground, some smoking, others alight. Not everyone was dead, though, and the silence that had followed the souls' freeing was rupturing with screams and moans. Fool walked back to the fence, his body and head weary, and took hold of the railings; they were warm. On the ground near him, a charred banner read
WE DESERVE BETTER
.
Yes
, he thought,
we do, but this is Hell, so we won't get it.
Looking up, he saw Elderflower at one of the windows. The little man nodded at Fool and then turned away and was gone, and the pane filled with silent shadows.

Clearing the square took the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon. Fool detailed some of his troops to help in the job, getting them to drag the mounds of burned and mangled flesh away from the exits. The corpses against the walls came loose with a terrible tearing sound, were bent in ways that humans should not be, their bones shattered by the weight of the crowd behind them. Some had suffocated and looked as though they were asleep when they were laid on the ground; others were only just recognizable as human, blackened and blistered, curled into tight balls by the heat. Those humans who were still alive and not too badly injured were pulled in to assist as well, stacking the bodies to make their collection and transport easier; even Balthazar helped, carrying corpses and piling them like cordwood.

Porters ran carts, directed by Fool, taking pile after pile of bodies to the Flame Garden, ferrying them on wooden carts and carrying them in hammocks of gray canvas. The air was thick with the smell of charred flesh and burned hair and burning wood. Clouds of steam spat from the buildings aflame around them as demons sprayed them with water, streams of warmed liquid spilling across the square and washing the dead flesh it contained.

When the square was finally empty of the dead, the ground covered in sodden ash and torn paper and clothing and banners and pools of blood and urine and dirt and water, Fool went and sat with his back against the fence. His uniform was filthy, but at least, he thought, he still had it. He had listened to Elderflower and obeyed, obedient Fool that he was, and this was the result; bodies ferried to the Flame Garden all day, souls torn loose by fear and pain, sent back to Limbo. Was he any better than
the demon that killed the Genevieves? Or the one that had come to the Iomante to kill him and had slaughtered its way along the wards to find him? He looked at his gun, turning it in his hands. The barrel's mouth stared solemnly at him, black and open and waiting to breathe. Was he any different? Any better?

Was he a demon? After all, he ordered demons about now—some, anyway—and they obeyed his instructions without complaint. What was he? He was an Information Man, the only one in Hell, a powerless thing that suddenly, apparently, had power.

Power. He looked at his gun again and then holstered it. Was he powerful? Really?

No; he was simply a fool, he told himself, was
Fool
, a man like any other in Hell, and he was tired. He was as powerless as the dead, as helpless as the Genevieves and Marys who lined the Houska's streets and filled its brothels, but even as he told himself that, he knew he was wrong. He might not understand it, might want to back away from it, but he did have power, some power anyway.

The question was, if he had power, what could he do with it?

Later, in his rooms, Fool tried to work out where they had been and where he had come to. He had described what he was doing to Elderflower as “following a trail,” but what trail? It started with a body floating in Solomon Water and then traveled along past a body in the Orphanage, another in the farmhouse and a pit of dead Aruhlians. There were branches off the path, all stemming from its single root: a feather that glowed and wouldn't hold blood, angels and Elevations and riots, the deaths of Gordie and Summer and the Man. Somewhere in this trail and its curling branches, there had to be hints as to the next steps, didn't there?

Didn't there?

Fool wrote notes to himself, questions and answers and more questions, and spread them out on the table in the offices' small kitchen. Starting at the beginning, he tried to think through again each step he had taken so far, but there were so many, not all of them ones he had
chosen. Right from the little demon at the lake, he had been as much moved as the one doing the moving; more, really.

The demon at the lake.

Fool looked at his notes about the first body. The demon had attacked them and tried to claim the body for itself, had battened onto it like a leech and then stopped. It had tasted its emptiness, hated it, but it had said something, hadn't it? What had it said?

It had said, “What did he do?”

“He,” not “it.”

He.

There was something there, something Fool had missed all along but could see now, something that might be important. It had said “he,” not “it.” Did that mean it had seen who killed the first Genevieve? Could it tell Fool what the murderer looked like? He rose, suddenly awake and not tired, trembling.

It was as he stood that he remembered; there was another witness, maybe two. Morgan had them, had Summer and the body from the alley, and Summer's flesh at least still housed her soul. Summer might have talked.

They were traveling through the industrial district, on their way to the Questioning House, and they were in a transport. The vehicle had been waiting outside his rooms as he left, idling on the street. There was a demon behind its wheel and Elderflower was sitting in its rear, holding the door open for Fool.

“This is quicker than the trains,” said Elderflower, “and the Bureaucracy wishes you to be fast on this, Thomas. This has gone on long enough now; it is upsetting the balances. Hell has not seen riots for years, still less humans attacking demons. Death on the scale that occurred today is almost unprecedented and the oceans of Limbo cannot afford to be flooded with that many released souls. They are already awash, and there is a risk of flooding.”

“A flood of souls?”

“A flood of souls, Thomas, is something you do not wish to ever experience.”

“I don't?”

“No, Thomas, you do not. Trust me on this.”

Trust Elderflower? Did he trust him? “Why?”

“Because, Thomas, I am all you have to trust.” And in this, Fool thought sadly, Elderflower was right.

The journey took Fool through a Hell he had not seen before. The riots had spread, fires burning almost unchecked, some guttering behind the heavy stone walls and some raging, forcing their tongues out through broken windows and doorways in flickering leers. Humans no longer walked with their heads down, scurrying by themselves or in twos and threes; instead, great crowds of them patrolled the streets, blocking the
transport's passage on several occasions. Even when they parted, they did so slowly, hemming the vehicle in as it passed, peering in through the windows at Fool and Elderflower and their demon chauffeur. The Houska seemed emptier but the streets linking it and the boardinghouses fuller. They passed a train moving slowly toward the Houska; it was on fire, its rear two carriages burning brightly.

“What's happening?” asked Fool.

“Hell is changing,” said Elderflower. “Being changed. Something has emerged, something of such power that it's warping the things around it simply by being here. Slaughter isn't unusual in Hell, Thomas, you know that, but these are not usual times. These deaths, these murders, have become noticeable, Thomas. Things are being
seen
, rising above the normal tide of pain and suffering, and so we shall be seen to do something. I am to give you what assistance I can to put this situation, and by extension all those things happening as a result of it, to rest. Hell will have its control, Thomas. It will have charge of the things that occur within its boundaries.”

The transport brought them to the House. “There are more Elevations planned,” said Elderflower as they exited the vehicle. “We have collected the lucky few and they will be shown the way upward tonight. There will be yet more tomorrow, as well as the last of our discussions. You have permission to miss tonight's risings but will, of course, be there for the rest of our proceedings.”

“Of course,” said Fool.

“Go, Thomas,” said Elderflower. “Go and look, Thomas, and listen, and solve this mystery.”

“It's not a mystery, though, is it?” said Fool. “You know who's doing these things, you know what they are, where they are—you must.”

“Must I? I have told you before, Thomas. Your job is to investigate just as mine is to aid you where I can. We are tiny parts of the biggest picture, it is true, and we might see the fragment we inhabit and understand what it means or not. What I may see and know I cannot say; those are the rules that I have been given. Now, there is a body awaiting you, Thomas, as there are Elevations awaiting me. You must attend to them, as I must attend to Adam and Balthazar.”

The little bureaucrat turned and walked away into the night. Fool's
last glimpse of him was of his coat flapping behind him and his hair, bobbing like dry grass, and then the darkness closed around him.
He walks through the darkness and light equally
, thought Fool, and still had no idea what he really was.

Despite the hour's lateness, the nearby industrial area was still noisy, the air full of smoke and grit, and his swallows were grimy and rough. Everything was rough, everything scratched, everything about him ached, but this was Hell and what else should he expect? This path he was on, supposedly on, following a demon whose appearance he didn't even know, how could he hope to follow it when each turn seemed to be a dead end, an end filled with the dead, where each new trail looped back on itself? Did he really think that Summer would speak, could tell him anything? That the little thing in Solomon Water might have seen something? That it might tell him the something it had seen?

Yes, because otherwise he might as well lie in the mud at the lake's edge and allow his lungs to fill with Hell's earth, allow himself to be trodden away to nothing.
That's my tiny fragment of hope, I suppose
, he thought,
little hopeful Fool, wanting to catch a demon so powerful it can eat souls and that can slip between the spaces of Hell without apparently being seen.
He thought of the demon that had come for him in the Iomante, about his escape. If he kept on, he'd end up back at the Heights, he supposed, and its inhabitants would notice him again, would move against him. Had they already sent something else after him? Or were they waiting, watching for his next move?

Could he stop? Simply climb back into the transport and tell it to drive him away? Return to the offices and pretend that the blue ribbons were no more important than any other crime, stamp them
DNI
or
Unknown
, and then sit in his rooms and wait for Summer's and Gordie's replacements? Stay quiet, stay low, stay out of notice? He had come so far, but achieved so little other than the death of the people around him he cared about, other than the battery of his own body to the point where all movement hurt.

Could he stop? Could he?

He looked at the Questioning House; it was time to decide. Fool
put his hand on the butt of his gun, felt its shape and solidity and how small it was compared to the terrors that Hell held, and looked down at his hand, scabbed and pale like some injured spider. He looked back at the house, with its thick covering of vines, and thought of the Man lying dead with holes torn in his back, his musculature exposed and manipulated.
The demon could have killed me, but it didn't
, he thought.
It sent me to Crow Heights so that others would kill me. It was playing with me, making me dance for its entertainment. Elderflower, the demon, the Man, Rhakshasas, and the rest of the Bureaucracy that find me so interesting to watch, they're
all
playing with me, watching as I do what they want, dancing as they whistle.
He glanced down at his uniform, wrinkled and grimy already, and remembered the taste of Summer's blood in his mouth, the scent of Gordie burning and the sound of him screaming, the sound of the demon in the Iomante.
I wonder if they found that interesting? If any of it bothered them? If they watched me as Gordie died, not murdered but still killed by that demon, whatever the fuck it looks like?