Fiery Edge of Steel (A NOON ONYX NOVEL) (5 page)

“Duties can arise from all sorts of things. Contracts, promises, moral and ethical obligations, emotional attachments—”

“To whom are duties owed in those situations?”

I opened my mouth and closed it. The examples were almost limitless. Duties were owed to the Council, to clients, to Luck, to those we lived with, worked with, loved. The demons owed duties to those who followed them; the Angels to the wards they were sworn to protect. Now that I’d been forced to think about it, Halja had infinitely more duties than demons. Anyone who had ever had any kind of a relationship with anyone had owed some kind of duty at some point. I said as much to Rochester, who finally nodded at something I was saying.

“Right.
Relationships
create duties. Your first answer was correct, Ms. Onyx. Duties and obligations are nearly synonymous, because every relationship confers benefits on its participants. Just by virtue of being in a relationship, a party receives something so a debt is then owed to the other.”

“Yeah,
benefits
,” Brunus sniggered, glancing over at Mercator. “Do you think your benefits with your fiancée are the same as Noon’s with Ari?”

Mercator’s signature pulsed and Brunus grunted. He looked ready to throw something fiery in return but Rochester cleared his throat. There was no official policy on when it was appropriate to throw waning magic in Manipulation. Class rank was established based on magic use so, of course, there was some showing off. But Rochester always reined us in when small eruptions threatened to become major interruptions.

“Ms. Onyx, what is the duty of an outpost lord?”

“To provide for his people.”

“That’s not a literal obligation, is it? Outpost lords are just figureheads, right?”

“No,” I said, my tone almost ominous. “It
is
literal. Like everything else in Halja,” I muttered. And that was the crux of it, I thought. My problem with Halja. My problem with St. Lucifer’s, this class, and yesterday’s execution.

Under demon law, when a person owed a duty of care to a stranger, it didn’t mean be careful. It meant
care
. A person had to care about the person you owed the duty to, which was ridiculous. Only the demons would try to legislate caring and concern.
As if.
But I knew why they’d done it. Because it was the only way they could do it. The only way they
could
care about perfect strangers was on paper. Demons didn’t understand the difference between words and actions. “Do as I say, not as I do” was a Hyrke phrase. Humans understood the nuanced agonies and emotional intricacies involved with ethical dilemmas, but not demons. To the demons, everything was black and white. Morality was a math equation. They never had to worry about guilty consciences because (even if they had consciences) their own law gave them an out. If the law said a person had to die for their sins, they were executed. And no one would feel bad about it. Because there was no duty of care owed to criminals. And if demon law didn’t require a duty of care . . . Well, the demons just didn’t care. So where did that leave waning magic users like me?

Grinding my teeth.

Rochester paced the front of the room. The way he intentionally bumped his signature into ours when he was questioning us made me think of a mortar and pestle. Rochester was the pestle and we students were the mortars—empty ones, of course, because if we’d had anything to buffer the grinding crush of his signature against ours, then Rochester wouldn’t get as much perverse pleasure out of our discomfort as he did. He turned around to face his desk and rummaged around in the stacks of papers and books, finally pulling out a thick leathery envelope with trailing ends of loose string and a broken wax seal. He threw it to me just as Ari walked into the classroom.

“The case file for your first field assignment, Ms. Onyx,” he said when I caught it. “And you too, Mr. Carmine,” Rochester said, addressing Ari. “As
Primoris
, Ms. Onyx has been selected as the lead investigator. As
Secundus
, you will be her partner.” Ari nodded at Rochester and then turned toward me.

Suddenly, all the conflicted emotions I’d felt yesterday flared up again: my anger over the fact that there was very little mercy (if any) in Halja, my shame at running out on Jezebeth’s execution, which had left Ari covering for me—the last thing I’d wanted. And my horror over Ari’s swift execution of Jezebeth. I knew Ari, who had freelanced for my father as a demon executioner before enrolling at St. Luck’s, was no stranger to executing demon wrongdoers, but
still
 . . .

I met Ari’s stare. Neither one of us smiled. If Rochester was aware of the tension between us, he ignored it.

“In your case file, you’ll find an accusation—a demon complaint—filed by an outpost resident with the Demon Council. Locate the complaint and read it.”

I did, wordlessly passing it to Ari when I was finished.

C
OUNTRY OF
H
ALJA

DEMON COMPLAINT

CITY OF NEW BABYLON

TOWN OF ETINCELLE

OUTPOST:
THE SHALLOWS

ACCUSER:
ATHALIE RUST

ACCUSED:
VODNIK, PATRON DEMON AND OUTPOST LORD

DATE FILED:
SPRING

CASE NO.:
2013 OSH 00000001

NATURE OF COMPLAINT:

TO THE HONORABLE KARANOS ONYX, DEMON COUNCIL EXECUTIVE, C/O THE BOAT MAN,

FIFTEEN. THAT’S HOW MANY MEN DISAPPEARED LAST WEEK. ALL FISHERMEN, WHO KNEW THE MARSHES AND SHALLOW LANDS. THEY WOULDN’T HAVE GOTTEN LOST. THEY WOULDN’T HAVE LEFT. THEY LOVED US. AND BESIDES . . . THERE’S NOWHERE TO GO.

WE’VE BEEN HUNGRY. (VERY HUNGRY.) SO OUR DEMON PATRON LED THE MEN INTO THE DARK WATERS TO FIND MORE FISH. HE TOLD US THEY’D BE SAFE, BUT HE LIED. LORD VODNIK AND OUR GEREFA, STILLWATER, WERE THE ONLY ONES TO RETURN FROM THE DARK WATERS. WHEN WE ASKED THEM WHAT HAPPENED, ALL THEY SAID WAS—GRIMASCA GOT THEM.

BUT GRIMASCA ISN’T REAL. VODNIK IS.

AND VODNIK IS THE ONE WHO KILLED THOSE MEN.

MAY LUCK FAVOR YOU (AND FIND US),

ATHALIE RUST

After Ari was finished reading, Rochester summarized the contents of the complaint for the rest of the class. “Who’s Vodnik?” he then barked out. “Has anyone read his Demon Register entry?” This was another of Rochester’s favorite assault tactics, accusing us of not spending enough time with Halja’s demonicopedia.

Sasha’s hand shot up and Rochester nodded at him.

“Vodnik is a water demon and the current outpost lord for the Shallows, a poor fishing community in the far eastern region of Halja. The Register says he was spawned in a polluted storm drain somewhere along River Road . . . sometime in the last half century . . . I think.”

Sasha paused. Rochester frowned.

“Well over four centuries ago,” Mercator corrected. Sasha gave him a cool look, which Mercator ignored. In Manipulation, we learned almost as much from Mercator’s extracurricular readings as we did from the big man himself. Mercator continued.

“Sometime around 1593, Vodnik and a group of followers set sail down the Lethe. They’d intended to sail as far as the sea, but six months into their journey they hit the trifecta of travel woes: sickness, spoiled food rations, and shallow waters. Vodnik convinced the party their bad luck was really Luck’s hand, guiding them to settle there.”

“And Grimasca?” Ari said, looking at Rochester first and then Mercator. “There’s no Grimasca listed in the Demon Register. Which demon is Ms. Rust referring to?”

Rochester gave the class a hard look. “Some of your mothers must surely have warned you about Grimasca?”

To my surprise, Mercator, Sasha, and Tosca all nodded.

“Well, what did your mothers say? Speak up,” Rochester commanded.

Tosca answered first, saying that his mother had called Grimasca the Demon of Hunger. “She said he was spawned before Armageddon, which makes him even older than Luck. She said he was the biggest and baddest hellcnight that ever lived.”

I’d never heard of Grimasca, but I’d heard of hellcnights. They were a particularly vicious and venomous type of demon. All demons can shape shift, usually into horrifying beasts, creatures, or natural phenomena like wind, rain, plague, or fire. But hellcnights could shift into a mirror image of any living thing. But what really made them dangerous, and something to be extraordinarily cautious of, was the fact that, in addition to their ability to manipulate their physical shapes, they could also mask, manipulate, and mirror signatures. So even I wouldn’t be able to distinguish a real person from its hellcnight imposter.

Sasha told us his mother had referred to Grimasca as Lucifer’s Spy. According to her, Lucifer used Grimasca’s uncanny ability to impersonate in order to gather information and infiltrate enemy groups. His favorite alias? A Hyrke butcher. According to Sasha’s mother, Grimasca had three parallel scars on his cheek that he’d put there himself.

“But Grimasca wasn’t just a spy,” Mercator said quietly. “He was also supposed to have been an assassin. Luck used his butcher alias not just to gather information and infiltrate enemy groups, but also to execute his adversaries. Grimasca’s bite, as well as the bite of all hellcnights, is poisonous. Anyone bitten by them succumbs to a deep and unbroken sleep. It’s interesting that your mother called him the Demon of Hunger, Tosca. There’s a rumor that after Armageddon, when Halja was starving, Grimasca and his hellcnights went for so long without food that they no longer needed it. That they found other sources of sustenance.”

“Yeah, well, what did
your
mother call him?” Tosca asked Mercator, as if Mercator had called his mother’s honor into question instead of just suggesting there might be more than one interpretation of Grimasca’s legend.

“The Grim Mask of Death.”

Everyone got quiet after that. Mercator’s mother’s moniker for Lucifer’s spy slayer seemed to sum up all of the horrid things all the mothers had said about him.

I considered the stories I’d just been told. Most demons lived for centuries, not millennia. And the fact that Rochester knew Grimasca’s story had likely been told to students by their mothers had me thinking Grimasca sounded like more of a myth than a drakon did. In fact, Grimasca actually sounded more like a children’s boogeyman than anything else. But we lived in Halja, a country where anything was possible and all demons, no matter how mythological they might sound, were potentially real. When it became clear Rochester wasn’t going to comment on the stories’ veracity—or lack thereof—I asked him outright: “Are any of those stories true?”