The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Around him, the air was staining orange with flame, smoke agitating in thicker and thicker skeins over his head. Sparks skittered and danced as ash drifted like black snow. The flames smelled, not the fresh fires of the Flame Garden but sullied and sharp, full of boiling alcohol and shriveling hair and charred cloth.

  Hell burned.

  It couldn’t last. As Fool watched, a phalanx of older demons appeared at the edge of the square, jogging and shambling in a loose formation, peeling off in twos and threes down side streets and into bars. Soon the screams filling the air were human and the running was in terror. Fool, suddenly exhausted, sat on the ground by the demon’s body. The rioter lay dead at his feet, his face set into a blood-slicked skeletal grin.

  The now-straggling column of demons arrived at the center of the square, and from out of its center came Elderflower. Somehow, Fool wasn’t surprised. He took his gun from its holster and grasped it by its barrel. The metal was still warm. When Elderflower reached him, he held it out without looking up.

  “What are you doing, Thomas? I don’t want that.”

  Now Fool raised his eyes. Even sitting, his head wasn’t that far below Elderflower’s; lit from behind by the flames that now raged across the Houska, his hair curling across his head in corkscrew twists, the smaller man’s features were hidden in shadows. Screams echoed across the street and around the square and smoke spewed into the air from broken windows and from holes in roofs. Embers swirled about them, sparking and glimmering. Perhaps this is how Hell used to be, Fool thought, hot and loud and full of death and pain.

  Fool held the gun out again and said, “I killed a demon. You’re here for me.”

  “No, Thomas, no, you are not in trouble for killing that little thing,” said Elderflower. “Quite the opposite, in fact. Hell is pleased with you. Rhakshasas and the other archdeacons are pleased! The Man is no longer an issue, and you make further and further progress in finding our mysterious killer.” Elderflower reached into a large bag that was hanging over his shoulder and pulled something from it that he draped over Fool’s outstretched arm. When Fool held it up, he found it was a dark jacket with large pockets and braiding around the shoulders. It had large brass buttons that glowed in the firelight. Elderflower pulled something else out of his bag, a pair of dark trousers, and handed them to Fool as well.

  “This is a mark of Hell’s gratitude, Thomas.”

  “Gratitude?”

  “You protected a demon, Thomas.”

  “No, I killed it.”

  “Your fellow men saw you kill it, yes, but before you killed it you saved it. Hell sees these things, Thomas, and it does not forget. You are intriguing, Thomas. You are attempting things that have not been done in Hell before, and there is a keen excitement in seeing where your new activities take you. You investigated the Man and you investigate a murderer, and your investigation stirred up the murderer so that it used the Man against you and, in doing so, rid Hell of something that was becoming troublesome. This riot is a reaction to that, to the Man’s death and to something else, something you are doing. You are creating something, Fool, and creation is not usual in Hell. These new clothes, your uniform, is a mark of your new status. Or rather, it is a reflection of the fact that Rhakshasas and the archdeacons, and through them the Bureaucracy itself, are recognizing a status you have always had but that has never been properly acknowledged previously.”

  Fool didn’t know what to say. He looked at the jacket and trousers, at the shiny buttons, feeling the heavy, rough cloth with his fingers and then rubbing the thin material of his current jacket. He looked at Elderflower again; something seemed called for, so he said, “Thank you.”

  Something crashed into the ground on the other side of the square, spraying glass and metal shards across the ground. Shouts came from above them; when he looked up, Fool saw a man running along the edge of the roof of one of the buildings that wasn’t on fire. He was scattering paper as he ran, and the white sheets drifted down through the smoky air toward them.

  Elderflower reached up and caught one of the falling sheets as it drifted down past him. He held it up and looked at it, turning it around and around. The paper was thin, and in the shifting, dirty light, Fool made out the shape of words and some kind of image.

  “Well,” said Elderflower, handing the sheet to Fool, “you are noticed by more than even I realized, Thomas.”

  The sheet was cut badly, the sides uneven, and the writing on it was thick and blocky.

  WE CAN FIGHT THE DEMONS

  WE DESERVE BETTER

  THE MAN IS DEAD BUT THIS MAN STANDS UP FOR US

  Underneath the words was a crude drawing, and it took Fool several seconds to realize that it was meant to be him.

  20

  Fool then spent the strangest few minutes with Elderflower that he had spent in all his time in Hell. The bureaucrat began to list trouble spots, detailing what was happening and who was involved; which bars were on fire or had been damaged; the places groups of humans were currently congregating and what they were doing; which demons were injured and which were rampaging through the streets.

  It wasn’t simply in the Houska, either; a group of Genevieves had attacked their masters in one of the boardinghouses and had then tried to burn the building down, and on one of the farms a field of workers (not Aruhlians, Fool thought abstractly) had turned on their overseer. Several of them had died in the ensuing violence when the overseer’s companions had come to its aid, and the rest were even now, Elderflower said, huddled in an outbuilding with the doors barred, hoping for rescue but expecting death. Things burned and were being torn down, people hid and ran and rampaged.

  Fool listened to Elderflower with the riot swelling all around them, but it was as though the conversation were happening in a bubble, with him and Elderflower on the inside and the rest of Hell outside. The noise of the violence, of the screams, of the damage and the fires and the roars and the shouts and the running feet and clawed toes striking the ground came as though from a great distance. Nothing came near them in the square; no humans ran into it, no demons tore through it. Even the smoke hovered above them but did not descend to the ground, forming a ceiling over them.

  Eventually, Elderflower finished and said, “So, Thomas, what are your recommendations?”

  “Recommendations?”

  “What should we do, Thomas, to douse the fires, to bring these situations under control?”

  Fool was lost. Summer had arrived sometime during Elderflower’s speech, he realized, and was standing behind him. She was dressed in a new uniform much like his own; it hung baggily on her slight frame, and if he hadn’t known her, it would have been impossible to tell whether she was female or male. He made a confused face at her, but when she made to step to his side Elderflower hissed at her. For a second, the small man’s face twisted out of shape, his mouth stretching as his lips pursed into the sibilant noise, and only when Summer stopped moving did it fall back to normal.

  “I don’t know,” said Fool eventually. “What can we do?”

  “How do you want to deploy your troops?” asked Elderflower.

  “What troops?”

  “Your troops, Thomas, the willing soldiers come to help restore Hell to its former state,” said Elderflower, gesturing behind him at the uneven column of demons. “The demons that want order, Thomas, that dream of times when they were Hell’s rightful rulers and when humans were simple slaves, things to torture with flame and oil and rock and whip. They will even serve under a human, for a time, to achieve their aim of bringing Hell back to order, Thomas. They are yours to use as you wish.”

  “Troops?” repeated Fool, and looked down at the uniform that was now draped over his knees. What was this? What was going on here? He felt like Hell’s earth was dropping away from under him, leaving him in free fall, dizzy with something that might have been exhilaration or might have been terror. The paper sheets were still falling, some dropping and then lifting again as they drifted into the
heated updrafts, sent off in spirals to disappear over the rooftops. There was no sign of the man who had thrown them down.

  “Someone needs to go and stop the overseers killing the farmhands,” he said eventually. “They’re the farthest away, so someone needs to go now.”

  “Who?” asked Elderflower.

  “I don’t know,” said Fool, and then, “those two,” pointing at the first two demons in the line. They immediately left, moving quickly back up the line and disappearing into the swirling smoke.

  “And?” said Elderflower.

  I don’t know how to do this, thought Fool and then felt Summer’s hand touch his shoulder gently. He looked down at the dead demon and the dead man, saw his toes scuff into the drying bloodstains, thought of Gordie and notes and string tying things together, and made a decision.

  “The fires need putting out,” he said, “or everything will burn flat. It’ll spread.” Fool quickly went through the rest of the incidents Elderflower had listed and sent demons to sort them out; stop the fighting, release the humans, put the fires out, restore order, prevent the death, prevent the destruction, instruction after instruction, and after each one the demons he pointed at left without question. I’m a human, giving orders to demons, he thought. And they’re obeying!

  When all the demons were gone, Elderflower nodded at Fool, spun on one delicate foot, and also left. Fool’s last sight of him was as a tiny figure being swallowed by the swirling black clouds, his corkscrew hair jutting from his head in twists that reached above him into the shadow.

  “What was that?” asked Summer, finally coming and standing next to him.

  “I don’t know,” said Fool. Soot gritted and crunched under his feet and the smell of fires felt painted into his nostrils. He looked up; the man with the leaflets had reappeared on the roof, and although he was too far away to see, Fool was suddenly convinced that he was looking straight down into the square and had seen everything that had happened in these last few minutes. As Fool stared at him, the man thrust a fist into the air and shouted something that the heat took and whirled away, and then a violent blue flash rippled across the sky, turning the man and the building he was standing on into an angular and depthless black shadow.

  It didn’t register at first, was just a blue flash, another part of the Houska burning, and then comprehension came; it had been a flash, a blue flash, lifting into the sky. It couldn’t be, could it? So close, just streets away? No.

  Yes.

  Without thinking about it, Fool dropped his new uniform and rose, starting to run toward where the flash had originated. Moments later, Summer joined him, her longer and younger legs easily keeping pace with him. As they dodged a pile of burning wood and started down an alleyway between a bar and a Genevieve parlor, another flash tore apart the night ahead of them, this one, if anything, even brighter. It left after-images glazed across Fool’s eyes and he stumbled, his shoulder striking the rough brickwork wall. There was a third glaring flash, filling the passage with dancing blue illumination into which Fool and Summer ran.

  The alleyway opened out into a filthy space, a wide yard that stretched across the rear of several of the Houska’s businesses. Piles of rubbish rotted up against each other, the stench of them thick and sewerish, and mud that felt loose and watery moved under Fool’s feet. Old furniture lay in broken pieces between the piles, chairs without seats and benches with splintered legs and tables with tops that were broken and scarred and torn. This was the part of the Houska, abandoned and fragmented, that few people saw; Fool and Summer and Gordie had taken bodies from places like this most weeks.

  They went cautiously along the yard, staying close to the rear wall, skirting the rubbish when they needed to and both holding their guns ahead of them. On the far side of the yard, more building rears faced them, hidden behind a long wooden fence that was itself partly obscured by the piled refuse. “Was—” Summer began, and then something pale leaped from between two of the piles ahead of them.

  It rose through the air and slammed into the wall in front of them, unpeeling and slithering down the brickwork with a sound like tearing paper. Summer screamed, firing, and the flash of her weapon sent warm orange light lurching in elongated fingers around them. Mud and liquid sprayed up from the ground where the bullet struck and it whined as it ricocheted away, leaving a tiny twist of steam behind it.

  It was a body.

  It didn’t have as many injuries as the earlier victims, but the ones it had sustained were, if anything, worse. It was a man, not a Genevieve Fool didn’t think but a customer, some factory worker dressed in oily clothes with dirt pressed in dark moons under his fingernails and into the skin around his nose and mouth in the shape of one of the cheap masks they were given to wear when working. His throat was missing, the flesh gone back as far as his spine and the edges of the wound ragged and furrowed. His upper body had been twisted completely around so that his legs bent back from his belly instead of forward and there were tears in his shirt near his shoulders. Under the tears, the flesh was punctured as though by huge claws, opened down to bone that was startlingly white against the red muscle around it. All this Fool took in during a brief glance, marveling at how much he was seeing, how far his eyes had opened, even as he was moving past the body toward the gap between the rubbish piles from which it had emerged.

  There was a crash from somewhere deeper in the yard, a gate swinging open and then rebounding shut and Fool was running again, chasing the sound, chasing the demon that had made it, that had left so many people dead. Rubbish spattered and clung to him as he ran, water splashing up his pants and slithering in over the top of his boots to take his feet in its cold grip, and then he was at the gate.

  It was one of several set into the fence, wooden and old and battered, its paint peeling. Fool pulled it open, ducking back from it in case the demon was waiting for him. It wasn’t, the opening revealing nothing more than another alleyway, short and empty and open at the other end. Fool ran down it, Summer still at his heels, emerging from it to find himself in one of the demon quarters.

  The Houska, Fool knew, was much smaller than it appeared in memory; it acted like a drain at the center of a hole, pulling everything, including people’s attention and fear, toward it, but in reality it was only a long spinal street and several shorter tendril streets and alleys, all lined with brothels and bars, places where demons ate their way through the fears and losses and horrors of the humans they bought. Much like the Genevieves had the boardinghouses and the working humans had sections of Hell they considered theirs, demons lived together in cluttered groupings called quarters even though there were, to Fool’s incomplete knowledge, at least five of them making up the whole area of demon habitation called the Pipe. Fool had never been in one before, and stepping into one now gave him pause; he was farther out than he had ever been, past reason and sense and safety, but he wasn’t yet lost to himself and his sense of self-preservation. This was a demon quarter, this was the Pipe, and he and Summer had to tread carefully.

  Within seconds, being in the Pipe began to disturb Fool. The architecture of the buildings was wrong, somehow. In front of him, the short, squat houses appeared normal, but as he and Summer went slowly farther into the area, walking down the center of the road, the ones that drifted to the corner of Fool’s eyes seemed to bend into unusual shapes, as though they had been fit together wrong by whoever built them or were warping as they fell behind him, were twisting to watch their passage. Most of the windows were boarded over, the wood buckled and black; from behind at least one set of windows water trickled in thick rivulets, staining the walls in a pattern that looked like constantly drying and moistening tears.

  “Where did it go?” whispered Summer. Fool didn’t reply but gestured with his gun, sending Summer to the far side of the street while he went to the near side. He tried each door he came to, but none opened. Summer shook her head when he looked over at her, rattling at one of the doors to show him what she meant.

&nb
sp; Some of the doors were actually gates, and Fool stood on tiptoe to peer over one of them. Behind it was a narrow strip between the buildings, almost too thin to even be called an alleyway. Similar narrow passages stretched away behind the other gates, most of which were empty, although in one Fool saw a pile of something that might have been bones, smeared with mud and showing signs of having been gnawed.

  Nothing moved, nothing made a noise, but Fool sensed that he and Summer were being watched, peered at from countless places behind the wood and the doors and on the rooftops. It was colder here, and Fool’s breath misted on each exhalation, damp clouds of vapor trailing him as he moved along. He caught glimpses of movement from behind the boarded windows, dark patches shifting as he went past. Something whispered, a long sound, drawn out and venomous. Movement skittered behind the doors, the sound of things without toes attempting to move quietly as they weighed up the new arrivals.

  The road wasn’t well used. In places thick banks of mud and detritus had formed, heavy ridges that had packed down over time and that gave little as Fool stepped on them. There was one ahead of him now, perhaps two feet high and rippling across the ground in front of him. He stepped on it, keeping his eyes on the doorways near him, glancing over at Summer, who was still on the other side of the road but was maybe ten feet ahead of him. She looked back as he stood on the mound and he saw terror flitter across her face. He tried to jump away but he didn’t react quickly enough to avoid the thing that rose up from the ground under his feet.

  He was thrown back, had a brief image of something covered in mud and ordure emerging from the earth where it had buried itself, something that unfurled huge arms and that came toward him with its eyes glinting and its teeth bared. He managed to fire his gun, the flash dazzling him, and then something crashed into him, spinning him violently sideways.