The Devil's Evidence Read Free Page B

standing, then piled at the back. There’s blood beneath the table where there are no bodies, and bloody footprints on the floor.”
    “Human?”
    “No. Maybe. No, I don’t think so, they’re distorted, smeared, but I still think demon, although what sort I can’t tell.”
    “Good, you’ve done well,” he said, then turned to the rest of the troops and called out.
    “This is a Seamstress House, a place of sewing and repairs. Look around, see what’s here, decide whether it should be, and if it shouldn’t, or it looks wrong in any way, tell me. Do you understand?”
    There were muttered responses and the Information Men began to spread out, scattering through the space and peering about themselves in exaggerated shows of looking around. So far, apart from Marianne, who was now back to looking beneath the table, few of the demons or humans that had been given a role as Information Men showed any aptitude for the tasks it entailed, simply carrying out Fool’s orders in stolid silence. They could sketch, some of them; others took accurate notes, could encourage people to talk, or even managed to drag information from the demons that walked Hell’s streets, but it was still Fool who collated everything, tried to discern the patterns that lay below the surface.
    Fool went to the pile of bodies at the end of the room, trying to take in the whole scene as he did so, trying to let it talk to him. As Marianne had said, the bodies were, by Hell’s standards, not badly abused. Most seemed to have been beheaded or torn apart, but there was something almost surgical about the injuries; there were no defensive wounds and little sign that the bodies had been interfered with following their deaths. They had simply fallen where they stood or sat, set upon by assailants who murdered them and moved on. Even the pile of dead flesh seemed to have been created more as a convenience than anything, the shoving together of the dead so that a walkway around the end of the table was still passable. A small horde of flies droned about the splashes of part-coagulated blood in noisy hunger, landing and alighting in delicate waves. Streaks and gashes through the liquid might have been made by the feet of the attackers, but if so, it would be impossible to gain any knowledge about them as the blood had seeped back in before drying, the edges of the marks furred and unreadable.
    What else? There had to be more, more openings leading away from this initial scene, paths that he could follow.
    The dead were all naked and few, so he knew it had occurred at the end of the shift. He could find the time the shift usually finished and pinpoint the violence to sometime around then. What else? There was more, there was always more, it was what he had learned these last months, more trails unfurling from every point that he could try to track his way along. There were blood streaks under the windows and on the frames, so the assailants had left the building the same way they had come in. Why? What would be the purpose in that? Coming in that way Fool could almost understand, it would be shocking, fear carried on the sound of breaking glass, but leaving that way? It made little sense. “Think, little Fool,” he said aloud, ignoring the look the nearest Information Man gave him, “think.”
    These were workers, sewing the clothes that they all wore, naked so that no thefts could occur and, he suspected, to rob these workers of what little dignity and safety their job might offer them. What had the supervisor in the last place like this he had been told him? About clothes?
    No, not told him, shown him, her seniority marked out by the fact that she had been clothed, that she was not a worker and therefore not naked. He looked again at the corpses and saw that all were bare, clothed only in blood and flies. Workers, but no supervisor. Had the supervisor fled? How could he? The swiftness of the attack, the carnage around him, seemed to show that no one had