The Devil's Evidence (36 page)

“I know that the war you're about to go to is based on a lie. I know Heaven is wrong and that you'll battle each other over a mistake.”

This brought Rhakshasas up short, and even in this grandest, foulest demon Fool could see uncertainty take root, blossom. “A lie?”

“A lie, or a mistake, it doesn't matter what you call it. I told Mr. Tap but maybe he's not passed the message on. Heaven thinks you attack it, you think Heaven attacks you, but neither of you is right. You've been manipulated into war, Rhakshasas, you and Heaven both.”

Rhakshasas stepped into the courtyard fully, dripping, its flies buzzing, and seated itself on the bench opposite Fool. Even sitting down, its head was level with Fool's. The demon turned its burning eyes to Gordie and Summer and asked, “Who the piss are these two? They're not Hell's, are they?”

“They used to be. I don't know whose they are now.”

“Then they do not belong. Remove them, or I will.”

“No. They're with me.”

“No? Who the fuck do you believe you are, Thomas Fool? You exist because I and the other Archdeacons allow you to, you and every other little piece of human scum in Hell.” Rhakshasas's guts began to slither loose from it, heading for Summer, who was closest to it. She stepped back and the guts moved faster and Fool lifted his gun and fired.

He didn't hit Rhakshasas; he hit a point in front of the moving guts so that chips of stone and sparks sprang away from the impact as the bullet ricocheted up and tore through the bushes before burying itself in the wall. Rhakshasas's guts reared back, curled, pulsing tubes of it lifting from the ground like worms.

“You dare?” asked Rhakshasas. “You dare to attack me?”

“No,” said Fool, “but I dare to try to save Hell from the mess it's about to find itself in. Listen to me, Rhakshasas, listen. Please.”

The demon considered Fool and then said, “Very well. Talk, but talk quickly and be aware that if I am not convinced when you've finished, I will tear you into pieces, you and your friends.”

“That's fine,” said Fool and started to talk.

He told Rhakshasas everything, everything that he'd seen and heard, everything he'd done, the conclusions he'd reached. Gordie got the pincer and the scooped-out demon and the scale and the claw and the torn books out of the sack and showed them to Rhakshasas, setting them on the ground in front of it. Finally, Fool told Rhakshasas what he thought had happened, about the secret place on the island and the incursions from the island to Hell's mainland, about the thefts of the Joyful for food, about the demons in boxes and what it all meant.

“It's the things from outside of everywhere,” he said finally. “It's them, they're doing this.”

Rhakshasas didn't move or speak, sitting on the bench, its eyes dimmed to a pale flicker as it thought. Fool, exhausted, sat back as Gordie gathered the things from the ground and placed them back in the crude bag. There was just the Man now, his contribution to the story; then it would be over. Fool nodded at the bushes and then sat back, waiting.

“It's true,” said the plants, rising up in front of Rhakshasas. “I never died. I've been here all along. Allow me to be the thing that confirms Fool's story, Rhakshasas. Something has used Hell's empty spaces to plan this attack, and it isn't Heaven. The island exists and the graves Fool saw have all been emptied.”

There. It was done. They'd said all they could now, and showed everything they had. Either they'd be believed or they wouldn't, either the war would be averted or it wouldn't.

Either the things from outside would win or they'd be beaten.

As he sat waiting for Rhakshasas to respond, Fool thought about everything. Setting it out for the demon had churned it up in his mind, thrown the pieces into the air, and now they were drifting down, settling into new patterns, and something started to feel wrong, started to nag at him like an aching tooth that needed probing with a tongue to find the gap, find the rottenness. What was it?

It didn't fit.

Fool's head was suddenly filled with questions, all clamoring for his attention at once, yammering and squawking and flapping their panic at him. He groaned and placed his hands to his temples, pressing, trying to reduce the noise in his brain, trying to see it one piece at a time.

If the things were from outside, were so
other,
why did they need the Joyful to feed on?

If they used the boats to come from the island, why the filled-in tunnels in Hell's deserted spots? Why use boats at all if they had tunnels?

“Fool,” said Gordie.

“Not now,” said Fool, thinking furiously.

“Now,” said Gordie insistently, “listen.
Look.
This isn't a pincer.”

“What?”

Gordie held it out in front of him. “Pincers are hollow when they're not attached to the living creature, they're made of shell with meat and veins and blood inside them. This is
solid
. It's like a carving of a pincer.”

How did the Man know about the graves and the island? How did he know how Marianne's body had been left?

Gordie reached into the bag and took out the scale and began to bend it; it snapped, breaking into two pieces. “I've realized it, the thing that's wrong. This isn't a real scale, like the pincer isn't a real pincer; real scales are flexible,” he said urgently.

Orobas. The thing that had pushed itself through the dirt at them on the island, the blind thing, was the demon Orobas. It was an Information Man, one of Fool's troops.

The demons in the crates, they weren't being fed on, they were being
used
.

The Man knew because he'd seen them. Because he'd been there.

“Fool, these are imitations,” said Gordie.

“It's you,” whispered Fool, turning to look at the Man, the shape of him in the bushes.

“Of course it is,” said the Man and tore Rhakshasas in half.

The ground under the demon churned as the plants there burst violently up and plunged into its flesh. Stems grew from Rhakshasas's eyes and mouth and pulled away from each other, splitting its head apart with a wet, sloppy noise. In the now-exposed flesh of the neck, tendrils of vine turned and twisted, slicing through the meat. More, thicker stems pushed out of the demon's belly and cracked its ribs as they forced their way out from between its bones, the pop of them breaking as wet as the sound of its head splitting had been. Fool jumped back as a spray of Rhakshasas's blood arced through the air and only just managed to avoid being caught in it.

Summer screamed and a part of the Man lashed out and wrapped around her neck, choking her to silence. Gordie dropped the two parts of the scale and tried to simultaneously pick up his window frame club and go to Summer, but a thick branch whipped around and caught him across the forehead so hard that it broke, a section of it falling at Fool's feet and Gordie spinning back across the courtyard and slamming into the wall, his club flying into the bushes and lost from view. His head hit the bottom edge of a windowpane and it cracked, the crack starring through the glass as Gordie slid down, unconscious.

Rhakshasas's guts reacted fast, flinging themselves away from the attack and landing on the ground in a greasy slither. They moved rapidly across the courtyard but were not fast enough; as they went over one of the beds, shoots exploded from the earth and tore into them, the tubes punctured and ripped. Brown liquid and semi-digested chunks of something unidentifiable spilled from the intestines as more growths burst through them, lifting them from the ground so that they hung, suspended and oozing, two or three feet above the earth. Rhakshasas's flies abandoned the body, but again the Man was too quick; hundreds of stems and branches rose from the bushes around the courtyard to form a thick, impenetrable ceiling, each lined with buds shaped like mouths that opened and snapped closed rapidly, eating the insects.

Rhakshasas's now-naked body slumped, one part falling from the bench and the other tilting back and flopping loosely. Thick ichor spattered to the ground below, a rainbow pool of red and yellow and green that stank and that almost immediately congealed into a thick scum.

The courtyard was dark, the only light in it that which came in from the windows of Assemblies House, through which demons looked on as they continued to scurry and dart. None reacted to the scene below them, because this was Hell and who was to say what was normal and what was wrong here?

“Now, Fool,” said the Man. “Shall we talk?”

“It was you,” said Fool again, not asking, watching blue flowers sprout in the earth around his feet.

“Oh, Fool, of course it was. I spent my death exploring and I found that I can tunnel, Fool, when left alone I can build the most beautiful tunnels between all the worlds, can go anywhere! I'm not angel or demon, Fool, nor human anymore, and I'm not tethered to any world. I'm strongest in Hell, of course, but I can reach everywhere, Fool, everywhere! So I thought about what I wanted, and what I would have to do to get it, and then I started.

“I lit my fires to cause worry, and I slaughtered to do the same thing, to make the Bureaucracy feel the sting of uncertainty, I took the Joyful from Heaven and I imprisoned them in Hell. I took demons and nameless angels and I unearthed the old books and I burned them. I did it
all
. Everything to this point and beyond, me, just me. I want this war, Fool. I want it to rage and howl and I want the dead to pile up in drifts, and I will make it happen, Information Man. I will make it
explode
.

“But you were always a danger, Fool, always the thing that might right the balances I was trying so hard to upset. You being sent to Heaven was a godsend, if you'll pardon the pun, because it focused angelic eyes on the presence of Hell and made them more prepared to see the blasphemies being committed, but you might also have shown them that it wasn't Hell committing them. You're better than you realize, Fool, more aware than you give yourself credit for, so I kept as good a track of you as I could and then I distracted you by letting you think that the things from outside were breaking through and I set you chasing your tail.”

“There are no things from outside?”

“I'm sure there are, Fool. You told me you'd seen them the first time we spoke with you in Heaven, after all, but inside the beautiful kingdom of Heaven or this foul place? No. They remain where they have always been, outside. I just pushed you in the direction of thinking they weren't. You gave me the idea, Fool, gave me the means to so easily fool you, little Fool. A pincer here, a claw there, a scale in a bed. Simple.

“And my demons, those sad things I turned into puppets, they helped, too. I never got their movement right but they gave me ears and eyes and fingers and teeth in Heaven and in Hell, in the places I couldn't reach, and you thought their movement was something wrong, didn't you? And you made up your own stories, gave it details I could never hope for. You've been so
helpful,
Fool!”

Helpful Fool, little helpful betrayed Fool.
“And you killed Marianne?”

“I did. I wish I could tell you I felt some sorrow, Fool, but I don't. She was a useful way of keeping you off balance, so I killed her when I knew you were back in Hell. I smelled you through that demon, Fool, and decided to make sure you were distracted. You introduced us, Fool, you let me see her and see how much you liked her, and I used that information at the point where it was most useful, where you presented the most danger, where if you had been thinking clearly you might have still got ahead of me and turned this all around. I always said, Fool. I always said that information gives power, and you've started to learn it, haven't you, in the secrets you kept from me in Heaven, but you aren't a good enough liar. I could always tell there were gaps, tell the untruths. I can always judge where you are on the journey, Fool, better than you can yourself, and I watched as you wandered the trail I'd laid for you and I knew you'd try, you'd try so hard, but that ultimately it would be to no avail.

“It's too late. This day is mine, Fool.”

“Why? Why do you want this war?”

“Why?” replied the Man. “Why not? Because I can have it, Fool, just because I can and because I
want
. Because I want to see Heaven and Hell burned to the earth and see the burned earth salted with the bodies of their dead.”

“But why?”

“Why anything? You tell me, Fool.”

“Because you want to take over.” It seemed so obvious now that he said it, the part he'd been right about all along, not about the things from the places outside but the Man all along, a manipulation within the wheels of other manipulations, a third element that he had missed, been tricked into missing.

“Of course I do, and what better way than to have Heaven and Hell war with each other?”

“And you'll step in at the end, when things are at their most awful, and you'll be unstoppable,” said Gordie, sitting up. His face was a mask of blood, his forehead torn open by a gash that stretched from temple to temple. A flap of skin hung down and covered one eye, and broken glass glittered in the wound.

“You've trained them well, Fool; they're almost as observant and smart as you are, even the ones that have been dead,” said the Man and sent a branch, almost casually, to wrap around Gordie's neck. It tightened and he, like Summer, began to choke, twin sets of breathing on either side of Fool that whistled and caught.

“So, Fool, the question is, what now? The war is almost begun and I am ready to ascend, but what do I do with you?”

“Let me go. Let us go?”

“I think not,” said the Man. “You're still dangerous. Until the war is in full spate you might still, by some miracle, stop it. There are Archdeacons other than Rhakshasas who might be persuaded to listen.” As he spoke, the Man sent tendrils out from his base and snared the pincer and claw and pieces of scale, dragging them back into the denseness of his growths. The demon and torn books he left.

“And now you don't have those. I feel better this way,” he said.

“You can have my feather,” said Fool, removing the angel's feather from his pocket and holding it out.

“Fool, if I wanted your feather, I'd have taken it. Besides, I have a whole angel I can take feathers from.”

“You tore her wings off,” said Fool. “She hasn't any feathers left.”

“There are more angels coming, Fool, a whole Heaven's worth of angels, and they all have feathers. It's over. It has been a genuine pleasure, but now I have other things to attend to.”

Fool thought, trying to force his brain to speed up, to fucking concentrate, but it was so hard, too hard to push through. Nearly everything he'd thought was true was a lie, and again he'd been manipulated and played, sent like a spinning top into the worlds about him and snapped back at the twitch of a cord. What did the Man want? Power? Control? No, not just that, he wanted to be the thing at the tip of the hierarchy, that everyone and everything else looked up to and relied on. Everything the Man had ever done or been, Fool saw, had been building to this point, the point where he could take over.

And he'd helped, keeping Heaven and Hell focused on him as the Man crawled around in the background, setting things into play that were now almost beyond stopping.

“We're done now, Fool. This is my time and I intend to savor it,” said the Man. The limbs of plant began to tighten around Gordie's and Summer's necks, lifting them up onto their toes and then farther so that they were dangling, suffocating.

In the distance, Fool heard horns, clear and sharp.

The Man relaxed some of his limbs and the ceiling above them fell away, revealing the sky again. The vine holding Gordie, which had reached down from the ceiling to grasp him, relaxed but did not let go, and he slumped back to a seated position by the wall, whooping, his face blue under its mask of drying blood.

Tiny black spots were swarming across the underside of the clouds, and Fool at first thought it was flies from Rhakshasas that the Man had missed, that were making their escape, but then he realized with a sudden perspective shift that these were far away, high above them. The Man's parts all twisted to see, eyes that didn't exist turning toward the sky and watching and mouths made of buds and stems opening as the black spots grew larger. “It begins,” he said, his voice quiet, anticipatory.

This was Fool's only chance.

The courtyard was large, and although there were plenty of flowers and bushes for the Man to occupy around the edges and in the spaces left by the lifted flags, there were still large open areas that he could try to move through. Fool knelt and swiftly grasped a mass of the ragged paper from the bag in one hand and the broken part of the branch used to strike Gordie in the other. Moving swiftly, he wiped the books into the remains of Rhakshasas, jamming them hard into the exposed innards of the demon, and then slapped them onto the end of the stick, working them around the wood so that the tip was covered in them. Rhakshasas's fluids burned Fool's skin and he wiped them on his jacket and then all he could do was wait, wait and hope.

“What are you doing?” The Man, attention down again, peering at Fool.

“Fuck you,” said Fool,
brave Fool, wishing Fool,
and then the books, the holy texts, reacted to Rhakshasas's drying and unclean fluids and burst into flame. The end of the branch caught alight and Fool thrust it at the nearest mass of the Man. He reacted immediately, the branches coiling away, and Fool stepped forward, pressing his advantage, thrusting the flames into the greenery. It caught in a mass of sparks and thick smoke, the burning plants whipping back and forth in an approximation of pain. A vine lashed away from the wall and struck at Fool, who jumped back, stumbling and ducking at the same time, just avoiding being hit. The Man roared, but his attention was now on the fires that had caught within him and he lost his grip on Summer, the wooden noose loosening and letting her tumble out of its grasp.

She fell and Fool managed somehow to hold her in his free arm, backing away, still holding the torch in front of him. Something whipped toward him and he ducked, the movement awkward with an unconscious woman in his arms, waving the burning branch low in a circle around him. There was a path back toward Gordie and the door and he started to move along it, half dragging, half carrying Summer. She moaned dully and spat, the drool thick, landing on his shoulder and rolling slowly down his arm.

“Fool, this is pointless,” said the Man. A thick branch speared forward, missing Fool's head only because he saw it coming and dodged at the last second, shoving the torch at it and making it retreat in wisps of smoke and the smell of burning bark.

“Really, Fool? You think I can be killed by fire?”

“No, but I think you can be hurt,” said Fool and again jammed the torch into the nearest mass of greenery, occupying one of the missing flagstone beds. The flames snatched at the plants there immediately and they writhed, and they
screamed,
a high-pitched agony that sounded like steam escaping from a narrow spout. The Man threw another spear of wood forward and it slammed into Fool's side, skewering him, and he felt it punch out of his back. He screamed and slammed the torch against the wood, which lashed back out of him in a spray of blood.

Fool dropped to one knee, feeling his foot bang against Gordie behind him, losing his grip on Summer and trying to hold the torch up. She moaned again and rolled onto her knees. A writhing mass of plants came at her side, and Fool leaned over her and thrust the torch at them, singeing the closest few, making them retreat. The move sent a spike of pain through his stomach, less abrupt than the splitting of the tattoos, deeper, a tearing and rolling pain that branched out in waves.

Fool clambered to his feet as another spike burst from the mass, not a javelin of wood thrown, he saw, but a branch forced to grow grotesquely fast, its tip bulging and expanding toward him. He stepped out of its path as another came at him from the side, puncturing his wrist and forcing its way between the bones of his forearm. He gasped and staggered sideways as it yanked itself out. He kept hold of the torch, barely, and swung it, forcing the Man back. He had to move, and move now; the torch was already burning down, the wood little more than a charred remnant.

The Man was all around him now, every part of him moving, approaching, bursting from the beds and surging from the walls. Fool stepped over Gordie, shouting, “Get up!” Gordie grunted and started to rise, and a part of the Man, a curling scythe of greenery, burst out of the bushes. It laced through the air with a noise like tearing silk, heading for Gordie's neck. Fool managed to get the torch in its way and it tangled around the wooden stave, snapping it, the flaming tip falling to the ground and rolling to the gutter, harmlessly, in the center of a stone flag.

Gordie grabbed Summer by the shoulder as Fool drew his gun, although how he'd shoot plants he did not know. They backed toward the door as the Man roared and tried to follow, still burning, the flames catching and leaping from part to part of him. Blue flowers in the nearest bed began to slither over the stone toward them, the flag next to the bed bucking up as their roots swelled, grew, and forced the flowers on. As they came close they rose up and spat, red globules spraying them. Where they hit Fool's exposed skin, the globules burned.

The attack was unnervingly silent, the only noise their own breathing and the rustle of leaf and root and stem as they moved.

Fool stamped on the nearest plant head, the fleshy bulb bursting in a mass of thick red slime under his heel. Stamping caused another wave of pain to ripple across Fool's midriff, the upper edges of it meeting the pain flowing back along his arm, and he grimaced and gritted his teeth. He loosed a single shot into the Man, the noise terribly loud and echoing, and then his back hit something.

Fool thought it was the Man at first, but it gave against him and he realized it was the door back into the corridor. He pushed harder, still moving backward, calling Gordie and Summer. His heel caught against the bottom of the doorway and he fell, crashing across the space and hitting the far wall hard. He dropped his gun, scrabbled for it feeling woozy and sick, as Gordie appeared in the doorway, a patch of dark shadow against the sky beyond. He was still pulling on Summer's shoulder, dragging at her.