CHAINS OF THE ARROGANT CONTRACT DEVIL
Chapter 2
THE WITCH IN THE STABLE YARD AND OTHER VERY BAD IDEAS
I did not go back to sleep.
The window had moved. Not from wind because there was no wind. Just the quiet, deliberate sound of wood shifting against wood, like someone making the smallest possible adjustment to something very carefully.
I was at the window before I had fully decided to be there. The book was in my hand somehow. I looked down into the stable yard.
A woman.
Standing in the exact center of it, looking directly up at my window. Silver hair, long, loose, catching the very first light of pre-dawn in a way that made it look like it was doing something other than just reflecting. Long dark coat. She looked maybe twenty years old or maybe much older than that, I genuinely could not decide, the kind of face where the number kept changing the longer you tried to pin it down.
She was not surprised to see me. That was the first thing I noticed. She was looking up at my window with the expression of someone who had already known I would be standing here and had come anyway because knowing it was not the same as seeing it.
In her left hand she was holding a piece of paper.
Even from up here, even in the dark of very early morning, I could see my name on it in silver ink.
I could see the thumbprint already set at the bottom.
A contract. Already signed on her side. Waiting only for mine.
She looked up at me.
She was extremely beautiful.
I thought this is clearly a business opportunity.
I put my coat on and went downstairs.
The common room was empty. Chairs still up on the tables, fire burnt down to a quiet orange glow, innkeeper not yet awake. I crossed it, unbolted the side door toward the stables, and stepped out into the cold.
She was still in the exact same spot. Had not moved even slightly. Standing in the middle of the stable yard with her hands at her sides like she had all the time available in the world and had decided to spend some of it here.
Up close she was I searched for the right word and the right word was precise. Everything about how she looked had been arranged with deliberate care, not like vanity, more like intention. The silver hair was too uniform to be natural, pale from root to tip with no variation at all. Her eyes, when I got close enough to properly see them, were a light amber colour, like old honey, and they had the quality of something that was always, quietly, measuring.
She was not human. I could not have told you exactly why I was certain of that but I was, completely.
"You already read the contract," she said. Her voice was light with an accent I could not place.
"I read my name on the front of it," I said. "From the window. In the dark."
She looked at me with the expression of someone making a small mental note about something.
"That is less impressive than you think," she said.
"What are you?" I said.
"That is a rude question."
"It is four in the morning and you are in a stable yard with a contract that already has my name on it," I said. "I think I am allowed to ask."
She appeared to genuinely think about whether that was fair. Then she said: "A witch. Specifically a contractor witch which is its own thing and most people find the detail boring so I do not usually lead with it."
I looked at her. "A witch," I said.
"Mm."
"Who found me on my first night here."
"Your second," she said. "You spent several hours in the lower planes before you came through. I found you about forty minutes after you crossed. You were walking through the forest looking very focused and a little bit terrified which was actually a good sign. The ones who come through calm are usually the ones who lost something important on the way."
She said all of this the way you would tell someone what time it was. No drama about it at all.
"You followed me," I said.
"I walked parallel at a comfortable distance. There is a difference." She held the paper out toward me. "Read it. I will wait."
I took the paper.
It was warm, which surprised me more than it should have. I held it up toward the torch on the stable wall and read it properly.
CONTRACT OF MUTUAL NAVIGATION OPEN TERM
Party A: Sera Contractor Witch, unranked
Party B: Lucien Ash Devil, First Rank
Terms: Party A provides navigational assistance, local knowledge, and situational guidance to Party B for an indefinite period, renewed by mutual agreement at each season's end.
Counter-terms: Party B provides one contract per month, drawn from his ledger, of Party A's choosing, for Party A's personal use. Party B does not ask about the content or purpose of said contracts.
Penalty for breach: Standard soul damage, weighted to severity.
I read it once. Then I read it again.
It was a clean deal. She gave me knowledge and guidance, I gave her one contract a month. Simple exchange. I was new to this world, I had no knowledge of it, and she had already found me from forty minutes away in a dark forest which meant she knew things I very much needed to know.
One contract a month was not a lot. The book could handle dozens at a time. Twelve per year for local knowledge and someone who clearly knew how to move in this world was, if I was being objective, a very fair price.
I was being objective. I was fully calm and objective about this.
I looked up at her.
"The one contract a month," I said. "You pick which one."
"Yes."
"And I cannot ask what you use them for."
"No."
I thought about this for approximately four seconds. "Okay," I said. "Fine. Deal."
The book made a sound like it wanted to say something.
I opened it and pressed my thumb to the page before it could.
Sera pressed her thumb to hers without any hesitation at all.
The book sang. Same low note as before but different somehow, like the same instrument playing a different string.
Active Contracts: 2
Soul Integrity: 95%
Three percent. I looked at that.
"That is more than the bandit cost," I said.
"I am worth more than the bandit," she said.
I could not really argue with that so I did not try.
We sat in the stable doorway on an overturned crate while the sky went slowly from black to that deep blue that happens just before proper morning comes. One of the horses shifted in its stall. Sera talked and I listened and I will say this about her she did not waste words. Every sentence she said was a sentence that needed to be said.
The first thing she told me made my stomach go cold.
"The Celestial Order," she said, "had a presence in Ashwell that was bigger than Mira had told me. Not one young priest. One young priest and a senior investigator who had arrived three days ago following reports of unusual supernatural activity on the northern road."
"Senior investigators carry soul-lenses," Sera said. "Instruments that can detect the signature of an active contract within a quarter mile."
I thought about the two contracts currently sitting in my ledger.
I thought about the inn, which was not a quarter mile from anything.
"Why did you not tell me this first?" I said.
"I wanted to see if you would sign the contract before or after you knew you were under time pressure," she said. "It tells me something useful about how you make decisions."
I looked at her.
"And what did it tell you?" I said.
"That you reason fine under normal conditions," she said. "And will probably reason very badly under urgent ones."
I decided to be offended about this later when I had more time.
The second thing she told me was about the northern road. Three travelers had disappeared on it in the past two weeks. Not robbed, not killed in any normal way. Vanished. With burnt patches of ground at each location shaped like an open book and silver residue on the nearby trees.
"Another contract devil," I said.
"A senior one," she said. "Third rank at minimum. Has been working this region for about a month. Before you arrived."
"And the Order thinks it is me."
"The Order does not know there are two of you yet. When they find out they will look for connections. Two contract devils in the same region is unusual. They will assume you are working together or working for the same person."
I thought about the six weeks the book had given me before the church found me and I recalculated it with this new information and the number I came up with was considerably smaller than six weeks.
"You knew about the senior devil before you found me," I said.
"Yes."
"And you still came to me instead of them."
"A first rank devil with a new ledger and no allies is considerably more manageable than a senior devil with a month of active contracts already running," she said. "I made a practical choice."
I was not entirely sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing for me specifically but I let it go.
The third thing she told me was the smallest one and somehow the most unsettling.
She said: "The merchant woman."
"What about her?"
"She is carrying a sealed contract in her cargo," Sera said. "Not one of yours. Old one, decades old from the physical signature. Whoever wrote it is either very powerful or very dead."
She paused. "Possibly both," she said.
I stared at her.
"She does not know," Sera said. "Or she does and she has not told you. One of those two things is true."
I thought about Mira Calloway. Her flat intelligent eyes. Seventeen years of merchant travel. The knife in her sleeve. The fifteen silver placed on the table without a second thought.
I thought about the fourth note in my book's margin from last night: the merchant woman is carrying something that has attracted supernatural attention.
I had made a mental note to ask about that and then fallen asleep before asking about it.
"I need to talk to her," I said.
"Yes," Sera said. "But carefully. If she knows about it and has not mentioned it she has a reason. And if she does not know and you tell her badly it could panic her into doing something that makes your situation worse."
"I know how to have a conversation," I said.
Sera looked at me with an expression that was not quite a smile but was close enough to one that it was doing most of the same work.
"You also knew how to write a contract," she said. "Roughly."
She walked away across the stable yard before I could answer that. Her silver hair caught the first real light of morning as she went, moving with the completely unhurried confidence of someone who had arranged to have exactly as much time as they needed.
I watched her go.
I thought I like her.
Then I thought that is probably not a simple thing to like.
Then I went inside.
Mira was already awake.
She was at the same corner table as last night with a cup of something hot and a cloth-bound ledger of her own open in front of her, writing in it with the quick shorthand of someone who had been doing accounts since before they found accounting interesting.
She looked up when I sat down. She looked at the side door I had come through. She looked back at my face.
"You were outside," she said.
"Couldn't sleep," I said.
"Mm." She went back to writing. "There was a woman in the stable yard earlier. Silver hair."
I was quiet.
"I saw her from my window," Mira said, still not looking up. "She was looking at your room specifically." She paused. "Do you know her?"
"I do now," I said.
Mira's pen stopped. She looked up at me. "You contracted with her."
I did not ask how she knew. "Yes," I said.
She looked at me with that expression that was doing several things at once assessing, updating, filing the new information next to everything she had already figured out about me. Then she went back to her ledger.
"The book warns you," she said quietly. "When a contract is risky."
"It advises, yes," I said.
"And."
"And I made a judgment," I said.
Mira wrote three more numbers in her ledger. Then she put the pen down and closed it and looked at me with the full and undivided attention of someone who had decided a conversation was happening now whether she had planned for it or not.
"What do you know about my cargo?" she said.
I was careful. I said: "Less than I would like to."
She was quiet for a long moment, doing that inventory expression, measuring the cost of yes against the cost of no.
Then she said: "Who told you?"
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to me." She was not angry exactly but she was the specific temperature of someone who had been managing a private situation very carefully and had just found out the edges of it were not as tight as they believed. "I have been carrying that cargo for six months. In that time two different people tried to take it. I have been very careful about what I tell people."
"I don't know what it is," I said. "I know there is a sealed contract in your cargo. I know it is old. I know it is drawing attention from things I would rather not have drawing attention to anything near me right now."
Mira was quiet.
Outside the town was beginning its morning cart wheels on the road, a vendor calling something in the market, bread smell coming from somewhere east of us.
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she said: "Sit with me." Though I was already sitting. It was a different kind of instruction than it looked.
She picked up her cup.
"My father was a contract broker," she said. "Not a devil. A human one, someone who sat in the middle of deals between humans and supernatural things and made sure both sides did not destroy each other. Twenty three years ago he arranged a contract between a merchant family and something he never told me the name of. It was the biggest deal of his life. The payment to our family was enough to fund everything I have built."
"And the contract itself," I said. "You have been carrying an open supernatural debt," I said slowly, "for six months."
"For six years," she said. "Six months is just how long this route has been giving me trouble."
I stared at her.
"And you did not tell me this last night," I said.
"You were a strange grey man I had known for two hours." She met my eyes without any apology at all. "I do not give sensitive information to strange men. That is a very basic policy."
I opened my mouth.
I closed it again. Because that was, completely, a reasonable position and I had nothing useful to say against it.
"Can I see it?" I said instead.
Mira looked at me. The inventory expression again. Long and quiet and measuring.
"Finish your breakfast first," she said.
I looked at the table. Somewhere in the conversation a bowl of hot porridge and a cup of tea had been placed in front of me by the innkeeper's boy moving quiet as a shadow.
I picked up the spoon.
The morning light came through the windows now, yellow and ordinary, landing across the tables and the old wooden floor and the plain ceramic cup in my hands. A dog was barking outside at something with great commitment and absolutely no result.
I ate.
Across the table Mira Calloway watched me with her dark and calculating eyes.
And somewhere in her locked wagon in the stable yard outside, behind the wall where Sera had stood an hour ago in the pre-dawn dark, an old contract sat in an iron box and waited.
Patient the way only very old things know how to be patient.
Like it had been waiting twenty three years already and a few more minutes meant nothing to it at all.
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End of Chapter 2
Active Contracts: 2 | Soul Integrity: 95% | Rank: Ash Devil
Days Until Church Detection: ~40 | Senior Devil: Unknown revised