Page 11 of Paladin's Hope

“I feel like death warmed over,” said the doctor, “and the thought of food is nauseating. That’s probably a sign I should eat, or at least drink something non-alcoholic. What do you suggest?”

“I know just the place.”

Galen started to lead the way, but Piper held up a hand. “Let me wash up first,” he said. “I’ve had my hands in a corpse and that doesn’t go well with toast.”

They detoured to a public pump. There was a bucket of mostly clean sand there for scrubbing, but Piper ignored it, pulling out a brick of soap and washing up with that. Galen worked the pump handle a few times to give him water to work with. He turned his gloves inside out and used the sand on them, however, then tucked both damp gloves into his bag. “Right,” he said, when he had finished this rather elaborate washing up. “That’ll do.”

“Mmm,” said Galen. Saint’s balls, the man’s hands were also extremely pale. It was amazing he didn’t have rickets. He needs to spend more time outside, not in that basement.

For all that, Piper looked to be in good shape. He was no soldier, but he had those lovely long-fingered hands and smoothly muscled forearms. Galen wondered how much muscle it took to sling bodies around. Probably quite a lot. Every corpse I’ve ever dealt with has been a lot of dead weight, and he didn’t seem to have an assistant helping him.

“How do you get the bodies down to your workshop?” he asked abruptly.

If the change of topic surprised Piper, he didn’t show it. “There’s an old shaft that runs down under the wall from outside. Fairly steep, but you can get a wheeled cart down it. We bring the bodies in through there.”

Galen did some mental calculations. “Odd place for a shaft.”

“It really is. Supposedly it was the remains of a tunnel dug by sappers during some war a few hundred years ago, but let’s say that I’m very, very skeptical.”

They had reached the hole-in-the-wall public house that Galen had selected. He held the door open. “Oh?”

“It’s much deeper than it needs to be to get under the wall, and everything’s been smoothed. Now, I grant you, I’m working out of what was probably an old wine cellar, and you can make a case they were bringing barrels in, but that’s not where the tunnel stops.”

Galen paused. “It isn’t?”

“Nope.” Piper squinted at the menu on the wall. “What’s good?”

“Toast, egg, and pork scrapings. And the tea is strong enough to kill an ox.”

“Sounds dreadful. I’ll take it, minus the pork scrapings.”

“You sure? They’re better than they sound.”

“I don’t think I can handle meat at this hour.”

Galen placed the order and took two mugs of tea, then steered Piper to one of the tables. It was still early enough that most of the other customers were either late workers or carousers from the night before. “So where does the tunnel stop?”

Piper took a slug of tea and grimaced, then set the mug down. “An ivory door.”

“A what?”

“You ever seen a wonder engine?”

“Those big statues they find that the ancients left behind? No, but I saw plenty of clocktaurs back in the day.”

“Made of the same stuff. Looks like ivory, but much harder.”

Galen grimaced. He’d been twenty when the clocktaurs came through, and fighting against Anuket City’s monstrous mechanical legions had been his first taste of battle. Also his first taste of the battle tide. The Saint of Steel had taken him up barely a month after the war started. Then Archenhold had surrendered and he and the rest of the Saint’s chosen had to choose between standing idly by and going to the Dowager’s City, to the south, to hold the line against the clocktaurs.

And then it had ended as abruptly as it started. The clocktaurs went out of control and the demons bound inside turned on each other. He’d helped the Dreaming God’s paladins mop up a few stragglers that survived, and they were still gigantic and made of strange bone gears, but if you hit them with hammers long enough, they went down.

You had to boil the pieces to stop the gears turning, though. It was nauseating.

The notion that there was a door made of that horrible ivory under the city was deeply unsettling. “And it’s just down there? What’s on the other side?”

“No idea. Can’t get the door open. You know what that material is like.” Piper drank his tea with the grim expression of a man taking medicine. “My predecessor said he’d tried everything, but it’s more like a wonder engine than a clocktaur. You can’t even dent the stuff. Fire is supposed to work, if you can get it hot enough, but that’s not really feasible in a closed corridor.”

Galen nodded. Clocktaurs would burn at about the temperature used to temper steel, but it was nearly impossible to get the fire hot enough on a battlefield. The Forge God’s people had tried rigging something up with portable bellows, but the only way to make it work was to have one of the forge-priests practically standing on the clocktaur’s head. They’d had better luck with the Forge God’s rare paladins, who could swing a hammer long after even a berserker like Galen had to stop.

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