It took Fool a moment to realize what Elderflower was saying. The pyrotechnic display was coming to an end now, the light fainter, the writhing tendrils less pronounced. The Falling was almost complete. “I can’t,” he said.
“Do you have a choice?” asked Elderflower. “He’s admitted his crimes, attacked a member of the delegation, killed humans and demons. He is Hell’s, Thomas, just as you are. You have your role to play, and Hell requires it be played.”
“He’s in Crow Heights,” said Fool, thinking of a demon aflame, screaming and spitting and sent to kill him, thinking of revenge and anger.
“A place deeper and larger than it seems from the outside, Thomas. You had best hurry or Adam may lose himself in its heart and emerge only after you are long gone, and who will stop him then?”
“I can’t,” said Fool again.
“You can,” said a voice behind him. Hands slipped under his armpits and he was lifted gently, set onto his feet. Balthazar let Fool go and came around in front of him. Balthazar’s wings were open, huge, and his arms wreathed in curling flames but his head was bowed.
“I am yours,” he said. “I owe you an apology. Adam was my companion and I saw none of this, and in my blindness I have allowed a betrayal of both Heaven and Hell. He deserves capture, but I am only a soldier and cannot move against him without command.”
“Marvelous!” said Elderflower, clapping his hands. “And don’t forget, Thomas, you have other troops.”
“No,” said Fool immediately, wondering what would happen if he took his demons into Crow Heights, how strongly their allegiance would bind them to him when they came under the influence of the elders there. Some of the Heights’ inhabitants were the first links in the chains of generations and breeding that eventually led to his troops, and he was, after all, only human.
I thought of them as “my demons,” he thought suddenly. What’s happening to me?
“Very well,” said Elderflower. “Very well, you know best. This is your investigation, after all. The Bureaucracy simply requires you to take it to its end. So, you and Balthazar, Thomas, collect him, or make sure he does not remain a threat. There is a transport on its way.”
There was a crowd around Crow Heights’ gates, a mass of the Sorrowful milling together and scattered across the road. The transport, its demon driver as quiet as ever, had to slow as it approached, the mass of bodies becoming thicker and thicker around the car until Fool ordered it to stop. Through the windows he watched the Sorrowful; they were watching the walls and the gates, their expressions an uneasy mix of longing and fear and hope. They ignored the transport.
“They want to find the Fallen,” Fool said, seeing the expression of confusion on Balthazar’s face.
“Why?”
“They believe whoever first finds the Fallen receives Elevation.”
“No,” said Balthazar. “That can’t be right. What if it is found by a demon? We would not Elevate a demon, or someone who hasn’t yet repented or paid for their sins.”
“Really?” said Fool. Poor Balthazar, he thought, he wants so much to believe in the logic of all this, but there is no logic, not here in Hell. There’s just each day and surviving it. Poor me, I’m feeling sorry for an angel. Little topsy-turvy Fool. Am I going to my death? With broken fingers and new bruises, sitting next to an angel who I’m realizing is as naive as I am out of my depth? I am.
I am.
Balthazar was looking out of the transport’s window at the Sorrowful. One or two of the humans were peering disinterestedly into the car and looking back at the wall. Some had started to move away, Fool saw, following the curved stone barrier around, and some would, he had no doubt, find the tumbled section he had stood on the other day. Would they enter? Climb those black and greasy blocks and venture inside the Heights? He wasn’t sure. Unlike the crowds outside Assemblies House, these didn’t seem angry enough to shoulder any kind of risk; not yet, anyway. Their presence might help him; he and Balthazar could try to mingle and lose themselves within the mass and slip through the gaps in the wall to enter secretly, he thought, and then, No.
No. They would enter by the gates, like the official visitors that they were. He would not be turned away, not now or ever again. Fuck the demons, fuck the guards. If he was to die chasing a Fallen angel, it wouldn’t be skulking along the base of a wall like something verminous and shameful. “Come on,” he said to Balthazar and opened the transport door.
Fool emerged from the transport into the cold air. Balthazar opened the door on the other side and climbed out, standing straight and flexing his muscled arms. His glow had simmered down to a faint pink gleam now, his skin shading back down to a ruddy, healthy skin tone, and Fool felt scrawny and ragged next to his beauty. The two of them went to the gates, Fool a step ahead of Balthazar, leading. The crowd parted before them, most turning to look at Fool and the angel but a few ignoring them, watching the wall. They had the same look on their faces as the Sorrowful wore when they stood outside the Elevation meetings, before the riots and the missiles and the banners, hopeful and desperate and guarded. From around them came whispers and mutterings as more and more of the Sorrowful watched. Fool raised one hand and, using the butt of his gun, hammered on the wooden gates.
“What?” said a voice. The same voice as his last visit? A different one? It was impossible to tell. It was muffled by the inches of wood between them, and this time the speaker did not open the slot to see out. Crow Heights, it seemed, was closed.
“I’m coming in,” Fool said. No choices, no offers, no requests. There was only forward and wherever it took him.
“You’re not,” said the voice. It reminded Fool of the last time he was here, and he had no time to waste now. No more skulking, he told himself again.
“I’m an Information Man and I have the right to enter,” he said. “A last chance: will you open up?”
“Go piss yourself,” said the voice.
“Balthazar?” asked Fool.
“Certainly,” said Balthazar, and he tore the gates apart.
The wooden planks didn’t splinter; they snapped like brittle metal as Balthazar punched through and yanked them outward. One snapped at its top hinge and swung drunkenly down; the other simply tore away from the jamb and fell into the mud at their side. The noise of it was huge, startling, the sound of orders being fractured and of something ancient shattering.
Beyond the broken gates, Crow Heights was bathed in fire.
Although the Falling had ended, remnants of its light were still scattered across the ground and slicked up the walls. As Fool walked into the Heights, the gates’ guardian was nowhere to be seen, either having run or in hiding, and he was glad; he didn’t want any more conflict. Around him, the fragments of light writhed sluggishly this way and then that across the ground. Where they touched against moss or the Heights’ wretched shrubs, it flared and then guttered to nothing and the plants themselves crumbled to black, ashy remnants. Balthazar knelt and grasped part of the light and lifted it; he squeezed it and it curled around his biceps before fading to nothing, leaving faint blue striations on his skin.
“It’s diseased,” he said. “Rotten.”
“Yes,” said Fool and wanted to say, “That’s Hell” but didn’t. How long would it be before Balthazar changed, if he stayed here? How long before the things he saw became commonplace? How long before his righteous anger and disgust made him do the things Adam had done?
How long before he Fell, corrupted into something new?
Behind them, the Sorrowful were coming cautiously through the gateway, looking around and seeing the Heights for the first time. In front of them, buildings looked on, impassive. Nothing but the light moved.
“It’s ahead of us,” said Balthazar. Even without the angel, Fool would have known; the strands of light all led back in one direction, snaking back between the buildings, throwing glimmers of illumination up walls that were old and crooked and dark. From somewhere in the distance came a crash and then a
long, inhuman scream. There was a rumble like something huge coughing violently, of falling stone, and then, from behind the buildings, a flash that lit up the sky and reflected down from the clouds.
Another scream, another flash, and then a howl of fury. It vibrated the air, louder and louder until it hurt, and then it cut off suddenly. There was a moment’s silence and then another crash, and this time Fool saw movement to accompany the noise, a building tilting and then collapsing down in a rising mask of dust and splintering masonry.
“What’s happening?” asked one of the Sorrowful, a man. He had picked up a long piece of wood from the ground, part of the broken gates, and was holding it out in front of him nervously.
“The Fallen thing is angry and is lashing out,” said Balthazar. “It has lost the glories of Heaven.” “It” again, not “him”; Adam no longer existed for Balthazar, Fool thought.
“What screamed? What is it?” asked the man.
“It? Possibly a demon, possibly something far, far worse,” said Balthazar. He was grinning as he spoke, his teeth white.
“A murderer,” said Fool.
“You have come to take it away?” This new voice came from one of the alleys ahead of them. Something was hunched far down in its depths, and although Fool could not see it, he had the clear impression of too many eyes and a shape that seemed to shift and ripple. “You are to remove it? It is tearing things apart. To pieces.”
“You need my help?” asked Fool.
“Yes,” said the thing in the alley. “It is like nothing we’ve encountered, not for years. For millennia.”
“You tried to have me killed. You sent something to kill me, and now you need my help?”
“We apologize,” said the thing easily. “You were an annoyance. Now this is worse, and you are here.”
There was another crash, this one lower, somewhere underground, so that Fool felt it travel up from the soles of his feet as much as heard it.
“Fool, the longer we wait, the more chance there is of it escaping,” said Balthazar.
“Where is it?” asked Fool. The thing in the alley raised something that might have been a tentacle but that ended in a pincer with three or four curved sections and said, “It fell into the house of the Bwg.”
“Bwg?”
“Ghosts. It is in the house that isn’t there, Information Man. Take your angel and go remove it.”
“Yes,” said Fool. He felt in his pocket and rubbed his fingers along the feather. This demon, all the demons here, would use him when they wanted and then kill him if they could, because it was what they did, and he wondered whether any of them really had choices. Right now, they needed his help to find Adam and because they were scared and would not risk facing the Fallen themselves, but then? They would hate him again, no doubt, because that was how they were created, what Hell required of them.
Was that the feather clarifying things for him? No, it was obvious; demons hated humans, used them, fed on their fear and unhappiness. All the fear I feel now, I’d be a fucking feast for them, he thought. If they wait, I may be even tastier because I can’t see this getting any less terrifying, only worse. Little scared Fool. Little terrified Fool.
There was another crash, another howl. Adam was ahead of them, and there was only one way to go.
33
This part of Crow Heights didn’t seem to have been built so much as grown. As Fool and Balthazar started down the alley, the walls twisted so that the buildings leaned in above them, blisters of stone and brick bulging from their sides, hollows curving back and creating pools of shadow. Holes in the brick might have been windows, glassless and their angles smooth and distorted, frames bent into swirls and irregularities, or they might have been mouths or eyes. Everything seemed coated with sweat, dripping in long, thick strings and making the air humid and sour. The demon, shape still muffled, slipped back into the darkness and disappeared. Behind them, there was a shout, a human shout, and a faint crash.
The alley opened out into a wider street similar to the one that Fool had been attacked in during his last visit to the Heights, lined on either side by houses of stone or wood. Their facades looked normal when Fool looked directly at them, but when he turned away they moved, swaying sinuously in the corner of his eyes. The empty windows made him think that someone or something had left the space only moments before, although he couldn’t tell what it was that made him think that. It was Hell, he supposed, another of its tricks and terrors.
The writhing light, fainter now, was strung along the center of the road in thick limbs, shoots of it wriggling down the alleys and passages between the buildings. Steam rose from around the light, bringing with it the smell of baking earth and burning mud. When the steam hit Balthazar, it hissed and vanished; when it hit Fool, it clung to his uniform in wet, silvery streaks. Chalkis lined the roofs around them, watching them silently; wooden Alrunes were carved at the corners of some of the roofs, streaked in chalkis’ shit, faces worn. They turned and watched as Fool and Balthazar went past, but stayed as silent as the flying things that were their companions.
There was another crash ahead of them and something spun up into the air, arcing toward them and then crashing to the earth at their feet. It was a lump of ragged flesh, not human. Balthazar prodded at it; after a moment, it rolled and sent out tendrils, began to crawl sluggishly toward the nearest house. Balthazar sliced it into smaller pieces and it stopped moving.
“It kills demons, Fool,” said Balthazar. “Perhaps I should leave it be?”
“It killed humans,” said Fool.
“And set their souls free.”
“It broke the rules. It broke the law.”
“Yes,” said Balthazar after a moment’s silence during which Fool heard another distant roar of voices. “Hell’s law. This is a new situation, Fool, and I find myself unsure. I believe it has sinned, but surely everyone here has sinned? Isn’t that the point?”
“Maybe,” said Fool, and he was suddenly weary. “If I sinned, I don’t know what it was that I did. I don’t know what any of the dead did, except I know they died and I know that Adam killed them. Perhaps that was Hell’s plan for them, perhaps not. Maybe this is all Hell’s plan, my investigation and the trail I’m on, and if so, so be it. Adam came here and killed and I have to bring him to justice. Help me if you want or you can, or not; I’m going anyway.”
“We don’t have this in Heaven,” said Balthazar.
“No,” said Fool. “This isn’t Heaven, it’s Hell, Balthazar. The rules are different here.”
“I’m not used to uncertainty, Fool,” said Balthazar, and Fool wondered whether he was permitted to feel sorry for an angel; Balthazar sounded forlorn, lost. Even his gleam was low, his skin cast blue by Adam’s Fallen light rather than his more usual red fires. “I am one of the angels of flame, belonging to Michael. Angels of the flame, of Michael, are always arms and guards, soldiers for the greater good. I need order, Fool.”
“Hell has order of a sort,” said Fool. “We have an order, a simple one. We have to stop Adam.”
“Yes,” said Balthazar. They had come to the place now, were standing in front of the house that wasn’t always there, the house of the Bwg. “An order.”
“Are you with me or not?” asked Fool. The house was fading and surging, one moment there, the next almost gone, only its outline visible against the surrounding structures. Dirty blue light spilled from its windows, strings of it dripping down the walls. The building next to the house had collapsed, dust still hanging in the air above it. As the house came back into view, its windows filled with faces, some human and some not, and all of them were openmouthed and screaming.
There was no sound, and as Fool watched, one of the windows filled with a dazzle of the blue light, submerging the faces; when the light vanished, they were gone. The house faded again, became something indistinct, the reflection of a shadow, and then drifted back into view.
“Yes,” said Balthazar, “I’m with you. It needs stopping.�
��
When Fool reached for the door handle, he expected his hand to pass through it, for it to feel insubstantial, but it did not; it was solid against his palm even as the house faded, and when he twisted it, the door opened without resistance. As the door swung back, the Alrunes on the buildings around them began to shriek and the chalkis took flight, circling up into the air and taking up the Alrunes’ song, discordant and ragged.
“They sense danger,” said Balthazar.
“So do I,” said Fool. He went to draw his gun and realized that he was already holding it. He didn’t remember picking it up after falling from the ballroom. He lifted it and used it to push the door open wider; it revealed an empty lobby with dirty wooden floors and a staircase lifting up from its far side.
“I’m scared,” said Fool aloud.
“Don’t be,” said Balthazar. “God is with us.”
This is Hell, thought Fool as they stepped into the house of the Bwg, so somehow I doubt it.
Inside, the house was solid and thick and did not fade and return. Its ghosts, however, did, flitting into existence around them and then shimmering away to nothing again almost as soon as they had appeared. Most were human, stunted men and women who darted past with their heads down, their limbs twisted and thin, but some were entirely demonic. Something that might have been an orphan scuttled past, almost running over Fool’s feet, and a huge horned thing shaggy with matted hair was perched on the stairs. None of the ghosts paid them any attention; Fool wasn’t sure whether they could, whether they were conscious in any way. Would Gordie have known? Maybe, maybe not; Bwg were rare outside Crow Heights, only appearing in some of the older structures. Most people thought they were rumors, that the dead of Hell never left ghosts, but Fool knew that they were one of the rare rumors that were also true, that there were occasional traces drifting along old corridors or screaming in the corners of rooms where terrible things had been done.
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