Hounds!
Since the Hounds were already on the case — oddly, without me being told about it — I decided to check in with them next. Besides, one of their brimstone-sniffers would want to check me out anyway, given my close proximity to demons under uncontrolled conditions. I felt fine, but there was no harm in getting the chore out of the way early.
Nobody would talk to me before the sniffer gave me a clean bill of sanctity, which I expected. What I didn’t expect was the lack of information on Iomuel. “He was first active about thirty thousand years ago, during the Second War of the Land Bridge,” a sleek little Wheel in the records office told me. “He inflicted numerous atrocities in the Doggerland Drowning, then operated in northern Eurasia during the False Cultivation period. Pretty gruesome stuff.”
(Don’t bother looking any of that up. Let me put it this way: Mesopotamia is not the place where human civilization started. It’s just the first place where a human civilization survived.)
“Right, he’s a demon,” I said. “Why was he on the watch list? We’ve let in worse.”
The Wheel spun, idly. “I assume it was for his political leanings, Angel Vadriel. He was of the Chernobyl faction, after all. Most of those either very publicly recanted after the Treaty was signed, or they were quietly killed. The few that managed to avoid either are of special interest to everybody.”