Page 8 of Paladin's Hope

“Not a who, tomato-man. A what.”

This would have been a very dramatic statement, but Piper was only interested in one part. “Pardon. Tomato-man?”

Galen groaned. “It’s the hair,” he muttered. “A gnole named me that last year and I hoped maybe he hadn’t told anyone, but…”

“A job-gnole told everyone,” said Earstripe. Galen ran his hand through his hair which…well, yes, Piper could see the analogy.

“More the color of smoked paprika,” he said absently. “But I can see how that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.” And now Galen knows that I’ve been thinking about his hair. Ah, yes. What a wonderful morning I’m having.

“Bone-doctor understands,” said Earstripe, arching his whiskers forward.

“He gets to be bone-doctor, but I have to be tomato-man?”

“Tomato-man is a job-human,” said Earstripe. “Bone-doctor is our priest-human.”

“I’m not a priest,” said Piper, bemused.

Earstripe flicked his ears. “No, a priest.” Piper looked at Galen for explanation.

“Priests and healers are the same caste among gnoles,” said Galen. “Also, you’re…” He turned to Earstripe and held up his hands over his ears, cupping them forward in imitation of Earstripe. “He? His?”

“Close enough. Humans don’t have whiskers.” Earstripe’s voice dropped on the last word, as if he were bringing up a terrible deformity. “A gnole won’t take offense if bone-doctor doesn’t.”

Piper was completely at sea by this point. “What do whiskers have to do with anything?”

“If you’re a gnole, your caste determines whether you’re called he, she, it...” Galen spread his hands. “All job-gnoles are he. Healers and priests and others who are particularly respected in gnole-society use a word that translates as our or ours.”

“Ours belongs to all gnoles,” interjected Earstripe.

“As a priest-caste human, you’re somewhere between a he and an our, but since you really need whiskers and mobile ears to say that properly in gnolespeech, gnoles generally allow us to use whichever.”

“Humans are doing the best they can,” said Earstripe, in a tone Piper usually identified with teachers of small children trying to excuse the slowest members of the class. Galen chuckled.

“I’m flattered,” said Piper, returning his attention to the corpse. “And in answer to your question, Earstripe, I think that, yes, you could make a good case that this one is tied to the others.”

Earstripe nodded, all humor gone. “A gnole thought as much.”

“But where are they coming from?” asked Galen, digging his fingers into his hair. “Upstream, but where? We’ve got two fishing settlements upriver, and then it’s just rich people’s chateaus, but they’re empty this time of year. The nobs are all in town for the social season.”

“Presumably even the chateaus have staff to keep the rats from getting in,” said Piper absently. He gazed into the missing eye sockets. You know you should do it. There might be something you can use. The last one could have been an accident, but not this one. You have to do it.

He grimaced and pulled off one of his gloves, holding the wound open with the other hand.

“A bone-doctor thinks something might be in there?”

No, but it’s a good explanation. “Worth checking.” Piper made sure his knees were firmly planted. You really didn’t want to pitch face down over a body. He touched the wound.

Corridor lit by candlelight. Long with pale walls. Something etched on the walls, lines, a shape…He stepped forward. A snick and then a woosh of air and then something struck him hard in the thigh and the world spun around him and his shoulder hit the wall and he was on the floor and his heart was thundering but something was wrong and there was another woosh overhead and another but he couldn’t hear it because his heart was beating so loud and…

Piper withdrew his hand and took a deep breath. A pale corridor lit by candlelight. It didn’t look like anything he’d expect to see in a fishing village. How to express that without revealing what he’d done?

“I can’t say exactly what caused this, but I do know it’s harder to commit murders like this in a small village crowded together on the water than it would be in a chateau where no one is staying for the season,” he said. “Poison, strangling, even a stabbing I could see in close quarters, but this is big dramatic stuff with severed limbs.”

Galen and Earstripe both nodded. “A gnole has seen things done in tight spaces,” said Earstripe, “but a gnole still agrees.”

“The city guard’s got no authority over the chateaus,” said Galen. “If there’s a crime out there, it gets reported back here and the paladins or the Archon’s people deal with it.”

Earstripe grabbed his own whiskers and twisted them savagely. It looked painful. Galen actually reached out a hand as if to stop the gnole, but didn’t.

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