“It’s funny?” asked Fool, not raising his voice, feeling the anger build inside him and letting it. “The deaths, the murders, they’re funny?”
Balthazar’s laughter trailed away. “You’re serious?” he asked. “You think I committed these murders that you’ve been investigating? Fool, I’m an angel.”
“Yes,” said Fool, thinking of the demons by the lake falling into pieces and the chalkis dropping from the sky in smoking segments, “you are, and all the way along you have destroyed my evidence and killed my witnesses. You destroyed the bodies of the Aruhlians in case they talked and—”
“I destroyed them to give them dignity,” Balthazar interrupted.
“You killed the demon at the lake before it could describe you to me, you killed the Man of Plants and Flowers so that you could use him to send me off in the wrong directions. So, I ask again. Why?”
“Fool, I did not kill them,” said Balthazar, formal now, making a statement. “My weapon has been used only in the tasks of protecting you. Why in the name of God would you think that I killed those poor souls?”
It was the question Fool had been avoiding in his head, the why of it all. Why would Balthazar kill the Genevieves, the Aruhlians, all the others? They disgusted him, yes, weak as they were, failing sinners that they were, but surely that wasn’t enough? Was it? Yes.
No. No, because suddenly it was there, clear and shimmering in his head and in the air in front of him and he opened his mouth so that his tongue could chase it.
“Because of the souls,” said Fool, speaking without pause, allowing the words to lead the thoughts. “Because what you did freed their souls and punished them at the same time. They weren’t sent back outside the wall when you killed them; they were released. That’s why the murders were so violent: they had to be to ensure that the dead weren’t simply sent back to Limbo, the violence absolving the dead of their sins and freeing them. The blue flashes—they were souls escaping from Hell and rising up, gaining entry to Heaven.”
“Very good, Thomas,” said Elderflower, and then Balthazar’s flame was dripping from his hand and beginning to rise.
“I did not kill them,” he said again, and his wings were unfurling, curling out from his back in black arcs, smaller shadows around his feet opening, his arms coming up in front of the larger wings, his body taking on the color of flame and ash.
“I have a witness,” said Fool. Had a witness, he thought, remembering the demon’s head collapsing to the mulchy ground, killed by the angel he would have pointed his accusation at. He drew his gun, trained it on Balthazar, watching the whip of flame curling down from the angel’s hands, growing longer and thicker, curling and flickering like a reptile’s tongue. The light was draining from the room, the shadows at its corners thickening as Balthazar pulled the illumination in, became the burning center of the room.
“A witness,” said the angel, “who saw what?”
“A bright man,” said Fool, hearing as he said it how thin it sounded.
“Do I look bright?” asked Balthazar, who was churning with a dull, fiery redness now, convection patterns of heat boiling away from his skin and filling the air around him with mazy shades. “Do I, little Information Man, little Fool? Do I look bright?”
The flame curled up, dancing around Fool, encircling his wrist but not tightening. He felt its heat, saw the hairs across the back of his hand begin to shrivel and char and tried to stay still; one twitch and he had no doubt his hand and the gun it held would fall.
“I say again, I did not kill them,” said Balthazar.
“No?”
“I’m not lying, Fool. I can’t lie. Don’t you understand? I’m an angel, Fool, one of God’s holy things, and the truth is woven through me as surely as blood is woven through humans and evil through demons. You have my feather, a part of me. Haven’t you noticed that people tell the truth when they hold it? That you tell yourself the truth when you have it near you, when you carry it or hold it?”
“Tell myself the truth?” asked Fool, but suddenly understood. All Hell’s fog had burned away from him not because of anything he had done or anything inside him but because he had had the feather, had been carrying something beautiful and pure and clear. He had seen the trail, understood the marks on the path, the clues, because, once gifted, the feather had sharpened his vision. All the time it had been with him, it had been drawing him taut, sharpening him, bringing him into focus, bringing him here, and he felt betrayed and hollow. Sick.
“The feather only made you a better version of what was already there,” said Balthazar, with something like tenderness in his voice. The curl of flame widened, tip lashing slowly, and then fell away from Fool’s outstretched hand. He flexed it carefully, feeling the tightness of the skin where he had been scorched.
“I am capable of killing,” said Balthazar, “but I did not kill anyone or anything in Hell that did not deserve it, Fool. My work here is to service the delegation and nothing more.”
“So if it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t a man or demon, then who killed them?” Fool asked, speaking out loud because his mouth was still running ahead of the rest of him. He needed answers, something concrete to grip and understand. If it wasn’t Balthazar—and it wasn’t, couldn’t be, because the angel was right, he wasn’t bright but was a rippling, fleshy gleam that seemed to sweat shadows into the air around him—if it wasn’t him, then who? “Who was it?” Fool asked again. “Who killed them? Who killed all those people?”
“I did,” said Adam and then the room was full of the brightest light Fool had ever seen.
It was beyond light, somehow, had weight and mass and volume, pushed Fool backward and sent him stumbling. Somewhere, lost in it, he heard Balthazar shout and then the angel’s red glow was extinguished by the glare. Fool squeezed his eyes shut and tried to swing his gun around to where he thought Adam was, but the weight pressing against him made it feel like he was moving through mud or heavy, oily water, clinging and pushing against him. Oddly, it wasn’t painful; the opposite, if anything, and he felt the skin on his wrist soften and calm, the aches to his face and body flare briefly and then begin to fade. It was healing him, and even through his closed eyelids, the light was inexorable and he had to turn away from it. The white man, he thought. White, and bright.
“I gave them freedom,” said Adam. “They thanked me.”
“You murdered them,” said Fool, and the light moved across his flesh and he could feel it, faster and faster, a whirlwind, and he wondered whether this was what it had been like for them, the center of something too big and too fast and too bright to understand but knowing that it was coming, terrible and painful and inexorable.
“It is not murder,” said Adam, his voice a calm note in the maelstrom of light. “They are dead already. I merely did what Hell has stopped doing, and gave their souls release. This is Hell, and I had to be cruel to perform the greatest kindness, to unanchor their souls, but it was God’s work I performed with those poor things.”
“And so it begins,” said Elderflower from somewhere in the room. He sounded as though he were moving, but when Fool tried to open his eyes he found he still could not.
“We aren’t dead,” said Fool.
“No?” said Adam. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, Adam, everyone here is alive,” said Elderflower, his voice still moving, seeming to fade closer and then farther away. “Flesh with a resident soul is living flesh, you know that.”
“Then you’re a murderer,” said Fool, feeling forward with his free hand. He found the wall and used it to stand, pulling himself upright. He held his gun forward, fighting against the weight of the light, heard something swish past him, felt heat cut through the light and pass over his skin. There was another noise, like chains going taut and snapping, and then the weight of the light was gone and the glare had faded from his eyes. He risked opening them, squinted through tears that came unbidden and turned the room into a blurred mess, and saw Adam standing in front of the windows.
“Yes,” said Fool.
“Hell is God’s domain, Fool, and the freeing of souls is God’s work. Is it a crime, to carry out God’s work?”
“Yes,” said Fool. “In Hell, the rules bind even God’s children. You had no permission to murder flesh nor steal souls. You went outside the remit of the delegation. Criminality is criminality, whether carried out by human, demon, or angel, and under the rules of Hell you have sinned.”
“God will protect me,” said Adam, reaching up and taking hold of Balthazar’s flame. He tugged and Balthazar was jerked forward. As he came within his companion’s reach, Adam swung his other arm. It became a silver blur as it moved, sweeping up and chopping Balthazar across his stomach, lifting him and throwing him back across the room. His other arm swung after it, glowing silver and shining and growing until it stretched across the room and battered into Balthazar. The red angel groaned as he was thrust farther, his body crashing into the wall. Something cracked as he hit, although whether in the wall or within Balthazar Fool could not tell. Adam pulled his arm back and prepared for another strike.
Fool fired, his hand trembling, and a ragged line opened along the side of Adam’s face. Light poured from it, splashing down the angel’s shoulder like liquid, coating the side of his face. His arms snapped back, reducing, becoming simply arms again.
“Do you think you can harm me?” he said, and as he spoke his robes lifted, spread, fanned out behind him, and Fool realized that they were not robes, that they never had been. They were his wings, its wings, because Adam was no longer even an approximation of a human, had become something made of light and rigidity and gleam, humanoid but not human in the least. Its eyes were burning silver, its skin a flawless alabaster that gleamed as though lit from within, and its wings were huge, colors shifting across them like oil glinting on the surface of water, and when it spoke, its voice echoed in the room, shivering dust from the joints and beams above them.
“I am angelic, Fool, one of the host of Heaven. Your gun cannot touch me.” Its wings curved, blocking the windows behind him, their tips brushing the walls with a sound like nails dragging across glass.
“In point of fact, you aren’t,” said Elderflower as he walked in between Adam and Fool. The little figure blurred, its edges lost in the angel’s glare, reduced to a black smudge at its heart. “An angel, I mean. You’re a criminal, nothing more. You murdered the citizens of Hell, attacked your companion. Scribe has it written, I believe?”
“Yes,” said a voice, dull and toneless. They can speak, thought Fool, they can!
“Elderflower,” said Adam, “what nonsense is this?”
“You’re a criminal,” said Elderflower, “and there are thousands like you in Hell, you’re no different from any other thing here. Just a criminal. Whatever you were, that’s all you are now. Thomas, if you’d be so kind?”
“Certainly,” said Fool, and shot Adam again.
Adam, no longer an angel, now a pale and bright thing, exploded.
32
For the second time, the room filled with light. This time it was blue, dark and clinging, and it buffeted Fool. It wasn’t bright, exactly, but it filled the space and it was thick, distorting the shapes of Elderflower and Adam into ragged things that appeared to be floating. Adam was shouting, screaming, and then everything in the room shifted as though it had tilted on its side. Fool was pulled, his feet leaving the floor, tumbling sideways, falling through the air and crashing into Elderflower and then onward into the thick, quartered windows. A moment later, Balthazar hit the glass next to them, and Fool just had time to realize that he was several feet off the floor and then the furniture was hitting the glass around him.
Fool was flat against the panes, his face pressed against one square of glass. A chair hit the pane next to him, cracking it, its dusty stuffing spraying loose as the material of the old cushion ripped. The air swilled blue around him, light eddying and coagulating in front of him. He heard an impact followed by someone grunting, and then Balthazar said, “Adam.”
Adam screamed.
It was a wretched sound. It whooped, hoarse, agony and loss and fear all impacting and scratching, louder and louder until Fool’s ears hurt. The light had a taste and scent, of old copper and spent saliva and long-dead flames, filling his mouth and nose. He couldn’t breathe, felt it clog his throat, press his tongue down. He tried to spit but couldn’t, and the screaming came again and was, if anything, worse.
“Adam!” Balthazar said again, and there was another high snapping sound by Fool’s ear. The weight around him increased, pressing him harder against the glass, and he felt a crack snake its way along his cheek. The edges of the glass parted slightly, cutting into his skin, thin lines of pain slicing into his cheek, new pain to replace the injuries that Adam’s angelic light had washed away. There was another crack, this one from somewhere farther down his body. His arm was pinned under him, the gun trapped and pressing into his belly. He tried to wriggle, tried to breathe, couldn’t.
There was another crack. The blue deepened, and the rest of the room was lost to Fool completely. There was a third scream, half-formed words bubbling through it, and then the windows under Fool splintered farther. The wooden struts began to bow out, the weight against him increasing. He tried to speak, drew in a thick breath that got no farther than the back of his mouth, choked, and then he was falling in a mess of fragmented glass and wood and swirling, dancing blue.
It was dizzying. Fool fell out of the room and then shifted direction, still falling now not out but down, everything arcing along with him except the blue, which curved in the other direction, climbing. He saw Elderflower, coat flaring behind him like a cape, and Balthazar, wings beating. The scribe dropped past him, the archive following. How many floors up is the ballroom? he wondered. He couldn’t remember. Glass fell like stars around him and the weight was removed from him, he had no weight at all and the smell was gone and he could breathe and he was looking out at Hell and then the ground was leaping toward him.
There was no mud; the square had been scraped after the riot and deaths and Fool hit the flagged ground feetfirst. His legs buckled up, his knees driving hard into his chest and then knocking him back, the breath driven from him in an explosive gasp. Glass crunched under him as he rolled, more falling around him, and he brought his arms up and wrapped them around his exposed head. The back of his head hit the stone hard, protected by his hand, and Fool heard the thin snapping of his fingers breaking moments before the pain hit.
It wasn’t his gun hand; even as his roll came to a sprawled end and he curled around, nursing his hand, he was thankful for that. He had lost his gun in the fall, but when he found it he would still be able to hold it.
“Give me your hand.” Balthazar, standing in front of Fool. His wings were folded up above his head, protecting them from the still-falling detritus. Fool held his hand out. Two of the fingers were twisted, bent at a strange angle.
“Look away,” said Balthazar. Fool looked around; Elderflower was standing not far from him, the scribe and archive behind him, and then Fool saw the rising light.
It was streaming out of the ballroom and rising into the sky, piercing the clouds. It had formed itself into a thick column, was pulsing, and reminded Fool of one of the Man’s twisting fronds, and then Balthazar pulled his fingers and the pain grew brighter than anything else. When the corona of white had faded from his eyes, the blue stream was fading and guttering. Several seconds later, it had petered to nothing.
“You’ll need to strap the fingers,” Balthazar said, letting go of Fool’s hand.
“Thank you.”
“He’s been taken back,” said the angel, looking into the sky toward Heaven. Fo
ol grunted, not trusting himself to speak. Pain and anger surged in him, throbbing and raw. Adam had escaped, managed to avoid facing any kind of justice. Fuck. Fuck!
“No,” said Elderflower, “he’s not.”
“Then where is he?” asked Fool.
“Falling,” said Elderflower. Above them, the clouds boiled and bucked and then vomited out a mass of dirty blue light.
Everything’s about light, thought Fool as a tendril of cold fire fell from the sky. All this, from the very beginning, it’s all been about light. Light that comes in, light that gets released. Light that means something. Adam and Balthazar are things of light, hot light and cold light.
Falling light.
All of Hell was lit up by the pulsing coming down from the clouds, strands of filthy blue spilling down. They looked like sodden paper, threaded through with shit and grime, spattering earthward. Fool sat back on his haunches watching the light; as it hit the ground, there was a soundless explosion that sent sprays bouncing back upward, only to arc out and fall back to earth again. Finally, there was a brighter flash and an egg of blue flame belched down, wrapped in the dank tendrils, and crashed to earth.
There was a last, violent pulse of light, lurching into the air and rippling down in waves. Between the group in the courtyard and the murky lifting and falling light, some fragment of Hell’s brutalist architecture was black and stolid. It looked like broken teeth in a mouth with no gums, jagged and irregular.
“What’s that?” asked Balthazar.
“It’s glorious,” whispered Elderflower.
“A wall,” said Fool. He recognized the top, saw in the stark shapes something that he knew. “It’s a wall.”
“The oldest wall in Hell, Thomas,” said Elderflower, “around the oldest part of Hell.”
“He’s in the Heights?”
“Of course. Where else would Adam fall? He is Hell’s first Fallen in years, and he is, in his way, important. Vital, maybe. He is old and powerful and has a taste for blood, a Fallen thing to fear. He’ll make a terrible demon, Thomas, cruel and full of bile and bitterness, and he has fallen into the center of Hell’s most private place. But justice still needs to be served, does it not?”
The Devil's Detective Page 28