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

by T. Kingfisher

  “Yes, but that’s so you have something to yell when they knock things off the table.” Galen rubbed his forehead. “No, I don’t name my swords. I’d have to keep thinking of names, for one thing. They break and then I grumble and try to find another one that suits my grip and hand over far too much money for the privilege.”

  “So all those tales of heroes with magic swords named, oh, Chainbreaker and Blood-drinker and so on?” He finished the bindings and Galen pulled his shirt back on.

  “I suppose if you had a magic sword, the rules would be different. Or even a particularly fine one. I’m a berserker, though, as you might have noticed. We’re rather hard on weapons.” He climbed to his feet, his gaze darkened. “And everything else.”

  Dammit. For a second there, Piper thought he had managed to distract the man. “That’s hardly your fault,” he said.

  “Don’t do this,” said Galen. “Don’t excuse it. You of all people should have seen it enough by now. A man beats the shit out of his loved ones, and all they can say is, ‘but he loves me, he doesn’t mean it.’ And then he apologizes and eventually they wind up on your slab, because love doesn’t fix it.”

  “It’s not the same,” said Piper furiously. “You have a medical condition. Sleep disturbances have been known to medicine for centuries. Including violence. Sleepwalkers have murdered people and judges found them not accountable because they were asleep.”

  Too late, he realized that this was the wrong tactic. Galen’s face grew even bleaker. “Fat lot of good that did the people they killed. Fat lot it would have done you, if I’d...” He couldn’t seem to finish the words. So softly that Piper could barely hear it, he added, “I should have killed myself after Hallowbind. I should have known that I was too broken to live around other people. Damn Stephen and Istvhan for stopping me.”

  “You aren’t too broken! You said you’ve lived just fine for years now! Dammit…” Piper stomped forward, grabbed both of Galen’s hands in his and brought them to his throat. “Here! Do you want to start strangling me? Are you fighting the urge to kill me right now?”

  Galen’s nostrils flared and he took a step back. Piper followed, clinging to the paladin’s hands. “See? You don’t have the least desire in the world to hurt me. This is just a thing that happens to you when you sleep, like…like snoring, for god’s sake!”

  “Nobody dies because you snore at them.”

  Piper’s exasperation was exceeding his ability to keep his emotions in check. “Nobody died today. Stop it. You are not a monster.”

  “You have no idea what I am.”

  “Maybe not. But I’d like to find out.”He risked dropping one of the man’s hands so that he could reach up and touch that angular jaw.

  Galen froze.

  Oh boy. Did not expect to be doing this. Adrenaline aftereffects. How ‘bout that. The paladin’s skin was just starting to roughen with stubble, the texture slick one way, coarse the other. Either this is a wonderful idea or I am making a colossal fool of myself. I suppose, that’s always the risk you take when you declare your intentions. Piper moved his thumb gently across Galen’s lips and something hot and savage flared in the paladin’s eyes.

  “You’re not afraid of me.” His breath was warm on Piper’s fingers.

  “No,” said Piper, which was mostly true, although the look in the other man’s eyes was waking something that felt a little like fear and a lot like lust. “No, I’m not.”

  The paladin moved. He was impossibly fast, catching Piper’s arms and pinning him up against the wall. Piper swallowed hard, stunned by the speed and by the sensation of Galen’s body pressed full-length against his.

  “You should be,” said Galen, and kissed him.

  Eighteen

  Piper had experienced a number of kisses that started tender and turned fierce. He’d never had one go the other way before. Galen’s mouth was hard over his, all teeth and tongue, but as soon as Piper began to respond, he softened. His hands slid down Piper’s arms. Some part of the doctor’s mind registered that he was free, and another part registered that he didn’t particularly wish to be.

  It was so good. The hardness of the muscles he’d been trying to ignore, just a few minutes ago, the hardness of…well, other things that weren’t technically muscle, actually they were spongiform erectile tissue comparable to…dear sweet Rat, why am I thinking about spongiform erectile tissue right now…okay, well, obviously that’s why I’m thinking about it, but…

  The kiss ended. Galen brushed his lips almost apologetically and stepped away. “Damn,” the paladin said softly. “Damnit, I shouldn’t have done that.” He raked his hand through his hair. “I find myself behaving very badly around you. I’m sorry.”

  “I rather enjoyed it,” said Piper, which was possibly the understatement of the century.

  Hmm, that’s a funny way of saying ‘take me, take me now, right here, let’s go.’

  He told himself to shut up. His inner voice laughed at him.

  Galen gave him an anguished look. Piper knew that he was about say something self-flagellating and was almost certainly going to promise to never kiss Piper again and he didn’t want that to happen so he opened his mouth and blurted out the first thing that came into his head.

  * * *

  The man was absolutely witless. He had no sense of self-preservation. First he’d lunged into a trapped room to grab a corpse, then he’d been making excuses for a killer who had just come within an inch of throttling him, and now he was sitting here calmly, having just been kissed by said killer, as if that were normal and not really, really messed up.

  Well. Perhaps not absolutely calm. Piper’s face was flushed and he was still breathing hard from that kiss. That terrible, foolish, glorious kiss.

  Gods above and below, he shouldn’t have done that. He wasn’t even sure why he had. Galen never kissed. He preferred encounters where both parties walked away—occasionally a little stiffly, depending on what exactly had occurred—and went on about their day with the warm glow of lust satisfied and nothing else. Kissing felt like intimacy, not lust, and intimacy with someone like Galen was far too dangerous.

  Most of the paladins he knew were the same way. Hell, compared to half of the Dreaming God’s people, Galen was practically celibate. It was a high-mortality profession, and less than half of them made it to old age. Hardly anybody wanted to leave a spouse or, god forbid, children behind. He’d seen the devastation that Marcus had been through, leaving his wife for her own safety after the death of the god. It was part of why he’d been so surprised when Istvhan had fallen in love up north.

  Very well. If Piper didn’t have any sense, Galen would have to have sense for both of them. He couldn’t be trusted and Piper was a doctor and probably had some misguided notion that he could cure what was wrong with Galen, when it wasn’t that something was wrong, it was that Galen himself was wrong and broken. The only cure for someone like him was a sharp knife, but he kept staggering onward because the Rat said they needed him and sometimes he was able to fix things.

  He doubted he could explain any of this, and Piper would have argued if he tried, but before he could say any of it, Piper said, “Spongiform erectile tissue!”

  “Err…what?”

  “Oh god.” Piper put his hand to his face. Galen could see the flush starting at his collar and rising rapidly. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s…it’s what your cock is made out of. Not just yours. Mine. Everybody’s.” He made a helpless gesture toward his crotch, where Galen noted that there was indeed a definite bulge, apparently caused by the tissue in question.

  “I see,” said Galen. He knew that he should still be wallowing in shame, and he absolutely was, but there was a tiny part of him that was feeling ungodly smug that his kiss had gotten that kind of reaction. Yup. Still got it.

  The tips of Piper’s ears were blazing scarlet. “It’s also present inside the nose.”

  “Goodness.”<
br />
  “I know I’m babbling, incidentally.”

  “Just a bit, yes.”

  “This is what happens to me when I stop trying to be dispassionate about everything. It’s not that I’ve got a terrible temper or anything like that. It’s just that I start babbling.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a bit of a problem in relationships.”

  “I would imagine so.”

  “And also if I keep talking about this, maybe you won’t get all tragic and paladinly and swear that you’ll never kiss me again. And I would very much like it if you did. Err, not be tragic and paladinly. The kissing part.” His blush wasn’t fading. In fact, it seemed to be deepening from scarlet to near-purple.

  “Why aren’t you scared?” asked Galen hopelessly. “You ought to be. I came after you with a sword. Most people don’t get over that in five minutes.”

  This actually shut Piper up for a moment. His color slowly began to return to normal. “I didn’t die,” he said finally. “I’ve felt dying dozens of times. You get used to it. If you don’t actually die, it just doesn’t seem worth bothering about.”

  “You are going to get yourself killed!” yelled Galen, trying not to tear his hair out in frustration.

  “This is the most dangerous thing I’ve done in years,” said Piper. “Probably in my whole life. It’s not like my job is going around fighting people.” For the first time, he sounded a bit annoyed. “Unlike some people I could mention.”

  Galen took a deep breath and let it out again. All right. I probably deserved that. But still! I’ve got a sword and berserker rage! All he’s got is brains…quite a lot of brains, admittedly…and a bonesaw…and gorgeous fingers…

  “Anyway,” said Piper, “being in mortal danger is bad, but surviving mortal danger is a well-known aphrodisiac. And this place is just nothing but mortal danger after mortal danger, isn’t it?”

  The blush was starting up again. Galen wondered if the man was still thinking about spongiform erectile tissue.

  Saint’s teeth, what’s wrong with me? Why don’t I just fuck his brains out right here and now and be done with it? I’ve done it often enough, with any number of people. I was completely willing to do it before I nearly killed him. Why am I making this so difficult for myself?

  Because trying to kill someone ought to matter. Because he liked Piper, dammit. Liked him…well, rather a lot. Because it might mean something, and that meant sex might mean something, and that would be far more dangerous than this maze of traps they found themselves in.

  It’s probably going to kill you, though. And instead of worrying about the future, you could just worry about right now. And right now, there’s a very attractive man coming toward you with an expression like he doesn’t know if he’s going to the whorehouse or the gallows.

  Piper kissed him, very carefully. A light brush of lips, nothing more, giving Galen time to pull back. Galen…did not seem to be pulling back. Galen seemed to be responding, politely at first, and then with all the pent-up frustration of that first kiss, his hands on Piper’s shoulders, feeling the muscle flex as the doctor’s arm lifted, his hand going to Galen’s face and sliding up into his hair and Galen’s cock was standing at attention and thought, furthermore, that Galen was an absolute fool for not tearing the man’s clothes off right now, bruised ribs or no bruised ribs, it’s not as if you used your ribs when you were on your knees anyway and if he was on his knees, then he could—

  The door slid open.

  Piper and Galen leapt apart as if they were children discovered with their hands in the cookie jar. Which is deeply unfair, because I didn’t even get my hands anywhere near that particular cookie jar. Dammit.

  Earstripe appeared, holding a lumpy burlap sack over his shoulder. “Good news,” he said. “A gnole has had an idea.”

  Nineteen

  “You’re back,” said Piper. “Err…great!”

  The gnole looked between the two humans, sniffed a few times, and then raised both eyebrows. “A gnole can come back, if humans are mating,” he said.

  “We aren’t!” said Piper. He was turning scarlet again, Galen saw. At least that’ll pull the blood away from other parts of his anatomy, I suppose.

  “A gnole doesn’t mind.” Earstripe glanced through the open door. “Twenty-eight minutes until a door opens, though. A gnole can go into the other room?”

  “That’s quite all right,” said Galen.

  “A gnole promises not to shout suggestions.”

  Piper put his face in his hands. Galen gazed steadily at Earstripe, who he suspected was enjoying this far too much.

  This is what you get for wasting time arguing. Twenty-eight minutes might not be a great deal of time, but it was long enough to do all sorts of things, if you just shut up and got down to doing them. Hell, we’re both so keyed up right now that five minutes would probably do it for me, if those fingers are anywhere near as skilled as I think they are…

  Perhaps I can convince Earstripe to go back for more water later.

  “A gnole doesn’t—”

  “The moment has passed,” said Galen firmly. “Why don’t you just tell us about your idea?”

  “Ah.” Earstripe thumped the sack. “A gnole’s idea is apples.”

  “Apples?” said Galen.

  “I’m not following,” Piper admitted.

  Earstripe held up a finger and went to the next door on the left. He slapped the panel, and when it opened, he dumped part of the sack out. Apples bounced and rolled across the floor. The gnole bent down, picked up a few, and began lobbing them deeper into the room.

  “Apples,” he said. “An apple is sliced in half, we know a blade is there. An apple vanishes, we know a pit is there. Yes?”

  “Earstripe, you are a genius,” said Galen fervently. The door slid closed.

  “Do we have enough apples?” asked Piper.

  “Depends on how many rooms.”

  Twenty-eight minutes later, when the door slid open again, the apples were all neatly lined up in the center of the room and every single one had been smashed into paste.

  All three of them stared at the resulting fruit carnage. Finally, Galen said, “You know, maybe we should try the other door.”

  They tromped down the hall to the right. Earstripe dumped out yet more of the sack. Galen tried not to think about what would happen if this batch proved equally ill-fated.

  “Surely we’ve got to be most of the way through by now,” he muttered.

  “If the rooms run straight to the closed doorway we saw before, then we would have three, possibly four,” said Piper. “The corridors aren’t all the same length, so I couldn’t say for certain.”

  “Three is not so bad,” said Earstripe, a bit dubiously.

  “But that assumes there aren’t switchbacks,” said Piper, “or that it doesn’t turn again, or spiral.”

  “Maybe we’ll be lucky and more of them will be broken,” said Galen.

  “We’ve already been incredibly lucky, if you ask me.”

  “A gnole thinks it would have been luckier not to get caught by a crazy human.”

  There didn’t seem to be much to say to that.

  When the door finally opened, the floor was covered in sliced fruit. An apple sitting in front of the doorway had been neatly halved. They all wedged in the doorway, craning their necks. “There,” said Piper, lifting his lamp and pointing. “Those in the far left corner are all intact.”

  “That’s where I’ll go, then,” said Galen.

  “But if you cross the halfway point, the trap will trigger.”

  “There’s still got to be a way to get there,” said Galen. “There’s been a way to get through all the rooms so far.”

  Piper blinked at him. “That’s…ah…”

  His expression was simultaneously so sharp and so befuddled, as if he had just had a brilliant but baffling idea, that Galen wanted to kiss him. Oh hell with it, there’s a good chance you’ll die. Just do it. He leaned forward, plant
ed his lips hastily on the doctor’s forehead, then stepped back into the room.

  “Galen! Wa—”

  The door slid shut. The lights came up. Galen saw that the apples in the center of the room were downright macerated. Not a great sign. Here goes nothing.

  He lunged forward.

  There was a click of warning as a blade fell. Galen dove under it, rolled, and kept rolling as a second one came down, missing him by half an inch. A third cut off the route to the safe corner. Oh shit. Oh shit. Okay, there must be a clear space, we didn’t have enough apples to completely cover the floor, maybe if I crouch right here, nothing will land on me.

  He had one moment when he thought he’d avoided the worst of it, and then another one fell, perpendicular to the first two, coming right at his head.

  Galen let out what he hoped was a yell, but suspected was a squeak. The battle rage wanted to rise but it had nothing to work with. This wasn’t an enemy you could fight. All you could do was dodge and he wasn’t going to be fast enough and—

  His scalp smarted as the blade buried itself in his hair. He jerked free, leaving several inches of auburn behind. It occurred to him that there might well be another perpendicular blade, and if it was spaced anything like the others, that meant—

  He jerked his knees up to his chest, feeling like a turtle on its back.

  Click.

  There was a little more clearance on this one. It missed him by nearly six inches.

  He rolled over. He was trapped in a box about three feet on a side. Now, will it stay like this or not?

  He didn’t dare risk it. The first blades were pulling back into the ceiling now, but he could hear the clicking as another set started up and he had no time at all to get to his feet. All he could do was throw himself forward on all fours, hearing things land behind him with soft, lethal clicks.

  His hand skidded on a cut apple and he pitched forward, slamming his chin into the ivory floor and biting his tongue hard enough to draw blood. One of his knees hit the ground wrong and flared with pain, but he couldn’t stop. He wasn’t going to be fast enough, but he had to keep moving…