Page 4 of Paladin's Hope
“Shane says she got that one look—you know, the I-am-taking-your-concerns-very-seriously look—”
“That look terrifies me.”
“—and said that of course no one could expect the guard to pay for it, but fortunately she and the other temples had recordkeepers ready to go, and since he had given his approval, they would report to work the following day.”
Galen let out a low whistle. Then he tried to do math in his head and reached several large numbers. “Wait, but where did she get the money? Scribes aren’t cheap, and you figure there are…what, a dozen guard posts?”
“Eleven,” said Stephen. “Thirty-six scribes, assuming eight hour shifts and an extra to cover in case anyone’s out. And she wanted people to record all the records in a central log as well, so forty.”
“Where is she getting forty scribes? Are there even forty trained scribes in the city?”
“The Scarlet Guild.”
“The prostitutes?”
Stephen chuckled. “That’s what I said. But it’s a field you age out of fairly young, and the Guild has been very concerned with finding gainful employment for members who aren’t officially working, in case they decide to start doing unlicensed work somewhere else. You know how the Scarlet Guild is about unlicensed competition. And as Beartongue said, if there’s one group of people who can remember names, faces, and respective deviant acts…” He spread his hands. “They don’t have to copy illuminated manuscripts or anything, just do basic recordkeeping, and most of them are a lot better at that than the guard. And they aren’t going to be appalled at anything they see in a guard station. So the Scarlet Guild is supplying the ladies, who don’t charge nearly as much as a scribe.”
“Beartongue is a genius. A terrifying genius. Who’s footing the bill?”
“The Rat, the Forge God, and the Lady of Grass. And the Dreaming God provided some of their nuns, who are extremely literate, and they’re training the ladies who want it on the finer points of recordkeeping so that they can hopefully use this as a springboard to other jobs.” Stephen shook his head. “And the Scarlet Guild approves of that a lot, so they offered to pay the nuns a commission because you know they don’t believe in women working for free, so the nuns plowed it back into the project. I’m told the Temple of the Rat has already taken three of the ladies for law clerks and there’s a waiting list at the Scarlet Guild to become one of the record girls.”
“Saint’s teeth.” Galen chuckled. “Nuns and whores, doing the good work together. Only the Rat would see that as a great idea. All right. So let me guess…the guards aren’t pleased with outsiders checking their records?”
“Oh, it’s much worse than that. When the records were spotty, it was a lot easier to extort prisoners and their families.” Stephen’s expression grew grave. “I knew some of that went on, of course—big city, you expect a certain amount of graft—but I don’t think even Beartongue quite knew the level of corruption that was going on. We’re hearing of cases where people would get picked up for being drunk, be unable to pay a bribe, and when they got to a magistrate, they were charged with theft and assault. How can you prove the records were altered if the guard are the ones in charge of the records?”
“Oh hell.”
“So now a whole lot of guards found themselves out a major source of revenue. A bunch of them quit outright. Even the ones like Mallory who are relatively honest have gotten used to telling themselves that this was just how things worked and the people in jail were undoubtedly guilty of something.”
“The broadsheets must have had a field day,” muttered Galen.
“Oh yes. Caricatures of nuns and prostitutes standing over the downtrodden, holding the guard back with fans and switches. Frankly, I’m surprised that Mallory will even talk to us any longer.”
“Why did he, do you think?”
Stephen raised an eyebrow as they turned down the street housing the entrance to the Temple of the White Rat. “He wanted Piper, not us. Piper’s the best at what he does, bar none. And Piper happened to be visiting the Temple when word came down.”
“Well,” murmured Galen, remembering the pale, thoughtful-eyed man. He’d been classically handsome underneath his annoyance, and his hands had been swift and sure as they worked. “Isn’t that interesting…”
Three
Two days later, Piper was wrist-deep in a corpse.
This wasn’t an unusual situation for him. He spent a lot of time with his hands in corpses. He didn’t like it. He didn’t dislike it. It was just what he did. He enjoyed putting the mental pieces together about why someone had died, and he liked being able to provide certainty to families, but mostly what he liked was being good at his job.
And Piper was, for reasons he kept to himself, very, very good at his job.
This particular corpse was not a difficult problem to solve. He found what he was searching for and carefully pulled the flesh back to reveal it. The man’s liver was a horror show, knobbly and puckered, with a growth that looked like a fleshy cauliflower. The man’s wife was convinced that he had been poisoned, and arguably he had been, but the poison was self-administered over a long period of time and came in brown glass bottles. Piper sighed. He’d suspected as much, but you had to be thorough.
He cleaned his tools in the little sink in the corner. It connected to a cistern on the roof and the water was cleaner than the sludge in the Elkinslough. He scrubbed his hands down to the elbow as well. It didn’t matter as much, perhaps, since he never treated live patients, but it made him feel better not to carry traces of the job home with him.
He was nearly finished when there was a knock on the door.
“Just a moment!” Now who could that be…? Normally people made appointments. The families of the bereaved did not get past the door guard, assuming they could even find his workrooms in the basement of the tower. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and lich-doctors didn’t get a lot of social calls.
Another, louder knock. Bless it, couldn’t they wait? Was it an emergency? No, that was ridiculous: by the time Piper got to a patient, urgency was a thing of the past. He pushed the door open to find the red-haired paladin from the river standing on the other side, his fist raised.
Piper took a step back and lifted his hands defensively. The paladin’s eyes went very wide. He had dark green eyes with paler flecks in them, like flawed jade. Very pretty eyes, except for the alarmed expression. Piper looked at the man’s raised hand—oh, right, he’d been knocking—and then at his own. He was still carrying the bonesaw.