The water curled away from the angel, drawing back into two lips around him and pulling away to reveal a muddy floor that dried as Fool watched, its surface cracking and buckling into something solid. Balthazar stepped farther into the cellar and the water retreated farther, a pathway opening up between the bottom of the stairs and the body. As the separating water reached the corpse and peeled away from it, the body bobbed and then came to a gentle rest on the floor. The air filled with a crackling sound as the newly exposed mud dried to a crust.
“Does that help?” asked Balthazar.
“Yes,” said Fool. “Thank you.”
“Take it as my apology. They deserve dignity,” said Balthazar, “something which I may have forgotten earlier.”
“Yes,” replied Fool, “he does.”
“You know it to be a man?” asked Adam.
“No,” said Fool, peering at the pale dead thing. “I assumed it was because the others were men. Boys, really.”
“And you know this to be another link in that chain?”
“No,” said Fool again. “I assumed it because of the blue ribbon.”
“I see. And what do you do now?”
“I investigate,” said Fool, and went to the body.
It was another young man, and being in the water had bloated him and bleached his flesh down to a ghostly white. It had also cleaned his wounds, which made them somehow worse, showing them in clinical dark reds and purples against the pale skin. He had bruises across his chest and shoulders, as well as tears into his muscle across his thighs and belly, and his face was a mass of grazes and cuts. There were indentations on the back of his head and when Fool placed his hand above them, he thought they might be where the demon’s fingers had pressed so hard they had ruptured skin and fractured bone. Most of the man’s teeth were cracked or broken, and several had dirt ground into their fronts; more grit and earth were lodged in the man’s gums and crushed up into his nostrils. Bent above the corpse, Fool had a sudden image of the man being held down, battered, his face forced through the foul water and into the earthen floor, the mud flowing up his nose, granules scouring his teeth and driving themselves into his flesh, the back of his head bowing, cracking under the pressure with a noise like snapping twigs.
“His clothes are here,” said Summer from behind Fool. Turning, he saw that she was pointing to the wall of water at her side in which he could just make out something colorful moving. Summer plunged a hand into the liquid and grasped the thing, pulling it out; it was a shirt made from different strips of material sewn clumsily together; the stitches were visible even from a distance, hanks of twine crossing and crisscrossing each other. It dripped in Summer’s hand, making puddles on the newly dried floor. She drove her hand back into the water and this time came out with trousers, sodden black and torn almost in two.
“What happened?” asked Adam.
“They came here,” said Fool, “and the human was murdered. He was beaten and probably drowned, his clothes were torn off, and then he was left here to float like something worthless and old.” The rage was in him again, the fury, and he felt his hand drop to his weapon, but what would he shoot? He looked up, wondering if he might see some evidence of the soul’s passing embossed into the ceiling above him, but there was nothing except a mess of dancing reflections and beams and dirt, just as chaotic and answerless as everything else around him.
“And you know this?” asked Adam.
“I’m guessing,” said Fool. “I’m always guessing; it’s all we can do. We guess and sometimes we’re right and most times we’re wrong and it never matters anyway.”
“Nothing ever changes,” said Summer, and the drip-drip-drip of the water falling from the shirt in her hand was like the beat of a tune that Fool couldn’t hear.
“And what will you do now?” asked Adam, apparently not hearing or choosing to ignore the anger in Fool’s voice.
Perhaps he hears it but doesn’t care, thought Fool, because he knows I have no choice but to answer him and serve him, little slave Fool that I am. Out loud, he said, “Try to work out what happened. Try to find out who he was, where he was from.”
“How?”
“We’ll send the body for Questioning,” said Fool, “and see if that turns anything up, although if it’s like the others, I doubt it.”
“And is it like the others?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know,” said Fool, but even as he said it, he realized that he did know. It wasn’t conscious knowledge, not exactly, but something underneath, something turning and writhing, making itself known. There were safe assumptions here, safe enough at least to work with: that the dead man was a Genevieve, that he had been killed by something enormously powerful, that his soul was gone, that he had been taken not from the Houska but from somewhere outside it. On the journey home? And the anger in Fool, in his head, was forcing the assumptions into new shapes; they could ask the other Genevieves about the dead man, make sketches, could see if he had been seen. The Bar-Igura might know him, or one of the other boardinghouse operators. This man had a name, had as much of a life as anyone in Hell had, and Fool could make his death less pointless if only he could find it.
He had a killer, and Fool would find it as well, he hoped.
“Forgive my questions, but we have nothing like your investigation in Heaven,” said Adam. “We have no need of it; there is no crime. I’m fascinated to see how you carry out your duties, what steps you take to apprehend the culprit.”
“We’ll ask questions,” said Fool, ignoring the comment about apprehending the culprit. “We may uncover something useful. I’ll look around, see if there are signs I can read. There’s no way of knowing what we’ll find. The Man may be able to help, although there are no plants down here that I can see, so I doubt it.” There weren’t even mosses or lichens on the walls, and nothing in the water except dirt and oil.
“The Man?”
“The Man of Plants and Flowers,” said Fool. “He helps people, gives them information for a price. I don’t know his real name. He likes to be entertained, so he helps me by telling me things that are useful, and I appear to amuse him by following his leads.” Fool did a little, bitter parody of a dance, shaking his hands in front of him and shuffling his legs like a puppet, and then stopped, ashamed. He felt helpless, dull with fury, stupid and sightless and a step behind everything.
“What can you tell from the body?” asked Adam, coming closer to the dead flesh.
“Not much,” said Fool. “He’s young. He’s dead.”
“This Man will want more entertainment than that, will he not?” asked Balthazar. What little compassion had been in his voice before had gone and he sounded bored. He was gazing about the cellar, looking out over the sundered water, and his glow was the red of distant fires. “Are all investigations like this? This slow?”
“Yes,” said Fool. “It’s all slow, so slow we almost never catch the demons that do these things.”
“And it is always demons?” asked Adam. “Never humans killing humans?”
“Always,” said Fool. “It is always demons, never humans.”
“I suppose if humans could kill humans, you’d slaughter each other just to escape Hell,” said Balthazar.
“Yes,” said Fool, the weight of his gun heavy against his thigh, and he turned again to the body. Above them, he heard the sound of the porters arriving.
The porters trudged up the road, carrying the body between them. It was wrapped in tarpaulin, sagging down; trails of liquid spilled from the wraps of material and left shadows on the dusty road. Fool watched as the men walked back toward the Houska, their shapes dwindling into the hazy light and losing definition as they went. When he could no longer see them except for the weakest of impressions, he turned back to the house to find everyone looking at him expectantly.
“What do you do now?” asked Adam. The scribe and archive, behind Adam, stood with their heads bowed, waiting. Baltha
zar was apart from them, still looking at Fool, standing in the tangled growth to the house’s side. The chalkis had returned to the building’s roof and from above them came their noise, chirrups and squeals and the occasional clatter as they moved and hopped across the beams and tiles. What did he do now? Fool had no idea.
No, he told himself, I do not have no idea, that’s how I used to be but now it’s different, now I’m learning, I’m understanding this better. I have ideas. He looked at the house and tried to remember—had the door been open when they arrived? No, it had been shut and they’d had to force it, pushing it back against the swelling planks of the hallway floor. Which meant what? Think, Fool, think, he urged himself, so what? It was important, but he couldn’t work out why; why should it matter that the front door had been shut, that it clearly hadn’t been opened for months or years, that it had protested its movement with a noise like a distant scream?
Because it meant that the man, and his murderer, had not gone into the house through the front door, and if not the front there must be another entry.
Fool left Adam and Summer and walked along the front of the house. Balthazar stepped out of his way as he reached the corner of the building and went around it. Here the foliage was thicker, more tangled, matted, and dark as the land fell away from the roadway. “Have you been here?” asked Fool, turning to Balthazar.
“You wish to ask me questions? Am I under investigation?” replied Balthazar, and his glow was rising again, red and rich and creeping from his flawless skin, his warrior soul calling itself to arms.
“No,” said Fool as patiently as he could, “but there are trampled plants here, and I need to know if you trampled them. If not, it’s probable that this is where the thing that killed the Genevieve waited.”
The patch was a rough circle about five feet across, close to the side of the house. At night, something standing there would have been hard to see. Fool stood in the center of the patch, turning around slowly, ignoring the angels, ignoring Summer. He tried to see things from the demon’s view: waiting for a lone Genevieve, stepping out from the shadows and plants, and snatching the young man from the street as he walked back toward his boardinghouse. He reached into his pocket and brushed his fingers against the feather, still thinking, still pushing his mind against the facts he had, trying to see them from new angles, to force them into new shapes.
Plants. The demon had been standing in the plants.
Plants.
The Man would have surely seen him and would be able to tell Fool what he looked like, where it had gone after! Suddenly Fool was elated; the Man would help him! He went swiftly along the side of the house, reaching its rear to find out that it looked out over more scrubland, the earth a sickly yellow and brown. The sound of the chalkis was louder here, angry squawks and screeches rising into the dusty air. A group of them was clustered a few feet away, scrambling over each other, the ground writhing and dark with them. Fool drew his gun and went toward them; they rose at his approach, flying in tight, angry circles around him, swooping in but never quite hitting him. Their shit spattered in long strings on the ground around him, its stench strong, making his eyes water.
Something hissed in the air over Fool, a streak of flame slicing past him, and the chalkis started screaming. Pieces of them began to fall as the flaming thing curled and sliced again, this time in the other direction. More pieces of chalkis dropped to the floor around Fool, smoking.
Fool’s hand went to his gun and then Balthazar said, “They will not bother us again.”
As Fool turned, the angel’s flame vanished, his hands dropping back to his sides. Balthazar smiled, broadly, teeth showing. It was the first time he had shown any emotion other than anger or boredom, and Fool thought it awful, a flaming, exultant joyousness. The warrior angel had at last been able to kill something.
The chalkis had risen higher, though, were no longer swooping or crapping, although they were still screaming. The sounds were oddly human, almost-words falling from the sky as Fool inspected what Hell’s birds had been so desperate to get to on the ground. It was a stain, overlaid now by the spiral patterns of the chalkis’ excrement, stretching in a ragged circle and creeping several feet up the building’s rear wall. It was dark, soaked into the earth and the wooden planking, but it was still obvious that it was blood. Fool had found where the dead man had been attacked.
Just beyond the stain was a set of steps cut into the ground and the remains of a pair of wooden doors. The doors had been torn from a doorway set into the wall that was partly below ground level, and the pale center of their broken planks was visible; these had only recently been damaged and had not had time to darken and rot. Fool went to the top of the stairs and saw that they continued down into a darkness that glinted.
“They go to the cellar,” said Summer from beside him. He hadn’t heard her approach, so engrossed was he in this new sense of investigation, of finding things.
“Yes,” he said. “This is how they got in.”
“Was the boy alive?” Adam this time, standing behind Summer, his robe drifting about him. Fool thought about the stain, about its size, and about the damage he had seen on the body, and said, “Possibly, but if so it must have been only just. I think he was beaten here and then the body was taken into the cellar and drowned.”
“To hide the corpse?” Adam again.
“I don’t know,” replied Fool. Had the other corpses been hidden? The one in the Orphanage, possibly, but the first? No. He had been discarded like something unimportant, certainly, but not hidden, unless the demon was hoping that Solomon Water’s inhabitants might eat it before it was discovered. No. No, that wasn’t right, it didn’t feel right, this was a demon without fear of capture that simply left the bodies where it wanted to.
“It does it to make it hard for us,” said Summer. “In Solomon Water where we might meet other demons, in with the orphans who would attack us, and now in the cellar where we couldn’t get to it easily. We wouldn’t have found it so easily without Balthazar’s help.”
“You think this is about us?” asked Fool, surprised.
“The murders? No,” said Summer. “But this? Where the bodies are? Yes.”
Fool’s head was almost spinning with the idea, with its enormity. Hell had noticed him, was watching him, Rhakshasas had given him a task to carry out, the Man was entertained by him and was using him to feed back his own growing power to the Bureaucracy, and now whatever ancient demon was doing this was thinking about them when it abandoned the bodies of the Genevieves it killed? Could that be right?
Could it?
“Why?” he asked, probing the idea in his mind.
“To stop us finding it?” said Summer.
“No, of course not. You’re merely an amusement to it,” said Balthazar, coming closer to them. “It likes the idea of making your job difficult, of making you clamber through water and mud and wherever else it chooses just to retrieve the bodies. It’s a demon; it uses each of its actions against as many humans as it can. If this is not the Hell of fire and torture, as I must accept is the case, then it is the Hell of inconvenience and difficulty and fear and uncertainty, and it is merely contributing to that. These dead souls are part of its game.”
“It is not a game,” said Fool, thinking again of bodies drifting in water and left lying in mud and bleeding out, headless, on the Houska’s streets. “They are not things to be used and then thrown away, they are humans.”
“No. They were human, but no more,” said Adam quietly. “The thing that made them human is gone and now they are mere sundered flesh.”
14
The discussions were shorter that day because of the delegation’s morning with Fool and because of the near riot that happened prior to the trading taking place, but while they went on they still seemed interminable.
Crowds of the Sorrowful had already gathered outside Assemblies House by the time Fool and the angels arrived, and they flocked against the transport, slowing it to almost
nothing. Hands banged on the windows and faces pressed in pale moons against the glass mouthing Take me and Please and It’s my turn, my turn. They were almost at the building’s gates, which were swinging open, when the first missile hit the roof.
It impacted with a loud, violent crash and a dent pocked into the metal, dimpling down above Balthazar’s head. For a moment, the crowd outside the car fell silent, and then they began to clamor again. This time there were notes of discordance, of anger, in the noise. Fool moved the transport forward, pushing it through the crowds; a sign, a piece of painted material on a wooden pole, swung out from the press of people and banged into the windshield. For a second the material covered the glass, the words We Deserve Better visible, and then it whirled away into the press of people. More bangs sounded against the roof, hands hammering down and other, harder, things. Something hit the rear window with a sharp crack and a splintered star leaped across its glass face.
As the transport passed between the gates, demons moved to shift the milling crowd back. More rocks and chunks of masonry fell into the courtyard around the transport as Fool and the angels alighted. Balthazar had his flame drawn again and was slicing at the air, each slice performing intricate patterns that connected with the missiles, sending them spinning to the sides with a metallic clattering noise. Sparks leaped like bloated fireflies each time flame and rock collided, pale and short-lived in the chaotic air. Adam, meanwhile, simply walked to the entrance to the building, head down, and the scribe and archive followed. Nothing falling from the sky hit him, seeming to veer away at the last moment to bounce harmlessly on the ground. A single stone hit the scribe in the side of the head as he scurried after Adam; he did not seem to notice and the angel did not look around.
The Devil's Detective Page 14