The Devil's Evidence Read Free Page A

of that, and doubted it.
    The first body was seated halfway down the table; it was a man and he had been decapitated. His head had been placed on the table, turned so that it was looking back at the body it had come from, and the floor and chair and table were thick with drying blood. The body was rigid, the left hand still clamped around a needle and the right around a piece of cloth now soaked red. The man was naked. Beyond him, a second figure was sprawled on the floor, another man, judging by the hairiness of the part of the back and single arm that were visible. Whatever he had been stitching together had fallen on him and covered him like a shroud, reminding Fool of the gray tarpaulins the porters used to take bodies to the Questioning House or the Flame Garden. Patches of blood showed through the material, odd blooms like the petals of a flower he hadn’t seen before. He didn’t bother to peel the cloth back; there were other bodies to investigate, two or three of them on either side of the tables and more beyond them.
    The worst were gathered in a pile at the far end of the table: a tangled mess of naked limbs and blood and pieces of material. The attack had happened toward the end of the night shift, had caught only the straggler workers, those who hadn’t finished their jobs for that shift and hadn’t yet been allowed to leave. There was space at the tables for at least fifty workers, but Fool could see only nine or ten distinct bodies in total, counting torsos to find the tally. All of them were naked, and his first thought was that they had been stripped after death until he remembered that nudity was a condition of working for the seamstresses to prevent the theft of material. He had been to a Seamstress House once before, somewhere on the other side of the industrial area. He had visited during the day and had found it unbearably hot, the air dry and hard to inhale because of the dust of tiny fibers hanging in the atmosphere, but still a better place than most of Hell.
At least it’s covered,
he had thought,
at least they’re not wet and cold.
Most of the workers’ hands had been bleeding, he remembered, covered in cuts and peeling dry skin and punctures that left spots across the clothes they were stitching. The supervisor, a painfully thin woman, had told him that was normal even as she beat the workers’ shoulders with a flat stick for getting blood on the garments they sewed.
Everything we wear is bound in blood,
he remembered thinking,
little bloody Fool.
Despite their bleeding hands and the beatings, most of the workers had looked, if not happy, then at least less miserable than the heavy-industry workers or farmhands.
    Calling Marianne to his side, pulling her away from her study of the table and what lay under it, but noting her interest and hoping he’d remember to ask her about it later, Fool said, “So. Tell me.”
    Marianne looked around, visibly gathered herself, and said, “Whatever happened here happened quickly. There’s no blood near the door, meaning that the dead hadn’t had time to run. Something came in through the windows fast and savaged the workers, tore them apart.”
    She paused, waiting. He nodded at her, encouraging her to go on, thinking,
She saw the windows. Good. She’s getting sharp, seeing it clearly, learning to understand the story.
    “It was fast and brutal but not about torture. The dead have been killed but not too badly mistreated.”
    “Apart from being murdered?”
    “Apart from being murdered,” she replied, ignoring his sarcasm, the ghost of a smile twitching across her face and then vanishing. “There are bodies at the back of the room, piled, but there’s still no sign of mutilation or torture, they were simply killed.”
    “Were they driven to the back of the room and slaughtered like cattle, or did they simply run that way because the other direction was toward their attackers?”
    “Neither. They were killed close to where they were sitting or