The Devil's Evidence (11 page)

“Your comments are noted, Fool,” said Mr. Tap. “You've been useful tonight. We shall speak again tomorrow. Have something else to tell me or I may decide to eat you again and this time simply not stop.”

Fool didn't speak, just lay there as the mouth and the eye closed and the flesh knitted back together. It itched, a maddening burn below the surface of his skin, and when he touched the area tentatively after it was sealed it hurt, was bruised, but at least the sharp, slicing pain had gone. Even as he looked, the tattoos were swirling apart, the eye and mouth now irregular patterns that contained only faint hints of the things they had just been.

There was now a clearly drawn mouth and a pair of eyes on his inner left forearm that hadn't been there earlier, and Fool had only a brief moment to steel himself before they, too, ripped apart and opened.

The pain wasn't as bad as Mr. Tap had been, the holes created smaller, but it still knocked him back. He let his arm fall across his bruised stomach, waiting for the mouth to speak. The eyes blinked, bloody tears weeping from them and dribbling down onto his navel, and then the mouth opened, wide. For a second it was silent, and then a voice he recognized said, “Mr. Fool? Sir?”

“Marianne?” he asked, startled beyond pain. “Is that you?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“Heaven. Where are you?”

“In your room in the Information House. In Hell. Are you really in Heaven? They said to expect a contact from you, but not like this.”

“How am I talking to you?” asked Fool, suddenly worried that Marianne's flesh had split as his own had, that she was feeling the same kind of roiling pain he was.

“There's a drawing of you,” said Marianne. “It's moving, speaking. I can hear your voice.”

Fool closed his eyes, concentrated. He could feel the link to Hell, some great chain he couldn't understand but at whose end was a throb unlike anything else he'd experienced, this link to the place of his birth, the place he hated. He let it fill him, the throb of fires and pain and fear, and then he could
see
Marianne. She was blurry, as though he was looking at her from behind a thin curtain of greasy material.
Or from within a thin sheet of paper,
he thought, but it was her, Marianne with her soft face and short hair.

“They tell me you picked me to act as your liaison with the Information Office while you're away? I got a canister telling me. Why me?”

“Because I trust you,” Fool said, “and you're about the only one of my troops I can say that about.”

There was a moment's silence. Fool looked at Marianne, and wondered what expression was on his face in the picture. The same as his face in reality? Or had they given him a different one, twisting him into what they wanted him to be?

Was it a picture of him that Summer had drawn, saved by the Bureaucracy for a purpose like this?

“What's been happening?”

“There've been more fires, arson,” said Marianne. “Another warehouse, not empty. It had had workers in it. They were all dead by the time we got there.”

“Did you look at the scene, look at it the way I showed you?”

“Yes. It was another set fire, started in the corner near the entrance so that the workers couldn't get out. We found some of them huddled together at the back, all dead. They hadn't burned, they'd suffocated on the smoke. There was vomit and they'd tried to shield each other, made masks but it hadn't worked. Their faces were black and purple and their eyes were bugged out.” She stopped, swallowed. Fool's image of her faded as she moved away, and then she was back, leaning over him, close, whispering. “We're being told to investigate, but no one knows how to do it, and we found something, sir.”

“Something?”

“A pincer, a huge pincer or claw.”

“Have you got it?” Thinking that, perhaps, Marianne could hold it up in front of his paper self so that he could see it.

“No. The Evidence have taken it, but they're not letting us near it. They're all over everything. They try to look like they're investigating but they're not, not really. They're useless, they don't know anything.”

“No, they won't, not anything real anyway,” said Fool, thinking. “Describe the claw.”

“It's big, and solid. We found it on the edge of the fire. I think whatever it was that left it got burned, it's charred around the edges. No one I asked when I still had it remembered seeing anything like it before. It's strange.”

“ ‘Strange?' ”

“I can't explain it,” said Marianne, “but it feels like it isn't really made of bone or flesh exactly. It feels wrong.”

Did that help? No, not really, not without seeing it. Some of the older demons had claws, was this something old turned arsonist? He thought for another second and then said, “Have there been any more murders like the one we were at before—” He paused. What could he call this?

“Before this?” he finished, eventually.

Marianne shook her head, then, thinking he couldn't see her, said, “No.”

“I can see you,” he said. Experimentally, he opened his eyes in Heaven and Marianne vanished; there was simply his arm and its tattoo. He closed his eyes again, Marianne filling his view.

“No, no murders…” she said, one hand appearing and scratching at her head, brushing at her hair.

“There's a ‘but' there,” he said. It was obvious in the way she'd paused, the way she drew the words out longer than they needed to be. Even through the blear of the paper, he could see that she was thinking, struggling to work out how to say something, or whether she should even say it at all.

“Just say it,” he said, wincing as his arm-eyes blinked, squeezed shut as she thought, and then gasping a little as she spoke again.

“We've had reports of people seeing things in the distance.”

“ ‘Things'?”

“Things dancing,” she said. “The man, the supervisor, he said something about them dancing, didn't he?”

“He did,” said Fool. “Where have the dancers been seen?”

“All over,” said Marianne. “There's no logic to it, as far as I can tell. They've been in alleys on the outskirts of Eve's Harbor, at the back of a boardinghouse, once in the middle of a farm. It doesn't make any sense.”

“No,” said Fool again, and let out a short, ragged breath. His arm was throbbing, the pain a sleeve that stretched from wrist to shoulder.

“Are you okay?” asked Marianne. In his vision, she looked concerned.

“I'm fine,” he said. “Keep an eye open for any more reports of dancers. Try to plot them on a map if you can get one, see if there are any common elements or obviously central points.”

“I will.”

“And Marianne?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful. Watch out for the bauta. Mr. Tap is dangerous and his Evidence Men aren't to be trusted. Stay away from them if you can, give them what they ask for only if you have no other choice.”

“Yes,” she said and yawned. The mouth in Fool's arm stretched and he groaned. He was a single ball of pain now, limbs heavy, eyes clenched against more agonies.

“Are you sure you're okay?” Marianne said.

I'm talking to you through my arm, through a tattoo that was burned into me and is now using my flesh to create a moving mouth and eyes—no, I'm not okay.
“Yes. Marianne, I need to go. I'll be in touch again. Be careful, Marianne, please. You're my eyes in Hell now, the only ones I have.”

“I will. Good-bye, sir, and you take care, too.”

“I'm in Heaven, Marianne, what could possibly happen to me here?” he said and concentrated, broke the connection between him and her apart. Even before the mouth and eyes in his arms had sealed themselves, Fool had fainted and dropped into a sleep that was blacker than any he'd known before.

Fool noticed the pictures the following morning, on the walk from their rooms to the next Delegation meeting. They lined the walls of the Anbidstow, all near-identical, dark-framed paintings of hooded figures. The pictures were large, filling the walls from floor to near the top of the ceiling, and the figure in every painting was facing away from Fool, the broad expanse of its back the central element of each picture. The backgrounds were dark, unclear, although there were sometimes hints of landscape, twisted bushes or stunted trees, grasslands or expanses of heath or moorland. The figures were wearing robes, dark and plain, and they seemed somehow sad, their shoulders slumped. None had wings, or if they did, they were hidden beneath their robes. The air of the pictures and the people they contained was somber.

Fool stepped close to one of the pictures, looking for a plaque or mark to tell him who or what it might portray. The glass was dusty and he reached to rub at it, but Benjamin caught his hand, gently, and stopped him.

“No,” said the angel. “They should rest uninterrupted.”

“Who are they? Are they all one person?”

“No,” said Benjamin. “These are the saddest of God's angels. They are the Estedea.”

“Estedea?”

“Do not ask about them, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin, still smiling that smile, delicate and slight, a curl to the edges of his lips and a crinkle in the perfect skin around his eyes. “To ask about them might attract their attention.”

“And that's bad, I assume?”

“It would increase their sadness,” said Benjamin. “They are created to carry the sadness of the worst days, and they come only when they are most needed and least wanted. They are the Estedea, Thomas Fool. Pray their sadness never reaches you.”

They carried on walking, kept passing the pictures, and Fool couldn't stop himself from asking, “How many of them are there?”

“As many as are needed,” said Benjamin, and the kindness in his voice had become chill, the absoluteness of knowing what Fool needed to do even if Fool himself did not. “Now let them be. Let them rest and hold their sadness.”
He doesn't like them,
thought Fool,
doesn't like them at all. It's not their attention on me he's bothered about, it's their attention falling on
him
that worries him.
He did not mention the figures in the pictures again.

They had arrived at the room, Benjamin opening the door for them. Wambwark, now without its cloak and hat, and Catarinch, still rotting and dripping, took their places at the table, where they were joined by the same angels from the day before.

“So. Day two,” said the first angel, and gestured behind it. Its scribe came forward and pulled a piece of parchment from the air, began reading a report of the previous day's agreements.

“Do you agree with the record?” asked the angel when the scribe had finished reading.

“Yes,” said Catarinch, “with one exception.” Fool tuned them out and moved across to his usual space when attending Delegation meetings, by the window. Benjamin, as before, joined him.

The view from the window had changed. Gone was the patchwork of fields and dark green hedges or fences, and where they had been was now a rolling swath of gorse-scattered lowland fields that dropped to a gently undulating ocean. Was it the same ocean Fool had seen on the journey here from the gate? He couldn't tell. It was shaped into a sickle bay that was lined with a fat strip of sandy beach, and at its far edge it pressed against tall gray cliffs topped with woodland. Had the ocean yesterday come up against cliffs? A beach, certainly, that he remembered, but the cliffs he was less sure about.

“How do you know where things are?” he asked Benjamin, quietly. Behind him, Wambwark, Catarinch, and the two angels were talking again about borders, the scribe standing at Catarinch's shoulder, its equivalent standing behind Heaven's representatives. Both scribes were now holding books, writing notes; presumably the dispute about the record had been solved. Neither scribe had, as far as Fool could tell, spoken apart from the initial reading.

“We don't need to,” said Benjamin. “We simply go where we are required.”

“But it's all changed,” said Fool.

“Yes.”

“So how do you find places? How do you know where places are? What if a place you want to go has moved or vanished? Are there maps?”

“There are no maps,” said Benjamin, “but nowhere vanishes. Places simply move. The roads we use find them, the paths through the air lead to them. It simply is.”

“This is how God wants it? With everything shifting and moving, I mean?”
God. The great enemy of Hell,
Fool thought.
Why have I brought Him up. Or Her?

“God? We have no contact with God, and I would not presume to know my Lord's business or plans.” For the first time, the smile dropped completely from Benjamin's face. “We are not meant to understand God's design of Heaven. Ours is simply to carry out God's will.”

How do you know God's will?
Fool wondered, but didn't ask. The smile, he thought, Benjamin's missing smile, it told him so much. God was as distant and remote to the angels as the Devil was to the human and demonkind inhabitants of Hell. Had Fool ever seen Hell's Devil, its grandest demon? He wasn't sure even now, though he suspected he may have, but he knew from Benjamin's reaction that neither he nor, Fool thought, any of the other angels he'd met had ever been graced with the presence of God.
We're all workers toiling at the face of something we cannot grasp,
he thought.
Poor Fools all.

Wambwark said something behind him, voice raised. Fool glanced over in time to see it stand, crash one larval fist on the table between it and the angels in a spray of maggots, and shout again. The two angels simply looked at it until Catarinch placed a hand on its fellow demon's arm; the torn and dripping demon's clawed hand sank slightly into the mess of writhing bugs, pallid white shapes falling over the rotten wrist and onto the table. Wambwark remained standing for a few seconds, angels and Catarinch looking at it, and then sat back down. The parts of it that had fallen to the table wriggled back toward its arm, questing snouts burrowing between the other bugs, and rejoined the mass of flesh.

Fool looked back at Benjamin. The smile had returned to the angel's face, although it seemed, to Fool's eyes at least, a little less sure than before.
It's not good when someone shakes the foundations of your world, makes you question, is it?
he thought.
Those little uncertainties, that little worm of concern and doubt?
Aloud, he said, “Does the fairground we were at yesterday still exist?”

“Of course,” replied Benjamin, “although it may have changed. Everywhere exists in Heaven, the spaces themselves simply appear in different places, that is all.”

That is all,
as though shifting geography was something usual, something normal. It is normal here, he realized, all perfectly normal, to be in a place where geography could not, apparently, be trusted. Fool thought of Hell, of the burning buildings, and of how much harder it would be to investigate if they were constantly moving, if they were constantly changing where they sat in relation to the things around them.

On the beach, visible more as dots than as individuals, people were standing, moving around slowly, clustering and separating. Some were in the sea or at its edge, white curls of breaking foam clinging to them as the water parted and came back together around thighs and waists. Angels, easier to make out because of their color and the speed at which they moved, arced through the crowd, sometimes stopping behind one of the human dots, never for long, then moving on.
Feeding,
he thought.
Feeding on happiness and joy like bugs, like parasites.
He looked again at Benjamin, who smiled more widely, and Fool couldn't help but see that mouth yawing open, the throat dark and empty.

“May I ask you a question?” asked Benjamin.

“Yes,” said Fool, startled. It was, apart from the angel's initial greeting to Fool, the first time he had sought interaction instead of simply responding to queries.

“Do you know the two who follow?”

“ ‘The two who follow'?” Fool repeated, confused.

“You do not know they are there?”

“No.” He looked back over his shoulder, uneasy. The room contained nothing unexpected.

“They are clearly yours, Thomas Fool, tied to you by threads that are thin but strong.”

“I don't know,” said Fool, still looking around. His hand, without him telling it to, had drifted to the butt of his gun, was rubbing at it as though unsure of whether to grasp it.

“If you will allow me, I can show them to you later?”

Fool hesitated. He had followers? He remembered being followed by a crowd of the Sorrowful, remembered them staring at him in helpless, terrible, cloying
hope
. Were they like that? “I don't know,” he said. His hand was still toying with his gun.

“They are yours, Thomas Fool, you should know about them and own them,” said Benjamin. “Give me permission to bring them to your sight?”

“I—” said Fool and interrupted himself with his own silence. Then, “I don't know.”

“You are fearful,” said Benjamin, a statement. “Do not be. This is Heaven, and no harm can befall you here.” Fool, thinking of bodies on carousels and his own splitting flesh, still bruised and sore, did not reply.

“Fool,” said Catarinch from behind him. “We're finished.”

Fool followed Catarinch to the door, falling in behind Wambwark, walking alongside the scribe. As Benjamin passed him, the angel said softly, “Later, Thomas Fool.”

They exited the room and started down the corridor, Benjamin leading, as ever. At the end of the corridor, at a T-junction, the members of the Delegation turned right, and as they did so, Fool saw Israfil standing just to the left of the intersection. The angel, head wreathed in flame, nodded recognition at Fool, the expression on her face stern in the fire.

Wambwark, seeing the nod, reached back and cuffed Fool on the side of the head, knocking him into an ungainly stumble that ended with him kneeling against the corridor wall. Wambwark might look soft, pliable, but its fist was hot and its blow had been as hard as if he'd been hit by stone. Fool's vision shimmied, blackness creeping in at its edges, and then a hand was on his shoulder and another was under his arm and he was being helped to his feet.

Israfil's hands were as wrapped in flames as her head and body, but the flames did not burn Fool or his clothes. She turned him, still unsteady on his feet, to face her and then placed one burning palm at the place where Wambwark's blow had landed. The pain immediately subsided, its sharpness reduced to a dull throb and then a mild ache. “Thank you,” he said. Israfil merely inclined her head so that her forehead was above Fool's, her hair hanging down around their faces like a caul.

“We do not need you or want you here, but you are still our guest,” she said, and then stepped back and was gone. Fool rubbed at the spot she had touched; it was warm, and did not hurt. From behind him came a shriek and a sizzling sound, and then Catarinch cried out in fury. Fool turned, hand automatically going for his gun, to see Benjamin in the center of the corridor, ropes of fire dancing from his hand.

Wambwark was in pieces on the floor under him.

The demon was thrashing, struggling toward a detached arm, which was already collapsing, the shape of it becoming simply an elongated mound of white bugs. One leg was also gone, severed and flung away, a pool of maggots spreading behind the demon, dripping from its thigh stump like blood in which each droplet had a will of its own, was crawling to safety.

“Angel!” shouted Catarinch, and grasped at Benjamin's shoulder. Benjamin shrugged off the grip, sending Catarinch staggering back.

“All of you are the guests of Heaven,” Benjamin said, “including Thomas Fool. Aggression against him is aggression against Heaven, and cannot be left unmarked.” His fire dipped, encircled Wambwark's other arm at the wrist, and then tightened, snipping it off in a sizzle of foul-smelling steam.

“We are the members of the Delegation of Hell,” said Catarinch, trying to regain its composure, “and aggression against a member of the Delegation is an act of aggression against Hell.” The demon's voice was uneven, fearful.

“Then Wambwark is itself guilty of aggression against Hell,” said Benjamin, without looking around. His fire curled lazily away from the cauterized wrist and wound around Wambwark's neck, tightening slowly. The air filled with the sound of popping and crackling as bugs cooked and exploded in the heat, smoke drifting up in loose wraiths. “By striking another member of the Delegation, Wambwark became the aggressor and this is a just retribution.”

What to do? Fool wondered but knew that he had little choice in the matter. He was here as a representative of Hell, as Hell's Commander of the Information Office, he was Thomas Fool of Hell, and Wambwark and Catarinch and the scribe were, like it or not, his colleagues and his masters and his responsibility and his peers.

“Benjamin,” he said, stepping forward. “I appreciate your intervention, yours and Israfil's both, but please don't carry on with this or I'll end up regretting what I have to do next.”

“And what will you have to do that could cause you regret?” asked Benjamin, still without turning around or looking up from the straining Wambwark. Benjamin's color had, for the first time, darkened to a dull red, the glow coruscating within him, throwing off light that was almost a shadow, so dark was it. His wings had opened slightly, the whiteness of the feathers shaded pink by his glow.

“Draw my weapon and point it at you,” Fool said, “and try to get you to leave my colleague alone, which would make us enemies and probably get me killed. Please.” Catarinch opened its mouth to speak; Fool saw the movement from the corner of his eye and shook his head, mouthing an angry
No
. Catarinch, surprisingly, did as it was told and closed its mouth without sound.