Page 1 of Paladin's Hope

One

It was early morning on the banks of the Elkinslough River. Mist hung heavily over the brown water, turning it briefly pale and disguising the muddiness of the flow. Five men stood on the city-side bank, looking at a corpse.

Four of the men were human, one was not. That member of the group was a gnole, one of the short, stripe-faced badger people. Despite their species and the nearly three foot difference in their height, there was something about both the gnole and one of the men that marked them as similar. They wore identical badges that marked them as members of the city guard, but more than that, they stood alike and they had the same watchful, suspicious air about them.

Two of the remaining men were also similar in the same indefinable fashion. They had impeccable military posture and wore chain and tabards. Their cloaks marked them as servants to a dead god. One was of average height, with dark hair, the other a fraction shorter, with auburn red hair that stood out like fresh blood against the mist.

The last of the five was the only one who did not share a certain martial quality. He was slim and well-groomed and would be considered handsome, but he was also extraordinarily pale, as if he lived his life underground.

It was this fifth man who nudged the corpse with the toe of his boot and said, “Well, if you want my professional opinion, this great goddamn hole in his chest is probably what killed him.”

* * *

Doctor Piper dealt with corpses and for the most part, he preferred them to the living. He didn’t mind living people, he was perfectly happy to meet them and talk to them and even work with them, but corpses never, ever asked stupid questions. You learned to appreciate that when you spent all day analyzing why and how people had died. The dead didn’t say things like, “Are you sure he’s dead?” when the man’s head was half off or, “Dear god, what happened?” when it was bloody obvious that someone had shoved a sword through him. The dead just laid there and got on with being dead.

He definitely preferred them to the city guard. Piper was suspicious of power, particularly power that thought it was the arbiter of justice. He knew Captain Mallory well enough to know that the man was that rarest of creatures, an honest policeman, but that simply meant that his dislike was tempered with pity. Mallory did not engage in graft or extortion and for this sin, he had been assigned the poorest and most crime-riddled quarter of the city, where he could be handily forgotten until his superiors decided they needed someone to blame.

The two paladins were different. Paladins were god-touched and thus could make a much better case for being arbiters of justice, since presumably a higher power was doing the actual arbitration. These two happened to work for the Temple of the White Rat. Stephen, the taller one, he’d met before. The good-looking red-haired fellow was new, but was cut from the same cloth as Stephen, which meant that he might well go into a battle-madness that could level a town but would feel extremely guilty about it afterwards.

The corpse was a corpse. Something very large had punched through the man’s body, back to front, exploding ribs outward. Probably it had exploded guts outward too, but after a day or two in the river, most of those bits had gone missing. The fish had gotten a good meal there. They’d gotten his eyes, too. It was fairly gruesome, but you got used to that sort of thing. Normally bodies were brought to Piper’s workroom, in a cool subterranean storage room near the Archon’s palace, but it was fairly obvious that moving this one would cause it to fall apart, so they’d sent a runner for him to come to the river.

“Any idea what happened to him?” asked Captain Mallory.

Piper shrugged. “If somebody stabbed him in the heart and then tore his chest open, I couldn’t tell you.” He squatted down. Drowning was always so unpleasant. Things got soggy and bloated. The dead man hadn’t been in the water long enough to get truly nasty and the water was cold enough to keep decay to a minimum, but it still wasn’t pretty. “I can tell you he’s been in the water a day, maybe a day and a half. Not much more than that.”

“How do you know?”

Piper nudged the man with his boot again. “The catfish haven’t cored him out completely. If he’d been in there for two days, he’d be mostly catfish by weight.”

“A human isn’t joking,” said the gnole constable, nodding to Piper. “A gnole has seen catfish eating.” Stephen the paladin rubbed his hand over his face.

“We do have exceedingly voracious catfish,” said the red-head, with understandable civic pride.

“What could have made a wound like that?” asked Mallory, refusing to be sidetracked by the local ichthyology.

Piper studied the wound. Even assuming that the local fish population had been at work, there had been a great deal of trauma to begin with. The man’s chest looked as if it had exploded outward. “Something big,” he said. “Someone help me roll him over?”

The two paladins immediately took an end and flipped the corpse over. Mallory scowled but didn’t argue.

The corpse’s back was ragged, his head bashed and misshapen. Whatever had taken out his back had gone in at an angle, only just missed the spine, and left a gaping hole the size of Piper’s fists. “Most of this is from being banged about after he died,” said Piper, squatting down next to the body. It stank, but they always did. He wiped his nose.

“A warhammer could have caused the chest to break outward,” said Stephen, “but it doesn’t punch a hole in the back like that. Perhaps some kind of maul with a sharpened end?”

“Gored by a bull?” asked the red-head.

“That might do it.” Piper nodded up at him. “Didn’t catch your name?”

“Galen. Formerly of the Saint of Steel, now I serve the Temple.”

“Yes, I figured that much.” Piper gave him a brief smile. He really was very good-looking. Cheekbones you could slice cheese on.

“That would be a remarkable bull,” said Mallory. “To make a hole that size.”

“There’s still some aurochs in the woods upstream,” said Stephen. “Or a demon could have taken a normal cow. They do like to possess livestock.” Mallory grunted.

Piper looked down at the body. He didn’t want to do the trick. He could do it, but it was unpleasant and none of these men were stupid and might have questions about why he was touching a dead body with his bare hands and getting a vague expression.

Anyway, it wasn’t as if the cause of death was all that mysterious. Piper was pretty sure that the man’s last sensation had been of being struck very hard in the back. It might not even have had time to hurt.

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