Page 25 of Paladin's Hope

“He said that was a pig.”

“We don’t know it wasn’t. Shhh, act normal. The wall’s about to come up.”

The last thing Galen wanted to do was act normal, but if Piper was right, they were down in a labyrinth with someone who was probably a murderer. Although you don’t know that, he told himself. They might have been his assistants. Or burglars.

Though those bodies didn’t get dumped into the river by themselves, now did they?

Either way, act normal. Don’t let him think you suspect. He’s clearly excited to talk to Piper, but if he gets the impression you know what’s happening, he may turn on you. And since this is his dungeon, that’s the last thing we want.

The wall slid up. Thomas stepped out of the corner. “Just one more!” he promised. “This one’s easy.”

“Easy?” said Galen, with false heartiness. “Easy how?”

“Easy in that nothing happens. I think it was meant to be filled with poison gas.” Thomas sounded much too excited by the prospect. “But it must have broken down over the centuries, because now nothing much happens. There’s a little bit of a hiss from some nozzles and then the door opens.”

“If nothing happens, do we really have to see it?” asked Galen.

“Oh, but you must! The technology is really quite ingenious. The nozzles look like seashells. Come, come, it’s very safe. I’ve been in that room a hundred times.”

Galen and Earstripe exchanged glances. Galen knew that gnoles were much better at reading body language than humans—their language was based on it—but he didn’t know how to express as complex a concept as this. He settled for jerking his chin toward Thomas’s back and giving Earstripe a very intense look.

The gnole shrugged. “Door back is closed anyway, tomato-man. Might as well.”

Galen stepped away from the wall, one hand on Piper’s arm. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’ve been better.” Piper’s already pale skin had gone unusually ashen. He shook his head a few times, raking his hands through his hair. The candle in Earstripe’s hand cast shadows from beneath and left his eye sockets as dark and shadowed as a skull.

Thomas was waiting for them in the hallway. This one was turned ninety degrees, with a door at either end. Piper cleared his throat and said, in something approximating his old enthusiasm, “Does this lead to two different rooms?”

“Yes! Though the gas room is much more interesting. The other room is just another one where blades fall from the ceiling, though they do it in lengthwise thirds.” He started toward the left door.

Earstripe held up a hand. “Smells like death,” he said.

Galen stiffened, waiting for Thomas to react, but the man only sighed. “Oh dear. Yes, it’s the pig, I expect.”

“Another pig?”

“It’s really the most efficient way,” Thomas said. “I get a couple of shoats from one of the local farmers and then I put them in the room and close the door. When the door opens again, even though the trap has reset, I can usually tell more or less what happened. Unless the pig is still alive, of course, but when that happens, I just close up the door again and wait. And once I know, it’s easy enough to wait out the trap and then pull the dead pig out. But one of the doors past this one has a pit that runs across the middle of the room, and the pig fell in the pit, and then once the pit closed up…well, six minutes isn’t a lot of time to haul a dead pig out of a hole in the ground. So it’s still there. The smell was a lot worse a few weeks ago, believe me.”

“That is…efficient, yes,” said Galen, trying to keep his voice entirely neutral. He wondered if there was really a pig down there, or if there was another victim in a pit somewhere, like the ones that had washed up on the riverbank. Can Earstripe smell the difference between a decaying pig and a decaying human? He wished there was some way to ask without alerting Thomas.

“Anyway, this is the last room we’ll do,” said Thomas. He palmed the door switch and strolled inside. “No need to stand anywhere for this one.”

This room looked slightly different than the others, the walls lined with round shapes that resembled a snail shell, each with a circular hole in the middle. Galen found himself gravitating to the corner despite Thomas’s reassurances. Not that the corner is necessarily safe, mind you. Earstripe had his shoulders hunched and kept pawing at his nose, although Galen couldn’t smell anything yet. Piper went to one of the round openings and peered into it, which was unsettling to watch. It’s not likely that there’s a spring-loaded arrow in there, or an eel that’s going to shoot out and latch onto his face, but there’s something about staring into holes…

“Aren’t they interesting? I wish I could see the mechanism inside.” Thomas lifted the lantern and then cursed as oil sloshed from side to side. “Oh, blast!” He squatted down and set the lantern beside him. “No, don’t worry, just me being clumsy…should have dealt with the wick earlier, but I was so excited to show people the rooms…”

He crouched in the doorway, still muttering to himself, and began disassembling the lantern. Galen’s nerves were jangling again. “Could you please not put your eyeball against that thing when it starts clicking?” he said testily.

“I wasn’t putting my eyeball against it,” said Piper. “Thomas, have you slid a probe into these holes? How deep are they?”

“One and three-quarter inches, give or take,” said Thomas, and then, without so much as a pause, he pitched backward through the doorway.

Galen lunged forward on instinct, not sure if he was catching Thomas before he fell or grabbing him before he ran. The door was already closing and he barely got a hand around the edge, then had to yank it back or lose his fingers. The room was plunged into darkness, broken only by Earstripe’s candle.

Click.

Click.

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