by Tad Williams
Meanwhile, there are also a few odd souls from both sides who’ve dropped out of the game altogether: tweeners and renegades. Most of them sell information to survive and so most of them have some kind of price on their heads. We advocates deal with them, from time to time. I even like some of them in a guarded sort of way.
Put it all together and it’s more than a bit like the Cold War used to be-deadly dangerous but invisible to most of the living, and we’re all expected to play our part in the struggle. My job is to make certain that as many souls as possible make it into Heaven, and like my friend Sam I’m pretty good at what I do, which is one reason why, even though my attitude sucks, my bosses mostly leave me alone.
Another reason, as I was about to discover, was that even the big boys up at the House don’t know everything. That was a lesson I would rather not have learned.
So there I was, standing in the Outside version of Edward L. Walker’s driveway while various heavenly and infernal minions fresh in from headquarters made themselves useful (or at least busy). Some were drawing glittering golden lines in the air or scrying with instruments of black glass. Grasswax gave me a look of quite impressive hatred from his place at the center of it all, then snatched a small, sticky-looking thing out of the air, which I assumed was Hell’s version of Walker’s guardian angel, and carried it to one side where the two of them proceeded to enjoy a spirited conversation-“spirited” meaning that Grasswax shook the Hell-minion around like someone trying to flick snot off his finger as the minion squealed out its innocence.
“He was here, Master, he was here! We was with him when he died!”
“Then where is he?” Grasswax stared at the underling until it started to steam like an abalone on a hot stone.
“We doesn’t know! We is confused!”
“Curse you. I’ll have to call Scorchscar.” The prosecutor produced a handful of fire and held it up before his face and said, “Prosecutor to Prosecutor’s Office, put me through to the inquisitor immediately.” He scowled at me, his cheek-holes pulsing wetly. The weird thing was, Grasswax was more scared than he was acting, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. Not that I’m an expert on infernal psychology. “By the Master’s hot, pimpled arse-I’ll be stuck here for hours!” he snarled at me. “This is all your fault somehow, you fucking little cloud-jockey, and I’ll make you pay for it. Don’t you try to sneak off!”
I turned away with the prosecutor’s charming voice still ringing in my ears: I had my own call to make. Just because the house in old Palo Alto was now so full of shining angelic presences that it looked like a Christmas display didn’t mean I could assume everybody knew who needed to. I took out my phone, which in its Outside form appeared as a rod of silvery light. A moment later Temuel was in front of me, although nobody else could see him or hear him.
“You’re joking, right?” he said when I told him the situation, but the Mule didn’t sound quite as dumbfounded as I would have expected. “No? Then I’ll get a fixer out there right away.” Then the magnitude of it apparently began to set in. “This is bad, you know. This is very, very bad, Doloriel. Hang tight and don’t say anything to the Opposition.”
“Not even, ‘Let go of my balls?’ Because I can promise you, Grasswax is squeezing pretty hard at the moment.”
“Just do your job.” And that was all. He was gone. But if Temuel hadn’t known about the missing soul then where had all these heavenly functionaries come from? Not to mention all the nasty little things from the Opposition side? I put the question away for later, because just then a new, extra-shiny Zipper flared beside me and the Mule’s fixer appeared.
Another quick note: “Fixer” is actually a sort of job description. They’re really called “ministers”-not the priest kind but more like a government minister. You hardly ever see one. You hardly ever want to see one. Their job is to quickly remove the “fuck” from “fuck-up”, and nobody wants to be involved in one of those situations.
I already was, of course. A really big one, from the looks of it. I had a feeling it was going to be a long time until I saw my apartment again.
The fixer/minister looked a bit like a plague doctor from the seventeenth century, in long white robes and a strange white mask that might have represented a novelty drinking bird or a Winnie-the-Pooh Heffalump. He also may not have had any feet under those robes, but it was hard to see because he kind of glowed down at the bottom. He also moved like someone who knew no hurry.
He spent a long time staring at the car and the corpse, then at last turned to me. “You Are the Advocate?” He even talked with audible capitals.
“Yes, Minister.”
“Tell Us What You Know.“
I did, as concisely as I could, without guesses or assumptions. I had met one of these guys before (that’s another story) and knew that the last thing you wanted to do was waste their time. The one I met before had been half a whim away from demoting me all the way to the Bless the Beasts Division, where I’d be watching over depressed field mice, and that case hadn’t been anywhere near this serious.
I had just finished my story when another light glimmered in the air, this one dull and smoky-red, and someone else stepped through-or some several, to be precise: a woman and two men, although all those terms fall very far short, descriptively speaking. My friend Sweetheart is about the size of an Alaskan bear but these two guys could have been his bigger brothers. Both had necks wider than my chest and sported the dead gray skin common among the less pain-sensitive minions of Hell, as well as facial expressions that suggested a hammer-blow on the head would barely get their attention. In short, they had the look of argument-winners-the “you and what army?” kind of arguments.
The female demon, though, was something else. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like her outside of a few fetish magazines (professional research only, of course). She was tiny, for one thing, especially standing between those two bonebreakers, and she was also astonishingly lovely by any normal standard, with straight white-blonde hair, skin as pale as milk, and long, stockinged legs prominently displayed by a schoolgirl miniskirt. She looked like Wonderland’s Alice as dressed for success by a committee of manga-reading Japanese businessmen. I didn’t expect to see one of the Opposition’s heavy hitters looking so mainstream. Usually they’re big on horns and fangs and weird, crusty skin.
As she got closer she only got more gorgeous, although now it was plain that the irises of her eyes were the color of…well, of something really red. (I was going to say “blood” but that’s a bit of a cliche already, isn’t it? But that’s certainly what color they were-like big shiny drops of the stuff.)
“What piece of shit are you handing me this time, Grasswax?” she asked as she reached us. She might have had the trace of an older accent, but mostly she sounded like Hayley Mills, one of those sweet, super-plummy upper class English voices-“Oh, Mummy, I’ve lost my pony and I’m ever so weepy about it!” But Grasswax positively flinched when he saw her. Oh, my goodness yes, she was cute, but she was also the scariest thing I’d run into lately, that was for sure. This she-thing was one of the nobility of Hell, after all, so she had to be quite a few notches above me on even the most generous comparative organization chart.
The fixer from our side gave her a little nod of respect. “Countess.”
She barely glanced back at him. “Minister.”
She walked past me as if I wasn’t there and pulled Grasswax aside. From the look on his face I guessed she wasn’t going to be asking him the whereabouts of a good coffee bar. I was still staring as she led him away, so much so that the fixer had to make a throat-clearing noise.
“Angel Doloriel?”
It was hard to turn away from her, even when the competition was an impatient, high-ranking angel. The other side’s fixer was a small, slender woman, but something about the way she walked was mesmerizing. You know the chesty way some small dogs have that shows they think they’re really big dogs? The Countess, whoever and whatever she wa
s, might dress like a schoolgirl but she walked like a very confident stripper.
No, classier. Like a prima ballerina. Yeah, a ballerina from Hell.
“Sorry, Minister. I was…thinking.”
“I Hope I’m Not Taking Too Much Of Your Valuable Time, Doloriel.” Now that I could see him closer up it became clear that the minister wasn’t exactly normal himself. For one thing, unlike most higher angels, the fixer had eyes, but they were almost entirely white except for a pinprick of black at the center, which, with the mask, made it a little hard to tell where he was looking. The other thing was that he had at least six or seven fingers on each white-gloved hand. I couldn’t help wondering what that was about.
“Not at all. Sorry.” I turned my back on the prosecutor and his boss so I could concentrate on my superior. The beautiful little Countess was a demon, I reminded myself-a powerful one. Infernal nobility can appear in any form they choose to, but what was inside that yummy exterior was certain to be extremely ugly. More important, personal experience told me that each and every one of Hell’s residents would tear me into little pieces if I let my guard down. No matter what they looked like, they were all monsters of corruption. “What can I tell you, Minister?”
“Repeat Once More All That Happened From The Moment You Received The Call,” he demanded.
Under his strangely unemotional gaze I went back over everything I could remember. I didn’t say anything about Sam and his trainee, but I did mention I had seen Grasswax just the day before on another case.
“And You Are Certain You Arrived Here Before The Prosecutor Did?” The beak of his mask swung toward me as if sniffing for truthfulness. “Quite Certain?”
“You don’t think Grasswax would actually do something that crazy, do you?” I wondered whether I should mention again how angry the prosecutor had seemed to be about the missing soul. Did Grasswax have a guilty conscience? “How? How would he even have pulled it off?”
“We Couldn’t Say.” The minister made a sniffing, offended noise. “But If You Are Saying He Couldn’t Possibly Have Managed It, Then Your Role In The Matter Becomes Even More Significant.”
Oh, no. No way I was going to get rolled up for something I didn’t do. “I’m not saying any such thing, Minister. I had nothing to do with any of it. I was as surprised as you are.”
“Really? Then You Might Be Aware We Are Not Particularly Surprised.” He shook his snouted head, looking more than ever like a very creepy child’s imaginary friend. “We Feared It Might Come To This.”
I had no idea what he meant and told him so.
“We Have Heard Enough From You To Make Our Report, Angel Doloriel,” was all he said. “You May Go. God Loves You.”
Most of the regulars had drifted into The Compasses by the time I made it back, although there was still no sign of Sam or his sidekick. I had stopped at Morton’s Cafe to eat an early dinner and watch the shadows lengthen across downtown as the sun stopped trying to light the darker bits of San Judas and eventually gave up and went to bed. Now the lights of downtown and the big black empty of the harbor filled the windows.
“Are you all right?” Monica asked when she saw me. “I was worried about you.” She had sobered up a bit, so maybe she was telling the truth. “Was that guy’s soul really missing?”
“You heard about it already?”
“Of course we did. Somebody called in a minister and that never stays secret long. Alice at the office said everybody in the city’s talking about it!” Which meant everybody in the city with wings and horns, anyway, although the Walker suicide was probably going to draw quite a bit of earthly attention as well. “What was it like?”
I shrugged. “What was it like? Like nothing. They pulled out the corpse but the important part of the guy just wasn’t there.”
“Oooh.” Monica made a face of sympathetic worry. “How freaky!”
Jimmy the Table and Sweetheart and some of the others made their way over. The one good side of the whole nasty mess was that for at least one night I didn’t have to pay for my own drinks.
“Do you think the Other Side did it?” Monica asked. “Are they trying to provoke something?”
“Jeez, how should I know? They sent in one of their own fixers quick enough. Female, called the Countess?”
Jimmy the Table let out a shrill laugh. “I heard about that bitch! They said she wore a necklace of human balls to the company Christmas party!”
“I don’t think the Opposition celebrates Christmas, darling,” Sweetheart gently told him.
“Some party, then-don’t matter.” Jimmy was very pleased to be the one with information. “Anyway, if they put her in charge, that’s some serious shit. You ask anyone who knows-the Countess is a definite bad ass. You remember Zippy? Zippoo-whatever?”
“Zepuriel,” said Sweetheart. “The one with the cute bottom?”
“Whatever,” said Jimmy, refusing for once to be baited. “Why do you think he transferred out of the advocates back to Painting Rainbows Division or wherever he wound up? He met up with her on a job, and she ripped him up so bad he never got over it.”
“You are entirely full of shit,” said Walter Sanders from behind his beer in the corner. “Never happened.”
“Screw you, I was there!” said Jimmy, and half a minute later they had forgotten all about the rest of us and were happily insulting each other in a way that an outsider would think was deadly serious. Some combination of the Table, Walter Sanders, and young Elvis were always arguing about some stupid thing, but I didn’t mind. You spend a lot of time passing time when you’ve got Eternity on the clock.
“I’ve heard of her,” Monica told me when the rest of the Whole Sick Choir had finally eddied away. “Jimmy’s right about one thing-everything I’ve heard about that bitch is bad news.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. Actually, I couldn’t stop thinking about Hell’s fixer and her slender pale legs and fairy-tale face. Even for the most confirmed Hell-haters among us heavenly sorts, it’s hard to remember sometimes what’s underneath the exterior if the bodywork is good enough. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to admit that to Monica. “I’m done with it. Filed my report with the minister and another one with the Mule. And if this missing-soul thing is real, it’s way out of our league, anyway. I doubt any of us will ever hear about it again.”
It’s amazing the stupid things I say sometimes. I mean, you could start an entire branch of scientific research about the stuff I say that gets proved wrong while I’m still busy saying it. Because less than an hour later, Sam and young Clarence walked in, which at the time I thought was a very good thing, because Monica and I were sharing a table and I was having trouble remembering why we stopped doing those things we used to do together. Yes, I’d had a few. Anyway, Sam and his pup angel walked in, and I took one look at young Clarence and knew I didn’t want to hear it. He had that excited-rookie look on his face-the kind of thing that never brings anyone any good. At the cheap end it only steals a few priceless hours of your immortal life, but the cost can and often does go much higher.
“You remember Grasswax the prosecutor?” Clarence asked.
“Just saw him a few hours ago. In fact, I see more of him these days than I do you guys. What of it?”
Clarence’s eyes were big. “He’s dead.”
I stared at him and wondered if I had ever been that new. “Nobody dies, kid. At least nobody like us. You mean his body got killed?”
The rookie blushed. “I guess so.”
Like our side, the bad guys hand out mortal forms to those who do their earthly work; if lost to accident or actual malice those bodies can be replaced. But trust me-getting killed can still be extremely unpleasant, even when you don’t permanently die from it. I turned back to Sam, who seemed unusually grim. “I just saw the red bastard an hour or two ago. Is this real?”
“Real and real bad,” Sam said, nodding. “And real messy, apparently-they found him at the scene of that last death, the weird one with
the vanishing soul everyone’s losing their shit about. We just got interrogated by a minister because we won that Martino case against him yesterday.”
Which explained where Sam and the rookie had been, at least for the later part of the day. I realized I still hadn’t told Sam what Temuel had said about the kid, but I didn’t want to get distracted now. “Oh, man,” I said, “Grasswax got killed at the Walker house? It must have happened right after I left.”
“Then I’m surprised you haven’t been questioned about it yet, actually.” Sam’s tone was a little odd, but I put it down to the circumstances. Not that one of the Opposition getting rubbed out was unheard of, but it wasn’t common, and on top of the inexplicable case of Edward Lynes Walker, it had clearly been a day for strange stuff.
“I already got put through the mill on the suicide guy, so maybe they don’t need…” was all I had time to say before I felt a presence in my head, a dazzle of power and a sounding ring like trumpets.
Angel Doloriel, You Are Summoned, it said. Come With All Haste.
Come where? Why, back to the Walker house in Palo Alto. Scene of the crime.
In fact, the scene of both crimes, now that I thought about it.
four
the bloody net
I liked my situation less and less by the moment-in fact, the whole thing stank. Why was I being called back to the Walker house? If my bosses wanted to quiz me beyond what the fixer/minister had already done, why not just summon me to Heaven? Temuel had called me in for nothing more important than chatting about young Clarence, so something like this obviously rated a visit to the House.
Another question that was still itching me: Who had called in the shock troops so quickly? As soon as Edward Walker’s soul turned up missing, worker bees from both sides had descended on the scene before either Grasswax or I could check in with our bosses-or at least that was how it had looked. My team and the Opposition are both very into procedure, as I had learned many times to my sorrow. What happened this time?
