They followed the gleaming white suit—and the floating point of light accompanying it—through an archway to another tunnel, this one still half-full of bunk bed frames from the days when this had been a shelter for ordinary people, not cultists. Cranswell sat down on a creaking, rusty bed frame and watched the Devil take out an enameled cigarette case, remove a cigarette that was an improbable shade of teal-green, and light it with a fingertip. He drew in the smoke, eyes closing, and sighed it out with the air of someone coming to grips with an unpleasant necessity.
“Right,” he said, opening his eyes again; they were back to being brilliant blue. “What you’ve just seen is the sort of thing we try very hard not to have happen, for obvious reasons. I’m terribly sorry you had to deal with this on your own, although I am frankly impressed by your resourcefulness, and I am also sorry that so many people have died. It may come as some small consolation that you have undoubtedly saved a much larger number of lives by stopping it when you did—as far as I can tell, it was planning to burn the city down, which is not only atrocious but unoriginal. We would, of course, at that point have realized what was going on and taken steps to address the situation, but my London surface op has been away from his post and I’m afraid this sort of thing doesn’t ping on our radar until a fairly significant death toll has accumulated. London owes all of you rather a large debt of gratitude—which, of course, it must never be permitted to know about.”
He sounded genuinely rueful. “I can at least reassure you that the entity responsible for this whole mess is now controlled and will not be allowed to make a nuisance of itself again on this or any other plane. Obviously you’d worked out that it was using that glass thing to project its influence over its followers, because you went to what must have been considerable personal peril to smash said glass thing, thus releasing said followers. I’m afraid none of them seem to have survived the experience.”
Cranswell watched him tap ash; it vanished in faint sparkles before it hit the floor. “I’m here for two reasons: to see to Fastitocalon, and to tidy up this nasty little mess. The entity is … what we call a remnant, something left over from the beginnings of the universe that does not fit anywhere within it. Mostly the remnants are inert, do nothing, cause nothing to happen, but this one must have been a leftover from the creation of something intelligent and aware, because it developed its own awareness over an eon or so. Enough to be capable of identifying its own hunger, and acting upon that.”
Ruthven looked up at this latest intelligence. His eyes were puffed almost shut, like a man in the middle of a nasty allergic reaction. “Then it’s as old as creation itself?” he asked.
“Yes. And this isn’t even close to the first time it’s been active in this world, either; it had developed a particular and specific taste for fear—and hate, and anger. It’s been very busy over the past couple of millennia.”
Samael glanced at the hovering ball of light above his right shoulder. “Haven’t you?” he added, and lassoed it with a smoke ring; the light pulsed briefly, resentfully, and Cranswell realized what exactly it was they’d been looking at all this time. “You needn’t worry,” Samael went on, still looking up at the light. “I’ve got it firmly under control. I happened to have been inadvertently summoned here by Fastitocalon, not that he intended to bother me, and when I showed up I thought it expedient first to simply catch the thing and stop it scuttling off to infect any other minds, and then see to Fass.”
“I’m still a bit unclear on how all this works,” said Ruthven, a little unsteadily, but only a little. “Fastitocalon told us about the … balance, between the sides, and that both sides are actively engaged in maintaining this balance. Neither of you knew about this business until now?”
Samael exhaled smoke again. “I’m afraid not. It’s been very good at hiding its tracks and at the moment things are a little fraught in terms of infernocelestial politics; this couldn’t have come at a less opportune time. The angels aren’t at their best, either.”
“Angels,” said Ruthven.
“Mm. It’s somewhat sensitive,” Samael said, and lit another cigarette, this one pale pink. Cranswell thought he recognized them as Sobranie Cocktails, and wondered half-hysterically if Sobranie of London was aware of this particular celebrity patron. “I think this time I am going to have to request a meeting with Gabriel in person, which is going to be immensely tiresome. He won’t like it one little bit, but then Gabriel never likes anything I do. I really am sorry you had to sort out this wretched business on your own, it’s unconscionable, but you did do a remarkably good job and prevented a lot more deaths, and it cannot ever happen again.”
Beside Cranswell, Ruthven sighed. “One other thing, though. I thought ‘Samael’ was the name of the Angel of Death, not the Devil himself.”
“Well, technically I am an angel,” Samael said, “or an ex-archangel, anyway, and the lovely thing about human scripture is its varied and extremely versatile potential for interpretation. You lot are so endlessly creative. As it happens I’m in charge of a group of archdemons who run various aspects of Hell, which I’m afraid I really ought to be getting back to, if you don’t mind; Fass needs looking after properly and I’ve got to shout at Asmodeus about his Monitoring and Evaluation protocols.”
Cranswell looked up at the golden hair, the peacock-blue eyes. He thought he could make out Samael’s wings, even though they weren’t being completely visible: a sort of faint shimmer in the air, a change in refraction, like looking at the edges of ice under moving water. He was aware of something not unlike thrall lapping at his perceptions, numbing him from feeling the kind of awe that might ordinarily strike an observer dumb and breathless—or maybe his capacity for wonder had just been saturated by the night’s events.
“I have a question,” he said, raising a finger.
“Yes?” said Samael.
“I quit a couple years ago, but … can I bum a cigarette?”
Fastitocalon’s suit was, in fact, a lost cause. “Even if I could get the blood out,” he said, looking dolefully at the ruined jacket in his hands, “which I can’t, there’s no way the hole could be repaired. I really am cross about that. It’s fifty-six years old and completely irreplaceable.”