The Devil's Evidence (14 page)

The trail wasn't made by angels, then. Fool went back to it, crouching again. Sand stuck to the hems of his trousers and scratched the leather of his boots, crunching underfoot. What was that? He reached forward, then thought better of it and unstrapped his gun. Using the barrel, he dug into the sand and worked out what he had seen: a small blue string of plant material. He lifted it and it came free with a sucking sound, pale and thin white roots hanging from its end, stem and tiny flower bud hanging loose. It smelled, reminding him of the plant he'd found at the fairground the day before.
The blue growth of corruption,
he thought.
Imperfection in a perfect place.

“What's this?” he asked, holding it out toward Benjamin and Israfil.

“A sea plant,” said Israfil, uninterestedly.

“That's all?”

“Yes.”

Fool dropped it and went on. More of the long fronds grew in the trail, here and there topped by closed flower buds.

“Have you seen this plant before?” he called over to the angels.

“No,” said Benjamin, “but I rarely attend the beach. My role in Heaven is at the Anbidstow, as is Israfil's.”

Fool found more prints and elongated tracks within the trail the farther he went along it, and soon came to the conclusion that this was actually two trails, one overlaid across the other. Some of the clawed prints faced the Joyful, some of them the cliffs, and at one place he found a print facing the cliffs pressed over a similar print facing the crowds.

“They came from the cliffs to the crowd,” he said aloud. He had a sudden thought and went rapidly back to where the body was still lying on the beach. Here were his tracks and gradually soaking-away splashes of water he'd made as he brought the dead woman from the water. He looked at the sea, saw that it was flowing slightly along the coast as well as washing in and out, and moved along the surf against the flow. Several yards farther away, he found what he was looking for.

A set of footprints in the sand, leading from a space on the beach to the ocean.

The woman had walked from where she had been standing into the water, a distance of about forty feet. The spaces between the prints grew longer as they approached the water, becoming blurred and oddly wide, irregular. Experimentally, Fool walked a few steps, then turned. His prints were evenly spaced. Why the difference between the way his tracks looked and the way the woman's looked?

Wondering, Fool started to run, accelerated over thirty feet or so, and then stopped and turned back to look at his tracks. The spaces between individual prints grew larger the farther he had run.

She started running,
he thought,
but why? And why do her prints get wider toward the water's edge?

Fool went back to the body, glancing down again at his tracks as he did so. The last of his prints, the ones he'd made as he surveyed the marks he'd pressed into the sand while running, were wider, similar to the woman's prints near the water's edge. What had he done?

I turned,
he thought.
I turned to look at where I'd come from, turned to see behind me. She turned, she was turning as she ran, trying to see behind her.

Trying to see
what
was behind her?

Fool retraced his steps, looking at the tracks the dead woman had made. He walked along, imagining a woman starting to run, turning as she did so, and then? Then? What happened to her? How did she go from running and living to dead and floating?

Just under the edge of the surf was a rock, jutting up from the sand like a stumped tooth. He judged the distance between her last prints, at the edge of the surf. It was the right distance, assuming that there hadn't been more prints nearer to the rock that the water had washed away, a body's length. Was that it? If so, there would be a mark on her. Fool started back to her corpse.

There were six tiny black naked angels around the woman's body, holding her, wings fluttering so fast they were little more than blurs, and lifting the woman into the air.

“No!” shouted Fool, starting to run, aware he'd just run over the woman's tracks, obliterating them, confusedly aware that his own tracks would show greater distance between each print as he accelerated and knowing that it wasn't important, still shouting.

“Put her down!”

The angels carried on raising the woman, wings frenzied, air beating and swirling, sand lifting from the beach in the downdrafts, and then he was at the corpse and grabbing it, trying to pull it back to the earth.

Fool was lifted from the ground. He tried to concentrate his weight downward but it was hopeless; the angels simply continued to rise, carrying him as though he wasn't there. He wrapped one arm over the woman's belly, gripping hold of her flesh, dangling below her, and tried to pull again. The body shifted in the angels' grasp but continued to be borne aloft with Fool its unwilling passenger. “Stop,” he cried again, but his voice sounded weaker, thinner, even to him.

“Do you wish to stop this poor soul from moving along her rightful path?” asked Benjamin. The angel was flapping his wings gently, rising alongside Fool and the woman, one arm reaching out and stroking the head of the nearest black angel.

“Yes,” said Fool, not looking down, breath coming in ragged looping swallows.

“Why? She has surely earned her peace?”

“I need to examine her corpse, to check something. I need to see what the woman can tell me,” said Fool. How high up were they now? How high, and how hard would he hit if he fell? His arm slipped, his grip loose, not wanting to dig into the woman's dead thigh but having no choice.

“The dead cannot speak, Thomas Fool.”

“Yes, they can,” said Fool, and then he had no more words, had a band of fear running around him, tightening so that he couldn't speak. His grip slipped again, the wet material of the woman's robe slithering, his fingers unable to keep a solid grasp of her. He looked down, saw the beach and the Joyful below him, too far below, and then the ground was lifting toward him.

He wasn't falling. The little black angels were descending, bringing the woman back to earth, Benjamin taking hold of Fool and supporting him, lowering him. As his feet touched the ground, Fool let out a tangled sigh and, as soon as Benjamin let him go, dropped to his knees. He swayed, dizzy, breathing deep, and then managed to lift his head.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I cannot pretend to understand,” said Benjamin, “but my instructions are clear. She is yours until you need her no longer. But please, the angels of the dead should have her flesh as quickly as possible.”

“The angels of the dead?”

Benjamin inclined his head, gesturing slightly at the black angels that were now hovering over their heads. “They have the sacred duty of caring for the flesh as it slips away. They are the kindliest ones, the most revered of the angelic host of Heaven.”

“It should only take a moment,” said Fool, feeling carefully around the woman's head. He probed her scalp and neck, running his fingers through her still-wet hair, pressing and pulling.

There.

Carefully, Fool rolled her over and parted her hair. There was a long gash, washed clean by the sea, its edges pale, across the rear of her head. The bone below the cut felt loose, shifted in a way that a skull should not. When Fool pulled free some of the strands of hair that had pressed into the gash, they brought tiny flecks of dark stone with them.

“She woke up and ran. She was running,” he said, “turning to see something behind her as she ran. She fell as she turned and hit her head on the rock. I would think that the impact knocked her out and she drowned.” He pressed her chest. Foamy water bubbled up from her lungs and spilled down her face, threaded with pink streaks.

“Her lungs are full of water,” he said, watching as the strings of water soaked into the sand.

“Impossible,” said Israfil. “While they inhabit their personal Heavens their bodies sleep here, but it is not the simple sleep of rest, it is the sleep of joy and reward. They cannot wake up.”

“Really?” said Fool. He went to the closest person, a young black man with a beard and short hair, and stood in front of him. He thought about the first body, about the slash across its shoulder, and took hold of the man's upper arms.
If I had claws, long claws, they'd be over his shoulder blades,
he thought,
and if I pulled forward but lost my grip, I'd cut him from rear to front.

Experimentally, he shook the man.

“Don't,” said Israfil, but Fool ignored her and shook again, harder. The man's head wobbled loosely on his neck, rocking back and forth. Fool shook even harder, and then pushed the man, who stumbled back and fell. His head hit the sand with a crunch.

“Fool, stop this now,” said Benjamin, and then the man's eyes flickered open.

“What?” he said, his voice sounding as though it came from far away, from a place of wooziness and deep, drowning sleep. “What's this?”

“Where are you?”

“Fool,
stop,
” said Israfil, and her fire was blazing now, throwing leaping yellow and orange shadows around them, the color at her center darkening to a grim, crackling red.

“Where's Richard?” said the man, looking around, eyes darting back and forth. “He was just here. Where's Richard, where's my boy?”

“Human, I command you to
stop,
” Israfil said, but Fool ignored the angel, took the man's hands, and helped him to his feet, guided him back to his space. By the time the man's feet were planted back in the marks they had made earlier, his eyes were closed again and his head was rotating slowly, rolling on his neck until his face was pointing at the sky. Fool stepped away from the man, letting him return to his Heaven, wherever that was, and whomever he was sharing it with. Richard, presumably. His son? Lover? Fool would never know.

“Don't ever do that again,” said Israfil, stepping toward Fool. “These people are souls who have earned their place here, they are those who do not need to experience Hell's touch, and they should be able to enjoy their reward uninterrupted.” Her features were almost lost in the fires about her now, tongues of it snaking out from her hands and mouth as she spoke, curling about each other.

“I apologize,” said Fool, “but it proves something, doesn't it?”

“What?”

“The Joyful can be woken,” he said. “Something woke that woman and she ran, she ran and fell and died.”

“What woke her? Why run?” asked Benjamin.

“I don't know,” said Fool. “Shall we try to find out?”

The trail in the sand led back along the beach toward the cliffs. This time, Fool didn't stop to inspect it; he already knew what it would show him, and the blue growths rarely looked different from one another. He walked along the side of it, followed by Israfil and Benjamin, leaving the Joyful behind and approaching the rock walls ahead of him.

Close to, it became clear the cliffs were not an unbroken line of rock but were split by gullies and gorges. The trail beetled across the sand, meeting the rocks and turning, following the base of the cliff, staying parallel to the lower edge of rocky outcrops. The sand was coarser here, crunching under Fool's feet but not, he noticed, the angels', the trail less defined. The blue growths were stronger, as though more rooted, and the track became covered with them. They smelled foul, the odor thick in Fool's nose.

Eventually, the trail turned toward a valley formed by a deep cleft in the rock. A narrow stream trickled out of the valley's opening, and thick vegetation grew on its banks, choking the space in greens and browns and humidity. The trail stopped at the valley's entrance, and Fool stopped with it, peering up into the narrow throat. He looked around,
little constantly-turning-around Fool, little always-looking-behind-him Fool,
and took his weapon from his holster.

“There is no danger here,” said Israfil, seeing the gun in Fool's hand.

“No?” asked Fool. “Then what was the woman running from?”

Holding the gun out before him, he walked into the valley.

It was warmer in the valley, claustrophobic, the greenery pressing in on him, dripping water on his head and down the back of his neck. Thick trunks and twisted vines blocked Fool's way, forcing him to constantly step sideways and to backtrack to find alternative ways past.
How do I know I'm going the right way?
he thought, and the answer came to him almost immediately.

Because of the blue flowers.

There were more here, budding on the vines, rooted into the trunks. They were larger, seemed somehow older, as though they had been growing longer. Around the places where the flowers had burrowed into the wood, the trees' flesh had become pulpy and wet, rotten. In several places, he found plants so thick with the blue flowers that they were crumbling and bent, strangled by the growths. The blue flowers stank, a smell that Fool recognized but had almost forgotten in his couple of days in Heaven—the smell of death and things decaying.

The ground rose as Fool progressed, the valley climbing the farther he went. Would it eventually come out on top of the cliffs, or narrow so far that it closed away to nothing? What was he looking for? He wasn't sure.

No, that's wrong, I
am
sure,
he thought.
I want information. I'm an Information Man, the Commander of the Information Office of Hell, and I'm looking for information, for the answers in the information.

I want the truth.

And the truth was, Fool wasn't alone. Something was moving alongside him in the undergrowth.

Fool heard it first, the crack of a branch breaking underfoot, the rustle of plant material being pushed aside as something passed by it. He stopped. The sounds stopped. Carefully, he moved forward; the sound of something also moving forward started again, stopped when he did.

Was it the angels?

No. Turning, he found that he could see them through the tangles of growth, perhaps fifty yards behind him, Israfil's fire gleaming and moving in the fractured view through the branches.

Something dark shifted to Fool's side, darting ahead of him.

It was a fast movement, small, keeping its distance but moving around him so that it was now slightly farther up the valley than he was. It stopped again as Fool turned back toward it, whipping his gun around. He crouched slightly, looking through the framework of leaves and branch ends. Whatever it was had remained still, hidden in the patchwork of color and shadow.

Had he imagined it? Disturbed some creature, startled it into running?

Fool carried on up the valley, slower now, listening. After a moment the noise of something moving, now just ahead of him, started again. The sound was somehow
cautious,
as though whatever or whoever it was, was being deliberately quiet. There was a definite sense of observation and concealment to the noise. Fool reached out to push aside a heavy tangle of branches and blue flowers that left streaks of dankness across his hands and clothes. The thing in front of him moved again, coming no closer but keeping the distance between them steady. Reaching out had pulled his sleeve back, and the tattoo of Marianne's face on Fool's forearm was exposed, as though she, too, was looking out into the foliage.

Was it the scribe? In the excitement of the morning, with the Delegation meeting and Benjamin's attack on the demons after, he had forgotten to try to talk to the little demon. Had it come out here, scared the woman somehow, caused her death?

If it was the scribe, what was it still doing here?

Fool stepped on something loose. His foot rolled and he stumbled slightly, attention drawn momentarily away from the movement ahead of him. He steadied himself, looked again, gun wavering.

It was closer.

Fool didn't know how he knew, nothing had changed, nothing to say that it was nearer, but it was. His instincts, grown and sharpened in a place where to stop paying attention was to be killed or taken or lost, told him that the thing had used his momentary distraction to move closer in. How far away was it now? Ten yards? Fifteen? Five?

What was it?

Fool took another step. Another. The soft sound of shifting air alongside him, the itch of branch against branch, and then a gentle pressure of wet leaves being trodden upon. A hiss.

Fool pointed his gun to where he thought the hiss had come from. Was that a shape, lurking behind a thick fringe of hanging vines and wet leaves? An eye, peering at him, the pupil slitted and dark. He pushed forward, stretching his arm out.

“Come out,” he said. “Come where I can see you.”

Nothing, no movement.

Another step, closing in on the dark shape, gun barrel waving, trying to pierce the shadows. His foot came down on something that rolled and he stumbled again, crashing into the tree next to him, and as he did so the thing moved. It darted, away this time, putting distance between him and it.

Was it there at all? Was this all in his imagination? Another step, another, another, and the undergrowth was thinning, opening out now, and the thing had slipped behind the tree trunk, thick enough to hide it completely.

Fool pressed himself against the trunk, trying to listen. The air was filled with the rustle and patter of water rolling down leaves and spilling to the floor, with the sounds of tiny creatures skittering through the mulch at his feet, with his own breath a hollow rattling in his ears. Which way around the trunk? Widdershins, or righthandwise?

Widdershins.

Fool took a step to his left, hugging against the trunk, careful to keep his gun low so that it could not be taken from him.

A hoarse inhalation, from ahead of him.

Fool took two rapid steps and came around the trunk, and a clawed hand slashed at him.

Instinctively he jerked away, the back of his head cracking against the tree, hard, and then the claws were at him, digging into his cheek and curling through his flesh. There was an audible grind as they collided with his cheekbone and then they were yanked forward and Fool felt them peel open his face. He screamed, gun jerking up and firing without thought. The percussion of it was terrible, the flash huge even through his closed eyes. He slipped down the trunk, legs uneven and weak, raising a hand to his cheek and feeling blood run fast and warm over his fingers, feeling something flap against his palm. His legs sprawled out and then he was sitting on the ground, back against the trunk, and he opened his eyes.

His vision was blurred, pain and blood stretching it and twisting it, making the thing running from him look distorted and warped, its motion uneven and ragged. It pitched, first to one side and then seemed to tilt farther the same way, before almost rolling back the other way. The angles of its legs seemed wrong, although maybe that was his vision, which was rippling at the edges. Was it the scribe? Something else? Pain flared and died, flared and died in his cheek as he tried to bring the gun up. He heard Israfil shout, then Benjamin, and then he fired again.

The echo of the shot rolled around the valley, broken and splintered by the plants, a channel tearing open through the leaves as the shot went wide and missed the running figure.

“Stop,” he shouted, feeling his cheek flap open, feeling air spill into his mouth through the hole, air that hadn't been drawn in over his lips. “Stop,” he shouted again, the word oddly elongated and breathy. Fool pulled his legs under him, stood, unsteady but at least upright. He could hear Benjamin and Israfil, close but not close enough to help, and started after the thing that had run.

Fool's run was a stagger, and he wondered if he appeared as uneven as the thing he was chasing. He banged, hard, into a trunk, and bounced away from it with blood spilling out from him in hard-edged droplets, slipped to his knees, and then rose, ungainly, and carried on. Ahead of him, the dark shape, scribe of the Delegation or whatever it was, ducked under a fallen trunk, and Fool raised his gun again and fired a third time. The trunk above the space the thing had disappeared into exploded in a spray of splinters and pulp.

“Thomas Fool, do not fire your weapon again!” came Benjamin's voice, booming, from up above him. Fool glanced up, seeing the two angels as tiny shapes against the sky now, specks flying above him. A stream of fire leaped from Israfil and crashed down into the valley somewhere behind him, causing a violent explosion and a plume of flame and black smoke to rise into the sky, buffeting the angels.

Were they trying to kill him?

It didn't matter. Fool pressed forward, following the figure as it shifted through the growth, still ahead of him, still moving with an uneven, collapsing gait. Fool pursued it, face throbbing, feeling his skin fold down, hanging and open. Another bolt of fire curled down into the trees, closer now, ahead of him and to his right, the glow of flame crackling through the gaps in the trees, the sound of it loud, the smell of it raw and sharp.

“Thomas Fool, stop!” cried Benjamin again, and again Fool ignored him. The valley was untangling a little now, more grass appearing on the ground, the gaps between the trunks and twists of vine wider. Blue flowers grew in abundance, the stink of them heavy and thick, mixing with the fires' scents, creating something new and cloying. He saw the running thing again, fired and missed, the shot tearing a steaming path through the damp air.

“Human, do not fire your gun again,” boomed Israfil. “Damned creature, foulest thing, you will stop it now!”

The figure disappeared between two clumps of growth ahead of him, its run now a clumsy, hopping set of leaps, leaving the branches disturbed by its passing, the tree limbs still swaying, dripping water, and then Fool was pushing through the same gap and emerging into a clearing. It was roughly circular, hemmed in by trees and bushes, and at its center was a hole. There was no sign of the figure. What looked like a tangle of black vines slipped over the edge of the hole as Fool stood, and then nothing moved.

Fool waited. Benjamin called him again, and in the sky above the clearing he watched as the two angels swooped and rose, Israfil's fires a bright sunspot against the blue. Another long thread of flame dropped from the angel, striking the earth somewhere back down the valley. If he walked out to the hole, into the clearing, would they look down and see him?

Burn him?

His face was sticky, still dense and hot with pain. Fool lifted a hand to his ruined cheek but couldn't bring himself to touch it, not wanting his fingers to poke through the holes and into his mouth. The figure had entered the clearing and vanished from it, either into the hole or into the foliage on its far side—likely the hole, dragging the vines Fool had seen with it. He had been asked to investigate, and the hole and beyond was where his investigation had led. He had to check, it was what he did.
Little Information Man Fool,
he thought,
little target
and walked out across the clearing.

The hole was about a man's length across, the edge crumbled and uneven, and Fool stopped several feet away from it and approached slowly. The speed at which the thing had been moving meant it was unlikely to have made it to the far side of the clearing without being seen, so he was assuming that it was at the bottom of the hole, ready to spring on him as he appeared at the edge, but when he looked in, he found that in this assumption he was wrong.

The hole was the opening to a shaft.

Above him Benjamin called his name again but Fool paid little attention, looking instead into the space in front of him. It dropped away, a gullet that descended through the earth, its sides the metallic and roiling colors of oil spreading on the surface of turbulent waters, its bottom too distant to make out. Roots poked from the earth at its upper edge, dangling white and wormlike into the opening.

In the sides of the tunnel the swirls were coming together and parting, creating shapes that fit against each other without gaps. “The things outside of everywhere,” Fool whispered, watching as the patches resolved themselves into claws and many-jointed legs and the hint of tooth and rough-edged carapace and then the clearing exploded into fire as Israfil's flame struck the earth on the other side of the shaft.

The pressure wave lifted Fool and dashed him backward, a huge warm hand that slammed him hard against a trunk and spun him violently. The breath was driven from his lungs, something new tore in his face, and his gun was bounced from his hand. He glanced away from the tree and collapsed hard onto the ground, his face striking the earth with a jolt, undamaged cheek down, damaged one facing the sky. He tried to roll, managed to struggle perhaps halfway over, staring into a sky almost obscured by burning, and watching as the angels dropped through the flames.

Benjamin landed in a cloud of swirling, burning dirt in front of him, Israfil a second behind, and both angels were glowing with heat, redness washing across Fool as he lay stunned.

“You discharged your weapon,” said Benjamin, voice calm but face still pulled into an expression of fury.

“Yes,” said Fool, and the word seemed to escape from his mouth and through his cheek at the same time. “I was chasing something.”

“Something?”

“Something,” agreed Fool. “It attacked me, slashed my cheek, ran. I think it might have jumped into the hole, into the tunnel, I'm not sure.” Speaking was hard; the voice he heard seemed layered, lazy, and spreading out sideways, not his own. His tongue kept darting to his teeth and past them, finding the holes in his cheek, the spaces where flesh used to be. The taste of blood, metallic and sour, filled his mouth and he spat, trying to clear the thickness.

“What tunnel, human? What lie is this that you've brought here?” asked Israfil. Fool managed to roll onto his front and then pulled himself up onto his knees. More blood spattered down onto his shoulder, soaking into the fabric of his jacket. Benjamin held a hand out and Fool took it, grateful for the support. He managed to get to his feet, dizzy, and saw that the clearing behind the two angels was empty, the ground burned and smoking but smooth, the earth flat.