The Devil's Detective (35 page)

“You, and the demons and the souls of everything and everyone here, they belong to Heaven, Information Man, and don't ever forget that. These deliberations happen because we allow them, and for no other reason. Don't start to believe you have power, or choice, because you do not.”

“No,” said Fool, and then, “but if I have no choice, then who's in control of me?” Balthazar didn't reply, and the crowd made their low noise as another person was Elevated from Hell up to Heaven.

And after the Elevation, life, such as it was, went on.

Fool returned to his rooms almost with a sense of anticlimax, of dislocation and things unsaid and energies unused, and spent hours opening the metal tubes, stamping the enclosed papers
DNI
without reading them, sealing them and inserting them back up into the pneumatic pipe. In among them, he found the blue ribbons for Morgan's and Summer's deaths. Because he had no stamp for it, he wrote
Investigation ongoing
by hand on both and sent them up the pipe after their companions, each throaty swallow feeling like the end of something. He had no idea where the canisters would end up. With Elderflower? Passed on to Rhakshasas, or some other member of the Bureaucracy? Or did they end up deep in Crow Heights being read by Satan himself, surrounded by flames as black as terror?

Not to the floor above, though; that wasn't where the canisters went, despite the fact that the pipe went up through the ceiling. Fool had once gone up to the floor above him but had found simply an abandoned suite of rooms, the pneumatic tube sticking into the still air, finishing halfway up a wall. The end of the tube had been rusted and buckled, too narrow for a canister to pass through, yet there was no sign of the thousands of canisters he had sent up in his time as an Information Man. He had wanted to ask Elderflower about it but hadn't, thinking at the time that his question might get him noticed; ironic, given what had happened since.

In the time he had been absent, Summer's and Gordie's rooms had been cleared out, the bras and pants taken from the shelf, Gordie's spare
shirts and pieces of paper and pencils and notes all removed. There was nothing left of the life Fool had known for these last months, of the life he had understood since he was born into Hell years back. Even he was different, a new thing constantly shifting and evolving.
Hell's changing
, he thought,
rippling and buckling around me, around us all.
Men, a man, a pale man murdering other humans, demons frightened of him, uniforms, troops, fucking
demon
troops taking orders from a human.

And a feather.

He was holding it now, feeling the shimmer of heat and light emerging from it against his fingers. It had been with him since the beginning of this whole sorry, strange situation, since that night collecting the delegation. It had survived being taken by the Man, the riot in the Houska, the deaths in the square, being dropped in Summer's blood and left overnight, and it was unmarked, unaffected. What had the Man said? That it was a thing of beauty and truth, a grace note in Hell's music? Not that exactly, perhaps, but something like that. It had come from Balthazar, from the wing of an angel, from something that looked like a human but that was more, a thing of beauty and awe and terror.

Something, there was something dancing just beyond the tip of his tongue, waiting for him to speak it into existence. Something about the first bodies, about the wounds; their severity, he remembered. They weren't injuries caused by a human, they were demon in origin, were too extensive to be caused by a man. Hadn't Morgan said so? He couldn't remember, but he remembered how they had looked, torn and puckered and terrible. Not human injuries, demon-caused, but the thing from the lake had seen a man. A man, or a demon that looked like a man. But there were no demons that looked human; to look at a demon was to look at a warped and distorted reflection of a human, and besides, demons knew demons. So, if the thing from the lake had not seen a man or a demon, what had it seen? Something that looked human, looked like a man, was pale, that had the strength to tear the soul from the flesh and send it skittering into the sky. What had the demon said? Not just that it was pale, but that it was white. Pale and white.

“Those souls weren't consumed,” Fool said aloud, giving the truth shape with his words. “If they were eaten, there would have been no sign
of them, but there was, there was a flash rising into the sky. The souls were rising up, flying away, free. Whatever it was, it didn't eat the souls.”

A pale, white man.

White.

“Oh, you idiot, you
fool
,” Fool breathed, suddenly knowing. There were no white demons, no white humans. Only one thing in Hell was white.

Only angels were white.

If the thought that it was a man doing the killing had sent the world pitching under Fool's feet, then the thought that it was an angel was like having the floor drop away to nothing. He managed to stand and back away from the table and then felt his legs give way, and he sat down on the floor with a heavy thump. His chair skittered away and ended up on its side against the wall, legs pointing at him.

An angel, not a man or a demon.

An angel.

Fool felt sick, leaned sideways, and opened his mouth to vomit, but nothing emerged except a strangled choking sound. His throat constricted and then released, constricted and released, his belly clenching.

An angel.

Fool wanted it to be wrong but knew,
knew
he wasn't. The only white men in Hell weren't men, they were the angels, and they were supposed to be perfect, uncorrupted and incorruptible. It made a kind of twisted sense, he thought; Balthazar's perfection and his disgust and rage at the things he had seen here spilling out, uncontrolled and uncontained. Fool remembered the angel's anger at Hell, about its lack of perceived punishment, and thought that maybe Balthazar had taken it upon himself to inflict the kind of damage that he thought Hell ought to be delivering. He had become the Hell he believed should exist, had become retribution and torture, a thing of flame and pain and violence.

Balthazar was his killer, the warrior angel with his savage weapons.

How could Fool stop him? Bring him to account? Balthazar was brutal in his power, and worse, he was Hell's guest, more distant than even the eldest of the demonkind from Fool's touch. How could he accuse
him? Arrest him? Did Fool's jurisdiction even stretch that far? No, no, surely not, it couldn't.

Yes, it could.

Fool finally sat up and then pulled himself to his feet, using the table for support. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the
Information Man's Guide to the Rules and Offices of Hell
, flicking through its pages until he found the passage he was looking for. He had read all of it before, of course, but it had never meant anything previously because he had never tried before, never followed trails or clues or thought about making arrests, but there it was in black, slightly uneven print: “If it walks or flies or swims in Hell, it is cast over by the net of law and by the authority of the Information Man, whose feet may tread where they will and whose word is all-informing.” Which meant he could go anywhere in the pursuit of his aims, didn't it?

Didn't it? Could he try to arrest an angel? Track Balthazar and require him to submit? He thought of that great curve of near-invisible fire dancing in the clearing, stretching from Balthazar's hand up into the sky, thought of the lake demons falling in severed pieces to the ground in billows of steam and scalding scents, and tried to imagine Balthazar simply allowing himself to be taken, complying meekly. It wasn't an image that would come to him.

Where would he take him? There wasn't a place in Hell that could hold an angel, Fool didn't think. It was a fool's errand.

He had to try.

What choice did he have? This was where the trail had led him, and he had followed it this far, leaving the bodies of Summer and Gordie and so many others as the markers on his path, detritus in his wake, and if he had had it wrong about some things, about one thing he knew he was right: he had to solve this and bring it to an end.

Checking that his gun was still strapped to his leg, Fool pulled on his uniform jacket and left the office. This time, he didn't look around before he left; he had no time left for questions, and no hope of success. Alone, Fool went to arrest an angel.

His transport was gone. Fool stood in the street and looked toward the distant stain of Crow Heights, black against the thin night sky. It peered down on Hell, the highest point except for the surrounding wall, and the eyes behind its barricades were assumed to see everything. He thought about the black transports, the missing people, the rumors, and the sense that everything old and powerful and destructive lived in the Heights, and knew that Hell's inhabitants were wrong. It was deep in the bureaucratic district, in the Assemblies House where the angels had their rooms, that the most terrifying thing lived. Fool touched his gun again and started walking.

The train beetled along the wide road that ran out from the Houska. It was ahead of Fool and he ran to catch it; it wasn't hard as it was moving only at the speed of a fast walk. At this time of the evening it was quiet, the night's revelries not yet having swung into high gear. The train would take him to within a few hundred yards of the road to Assemblies House, but it would take a while, so Fool found a small carriage that was almost empty and sat. After a moment, though, he rose, unable to remain seated. Energy crackled in his arms and legs and his head was stuffy with thoughts, clustered together like sodden cotton wadding. Balthazar, with his flames and his anger, murdering Diamond and the others. He imagined him descending on the pit of the Aruhlians, his wings spread wide against the sky and his teeth huge in a face torn back into an expression of terrible joy, of him dragging the Genevieve down to the flooded cellar, his red gleam turning the water to a pool of blood, and Fool was frightened. He began to pace, swinging along the carriage and back again, using the straps dangling from the ceiling for support.

“Are you him?” One of the two other people in the carriage. It was a woman, younger than Summer, with dirt ground into her skin. She had come from one of the factories, he presumed, was making her way back to her billet. If she was lucky, it would be a room with her and only four or five other women in it; if she was unlucky, she'd be forced to share with up to twenty or thirty. “Are you him?” she asked again.

“No,” said Fool and kept on pacing. To the end and turn, and as he came back along the carriage, still thinking about Balthazar, unable to shift the angel from inside his head, where the thought of him had
pushed everything else to the side, the person sitting next to the woman, a man, spoke.

“You are.”

“No,” said Fool again. “I'm not. I'm no one,” and it was true, he was no one, just a man in Hell, an Information Man, but no one special. He was no one, was happy being no one.

“You are,” said the man and held out a sheaf of paper. “You're him. You're Fool. We recognize you.”

Fool took the paper. Papers, really; there were several sheets, their corners folded together to keep them in a bundle. Each page was covered in tight black print and pictures, all hand-drawn. On the first page, under a thick heading that read
THIS MAN CONTROLS DEMONS
, was a picture he thought might be of him. It was badly drawn and Summer's image of him was better, but it was still him. The text below the picture was a list of things Fool had done, some true but most nonsense. All the sheets were variations on the theme, he saw as he leafed through them; details of his investigation, of deeds he had supposedly done, and of tasks he had apparently accomplished. All were at best exaggerations, at worst complete fabrications. On the final page, under the words
MANY LIVES SAVED
, there was another picture of him, or someone supposed to be him, outlined in flames drawn as heavy black lines and pointing as two caricatured demons slunk away, heads down. Underneath this image was the comment
He Conquers Hell.

“What is this?” Fool asked.

“They're everywhere,” said the woman. “No one knows who's making them, but they're in all the factories and streets. Demons keep clearing them up, but more appear. They're everywhere.”

Everywhere. That meant that people had read them, demons had seen them, were reading them. Were reading about
him.
He wondered what Rhakshasas thought about this and didn't imagine he'd be pleased. He wondered who was making the sheets, whether he could stop them somehow, or get them to print something else, but knew that it was probably too late. Even if he did, another version of Fool had already been born in the paper, one that held little resemblance to the actual Fool.
And even he's not the same, because I don't really recognize him anymore
, he thought, and gave the paper back to the couple. He noticed that
they were holding hands, their fingers tightly intertwined. He knew they wouldn't have dared to do that a few days ago.