The Devil's Evidence (10 page)

It wasn't conclusive, but it was the start of a trail.

Fool went back to the carousel, intending to study the body more, but found it gone.

“Where is it?” he asked. “Where's the body gone?”

“To the Garden, where the dead go,” said Israfil.

“Why?”

“Because the journey carries on,” said the angel.

“Bring him back,” said Fool.

“No,” said Israfil. “His journey must be uninterrupted, and what happened here was an accident.”

“I'm not sure it was—” said Fool, but the angel interrupted him before he could go on.

“The man fell because the attendant was not looking after him correctly. He caught himself on the way down and cut himself before hitting his head on the floor. It was an accident. We do not need the interference of a human from Hell to tell us this.”

Fool looked at Benjamin, who nodded. “It is a tragedy,” said the shorter angel, “but they can start their journey again.”

“Can I at least speak to the attendant again?” asked Fool, looking around, unable to see the other angel. “He may have seen or heard something and not realized it was important.”

“The attendant has been removed,” said Israfil calmly. “His replacement will arrive soon. You may talk to him if you wish.”

“No,” said Fool, “that's pointless, he wasn't here to see anything.”

“There is nothing wrong here, so there was nothing to see,” said Israfil. Around them, the rides were all drawing to a stop and this time their inhabitants were moving, standing up, exiting the cars and cups, climbing off the horses. Soon they were surrounded, a crowd of people wandering past them one way as new riders came from somewhere else, took up residence on the rides, and mounted the horses. None were awake, all their eyes closed, feeling their way with their feet and guided by the angels that moved among them, pale and delicate against the heavier human flesh.

“Can I see the body at the Garden, before it's burned?”

“Our Garden is not one of flames, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin. “It is one of earth and air, a hilltop where the dead are released, and you are already too late to see them. They are gone.”

Fool muttered angrily, turning on the spot and looking around, trying to see if he had missed anything. He lifted his face, let the sun warm it, and then looked out across the field again.

The scribe was crouched at the edge of the field, almost hidden by the crops, watching back as Fool stared at it.

Fool took a step in the direction of the scribe, struggling to keep it in view as he stepped off the carousel and descended into a moving sea of humanity. He glimpsed it as a dark shape, fragmented between fluttering white robes, and then it was gone.

Fool broke into a run, weaving between people with difficulty before coming to the edge of the fairground. He ducked under the rope fence, hearing the crackle of the flapping pennants as he passed below them, and then he was at the edge of the crop. The scribe had been farther along the field, away from the trampled earth and bent plants, and its prints were clear in the damp soil. Fool crouched, trying to make sense of it.

Had the scribe injured the man? Murdered him?

It was swimming in his head, the images of the dead body and the carousel and the scribe jumbling, refusing to separate. Fool wavered, putting out a hand to steady himself, liking the feel of the warm, soft dirt against his fingers.
Even Heaven's dirt feels clean,
he thought.
Clean dirt, little Fool, clean and healthy dirt.

“It's late,” said Benjamin from behind him. “You need sleep, Thomas Fool. We will escort you back to your room.”

“No,” said Fool but then realized that yes, he was tired, was
exhausted,
that Benjamin telling him had shown him the truth of this. He'd carry this on tomorrow if they allowed him. Now, he suddenly understood, he had to rest. He stood, rubbed his eyes to clear them, and let them take him away.

When he got back to his room, Fool found that someone had put a bottle of ink on his desk along with lengths of string and a sheaf of plain paper, thick and creamy and entirely unlike the thin, near-transparent sheets he used in Hell. Paper and ink, and it was easy to understand the meaning in the items, so he sat at the desk despite his tiredness and tried to set his thoughts in order. He was required to make his report, and to make it now.
Information about this mystery must be delivered, little knowledgeable Fool,
he thought, and then realized that whoever had left the ink and paper hadn't left a pen. Fool wondered how he was going to write before remembering the feather.

It was smaller than the feather he had owned previously but it glowed as brightly, and when he waved it, it left trails in the air that sparkled even as they faded and vanished. Its calamus was bone-white and curved, the delicate spine darker and the barbs soft to the touch. Its pale glow made his hand look like marble, a ghost in the darkness. Sighing, he unscrewed the top of the ink bottle, dipped the feather in the ink, and began to write.

It took him an hour or so to write up everything he had seen, to note the things that concerned him and the few conclusions he had drawn. He did not mention the scribe in the report, for reasons he was unclear about but had to do with wondering where his loyalty lay, and wanting to find out what the scribe had been doing before reporting it. When he had finished, he rolled the paper into a small scroll and tied it with a piece of the string and looked around for a tube in which to place the scroll. It was in the corner, where no tube had been before. Beneath the tube was a canister, and Fool put the scroll in the canister, was about to insert it into the tube, when he stopped. After a moment, he opened the canister and tipped the scroll back onto his desk. Untying it, he smoothed the paper and took the feather and, in large letters, wrote beneath his report:

THIS WAS NO ACCIDENT.

He was asleep and then he was awake and screaming.

The pain was similar to when Rhakshasas's guts had wrapped themselves around him but somehow reversed, not something burning in but something clawing out. Fool threw back the blankets and tried to sit to reach the lamp, but the pain that wrenched at him from his belly was terrible, made him collapse back. He was naked, sweating, riding a wave of cramping agony and then lurching up again and this time his fingers hit the globe and brought it to weak life.

The tattoos on his body were twisting and moving across his skin. The lines across his belly and chest had formed themselves into a single large eye and a wide, grinning mouth, and both were opening. The eye was across the skin of his lower stomach and the mouth just below his ribs, both upside down so that he faced them and they him. His flesh was tearing along the line of the eyelid, the skin splitting with a sound like ripping linen, and the pain roared through him and he screamed, and then the lip of the mouth curled back at one side to reveal red and gleaming muscle beneath. Fool screamed again, the noise cut short by a bolt of pain so terrible, so
loud,
it tightened his throat to a clenched pipe, and then both eye and mouth were open fully.

The eye blinked, opened wide to show a spread of red and fatty muscle, then blinked again, and when it opened a second time, Fool's raw musculature was gone and a dark, slitted pupil had replaced it. Inside the mouth, which was opening and closing as though to bring the new lips to life, his flesh had disappeared and there was instead a blackness that held in its depths, impossibly deep so that it appeared to be coming from a place below both Fool and the bed he lay on, something that rippled. The pain was ridged now, coming in waves and peaks, making him gasp and cry. The eye and the mouth, disproportionate, eye larger than the mouth, opened and closed a few more times, as though testing their newfound existence, and then the mouth spoke.

“Hello, Fool.”

The voice came from inside his stomach, the vibrations of it running along his torso and arms and legs, making his teeth clench. The voice was different yet familiar, the mouth something he recognized, the pain still crashing over him but slower now, receding. The eye blinked again, rolled, slit pupil widening and then narrowing as it took in the room around Fool.

“They treat you well, I see.”

Mr. Tap. Mr. Tap's voice, coming from Fool's belly, Mr. Tap's eye staring out at him from his own flesh. He tried to cry out, reached for the eye, not knowing if he was hoping to close it and hold it together or poke at it, fight it off. The mouth snapped at his hand, the edges of his stomach pulsing as the teeth forced themselves forward, sending another yelp of pain through him and out of his own mouth. He pulled his hand back, weeping, and waited.

“That's better, Fool. Try to remember, you were told that we would need to communicate, and this is our chosen way of doing it. This way, Fool, Heaven has no part of our little chats, and cannot listen in. I can be honest with you and you can be honest with me, yes?”

“Yes,” said Fool, lying back, partly through sheer pained exhaustion and partly so he didn't have to see the edges of his stomach move and flap, forming Mr. Tap's words. The sound of them, and the feel of them, were bad enough, but seeing them was somehow worse, his own body manipulated and torn, his skin curled under itself to create lips, warped and distorted like putty.

“So, Fool, what news?”

If Fool lay still, the pain was almost gone, almost a memory, except for the throbbing around the edges of Mr. Tap's eye and mouth and an itch that crawled across the rest of his skin. Were the rest of the tattoos moving, forming into new shapes that could open, talk?
Little talking Fool,
he thought fleetingly, trying to keep his tears at bay, and said aloud, “About what?”

“The Delegation, of course. How does it fare?”

“We got here safely,” he replied. “I didn't burn up in the Flame Garden. We didn't get eaten by the things from the place outside of everywhere.”

“And the discussions?” asked Mr. Tap. Fool risked another look at his chest. The eye blinked at him, the pupil inside the eyelids slicked with pale blood, the mouth an open tube with teeth, Mr. Tap's teeth, impossible yet real, clicking and clacking together.

“I didn't understand them, but they seemed to go well,” replied Fool. Talking was wearying and he collapsed and closed his eyes.

“Good,” said Mr. Tap, sounding uninterested. “And now, tell me about Heaven. What have you seen? What have you heard?”

“Nothing,” said Fool, and immediately a fresh wave of pain bloomed within him. He jerked up, looked at himself, and saw that the mouth had started to gnaw at its lower lip, was pulling on the skin of Fool's upper chest. The skin stretched, was pulled toward the mouth, one nipple coming close to the teeth, and he screamed again, hearing his own hopelessness in the sound, and said, “Stop! I don't understand what you want to know!”

“Everything,” said Mr. Tap, letting go of Fool's skin. Blood welled and trickled, rolling down his lower rib to the edge of the mouth. From inside him, a tongue emerged and licked at the blood, slurping it. The mouth grinned, the edges of the grin disappearing into Fool's flanks.

“You taste good, Fool,” said Mr. Tap. “You taste
wonderful
. I must eat you again sometime.”

“Heaven is in people's heads,” said Fool, trying to sort through the dense fog of his pain for what the demon using his skin wanted to know. What could he tell Mr. Tap?

What
should
he tell it?

“We know that,” said Mr. Tap. “They don't share like we do in Hell. More.”

“It changes. They…dream, or remember or think, I'm not sure, but they bring places into existence, when enough of them are thinking about something similar. I think that's how it works.”

“Interesting,” said Mr. Tap. “That may prove useful one day. And what about you, Fool?”

“What about me?”

“You know by now that the Bureaucracy of Heaven requested that you be sent with the Delegation, requested you specifically?”

“Yes,” said Fool.

“Good. We'd like to know why, Rhakshasas and I.”

“I don't know.”

Pain, just a tiny wave of it, as the mouth took an edge of skin and pulled on it, nibbling. “Come now, Fool,” said Mr. Tap, said Fool's
torso,
the words slightly muffled as the mouth clenched a morsel of skin between its front teeth.

“I think it was to thank me,” said Fool, thinking fast. For some reason, he didn't want to tell Mr. Tap or the Archdeacons, in the shape of Rhakshasas, about the mystery, the accident, the whatever it was. This was Heaven, and Hell would use any weakness to infiltrate, to attack, to gain advantage. “Because of what happened, I mean. The angel who greeted me mentioned it, as did the Malakim later.”

“The Malakim?” asked Mr. Tap, voice suddenly serious, darker, colder. “You've spoken to the Malakim?”

“Yes,” replied Fool.
That was a mistake, little Fool,
he thought. He was struggling to concentrate, struggling not to simply tell Mr. Tap everything, just to stop the pain, make it go away.

“Why? Why did the Malakim speak to you?”

“For the same reason. They came to my room, appeared in it, actually, scared me, then told me I had their gratitude.”
Almost truthful Fool, little lying Fool.

“Gratitude? That may be useful, Fool. See that you don't lose it.”

“No.”

“Is there anything else, any other snippet you can give me?”

“No. Yes, wait, there's one more thing. Catarinch, it's scared of the angels here. It's rude to them.”

Why had he added that? Why make trouble?
Because my skin is being abused, and because Catarinch is a problem for me, even if I'm not sure how yet.

“And Wambwark?”

“It doesn't say much. It seems calmer, less afraid.”