The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “Will it work?” asked Gordie and his voice was low and dead.

  “Maybe. I hope so.”

  Fool went back into the corridor, gesturing Gordie to follow him. They went back to the foyer, fighting their way through the thickening flow of administrators and clerks. Walking seemed to be a problem, one foot falling not in front of the other but loosely, to the side, the strength going from his ankles and his knees locking and unlocking in irregular bursts. He leaned against the wall as the horns sounded again, louder this time, loud enough so that the building itself seemed to rattle and shiver. Or was that him? he wondered. Was it him rattling and shivering, his body jittering along the lines of his pain and exhaustion?

  They arrived at the foyer and pushed through the throng. The demon behind the desk had gone and had been replaced by a large column of smoke with something solid but unidentifiable at its center, strings of black vapor stretching out from it to point or gesture as other demons approached the desk with questions or requests. Fool paused, catching his breath, buffeted by the passing demons, and then set off again, heading for the doors.

  Halfway across the floor, Fool realized that something was happening. The clerks and scribes and archivists, all the little things, had stopped and were craning their heads around, some pressing themselves up against the windows and peering up. The foyer fell silent and Fool heard the horns for a third time. One of the demons whimpered as the outside visible beyond the windows blackened with descending figures. Fool felt dizzy, his arm and stomach burning, the world pitching around him, and as the first of the Estedea landed in Hell’s streets he collapsed to the floor and into a blackness as deep as Solomon Water.

  —

  When he awoke, Fool found himself propped against a wall in one of Assemblies House’s smaller offices. Gordie was leaning against the wall opposite, knees drawn up and head down, and all around them were demons, small and large, silent and still. There was little light in the room and the air was thick with dust and sweat and the sour exhalations of the mass of demons.

  Distantly, Fool could hear shouting and a terrible flapping sound, and then a heavy crash. The building shook and dust shivered out of old cracks that lined the ceiling.

  Fool tried to move and lean away from the wall, but something pushed on him and held him back as a wave of dull, intense pain coiled inside his belly. Looking down, he saw a hand in the center of his chest, long-fingered and demonic, the arm behind it scrawny and ropey with veins and scrappy muscle.

  A demon crouched over Fool, holding his injured arm and trying to feed. Fool jerked away. The demon moved without looking around, reaching out and grasping Fool’s elbow and not letting go. Its grip was strong, holding Fool’s arm in place despite his best efforts to draw it away, and then he thought, An arm holding my elbow, a hand in my chest, a hand holding my wrist, and another hand there by its face on my skin. It has four arms.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. He’d spent the past week or so in a place of perfect shapes, and this distortion of the normality he’d become used to was jarring.

  You were attacked by a man made of fucking shrubbery, he thought. Nothing should surprise you anymore! The demon, finally acknowledging Fool, looked around at him. Its face was smooth, mouthless, had only eyes and two rapidly expanding and contracting slits for nostrils, and it was not feeding on him.

  It was inspecting the stitches that now sealed closed the holes in his wrist.

  “They fixed you,” said Gordie. When Fool looked at his friend, he hadn’t moved, had spoken down between his legs so that the sound was muffled and flat. “While you were unconscious. They stitched you and bandaged you. Me too.”

  As Gordie spoke the demon started to wrap Fool’s lower arm in a white bandage, the dressing tight but not uncomfortable, pinning it at the wrist and just below the elbow to keep the material in place. Finished, it nodded at Fool and then moved away. It had feet attached directly to its waist, no legs, and its arms were longer than its torso, so that it knuckled across the floor and into the shadows.

  “Where are we? What’s happening?” asked Fool.

  “Why didn’t we ever notice?” asked Gordie, apparently ignoring Fool’s question.

  “Notice?”

  “The smell,” Gordie replied. “It stinks here.”

  He was right, it did, not just in the room but in all of Hell, it stank of fear and violence and blood and death and rottenness and vomit and shit, and they didn’t notice because it was their air, it was all around them all the time. Fool didn’t know what to say to Gordie, so instead he simply moved across the room to sit next to him. Moving ached and lifting his shirt showed him that another bandage had been wrapped around his stomach. A bloom of red, small and delicate, had soaked through the bandage about two inches in from the edge of the midriff and the same distance up from his hip. He twisted, very slowly, and felt something slip in his flesh, two planes moving along each other.

  “They said to say it wasn’t serious,” said Gordie, still not looking up.

  “ ‘They’?”

  “The demon that helped bandage you. You’ll be okay.”

  “Why did they help me? Gordie, I know you hurt but you need to talk to me.”

  “We helped,” said a new voice, reedy and thin, “because we are scared.”

  Fool looked around and found that a demon had crouched by his side without him noticing. It was tall, its skin a murky brown, and it was covered in eyes. There were hundreds of them, different sizes, different types, and different colors. Fool saw predators’ slit pupils, all-black orbs, almost-human irises, golden eyes that glowed, all of them set into the thing’s chest and belly and across its shoulders like a pelt. They blinked in unison, and moved independently, glancing about the room.

  “You’re scared?” asked Fool.

  “Of the war. Of what will happen to us. We’re not soldiers, human. We don’t want to die.” It gestured back behind itself, taking in not just the room but the demons in Assemblies House, the demons outside the House that just wanted to be left alone to scurry and dart and do their jobs and feed on scraps. Fool couldn’t help but feel a momentary flash of cruel pleasure. You’re scared, he thought. Welcome to our world.

  “But why help me?” He raised his bandaged arm and looked at it again.

  “Because we heard you say you could stop it, after the thing killed Rhakshasas and the woman,” the demon said. It leaned in close and now all its eyes were staring at Fool, their gaze intense and unflinching. “I’d eat you if I could, little man. I’d suck the memories from your head without thinking about it, but at the moment you’re more useful to us alive. You kill my kind and I hate you for it, but now you say you can stop the war and so we have to help you because we don’t want to die.”

  Fool pulled himself to his feet, slowly, using the wall as a support. The demon stood from its crouch, its face keeping level with Fool’s own as he rose.

  “You will help us?”

  “Get out of my way,” said Fool. “I’ll try to stop the war. Not for you, you fucking freak, but for all the little humans out there that you’d eat in a second and that’ll die in this war alongside you if it carries on.”

  The demon stepped aside and the ones behind it scuffled and crabbed out of the way as well so that a path to the room’s door opened up.

  “Gordie,” said Fool. “Come on.”

  Fool thought Gordie was going to sit there until he collapsed and fell to dust and blew away, but then he pulled himself up, too. His movements were weary. His head was bandaged and he looked very young and as though he was only partly there, was looking at some other place through lidded and half-closed eyes.

  “She’s dead,” he said, his voice still flat and uninflected.

  “Yes,” said Fool. What else was there to say? “She and Marianne and all the others because the Man wants to take over Heaven and Hell. We can try to stop him, Gordie.”

  “Will that bring her back?” Gordie met Fool’s
gaze for the first time since Fool had come around, and his eyes were red, raw and bloodshot.

  “She came back before, you both did,” said Fool and hated himself for making the hope grow in Gordie. He watched it blossom in the man’s eyes, little manipulating Fool, making him hope just because you need him, and he put a hand on his shoulder and said, “We can try.”

  “What do we do?” asked Gordie. His eagerness was almost pathetic, it was so transparent. Is this what I’ve become, or have I always been this way? wondered Fool. Is this the real me, revealed layer by layer the longer I survive in Hell?

  There was another crash from somewhere in the building and a long shriek. The demons around Fool cringed and he thought they might have recognized the sound, heard something in it that spoke to them, of demonic pain and suffering and death, and made them see their own approaching ends. He looked down at himself, at the torn and bloodstained clothes and the scars and the dirt and the bandages and the tattoos that even now slipped about his skin like eddying water, and smiled. They think I’m their only hope and maybe I am. I’m Hell’s angel of survival.

  30

  The streets were chaos.

  Of course, Hell’s streets were always chaos, but it was usually a controlled form of disorder, one with hierarchies and rankings and structures, humans below demons below the Evidence below the oldest things. What Fool saw when he looked out the doors of Assemblies House was like nothing he’d seen before.

  A train had been overturned in the streets and was burning, flames leaping in its broken windows, filling them. A single Estedea was walking along the side of the train, now its roof, flowing between the fires as Evidence Men attacked it. The angel flicked the little things away, long, white hands appearing from its robes and making tiny gestures that sent out strings of old and dusty fire. The street around the train was littered with dead demons and humans, and the kindliest angels flew among them, fluttering down to stroke the torn and battered bodies. When they touched the flesh of the dead, blue sparks sprang up that they caught and swallowed. Above them all, the atmosphere was black with smoke and flying figures that carved trails through air thick with cries.

  The sky was the color of diseased skin.

  Gordie and Fool watched as more angels dropped from the sky to form a phalanx beyond the train and demons boiled from one of Hell’s alleys to attack them. These weren’t just bauta, but a mass of the things that usually walked the Houska or worked the fields or swam in Solomon Water, all of them armed with their own versions of the angels’ fires. Fool saw columns of smoke rising from some demons’ hands, others holding writhing coils of what looked like living dirt. As the two armies met, the noise in the street rose, a caterwauling blanket of cries and clashes and sizzles and burnings and screams. In among the demons were humans, chained around the necks, held captive in metal collars. The demonkind used the humans as both weapon and distraction; Fool watched as one chained Sorrowful was spun so hard by its demon captor that its feet lifted from the ground and it crashed into an angel. The angel tried to shake off the Sorrowful, but its chain had wrapped around the angel’s head, confusing it and pulling it over, and then the demon coiled its weapon of living filth around the angel, and flames and smoke rose from it until its head rolled free and bounced to the street. A burst of light exploded from the angel’s sundered neck as its body collapsed and then the Estedea from the train was arrowing through the air and its own cracked and bitter light was reaching out and both human and demon fell to pieces alongside the angel. The Estedea picked up the demon’s head and shoulders, the line of severance through the center of its chest still smoking, and fed off the remains. As it did so, the demon’s body crumpled as though the Estedea was sucking the very essence from it, finally dropping it when there was nothing left to suck free. A kindly one dropped and swallowed the light from both human and angel; the demon it left alone.

  As the battle raged, Fool and Gordie stepped into the street and began to move in the direction of the Flame Garden, hoping that the Archdeacons had obeyed and that he wasn’t too late. His battered body wouldn’t run no matter how hard he pushed it. He felt as though there were ropes around him, pulling and tautening, dragging against him. He needed to be fast, to be faster, but he wasn’t, he was slow and clumsy and worried that time was slipping by more and more quickly and that he was late, so very late.

  Too late.

  An Estedea landed in the street in front of Fool and Gordie, its robes opened into huge wings as it descended and then wrapping back around itself as its feet hit the ground. In the black depths of its cowl a pale face shifted and teeth flashed and eye sockets gleamed and then it was coming at them.

  Fool didn’t draw his gun. Instead, he stood his ground as it approached and said, “We’re not your enemy.” In response, the angel opened its arms, the robes pulling back from those impossibly long and bone-white hands, and produced its fire. This wasn’t the flame of Benjamin or Israfil but something older and darker, a fire that was made of smoldering dust and old shrouds caught by embers, but it moved quickly, lacing its way through the gap between them and encircling them.

  “We’re not your enemy,” said Fool again as the fire closed in. The urge to pull his gun from its holster was pulsing in him but he fought it, no aggression, no violence, giving the Estedea no excuse. “Look at us. We’re no threat. We’re human, we’re the damned, not demons.”

  The Estedea tilted its head, its hood, and the blackness underneath the cowl looked at him quizzically. The gray fires tightened slightly, ready to snap closed, but didn’t touch them. Somewhere behind them there was an explosion, a dull crunch of sound that sent flurries of dust dancing around them on gusts of heat, and then horns sounded again. Over the Estedea’s shoulder Fool watched as a squad of demons and chained humans emerged from a side street and ran to the entrance to a farther street, bauta outlying the squad and harrying it along. None of them looked around.

  “Please,” said Gordie. “Please, listen.” The Estedea took another step toward them and Fool could smell it now, could smell old stone and rain and damp earth and ancient paper as it leaned in, peering at them, assessing them.

  Judging them.

  The string of fire came closer but Fool felt no heat from it even as it touched his skin. He smelled burning hair and then it was gone and the Estedea was stepping away and then something came at the angel from the side and swallowed it.

  It happened fast, a creature like a mass of spiders riding a living web rising up in the alleyway between two buildings and surging forward, parts connected by constantly moving cables, and the whole of it fell on the Estedea, and now Fool saw it for what it was—not a thing from outside but demons, demons controlled by the Man like some parasitic host, his branches thrust into their back and sides and making them do his bidding the way his own flesh had once been manipulated by a Falling angel.

  How had he not seen? How had he missed it, been so convinced of his own rightness that he hadn’t seen the obvious? The thing he had chased across the Sleepers’ Cave, the thing that had fed on the Joyful on the island in the middle of Solomon Water, all demons as captive as the humans themselves. That’s why the Man needs the Joyful, as captive food for his captive demons, all of them in boxes until he needs them, and then he takes them out and makes them his puppets.

  The Estedea thrashed against the Man, against the demons controlled by the Man, and its fire curved through the mass that gathered around it, cutting chunks of the demonkind away, but for every piece that fell another took its place, more and more emerging from the alleyway to consume the angel. It shrieked, a sound that was the absence of sound, a silence torn wrong ways out that filled the street like oil and pressed against Fool’s ears, making him wince.

  The Estedea rose into the air, carrying its attackers with it, and then the weight was too much and it crashed down. This time, as it hit the ground, the mass flowed over the top of the angel, crushing it. It made that heavy not-noise again, its cry rising into
the air and expanding into the clouds. There was a sharp tearing sound, and the Estedea’s fire, twisting around itself like a dying snake, was tossed from the struggling confusion and flopped into the street. The Man began to drag the angel back toward the alley as it howled, the silence louder than ever, destroying the noise of the war and the fires and the distant rumble of trains, filling Hell with nothing.

  “We have to go,” Fool said but heard nothing, made no sound. He tried again but again his words were absent. He shook Gordie’s shoulder, pointing; the Estedea’s cry had summoned help and more of the saddest angels were looping in the sky above them, searching for their fallen companion.

  There was a sudden pop, and sound rushed back in, the clamor of Hell shocking after the nothing. “It was Fool!” screeched the Man, still pulling the Estedea back into the darkness of the alleyway, still battering it down. Another piece of its fire was cast aside and then a flapping thing that might have been a wing or might have been a section of its robe was tossed to the street to lie, pulsating weakly.

  “It was Fool!” the Man shouted again, and then was gone, taking his prize with him. The Estedea above them began to close in, crackles of dry fire slithering across the ground, searching. One of them hit the now-still wing and immediately they were all crying, their noise a grand muteness that had weight, had mass, weighed down on Fool.

  “They’ll kill us,” Gordie mouthed at him, and Fool simply nodded and they ran and fuck his aching flesh, fuck its infirmity, Fool was running because that was the only hope there was, and if that was his only hope he would damn well keep hold of it.

  As they reached the end of the street, the mass of the Estedea arrived and the earth shook with their landing. A tongue of fire curved over their heads as they went around the corner, but it didn’t grasp at either of them, instead scoring a line across the front of the building ahead of them and then snapping back to its owner in a flash and a stench of burning brick.