I started to pick up the papers, carefully ordering them.
“We define the conditions for penalties,” he said, interrupting me. “I break free of my own will, or I take action that interferes with the goal, or I take action to harm you or yours, as we covered in the other part. Connect it.”
Suspicions confirmed.
“And… you agree to the penalty clause, then,” I said. “Forfeiting all that you have claimed and corrupted? Undoing the damage?”
“Yes.”
I exhaled slowly. Better than drawing in deep breaths, with the reek of this place. The cold made smells easier to handle, but it was still filthy. I laid out the pages again, then started writing it out.
The lingering animals, I noticed, were gone. They must have started slinking away when the mouse was killed.
A part of me wanted to think it was ominous, but… I felt pretty damn relieved the beasts weren’t around.
My gut told me he was getting rid of them to put me more at ease, in the hopes that I’d let my guard down and let the loophole slip.
“Two more things to cover,” I said, “Unless you have ideas on what goes into a contract?”
“If I had specific knowledge,” Pauz said, “I would not be free.”
“Okay,” I said. “I would like to say that, should there be a grievance in the contract, mediation goes to a third party.”
“Who?” he asked.
“A neutral party, or a party professional enough to be neutral and unbiased with both a mortal human and an imp. Someone we both agree on, with further stipulations to prevent one party from simply refusing every suggestion.”
He cackled. The little bald, shark-toothed, clawed baby was surprisingly good at cackling. “Fine.”
“With further rules against the number of complaints,” I said. “To be defined in a few minutes.”
“Granted,” Pauz said. “Amusing thing to imagine. I don’t think neutral parties exist, in the midst of this, but yes. We can try, or form another compromise.”
“Yes,” I said. “Which brings us to the last part of sketching this out, before I write out a draft. We need to clarify terms, which means footnotes. Let’s start with the definition of harm. We can rewrite it to be clearer.”
“That portion is done,” Pauz said. He wasn’t hostile, not tense, but the response was a fraction too fast.
He crossed the table, viciously kicking and flinging dishes, bits of trash, and dried pieces of shit off to either side as he walked.
He stopped a few feet from me, tilting his head a fraction past normal human limits to read the paper. I felt the intensity of the effect from him increase. Wearing me down at the corners of my mind.
The stink of him. There was a sound that rolled off him too, faint and grating, as if he were a radio, generating the opposite of calming, soothing white noise.
I could feel my skin crawling, and I had an awfully hard time convincing myself that I didn’t have lice or fleas, just being in this house.
Too cold for lice, I told myself, not sure if I was right.
“That portion is fine,” he said, again. He looked up at me, glaring. “Resolved.”
“We redefine harm,” I said. “Something simpler. Implicit and explicit harm.”
He paused, taking that in, then scowled. “Why?”
“Cover more bases. Unless you’re admitting you’re not acting in good faith?”
How hard would he fight me? He would have agreed to the penalty with the idea that he could get at me this way.
If he was going to attack me, it would be now.
Long seconds passed, his eyes roving over the scattered paper.
“What if I said I had other issues?” he asked. “Other grievances.”
“Keep them in mind, we focus on this one first. Defining the clauses.”
“What,” he said, his voice low and dangerous, “If I threatened to have you devoured alive, right now?”
“Then we’re just about back to the same point we were at the beginning, and we’ve made almost no progress,” I responded. “And, again, it’s up to you to decide whether you want the Lord of Toronto in two days or me right now.”
“I don’t have much patience, diabolist,” he said.
Rose had surmised as much. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry. I was still leaning on the rather gross table, staring down at the imp. I didn’t want to be the first to back down. We’d decided our last conflict when he’d backed away from June’s frost.
“Maybe you don’t,” I said. “But if that’s true, if you’re that shortsighted, you may well be doomed to being small fry forever.”
“You think me small?”
Well, there I went, insulting him and turning a bad situation into a worse one.
The intensity of the radiation was growing.
“It would be more correct to say,” I said, very carefully, “I think that you could be bigger.”
I saw a smile spread across his face, the very tips of his teeth visible just past his thin lips.
Thank you, Rose, I thought. It was always so much easier when I had an idea of the motivations at play. You’re helping even when you’re not here.
Might as well drive the point home.
“I’m not stupid, Pauz. I know you’re trying to screw with me in this clause. Bluff me, distract me, mislead, I’m still not going to let it slide. No harm, implicit or explicit,” I said, tapping the paper.
“Hm,” he grunted. “Curses.”
“Well?”
“Damnation. I will, to the best of my ability, prevent you from coming to harm, that implicitly or explicitly derives from me in any way or form.”
I wrote it out.
“You’d damn well better be able to deliver,” he said, clearly perturbed.
“It’s up to you to decide how you’re going after Conquest,” I said. And it’s up to me to decide how to deal with you both. Rose had suggested this and then disappeared on me.
“Agreed,” he said. “I’ll find a weak point. I always do.”
“Now,” I said, “We go over every single word to make sure there aren’t any hidden meanings. We define or reword everything, until there are no questions.”
“Hm,” he said. “I thought you were on a schedule, diabolist.”
“I am,” I said. “Were you calling me diabolist, before this?”
“No,” he said. He smiled. “Because you weren’t. But you are one now, hm?”
The smile and the idea both disturbed me.
“Let’s begin,” I said.
It was tedious work, slow going, with me taking my time over every word, thinking in abstracts, in terms of symbols, and in terms of the very literal.
Knowing all the while that I was probably missing something vital. Something that could get me killed or spell horrible doom for everyone and everything.
I didn’t own a watch or a phone, which made it hard to track the time. The long-faded light did make life harder, as I stared at the paper in the gloom, in a house without power. I was glad for the light that did filter through the windows, and I was glad I’d left earlier than I had to, that I hadn’t folded and waited for Rose to show up. This was proving to be time-consuming, tedious, and we weren’t even done.
Time would be running short.
We finished looking it over. He was pacing, now. Eating more.