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head, turned as though to catch the sound from everywhere. It should have been comical, something to make it seem preposterous and weak. It didn’t.
    “Because no human could inflict this kind of damage,” said Fool, “not even in a group. This was fast, organized violence. This man isn’t even armed, the footprints don’t look human. You’re Information Men, you have to learn to
see
this; you have to learn to read the places we visit, to see the truth of them, not the lie of what you want them to be. You are the line that divides truth from lies, and even in Hell the line has to exist. You have to
see
.”
    “Could have dropped his weapon,” said another voice, this one high and breathy.
    “It could have hidden the weapon, or hired someone,” said Orobas, and now as it clacked and spoke it drooled, strings of thick saliva spilling over the teeth, making them glimmer in the torchlight. It was only short but the body in the ill-fitting uniform was solid, the arms extending from the sleeves capped not with hands but with clumsy, uneven hooves. It flexed them now, the dark curves of solidity that it had instead of fingers splitting, twists of hair tangled between each segment, and then the demons were drawing together, taut and rigid. Orobas took a step forward, lifting its hooves, and the ends of the bony arcs were filthy, looked solid and sharp. It smiled, black lips pulling back without humor.
    Whatever authority Fool had previously had, it was ebbing from the room moment by moment. He had killed not just a demon but a fellow officer of sorts, a mere upstart human thinking he had the authority to challenge the demonkind. How high would this feeling go? he wondered suddenly. All the way to the top? To Elderflower, assuming Elderflower
was
the top? His usefulness would not, he thought, protect him if Hell thought he had stepped too far. And then there was Mr. Tap to think about, and Fool pondered, not for the first time, whether the most dangerous thing in Hell for Fool was Fool himself.
    “Fine,” he said, thinking fast. “We’ll send him to the Questioning House along with the others and tomorrow morning they’ll ask the flesh what they need to ask, and if this man killed the people here and the Evidence Man was right and I’m wrong, I’ll take whatever punishment is required of me. Agreed?”
    A pause and then nods, an affirmative noise under them, sullen and mistrustful, and Fool saw Orobas hesitate, try to gauge the mood and then decide that now was not the time for open rebellion and it, too, nodded and lowered its arms, and Fool thought,
I hope you’re right, little Fool. I hope you’re fucking right.
    —
    Fool returned to his room in the Information House and stripped, trying to shed the stress and fear of the morning but they clung to him, wrapped around his skin like old cobwebs. Dropping his dirty clothes in the hall, where one of his troops would take them away, he washed and dressed in a fresh shirt and trousers, and then looked at his board and tried to ignore the ghosts beneath it.
    The board was mounted on his wall and contained all the information they had gleaned at the fires that had spread across Hell these past weeks. It wasn’t much, a disparate collection of words and thoughts, lists of ideas, of suppositions, of guesses and things crossed out as they were disproved or dismissed. Fool used threads to link resemblances between the various fires, but the only constant was that each fire was man-made; there were more differences than similarities. Some were near water and easily doused, some were miles from the nearest stream or pond. Several of the burned buildings had contained the dead in their seared rooms, others were empty or contained only the things that Hell stored, food or machinery or other, more obscure, items. Some of the information he had discovered or surmised himself, some he had taken from the reports written by Marianne. Recently, she had become his regular companion