The Devil's Detective (19 page)

Plants. The demon had been standing in the plants.

Plants.

The Man would have surely seen him and would be able to tell Fool what he looked like, where it had gone after! Suddenly Fool was elated; the Man would help him! He went swiftly along the side of the house, reaching its rear to find out that it looked out over more scrubland, the earth a sickly yellow and brown. The sound of the chalkis was louder here, angry squawks and screeches rising into the dusty air. A group of them was clustered a few feet away, scrambling over each other, the ground writhing and dark with them. Fool drew his gun and went toward them; they rose at his approach, flying in tight, angry circles around him, swooping in but never quite hitting him. Their shit spattered in long strings on the ground around him, its stench strong, making his eyes water.

Something hissed in the air over Fool, a streak of flame slicing past
him, and the chalkis started screaming. Pieces of them began to fall as the flaming thing curled and sliced again, this time in the other direction. More pieces of chalkis dropped to the floor around Fool, smoking.

Fool's hand went to his gun and then Balthazar said, “They will not bother us again.”

As Fool turned, the angel's flame vanished, his hands dropping back to his sides. Balthazar smiled, broadly, teeth showing. It was the first time he had shown any emotion other than anger or boredom, and Fool thought it awful, a flaming, exultant joyousness. The warrior angel had at last been able to kill something.

The chalkis had risen higher, though, were no longer swooping or crapping, although they were still screaming. The sounds were oddly human, almost-words falling from the sky as Fool inspected what Hell's birds had been so desperate to get to on the ground. It was a stain, overlaid now by the spiral patterns of the chalkis' excrement, stretching in a ragged circle and creeping several feet up the building's rear wall. It was dark, soaked into the earth and the wooden planking, but it was still obvious that it was blood. Fool had found where the dead man had been attacked.

Just beyond the stain was a set of steps cut into the ground and the remains of a pair of wooden doors. The doors had been torn from a doorway set into the wall that was partly below ground level, and the pale center of their broken planks was visible; these had only recently been damaged and had not had time to darken and rot. Fool went to the top of the stairs and saw that they continued down into a darkness that glinted.

“They go to the cellar,” said Summer from beside him. He hadn't heard her approach, so engrossed was he in this new sense of investigation, of finding things.

“Yes,” he said. “This is how they got in.”

“Was the boy alive?” Adam this time, standing behind Summer, his robe drifting about him. Fool thought about the stain, about its size, and about the damage he had seen on the body, and said, “Possibly, but if so it must have been only just. I think he was beaten here and then the body was taken into the cellar and drowned.”

“To hide the corpse?” Adam again.

“I don't know,” replied Fool. Had the other corpses been hidden? The one in the Orphanage, possibly, but the first? No. He had been discarded like something unimportant, certainly, but not hidden, unless the demon was hoping that Solomon Water's inhabitants might eat it before it was discovered. No. No, that wasn't right, it didn't feel right, this was a demon without fear of capture that simply left the bodies where it wanted to.

“It does it to make it hard for us,” said Summer. “In Solomon Water where we might meet other demons, in with the orphans who would attack us, and now in the cellar where we couldn't get to it easily. We wouldn't have found it so easily without Balthazar's help.”

“You think this is about us?” asked Fool, surprised.

“The murders? No,” said Summer. “But this? Where the bodies are? Yes.”

Fool's head was almost spinning with the idea, with its enormity. Hell had noticed him, was watching him, Rhakshasas had given him a task to carry out, the Man was entertained by him and was using him to feed back his own growing power to the Bureaucracy, and now whatever ancient demon was doing this was thinking about them when it abandoned the bodies of the Genevieves it killed? Could that be right?

Could it?

“Why?” he asked, probing the idea in his mind.

“To stop us finding it?” said Summer.

“No, of course not. You're merely an amusement to it,” said Balthazar, coming closer to them. “It likes the idea of making your job difficult, of making you clamber through water and mud and wherever else it chooses just to retrieve the bodies. It's a demon; it uses each of its actions against as many humans as it can. If this is not the Hell of fire and torture, as I must accept is the case, then it is the Hell of inconvenience and difficulty and fear and uncertainty, and it is merely contributing to that. These dead souls are part of its game.”

“It is not a game,” said Fool, thinking again of bodies drifting in water and left lying in mud and bleeding out, headless, on the Houska's streets. “They are not things to be used and then thrown away, they are humans.”

“No. They were human, but no more,” said Adam quietly. “The thing that made them human is gone and now they are mere sundered flesh.”

The discussions were shorter that day because of the delegation's morning with Fool and because of the near riot that happened prior to the trading taking place, but while they went on they still seemed interminable.

Crowds of the Sorrowful had already gathered outside Assemblies House by the time Fool and the angels arrived, and they flocked against the transport, slowing it to almost nothing. Hands banged on the windows and faces pressed in pale moons against the glass mouthing
Take me
and
Please
and
It's my turn
,
my turn.
They were almost at the building's gates, which were swinging open, when the first missile hit the roof.

It impacted with a loud, violent crash and a dent pocked into the metal, dimpling down above Balthazar's head. For a moment, the crowd outside the car fell silent, and then they began to clamor again. This time there were notes of discordance, of anger, in the noise. Fool moved the transport forward, pushing it through the crowds; a sign, a piece of painted material on a wooden pole, swung out from the press of people and banged into the windshield. For a second the material covered the glass, the words
We Deserve Better
visible, and then it whirled away into the press of people. More bangs sounded against the roof, hands hammering down and other, harder, things. Something hit the rear window with a sharp crack and a splintered star leaped across its glass face.

As the transport passed between the gates, demons moved to shift the milling crowd back. More rocks and chunks of masonry fell into the courtyard around the transport as Fool and the angels alighted. Balthazar had his flame drawn again and was slicing at the air, each slice performing intricate patterns that connected with the missiles, sending them
spinning to the sides with a metallic clattering noise. Sparks leaped like bloated fireflies each time flame and rock collided, pale and short-lived in the chaotic air. Adam, meanwhile, simply walked to the entrance to the building, head down, and the scribe and archive followed. Nothing falling from the sky hit him, seeming to veer away at the last moment to bounce harmlessly on the ground. A single stone hit the scribe in the side of the head as he scurried after Adam; he did not seem to notice and the angel did not look around.

Balthazar pushed Fool, none too gently, toward the door. The angel was glowing a fiery red, his skin like burnished bronze reflecting nearby pyres, and he was grinning broadly, his teeth showing. He was enjoying himself, his arm and flame now indistinguishable from each other, an incandescent blur tearing at the sky and keeping them safe. His eyes, Fool saw, were blood-red orbs without pupil or sclera. Despite his beauty, he was more terrifying than anything Fool had seen, and when the angel turned his gaze on him and said, “Move,” Fool almost ran for the door.

By the time Adam and Elderflower were seated around the table, attendants waiting patiently behind them, demons were moving among the crowd and stopping the stone-throwing. Fool watched through the grimy windows, only barely listening to the discussions beginning behind him, as the mass of humanity outside the building shifted and roiled. Signs appeared and disappeared, emerging and then dropping as a demon approached, its passage visible as an odd wake that reminded Fool of the movement of the swimming things in Solomon Water that could be seen only as a disturbance on the water's surface. Some of them had a slogan he was getting used to,
We Deserve Better
, but others had ones he hadn't seen before:
Help Us
and
Take Us Up.
One that he didn't see clearly had a single word printed upon it, and for a moment he was convinced it had said simply
Fool
before dismissing it as a stupid notion.

“They are restive,” said Balthazar. He had faded back to his usual, paler skin tone and his eyes were almost human again.

“You sound impressed,” said Fool.

“Impressed? Yes. They are no longer acting like cattle but are acting like humans, fighting against evil as God intended them to.” Behind them, the litany of names being accepted and refused was soft in Fool's ears, like water spilling into thick dust.

“What do you do next in your investigation?” asked Balthazar. For the first time, his tone was almost pleasant, as though Fool were, if not an equal, then at least some more interesting kind of inferior.

“I go to see the Man,” said Fool, “to see if he reaches as far as the building we were at today. He may have seen something.”

“And if he has, he will tell you?”

“I don't know. He may, if he finds it amusing or I have something to trade. I'll take your feather; he may bargain with me for it.”

“And this is how your investigations usually work?”

“No,” said Fool. “Usually no one cares about the dead.”

“Even you?”

“Even me,” said Fool, ashamed at the truth. “There are so many of them, so much violence and misery, so many crimes that we can't solve them all, so we end up solving none of them.
I
end up solving none of them.”

“And this one? It's different?”

“This one? Yes. I mean no, it's no different, not really, but I'm different. I'll solve it.”

“Why?”

“Because if not me,” said Fool, “who else?”

“We're finished,” said Elderflower loudly from behind them. He had not asked Fool a single question during this discussion. As Fool turned to go, Balthazar grinned at him, showing his teeth again, and said, “Why, Fool, you should beware. You are becoming Hell's hero.”

“No,” said Fool.

“Oh yes,” said Balthazar. “I come from Heaven, Fool, and Heaven is full of heroes. I have learned to recognize them.”

Heroic Fool
, thought Fool as Balthazar went to Adam,
little heroic stupid Fool.

After the delegation had finished their discussions Fool updated Elderflower, which took a long time. The small man asked a large number of questions, picking over every aspect of the investigation and of what the delegation had done and said. Fool was jittery, wanting to be gone, aware that the day was crumpling into night and that his office would already be full of canisters that would need stamping with
DNI
and sending back to wherever they had come from before he could visit the Man and update him,
amuse
him, with the information about Diamond and ask if he had heard anything more. He was exhausted, and wondered when he had last slept in his bed. He had dozed on the train, he remembered, and before that in Gordie's room, but in his bed? Yesterday? Two days ago?

Elderflower eventually let Fool go, saying, “You seem eager to move, Thomas. Being noticed has given you energy.”

“I have something to do,” replied Fool, “in relation to the murders, the blue ribbons, I mean. I have an idea, a …” He realized that he didn't know how to describe what he was trying to do, had never really done it before. He had a single piece of information, less than that, really, more a hope of information, and it had laid a path out before him.

“I'm following a trail,” he said eventually. “There are signs being left, like pieces of a puzzle, a guess, each one a few steps farther on than the last, and it might lead somewhere. I don't know.”

“You're doing well, Thomas,” said Elderflower. “You are being watched with interest. Rhakshasas passes his compliments, and instructs me to tell you he awaits your report with interest. The archdeacons meet later, and they require your attendance. This is a new thing for Hell, this thing that you are doing. You should be proud.”

“Yes,” said Fool noncommittally. The path, the trail, was all he cared about now, about where it would take him. He was being led, was following something's lead, and he was eager to see where he ended up.

“Go, Thomas, go,” said Elderflower. “Be an Information Man.”

The Man's house looked even more rotten somehow, damper and more warped. Fool walked along the path to the doorway, opening blackly before him, and heard the chittering things inside squawk his approach.

He had returned to his office after leaving Elderflower and collected the report from the last body's Questioning. It was briefer than the report Morgan had done on the body from the Orphanage, simply reading:

Similar, although the wounds were cleaner. The murderer used their bare hands, there were no claw marks or slices, and it told me nothing but a hint that the poor child was killed by a client, but not one that he had met before. The soul is gone.