The Devil’s Evidence

PROLOGUEIt was a building, and it had burned.“How many does this make it?”Fool ignored the question, lifting his hands to his face and rubbing, and the skin of his palms smelled of soot and scorched flesh.“I don’t know,” he said eventually, dropping his hands from the exhaustion that his head had become. How many fires have there been in the previous days and weeks? he wondered, and then stopped wondering and tried to remember. I should know, he thought, I’m an Information Man. I should act like one and not like the Fool I was. So, how many? Certainly five, when he sifted through his mind he found that many, but possibly more. Almost certainly more. He was tired, the images in his head jumbling, blurring together, at least five but more, definitely more. Six, maybe seven, or even eight. Buildings, burned and damaged.“It’s eight,” said Marianne at his side, and Fool turned to her, focusing, pulling himself back to now, looking at her with his officer’s eyes. She was young, only several months old despite her adulthood, freshly harvested from Limbo and made into one of the new Information Men, and she was already beginning to understand her role. She was already good.“Eight, yes,” he said, “this is the eighth. And the links between them?”“Fire,” Marianne replied immediately, “obviously. Fires that have been set, that haven’t happened accidentally.”“And?” It was unfair, really. Fool didn’t have any great insight; even after the previous seven investigations, he was simply hoping that her eyes might have seen the ground differently than his own. She was smart and sharp, and only rarely did she act around him as the other human Information Men did, with that irritating deference. Now, however, she looked at him without speaking, unable to answer, shoulders hunching slightly into a shrug. Sighing, he turned away from her and looked at the burned thing at his front and thought back, over the whole fucking smoking mess of the investigation. Eight fires, eight things burned to soot and spindle and ragged chaos, and what did he know?Mr. Tap crouched in the corner and watched, impassive.Fool’s officers, his troops as the Bureaucracy now insisted on calling them, were distracting him, pushing and poking and talking. Each time he tried to focus on the details the sound of them shifted his attention, or one of them would amble into his eye line and he would lose the threads that were starting to form behind his eyes. They weren’t helping, weren’t finding clues, assuming there were any to find; they were simply creating more chaos, more disorder, blurring the narrative the building was trying to tell him. “Out,” he said finally, waving his hand at the door.“Sir?” asked one of the demons, its black uniform hanging awkwardly over a body that appeared to be formed solely of twists and kinks. Fool could hear the disgust in its voice. This little demon, part of a lineage of the infliction of pain and suffering, was taking orders from a human, and it hated it; hated it. Never mind, it would learn, or it would be taken away. That was how things were now.“Out,” said Fool again, this time more loudly, jabbing his finger at the doorway. “All of you. Wait outside.”Fool watched as his Men left, their feet and claws leaving puffs of ash behind them, weapons and bags clanking, until they were finally gone and an almost-silence seeped back in around him. Only Mr. Tap remained, still in the corner, still crouched and watching. Its skin seemed slick in the hazy light, its mouth open and tasting the air. Fool, as instructed, tried to ignore it and turned back into the dead structure and tried to read its corpse.The problem now was the same as that first time, when he had been sent to an outbuilding burned away to shadow and grime. He saw it, it was there around him and in front of him, but the fires made things jumbled and he didn’t know how to investigate them; he’d never had to before. There was little or no information here, nothing to link the burned places besides the fires themselves. Fool understood, to some degree anyway, how to investigate the deaths of humans and even the deaths of demonkind, but the burning of buildings? He didn’t know where to start.