Page 17 of Paladin's Hope
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They reached the fishing village the next afternoon. Piper could smell it long before he saw it, which squared with his limited experience with fishing villages. He thanked the White Rat that the cold air meant the smell carried slightly less than it would have in summer.
“So how does this work?” he asked, as the village came into view. They were about half a mile off the main road out of Archon’s Glory, right up against the river. The river bent and split here, with a narrow channel that cut off part of the bend and left an island not much bigger than a city block behind. The fishing village was built on pilings that crossed the channel, two or three stories high in some places. “Do we just walk up and say, ‘excuse me, have you fished any corpses up recently?’”
“We will attempt to be subtle,” said Galen.
Piper raised an eyebrow. His experience with paladins was admittedly somewhat limited, but subtle was not the first phrase that came to mind.
“Gnoles will ask gnoles,” said Earstripe. “Gnoles will tell gnoles what humans won’t tell humans. If a killer is here, a gnole will warn other gnoles.”
“Assuming the killer’s a human,” said Piper.
Both Brindle and Earstripe looked at him sharply. Then Earstripe gave a half-nod. “Yes. A gnole was assuming that.” Brindle studied his claws.
“I mean no offense,” said Piper hastily. “Just…”
“No,” said Earstripe. “No, bone-doctor is correct. Could be. A gnole should not assume. “
Galen snapped his fingers. “Actually, yes. Bone-doctor is correct.” He flashed a grin at Piper, and despite his rejection the night before, Piper felt his stomach turn over. “We are going to go in and ask ‘excuse me, have you fished up any corpses recently?’ Or at least I am, and you are going to roll your eyes behind me and act as if this is all a colossal waste of your time, and I shall act like a public servant with just enough brains to fill a thimble, sent on a make-work job by his superiors.”
“A paladin, lying? I am shocked, sir. Shocked.”
“Where’s the lie?” Galen’s grin broadened. “Earstripe is in charge of our little jaunt, and he’s sent me on this mission to ask questions. I shall say exactly that, and what other humans assume is their problem, not mine.”
“And the brains to fill a thimble?”
“Oh, that part’s true enough. Paladins can’t afford to be terribly bright, you know. Otherwise we’d start to think too much about what we were doing, and fret ourselves into apostasy.”
Piper let that pass. “It could work. If the killer is here, and thinks we’re unlikely to turn him up, he may be careless. And if there are corpses…”
“Then people understandably alarmed at having caught one will certainly be eager to tell us all about it,” said Galen. “The public always feels better when they have someone to complain to.” He nodded to Earstripe. “With your permission?”
Earstripe gave the paladin a thoughtful sniff, nostrils working. “A gnole permits,” he said. “A gnole agrees.”
“A gnole wonders what will turn up…” muttered Brindle, and turned the ox toward the village.
Nine
Galen watched Piper and thought dark thoughts. Dark, mostly carnal thoughts.
The carnality wasn’t the problem. Galen had taken plenty of lovers over the years and generally felt that sex was only as complicated as you chose to make it. He wanted to slide his hands over Piper’s chest and follow that line of dark hair downward until he reached the promised land. He wanted to see what those long, clever fingers could do when they were wrapped around his cock. He wanted…well, he wanted a lot of things, and while it would have been a trifle awkward with the gnoles just outside, probably overhearing everything and rolling their eyes at each other about the silliness of human mating, Galen had worked with worse situations.
The problem was that he liked Piper a bit too much and he was starting to worry about him.
There wasn’t anything outwardly wrong. The man made jokes and laughed and listened to the gnoles and asked intelligent questions. He let Galen and Earstripe take the lead in the investigations, and he’d played his role perfectly in the fishing village, wearing a much put-upon expression. “Corpses,” Galen heard him say to an elderly matron, “are rather beyond my power to fix, despite what the gentleman here seems to think. But this salve you’re making intrigues me…” And the matron, who was boiling up a concoction that stank like the inside of a flounder, grinned at him and invited him to sit down and before long they were deep into a technical discussion of the various uses for fish oil.
By the time they left the village, Piper probably knew more about how to use fish oil for medicinal purposes than the fish did. When they were ready to leave the next morning, though, the doctor had vanished.
Galen finally tracked him down in a small, shabby room, writing furiously, with an overturned crate as a desk. There were two women in the room with him, one older, one young with her face turned away in clear embarrassment.
“Right,” said the doctor, as the paladin filled the doorway. He blew on the ink to dry it. “You take this to Doctor Lizbet on Pope Street. Can you remember that?”
The older woman repeated it back to him. “She can help, you say?”
“If anyone can.”
The young woman swallowed hard. “We don’t got the money,” she whispered.