Fiery Edge of Steel (A NOON ONYX NOVEL)

by Archer, Jill

  Was Ari in trouble?

  Across from me, my father continued to peel the skin from his fish. He looked up at me, his black-eyed gaze meeting mine. Only Karanos could fillet something and not get a single speck of flesh on his impeccable suit.

  “He took Ynocencia home,” he said matter-of-factly, peeling and slicing. “I ordered him to because I wanted to talk to you.”

  I took a sip of my soup. It was ice-cold, which I wasn’t expecting—clearly it was meant to be served chilled. I made a moue of distaste, which Karanos saw. The corner of his mouth twitched in what may have been amusement or, more likely, derision.

  “When I was young, I wanted to be a mechanic,” he said. I dropped my spoon in my soup and a few drops of orange splashed out onto my white paper place mat. I looked up at my father in surprise. The comment was so personal, so revealing. So unlike anything he’d ever shared with me before.

  “Hmm? Oh, yes,” he said in a bland voice with a bland expression that was only a smidge away from facetious. “I spent all of my free time with Mark Grayson. The Hyrke mechanic who lives on the Petrificai estate?”

  I nodded. I knew Mark, although we’d never had much to say to each other. Maegester magic didn’t mix well with machines.

  “Grayson, and the Petrificus family, were gracious enough to let me onto their repair docks. Luck knows how much longer Grayson’s repairs took with me hanging about, but he never said a word. Everyone was always friendly, very accommodating.”

  I swallowed, not wanting to say anything that might interrupt one of the only stories I’d ever been told of my father’s life before becoming the executive. Across the table, Karanos delicately deboned the fish. He placed the spine and rib bones on top of the pile of discarded skin. He stared at me then, and for just a moment the deadness of his stare reminded me of the snapper’s bulging eye.

  “What happened?” I said in a soft croak.

  “I grew up,” he said sharply. “I turned twenty-one. I declared.”

  With a single neat motion, Karanos sliced off the snapper’s head and pushed the plate toward me.

  “Jezebeth was guilty and deserved to die,” he said stonily.

  We stared at each other for a few moments. The deliberate conversational hum in the room became more forced. Hyrkes couldn’t sense my magic heating up, but they could see the flush in my face and my clenched hands on the table. But then Karanos got up, dropped his napkin in his chair, and walked out.

  Just before he left, he called over his shoulder, “The snapper is for you. I remembered how much you hate filleting them.”

  I wanted to remind him that I hated eating them too, but I knew he remembered. That’s why he’d ordered it.

  Chapter 3

  After the snapper incident, I had no appetite, but I didn’t want to offend Alba so I ate half my bread and managed to choke down the rest of my soup. Damn my father, I thought viciously. We were all damned anyway, or so some believed, but saying it helped keep my anger in check so I didn’t burn down the Black Onion. I left an enormous tip that included Alba’s dollar and enough to recompense for the untouched fish, grabbed my books, and headed back to Corpus Justica. I stayed at the library until close, reviewing doctrines, defenses, and demons because, in one very important way, survival at St. Luck’s was no different from in Halja as a whole.

  Ignorantia legis neminem non excusat. Ignorance of the law excuses no one.

  When I returned to my dorm room it was after midnight and Ivy, my roommate, was already asleep. I dropped my backpack as quietly as I could, stripped off my clothes, and slipped into bed without even brushing my teeth or washing my face. Why bother when I’d be up again before the sun anyway? But five hours later, when I awoke feeling completely unrefreshed, I thought better of my mini rebellion and scrubbed and brushed extra hard. Heading out into the warm, humid air of a midsummer morning, my skin glowed, my teeth shone, but my eyes were still bleary and bloodshot. Nothing short of a spell could disguise the tired, haggard look of a St. Luck’s law student.

  Manipulation class, the class that taught us how to manipulate our magic and control our demon clients, was starting at the Luck-forsaken hour of 8:00 a.m. All future Maegesters were required to take it. Manipulation was held in Rickard Building, where all of our other classes were held, but the classroom was on the fourth floor, an unoccupied, almost forgotten section of the building, furnished with decades-old desks, lithographs, and inkwells. Not that anyone actually used the inkwells these days. The rationale for such an old-fashioned venue was that visiting demon clients (who were sometimes centuries old) would feel more comfortable there, but I thought the real reason might have been to keep the Hyrke students happy. Most Hyrkes worshipped a demon or two but not many would actually want to meet one.

  I entered the classroom as I always did, tense. Even if my own client had not tried to kill me in this very room last semester, the room, its occupants, and what we discussed here still would have made me tense. I concentrated on keeping my signature in check. I’d learned a lot about how to control my magic, but unfortunate accidents still happened from time to time.

  Quintus Rochester, our professor, was leaning against the front of his desk, his bulk nearly hiding it, glancing at his watch. I had sixty seconds to get to my seat or I’d be sure to be his first victim.

  Why didn’t I get here earlier?

  Because I couldn’t stand to be in this room for longer than what was absolutely necessary. I nodded to Mercator, the only other student in the class besides Ari who would nod back at me, and scooted into my seat. The seat next to me, Ari’s seat, was empty. I guess he hadn’t made it back yet from escorting Ynocencia home. I couldn’t imagine how horrible that assignment must have been, making sure the lover of the demon he had just killed made it back safely into the arms of her abusive husband. But Karanos wouldn’t have seen it that way. After Ari’s protocol breach yesterday, Karanos would have viewed the escort assignment as the perfect test of fealty. Huh. Now that I thought about it, I was surprised my father hadn’t demanded that I eat the snapper he’d ordered for me. But as it turned out, my father had a far greater test planned for me.

  If revenge is a dish best served cold, then knowledge is a dish best left untouched.

  “Ms. Onyx,” Rochester’s gravelly voice erupted from his mountainous being like a lava spill, slow moving but unmistakably deadly. “Define duty.”

  Ugh. My mental musings about fealty and my father had inadvertently brought about the very thing I’d sought to avoid: Rochester’s attention. It was tempting to blurt out something about ad valorem taxes or import duties in an effort to misdirect the discussion, but such an attempt would be academically disadvantageous, as well as completely ineffective. Rochester always got right to the point and he expected his students to do the same.

  “A duty is an obligation that one person has toward another.”

  “So a duty is the same thing as an obligation?”

  “Not necessarily. ‘Obligation’ implies that something was received in return for the duty owed.”

  “So all obligations are duties, but not all duties are obligations?”

  “No . . .” Jeez, I was losing ground already and Rochester was only two questions in. To my left, Brunus Olivine, a nasty, lecherous, repugnant Maegester-in-Training whose signature always made me think of rotten cabbage, snickered.

  “A duty is something that’s owed,” I said, correcting my earlier answer.

  “Why would someone owe something for nothing? Isn’t one of the basic tenets of contract law consideration?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, thinking, “but duties can be imposed by all kinds of things, not just a contract.”

  “So all contracts are duties, but not all duties are contracts?”

  I nodded. Rochester stared. I swallowed. I knew he would have preferred an unequivocal “yes” to a nod but my analysis felt shaky. To my detriment, I’d glossed over the duty readings last night in favor of the demons and defenses.
Little wonder why, but now I’d pay for my poor choice. As if on cue, Rochester started windmilling his massive arm in an attempt to get me to answer faster.

  “And how does that work?”

  “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.

  COUNTRY OF HALJA

  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 n
ever 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.”