The Devil's Evidence (37 page)

Demons, little ones carrying the administration of the war, skittered around Fool and studiously ignored what was happening as he pulled himself around and up, wincing again as the pain in his arms and stomach flared, and then Gordie was in the corridor and Summer was behind him. Plants surged up to the edge of the doorway, tendrils slashing through the air into the corridor, their reach falling short of Gordie and Summer. Another red flower appeared and spat as the Man roared Fool's name, a long and furious echo of sound. Fool fired past Gordie and Summer into the Man, not because it would achieve anything but because he was angry, he was fucking
livid
at the pain and the manipulation and the deaths, and then another of those wooden stems, fat and jagged, burst from the mass in the doorway and punched into Summer's back and tore out between her breasts and pinned her to the far wall of the corridor.

There was a pause that lasted a sliver of a heartbeat and forever and then Gordie shrieked, not just a scream but a scream torn raw and inside out, and grabbed at the part of the Man that had transfixed Summer. He pulled and his hands slipped in her blood and he cried out again and pulled again and this time the Man drew back, roaring again. Fool grabbed at Gordie and yanked him down as the spike burst out of the mass in the courtyard again, missing Gordie by inches and slapping back when it failed to find its target.

Summer collapsed to the floor, her eyes rolling back in her head to white before closing, and a gout of blood sprayed from the ragged tear in her chest. She hit the corridor's tiled floor with a wet thud, and a pool of dark blood immediately began to spread out from her, so much blood, too much. Gordie scrambled over to her as the Man attacked a third time, and this time the spike impaled a little demon that was too inquisitive and that had come too close, lifting it as it slammed through it in a spray of dark gray fluid. The Man roared again and started whipping the spike back and forth, trying to dislodge the demon as Fool pulled Gordie away. Summer's hand came up and held Fool's wrist for a second and then fell away, leaving a last print of her blood on his skin.

“Come on,” he gasped. “Come on, Gordie.”

“Fool, no, she could be alive!”

“She's dead, Gordie,” said Fool, still watching as the blood pool expanded, Summer and Marianne both left lying in puddles of their own wet insides, both invaded by the Man. Both dead. He pulled on Gordie again, hating it, hating to separate them but knowing that the Man wouldn't stop. As if to prove him right, the Man shook the dead demon off and sent another spear toward them. It fell short, the two of them finally out of his range, but stabbed into Summer's neck, jerking her head and snapping her eyes open in a look of startled wakefulness. Instead of withdrawing the spike, the Man curled it around like a hook and began to drag Summer's body back toward the courtyard.

Gordie, seeing her begin to move toward the doorway, howled and tried to go after her but Fool pulled him back again, arm screaming its own lament now, blood dripping from the hole above his wrist. He pulled a last time and the two of them fell back, farther away from the door and the Man, and watched as Summer slipped into the roiling mass of plants. The last they saw of her was her legs and then she was gone.

There was a moment of silence as the few demons in the corridor skittered away and then the Man let his plants fall back, retreating into the soil and leaving torn pieces of Summer scattered in a bloody swathe behind him.

Gordie cried out and tried to scramble toward her again.

“No,” Fool said, unable to shout, voice on the crumbling edge of tears, still holding his friend but with no strength. “No, Gordie, it's what he wants, to get us back into his range. Gordie, we have to let her go.”

“I can't.”

“You can. You have to. We will have revenge for her, but not now. Not here. I have a plan, a thing that might work. We can still stop this. Please, help me.”

“How?”

Fool stood. “I need a room with a tube, and I need a canister and paper and thread,” he said. “I need to summon the Archdeacons.”

Fool staggered along the corridor, opening doors at random, until he found one that contained a desk and a chair and a pneumatic tube in the corner, this one dropping into the floor rather than rising into the ceiling. There was a pile of canisters on the desk and he took one, unscrewing its lid and emptying out the message it contained.

“I need paper,” he said. Gordie, who had followed him into the room in a kind of hopeless shuffle, ignored him and sat in the room's chair.

“Gordie, help!” Fool said, insistent. “Mourn her after. We'll mourn her and Marianne together, but now, for fuck's sake, help. I need paper and ink.”

Gordie looked at him dully and then got up and began to empty the other canisters, tipping out the messages they contained until he found one that was short, holding it out wordlessly. Fool, meanwhile, was rooting through the desk drawers until he found a bottle of ink. Removing the feather from his pocket, he opened the bottle and dipped the feather's end in the liquid it contained.

Taking the paper from Gordie, Fool scribbled out the message written upon it and then wrote his own message there. His writing was untidy and large, wavering, but he didn't care. As long as it could be read.

Come to the flame garden now

Message complete, he wafted the paper in the air to dry the ink and then rolled it and inserted it back into the canister. He couldn't tighten it because of his arm, so Gordie took it from him and finished sealing it.

“Thank you,” said Fool and then knelt in front of Gordie. The man's white shirt was filthy, but some cleaner threads hung from the seam up the side, and he took one of these and pulled on it, dragging loose a long white cotton string. This he wrapped around the canister and tied with a clumsy knot and then carried the canister to the tube. Dropping it in, he said, “This goes to all the Archdeacons. All of them.”

The tube sucked the canister away and it was gone.

“Will it work?” asked Gordie and his voice was low and dead.

“Maybe. I hope so.”

Fool went back into the corridor, gesturing Gordie to follow him. They went back to the foyer, fighting their way through the thickening flow of administrators and clerks. Walking seemed to be a problem, one foot falling not in front of the other but loosely, to the side, the strength going from his ankles and his knees locking and unlocking in irregular bursts. He leaned against the wall as the horns sounded again, louder this time, loud enough so that the building itself seemed to rattle and shiver. Or was that him? he wondered. Was it him rattling and shivering, his body jittering along the lines of his pain and exhaustion?

They arrived at the foyer and pushed through the throng. The demon behind the desk had gone and had been replaced by a large column of smoke with something solid but unidentifiable at its center, strings of black vapor stretching out from it to point or gesture as other demons approached the desk with questions or requests. Fool paused, catching his breath, buffeted by the passing demons, and then set off again, heading for the doors.

Halfway across the floor, Fool realized that something was happening. The clerks and scribes and archivists, all the little things, had stopped and were craning their heads around, some pressing themselves up against the windows and peering up. The foyer fell silent and Fool heard the horns for a third time. One of the demons whimpered as the outside visible beyond the windows blackened with descending figures. Fool felt dizzy, his arm and stomach burning, the world pitching around him, and as the first of the Estedea landed in Hell's streets he collapsed to the floor and into a blackness as deep as Solomon Water.

When he awoke, Fool found himself propped against a wall in one of Assemblies House's smaller offices. Gordie was leaning against the wall opposite, knees drawn up and head down, and all around them were demons, small and large, silent and still. There was little light in the room and the air was thick with dust and sweat and the sour exhalations of the mass of demons.

Distantly, Fool could hear shouting and a terrible flapping sound, and then a heavy crash. The building shook and dust shivered out of old cracks that lined the ceiling.

Fool tried to move and lean away from the wall, but something pushed on him and held him back as a wave of dull, intense pain coiled inside his belly. Looking down, he saw a hand in the center of his chest, long-fingered and demonic, the arm behind it scrawny and ropey with veins and scrappy muscle.

A demon crouched over Fool, holding his injured arm and trying to feed. Fool jerked away. The demon moved without looking around, reaching out and grasping Fool's elbow and not letting go. Its grip was strong, holding Fool's arm in place despite his best efforts to draw it away, and then he thought,
An arm holding my elbow, a hand in my chest, a hand holding my wrist, and another hand there by its face on my skin. It has four arms.

He shouldn't have been surprised, but he was. He'd spent the past week or so in a place of perfect shapes, and this distortion of the normality he'd become used to was jarring.

You were attacked by a man made of fucking shrubbery,
he thought.
Nothing should surprise you anymore!
The demon, finally acknowledging Fool, looked around at him. Its face was smooth, mouthless, had only eyes and two rapidly expanding and contracting slits for nostrils, and it was not feeding on him.

It was inspecting the stitches that now sealed closed the holes in his wrist.

“They fixed you,” said Gordie. When Fool looked at his friend, he hadn't moved, had spoken down between his legs so that the sound was muffled and flat. “While you were unconscious. They stitched you and bandaged you. Me too.”

As Gordie spoke the demon started to wrap Fool's lower arm in a white bandage, the dressing tight but not uncomfortable, pinning it at the wrist and just below the elbow to keep the material in place. Finished, it nodded at Fool and then moved away. It had feet attached directly to its waist, no legs, and its arms were longer than its torso, so that it knuckled across the floor and into the shadows.

“Where are we? What's happening?” asked Fool.

“Why didn't we ever notice?” asked Gordie, apparently ignoring Fool's question.

“Notice?”

“The
smell,
” Gordie replied. “It stinks here.”

He was right, it did, not just in the room but in all of Hell, it stank of fear and violence and blood and death and rottenness and vomit and shit, and they didn't notice because it was their air, it was all around them all the time. Fool didn't know what to say to Gordie, so instead he simply moved across the room to sit next to him. Moving ached and lifting his shirt showed him that another bandage had been wrapped around his stomach. A bloom of red, small and delicate, had soaked through the bandage about two inches in from the edge of the midriff and the same distance up from his hip. He twisted, very slowly, and felt something slip in his flesh, two planes moving along each other.

“They said to say it wasn't serious,” said Gordie, still not looking up.

“ ‘They'?”

“The demon that helped bandage you. You'll be okay.”

“Why did they help me? Gordie, I know you hurt but you need to talk to me.”

“We helped,” said a new voice, reedy and thin, “because we are scared.”

Fool looked around and found that a demon had crouched by his side without him noticing. It was tall, its skin a murky brown, and it was covered in eyes. There were hundreds of them, different sizes, different types, and different colors. Fool saw predators' slit pupils, all-black orbs, almost-human irises, golden eyes that glowed, all of them set into the thing's chest and belly and across its shoulders like a pelt. They blinked in unison, and moved independently, glancing about the room.

“You're scared?” asked Fool.

“Of the war. Of what will happen to us. We're not soldiers, human. We don't want to die.” It gestured back behind itself, taking in not just the room but the demons in Assemblies House, the demons outside the House that just wanted to be left alone to scurry and dart and do their jobs and feed on scraps. Fool couldn't help but feel a momentary flash of cruel pleasure.
You're scared,
he thought.
Welcome to our world.

“But why help me?” He raised his bandaged arm and looked at it again.

“Because we heard you say you could stop it, after the thing killed Rhakshasas and the woman,” the demon said. It leaned in close and now all its eyes were staring at Fool, their gaze intense and unflinching. “I'd eat you if I could, little man. I'd suck the memories from your head without thinking about it, but at the moment you're more useful to us alive. You kill my kind and I hate you for it, but now you say you can stop the war and so we have to help you because we don't want to die.”

Fool pulled himself to his feet, slowly, using the wall as a support. The demon stood from its crouch, its face keeping level with Fool's own as he rose.

“You will help us?”

“Get out of my way,” said Fool. “I'll try to stop the war. Not for you, you fucking freak, but for all the little humans out there that you'd eat in a second and that'll die in this war alongside you if it carries on.”

The demon stepped aside and the ones behind it scuffled and crabbed out of the way as well so that a path to the room's door opened up.

“Gordie,” said Fool. “Come on.”

Fool thought Gordie was going to sit there until he collapsed and fell to dust and blew away, but then he pulled himself up, too. His movements were weary. His head was bandaged and he looked very young and as though he was only partly there, was looking at some other place through lidded and half-closed eyes.

“She's dead,” he said, his voice still flat and uninflected.