The Devil's Detective (37 page)

“I gave them freedom,” said Adam. “They thanked me.”

“You murdered them,” said Fool, and the light moved across his flesh and he could feel it, faster and faster, a whirlwind, and he wondered whether this was what it had been like for them, the center of something too big and too fast and too bright to understand but knowing that it was coming, terrible and painful and inexorable.

“It is not murder,” said Adam, his voice a calm note in the maelstrom of light. “They are dead already. I merely did what Hell has stopped doing, and gave their souls release. This is Hell, and I had to be cruel to perform the greatest kindness, to unanchor their souls, but it was God's work I performed with those poor things.”

“And so it begins,” said Elderflower from somewhere in the room. He sounded as though he were moving, but when Fool tried to open his eyes he found he still could not.

“We aren't dead,” said Fool.

“No?” said Adam. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, Adam, everyone here is alive,” said Elderflower, his voice still moving, seeming to fade closer and then farther away. “Flesh with a resident soul is living flesh, you know that.”

“Then you're a murderer,” said Fool, feeling forward with his free hand. He found the wall and used it to stand, pulling himself upright. He held his gun forward, fighting against the weight of the light, heard something swish past him, felt heat cut through the light and pass over his skin. There was another noise, like chains going taut and snapping, and then the weight of the light was gone and the glare had faded from his eyes. He risked opening them, squinted through tears that came unbidden and turned the room into a blurred mess, and saw Adam standing in front of the windows.

Balthazar's fires were crawling over Adam, fingers of it wrapping around the angel's face and head and slithering down beneath his black robe. Adam ignored the flame and looked at Fool. “Will you arrest me, Information Man? Arrest God's representative in Hell on the word of a demon?”

“Yes,” said Fool.

“Hell is God's domain, Fool, and the freeing of souls is God's work. Is it a crime, to carry out God's work?”

“Yes,” said Fool. “In Hell, the rules bind even God's children. You had no permission to murder flesh nor steal souls. You went outside the remit of the delegation. Criminality is criminality, whether carried out by human, demon, or angel, and under the rules of Hell you have sinned.”

“God will protect me,” said Adam, reaching up and taking hold of
Balthazar's flame. He tugged and Balthazar was jerked forward. As he came within his companion's reach, Adam swung his other arm. It became a silver blur as it moved, sweeping up and chopping Balthazar across his stomach, lifting him and throwing him back across the room. His other arm swung after it, glowing silver and shining and growing until it stretched across the room and battered into Balthazar. The red angel groaned as he was thrust farther, his body crashing into the wall. Something cracked as he hit, although whether in the wall or within Balthazar Fool could not tell. Adam pulled his arm back and prepared for another strike.

Fool fired, his hand trembling, and a ragged line opened along the side of Adam's face. Light poured from it, splashing down the angel's shoulder like liquid, coating the side of his face. His arms snapped back, reducing, becoming simply arms again.

“Do you think you can harm me?” he said, and as he spoke his robes lifted, spread, fanned out behind him, and Fool realized that they were not robes, that they never had been. They were his wings,
its
wings, because Adam was no longer even an approximation of a human, had become something made of light and rigidity and gleam, humanoid but not human in the least. Its eyes were burning silver, its skin a flawless alabaster that gleamed as though lit from within, and its wings were huge, colors shifting across them like oil glinting on the surface of water, and when it spoke, its voice echoed in the room, shivering dust from the joints and beams above them.

“I am angelic, Fool, one of the host of Heaven. Your gun cannot touch me.” Its wings curved, blocking the windows behind him, their tips brushing the walls with a sound like nails dragging across glass.

“In point of fact, you aren't,” said Elderflower as he walked in between Adam and Fool. The little figure blurred, its edges lost in the angel's glare, reduced to a black smudge at its heart. “An angel, I mean. You're a criminal, nothing more. You murdered the citizens of Hell, attacked your companion. Scribe has it written, I believe?”

“Yes,” said a voice, dull and toneless.
They
can
speak
, thought Fool,
they can!

“Elderflower,” said Adam, “what nonsense is this?”

“You're a criminal,” said Elderflower, “and there are thousands like you in Hell, you're no different from any other thing here. Just a criminal. Whatever you were, that's all you are now. Thomas, if you'd be so kind?”

“Certainly,” said Fool, and shot Adam again.

Adam, no longer an angel, now a pale and bright thing, exploded.

For the second time, the room filled with light. This time it was blue, dark and clinging, and it buffeted Fool. It wasn't bright, exactly, but it filled the space and it was thick, distorting the shapes of Elderflower and Adam into ragged things that appeared to be floating. Adam was shouting, screaming, and then everything in the room shifted as though it had tilted on its side. Fool was pulled, his feet leaving the floor, tumbling sideways, falling through the air and crashing into Elderflower and then onward into the thick, quartered windows. A moment later, Balthazar hit the glass next to them, and Fool just had time to realize that he was several feet off the floor and then the furniture was hitting the glass around him.

Fool was flat against the panes, his face pressed against one square of glass. A chair hit the pane next to him, cracking it, its dusty stuffing spraying loose as the material of the old cushion ripped. The air swilled blue around him, light eddying and coagulating in front of him. He heard an impact followed by someone grunting, and then Balthazar said, “Adam.”

Adam screamed.

It was a wretched sound. It whooped, hoarse, agony and loss and fear all impacting and scratching, louder and louder until Fool's ears hurt. The light had a taste and scent, of old copper and spent saliva and long-dead flames, filling his mouth and nose. He couldn't breathe, felt it clog his throat, press his tongue down. He tried to spit but couldn't, and the screaming came again and was, if anything, worse.

“Adam!” Balthazar said again, and there was another high snapping sound by Fool's ear. The weight around him increased, pressing him
harder against the glass, and he felt a crack snake its way along his cheek. The edges of the glass parted slightly, cutting into his skin, thin lines of pain slicing into his cheek, new pain to replace the injuries that Adam's angelic light had washed away. There was another crack, this one from somewhere farther down his body. His arm was pinned under him, the gun trapped and pressing into his belly. He tried to wriggle, tried to breathe, couldn't.

There was another crack. The blue deepened, and the rest of the room was lost to Fool completely. There was a third scream, half-formed words bubbling through it, and then the windows under Fool splintered farther. The wooden struts began to bow out, the weight against him increasing. He tried to speak, drew in a thick breath that got no farther than the back of his mouth, choked, and then he was falling in a mess of fragmented glass and wood and swirling, dancing blue.

It was dizzying. Fool fell out of the room and then shifted direction, still falling now not out but down, everything arcing along with him except the blue, which curved in the other direction, climbing. He saw Elderflower, coat flaring behind him like a cape, and Balthazar, wings beating. The scribe dropped past him, the archive following.
How many floors up is the ballroom?
he wondered. He couldn't remember. Glass fell like stars around him and the weight was removed from him, he had no weight at all and the smell was gone and he could breathe and he was looking out at Hell and then the ground was leaping toward him.

There was no mud; the square had been scraped after the riot and deaths and Fool hit the flagged ground feetfirst. His legs buckled up, his knees driving hard into his chest and then knocking him back, the breath driven from him in an explosive gasp. Glass crunched under him as he rolled, more falling around him, and he brought his arms up and wrapped them around his exposed head. The back of his head hit the stone hard, protected by his hand, and Fool heard the thin snapping of his fingers breaking moments before the pain hit.

It wasn't his gun hand; even as his roll came to a sprawled end and he curled around, nursing his hand, he was thankful for that. He had lost his gun in the fall, but when he found it he would still be able to hold it.

“Give me your hand.” Balthazar, standing in front of Fool. His wings were folded up above his head, protecting them from the still-falling
detritus. Fool held his hand out. Two of the fingers were twisted, bent at a strange angle.

“Look away,” said Balthazar. Fool looked around; Elderflower was standing not far from him, the scribe and archive behind him, and then Fool saw the rising light.

It was streaming out of the ballroom and rising into the sky, piercing the clouds. It had formed itself into a thick column, was pulsing, and reminded Fool of one of the Man's twisting fronds, and then Balthazar pulled his fingers and the pain grew brighter than anything else. When the corona of white had faded from his eyes, the blue stream was fading and guttering. Several seconds later, it had petered to nothing.

“You'll need to strap the fingers,” Balthazar said, letting go of Fool's hand.

“Thank you.”

“He's been taken back,” said the angel, looking into the sky toward Heaven. Fool grunted, not trusting himself to speak. Pain and anger surged in him, throbbing and raw. Adam had escaped, managed to avoid facing any kind of justice. Fuck.
Fuck!

“No,” said Elderflower, “he's not.”

“Then where is he?” asked Fool.

“Falling,” said Elderflower. Above them, the clouds boiled and bucked and then vomited out a mass of dirty blue light.

Everything's about light
, thought Fool as a tendril of cold fire fell from the sky.
All this, from the very beginning, it's all been about light. Light that comes in, light that gets released. Light that means something. Adam and Balthazar are things of light, hot light and cold light.

Falling light.

All of Hell was lit up by the pulsing coming down from the clouds, strands of filthy blue spilling down. They looked like sodden paper, threaded through with shit and grime, spattering earthward. Fool sat back on his haunches watching the light; as it hit the ground, there was a soundless explosion that sent sprays bouncing back upward, only to arc out and fall back to earth again. Finally, there was a brighter flash and an egg of blue flame belched down, wrapped in the dank tendrils, and crashed to earth.

There was a last, violent pulse of light, lurching into the air and rippling
down in waves. Between the group in the courtyard and the murky lifting and falling light, some fragment of Hell's brutalist architecture was black and stolid. It looked like broken teeth in a mouth with no gums, jagged and irregular.

“What's that?” asked Balthazar.

“It's glorious,” whispered Elderflower.

“A wall,” said Fool. He recognized the top, saw in the stark shapes something that he knew. “It's a wall.”

“The oldest wall in Hell, Thomas,” said Elderflower, “around the oldest part of Hell.”

“He's in the Heights?”

“Of course. Where else would Adam fall? He is Hell's first Fallen in years, and he is, in his way, important. Vital, maybe. He is old and powerful and has a taste for blood, a Fallen thing to fear. He'll make a terrible demon, Thomas, cruel and full of bile and bitterness, and he has fallen into the center of Hell's most private place. But justice still needs to be served, does it not?”

It took Fool a moment to realize what Elderflower was saying. The pyrotechnic display was coming to an end now, the light fainter, the writhing tendrils less pronounced. The Falling was almost complete. “I can't,” he said.

“Do you have a choice?” asked Elderflower. “He's admitted his crimes, attacked a member of the delegation, killed humans and demons. He is Hell's, Thomas, just as you are. You have your role to play, and Hell requires it be played.”

“He's in Crow Heights,” said Fool, thinking of a demon aflame, screaming and spitting and sent to kill him, thinking of revenge and anger.

“A place deeper and larger than it seems from the outside, Thomas. You had best hurry or Adam may lose himself in its heart and emerge only after you are long gone, and who will stop him then?”

“I can't,” said Fool again.

“You can,” said a voice behind him. Hands slipped under his armpits and he was lifted gently, set onto his feet. Balthazar let Fool go and came around in front of him. Balthazar's wings were open, huge, and his arms wreathed in curling flames but his head was bowed.

“I am yours,” he said. “I owe you an apology. Adam was my companion and I saw none of this, and in my blindness I have allowed a betrayal of both Heaven and Hell. He deserves capture, but I am only a soldier and cannot move against him without command.”

“Marvelous!” said Elderflower, clapping his hands. “And don't forget, Thomas, you have other troops.”

“No,” said Fool immediately, wondering what would happen if he took his demons into Crow Heights, how strongly their allegiance would bind them to him when they came under the influence of the elders there. Some of the Heights' inhabitants were the first links in the chains of generations and breeding that eventually led to his troops, and he was, after all, only human.