The Devil's Detective (32 page)

Fine, now they can watch me catch the bastard.

Even from the end of the path, Fool could see that the front door to the Questioning House had been torn off its hinges and was lying inside the wide hallway in a haze of splinters and wood. He drew his gun, looking at the jamb; the wards and runes that should have protected the Questioning House were still there. He ran his finger along one of them, a series of black shapes traced into a piece of thin paper pinned to the wood, feeling the tingle of them in his fingertips. They still had power, these spells against Hell's more violent denizens, yet something had waded through them and torn its way inside.
How powerful was this demon?
he wondered. How strong, to be able to smash through the protections that the Bureaucracy gave the Questioners?

Fool went cautiously into the building. The broken door wavered under his feet as he stepped over it, splinters digging into his soles. It was bright in the building, the lamps still burning merrily in their sconces, making the shadows thin and weak. Apart from the shattered door, there was no sign of disturbance; the signs on the wall reading
FLESH
and
ADMINISTRATION
gleaming, the polished floor reflecting a blurred image of Fool as he moved carefully forward, the long desk where the corpses were signed in empty and neat.

Steps led off the main foyer up to the Questioners' private rooms, the top of the staircase lost in gloom. Fool moved to the foot of the stairs and then stopped, knowing instinctively that upward wasn't where he needed to go; it would lead only along another branch, a smaller one. The main trail, he felt sure, would lie in the Questioning Rooms, which were at the back of the House. He went to move away but a querulous voice came from above him.

“Has it gone?” Tidyman, emerging from the darkness. His white hair was haloed around his head and his hands were clasped in front of him.

“Did you see it?”

“Tidyman was too busy running,” said Hand, appearing from behind his colleague.

“Did
you
see it, then?” asked Fool.

“No, because I was running as well. We were in the foyer, Tidyman and I, discussing a new technique for questioning the dead when they are in pieces, when the front door was hit. Whatever it was sounded very determined, so we ran as the doors were hit again and came off their hinges. I didn't look back.”

“Where's Morgan?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you try to help him? Find him?”

“No.”

“It's not our fault,” said Tidyman as Fool looked up at them. “What could we do?”

“You could have tried,” Fool said.

“We could have died,” said Hand, looking at Fool as though he were an idiot. “Why should we put ourselves at risk for Morgan? Would he do it for us? Would you?”

“No,” said Fool. “I'd do what you did, I'd run and hide and not look and hope that I survived.” He was telling the truth, he thought, or at least, the truth that had governed his life until very recently. He turned from the men in disgust, unsure of where his disgust was aimed, and went back into the foyer.

He found the only other sign of disorder, a chair lying on its back, just inside the corridor toward the building's rear. He went past it and
continued down the hallway toward the doors that lined its far end, all of them closed.

The House was silent.

Call or not
, Fool wondered,
silence or noise?
And then,
If it's here, it'll know I'm here already. Call.
“Hello?”

His voice echoed along the corridor. “Hello?” he called again, but no one replied, and nothing moved. He took another step, listening; silence. Another, so that he was almost at the first door, reaching out, still listening, still hearing only his own breathing and the Questioning House's silence around him. “Hello?” he tried a third time, his hand closing around the door handle. It was warm, slippery.

The door opened easily, revealing an empty room. The table in the middle was bare, its metal surface and surrounding benches of instruments and bottles and scales covered in a thin layer of dust. Fool let out a long breath that he hadn't realized he was holding. The room opposite was the same, the table set up for a Questioning but clean and unused.

That left two doors. The first was locked but the second was not and opened a little when Fool pushed it. It grated as it moved, wood rubbing against wood. Closer, he saw that its upper panel was marked, two impact points set into its paint at about head height. He pushed at it a little harder, felt slight movement and then resistance, and pushed again. Something behind the door shifted, bumped against it, and then fell into the growing opening. Fool jumped back, reflexes singing, as Morgan's upper body appeared, the stump of his neck winking redly at him. A part of Fool, a part inside, screamed, but most of him was dispassionate, remained calm and silent.

Morgan hit the floor with a thick, glutinous noise, another dead body, another sack of ruptured and abused flesh like Gordie and Summer, and its interest to Fool was primarily in the story it could tell him and only distantly that it had once been someone Fool had liked.
What am I becoming?
he wondered, and the answer came on the thought's heels almost instantly:
An agent of Hell.
He pushed the door open and entered the room, stepping over Morgan's corpse to do so.

The room had been torn apart. The counter that ran the room's length along the far wall had been ripped from its moorings and the
tools of Morgan's trade scattered across the floor. The air was filled with competing scents, of thick oils and rich blood and sharp chemicals and something else, something bitter and rank. A huge pool of blood had formed around the fallen counter, jagged sprays of it climbing the walls above the worktop like the silhouettes of distant trees. Morgan's head was in the center of the pool, resting on its side and facing back into the room so that its open eyes peered at Fool owlishly.

There were footsteps across the floor, etched in blood. Some were the imprints of Morgan's feet, smooth-edged, the blood still a rich cherry. Others were less distinct, the blood burned to a thick black crust, the prints uneven, some large, others smaller, distorted, looking not like feet but like clawed hooves.
The heat of it must have been furious
, Fool thought, looking at the burned smears of blood. Could he track the movements in this room, follow Morgan's last steps by following the stains? Step into the demon's tracks and chase Morgan's ghost? What would he see if he did? Fear? Pain? Anger?

“Can we help?” said a voice from the doorway. Tidyman and Hand, both in the corridor and peering in from around the edge of the frame, were half hidden from the room and its contents.

“Yes,” said Fool. “Go away. Go back to your rooms and stay out of my way. I'm working.” He turned away from them, ignoring them, and went to Morgan's slumped corpse.

“I'm sorry, old friend,” he said and rolled him over. Blood had soaked into the man's clothes; there was little of the gray material left clean on his top half, and his thighs were spattered with thick, whorled stains. When Fool lifted Morgan's arms and examined them, not liking the way his flesh was still warm, he found several deep marks across his palms. Fool had a sudden image, a flash of Morgan backing away, holding his hands up and the demon lashing out, knocking the hands aside, tearing into them and then grasping Morgan's head and twisting, sucking on the soul as it emerged, slurping at it greedily.

Sighing, he let Morgan's hands drop and rose, looking around the rest of the room.

The Questioner's table, usually positioned at the room's center, had been tipped over and had skittered up to the far wall, its legs buckled around as though something had swept into them and torn the table
from its fixings in the floor. A hand was just visible at the top edge of the table, the skin blanched and the fingers curled toward Fool as though in greeting. It was small and the edge of the wrist was marked by striations of red and black where it had been bound.
Tied between two pillars
, Fool thought.
Summer.

When Fool pulled the table away from the wall, he found that her hand was the only part of Summer that hadn't been burned. The rest of her flesh was blackened and peeling, the surface of the table around her buckled. Her skin was split into a series of fire-torn grins, her head made bald and blistered by some intense heat. There was no soot, no marks more than a few inches from her body, no scars on the walls, no evidence that these had been human flames. Summer had been taken by the heat that lived in the demon flesh to stop her soul talking, to provide it with yet more food.

Fool glanced around the rest of the room, hoping that Morgan had conversed with Summer before the demon arrived, that he had made notes. How lovely it would be to find a note that stated simply the demon's name and where he could find it, all in Morgan's neat hand, but there was nothing.
Hope
, thought Fool, and grinned humorlessly.
I'm so helpless against it, I know it's pointless but I keep hoping anyway. Little hopeful Fool.
He realized he was crying and wiped his eyes, hoping to wipe away the pain and anger he felt along with the tears. Where did this leave him? Summer had been prevented from talking, his ally in the Questioning House killed and, he supposed, also prevented from talking; one look at the torn and wrenched flesh of the neck left Fool in no doubt that the violence of the death would have released his soul for the demon to eat. There would be a blue-ribboned canister with his details printed waiting for him back at his rooms, he knew, with orders to investigate. “I am,” he said aloud and angry, “I am.”

With Morgan dead, the only Questioner Fool trusted had gone, and his chance of finding answers was slimmer than ever. He had a Questioning House full of equipment and not the first idea of how to use it. He had
nothing.

No
, Fool suddenly remembered,
not nothing. I still have a little nameless demon in a lake.

The bag swung against Fool's leg as he climbed out of the transport. It was heavy, made his arms ache, and he swapped it from hand to hand to try to even out the effort.
At least it's stopped dripping
, he thought, the puddle of blood on the seat beside him cracking and flaking as he lifted the bag. It left a stain on the coarse upholstery; he wondered what Elderflower would say about it and found that he didn't care. He tried not to think what was in the bag, what was banging against his leg.

About what he was going to do.

Fool had returned briefly to the office after leaving the Questioning House. He found what he was looking for in one of the supply cupboards; a coil of rope, dusty and tangled, that he wrapped around one arm, lifting it from its place on the shelf next to spare sheets and notebooks and a box of cheap, thin pencils. Afterward, he went into his own room, but there was nothing there; everything of value to him, everything he owned, he carried. The feather was still in his pocket, his gun was snug in its holster, and he had his uniform. The
Information Man's Guide to the Rules and Offices of Hell
he debated leaving but then decided against it, placing it into a pocket. They were his rules, after all, the rules of Hell as they had been given to him. This thing, this
investigation
, felt like it was moving now, but the movement was headlong, dragging him without control behind it. He had, somehow, to get ahead of it, to slow it down somehow, to take control. And then what? Fool had a grim sense that this might be the last time he would see this room, although where the sense came from he didn't quite know.

Actually, he did know, if he was honest; he could see the real possibility
of his own death, not in the fearful way everyone in Hell feared their own death, but because of something concrete, something specific. He was changing, he realized, had already changed, had become something different. The old Fool was gone, burned away in the glare of attention and anger and a determination to solve this, to find the demon and make it pay. It was setting the trail for him to follow, he thought, and then trying to prevent him following even as he chased it, creating a mess of confusion in which new doors were opening and old, lost ideas were unfurling. It had killed Summer because she had gotten close to it, had managed to get within touching distance of it, but Fool had been close as well and had prevented it from taking her soul. It had made a mistake there, he understood, but it had not left it, had stepped ahead of Fool to finish the job and unmake the mistake.
Poor Summer
, he thought,
destroyed not once but twice. And me? It could have killed me when it killed the Man and I was in his room, but it didn't. Why? Because it wanted to see how far I could go? Because I amuse it the way I amused the Man? Because it didn't think I'd survive the traps it set me and it wanted to see me suffer? But I did survive, and I'm maybe not so amusing now. Next time, it won't hesitate.

It'll kill me.

Following this demon wasn't simply taking Fool to new geographies, it was forcing him into new shapes. He had shot demons, killed them, ordered them to do his bidding and been obeyed. He had seen spaces within Hell that he had never known existed, had walked further and further from the Fool he thought he was, and had further to go yet. He turned to leave, knowing that even if he came back, he would be changed even more, and wondering whether he would recognize himself at all by the time this was finished.

Summer's room was neat, almost sterile, the only sign she had ever been there the spare clothes hanging on the rail and the folded pants and bras stacked on the shelves of the bookcase. Next to them was a small pile of paper weighted down with a pencil. Fool picked up the sheets and leafed through them; they were sketches, he found, lots of them on each piece of paper. Some were of places or people he recognized; in several, he saw Gordie, and in others, he saw himself. In the sketches, Fool looked serious and Gordie was always smiling. The last picture in
the pile was of the three of them, three faces, roughly penciled but still recognizable; Summer and Gordie and Fool, Hell's Information Men, and now two were dead and the third was someone new. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket by his
Guide.