The Devil's Evidence (7 page)

“Fool,” hissed a voice. “Fool, come here.”

Fool looked around. The demons were still deep in conversation and ignoring him, although as he watched, Mr. Tap glanced at him and grinned again, licking its lips before turning its attention back to Rhakshasas.

“Fool!”

Still he could see no one, but now he recognized the voice. “Hello,” he said to the Man of Plants and Flowers.

“Come out of there,” said the Man, “off the path.”

“Why?”

“Fool, come here, I have a deal to offer you,” said the Man. “Quickly. We haven't much time.”

Fool remained where he was. The Man's voice was different, weaker, less confident. Why? Rhakshasas's presence? Mr. Tap's? The demons, senior in Hell's hierarchy, thought the Man was dead, and presumably he wanted it to stay that way?

“Fool, come now before our chance is lost!” said the Man urgently, and this time Fool responded, walking back along the path and out of the Garden. The Garden was separated from the farmlands by a swath of earth in which only discolored grass and twisted, low bushes grew. Close to Fool, two bushes were tangled together, bobbing in a breeze that he could not feel.

“Fool,” said the Man in a voice made of the sound of branches and twigs rubbing together. “Fool, come here.”

Fool went to the bushes, standing by them but not crouching, staring out over the farmland. If Mr. Tap or one of the others looked, he was simply looking out over the landscapes of Hell before he went on to Heaven, or up to Heaven, or however this worked.

“Fool, you're going to where I have no hold,” said the Man. “I can't make it to Heaven, but you going there gives me a chance that I simply cannot allow to go unused.”

“Yes?” Fool already knew.

“Tell me about it, Fool, interest me with the details of Heaven. What's it like? How are the angels like demons? How are they different? What does it look like and smell like and taste like? How does Heaven
feel 
?”

“How to get there?”

“Of course, Fool, of course! You're learning! Imagine: parts of me in both worlds!”

“Yes, imagine the fun you'd have,” said Fool. “Imagine how interested you'd be.”

“Yes! Yes! Find it for me, Fool? Find me a way?”

Find the Man an entrance to Heaven? Something rolled over in Fool's belly, a tension that didn't sit easy, refused to leave. “I don't know what I'll be able to tell you, or how,” he said, backing away from any kind of agreement. “Besides, what would be in it for me?”

“Ah, spoken like a true Information Man, Fool. Information, of course. I won't stay dead forever, Fool. Soon enough, I'll be back in Hell, different but the same, all over, hearing things, knowing things. You could use a friend, I think. Even now, Mr. Tap and his Evidence Men are taking over, and with you out of the way? It'll get worse. You can do nothing, Fool, and when you get back they'll be even stronger. You need me, Fool, need what I can offer. Information is leverage, Fool, information is strength.”

“And I'm an Information Man.”

“The Commander of the Information Office, Fool, the chief Information Man. I can help you stay safe, keep your men safe, keep the Bureaucracy from growing bored or tired with you.”

“Fool.” Not the Man but Rhakshasas, calling from the entrance to the Garden.

“I'll tell you what I can when I get back,” said Fool, finally looking down at the twisting shrubs.

“No,” said the Man, “before then.”

“How?”

“Find a way, Fool, find a way.”

“I'll try.”

“I have your word? Your promise?”

“Yes. I'll try.”

“Good. And you have my word I'll help you, try to keep your people safe while you aren't here.”

A single branch emerged from the tangle, curled around into a shape approximating a smile, and then the shrub shivered and collapsed slightly. The Man was gone.

“Fool.” Again from Rhakshasas, this time louder and less patient.

“Yes,” said Fool and obeyed his master's voice,
little obedient Fool,
and went to the demon.

“Fool, while you are in Heaven you will communicate with Mr. Tap to tell him how the Delegation is performing, and to answer any question he may have,” said Rhakshasas when Fool was standing back with the Delegation.

“How will I know how the Delegation is performing?” asked Fool, thinking of the complex and arcane discussions he had been party to between Elderflower and the representatives of Heaven in other meetings, thinking about how little of it he had understood.

“Simply give him your impressions. You will also give Mr. Tap instructions to pass on to the Information Men and he will deliver these instructions if he can.”

“No,” said Fool immediately, before conscious thought could inform his mouth.

“No?” asked Rhakshasas.

“No,” repeated Fool. “Mr. Tap may be in charge of the Evidence but he is not in charge of the Information Office, and I will discuss the business of the Information Office only with another Information Man.”

“You refuse a direct order?”

“No,” said Fool, and stopped because, of course, he had. Rhakshasas's intestines were bulging, lifting from its chest likes snakes, swaying, beginning to move toward him in sinuous, aggressive waves.

“I will say it one more time,” said Rhakshasas.

“No,” said Fool, “the
New Information Man's Guide to the Rules and Offices of Hell
states clearly that ‘no order may be given to an Information Man except by their senior officer, and no case discussed except with other Information Men and Information Officers.' I will not discuss Information Office business with Mr. Tap because I am forbidden to do so by the rules of my office, as set out by the Bureaucracy.”

Rhakshasas paused, gestured back the approaching Mr. Tap, and then said, “If not Mr. Tap, then who?”

“Marianne,” said Fool without pause. “She's the only one I trust to know what's happening and to be able to do what I tell her to.”

“Very well, then,” said the demon, “have her keep investigating the fires. All canisters will be sent to her, and you will have regular contact with her.”

“Thank you,” said Fool, without letting his relief show on his face. The new
Guide
might well say something like that, but if it did he certainly didn't know about it. It had been a gamble, an attempt to keep something back from Mr. Tap, banking on the guesses that Rhakshasas had not read the new
Guide
and that, although it was head of the Archdeacons, or at least the thing that spoke on their behalf, it was not properly senior in Hell. It was old, yes, had responsibility for the day-to-day Bureaucracy, lived in Crow Heights, but there were still older powers above it, and it wouldn't risk going against their orders.
Even you can be noticed, Rhakshasas,
Fool realized.
Even you don't want Elderflower's gaze turning upon you, do you?

“We're done,” said Rhakshasas. Its voice was, if anything, colder than before, despite the Flame Garden's heat.
It didn't like being reminded of its lack of total authority, and I've made another enemy,
thought Fool, although he was unsure whether Rhakshasas had ever really been anything other than a threat, a risk to be managed.
Little hated Fool. Maybe Heaven will be easier than this.

The Delegation went into the Garden, walking out along the path, the black demon ostentatiously walking along the stone ledge, letting the flames lick at its legs without apparent injury.

“How do we get to Heaven? Do we go to the Mount? Are we here to collect something?” asked Fool.

“Only the Elevated and the angelic host use the Mount to ascend to Heaven. We use the Garden.”

“The Garden?”

“The Flame Garden is the link between all worlds, Fool,” said Rhakshasas. “Heaven prefers to use light and brilliance to travel, but we in Hell are content with the movement of flames and heat.”

They had come to a platform sticking out into the flames. They were dotted at regular intervals along the path, were used as the tipping-off point for the flesh that died in Hell's brawls and murders and accidents and rapes. The Delegation made its way to the far end of the platform, and the rotting demon, without pause, stepped off and dropped into the flames. After a moment, without looking back, the thing of larvae stepped out and dropped away as well, followed by the scribe.

That left only Fool and Rhakshasas and Mr. Tap.

Rhakshasas stepped close to Fool, hunched over him, pressed its face close to his, and said, “I have my orders much as you do, but know this, Fool: If you can, die in Heaven. If you return to Hell, the Evidence Men will take you from the street one night or one day and deliver you to Mr. Tap, Mr. Tap will bring you to me, and you will never be seen again.”

“Yes,” said Fool. Another threat, another promise, another thing to fear.
Noticed Fool, put on notice.

“Now get out of my sight, little human,” said Rhakshasas. “Go. Fuck off to Heaven.”

Fool turned his back on the two demons and went to the edge of the platform. Here, the heat was terrible, sweat weeping from his pores and plastering his clothes to him, the flames moving the air around like a grumbling, toothless mouth. He could feel the skin of his face tingle, tighten, and start to burn.

“How do I do it?” he called back over his shoulder.

“Step in,” said Rhakshasas.

“Won't it burn me?”

“You're the first human to travel this way, we don't know what it'll do,” replied Rhakshasas, and then a hand that Fool somehow knew was Mr. Tap's jammed into the middle of his back and thrust him forward. He tried to back away, instinct driving him back from the heat, but the push was inexorable. His feet crunched over the grit of the ground, met the lip, and felt space beneath his soles, and then he was over and falling, flailing down into the flames.

It was agony, and then it wasn't.

The flames were all around him, so thick he could see nothing but the heated wall of them, and even as he was falling it felt as though they were carrying him aloft on waves of burning. He tried to breathe but the air scorched his mouth and lungs closed. He felt his hair spark and flame, his clothes catch fire, his skin shrivel back from muscles that were already contracting and thickening. He thought of the bodies in the buildings he'd investigated, thought about those tautened poses they had in death, fists held before their faces as though to protect themselves from their ongoing fate, felt his eyes burst and spray out and then dry, wondered how long before he became a hunched and blackened thing. Would they find him on the ground of the Flame Garden among the things that appeared there, ready to be harvested by the workers in their thick suits? Or would he simply be left to burn away to nothing? There was no air, just heat and burning and a thing that was beyond pain, and then he crashed into something hard.

A last, sharp bolt of pain, like the memory of his last few days, and then it was gone. Fool lay still for a second or two before risking opening his eyes, eyes that he found were not burst and dried to pits.

Above him, a huge creature with myriad eyes and long, insectile legs was hanging in the sky, mouth full of fangs, biting at him.

He didn't have the energy to scream or move. He was too tired, his entire body ached, his head ached, his violated skin prickled against his clothes, and he could still taste Rhakshasas in his mouth, smell it in his nostrils. If this was it, if this was where he died, then so be it. Let it kill him.

The thing, whatever it was, scuttled sideways, and the multi-jointed claws at the end of its legs scrabbled against a barrier between it and him, invisible yet apparently unbreakable. The more he looked at it, the more the creature looked
wrong
somehow. Not simply ugly or dangerous, Fool was used to that; he saw grotesqueries every day in Hell, demonic flesh twisted away from human and into shapes and functions that were terrifying and lethal. No, the creature looked insubstantial somehow, as though it was not so much real as a projection on the inside of some vast curved surface above him. And yet, it was solid, had weight and form. Fool could hear the sound of its feet as they skittered, hear the scrape of its claws on something he could not see. It was made of angles and shapes that his eye couldn't quite hold, that seemed distorted and warped in the corner of his eye. For a moment, he'd almost have it, could hold the shape of it in his mind, and then it would flip away, be impossible to visualize, as though it was shifting between a shape and the imprint of the same shape, both coming toward him and retreating at the same time. It was like seeing a picture from one angle and then seeing it in reverse in a mirror.

Fool closed his eyes, opened them again. He'd thought the thing was close at first, that it was a similar size to him and only a few feet above his head but he realized it wasn't, it was distant.
Huge
. The space around the thing was filled with other creatures, some smaller versions of itself, some made of tentacles and beaks and claws, some feathered, some with scales, some with leathern skin, all of them shifting and testing the same invisible barrier. There were no gaps between the creatures, they fit to each other's edges, moving in tight formations so that the sky above him was a tapestry of them with neither space nor hole between the creatures. They were the color of oil spilled on water, green and gray and blue, constantly mutating and flowing, and still his perspective on them would not hold, could not grip them. The creatures were there and then not there, solid and then flat, close to him and then vastly far away. They were all around him, dropping to the horizon on either side of him, before him, and behind him. They were the sky.

Fool looked to his side, not liking the way that staring at the things was making him feel.