“If you’re quite finished…” said Mallory, apparently deciding to move things along.
“I’m not, actually. Pala—Galen, can you turn the body over for me?”
“Of course, love.” Galen released him and bent to roll the corpse over. Piper know that the love was purely to make the act look better, but he felt the blush reach his ears anyway. He would never call anyone love in public. It wasn’t his nature. Also, this is fake. Also, he’s really goddamn good-looking.
That hair. Really deep red, not the ferocious carrot color most people got stuck with. And his eyes were probably actually hazel but that much red really drew out the green in them. And he had freckles—was there a redhead alive without freckles?—but only a few dusted across his skin and that was deeply unfair, given what your average redhead had to deal with. Were there other freckles elsewhere on his skin? Where? How far down did they go?
Piper stared at the body on the ground and thought fixedly about fish eating someone’s genitals.
The corpse didn’t look much better from the back, but then, they never did. Piper took more notes than he would ever use, even if he were writing a monograph, just to see if he could outlast Mallory. Earstripe stood in solemn silence. So did Galen.
Eventually, he had to admit that Captain Mallory was willing to wait quite a long time to give Earstripe a dressing down. He put his notebook away and nodded to the gnole. “Thank you so much for informing me. This will be very valuable.”
Earstripe nodded. Piper turned to Galen. Say something convincing. “I appreciate you humoring me. Would you like to walk me back home, then?”
“Naturally,” said Galen. “We can get that breakfast you promised me.” He winked. They strolled arm in arm away from the river, and made it nearly to the street before they heard Mallory’s voice raised behind them.
Six
“Think Earstripe will be okay?” asked Piper, as they walked. They were still arm in arm, which Piper had apparently forgotten, even though Galen hadn’t. There was more muscle lining the doctor’s forearms than he would have expected. Well, he’s out there sawing through ribcages. That’s got to take a certain amount of strength.
“I hope so.” Galen grimaced. “I know he was going behind Mallory’s back, and no commander appreciates that.”
“You think he believed us?”
“What, that we’re screwing like crazed weasels?”
Piper blushed again. Galen didn’t know whether to feel guilty or crow with triumph. Stop. That’s unkind. He might not even be interested in other men. Galen would bet his eyeteeth that wasn’t the case, but you did find some men who wouldn’t admit to it, for whatever reason. Really, though, how often do you find a grown man who blushes like a maiden? It’s adorable.
“I meant,” said Piper, withdrawing his arm from Galen’s, “that Earstripe called us because I’m writing a monograph.”
“Oh, he absolutely thinks we’re lying, but there’s just enough chance we’re not, and he’s a fair enough man, that Earstripe will get out of the worst of it. He’ll pretend he’s coming down on Earstripe for not informing him that you wanted to see the bodies though.”
“How is that fair?”
“For a policeman, that’s about as good as it gets.”
The doctor scowled. “I do not like policemen.”
Galen raised an eyebrow. “I thought you worked with them a lot.”
“How else would I know them well enough to dislike them?” Piper shook his head. “I prefer working with your people, honestly.”
“Paladins?”
“The White Rat. Although I suppose paladins, too. At least you’ve got a god in your head who will stop you if you decide to rough people up.”
Galen said nothing. He had not had a god like that since the summer solstice five years ago, when the Saint of Steel had died. It seemed like a good time to change the subject. “Would you like to get breakfast?”
Piper gave him a quick, startled look. Galen spread his hands and attempted to look charming and harmless, which was a bit of a struggle when you were carrying a sword longer than the other person’s thigh.
“I feel like death warmed over,” said the doctor, “and the thought of food is nauseating. That’s probably a sign I should eat, or at least drink something non-alcoholic. What do you suggest?”
“I know just the place.”
Galen started to lead the way, but Piper held up a hand. “Let me wash up first,” he said. “I’ve had my hands in a corpse and that doesn’t go well with toast.”
They detoured to a public pump. There was a bucket of mostly clean sand there for scrubbing, but Piper ignored it, pulling out a brick of soap and washing up with that. Galen worked the pump handle a few times to give him water to work with. He turned his gloves inside out and used the sand on them, however, then tucked both damp gloves into his bag. “Right,” he said, when he had finished this rather elaborate washing up. “That’ll do.”
“Mmm,” said Galen. Saint’s balls, the man’s hands were also extremely pale. It was amazing he didn’t have rickets. He needs to spend more time outside, not in that basement.
For all that, Piper looked to be in good shape. He was no soldier, but he had those lovely long-fingered hands and smoothly muscled forearms. Galen wondered how much muscle it took to sling bodies around. Probably quite a lot. Every corpse I’ve ever dealt with has been a lot of dead weight, and he didn’t seem to have an assistant helping him.
“How do you get the bodies down to your workshop?” he asked abruptly.
If the change of topic surprised Piper, he didn’t show it. “There’s an old shaft that runs down under the wall from outside. Fairly steep, but you can get a wheeled cart down it. We bring the bodies in through there.”
Galen did some mental calculations. “Odd place for a shaft.”
“It really is. Supposedly it was the remains of a tunnel dug by sappers during some war a few hundred years ago, but let’s say that I’m very, very skeptical.”
They had reached the hole-in-the-wall public house that Galen had selected. He held the door open. “Oh?”
“It’s much deeper than it needs to be to get under the wall, and everything’s been smoothed. Now, I grant you, I’m working out of what was probably an old wine cellar, and you can make a case they were bringing barrels in, but that’s not where the tunnel stops.”
Galen paused. “It isn’t?”
“Nope.” Piper squinted at the menu on the wall. “What’s good?”
“Toast, egg, and pork scrapings. And the tea is strong enough to kill an ox.”
“Sounds dreadful. I’ll take it, minus the pork scrapings.”
“You sure? They’re better than they sound.”
“I don’t think I can handle meat at this hour.”
Galen placed the order and took two mugs of tea, then steered Piper to one of the tables. It was still early enough that most of the other customers were either late workers or carousers from the night before. “So where does the tunnel stop?”
Piper took a slug of tea and grimaced, then set the mug down. “An ivory door.”
“A what?”
“You ever seen a wonder engine?”
“Those big statues they find that the ancients left behind? No, but I saw plenty of clocktaurs back in the day.”
“Made of the same stuff. Looks like ivory, but much harder.”
Galen grimaced. He’d been twenty when the clocktaurs came through, and fighting against Anuket City’s monstrous mechanical legions had been his first taste of battle. Also his first taste of the battle tide. The Saint of Steel had taken him up barely a month after the war started. Then Archenhold had surrendered and he and the rest of the Saint’s chosen had to choose between standing idly by and going to the Dowager’s City, to the south, to hold the line against the clocktaurs.
And then it had ended as abruptly as it started. The clocktaurs went out of control and the demons bound inside turned on each other. He’d hel
ped the Dreaming God’s paladins mop up a few stragglers that survived, and they were still gigantic and made of strange bone gears, but if you hit them with hammers long enough, they went down.
You had to boil the pieces to stop the gears turning, though. It was nauseating.
The notion that there was a door made of that horrible ivory under the city was deeply unsettling. “And it’s just down there? What’s on the other side?”
“No idea. Can’t get the door open. You know what that material is like.” Piper drank his tea with the grim expression of a man taking medicine. “My predecessor said he’d tried everything, but it’s more like a wonder engine than a clocktaur. You can’t even dent the stuff. Fire is supposed to work, if you can get it hot enough, but that’s not really feasible in a closed corridor.”
Galen nodded. Clocktaurs would burn at about the temperature used to temper steel, but it was nearly impossible to get the fire hot enough on a battlefield. The Forge God’s people had tried rigging something up with portable bellows, but the only way to make it work was to have one of the forge-priests practically standing on the clocktaur’s head. They’d had better luck with the Forge God’s rare paladins, who could swing a hammer long after even a berserker like Galen had to stop.
“Anyway,” Piper was saying, “when the war started, the Archon had it bricked up in a couple of places, just in case there was something on the other side. Apparently there wasn’t. Eventually they opened the far end again, because it bothered people to see the body wagons coming through the administrative areas.” He stared into the dregs of the tea. “Or it bothered them to see the grave-gnoles, take your pick.”
Galen gave a humorless huff of laughter. Grave-gnoles, the lowest caste of gnolekind, were swathed from head to toe in old burial shrouds, and tended to unsettle both humans and other gnoles. That didn’t stop either species from employing them to dig graves and move the dead, of course.
“Have you seen the door?” asked Galen.
Piper didn’t meet his eyes.
“You have, haven’t you?”
Piper looked around guiltily. “Look, once I found out what was past the bricks, I had to at least look. And they didn’t do a very good job with the mortar anyway. I left it better than I found it when I bricked it up again.”
Galen leaned forward. “And?”
Piper sighed. “And it’s a door, all right. Set flat into the wall. You can see the seams, but they’re barely a hairsbreadth. You can’t get a knife blade in. I broke two scalpels on it and stopped. They’re too expensive to waste on a bit of idle curiosity.”
“What do you think is behind it?”
“Water,” said Piper unexpectedly. He looked up as a grim-faced servitor dropped two stacks of toast on the table, drowning in egg yolk and, in Galen’s case, bits of blackened meat. “Ah, thank you.”
“Water?” asked Galen, helping himself to toast.
“It’s well below the level of the river. High water marks on the walls, and there’s about six inches worth of standing water down there. I’m surprised the tunnel isn’t filled, but I suspect that whatever structure is behind the door may be blocking off the worst of it.” Piper shrugged.
“And nobody’s broken it open looking for treasure,” murmured Galen. “Surprising.”
“I don’t think the ancients actually left very many treasures.” Piper gazed at the toast like a man approaching the gallows. “Sure, everybody with a blanket of junk will try and sell you one, but have you ever heard of a real one? Something that wasn’t a wonder engine, or a bit of mysterious wall?”
“Once.”
Piper looked up from his toast, startled.
“We escorted two dedicates of the Many-Armed God from where they had been excavating back to their temple. What they found looked like a carved lizard with one white eye. About as long as your thumb. The mouth opened and if you pressed the eye, a little flame would come out.” He spread his hands. “The dedicates were more excited about the scraps of fabric it was wrapped in than they were about the carving. One said that it was a finer weave than anything we could make. And I’ll tell you one odd thing about it…”
It was Piper’s turn to lean forward. Galen was pleased to see that he’d eaten most of a piece of toast, almost without noticing.
“Part of it was melted.”
“Melted?”
“The fabric. One corner of it had been singed, and it didn’t burn, it melted like wax.”
“…Huh.”
“I know, right? But I grant you, that’s the only treasure I’ve ever seen that I believed was real. The people from the temple were thrilled by what looks like bits of trash from the same site. I could believe they’d pay money for them, but it’s not the kind of thing someone trying to make a quick coin would recognize.”
Piper nodded. “If there was any trash around the door, it’s long gone, particularly given that the tunnel has been flooded before. I suspect it was more prone to that before the city got built up around it. There’s a decent neighborhood by the entrance now, with actual storm drains. Figure that the door was underwater for most of its history, and once it dried out, the only people who knew or cared were my predecessor and the Archon’s people. There’s probably things like that all over the place. How long was Anuket City around before somebody dug up their damn wonder engine?”
“Fair enough.” Galen took the last slice of toast and finished it off. Piper finally noticed that he’d been eating his and gazed at it with dismay.
“Glad you’re feeling better,” Galen said. “For a moment there, when you were feeling around in that wound, I thought you were going to faint.”
Piper grunted, staring down at his toast. “Just a hangover,” he said after a moment. “My head was pounding.”
“Mmm.” Galen nudged a fresh mug of tea toward him, and thought that the interesting thing about having watched Piper lie to Mallory was how easy it was to tell that he was lying now.
Seven
It was only a day later that there was a knock. It came from low on the door, and Piper, who had been half-expecting it, knew to look down when he opened the door.
Earstripe looked tired. He was wearing many fewer rags than he had been before, and though he was still well covered, he looked smaller and more frail. “A gnole is not a guard-gnole any longer,” he said, without preamble.
“I’m sorry,” said Piper. Oh damn, now what do I say? This is hard enough with a human. He found himself wishing that Galen was here, someone who understood the gnoles a little better. He didn’t want to say something so utterly wrong that he offended Earstripe or drove him away. He held the door open. “Would you like to come in?”
The gnole nodded. Piper ushered him in. “Do gnoles…ah…drink alcohol?”
“Only sweet.”
“Damn.” Piper had always preferred the smokier whiskeys himself. He tried to remember if there was something in the cupboard that might work, a mead or a fruit brandy or something. “I’m sorry, Earstripe, I don’t think I have anything.”
Earstripe waved a hand. “A gnole doesn’t mind. A gnole didn’t come for that, bone-doctor.”
Piper sat down opposite him. “Go on.”
Earstripe met Piper’s eyes squarely. “I need your help,” he said.
Piper blinked.
“Too many bodies. There are too many. I am going up the river to look. I know something is going on, no matter what Mallory-captain says.”
Every word was carefully chosen, but Piper could hear desperation underlying them. The change in Earstripe’s syntax startled him more than he cared to admit. Did I somehow think he was unintelligent because of the way he sounded before? Even though I know better?
Perhaps. But how worried is he now, that he dare not take any chances with a human misunderstanding him?
“Do you think you can find the killer?” he asked.
“A…I have to try.”
“Going upriver could be dangerous,” Piper said.
“Yes.” Earstripe lifted his hands as if to begin twisting his whiskers, then smoothed them down instead. “Tomato-man has offered to help,” he added. “Galen-Paladin. The Rat-priests, they will listen to a paladin. They listen to you too, yes? Bone-doctor?”
“Sometimes,” said Piper. He knew where this was going now. Yes, of course. He’s going to ask me to come with them. And he thinks he has one shot at this, so he is using the most formal human language he can, and staring me in the eye even though I can tell he doesn’t like doing it.
His first instinct was to refuse. He worked in a little stone room underground, not on far-flung trips into danger. I am not equipped for this. I cannot fight and my conversational skills are limited to things like, “Did you know that blowfly eggs only take a day to hatch into maggots?” I am no good for this sort of thing.
Galen was going. Galen with his easy smile and some kind of secret in his eyes. Piper had laid awake thinking of those eyes and the arm Galen had laid across his shoulders, the strength of muscle and sinew and safety.
Galen is going. And Earstripe needs your help.
He took a deep breath. Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it had been since the first morning on the riverbank, looking at a body with a gaping wound in its chest. “You need me to come with you,” he said.
“You would help a gnole, bone-doctor. You would help the dead.”
“There’s no helping the dead,” said Piper wearily, “but I’ll come anyway. Just in case we can help a few more of the living.”
* * *
It was barely dawn when they left the city. Piper couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something clandestine about their trip. We’re not doing anything illegal. We get to leave the city. I arranged for a replacement for a bit, I’m not leaving my job. And Earstripe left the guard, that doesn’t make him a prisoner.
Paladin’s Hope: Book Three of the Saint of Steel Page 4