Page 32 of Paladin's Hope
“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 beautiful. 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.”