Something in his face cracked as he spoke and fresh blood spilled down him, rolling down his neck. Pain radiated out from the injury, sharp and bright.
“A thing?” asked Benjamin, reaching forward and pressing a hand against Fool’s wound. His touch was warm, solid, and yet somehow smooth, as though it was a hand of sun-warmed glass rather than flesh. Fool felt the edges of the split knit together, the blood flow slowing and stopping. The pain remained, however, and he realized that Benjamin hadn’t healed him completely but only started the process. A punishment, he wondered, for firing his gun?
“A thing,” agreed Fool. What had it been? The scribe? Another demon? No, he couldn’t be sure but he didn’t think so; it hadn’t moved like a demon; its run had been uneven, tilting one way and then another like a ship in a gale, like a creature running on pitching floors. It had reminded him of something, hadn’t it? No, not reminded exactly; rather, it had made him think of something but he couldn’t remember or grasp what. Every time he tried, the thought of it slipped away, lubricated by the grease of pain and tiredness.
“It was in the valley, hiding from me. It tracked me, trying to see where I was going. It was watching me,” said Fool. Was that what it had been doing? Yes, yes, it had been tracking him, spying on him. If it had wanted to attack him, it could have done so far earlier. Its eventual violence was, he was sure, only a means of effecting its escape.
“Nothing in Heaven would attack you, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin, removing his hand from Fool’s cheek. Relieved of the angel’s touch, the damaged cheek throbbed, feeling cold. This time when Fool raised his hand to it, Benjamin did not stop him. Cautiously Fool placed his fingertips to his cheek and let them walk over the surface of his face. It felt alien to his touch, its topography altered and foreign. Three lines of scabs, roughly parallel, started from a point just in front of his ear and ran down, parallel to his jawline, finishing just under his cheekbone. They throbbed, feeling warm and knotted and fragile, furrows torn through his face and inexpertly fixed. He let his hand fall away again.
“We have no physicians in Heaven,” said Benjamin, “as we have no need of them. Israfil is asking the Gardens of Fire if they can provide something for your treatment.”
Fool lay back, relaxing into his pillow. “Does the Delegation know what happened to me?”
“Yes,” said Benjamin. “The demon Catarinch is using it as an excuse to complain and levy further concessions from Heaven. Wambwark merely laughed.”
Fool grinned, felt one of the slashes flash a warning at him, and stopped grinning. “What time is it?”
“Evening, Thomas Fool. You have been asleep for several hours. Are you hungry?”
“No.” Fool was surprised to find that he hadn’t even thought of food since he arrived in Heaven. How long was it since he’d eaten? Three days? Four?
“You will need to force yourself to eat, Thomas Fool,” said Benjamin. “Heaven is not a place of physical appetites, only ones of the mind, so it is easy to forget and become ill. We are not used to catering for humans who are not one of the flock.”
“The Joyful.”
“You called them that earlier. Is that the name you have for them? The Joyful? Well, I suppose they are, so it’s as accurate a name for them as any other.”
There was a soft knock at the door. Benjamin rose from the chair, wings flapping slowly and expansively before returning to their usual position, cowled behind and over his head. The globe on the wall was dark and Fool realized that the light in the room was coming from the angel, his pale glow suffusing the space around him, painting it in shades of ivory and yellow.
“Fool,” said Benjamin, his voice coming to Fool over the angel’s shoulder, “it is time for me to show you your followers.”
In the frenzy of the day, Fool had completely forgotten about the two who followed him. Another thing forgotten, you’re getting sloppy, he thought and sat, too quickly, feeling a wave of dizziness and pain wash across him. He managed to get his arms behind him, propping himself on his elbows and looking around the room. It was empty apart from him and Benjamin.
“They’re here,” said Benjamin without looking around. “They’re with you every moment. They have no choice.”
The angel opened the room door, revealing a second angel, a female, dressed in a sleeveless shift dress. “I do not have the skills or power to reveal your followers, Thomas Fool. I’m an angel of fire and war and conflict on the borders, but I have friends. I have taken a liberty and asked Bal Koth to act on my behalf.”
The angel Bal Koth entered the room, head down, blond hair hooked behind her ears, arms crossed in front of her.
“Your service to Heaven is remembered,” she said and bowed to Fool. She walked to the center of the room and looked around and then raised her head, sniffing. Her skin was flawless, her expression one of fierce pride. For a moment she looked masculine rather than feminine, her face hard planes and lines, and then she was female again.
“If I am permitted, I’ll begin,” said Bal Koth, the angel who might or might not be female.
Fool nodded and she knelt and began to feel across the floor of the room, finally wrapping her hand around something that he could not see. Benjamin had gone to stand in the corner of the room, was watching, motionless. Bal Koth began to pull gently on the thing that she held, following the line of it toward Fool. She came to him, still holding the thing he could not see, and delicately pushed him forward, tilting him so that his face was close to his knees under the covering sheet, and then her hand was tickling up and down his back. Finally, she took hold of something high up, the pressure of her grasp between his shoulder blades, and she yanked.
It was as though a tooth Fool didn’t know he had was being twisted. Something not a part of him but connected nonetheless tugged against not his flesh but the thing inside his flesh, the thing that made his flesh Fool, and then she yanked again and it came loose. Fool gasped, feeling a hollow space open in his back and close again just as quickly, and then Bal Koth cried out, a wordless song, and was tugging and it was as though she was pulling the shadows and shades up from the edges of the room.
Darkness crept out from the room, where the floor met the walls, sheets of it slipping out, spilling and bubbling into the open. It pooled around Bal Koth’s ankles, puddling in greasy waves around the feet of Fool’s bed, a darkness moving like oil and lapping hungrily at the furniture and swallowing the floor, and still she pulled, hand over hand, her teeth gritted and strain showing on her perfect forehead. The light in the room clenched in, balling at the center of the space, forming a tight sphere around Bal Koth and the thing she pulled.
Bal Koth’s arms were carved alabaster, the musculature sculpted in perfect curves and angles. She pulled, and pulled, and pulled.
Something pulled back.
Bal Koth staggered. Her hands tightened, veins rippling around her pale wrists, and she leaned back, straining. She swept her wings open, spreading them wide and beating them once, the air washing over Fool. The pressure lifted her, moving her back, and she was still pulling, hauling now, and the thing in her hand was becoming visible. It was a cable, no, two cables, twisted hanks of yarn or rope, stretched and taut. One end of the cables, Fool was astonished to see, disappeared under the sheets of his bed, the other submerged below the surface of the roiling darkness and somehow connected to the darkness, dragging it with it as the angel tugged and the blackness fought back. The other, close to Bal Koth’s hand, was torn, ending in frayed strands that glistened and twitched.
Bal Koth pulled, harder and harder, and the cords spooled back through her hands, more and more of the lengths emerging from the blackness, and now the momentum was with the angel, the cords falling and tangling by her feet. The blackness rose up faster now, soupy, filling the room.
“They are rooted in darkness and pain,” the angel said as the cords tugged back against her again, her voice a hard flint in the room. She set her feet into the swirling, eddying blacknes
s that now entirely covered the floor and had reached to above her knees, was rippling just below the edges of Fool’s mattress, and leaned back and gave a final, savage yank. There was a sound like a bubble rising through thick mud and the ends of the cords burst from the darkness, flailing violently, something flapping at their ends.
The darkness bucked and crashed and strained, sloshing farther up the walls, slapping against the edges of the ceiling, leaving a space around Benjamin that the angel filled with his pale, penumbral light. The black surged, its surface a gleaming rainbow of roiling colors, and fell back toward Bal Koth. She knelt and gathered herself together, wings curving around her, dress pulled taut across her thighs, and hissed at the encroaching shadows. They flopped around her and then, finally, collapsed away, leaving fragments of themselves clinging to the surfaces that slowly dripped, fading and vanishing.
The blackness that spread across the floor bubbled, surface broken and pitching, and then it, too, shrank down. In seconds it had drained away, lost in a great dark swirl, and the room was normal again. The globe on the wall popped noisily and light sprang out, expanded into the room’s corners and edges, revealed Benjamin still standing and watching. He flicked one hand out and a thin wrinkle of fire leaped around the room, burning away the last scraps of darkness in a series of unpleasant, earthy sizzles.
At first, Fool thought old clothes were tied to the cords, and then he realized that it was skin.
Fool wasn’t sure the skins were real, not exactly; they seemed too thin, almost translucent, the impressions of floorboards visible through them. They were pale, shining with damp and cold, glittering with frost, and they faded and came back as though attached to the breathing of some distant lung. Bal Koth pulled them to her, crouching lower and lifting the skins tenderly onto her now-bent knees. She ran one hand along them, trailing the backs of her fingers across the now-here, now-gone thinness, and then made a motion in the air. The cords fell away from the two skins, severed, and then disappeared in a spray of glittering silver sparks.
“Ah, so, so beautiful,” Bal Koth said, still stroking. Where her fingers touched them, the skins began to color, pinks and traceries of blue veins appearing, solidifying. The colors spread, giving the skins a reality that they had previously lacked, turning them into something approximating human. Fool thought of demons without skin, of muscles exposed and ropey with oily blood, and wondered if this was some kind of opposite creature, a thing of skin and little else, sent to keep track of him, seeking him out for reasons of revenge or malice or observance.
The skins shifted on Bal Koth’s knees, pinkly unpleasant in the angel’s glow. “So beautiful,” she said again and then leaned over and kissed the nearest of them.
The skin swelled as Bal Koth kissed it, unfurling, expanding. Its arms flopped back, its legs unrolling across the floor. Its feet and hands were abandoned socks and gloves suddenly filling, flexing as they did. The skin made a noise as Bal Koth kissed, or maybe it was Bal Koth herself, a low exhalation that was halfway between a groan and a sigh.
Bal Koth stood and draped the skin, still filling, across her arms. She stopped kissing it but it still grew, tiny pops coming from it as the skin smoothed and fitted around whatever was filling it. She’s kissing it to life, Fool thought, an angel’s kiss, and looked at his jacket hanging on the back of the chair in front of the desk. The feather was in his pocket, he remembered, another thing forgotten in the chaos of the day, and he felt a pang of jealousy that he clamped down on as best he could. An angel’s feather given to mark a possession lost or being created by an angel’s kiss, who was to say which was worth more?
Bal Koth was kissing the other skin now, her lips clamped onto it, her cheeks puffing out. The skin flopped back, crumpled arms and legs collapsing out, and then it was expanding, and then there were two groaning sighs in the air, two competing sets of pops and soft rustles as of thin leather being manipulated and caressed. The second expanding skin seemed smaller than the first, the tones different, the colors of it fractionally darker.
“They need to grow,” Bal Koth said after breaking the kiss with the second skin. She watched them for a few seconds, the expression on her face unreadable, breathing heavily. She looked tired. Had he ever seen a tired angel before? No, he didn’t think so; even at the height of the battles in Hell, the angels had always looked fiercely joyous, fiercely alive and vibrant.
“Whoever they are, I’ll tend them tonight and send them back to you tomorrow morning. Is that acceptable to you?”
“Yes,” said Fool. The farther away the skins were, the better. The thought of whatever they were having followed him from Hell was threatening, unsettling.
Bal Koth picked up the still-growing skins, carrying them carefully, and went to the door. Before she opened it, she turned and faced Fool. “This has been my honor, Thomas Fool,” she said and looked, for a brief glimpse, male again before her face seemed to shift and change, becoming female once more. She left, taking the skins and shutting the door behind her.
“How do you feel?” asked Benjamin, finally leaving the room’s corner.
“I’m tired,” said Fool. “I hurt.”
“Yes. Israfil should be here soon.”
As if in response to Benjamin’s statement, there was another knock at the door and, without waiting for an answer, Israfil pushed it open and entered. Her flames made the room shift and glimmer around them, the walls suddenly a moving kaleidoscope of light and gleam and shadow. In her hand, the angel held a bottle and a glass, both black with earth and silver with melting frost.
“The Gardens of Earth and Air have provided,” she said, opening the bottle and pouring out a splash of the liquid within it into the glass. Fool took it and smelled it, unsure of what he was being offered. There was a label on the bottle but it was stained to a brown illegibility, and any writing that had been on there was long gone. What was the liquid? It smelled sharp, moved like thick mud in the bottom of the glass, shards of ice glinting in it. What would it do?
Fuck it, he thought and drank, too tired to ultimately care what it was or what it did. It was cold in his mouth, tasted vaguely of mint and something else loosely herbal, and it left his throat feeling pleasantly warm after he swallowed. Within a few minutes, as the two angels watched him, the throbbing in his face drifted away to a distant mumble and his vision blurred. Despite himself, despite wanting to talk to the angels about the thing in the valley and the tunnel and the dead bodies and Bal Koth, Fool collapsed back into a thick and curdled sleep.
And then a timeless period later his flesh tore open and Fool was screaming again.
“Fool, Fool, be quiet,” said Mr. Tap, and Fool felt the muscles of his belly ripple and shift to form lips around the words. He threw back the sheet that covered him, finding that he was naked underneath it, and revealed the grinning tattoo again.
“I’m thinking of the longest words I know,” said Mr. Tap conversationally, “and I’m thinking of saying them one after another to make you scream, and each time you scream I’m going to take a bite from you.”
Fool didn’t reply. He clenched his lips, hoping that he would somehow get used to the pain, but clenching pulled his cheek and a savage bolt of new agony pulsed across him.
“So, Fool, what’s to tell?” asked Mr. Tap, asked his stomach wearing Mr. Tap’s face. When Fool didn’t reply immediately, Mr. Tap opened its mouth and then clamped down on the tattooed lip, on Fool’s skin, and bit, those surging teeth tearing into him. Fool screamed again.
“You taste as good today as yesterday, Fool, but you are a limited supply and if I continue to eat there will be nothing of you left, will there?” said Mr. Tap. “Perhaps, instead, I should speak the names of all the demons I know, most of them have names that twist and writhe as you say them. They can cause you lots of pain, Fool. Perhaps I could say my real name, the name given to me by my father. My name is long and painful but I’m sure you’d enjoy me speaking it through you. Shall I begin?”
&nb
sp; “No,” said Fool, and started to talk. He began with the Delegation meeting and the incident in the corridor after, which now felt like a day and a lifetime ago, and then went through the rest of his day. He told Mr. Tap about the body and the valley, and about the thing that had spied on him and the tunnel into which it had vanished. As he spoke, he was reminded again of something, although he still wasn’t sure what; when he described his injury, Mr. Tap laughed, the guffaws ripping through Fool like spasms. Finally, he told the demon about Benjamin’s comments and the way the hole had vanished, to which Mr. Tap said, “Typical angels, only seeing what they want to see.
“So. Is there anything else?”
“No,” said Fool, and the lie was smooth in his throat as he swallowed it down. What he had told Mr. Tap was true as far as it went, but he had omitted so much—the way the thing in the valley ran, the waking up of the member of the crowd, the ease with which Benjamin had hurt Wambwark, Mayall and his house, the shifting, interlocking colors on the walls of the tunnel seen in the moments before the clearing was lit to flame by Israfil, his followers and Bal Koth’s retrieval of them. Anything he thought he could leave out, he did, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear even to him. I’m lying about Heaven to Hell, while Hell demands a truth about Heaven, he thought abstractly, little confused Fool. He was lying because he didn’t trust Hell, lying because he wanted to keep some of Heaven’s secrets, although why he wasn’t sure, as he couldn’t see how Hell could damage Heaven by knowing the things he hadn’t told Mr. Tap. His job, his loyalty, was supposed to be toward Hell, yet he felt a need to…what? Protect Heaven? From what? Hell? They must already have protections in place; the accord, the truce between the two places, had existed for generations, for millennia. No, it wasn’t that, not exactly. It’s information, he thought, the currency of trade and power and truth and lie and rumor, information. They want it, I have it, so the more I keep the more power I may have.
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