The Devil's Detective (6 page)

“Now, can we start?”

Elderflower slipped out from between Fool and Balthazar and walked away. Fool watched as a look of confusion writhed across Balthazar's face, his skin darkening further, and even at a distance, Fool felt the heat
coming off him. The angel stared after Elderflower and then shot a look at Fool, saw that he was still being observed, and made a visible effort to calm himself. The color drained from his cheeks, his skin returning to the smooth pink of clean marble. On the other side of the large room, Adam made a noise somewhere between a cough and a summoning, and Balthazar and Fool followed.

Adam and Elderflower sat facing each other, a low table between them. Balthazar positioned himself behind Adam, and although he kept his wings folded in, he flexed his broad chest and shoulders so that they shuffled, the feathers rattling and punctuating the start of the meeting. The scribe and the archive took places on either side of Adam but at a distance, bookends around a space waiting to be filled. Adam smiled at Elderflower and said, “We find ourselves here again, old friend.”

“Yes,” said Elderflower. Fool didn't recognize Adam from previous delegations, and assumed that his last visit had been before Fool's emergence from Limbo.

“We shall take five this time,” said Adam.

“Ten,” replied Elderflower immediately. “The spaces beyond the wall grow full.”

“As you wish,” said Adam. “Ten. Do you have candidates?”

Elderflower did not speak. Instead, he waved a scurrying thing out of the shadows at the edge of the room, which darted forward and handed him a single sheet of paper. Elderflower handed the paper to Adam, who passed it without appearing to read it to one of his silent companions. The angel began to read the names aloud as the other, the scribe, held out a large book; it appeared in its hands as though it had been removed from between two flaps of air. None of the names meant anything to Fool, just as they hadn't during previous Elevations. They were the anonymous of Hell, farm or factory workers, Genevieves, barmen. No one special.

On the seventh name, Adam spoke. “No,” he said quietly.

Elderflower raised his eyebrows, but Adam merely smiled. Elderflower nodded, and then gestured at the shadows again. The scurrying thing darted out once more, carrying another piece of paper. Elderflower took it and passed it to Adam, who again handed it on to the archive, who in return gave Adam the first piece of paper. Adam handed it to the
scurrying thing, which scuttled back to the shadows, its clawed hands already crumpling the sheet. After a short moment, the archive started reading again, its voice dusty.

After the ten names had been read out without comment from Adam and recorded, Adam spoke again. “We will take another five of your choice if you agree to receiving one of ours.”

“No,” said Elderflower. “We have to take from outside. The flesh clamors at our walls.”

“Ten,” said Adam, still smiling.

“Perhaps,” said Elderflower. “We might require further concessions in addition to the extra Elevations.”

“Such as?”

Elderflower started to talk about some of the other trades currently being discussed between Heaven and Hell, outlining changes to various treaties and deals. Adam replied in the negative to almost all of them, and soon he and Elderflower were deep in discussion, speaking something close to another language as they discussed how the deals could be made to work. Fool tuned them out, looking instead at the Sorrowful beyond the windows. They were gray under the layers of dirt on the glass, reduced to shapes rather than people. He knew that Elderflower and the representatives of Heaven could trade for hours now, coming to agreements on the numbers taken and received, on the individuals Elevated or Lowered (
never Fallen, though
, he thought briefly,
never Fallen
), on the grease that would move the wheels of the give-and-take. They would repeat it every day for the next six days, until after seven days of trade and countertrade the delegation would return, those chosen would be Elevated, and Hell would welcome new inhabitants from Outside or Above. Sometimes, Fool would be asked to contribute to the discussions, to say whether he knew or had opinions on individuals, numbers, types of person, but mostly his presence there was, he suspected, to even up the numbers. He was Elderflower's Balthazar.

In the square, the Sorrowful watched, silent and still.

The train stank of unwashed flesh and sweat and dirt but they used it anyway, not having time to walk. They found a space in the second carriage,
managing to get one seat so that Summer could sit. It was touching, really, thought Fool, watching Gordie offer the seat to Summer and trying to pretend that it was merely a thing that he did as a colleague and not as a lover. Summer knew that Fool had guessed about their relationship, but it was clear that Gordie still thought Fool was in the dark about it. It was typical of the man's naïveté, thinking that Fool wouldn't see; they lived in tiny rooms in the building that also served as their offices. Fool heard them sometimes, in the night, heard the creak of the bed or the patter of their feet as they crept to each other's rooms. There were only the three of them, three Information Men for the whole of Hell, so working out who the creeping feet belonged to hadn't taxed his skills of deduction too much. Having a relationship with a fellow officer wasn't forbidden, but Summer and Gordie didn't want to reveal it for the same reason that Fool wouldn't talk about the fact that he liked his job; it paid to keep even the tiniest of happinesses secret.

“Have you got it with you?” Gordie asked suddenly. Fool didn't need to ask what he meant: the feather.

“Yes,” he said. It was in his inside pocket, safe. He carried it with him everywhere now, unwilling to let it go far from him. He liked the way it felt when his fingers trailed over it or when it brushed against his skin through the thin material, and he tried to ignore the joy in case it marked him out in the eyes of the Bureaucracy.

“Can—” Gordie began, and Fool interrupted.

“No. Not here, not among people.”
Can I see it again? Can Summer see it? Can I hold it again?
Fool could hear the queries as clearly as if Gordie had spoken them aloud.

“Oh,” Gordie replied, obviously upset. Summer touched his hand, briefly, and Fool understood that she was telling him,
It's okay, he's right, I'll see it later.

“It's from Balthazar, isn't it?” asked Gordie after a moment.

“Yes.”

“He's a warrior, one of the angels that patrolled the borders of Heaven when Hell was different, when there was a war. He's one of Heaven's greatest weapons.”

“Yes,” said Fool again, thinking of the heat of him, the flame that climbed from his hands. He touched the feather again, just for a fragment
of time, and felt its strength, its purity. Creatures of beauty that were weapons, blue flashes, dead bodies with no souls and eyes that pleaded from somewhere back in the past, from when they were alive and whole; it was too big, made no sense. The feather was cool against his fingertips, and he said, “We're here.” The train had brought them to Hell's battered, sordid heart.

The Houska was quiet. The train disgorged, along with Fool and Gordie and Summer, most of its night staff, the Genevieves and Marys and barmen and musicians joining the thieves and beggars who already lined the streets. The demons would start arriving soon, when full night had fallen. When the Houska had started to generate its sour, rank heat.

Summer had spent the day drawing the dead man, healing him in her sketch as best she could so that his face was whole and unmarked and recognizable. She and Gordie had then made as many copies of the sketch as they could, sitting at the small table in the kitchen; Fool had arrived back from the Elevation meeting and stood in the doorway as they worked and had spent a moment watching them, at the way they touched at the shoulders and hips, before turning away. This thing they had was new, delicate, and he had not wanted to intrude on their privacy. Instead, he had retreated from the room and then returned more noisily, and by the time he reached it they were sitting on opposite sides of the table and not looking at each other as they traced and copied.

Both Gordie and Summer now held sheaves of paper, a hundred sketched versions of the man; young, eyes whole, lips untorn, flat and lifeless and dead.
Would anyone look at them?
Fool wondered. Anyone see the man's image and recognize him, tell them who he was? Probably not, despite the number of people who even now filled the Houska's streets. The crowds moved about them, stragglers from the factories that were the Houska's daytime employers climbing wearily onto the train, taking the stink of their unwashed skin and the chemicals they worked with into the miasma of cheap perfume and sweat within the carriages.

The Houska was the last place Fool wanted to come, especially after a day with Elderflower and Adam and Balthazar, but he had no choice; if he was to investigate the body from Solomon Water, it had to be now. The tubes that had gathered during the day were all ones he could
legitimately ignore, stamp with his
DNI
mark, and send back to Elderflower. They were a normal day's story for Hell, rapes and assaults and robberies that the victims probably hadn't even reported but that Hell knew about anyway. Each stamp bit at him, a mark of his uselessness, but today he was grateful for them; he could not shift that battered face from his memory. The man's four teeth were still wrapped in a handkerchief, in Fool's drawer, waiting for the chance to put them back with the body and take it to the Flame Garden. At present, the body itself was wrapped back in its dirty sheet and was in the office basement, which was cold enough to act as a morgue and which had few rats. How long before something came through with orders to investigate that he could not ignore, though? Not long, he knew. Not long enough.

“We'll try the parlors first, before they get busy,” said Summer, and Fool nodded. They had arranged to meet later, to work the bars along the main street together for safety, but the parlors were slightly less dangerous and he hoped that the two of them would be okay. He didn't tell them to be careful as they walked off; there was little point. Neither was that long from being fished out of Limbo, but neither was stupid, and both had survived this far as Information Men. If anything, Summer was safer than Gordie, as she tended to back away from trouble, whereas he still thought that his office should mean something, should be respected, and tended to push back when challenged. There was no real advice or guidance he could give them, even if he wanted to, that he had not already passed on, and he could not go with them. There had been a message waiting for him at the office when he had returned earlier. He had been summoned; he had to visit the Man of Plants and Flowers.

The Man of Plants and Flowers lived in the center of the Houska in a building set back off one of the small side streets and that looked to be held together by the Man himself, by his growths. Its stonework was crumbling and most of the windows gaped, glassless and blind. Roots and vines squirmed out from between the bricks, displacing the mortar and covering the building's fascia. There was no door to the Man's home,
only a doorway whose wooden frame was torn and splintered, although the damage was old. The wood was pulpy with damp, not from outside but from within; the house breathed, and each exhalation was moist.

Inside, the building seemed to be made from angles that buckled and twisted as Fool looked at them. It was partly the lack of light, but also that the walls and floor and ceiling were covered in roots and stems and leaves; plants and flowers grew everywhere. Some had small petals, some had leaves, and some had vast, open cups lined with thick hairs and rimmed with heavy, fibrous stems. “Most of me is safe,” the Man had warned Fool during an earlier visit, “but parts of me are not. Don't approach the openmouthed ones, Fool, not ever.” On another visit Fool had seen one of the cups suddenly lunge and close around a scuttling thing as it ran past, and the near-human scream that the thing made, choking off with a sizzle like burning hair, made him glad he had heeded the Man's advice. Sometimes the thick vines that covered the floor moved languidly, wriggling, coiling and uncoiling, as he passed; he tried not to tread on them. In some places, roots emerged from the plants and disappeared into the stone of the walls, and Fool thought that the stone itself looked desiccated around the roots, friable and brittle, as though he could crumble it with the least pressure.

The Man lived in the room farthest back from the door; the part of the Man that usually spoke to Fool did, anyway. Fool walked cautiously along the hallway, making sure that he didn't go near the open cups as he went. He didn't bother to call to the Man, who had known Fool intended to respond to the summons as soon as Fool had spoken the words aloud back in the office. It was what the Man did, was why Fool was here; the Man knew things. He stretched across great swathes of Hell, and he saw and he heard, and sometimes he told Fool things. The Man very rarely allowed Fool to visit, so his summoning must mean something.
Hopeful Fool
, Fool thought as he reached the doorway to the Man's room. Even before he stepped through, the Man was calling out, “Hello, my friend! The demon killer arrives!”

When Fool had first visited the Man of Plants and Flowers, he was still recognizably human, although even then his corpulent shape was being lost to the mass of growths. Before he took to his current existence, he must have been vastly fat; on that first visit, the rolling topography
of his belly, with its pale and hairless stretched skin, had bulged out through the thin covering of leaves and stalks and mosses like the lips of some endlessly flapping mouth. The Man's arms had still had movement then; now they were thick cables of greenery, held out from his sides and clinging to the walls, motionless and cruciform. His voice had sounded human then, but now it did not.