And it was getting more confident. The Aruhlians, alone in their pit, couldn’t be seen from outside the field, but there were six of them and it had attacked anyway, sure that they couldn’t escape or harm it. It must be huge, powerful. Someone had to know something.
Which left the Man, and his information.
“I’m glad I entertain you,” said Fool, “but I need more help.”
“A fair exchange, Fool,” said the Man. “Tell me about the Heights and I will tell you what more I know.”
“The Heights? There’s nothing to tell. I saw nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I went inside but I had no chance to ask anything—not that they’d talk to me anyway. Only Rhakshasas being there allowed me safe exit.”
“Really? They would kill you?”
“Without a second thought. They’re demons, the oldest and most powerful in Hell, and I’m simply a human. Now, tell me.” He was giving orders to the Man, he realized. Little foolish Fool, he thought, glancing at the Man’s many mouths ranked next to him and behind him and above him, lining the branches that the Man had become. Many of the mouths looked hungry, their edges and thorns browning, not their usual lustrous green.
“It’s a terrible thing,” said the Man, “carrying out terrible acts. Those in the pit had little chance against it. It filled the sky with blackness and fire and tore them apart before they could scream, Fool, as it did at the lakeshore with that poor man, and then it went back, went toward the Heights. Go back, Fool, go back to the Heights and wait for it. It will come, and you will know it when it does; wait for the most terrible thing of all and that will be what you’re looking for, Fool. The most terrible thing of all.”
Fool thought about the roots in the pit wall, about how the Man spread, and heard himself speak, the voice sounding as though it came from someone else, somewhere else.
“Is it a demon? You’re sure?” What was that tone in his voice? Disbelief? Accusation? Fool wasn’t sure.
The Man went into a shiver, the room bucking and whirling around Fool.
“Why would I lie?”
“Everyone lies,” said Fool. “There’s little truth here, didn’t you once say that to me?”
“There is truth,” said the Man. “Go back to the Heights, Fool, and find Hell’s truth there.”
Fool waited but the Man said nothing more. Finally, he reached into his pocket and removed the feather; it was with him all the time now, and he drew some odd sense of security from its presence in his jacket. Holding it aloft, its glow filling the room, he waited for the Man to respond, to offer more in exchange for a chance to hold the feather again, but he did not speak again. Dismissed Fool, told to go back to Crow Heights, back to the center of Hell, and expected to do what he is told, he thought, and turned to go.
And then turned back. “Why are you so desperate to get me to go back to the Heights? If this demon is as terrible as you say, you could tell me when it emerged and then I should be able to spot it easily. And how do you know what it did at the lakeshore?” he asked, moving back toward the Man. “You told me that you don’t yet reach that far, that you hadn’t seen it. What’s going on?”
Fool waited for the Man to speak, but he did not.
Instead, he slumped.
The mass of him in the corner relaxed and folded down on itself, the limbs around the room dropping. His mouths fell, dangling down. From some a thin green slime trickled and the air filled with a smell of rottenness and mold. Fool had never seen the Man like this before, and as he looked more carefully, he saw other discordant notes in the room. The flying things were clustered in among the Man’s branches, but there were more of them and they did not react to the movement of the mouths, seeming less skittish. Less scared. Puddles of the green slime were scattered across the floor around the room, some dried and some still fresh, and tangled vines lay in knots across the floor. It was the changes to the Man himself that were the most marked, though; he had shed leaves and they lay in the corners of the room and in thick piles at the base of the walls. He had little luster left in his remaining foliage, and his branches were dry, their bark beginning to peel.
Fool stepped toward the Man’s main bulk, the place where his body had been when he first came here. “What’s wrong?” he asked. The Man did not reply.
Fool, unsettled, sure now that something was wrong and had been wrong for a while but that he had not noticed, drew his gun. The flying things shifted and muttered around him.
“What’s wrong?” He wished that he knew the Man’s name, but he had always simply called him the Man of Plants and Flowers or the Man. With a little jolt, he realized that he only ever used the name of one other human in Hell, Summer, now that Gordie was gone. He knew the names of more angels and demons than men or women. It was Hell, he knew, made to keep people apart, people keeping themselves unnoticed where they could, and at that moment he hated it, not with his everyday hate, the hate everyone felt for it, but with something more, something that burned and burned and kept burning inside, that took the fires that were already in him and drew them ever onward. He hated, and he was angry, and the Man was silent.
For the first time, Fool reached out to touch the Man. He did so with the hand holding the feather, keeping it gripped with his bottom three fingers and stretching out with his index finger. The top of the feather brushed against the tightly whorled fronds that made up the Man’s body, its bone gleam bright against the Man’s darkness. This close, Fool saw that the tiny petals and leaves that formed the branches of the Man’s chest and belly were curled and browning. He ran the feather up and down the Man, not knowing why but sensing it might be useful.
At the feather’s touch, a long groan came from the Man. It wasn’t words, exactly, more the sound of an exhalation being squeezed out from lungs and over vocal cords that were struggling to function. Did the Man have lungs or vocal cords? A heart? How much humanity was left in him? Fool wondered.
The Man groaned again as the feather ran up and down him. This time, Fool thought he recognized a word in there, “lies” stretched out and made into something elastic and uneven.
Another brush, another groaned “lies.” Instinctively, Fool turned the feather around and thrust it, stem first, between the Man’s branchlike ribs. It slid in easily, the most perfect dagger into desiccating flesh, and the Man groaned, much louder this time. “Lies, Fool,” he said, “all lies.”
“What are?”
“Me, Fool …” The Man’s voice was ragged, distorted, trailing off at the end of the words. “Me.”
The feather’s light shone out from the Man, pulsing, throwing shadows across Fool. “I’m a lie, Fool.”
“How are you a lie?” asked Fool, thinking he understood but not wanting to.
“I’m dead, Fool,” the Man said.
Fool yanked the feather out of the Man as his bulk began to tilt forward. He jumped back, tripping over a strand of cabled, woody flesh stretched out across the floor behind him and falling heavily. He lost his grip on the feather and for a second it drifted up in the air above him, illuminating the scene with a vivid clarity.
The Man was coming loose from the corner, pitching forward in a slow, elegant arc. Pieces of him tore away from the walls around Fool with a noise like gunshots, filling the air with spores and dust. The flying things took off from the Man’s limbs, adding their raucous squawking to the cacophony, setting off in wide, panicky loops, and banging into the walls. Coils of the Man sprawled across Fool as he struggled to rise, keeping hold of his gun and reaching for the feather. He managed to grasp it, and then the Man’s bulk crashed into the floor, sending up more dust in spiraling motes that looked like misting breath in the pale light. A smell of blood and mulch came from the Man’s fallen flesh as the room collapsed around Fool.
Branches came loose from the walls, vines snapping and flailing, haw-sering through the air above Fool. Leaves swirled up in ragged, capering circles and then started down on musty zephyrs. Fra
gments of broken wood, chips of branch and twig and frond sprayed down on Fool, the Man’s limbs collapsing over him, burying him. There was a noise of tearing wood, crackling and ripping, a tattoo of dull snaps accompanying it.
When the Man’s limbs had finished falling, the room slowly settled back to an uneasy silence. Fool slithered out from under the Man and stood. The feather drifted down past him and he took it from the air, amazed at how even now it could fall with such grace and gentility. Smoothing it, he tucked it away into his jacket and turned, approaching what he now knew was the Man’s corpse cautiously. He picked his way over the tangles of branches and leaves and mouths, his feet crushing parts of the Man, wondering just what had happened here.
The Man had come away from his usual place in the corner of the room, and the indented V of the walls behind him was dark and stained. Fragments of root and leaf still clung to the plaster, had grown into it, and there were two holes in the wall at the center of the space normally occupied by the Man. When Fool looked, he saw two holes in the center of the Man’s now-exposed back. Here, his original flesh was still visible, pale pink and smooth with tendrils sprouting from it, burrowing out from the expanse of skin. The holes were ragged-edged and raw, their insides glittering russet with bloody, reflected light.
Fool had little choice but to clamber up the Man’s flanks to reach the holes in the wall; through them, he saw the rear garden of the Man’s home. A great swathe had been torn through the foliage, bushes and branches and trees ripped aside, and what hadn’t been torn up now drooped loosely over. The hole in the brickwork was fresh, Fool thought; the naked faces of the wall had no moss and were the fresh pink of brick that had not been exposed to the elements. The torn swathe through the tangled undergrowth ended at the wall, just below the holes.
He turned to the holes in the Man himself. They were deep, about six inches across, and they looked … what? Not clean or smooth, ragged, but certainly fresh; as though they were punched rather than sliced into him. Fool had a sudden, terrible thought, and put his gun back into its holster. Slowly, he reached into the holes, one hand in each, his arms descending up their elbows into the Man’s back. The flesh was cold, clammy, filled with sharp edges that scraped against Fool’s skin. He pushed deeper, pressing against the resistance, smelling an odor of rot and wet and mold, and then he could push no farther and he was inside the Man almost to his shoulders.
At the bottom of the holes, he felt carefully and wrapped his fingers around what felt like a set of thick strings and cables. Experimentally, he squeezed the cables (not cables, he thought, tendons and muscles and strips of flesh, branches and stems and roots all bound together) and then squeezed harder and then pulled.
Pieces of the Man moved.
It was only a small movement, a twitch on the other side of the room in some of his limbs. Fool pulled again, struggling against the stiffness of the things he held, and another part of the Man snapped taut, mouths jerking open. Fool relaxed his grip; the mouths collapsed back to the floor. He took his arms out of the holes, thinking, Someone operated the Man like a puppet, manipulated those boles of flesh and voice to give me the wrong information, to send me down the wrong track. They had torn into the Man from the back, taken hold of him and twisted and grasped and made the Man say what they wanted him to. Little manipulated Fool, thought Fool, and felt sorry for the Man. He hadn’t really known or even liked him, had been scared of him, but he hadn’t deserved to end up this way, little more than a tool, discarded once it was finished with.
It wanted me dead, he thought, wanted the Heights’ residents to kill me, but why? And why not kill me itself? Why do it this way? Because I’m too visible? Because there’s a connection between me and it, or because I’m a threat, because it doesn’t want me finding it, because I pose some kind of risk to it. But what? What can I do?
From outside, Fool heard something crash and then the sound of screaming.
The air was full of smoke.
Down the street, flames leaped from the windows of one of the smaller bars, sending orange and red shades dancing across the buildings around it. The screaming was louder, coming not from one voice but many at once, containing the trebles of terror and the bass notes of anger and the roar of demons. Fool began to run, heading toward the fire and drawing his gun. A group of figures dashed across the road ahead of him, disappearing down a narrow alleyway; they were shouting as they ran. From somewhere farther away came the noise of breaking glass and more shouts and screams.
Fires were burning, their light lifting the sky above Fool, creating a ceiling of roiling colors and smoke. He passed several smaller conflagrations, barrels and piles of rubbish blazing against the fronts of bars. Demons milled around, stamping at the flames and sending sparks leaping into the streets. Humans ran amid the thickening smoke, some obviously Genevieves, others customers of the bars. One man was on fire, his sleeve and shoulder alight, and his companions were flapping at him as he yelped.
As Fool came closer to the Houska’s center, the streets became busier and more chaotic. He passed a group of people throwing stones at bar windows and another launching missiles at any demon that came onto the street. Outside a bar called simply Flesh, a huge group of humans were barricading the main door as demons clamored on the other side of the barricade and, behind them, flames spread.
Hell was rioting.
Fool had heard the term, of course; it was one of the major crimes listed in his Guide, but he had never seen one before. No one had. Instead of scurrying about and keeping their heads down, humans were fighting demons, gangs surrounding the demonic beings and throwing rocks at them, hitting them with sticks and wood torn from window frames. Even as Fool tried to decide what to do, the volume was increasing, the shouts growing louder and more frenzied. All the fear, all the hate, was coming out in a ragged blast as men and women howled and fought back. Fool heard chants of “We deserve better” and more. It was one of the slogans he’d seen on the banners held by the crowd outside the Elevation meetings, he remembered, and suddenly wondered whether this was not something random but something organized.
Fool was torn. As a human, he wanted demons to suffer, to get some kind of payback for all the times they had abused or dismissed him, but as one of Hell’s Information Men, he knew that his jurisdiction was over everything and everyone; it had to be, or it wasn’t jurisdiction at all. It was in his Guide that his role was to protect all Hell’s inhabitants; in practice, that was usually impossible and he was reduced to simply clearing up their messes. Now it meant he should be protecting the demons from the human mobs.
There was a group in the Houska’s main square, surrounding a demon; Fool recognized it as a server from one of the larger bars. It was one of the many, not grand or powerful or well connected, little different from the nameless scribe or archive, defined solely by what it did and nothing else. Fool had seen it and its ilk carry out innumerable small, thoughtless cruelties, just as he had seen all demons do the same. Now it was on all fours and the crowd was battering at it, rocks clenched in fists descending hard and fast, glass shards wrapped in material or stuck in wooden shards slicing at it. Its flesh, dense demon matter, was resisting the assault, but it would not do so for long; already, tears were opening in its sides and across the crown of its scaly head, and the tip of its tail had been severed and was twitching, forgotten, in the mud. People spat at the demon, stamped on it, shouted abuse at it. A kick slammed into one of its glowing yellow eyes, extinguishing the light of it like a snuffed candle in a spray of pale fluid, and Fool’s mind was made up. He raised his gun and fired into the air.
Although the riot continued in the distance, the people in the square fell silent as the gunshot echoed around them. Fool pushed through them, taking advantage of their surprise, and said, “Enough.”
“It’s a demon,” said someone from in the crowd.
“Yes,” said Fool, “and that’s enough.”
The demon rose up behind Fool; he felt rather th
an saw the movement, managed to move sideways as the creature flung itself forward and cannoned into the nearest member of the mob. For a second nothing happened and then everybody moved at once. The demon and the human in its grasp rolled, knocking people aside as they went. Others flocked toward them but didn’t dare hit out in case they struck the man. The demon’s jaws were clamped around the man’s face, its head bulging and expanding as it sucked the nightmares from the man. Its teeth tore into the man’s cheeks, sending blood spatters into the air as they rolled. Fool followed them, shouting, feeling the weight of the bullet drop into the gun in his hand and then grabbing at the demon. Its flesh was slippery and hot, slithering through his grasp as he called “Stop,” but it carried on chewing, more flesh tearing from the man’s cheek and exposing teeth that were brown and uneven and blood-slicked. Fool, helpless, jammed his gun against the base of the demon’s neck, angled the barrel so that it was pointing away from the man, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet tore through into the demon’s neck and exited from the far side in a huge fan of milky blood. It howled, thrown sideways, letting go its grip of the man. The crowd immediately set about it again, and this time, already weakened, it had little chance against the rocks and wood and glass. Blood, still spurting from the hole in its neck, pooled on the earth beneath it and then soaked away, trodden in and churned by the feet of the mob.
When the little demon was dead, the crowd surrounded Fool and he was pummeled by fists and slaps, not of violence but of congratulation, and then they were gone, streaming away to find something else to attack. Fool stood over the corpse of the demon and felt suddenly weary, wearier than usual. What good had he done here? He looked over at the man’s body, his face torn, shreds of flesh dangling to the dirty ground.
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