CHAINS OF THE ARROGANT CONTRACT DEVIL
Chapter 3
THE IRON BOX AND THE WORST THING I HAVE EVER TOUCHED
She kept it in an iron box.
Small, flat, locked with a key she wore on a thin chain under her collar. She set it on the table between us after the common room had fully emptied and she had checked every corner of it twice. The second check was the more careful one. I noticed that.
She opened the box.
Inside, sitting on a piece of dark cloth, was a folded piece of paper. Old. Yellowed at the edges. Sealed with wax that had gone from whatever colour it had started as to a deep and solid black, the way wax does when something supernatural has been pressing against it for a very long time.
The moment she opened the box I felt it.
A pull. Low and directional, somewhere behind my chest, like a compass finding north. The book under my arm went very still.
"Don't touch the seal," Mira said. Before I could reach out.
I pulled my hand back.
"What happens if I touch it?" I said.
"I don't know exactly," she said. "The last person who touched it lost feeling in their hand for two weeks."
She paused.
"That was me," she said. "Six years ago when I first got it and did not yet know to be careful."
I looked at the contract in its box. Even from where I was sitting I could feel it not heat, not cold, but presence. The dense and patient weight of something that had been owed for a long time and had not forgotten.
"Your father never told you who the other party was," I said.
"He said it was safer if I did not know," she said. "He was a very careful man. If he thought it was safer then it was safer."
I thought about that.
Then I thought I can probably read it.
I said this out loud before I had fully examined whether it was true. The book had a line in its margin notes about contract perception. I had read it last night. It said senior contract devils could sometimes perceive the structure of foreign contracts within proximity.
The notes had said senior. I was not senior. I was the absolute lowest possible rank.
But I had felt something when the box opened. A leaning toward, a receptiveness. And in my experience when you felt something pull toward you it was usually because you had the ability to reach back.
That was my experience. I want to be honest about what that experience was based on, which was roughly nothing.
"You are certain," Mira said. In the flat way that was not really asking whether I was certain.
"Reasonably," I said.
She looked at me for a moment. Then she looked at the box. Then she said: "Try."
I opened the ledger.
I held it facing the iron box the way you would hold a mirror facing something you wanted to see the reflection of. I waited.
Nothing happened.
I waited some more.
Still nothing.
I concentrated very hard on the contract in the box and thought at the book in a directed and purposeful way: read it.
The book wrote in the margin: I cannot read a contract of this class. You are not ranked highly enough.
I stared at that.
Then I thought well. I could just open it. Physically. Without touching the seal.
The book immediately wrote: do not do that.
I looked at Mira.
I said: "Okay so the reading thing is not working the way I thought it would."
She looked at me.
"But," I said, "I could open it. Not the seal. Just unfold it. Read the actual text."
Do not, the book said again from the margin.
Mira said: "The last person who opened it without breaking the seal lost their sight for three days."
I stared at her.
"That was also me," she said. "Four years ago. I was testing the limits."
"Right," I said.
I closed the ledger.
I looked at the box.
I thought there must be another way.
And that was when I had what I genuinely believed, in the moment I had it, was a very good idea.
The idea was this: if I could not read the contract directly, I could find someone who had been present when it was originally made. A witness. Someone who had seen the terms. You did not need to read the document if you could just ask the person who watched it get signed.
Mira's father had been a contract broker. Contract brokers did not work alone. They had assistants, partners, clerks. Someone who had worked with her father twenty three years ago might still be alive, might still remember, might be willing to talk for the right price.
This was, objectively, a solid line of thinking.
The problem was the next part.
The next part was that I said this out loud to Mira, and she said: "My father's assistant was a woman called Danna Voss, she is still alive, she lives in the city of Crale which is four days north of here."
And I said: "Perfect, you are going north in three days, we can go together."
And Mira said: "I am going north to Harrick, which is two days north. Crale is two further days past that. It is not on my route."
And I said: "Well it is on my route."
She looked at me.
"You arrived in this world last night," she said. "You do not have a route."
"I am making one," I said.
She was quiet for a moment, looking at me with that measuring expression.
Then she said: "Why."
"Because the contract in that box is drawing supernatural attention and at least some of that attention is going to start looking at me by association. And because I currently have an unknown senior devil working in this region and a church investigator within a quarter mile. And because finding out what that contract owes and to who seems like the kind of information that is better to have than to not have."
Mira looked at the iron box. Then she looked at me.
"And also," I said, "you would owe me another favour."
"I already owe you a favour from last night," she said.
"This would be a second one," I said.
She closed the box. She locked it with the key from her chain. She tucked it back inside her collar.
She said: "I will think about it."
Which I took as a yes, because in my experience when someone says they will think about it they have already decided and are just giving themselves a moment to feel like the decision was careful.
I was correct about this. She came back to the table two hours later and said: "Harrick first. Then we see."
I thought good. Progress. Forward movement. Solid.
I went upstairs to get my things, which took about forty five seconds because I did not have any things.
On the way back down I passed the young priest of the Celestial Order in the hallway.
He was thin and pale and young, maybe nineteen, with the slightly overwhelmed expression of someone who was doing a job that was bigger than they had expected it to be. He was carrying a stack of papers and he almost walked into me and then he looked up and his eyes went directly to my hands.
My grey hands.
Which were not covered.
We looked at each other.
"Sorry," I said. "Skin condition."
He stared at my hands for one more second. Then he looked at my face. Then he stepped past me and kept walking down the hall very quickly without saying anything.
I watched him go.
Then I looked down at the book.
The book had already written in the margin: he is going to report this.
"How fast?" I said quietly.
Immediately, the book said.
I went downstairs and found Mira at the wagon.
"We need to leave now," I said. "Like right now. Not in three days."
She looked at my face.
She did not ask any questions.
She untied the horses.
We were through the north gate of Ashwell in under ten minutes.
Sera was sitting on the back of the wagon when we came through it. Already there. Waiting. Like she had known.
She probably had known.
She looked at me and said: "The priest."
"Yes," I said.
She nodded once like this confirmed something she had already calculated.
"The investigator will have a horse," she said. "We have a wagon. If he moves this morning he catches us before midday."
I thought about this.
"So we need to not be on the road," I said.
"We need to not be findable," Sera said. "Which is different."
I thought about that difference.
Then I thought I have contracts. Contracts that people want. People who wanted things were all over every road in every world. And people who wanted things badly enough would do almost anything for someone who could provide them.
I said: "If I could find someone nearby who wants something enough, I can contract for concealment. Someone who knows these roads. Someone who can hide a wagon and three people from a man on a horse."
Sera looked at me for a moment.
"You want to make another contract," she said.
"Yes."
"Your soul integrity is at ninety five percent and you have been in this world for less than one full day."
"I know what it is," I said.
Mira was looking at the road ahead and not saying anything which was, I had already learned, her way of having a very loud opinion.
"There is a village twenty minutes from here," Sera said finally. "Small. Off the main road. The headman there has a problem he has had for three years and cannot solve. He would do a great many things for someone who could solve it."
"What kind of problem?" I said.
"His eldest son made a bad deal with a river spirit two years ago," Sera said. "The spirit takes one year from the boy's life every harvest season. The boy is seventeen and already looks thirty."
I looked at her.
"I cannot fix a deal with a river spirit," I said. "I am rank one. I can barely make contracts with bandits."
"No," Sera said. "But you can broker a new deal. A replacement contract between the father and the spirit. Something the spirit values more than one year of life per harvest. If the new contract is better for the spirit than the original deal the spirit will release the boy."
I thought about this.
I said: "And you could not do this yourself because."
"Because the spirit does not deal with witches," she said simply. "Old grudge. It predates me."
I thought about the soul integrity number. Ninety five. And dropping with every contract I made. And I had no idea how much a negotiation with a river spirit would cost me.
I said: "What does a river spirit value?"
Sera said: "Secrets."
I said: "Secrets."
"Yes," she said. "Real ones. True ones. The kind that would change things if they became known. A river spirit is very old and very bored and the only currency it respects is information it does not already have."
I thought about this for a moment.
Then I thought I just died and was reborn as a devil. I have no secrets. I have been in this world for less than one day. I know almost nothing.
Then I thought but I know things about my previous world. Things that nobody in this world knows because nobody in this world has ever been there.
I sat with that.
Mira said, still looking at the road: "The village is to the left at the fork."
She had been listening the whole time.
I looked at the fork coming up ahead.
I thought okay. This is manageable. A river spirit that wants secrets, a headman who wants his son fixed, and a church investigator on a horse somewhere behind us.
Everything was fine.
I told myself this with complete confidence and turned the wagon left at the fork.
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End of Chapter 3
Active Contracts: 2 | Soul Integrity: 95% | Rank: Ash Devil
Days Until Church Detection: REVISED hours | Location: North road, moving