The Devil's Evidence (16 page)

“They need to grow,” Bal Koth said after breaking the kiss with the second skin. She watched them for a few seconds, the expression on her face unreadable, breathing heavily. She looked tired. Had he ever seen a tired angel before? No, he didn't think so; even at the height of the battles in Hell, the angels had always looked fiercely joyous, fiercely
alive
and vibrant.

“Whoever they are, I'll tend them tonight and send them back to you tomorrow morning. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Yes,” said Fool. The farther away the skins were, the better. The thought of whatever they were having followed him from Hell was threatening, unsettling.

Bal Koth picked up the still-growing skins, carrying them carefully, and went to the door. Before she opened it, she turned and faced Fool. “This has been my honor, Thomas Fool,” she said and looked, for a brief glimpse, male again before her face seemed to shift and change, becoming female once more. She left, taking the skins and shutting the door behind her.

“How do you feel?” asked Benjamin, finally leaving the room's corner.

“I'm tired,” said Fool. “I hurt.”

“Yes. Israfil should be here soon.”

As if in response to Benjamin's statement, there was another knock at the door and, without waiting for an answer, Israfil pushed it open and entered. Her flames made the room shift and glimmer around them, the walls suddenly a moving kaleidoscope of light and gleam and shadow. In her hand, the angel held a bottle and a glass, both black with earth and silver with melting frost.

“The Gardens of Earth and Air have provided,” she said, opening the bottle and pouring out a splash of the liquid within it into the glass. Fool took it and smelled it, unsure of what he was being offered. There was a label on the bottle but it was stained to a brown illegibility, and any writing that had been on there was long gone. What was the liquid? It smelled sharp, moved like thick mud in the bottom of the glass, shards of ice glinting in it. What would it do?

Fuck it,
he thought and drank, too tired to ultimately care what it was or what it did. It was cold in his mouth, tasted vaguely of mint and something else loosely herbal, and it left his throat feeling pleasantly warm after he swallowed. Within a few minutes, as the two angels watched him, the throbbing in his face drifted away to a distant mumble and his vision blurred. Despite himself, despite wanting to talk to the angels about the thing in the valley and the tunnel and the dead bodies and Bal Koth, Fool collapsed back into a thick and curdled sleep.

And then a timeless period later his flesh tore open and Fool was screaming again.

“Fool, Fool, be quiet,” said Mr. Tap, and Fool felt the muscles of his belly ripple and shift to form lips around the words. He threw back the sheet that covered him, finding that he was naked underneath it, and revealed the grinning tattoo again.

“I'm thinking of the longest words I know,” said Mr. Tap conversationally, “and I'm thinking of saying them one after another to make you scream, and each time you scream I'm going to take a bite from you.”

Fool didn't reply. He clenched his lips, hoping that he would somehow get used to the pain, but clenching pulled his cheek and a savage bolt of new agony pulsed across him.

“So, Fool, what's to tell?” asked Mr. Tap, asked his stomach wearing Mr. Tap's face. When Fool didn't reply immediately, Mr. Tap opened its mouth and then clamped down on the tattooed lip, on Fool's skin, and bit, those surging teeth tearing into him. Fool screamed again.

“You taste as good today as yesterday, Fool, but you are a limited supply and if I continue to eat there will be nothing of you left, will there?” said Mr. Tap. “Perhaps, instead, I should speak the names of all the demons I know, most of them have names that twist and writhe as you say them. They can cause you lots of pain, Fool. Perhaps I could say my real name, the name given to me by my father. My name is long and painful but I'm sure you'd enjoy me speaking it through you. Shall I begin?”

“No,” said Fool, and started to talk. He began with the Delegation meeting and the incident in the corridor after, which now felt like a day and a lifetime ago, and then went through the rest of his day. He told Mr. Tap about the body and the valley, and about the thing that had spied on him and the tunnel into which it had vanished. As he spoke, he was reminded again of something, although he still wasn't sure what; when he described his injury, Mr. Tap laughed, the guffaws ripping through Fool like spasms. Finally, he told the demon about Benjamin's comments and the way the hole had vanished, to which Mr. Tap said, “Typical angels, only seeing what they want to see.

“So. Is there anything else?”

“No,” said Fool, and the lie was smooth in his throat as he swallowed it down. What he had told Mr. Tap was true as far as it went, but he had omitted so much—the way the thing in the valley ran, the waking up of the member of the crowd, the ease with which Benjamin had hurt Wambwark, Mayall and his house, the shifting, interlocking colors on the walls of the tunnel seen in the moments before the clearing was lit to flame by Israfil, his followers and Bal Koth's retrieval of them. Anything he thought he could leave out, he did, for reasons that weren't entirely clear even to him.
I'm lying about Heaven to Hell, while Hell demands a truth about Heaven,
he thought abstractly,
little confused Fool.
He was lying because he didn't trust Hell, lying because he wanted to keep some of Heaven's secrets, although why he wasn't sure, as he couldn't see how Hell could damage Heaven by knowing the things he hadn't told Mr. Tap. His job, his
loyalty,
was supposed to be toward Hell, yet he felt a need to…what? Protect Heaven? From what? Hell? They must already have protections in place; the accord, the truce between the two places, had existed for generations, for millennia. No, it wasn't that, not exactly.
It's information,
he thought,
the currency of trade and power and truth and lie and rumor, information. They want it, I have it, so the more I keep the more power I may have.

May have.

“So, Fool,” said Mr. Tap, “have you enjoyed our little chat?” The tattooed split in his belly grinned at him, showing teeth in that impossibly deep throat, and the eye widened, revealing the wetness at its center.

“No,” said Fool. His face was stiffening now, less mobile as the slashes gummed together and dried. His belly hurt, a deep and grimy throb.

“Perhaps you'll enjoy tomorrow evening's conversation more,” said Mr. Tap, its voice muffled as the tattoo sealed shut. “Perhaps that's the night I'll speak my name aloud. It's been so long since I've heard it spoken, after all.” The mouth grinned and then closed completely, the skin knitting back together; the eye closed and for a few seconds his flesh burned with the itch of it sealing and then Mr. Tap was gone.

Fool collapsed back on the bed. “Being in Heaven's more painful than being in Hell,” he said aloud, feeling the sweat roll across his newly smooth chest, feeling the tautness of his cheek as he spoke. Already the tattoo on his stomach had changed, no longer a mouth and an eye but a random pattern of lines and dots and blocks.

“Pardon?” Marianne's voice, roaring in on a second wave of pain, this time from his arm. He jerked, sitting upright.

“Nothing. Hello, Marianne,” he said. “How are things?”

“Fine,” she said, and he knew from her voice that they weren't fine, not at all.

“Report,” he said, becoming formal, giving her a framework into which she could fit, a structure in which to shore up her fears and uncertainties, giving her the support of information.

“There've been more fires, and another slaughter,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“A group of Genevieves this time,” she said. He looked at the tattoo, seeing the brow above her eyes furrow as she tried to put the facts into order and tell him. “We were called to a boardinghouse.”

“Which one?”

“It doesn't have a name, one of the smaller ones, on the outskirts of Eve's Harbor. It was the same as the Seamstress House, they'd come in through the windows, attacked everyone at once.”

“They?”

“They,” she said firmly, the word vibrating its resolution up his arm. Her mouth, the mouth in his skin, pursed, and then she said, “Multiple attack points, and no one inside had a chance to run.”

“Tell me about the scene.”

“Lots of footprints in the blood, but nothing recognizable. We took the dead to the Questioning House but Hand didn't get much from them. The poor bastards were asleep when they got attacked, so the most they saw was some fucking claw or sets of teeth coming at them, waking them up in time to kill them.”

A claw. He blinked, thinking about claws, about the pincer. There was something there. “Go on. There's more.” A statement not a question, he could hear it in her voice, feel it in the pent-up energy that trembled along his arm from Marianne's painted, split mouth.

“There was a crowd, Marys and Genevieves, all watching as we carried the bodies out. I thought it was odd, the size of it, so I asked a few questions. Everyone was talking about the deaths, everyone had heard a rumor about them, most of them exaggerated and untrue. It was like someone wanted the crowd to gather, wanted them to see us bring the dead out.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure. The Evidence arrived, started to arrest people, question them on the street. Before long they said they'd got the murderers, but they'd not, they'd just arrested a couple of Genevieves too stupid to get out of their way. It was like the crowd had been gathered to show them the dead, to present them to the Evidence, to let them see the Evidence being their usual brutal selves. To give the rumors somewhere to grow.”

Clever, Marianne,
he thought.
You're seeing things that aren't on the surface, you're finding the threads, you're listening to the rumors that form inside your own head, the guesses and theories, and you're working out which are real. You're an Information Man.

“Did they do anything to you or the other Information Men?”

“No. They seem to be giving us a wide berth.”

“Good. And the fires?”

“Three since yesterday, scattered all over.” She listed the places that had burned, and there it was again, the hint of something, a pattern that was rising up through the murk, but it wasn't clear yet, not enough to see, not enough to
read
.

“Anything else?”

“No.” There was.

“Marianne,” he said. “Whatever it is, you have to tell me.”

“It's nothing,” she said after a long pause, during which he rubbed his forearm around the tattoo, hoping to ease the dull ache of their conversation. “But, well, the canisters. The Bureaucracy, they're almost panicking. They're demanding we find who's setting the fires and not even pretending to be confused from them now. Here, let me read one of them to you.” There was a pause, the tattoo motionless, and then it blinked again and the mouth opened.

“ ‘Find the person making the burning.' Here's another: ‘The burnings must be stopped.' They've never been so demanding but so vague before. Do you see?”

“No.” What was the pattern, what
was
it? Warehouses, workers' houses, abandoned shacks, a boardinghouse holding however many Marys who had died, now factories making Hell's furniture, farm tools, or parts for the trains and other buildings scattered across Hell, but there was a link, there
had
to be.

A field behind the first place that had burned. The thick forest covering the hills behind the Seamstress House.

Wait. Wait a minute, not the places that burned maybe, but the places around them. “Marianne, can you get together all the sites of the fires before we talk tomorrow night?”

“I have them in front of me now,” she said, and there was a hint of pride in her voice, a recognition that she was getting the work done, getting ahead of her orders and doing the job well.

“No, it has to be tomorrow, I need time to do something. Wait there a minute.”

Fool looked at the tattoo across his stomach. Mr. Tap's face was still no longer visible, lost in lines that shifted, distorting him. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained, he thought, and then spoke.

“Mr. Tap,” said Fool and prodded the tattoo.

“Mr. Tap,” again, louder, and another prod, hard into the bruised muscle. After a moment, the tattoo eye tore open and the mouth split into existence.

“I don't appreciate being summoned, Fool,” said Mr. Tap.

“I'm still the Commander of the Information Office of Hell,” said Fool as coldly as his pain and fear would allow. “As Hell's representative in Heaven, I need something from you, something to assist me in the investigations you tasked me with continuing despite my absence from Hell.”

“From me?” said Mr. Tap, and the mouth curled back into a vast, humorless grin, stretching the skin farther than it had been before, revealing a red and raw expanse of fat-flecked meat at its edges.

“Yes,” said Fool, trying to breathe, trying to stay awake, trying not to faint. “I need a map of Hell, as accurate as you've got, as detailed as you can get me.”

“Why should I get you a map?” asked Mr. Tap, and already the mouth was nipping at the edges of him, tearing strings of skin away and spitting them out, sucking on the blood.

“Because I'm working to make Hell safe,” said Fool.

“Safe? I think you misunderstand Hell and its purpose,” said Mr. Tap.

“No, I don't,” said Fool, “but perhaps you do. Now, get me a map before we talk tomorrow and I may be able to tell you and your masters something about the fires.”

Mr. Tap paused, then the tattoo nodded without speaking. Fool's muscles rippled to make the nod, bulging and falling away in a nausea-inducing wave. The eye closed, the mouth resealed, and Mr. Tap was gone.