The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  Balthazar pushed Fool, none too gently, toward the door. The angel was glowing a fiery red, his skin like burnished bronze reflecting nearby pyres, and he was grinning broadly, his teeth showing. He was enjoying himself, his arm and flame now indistinguishable from each other, an incandescent blur tearing at the sky and keeping them safe. His eyes, Fool saw, were blood-red orbs without pupil or sclera. Despite his beauty, he was more terrifying than anything Fool had seen, and when the angel turned his gaze on him and said, “Move,” Fool almost ran for the door.

  By the time Adam and Elderflower were seated around the table, attendants waiting patiently behind them, demons were moving among the crowd and stopping the stone-throwing. Fool watched through the grimy windows, only barely listening to the discussions beginning behind him, as the mass of humanity outside the building shifted and roiled. Signs appeared and disappeared, emerging and then dropping as a demon approached, its passage visible as an odd wake that reminded Fool of the movement of the swimming things in Solomon Water that could be seen only as a disturbance on the water’s surface. Some of them had a slogan he was getting used to, We Deserve Better, but others had ones he hadn’t seen before: Help Us and Take Us Up. One that he didn’t see clearly had a single word printed upon it, and for a moment he was convinced it had said simply Fool before dismissing it as a stupid notion.

  “They are restive,” said Balthazar. He had faded back to his usual, paler skin tone and his eyes were almost human again.

  “You sound impressed,” said Fool.

  “Impressed? Yes. They are no longer acting like cattle but are acting like humans, fighting against evil as God intended them to.” Behind them, the litany of names being accepted and refused was soft in Fool’s ears, like water spilling into thick dust.

  “What do you do next in your investigation?” asked Balthazar. For the first time, his tone was almost pleasant, as though Fool were, if not an equal, then at least some more interesting kind of inferior.

  “I go to see the Man,” said Fool, “to see if he reaches as far as the building we were at today. He may have seen something.”

  “And if he has, he will tell you?”

  “I don’t know. He may, if he finds it amusing or I have something to trade. I’ll take your feather; he may bargain with me for it.”

  “And this is how your investigations usually work?”

  “No,” said Fool. “Usually no one cares about the dead.”

  “Even you?”

  “Even me,” said Fool, ashamed at the truth. “There are so many of them, so much violence and misery, so many crimes that we can’t solve them all, so we end up solving none of them. I end up solving none of them.”

  “And this one? It’s different?”

  “This one? Yes. I mean no, it’s no different, not really, but I’m different. I’ll solve it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if not me,” said Fool, “who else?”

  “We’re finished,” said Elderflower loudly from behind them. He had not asked Fool a single question during this discussion. As Fool turned to go, Balthazar grinned at him, showing his teeth again, and said, “Why, Fool, you should beware. You are becoming Hell’s hero.”

  “No,” said Fool.

  “Oh yes,” said Balthazar. “I come from Heaven, Fool, and Heaven is full of heroes. I have learned to recognize them.”

  Heroic Fool, thought Fool as Balthazar went to Adam, little heroic stupid Fool.

  PART TWO

  TRAILS

  15

  After the delegation had finished their discussions Fool updated Elderflower, which took a long time. The small man asked a large number of questions, picking over every aspect of the investigation and of what the delegation had done and said. Fool was jittery, wanting to be gone, aware that the day was crumpling into night and that his office would already be full of canisters that would need stamping with DNI and sending back to wherever they had come from before he could visit the Man and update him, amuse him, with the information about Diamond and ask if he had heard anything more. He was exhausted, and wondered when he had last slept in his bed. He had dozed on the train, he remembered, and before that in Gordie’s room, but in his bed? Yesterday? Two days ago?

  Elderflower eventually let Fool go, saying, “You seem eager to move, Thomas. Being noticed has given you energy.”

  “I have something to do,” replied Fool, “in relation to the murders, the blue ribbons, I mean. I have an idea, a …” He realized that he didn’t know how to describe what he was trying to do, had never really done it before. He had a single piece of information, less than that, really, more a hope of information, and it had laid a path out before him.

  “I’m following a trail,” he said eventually. “There are signs being left, like pieces of a puzzle, a guess, each one a few steps farther on than the last, and it might lead somewhere. I don’t know.”

  “You’re doing well, Thomas,” said Elderflower. “You are being watched with interest. Rhakshasas passes his compliments, and instructs me to tell you he awaits your report with interest. The archdeacons meet later, and they require your attendance. This is a new thing for Hell, this thing that you are doing. You should be proud.”

  “Yes,” said Fool noncommittally. The path, the trail, was all he cared about now, about where it would take him. He was being led, was following something’s lead, and he was eager to see where he ended up.

  “Go, Thomas, go,” said Elderflower. “Be an Information Man.”

  The Man’s house looked even more rotten somehow, damper and more warped. Fool walked along the path to the doorway, opening blackly before him, and heard the chittering things inside squawk his approach.

  He had returned to his office after leaving Elderflower and collected the report from the last body’s Questioning. It was briefer than the report Morgan had done on the body from the Orphanage, simply reading:

  Similar, although the wounds were cleaner. The murderer used their bare hands, there were no claw marks or slices, and it told me nothing but a hint that the poor child was killed by a client, but not one that he had met before. The soul is gone.

  It was what Fool had expected, yet he was still a little disappointed that Morgan had found nothing for him, no new things that could open up more paths. No more leads.

  He had left Summer sorting through the canisters. There was a pile of them, and more had fallen out of the tube’s spitting maw while he read the report, more descriptions of battery and rape and theft and a hundred other things that would never be addressed. It was as he left the office, the feather thrust in its usual place deep inside his pocket, that Summer called out, “Fool, this one’s different!”

  She was holding a thin sheet out to him, its ends curling back on themselves from being inside the canister. He took it from her and glanced at it, then read it more carefully. For the first time in his duty as an Information Men in Hell, a tube’s contents were not about demons abusing humans, but the other way around; a group of humans had set upon one of Hell’s smaller demons, itself little more than a slave of the Houska, and beaten it to death. It had been found in an alleyway on the Houska’s outskirts at the beginning of evening, twisted and bloody and almost unrecognizable, according to the brief report.

  “Was the ribbon blue?” Fool asked.

  “No,” said Summer, “red like all the others.”

  “Then it gets treated like all the others,” said Fool and very carefully, very slowly, stamped it DNI and placed it back in its canister; the canister he placed into the pipe in the corner of the room, and they watched as, with a pneumatic whoosh, it was sucked away. Fool found that he was smiling; so was Summer.

  The streets were quiet; it was still early enough that the evening hadn’t flowered fully yet, the petals of fear and aggression and subservience still curled closed around themselves. Knots of humans were dotted here and there, some moving to or from the train routes, others heading to the Houska’s bars and clubs. Outside one
bar, a larger group of humans, filthy from working in one of Hell’s factories, were drinking. As Fool passed, they saw him and, for some reason, cheered.

  The Man of Plants and Flowers’ house was lit from within, a pale glow shimmering in most of the windows and through the gaping doorway. Fool had never come to the Man’s house uninvited before, and although he expected that the Man knew he was coming, he was still wary. Fool, despite having the feather and being entertaining to the Man, didn’t overestimate his value; he was a small thing that had achieved the dubious honor of being noticed by the Man and others in Hell’s hierarchies, nothing more. He made sure that his holster was only loosely strapped closed and that the feather was deep in a pocket, and went in.

  The glow was stronger inside, wavering bright to dim and to bright again like a phosphorescent heartbeat. “Hello?” called Fool, treading cautiously over the corded vines that straggled across the floor. They were writhing slightly, clenching and shuddering, and he made sure that he didn’t step on them. The Man’s mouths opened and closed rhythmically, dipping and swaying and jerking. One closed around Fool’s trouser cuff but immediately opened and let it go, leaving a powdery green streak where it had been. Flying things swooped in the air about him, chittering, as he went along the hallway and to the entrance of the room where the Man was most present.

  The glow was brightest here, pulsing lazily along the Man’s outstretched limbs from the central mass of him nestled in the corner. Everything in the room was shaking, shuddering, so that the air was filled with rustling and the noise of fronds rubbing against fronds. Something within the mass moved, shifting around, and then spasmed. The Man’s tendrils writhed violently for a second, several of them jerking away from the walls and waving in the air before falling to the floor. Leaves all along the Man’s many limbs curled into clenched balls and then seemed to relax. One final pulse of light danced about the room and the Man sighed, long and slow.

  Fool waited; he might come to the house without an invitation, but entering the room without the Man’s permission was a step beyond where he was prepared to go. He wasn’t sure what he had just seen, and had no idea what mood the Man might be in. Was that the Man expanding somehow? Growing into a new place? Or had, somewhere, a part of him been burned or trampled? Fool suddenly wondered about the farmland, about the scrubby crops that grew there, and whether they were also a part of the Man. Did he feel himself harvested and resown, the roots churned into the dry earth as the stems were reaped? Or was that one of the areas he had told Fool he had little access to? There was grass at the edges of the Flame Garden, Fool suddenly remembered; were they the Man, or was the heat too great, was the burning at the grassland’s edge too much to bear? Fool supposed he’d never know, caught a sense in that moment of just how far from human the Man had traveled, how sheerly other he had become, and wondered how to communicate any of this to the archdeacons, to Rhakshasas. Even demons were understandable, quantifiable, had a logic across the species despite the individual differences, the variations in size and shape and look and history, but the Man had become something unique in all of Hell.

  “Fool?” said the Man, and his voice was low.

  “I’m here,” said Fool.

  “Come in,” said the Man, still quiet. His voice sounded different, breathy and hoarse. Fool entered the room, again stepping over the parts of the Man that lay strewn around the floor. Most were motionless, although one or two were moving slightly, in tiny jerks and contractions. As Fool made his way to the center of the room, the Man’s various branches and leaves that wound their way all around the room began to move more, lifting themselves from the floor. The Man’s mouths opened and when he spoke next, his voice was stronger.

  “Well, Fool. Am I to be entertained?”

  “No,” said Fool, uncomfortably, “questioned.”

  There was a pause, during which the Man’s limbs continued to move, stretching and then curling. It reminded Fool, absurdly, of the movement he made when he awoke sometimes, stretching his arms out and then wrapping them back in.

  “Well, Fool?” said the Man eventually.

  “The building where the latest body was found,” said Fool. He didn’t explain which of Hell’s many bodies he was talking about, assuming that the Man would know, would have been tracking him all day.

  “Yes?”

  “You can see it? You’re around it, I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you see that night? Did you see the thing that killed the Genevieve?”

  “Yes,” said the Man, still moving around Fool. Flying things were swooping and chirping above Fool’s head, landing on the Man and taking off again. One alighted on the edge of an open mouth, its wings brushing against the barbs that lined the mouth’s lips. A moment later, it took off, unmolested.

  “What was it?”

  “Something terrible, Fool,” said the Man. “Something shrouded in darkness and old, something that lives at the heart of Hell. It was too terrible to look at fully, Fool, clothed in flame and blood, and it took that boy from the street and tore him to pieces.”

  “Is that it?” said Fool, frustrated. “You didn’t see anything else, something that might help me find it? Catch it?” Little optimistic Fool, he thought. Little foolish optimistic Fool.

  “You intend to catch it?”

  “Yes,” said Fool. “I’ll catch whatever’s doing these killings and … and …” He tailed off. And what? Tell Elderflower and hope that he did something? Tell Rhakshasas and the other demons of the court and hope that they acted? Write it into a canister and send it up the pneumatic pipe in his office to wherever it was they went, to be read by whoever it was that read them?

  “Have faith, Fool,” said the Man. “Keep the feather close and keep pushing on. You are engaged in a noble cause, trying to find the murderer of those poor dead children. You will, I am sure, prevail.”

  “How, when I have nothing to go on, no trails to follow?”

  “It was an old thing, Fool,” said the Man. “Where do the old things live, here in Hell? Perhaps you could start there.”

  “They live in the walled section,” said Fool, thinking, Yes. Yes, he said that before, to look to the highest point. They live on the hill looking down upon us, the elders and the things that no longer wish to be seen. They live in Crow Heights.

  16

  “Elderflower is wrong,” said Rhakshasas. Around him, the other archdeacons nodded and sounded assent.

  “You should not be proud,” continued Rhakshasas. “There is no pride in what you do. You are a grub, wriggling through Hell’s shit, blind and lost.”

  “Yes,” said Fool, thinking, No.

  “You are a worm, set to quest where we send you. Set to investigate the Man. Tell us what you have found.” Rhakshasas leaned forward over the table, the intestines tautening around him. A noise like the buzzing of flies filled the air, metallic and hot. One of the other archdeacons gleamed blackly, its mouth open and its tongue emerging in a long, writhing wave. The air above it was hazy and seemed full of things that Fool could not quite see, swooping and darting.

  “He is strong, and his soul is spread throughout the parts of himself,” Fool said. “Destroying the parts of him doesn’t destroy all of him. I think it’s a deliberate thing he’s done, somehow.”

  “Yes,” said one of the other demons, something nominally female with strings of what looked like excrement, dried and crumbling, for hair. “It’s an old magic he’s found. He has a body, though. Flesh. Dreams. He is not invulnerable.”

  “I don’t know,” said Fool, thinking about the skeletons he had seen in the tangles of foliage to the rear of the property, about the way the Man moved and his speed, about the way his pale skin had gradually been lost to view in the room so that now there was only the mass of greenery in one corner, pressed back against the house’s wall. “I mean, yes, I think there’s still some flesh, that his center is still in the house. He must have a heart, I suppose, but he’s protecte
d to the front and back.”

  “Does he dream?”

  Who had asked that? Fool couldn’t tell; it was simply another voice from the table in front of him, all the archdeacons leaning forward now, clothed in flesh and dung and mud and fire and smoke, all peering at him. Dreams, they always wanted dreams and fear; it was the demons’ food, chewed out of the flesh like marrow sucked from bones. Did the Man dream? Fool remembered the way the Man had shivered as he withdrew the angel’s feather from one of his mouths. Had that been an orgasm? Was that a dream as well, a dream made flesh for one brief moment? “Yes,” he said, after a moment, “I think he does. He dreams of Hell burning, changing. Of chaos. Of pleasure.”

  “Does he?” asked Rhakshasas, and the entrails around him tightened and pulsed, angry.

  “Pleasure,” said another of the archdeacons. “It thinks it is allowed pleasure? It dares to dream of pleasure? It cannot be allowed. It cannot.”

  It, Fool noticed, not he. The Man was so far past what the archdeacons understood now that he wasn’t even human enough to have a gender. There was a rumbling from the room, from all around him now, as the rulers of Hell considered the Man. One of them began to froth at the mouth, spitting liquid out that hissed and sizzled where it landed, before collapsing from the table and thrashing arms and legs that were little more than tentacles around and making a noise like a badly warping kettle boiling dry. The others ignored it, focusing on Fool. Their attention had weight, burned his skin in prickles as though he’d thrust his hand into a nest of faintly poisonous plants or slightly acidic water.

  “And the murders, Fool? What of the murders?”

  “They happen,” said Fool. “The dead have their souls eaten.”

  Fool’s statement cut through the noise. The archdeacons must have known, he thought; they must, as they wrote the parchments that Elderflower sent him and they were who Elderflower reported to, and he wondered why it bothered them to hear it before realizing; they were the only things with anything like enough power to consume a whole soul in all of Hell, yet they were not responsible for these deaths. They’re worried, thought Fool suddenly. They’re worried because they’re unsure. And I know they’re worried because I’m getting better at seeing through the surface and glimpsing the things beneath.