Nanoc entered a maze of tall shelves that stood so close together that he had to squeeze past them, their ancient wooden bones creaking and threatening to snap at any moment. This was the cursed hall of records, where the devils of Hell recorded every contract in which a mortal had given up their soul for power, revenge, or even the old and boring reason of money, money, money. The mortals had all done so with the total certainty that while everyone dies they wouldn’t die, not them, no, never. They were special; they would live forever. It was the devils who had lost out in the contract because the mortal souls would never be delivered. Every mortal secretly believed this; every devil knew it wasn’t true. The devils nodded, winked, and laughed. They wrote down their little contracts and stored them away.

But not very well. There were millions of them stuffed into shelves, piled high on the ground so that the floor itself was a shifting river of paper.

“Gods dammit,” Nanoc sighed. “It’s a good thing Dren isn’t here. He’d hate it.”

In truth, the lack of filing offended even Nanoc’s repressed clerk instincts. He had been brought up to respect paperwork – he had hated every lesson – but this mess wasn’t chaos, this wasn’t fun, this wasn’t even rebellion again good sense. This was silly.

“I told myself I’d never do this again,” Nanoc muttered.

He looked around, but there was no one to see him.

“Find paperwork,” he muttered.

Light flowed out of him, forming a spectral pen. Nanoc signed, but his barbarian class would be no help now. He followed the pen through the shelves.

He reached a new section, even darker and more cramped than before: this was the section of the libraries where the devils kept the contracts they made with each other, the most devious, the most nasty, the most complicated works of legal art ever written.

His magical pen led him with unnerving confidence to a shelf, to a paper on that shelf. Nanoc fetched it down and started reading.

He squinted. He frowned. He cursed a little. A devil’s contract is a tricky thing - sometimes the small print is so small as to be invisible. The devil had an army of evil lawyers by class who specialized in making contracts almost unreadable to the average person. There were phrases that meant to confuse, others to downright mislead. The small, wriggling text would have driven most mortals mad, but he was a gnome clerk who had worked at the Heroes Guild itself, and no amount of writing was going to beat him. He drew out a pen – one of Dren’s – and sat down to read. He read the contract several times before he shook his head in disbelief.

“Sloppy,” he muttered about a particular cause, and his pen slashed out with as much certainty as his axe ever had.

“Vague,” he judged a statement, and his pen stabbed the words as if he wanted them to bleed.

“Surely no one would be so foolish…,” he said with a frown which turned quickly into the dreadful smile of a clerk who had beaten the forms of Hell. His pen leapt over the paper, black ink, crossing out dirty hoofprints and leaving his own signature in their place. Then he bit the tip of his index finger until it bled and used it to sign the paper.

Nanoc stood up. He folded the contract up carefully. He had no large pockets to store it in, so he shoved it down the front of his pants.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Right,” he said. “There’s still one thing to do, then. Two things.”

He searched through the maze of shelves until he found a wide space with a single, wide desk. A devil sat behind the desk. He had the casual arrogance of someone who gets to say ‘no’ to a lot of people every day.

Nanoc walked right up to the desk.

“Do you work here? I’d like to register a change of ownership,” he told the devil. “I need you to witness the contract?”

“What?” the devil demanded. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

But if Nanoc had learned one thing in his travels, it was to never pause long enough for the truth to find him out. He pulled the contact out of his pants and slammed it on the desk.

“Do you not know how to do that?” he asked the devil. “I thought it was easy enough.”

“I can do it,” the devil said defensively. “What contract is— ah, yes, I remember this one. The contract between Reen of the metaphysical inn and his landlord, Loof.”

The devil spoke the name with disdain, like Rotcel would say ‘free’, Dren would say ‘ignorance is bliss’, or Nanoc would say ‘diet’. Loof was not loved by his fellow devil. That was going to make things easier.

“But Loof didn’t sign the contract,” Nanoc pointed out. “Look here.”

While Loof had marked his hoofprints all over the contract, he had not actually done so where it said ‘Owner’s signature’. That bit had been left blank. The contract had still been accepted – Reeb had not objected at the time – and who else would have? – and so he had been forced to serve as Loof’s tenant. Devils had no sympathy for those who did not see the small print.

“Is that right? Well, that’s his own fault, and the contract is void,” the devil said, sounding bored. “But you can’t just claim the contract as your own, you know. You would need to ensure all elements are correctly signed, and I certainly won’t be helping—"

“I did. Here.”

The devil was surprised but not yet impressed.

“Yes? But did you countersign the pentagrams—”

“Of course. Here and here. And here and here and here.”

“Well, you’ll need to—”

“Sign in blood. Triple checked, yes, and initialed and—”

They went backward and forwards for a while, the devil refusing to help, Nanoc using every trick he had ever learned as a clerk to prove that the paperwork was in order. Finally, the devil had no option but to agree.

“Fine. You’re the owner, or rather, the person who owns your soul is. Get out!”

Nanoc got out.

Dren was waiting for him as he left the hall of records and walked back into the corridor.

“The guards are coming! Did you get the contract?” Dren asked.

“I did.”

“Then let’s get out of here! Here, let me help you with your chains, and we’ll be disguised again.”

He reached for Nanoc’s chains, but the gnome stepped back. Nanoc stopped his hands on the chains. They did need to escape: they had been in Hell for too long already. Leaving in a rush made sense. It was rational. Anyone normal would want it.

“Guess what? I found some old books back there, too,” Nanoc said casually. “Really boring and dusty tomes of history. We can steal a few on the way out.”

“No, I told you, put your chains on before the guards arrive! There isn’t time. We should get out of here,” Dren said.

Nanoc spun around, grabbed Dren, and slammed him into the wall.

“You’re not Dren!” he said, pinning the elf against the wall. “Who are you and what have you done with my friend?”

Dren gasped.

“Do you believe—”

“No! It’s do you ‘know’,” Nanoc shouted, punching Dren in the face. “And I never do, because I never listen! Now who are you!”

Dren screamed in pain, but then he saw Nanoc wasn’t relenting. His face melted, revealing the familiar face of their guild into Hell.

“You’re the imp, Ostor,” Nanoc said, startled. “You said you’d help us get the contract!”

“You saw through my tricks, gnome!” he hissed. “But its too late, too late!”

“You said you’d keep us safe!” Nanoc protested. “We did a pinky promise! That’s binding!”

“I promised to help you find the contract,” Ostor corrected him. “And now you have, so I can claim your souls! You will never find your friends! I have hidden them away in the very depths of the city so that I can sell their souls to the highest bidder! You will never find them, gnome! Not if you had a million years to search—"

There was a boom! in the distance followed by the sound of glass crashing and shouts of panic. Something sounded like a large gong falling over, and there was a hiss as if some great kettle was boiling over. Ostor grimaced.

Nanoc smiled.

“That sounds like my friends,” he said to the imp. “What don’t we go see how they’re doing?”