Paladin’s Hope: Book Three of the Saint of Steel

by T. Kingfisher

  “A gnole thinks that human dances with snakes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know…?” Earstripe made swooping gestures with his hands, wiggling his whiskers.

  Piper and Galen looked at each other, then back at Earstripe. The gnole sighed. “Humans can’t smell.” He reached out and touched the panel beside the door.

  It slid open onto darkness.

  Fourteen

  A smell of decay rolled out. “There’s a dead body in there,” said Galen, holding up the lantern. Earstripe mumbled something, grabbing his nose.

  Piper took a deep breath and lunged past him. Galen cursed, grabbing for him, but the doctor said, “I’m coming back!”

  “But if you go halfway—!”

  “I won’t!”

  The corpse was only about a third of the way inside the room. The corpse’s head was rather farther away. Galen followed Piper, ready to pick him up bodily and throw him through the doorway if he had to. But the doctor only leaned down and touched the body. He stiffened, inhaled sharply—Galen swore and reached for him—but then he straightened up and turned back, nearly running into Galen.

  “Sorry, I—”

  “Go, go! Apologize later!”

  Piper ran for the door. They got through and it was at least ten seconds before the door finally closed, which made Galen feel as if he’d been acting irrationally, which only annoyed him further.

  “Don’t take risks like that,” he said, through gritted teeth.

  “We agreed I was going to do the trick—”

  “I’ll drag the corpse back for you!” snapped Galen. “Just…no more running into death traps.” This came out much more angry than he wanted it to. He took a deep breath and added, in as pleasant a tone as he could manage, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to yell. It’s not that I don’t think you’re capable. I just...”

  Piper’s a grown adult. He’s not a soldier under your command. Stop acting like you have the right to order him around.

  Galen half-wanted to give the man a dressing-down as if he were a raw recruit, and the other half wanted to wrap him in cotton wool like a hollow egg. “So, the body,” he said, trying to change the subject.

  Lines drew taut around Piper’s eyes, and Galen cursed himself again. You’re yelling at him when he just watched a man die. What’s wrong with you?

  “More blade walls, I think,” said Piper. “Two of them meeting horizontally, right at neck height. I’m not sure exactly how tall that is, but if we crouch down, we should be all right.”

  “I’ll go in,” said Galen.

  “But we don’t know if there’s more blades. There could be another set.”

  “Is a corpse cut in any other direction?” asked Earstripe.

  “No, but they would have fallen down after the first one. If there’s another blade, at hip height, say, he wouldn’t have been around to see it.”

  “A human lies flat,” Earstripe suggested. “By corpse. Then we know.”

  “I love lying flat in congealed blood,” muttered Galen. “Really. One of my favorite things.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Piper. “I’ve seen a lot of blood. I can go.”

  “And relive the man’s death for six minutes?” asked Galen.

  “It would stop when I stop touching him.”

  Galen shook his head. “You’re not expendable,” he said. “If I die, you’ve still got a chance of getting through the trap by touching my corpse. If you die, we’re back to dumb luck.”

  Piper looked like he wanted to argue, but couldn’t. “Fine,” he muttered. “Just…don’t die.”

  “I’ll try to avoid it.”

  Unfortunately, they still had twenty-eight minutes until the door opened again, which was awkward, since Galen was still kicking himself for acting like an imperious ass.

  “Did you ever do the…ah…trick…with one of the smooth men?” asked Galen, when the silence had gotten almost palpable and he had to break it.

  Piper shook his head. “The bodies just knew that there was a terrible pain in their necks. The clay heads, once you had them out, didn’t do anything.” He swallowed, looking suddenly pale. Galen wondered what he was remembering. Probably being scared shitless. I would be, in his situation.

  “Did you ever try with one actually in a body?”

  “I offered,” he admitted. “To your bishop. Beartongue. She knows about the trick. That’s why I probably can’t ever be fired from my job. Not that people haven’t tried. The word of a lich-doctor is practically law in a courtroom, and a couple of times I’ve testified to things that were…oh…not politically expedient for various parties. They would have loved to send me back to the gutter, setting up a shingle to pull teeth and treat pox. But the Temple’s had my back, and she made those problems go away.”

  “It’s what the Rat does,” said Galen, with bleak amusement. “They solve problems.” He was one of those problems, and the Rat had solved it, as well as someone like him could be solved. They could do nothing for his night terrors, but they had given him a job to do, and a place for him and his brothers to recover what shreds of their sanity they still could. Some of them had even put themselves back together well enough to love and be loved. Mind you, some of us are lucky to have achieved ‘fuck and be fucked.’ I don’t see myself getting much past that…

  Piper was still talking. “Anyway. I offered to touch a live one. Beartongue said no. Said that there was a chance they might be able to jump down a connection like that, and she wasn’t throwing away her favorite lich-doctor on a chance. I won’t say that I wasn’t relieved.”

  “Ah. So that’s why you work with the White Rat, then.”

  “Yes, in a roundabout fashion. Technically, I am employed by the court system as a consult to the courts. There aren’t many lich-doctors and there’s a fair amount of competition for the posts, even knowing that people will give you a wide berth once they learn what you do for a living. But you get the tricky cases where people don’t know how someone died, and I was, thanks to my talent, good enough at it to get one of the few openings. Then we had a case where everyone thought it was murder, and I could tell it wasn’t—they’d found the suspect standing over the body, and he’d been hit on the head, but I felt him have a heart attack—and no one wanted to listen to me. I was only an apprentice then, and my predecessor was making the declarations. He thought it was the head wound, but the man had been dying before he ever got hit. But the Rat was representing the accused, and Beartongue was the lawyer—she was only a solicitor sacrosanct, they hadn’t made her the Bishop yet. I managed to pounce on her outside the courtroom and blurted out the whole story. To her credit, she didn’t think I was a raving lunatic. She did insist on testing my ability, but once I’d proved it to her satisfaction, she backed me. Managed to do it without having my talent exposed in court, which I was grateful for. The suspect was acting in self-defense, and she went free. We’ve been working together, unofficially, ever since.”

  “Makes sense.” Galen could just imagine Beartongue rubbing her hands together with unbridled glee at discovering Piper’s grisly talent.

  “So that’s how you become a lich-doctor. How do you become a paladin?” asked Piper.

  Ah, I should have seen that coming. Well, turnabout is fair play. “Depends on the paladin. Which god do you want?”

  “Pick one.” Piper smiled, and Galen was grateful, because it meant that he could pretend for a little while that they weren’t talking about him.

  “Ah, well. If you’re with the Dreaming God, you have to be pretty and incapable of being tempted by demons. Also…I won’t say dumb, because they aren’t really, but very, very straightforward. They’re a type. A good-looking type, mind you, but a type.”

  “I’ve seen them,” said Piper. “They were all very pretty, now that you mention it.”

  “I know. It’s unfair. The one I know—Jorges, good guy—says it’s so that they can’t be tempted by demons who offer to make them beauti
ful. The vast majority of demons wind up possessing farm animals, though, and they aren’t smart, so I suspect the Dreaming God is just shallow like that.”

  Piper laughed. “Well, if you’re a god…”

  “Indeed. Meanwhile, if you’re with the Forge God, you train as a blacksmith-priest. At the end of it, most of them stay smiths, but occasionally the god picks one as a paladin. I don’t think even they know what the criteria are. Most of them don’t actually want to be paladins, as far as I can tell.” Who would, really? You kill and kill and keep on killing, either for the god or so that you can keep on living yourself. If someone came back and gave me the chance not to be a berserker at all… He realized that Piper was waiting for him to finish the thought and coughed.

  “The Forge-God’s people tend to be very dedicated smiths, and having to go around and fight people and act as backup for other paladins means they don’t have much time for that. The ones I knew were constantly busy with their hands. They had to take up portable hobbies. One crocheted.” He chuckled. “Stephen—you know him—my brother in arms, he knits. Those two had some fine old fights about which was a better thing to do with yarn.”

  “Odd to think of knitting paladins,” said Piper.

  “Particularly berserkers. But it’s an easy thing to do when traveling. You’ve seen me using a drop spindle, haven’t you? I give him all the thread.”

  “Odd to think of paladins making thread, for that matter.”

  “Ah, but you didn’t grow up in my family.” Galen smiled. “My grandmother was a weaver. The children got drop spindles as soon as they could hold something in their hands. I was spinning thread practically before I could walk. Still do. It seems wasteful just to sit around.”

  “From a family of weavers, eh? A long way to becoming a paladin.”

  “Not really. My mother was a priestess of the Saint, you see. A genuinely god-touched one. My father, I am afraid, could not bear to come second in my mother’s life, and left when I was young.”

  Piper’s face held sympathy but no pity, which Galen appreciated. “Hard for a human to compete with a god.”

  The words struck him much harder than the doctor could realize. He had lashed out at Stephen once, to his disgrace. “Trying to replace what we’ve lost, are you? I didn’t think you’d try to find it between a woman’s thighs.”

  “It isn’t like that,” Stephen had said. “You cannot ask a woman to compete with a god. But we can still love someone and be loved. Even as broken as we are.”

  The memory still filled him with shame, though he knew that Stephen had forgiven him, probably before the echoes had died. His fellow broken paladin had found love against long odds. Galen did not begrudge him that, exactly. Stephen deserved love if anyone did. No, it was…envy. Envy, because Stephen had not been at Hallowbind. Envy, because Stephen deserved it, and after Hallowbind, Galen never would again.

  In the death throes of the Saint of Steel, the god-touched priests had died outright or killed themselves or fallen into death-like comas from which they did not wake. Galen did not know which one his mother had done. The high priest of her temple had burned it to the ground, screaming about a pyre fit for a god. The paladins though, had turned on anyone around them, each one taken by the battle-tide, trying to fight the world that had taken their god away.

  Stephen had been lucky. He and Shane and Istvhan had been travelling with two paladins of the Dreaming God, who had fought them off. Galen and Marcus had been less fortunate. There had been a dozen paladins meeting with local men near the town of Hallowbind. No one knew how many local men there had been. They had only found two left hands. The broken paladins had torn them to shreds and when they could not find another enemy, they had turned on each other. The survivors had fallen comatose when they could no longer fight, but only Marcus and Galen had woken up again.

  He remembered almost nothing of Hallowbind, but what little he did remember was enough to turn his dreams into screaming horrors.

  “And you were chosen?”

  “I was. I went for a soldier as a lad, and the god took me a month later. Fortunately, I knew what the berserker fit was, so I just turned around and went home.”

  “All right, that’s doctors and paladins,” said Piper. “Earstripe?”

  Earstripe sighed. “Ask.”

  “Why did you join the city guard?”

  The gnole shrugged. “Burrow said to join. Guard not always good to gnoles. Blame gnoles for things. If a guard is a gnole, that guard can speak up.” He picked at a loose thread on one of his rags. “A gnole was a rag-and-bone gnoll, but she was good at human speaking.” His diction shifted noticeably, becoming more precise, taking care with each syllable. “Burrow said to become a guard-gnole. Become a job-gnole.”

  “Ah.” Galen knew enough about the gnole caste system to know that would be a step up for Earstripe. “If you became a guard, you’d be promoted.”

  “Would have to be,” said Earstripe. “Some gnoles won’t listen to a rag-and-bone gnole. Would listen to a job-gnole.” It was always hard to tell, but Galen thought there was a bleak edge to his amusement. “Now gnoles listen to a guard-gnole, but guard-humans don’t always listen. Mallory-captain doesn’t listen now.”

  “So you struck out on your own to try to solve this,” said Piper. “To save these humans, when the guard wouldn’t listen to you. But why?”

  “God’s stripes.” Earstripe shook his head in disbelief. “Bone-doctor would save some gnole, yes? If some gnole was hurt?”

  “Of course,” said Piper. “If I could.”

  “And tomato-man would save some gnole?” He swung his muzzle toward Galen. “If some gnole needed big human with a sword?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Earstripe spread his hands, claws gleaming. “A gnole saves some human. Same thing.” He took a deep breath, clearly choosing his words carefully. “A gnole’s compassion does not require fur.”

  “Right,” said Piper, into the horribly uncomfortable silence that followed. “I’ve just put my foot in it. Earstripe, I apologize. I shouldn’t have questioned why you’d help humans. You’re a good person.”

  Earstripe shrugged. “Eh. Humans can’t smell,” he said.

  Piper looked at Galen.

  “That’s how they say we’re too ignorant for gnoles to take offense,” said Galen, faintly amused. Brindle said it frequently. As far as Galen could tell, gnoles viewed humanity as a race of ignorant, powerful toddlers, some of which were likable enough, but none of which were particularly bright.

  “A human is good at what a human is good at,” said Earstripe in a conciliatory fashion. “Build high walls, hit monster with sword, write words down on paper. A gnole doesn’t expect a human to be good at gnole speaking.”

  There was a clicking sound from inside the door and the panel on the wall popped out an inch.

  “Time to go,” said Galen. “I’ll knock when I can. Although I suppose you’ll hear the screaming if I get it wrong.”

  Piper winced. Galen squared his shoulders and went in to face his fate.

  Fifteen

  He’d been close to dead bodies before. Often he was the one who had made them dead. But there was a difference between a battle and lying down on the floor next to a headless corpse, particularly one that had been decaying for a couple of weeks.

  At least there were no flies. That was worth something. And it was cool down here, so the smell was only horrible instead of intolerable.

  I wonder how many people died here, and how far they got in the rooms. Let’s see, if Thomas pulled the corpses and dumped them in the river, we could have already had the headless one, probably the one with the leg chopped off, depending on the angle, and…hmm, yes, he mentioned a room full of spikes, that would explain the one that had been gored…he must not have been willing to pull this one out. Couldn’t figure out exactly how he died, and didn’t want to risk it.

  The lights came up. His view of the corpse got better. He turned his head t
he other way. If he was going to die, he didn’t want his last view to be the stump of a rotting neck.

  He had a sudden intense wish to confess his sins and be absolved. A priest would have been nice. Another paladin would have been even better. Unfortunately he had a gnole and a doctor, one of whom probably wouldn’t be impressed by his sins and the other of which featured far too prominently in them.

  Would Piper be able to tell what he’d been thinking when he died? Should he think something as a message? What sort of thing? It’s not your fault? You’re very sexy and I regret not jumping your bones?

  No, don’t be ridiculous. The best thing you could think is probably, “There’s another blade right about here.”

  His nose itched. He wanted to scratch it, but had a dreadful feeling that doing so might mean losing a hand.

  Click.

  Two blades came from overhead, just as Piper had seen. They met with an almost infinitesimal snick overhead.

  Perhaps thirty seconds later, just when someone who had crouched down would have been feeling relieved and maybe straightening up a little, a second set closed like jaws, about eighteen inches away from his face.

  “Clever,” said Galen, because the alternative was to piss himself. “Very clever.”

  The light through the holes in the blades mingled with the flickering of the oil lamp. It was like looking up through a supremely deadly cheese.

  It’s a good thing you’re a paladin, because you would never have made it as a poet. A deadly cheese? Really?

  Six minutes was an interminably long time to wait to scratch one’s nose. It felt like hours. He finally slid his hand up and scratched because possibly losing a hand was preferable to another minute with his nose on fire.

  He had just sagged with relief when the blades slid back. Galen caught a glimpse of a third set above the rest. Ah. In case someone was quick enough to jump on top of the first set. Even more clever.

  He waited another minute, just to be sure, then sat up. He could hear knocking on the door and scrambled to his feet to go alert his companions that he was still alive.