The Devil's Evidence (31 page)

“Do we go through? Or around?” asked Summer.

“Neither,” said Fool, letting the feather drop again and looking at the direction it pointed them to. “We go away.”

They walked again, away from the town, and soon the grass had given way, becoming at first scrubland and then shifting into a sandy place of cliffs and rocky earth with little plant growth. The feather led them into an area shadowed by cliffs and huge, tumbled formations of rock and scree before guiding them into a dry gorge that rose in ragged steps to a cliff-top mesa. They reached the top, panting with exertion, and Fool wished they had brought water. His mouth felt hot and cottony, thick with a clinging skin of dust or sand.

From the top of the cliff they were sent down the sloped far side to a dusty, barren landscape of rocks and stunted bushes. At the point where the slope leveled out, a spring bubbled in the center of a small patch of greenness and all three drank deeply. The water tasted clean and fresh and slicked through the coating in Fool's mouth, washing it away with each delightful swallow.

“Were you thinking about water?” asked Summer.

“I was,” said Gordie, “when we reached the top of the cliff.”

“Me too,” said Fool.

“We all thought about it and it was there,” said Summer. “Is that what happens here?”

“It might be,” said Fool. The sense of their being allowed to move freely, of being observed for what they might achieve, hit him strongly again, and he wondered if Summer was right, if the water had been provided for them because they'd all thought about it at the same time and strongly enough for Heaven to hear. Was it Mayall? The Malakim? Or some other part of Heaven as yet unmet, watching over them and making sure they reached whatever goal had been set for them in vast plans he would never be a party to? He mouthed a silent thanks, unsure whom he was thanking, and they carried on.

The path led through the center of the plain, jagging back and forth, moving around large rocky outcrops and between dust-bowl areas thick with red, rough sand. Creatures moved around them, too small to see, indistinct apart from the skitter of their feet and, once, a hiss that might have been a warning.

“I wonder how far away it is,” said Summer, moving back to the center of the path and looking suspiciously at the knotty plants near the path's edge that the hiss had come from.

“We'll see the chapel,” said Gordie, “and then we'll know we're close.”

“No, things change, don't they? Heaven changes all the time, we can look out of a window one day and see fields, look out the next and see the sea. The tunnel mouth could be anywhere, couldn't it?”

“No,” said Fool, emphatic, “Gordie's right. Whatever else has changed, it'll be by the chapel. The tunnel came out there for a reason, because the things from outside wanted the books in the graves. The graveyard's huge, and hundreds of graves have been opened and robbed; whatever happened there has been happening for a long time. The tunnel and the chapel are linked. When we find the tunnel, we'll find it by the chapel. Keep looking for the chapel.”

Plants covered in spikes and thorns grew sparsely along the path, and all three sweated as they walked, the sun above them seeming lower and closer and hotter than any other part of Heaven they had visited. It was directly above them, puddling their shadows squat around their feet. There were Joyful here as well, most of them still, some of them sitting down, all with the red dirt smearing their clothes and faces. They appeared unaware of the sun. Farther back from the path Fool saw several Joyful lying down, their bodies partly obscured by mounds of dust and small rocks.
What must they be dreaming of, to create this landscape?
he thought.
What kind of people are these, to love somewhere so rough and harsh?

If I was dreaming, what landscape would I make? An angelic version of Hell, the place I know best? Or somewhere from a past I don't remember, haven't ever been able to know, some space that meant something to me before I was born into Hell?

The sun blazed, huge and yellow in a sky that shimmered with heat, and they walked and the sweat gathered in their boots and rolled across their foreheads. Fool's clothes had started to smell, the dried blood upon them beginning to flake and crust, and he wished he had taken the chance to rinse them at the spring. He wished they weren't black.

He wished, and knew wishes were the bastard children of hope and that hope was dangerous.

How long they walked, Fool wasn't sure. It felt like it should be nighttime but it was still day and he wondered,
Is that because I'm so tired or is that because the time of day is like the landscape, different in different parts of Heaven? I entered the Sleepers' Cave in daytime and left it in night, but had enough time passed to make it night or was that just Heaven, just the changing of Heaven?
He took his jacket off and draped it over an arm, wanting to drop it by the wayside but not daring to because the next place they came to might be cold, might be one of the seascapes in the Estedea's painting, the air gray and bitter and filled with stinging needles of spray. Besides, it was his, the skin he wore as an Information Man, and he couldn't simply drop it and leave it behind. Even marked in his own blood and the blood of others and the thick, clinging dust, filthy with sweat and dirt, it was his and he would keep it because he had nothing else.

“There,” said Gordie and pointed at a distant shape. Fool squinted at it as Summer raised a hand to her eyes to shield them as she stared.

“Yes,” she said.

They had found the chapel.

As they approached the chapel, the temperature dropped and the air began to feel heavy with rain. The clouds that gathered above the angels were gradually expanding, their edges slithering out, the mass ballooning across the sky and shading the earth from the sun's gaze. Here and there lightning flashed in the clouds, the sharp white streaks illuminating the grayness around them and sending skittering leaps of shadow across the ground. The wind was picking up, chilling the air and making Fool's clothes flap. He put his jacket back on as a larger spike of lightning, still contained within the cloud, flashed. There was no thunder.

The landscape changed as they came to the chapel. The arid, rock-strewn gulches and cliffs eased, and although the fields that had surrounded the chapel the last time they were there did not reappear, the earth did flatten and smooth. They came to the wall that surrounded the chapel and the graveyard, now made of old stone and tumbled down in places, and walked along it until they could see the tunnel.

There were angels around the opening in the earth, although their number was fewer than in the period after the initial attack and Israfil's taking. They were standing facing the tunnel's mouth in the earth and each had their flame already burning, coils of fire held down and steady, curling around their feet while above them clouds gathered and churned. They ignored Fool and Summer and Gordie as they watched them from beyond the wall, their attention never shifting from the tunnel.

“What do we do?”

“The graveyard first,” said Fool. “We didn't get a chance to inspect it properly last time and I want to look around.”

“Will they let us?”

“Yes,” and he was confident they would because, like the dead Joyful, they weren't supposed to be here, so the angels wouldn't see them. They were invisible unless they made themselves visible by pushing themselves into the foreground, except perhaps to the likes of Mayall.

“Come on.”

They clambered over the wall and made their way to the building. Gordie went to go around the far side but Fool pulled him toward the tunnel and its attendant angels.

“No,” he said, “this way. This is the direction the things from outside would have come from, and we have to go where they've been.”

For all his bluster, Fool was nervous. This wasn't his territory and he understood too little to be anything other than anxious. The sound of his footsteps seemed terribly loud, echoing even over the increasingly powerful gusts of wind, and his breathing roared in and out of him. Surely the angels would hear, would turn to see what was creating this clamor, would see them then and respond? But no; the angels remained transfixed by the tunnel and ignored them as they made their way to the chapel's front.

Its door was open and Fool couldn't help looking into the chapel as they passed it. The inside of the building was plain, with neither decoration nor furniture, and it was filled with books. They were piled in huge towers, taller than he was, carefully lined up so that they balanced perfectly, some of the columns joined at their upper heights by carefully constructed bridges of larger books, overlaid so that the weight of the upper tomes was borne by all those below. The books were worn and, in some cases, damaged, spines etched with lines and cracks, the edges of covers fraying and loose. The effect was to make the space into a strangely worked lattice that appeared both elegant and decaying.

“I think they're waiting to be buried,” said Gordie. “Look.”

He was pointing at the far end of the chapel, where another series of columns made from books was standing, these shorter and draped with cloth, each cloth stitched with symbols. Fool saw crosses and stars and half circles and other sewn shapes, neat and small and regular in the cloths' weave. By the piled books, on the floor, were scrolls and what looked like pamphlets, their printing cheap and uneven.

Fool backed away from the door. The sight of the books was unnerving, things that had never been alive but that nonetheless now looked dead, collected together, stacked and sculpted and awaiting disposal. Awaiting burial.

“Let's go,” he said and carried on along the front of the chapel, glad to turn his back on the dead tomes and walk away. Turning along the chapel's side, they started toward the graveyard.

Even with the light made gray by the clouds and the wind pushing and pulling at the air, Fool could see the signs now that he was looking for them. There were long striations in the earth alongside the base of the walls, as if something had skulked low and dragged itself along the chapel's side. Some of the scores were older, had grass growing in their depths, were overlaid by newer marks in which the only growths were the tiny blue flowers. Indentations around the marks might have been made by clawed or pincered feet.

The chapel was made of rough, dark stone, and when Fool turned his Information Man's eye on it, he saw the marks of the things' passing here, too. Long scratches had been dragged into the stone, hard carapaces or shells scraping the building as the things went by. The scratches were at all heights, from just above ground level to above Fool's head, too high for him to reach even when stretching. The marks undulated in irregular jags, as though whatever had made them had been moving unevenly, jerking from point to point.

“Summer, stay here and see if there's anything else,” said Fool after pointing out the scratches on earth and wall. “See if they left anything physical, like the scale, that we can use. Look properly, Summer; you were an excellent officer and I need you to be one again. Gordie, come with me.”

The two men went around to the rear of the building, hurrying now. In pallid daylight, Fool saw that the graveyard was far larger than he had realized. It stretched off into the distance, the rows of stone markers and occasional gnarled, twisting trees eventually blurring together and then down to nothing and merging with the horizon. There were no angels here, and Fool and Gordie were free to walk among the gaping, ravaged mouths of the graves and to see the disinterred and damaged books without distraction.

The holes were rough and uneven, the earth of the graves ripped apart in the things' desperation to reach the buried tomes. Around the graves' lips were tears in the turf that exposed the rich, dark soil below, and at the bottom of the holes were the fragments of books. Now that he was able to observe without obstruction and to take a little time over the viewing, Fool saw that the books had been buried in large shrouds of the same stitched cloth he had seen in the chapel and that these had been torn open by the grave robbers, the material ripped to strings and peeled back like the skin of one of the bodies on Tidyman's or Hand's tables. The damp earth had stained the material and the paper that remained in the graves, painting everything with a dirty brown luster.

“Be fast,” said Fool to Gordie. “See if there's anything that'll help us persuade Heaven or Hell what's happening here. We need to move.”

They looked around, spreading out their search and calling to each other as they went, but found nothing. Fool gestured Gordie back to him and they went to the edge of the graveyard, staring out over it and trying to see what they had missed.
There must be something, somefuckingthing we've not grasped, some other way of reading this place, surely,
thought Fool, feeling the tension knot inside him. They had to be quick, to be quicker than they were; otherwise all this was going to be for nothing and the war would start despite them.

“The books are evidence, aren't they?” said Gordie eventually. His voice was whipped around by the growing wind, and Fool had to concentrate to hear it and to raise his own voice in reply.

“They don't prove anything by themselves,” said Fool, snapping, frustrated. “They're just books, buried and dug up. If we show them to Mayall he'll say, ‘Yes, we know, the demons that came from the tunnel did that,' and if we show them to Rhakshasas he'll say, ‘So fucking what?' We need more than this. We need something solid. We need
something
.”

“Solid? Like what? There's nothing here, not that we have time to find,” said Gordie, almost but not quite shouting. “We have the scale, there's the pincer in the office in Hell, the claw, what else can we show them?”

“I don't know,” cried Fool. “I don't fucking
know
!”