Paladin's Strength

by T. Kingfisher

  His hunch paid off. Almost, he wished it hadn’t.

  It was the mirror of the beast run, a semi-circle, though this one had no cages. There were dozens of drowgos laid out on the floor, in long lines, like bodies laid out after a battle. Hooded figures stood among them. When the door opened, the figures all turned, in eerie unison, to look at the intruders. Istvhan recognized the tallest among them at once. He had seen that one before, at Antony’s side.

  They stared at each other, the trio of living humans and the ranks of the dead. Smooth men moved to the tall one’s side, spreading out behind him like an honor guard.

  But that was not all. Slumped in a corner, shivering and sick, flanked by two smooth men, was Stachys.

  “Well, well, well,” said the hooded figure. “Look who came to join us.” His voice was terrible, the voice of something that should not have ever been given the ability to speak. It was guttural and lungless and it made the hair stand up on Istvhan’s arms. But it was also smooth and cultured, all the accents landing precisely where they should. The combination made Istvhan feel as if his ears were going to start bleeding.

  The hooded figure pushed back his cloak. He was a smooth man. Istvhan had expected that. Not merely a head, this was a sculpted bust with skin sewn up over the edges, drawn tight with thick black thread. His skin was waxy and desiccated and he smelled strongly of spices.

  “You’re not rotting,” said Clara.

  The clay head smiled. “No,” he said. “It was so inconvenient, always having to find new bodies. But they have so much salt in this city, do they not?” He spread his arms and Istvhan saw the long line of stitching down a narrow, sunken chest. His pectoral muscles were flat and sunken and also had that strange, waxy shine.

  “Saint’s breath,” said Clara. “You’ve salt-cured yourself.” Sigrid swore softly behind them.

  “A crude form of mummification, but an effective one. And it keeps me from relying on anyone else to stitch me into a new body more than once a year or so.” He tilted his head. “Now why are you here? You killed many of my kin in the arena, did you not? Did you think that you might finish the job?”

  “I have been hunting you across half the continent,” growled Istvhan. “You murdered dozens of people in Archenhold.”

  “I did nothing of the sort. Others of my kind did that.” He shrugged, the clay moving like flesh, the black threaded skin at the edges stretching against the waxy muscle of his chest. “Many of us went out in the world. We were looking for a place where we might live. Do not your own people do that as well? And sometimes kill those you find there?”

  “Sometimes,” said Istvhan. “We don’t ride their corpses around later, though.”

  “We are, by nature, parasitic on your kind,” the bust said pleasantly, in that hollow, horrible voice. “We require your dead. In the end, this local arrangement is the best one we have yet found. Your people were always going to die in the pits. I am merely making sure that those deaths do not go to waste.”

  “You’re a monster,” said Clara.

  “As are you. I saw what you did in the pit, you and your kinswomen.” He smiled. He had a beautiful smile, a young god sewn onto the shoulders of a monster. Stachys, at the height of his powers, had been a genius, there was no denying it. If the gods had been kind, they would have dropped a rock on the man’s head before he unleashed his genius on the world. “I suppose you will try to kill me now? After chasing me across the continent?”

  “That’s the plan,” said Istvhan, who really saw no point in lying about it.

  “And when you die, your bodies will be used by my kin.” His smile grew and it had teeth in it, and there was something not quite right about the teeth—maybe Stachys hadn’t sculpted them quite perfectly, or perhaps he had never sculpted them at all. “Perhaps as a bear. I had not thought of putting my kin in animals. The goat was so unsatisfactory. But a kin tiger, or a kin bear…my, what a swath they’d cut in the arena.”

  “Love…” said a weak voice from the corner. “Love, that’s not…that’s not right. It’s one thing if people are dead, but…but the animals didn’t do anything…”

  “Be quiet,” said Stachys’s creature to his creator. “No one asked your opinion.”

  “It’s not right,” mumbled the sculptor, staring at his clay hands. He looked half-dead already. God help me, it might have been the kinder thing if we had killed him. At least he’d have died at home and not dragged here to be abused by this monster.

  “You’re not wrong,” said Istvhan to Stachys, very gently. “It isn’t right.”

  The sculptor frowned up at him. One of his cloudy eyes had gone nearly white, and Istvhan wondered what had happened to him. “Do I know you?”

  “We’ve met before,” said Istvhan, giving Stachys his full attention and hoping that Clara was keeping an eye on the bust in his terrible salt-cured body. “You told me all about how you made him. You said it was out of love.”

  “Yes…” breathed Stachys. “Yes, I remember. Love is what makes it work.”

  “Oh, so you were the ones who killed my kin guarding him.” Stachys’s creation applauded sardonically. “Well done. It was sloppy of me to leave him out there, I suppose, but he is such a useless thing to lug about.”

  “And yet you don’t kill him,” said Clara thoughtfully. “I wonder why not?”

  “Sentimentality,” said the creature sharply.

  “I doubt that.” She flexed her hands, as if imagining that they were a bear’s paws. “I doubt that very much. I think even you don’t know what happens if he dies. I think you know there’s a chance that all his magic will die with him. Including you.”

  Stachys looked from Clara to his creation, then back to Istvhan. “Is that true?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said the creature.

  “I think it might be,” said Istvhan, in the kindest voice he could manage.

  “Oh,” said Stachys, and seemed to lapse back into himself, as if he had exhausted his store of words. The two smooth men behind him did not shift, but their flat ceramic eyes stared into Istvhan, unblinking.

  “You bore me,” said the creature. “Kin, kill them.”

  The smooth men started forward. Clara held up a hand. “Before I try to kill you,” she said, “I have one question.”

  “Ask quickly,” said the creature, as the smooth men advanced. He stepped back, placing them between himself and the three warriors. “If it’s interesting, maybe I’ll answer it before you die.”

  “Why did your kin eat that clear goo from inside the clay head?”

  A smooth man swung at her. Clara ducked. An instant later, Sigrid was erupting into bear form and its head exploded into pottery shards as she struck it with her good paw.

  “Clay,” said Stachys’s creation, stepping back further, “is far more efficient than flesh. I can know all that my kin know at a taste. It doesn’t work on your brains, you may be interested to know.”

  Istvhan rushed the smooth men standing over Stachys. One’s head popped as his knife hilt met it, but the other swept its blade at him, and he took the cut on the bad shoulder. Hot white pain ran down his arm and then it went limp, not merely numb but nearly useless.

  The smooth man lifted its sword, and then a bear’s mouth engulfed its entire head and crunched down. Shards of pottery flew and the beast dropped the clay, making a gagging noise of disgust.

  “You probably don’t want to bite them…” said Clara, far too late.

  Blood and clear goo dripped from the bear’s mouth. It gave Clara a look. Istvhan still did not know bears well, but he had once had a dog give him a very similar look after it bit a porcupine. Clara shook her head sadly, and then there was a visual sizzle and suddenly a great deal less free space on Istvhan’s side of the room. The second bear waded into the fray.

  Istvhan did not see a great deal of available space, so hung back, holding his injured arm. He tried to curl his hand into a fist and immediately wished that he hadn’t. The
pain was so sharp and electric that it almost stopped being pain and became something else entirely.

  Still, if you were going to fight smooth men, intelligent bears were better than two good arms. It had been hard to know where to aim on the drowgos. The smooth men required no such precision. Smash the head and they died.

  Stachys’s creation skipped backward as the last of the smooth men shattered against the wall. “My, my,” he said, sounding amused. “You’ve killed my guards. Oh dear. Whatever shall I do?”

  The bears either did not understand or did not appreciate sarcasm. Istvhan narrowed his eyes. He knew what it meant when a human enemy gloated, but the living statue did not look quite like a human and did not move quite like a human and Istvhan had serious doubts that he behaved quite the same either.

  “Oh, wait. That’s right. I have an entire army right here.” The creature grinned then, and there was an emptiness in his mouth, as if his throat opened onto a vast pit. “Up, drowgos! Up!”

  One of the bears made a nervous clicking sound in its throat, and then, all around them, the drowgos began to rise.

  “Pity you didn’t arrive about an hour earlier,” said Stachys’s creation, as his army shambled to its feet. “Before I finished putting the new kin into these bodies. It takes a bit longer on these, because the flesh is so rotten that it doesn’t form the connection readily. Still, they should be ready now…ah, there we go.”

  And then he laughed.

  “We killed them once,” said Istvhan, with bravado he didn’t feel. He fell back toward the bears, watching the corpses sway on their feet. “We can do it again.” He tried to do the mental math. They had rendered a number of them completely useless for battle, surely—limbless or torn in half. That left perhaps twenty here, and two bears and one paladin, except one of the bears only had three working legs and the paladin only had one good arm.

  The resulting equation was not coming out in Istvhan’s favor, so he ignored it.

  “There were a great many more of you then,” said the creature, echoing his thoughts. “Of course, you did make more than a few of my drowgos useless. Fortunately, I found some lovely replacements.”

  Three more figures rounded the curve of the run. One of the bears made a sound that Istvhan had never heard from an animal’s throat before.

  Their heads replaced by the unblinking stare of the smooth men, Clara’s three dead sisters stumbled forward into the fray.

  Fifty

  “Oh no…” said Clara softly behind him. “Oh no, no, no. Not you. Not this.”

  “Decided to join us in humanity?” asked the creature. “Or what passes for it, for such as you and I.”

  Clara ignored him. Istvhan darted a glance back and saw that she had her arm around the remaining bear’s neck. The bear moaned and tried to back up, running into the wall and starting like a frightened dog.

  Istvhan stepped forward in between the dead women and the living. One good arm. One knife. Twenty drowgos and three former nuns.

  No bears to back him up.

  He did not blame them. The two werebears were stronger than any human, but strength was useless in the face of love. Very well. He would be strong in their stead. It was what paladins were for, after all.

  “No,” said Stachys. The potter’s voice was very quiet, but the smooth men made no sound, and it fell into that soundlessness like a stone in a pond. “No, love, this is wrong.”

  “Be quiet,” said his creation.

  “You can’t do this.”

  The statue rolled its carved white eyes. “And how do you plan to stop me? You’ve never stopped me before. You just whine and snivel and collapse in a heap and I do whatever I wish anyway.”

  Each word struck the man like a blow. He flinched repeatedly, lifting his clouded eyes to Istvhan.

  “You three first,” said the sculpture, waving the three dead nuns forward. The trio advanced. Behind Istvhan, the bear moaned again.

  “No,” said Stachys again, with a little more conviction this time. He stood up, shaking violently, and staggered forward, as if to place himself between Istvhan and the smooth men. “No.”

  His creation broke into the same sardonic applause that he had used before. “Oh, very impressive. That will certainly work. You, in the middle, hold him and make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.”

  The sculptor lunged.

  Istvhan realized too late what was happening and tried to push the man away, but his useless arm refused to obey. The pain was breathtaking but he still tried to turn, pulling his knife hand away. He was too slow. Since his god died, the tide had not been concerned with saving lives, only with taking them.

  The knife entered Stachys’s belly. The sculptor blinked a few times and said, “Oh…oh, that’s not so bad, is it?” and clutched Istvhan’s wrist, pinning the blade in place with his own bodyweight.

  Istvhan dropped the knife and tried to catch the man as he fell, but Stachys collapsed straight down, dragging the blade upward through his flesh until it struck bone. His creation screamed.

  It was a scream that was not-right, the same way that his voice was not-right, a scream that should not have existed from a throat that should never have been born. Istvhan’s hearing vanished in a high-pitched ringing and the bear screamed.

  He could no longer hear, so he did not know what Stachys’s last words were. The man’s lips moved, something that might have been a word or a name, and then he died.

  The smooth men crumpled. The drowgos went first, collapsing where they stood. The three women went more slowly, first to their knees, then down into huddled piles on the floor.

  Stachys’s first and finest creation, in his stolen body of flesh and salt, swayed on his feet. He, too, tried to speak, but Istvhan could not hear those words either. He did not say very many, in any event. His clay lips moved slow and stiff and then stopped moving entirely, frozen in a snarl, and then he fell forward. The ceramic bust struck the floor and smashed into a thousand shards and none of the bodies in the room moved, not now or ever again.

  Clara felt as if her head might explode from the scream and hardly cared. Her chest already felt as if it had exploded. She had shoved everything down, over and over, so that she could function, but seeing her sisters coming toward her like that…she couldn’t. She had dropped the beast’s form because she could feel her control slipping. Sister Sara, who took care of the bees and harvested the honey every year. Sister Mel, apprenticed to the apothecary, who sat with Clara when she’d caught the summer fever two years ago. Ari the novice, barely fourteen, never to grow any older at all.

  She’d known they were dead, and she’d told herself that she would grieve later, when everyone was safely away. Seeing them walk forward, with those obscenely sculpted heads atop their bodies, was worse than death. I couldn’t save you in life, and now I can’t save you again. Blessed Saint Ursa, why would you let this happen to them? Why?

  And then they died and the scream rang in her ears and Istvhan turned and pulled her out of the room so she didn’t have to look. He was saying something to her, she thought, but she couldn’t hear him.

  Sigrid turned human again, and had the presence of mind to grab their clothes. Sigrid was practical. Clara had to be practical too. Everyone on this accursed island will have heard that scream. Half of Morstone probably heard it. I can’t fall apart. I can’t dwell. Mourn later. We have to get away.

  The feelings did not want to be shoved away. Istvhan was still holding her upper arms and saying something and the ringing was slowly subsiding but all she could make out was “…right?” Is he asking which way to go? Is he asking if I’m all right? She shook her head helplessly at him, touching her ears, and he nodded and held up her robe in that familiar gesture, which threatened to make her start sobbing again for no particular reason.

  Not now. Not now. Now we have to get away.

  The question of which way to go was answered when gladiators spilled around the corner, holding their heads. Istvhan pointed to the o
pen door and said something, gesturing with broad arm movements, and tugged Clara and Sigrid away. They followed his lead, still clutching their heads.

  “Up or down?” Clara heard, although the ringing in her ears tried to distort it.

  “Down,” she said, hoping that he could hear her. Down had been clear, thanks to the beasts. Saint Ursa alone knew what it looked like up above.

  Apparently the scream had done more to cow the animals than any number of men with spears. Even the scavengers had fled from the bodies. Clara led the way toward the docks, not sure what they would do when they got there, but lacking any better ideas.

  Sigrid stretched her jaw and grimaced, apparently trying to pop her ears. “Is that it, then? Are we done?”

  “God, I hope so,” groaned Istvhan.

  They reached the provisioning area and Clara saw the bins on the side of the wall and fell on them, ravenous. Raw potato was perhaps a bit much, but there were apples, packed in layers of straw. Sigrid joined her, nearly eating the cores in her haste.

  Istvhan looked up the stair worriedly. “I think more are coming.”

  “Damn and blast,” muttered Sigrid, grabbing as many apples as she could hold. “If I change again, I’m not coming out in this life.”

  Clara felt pretty much the same way. She tightened the rope belt at her waist and shoveled apples frantically down the neck of the torn robe. If I can get a couple more in me…

  “You should probably get those lumps looked at,” said Istvhan, as they fled for a more sheltered spot behind a wall of barrels.

  “Apple pox,” she said, fishing another one out of her cleavage and biting into it.

  “What did I—crunch crunch—say about—crunch—flirting?”

  Clara was about to answer when they heard a door creak and then the footsteps of multiple people on the stairs. She wasn’t sure if the metallic noises were from armor or if her hearing was still playing tricks on her, but she didn’t like it. We need to go to the docks. Now.