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  The Book Smugglers

  Paladin’s Grace

  T. Kingfisher

  Copyright © 2020 by T. Kingfisher

  Published by Red Wombat Studio

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For Kevin

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by T. Kingfisher

  One

  Stephen’s god died a little after noon on the longest day of the year.

  The Saint of Steel had not been a major deity, but neither had He been entirely obscure. He had four temples, staffed with priests and paladins, and the bishop of His church sat on the council in Archon’s Glory beside the elders of the other local churches—the Forge God and the Four-Faced God and the Temple of the White Rat. His paladins, Stephen among them, rode out when the Saint’s duty demanded swords and men to wield them, and rode back to the temple nursing their wounds, only to ride out again when they had healed.

  It had never occurred to Stephen or any of the others that a god could die. Such things happened in mythology, not in real life.

  He had just come back from a long, grim journey, hunting demons. It was not the Saint of Steel’s primary function, but the Dreaming God’s paladins had asked for assistance, so Stephen and three of his brothers had gone out with them. Demon hunting was ugly work, mostly involving possessed livestock, and while the Dreaming God’s chosen were skilled at exorcism, a two thousand-pound bull inhabited by a furious demon was not something anyone wanted to tackle alone. The Saint’s paladins were killing machines, first to last, and the god did not seem to mind loaning His chosen to the Dreaming God when demons were what needed killing.

  They were riding over the ridge on the road to the temple when Stephen felt his god die. His first thought was that his heart had stopped. It was as if someone had punched a mailed fist into his gut, reached up under his ribs and torn everything out. It did not feel like a wound, it felt as if he’d been cored.

  He collapsed forward over his horse’s neck. Distantly, he heard the sound of a body hitting the ground, and the shout as one of the Dreaming God’s paladins saw what was happening. And then he heard the sound of his brother Istvhan praying, harsh and rapid, and it was such a strange thing, that prayer, because Stephen knew instinctively that no one was listening.

  “What is happening?” he said, gasping into his horse’s neck. “Where is the Saint? What…?”

  The world spun around him. He could feel the black tide rising, crawling up from the ground, the tide that whispered of battle and bloodshed, but there was no sheen of golden light over it to sanctify it and make it holy.

  He was dragged off his horse and looked up, baffled, into the face of one of the demon hunters. Jorge, he thought vaguely. A handsome man, at least when he wasn’t coated in road grime and still stained with the blood of demon cattle. Strong enough that he could hold Stephen upright, even in full armor. Strong enough that killing him would be difficult, and he must be killed, surely, he was the enemy.

  “Stephen!” snapped the other man, shaking him. Stephen tried to focus his eyes. It seemed very difficult. The black tide lapped around his vision. He reached for his sword.

  “Stephen, what’s wrong?” the enemy said. Was he the enemy? He must be, he was here and the god was dead and the tide was closing over Stephen’s head. “What is happening to your people?”

  “It’s the Saint,” said Stephen, as blackness closed over him. He drew his sword. Somewhere, not too far distant, he heard a man scream. “The Saint is dead.”

  Two

  Three years later

  * * *

  Stephen stared at the ceiling of his room and thought, as he did every morning, about simply not getting out of bed. He could stay here until the end of the world, looking at the plaster ceiling and the long, dark wooden beams, while the square of light from the window crawled down the wall and across the floor and faded away to nothing.

  As he did every morning, he prodded the space in his soul where there had once been glory. There was only silence. There would never be anything there again. And then, as he also did every morning, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and got up. Grace was lost to him but he still had duty, and duty would carry him forward.

  The Temple of the White Rat was quiet at this hour, or as quiet as it ever got. In an hour or two, it would be a beehive of activity, filled with clerks and clerics moving back and forth, hundreds of people solving small, practical problems and occasionally even the large intractable ones. The Rat’s priests fixed things that could be fixed, and when things were broken past all mending, they helped people pick up the pieces.

  There was no mending seven paladins whose god had died, and who had shattered themselves to further pieces in the carnage that followed. Still, the Rat had taken them in, broken as they were. Both the Dreaming God and Forge God had offered, but the Rat priests had been the ones who ushered them inside, still bloody from the wounds they had taken and inflicted in return.

  Even now, Stephen did not know if he should be grateful for that kindness. He did not think that he could bear to stand beside the paladins of living gods and be eaten alive with envy for what they had. But at least in the house of those warrior gods, there would have been someone able to stop us. The White Rat claimed no paladins. He was served by law clerks and healers and diplomats, not by steel. Stephen often felt as if he was a dog in a hen yard, a protector who might turn feral and the gods knew how much damage he might cause before he was brought down.

  The Rat’s servants were not fools. They had seen the damage the Saint of Steel’s chosen wreaked in the aftermath of the god’s death, and they had faced it, unflinching. The temple set aside a wing for the broken paladins and asked nothing in return. As soon as they could rise from their beds, one by one, the remaining paladins had asked to be allowed to serve.

  Stephen pushed open the door to the dining hall. There was strong tea and biscuits for those who wanted it. A dozen other early risers were hunched over their mugs, some of them already going over the day’s work, a few simply sitting with their hands around the mugs, staring blearily at nothing. On the far wall, a mural of the White Rat gazed down benevolently, holding a book in one paw and a balance in the other.

  Stephen took a mug of tea and a biscuit, and sat down at a bench. Istvhan came in a few moments later to join him. He had always been the biggest of the paladins, a great bear of a man with shoulders like an ox. People tended to assume that he must be stupid because of his size. This was a very dangerous thing to think.

  “We are both still alive this morning,” said Istvhan, as he had said nearly every morning for three years.

  Stephen grunted, as he had also done nearly every morning for three years.

  There had been a time when that was not so certain. They had lost many of their brothers and sisters early, some to suicide, more who had simply not woken up from their stupor after losing the god. A few to darker things. For a time, they had thought they might lose others, but the final seven survivors had rallied. The care that the Rat priests had shown, tending to those who would never wake, was part of the reason that the broken paladins had asked to serve. A debt was owed. The dead could not pay it, so the living must pay it for them.

  It would have been difficult to explain to anyone other than Istvhan how that debt had kept Stephen alive. He could not give up while he owed others so much. Even if the Rat denied any such debt, until the ledgers had balanced, Stephen could not allow himself to stop moving.

  These were depressing thoughts. He was grateful wh
en Istvhan looked over at his plate and said, “What in the name of the little household gods is that?”

  “An abomination,” said Stephen. “I believe the cook called it gravy.”

  “Gravy is not that color.”

  “I did not say the cook was correct.”

  “Can we burn them at the stake?”

  “We’re not those kind of paladins. Anyway, it tastes okay if you close your eyes and pretend you’re eating literally anything else.”

  Istvhan groaned and went to endure trial-by-gravy himself.

  After breakfast, Stephen and Istvhan went back to the paladin’s wing together. The schedule was posted on a chalkboard at the head of the corridor. His fellow paladin read it, then clapped him on the shoulder. “Off to look menacing in court,” he said cheerfully. “You?”

  “Walking one of the healers through a rough neighborhood.”

  “Ah, lucky you. I do not mind scowling for hours, but my feet don’t care for the standing. And it’s hard to look menacing if they bring me a stool.”

  Stephen snorted. “Still with the one trial?”

  “Sadly. I could break the man and be done with it, but these so-practical Rats say that would look bad.” He shrugged.

  The trial in question was of a man who had become obsessed with one of the Rat’s servants, following her and sending her unwanted gifts, until finally obsession had tipped over into something much darker. The Temple would undoubtedly win their case but it was a grim, wearying job, and Istvhan’s part in it was to make sure that no one physically intimidated the woman while justice was done.

  A great deal of the work that the paladins did for the Rat was along those lines. Stand here and look scary. Walk here and glower at anyone who might be tempted to bother the healer in their work. Guard the bishop, not because we expect trouble, but because it needs to be known that the bishop is not without defenses. It was a far cry from their old duties, but not, in truth, an unpleasant one. Although if the enemy did not kill him, it was possible that his charges would.

  “These Rats are going to turn my hair white,” Stephen said. “This healer’s never had an escort before. He works in Weaver’s Nest and I am told he said he didn’t think he needed one.”

  “Is Weaver’s Nest the slum where that fellow is chopping off people’s heads and dumping their bodies by the river?”

  “One and the same.” Stephen rubbed his face. “How did they live this long without us?”

  “No idea,” said Istvhan cheerfully. “But on the bright side, no one’s stabbed me in months.”

  “Me neither.”

  They both made a sign to avert the evil eye, then laughed. Stephen gave Istvhan a friendly shove and went to sword practice.

  The Rat called no fighting men, so the Temple had never had a formal training ground. A small salle had been built in the city’s heyday for visiting paladins from other faiths and guards that might travel in a bishop’s entourage, but that had been long ago. The salle had filled up with dust and cobwebs and broken furniture that no one could bring themselves to throw away. The labor of cleaning it out had sweated the last of the illness from the seven broken paladins. Stephen remembered that the first spark of enthusiasm he had felt, after the god had died, was when he stood in the doorway of the salle and thought, We can fix this. It was the first positive emotion he had felt in a long time.

  He touched his lips out of habit as he passed the tiny shrine in the door. It was probably the last shrine of the Saint of Steel left on earth. Someone—a Rat servant—lit a candle in it every morning. There had originally been five candles. Stephen had removed four of them and left the single one remaining so that it was no longer a shrine to the living, but to the dead. The unknown maintainer of the shrine had only lit a single candle the next day. With such tiny, unspoken gestures, the broken paladins and the servants of the Rat had negotiated the way forward between them.

  Stephen hung his sword on the wall, took down a practice blade, and set to work.

  Forehand, backhand, parry, thrust. There was no chance, in such bloodless work, of the battle tide rising. It was repetitive, often tedious, but it was as close to meditation as he could manage these days. The sword required focus and concentration, a narrowing of the world to the next motion and the next instant, no farther ahead, no farther behind. When he practiced the sword, for a brief time he was not broken.

  He had found, in the first year, that he could no longer pray. The silence where the Saint had been was too final. Prayer only reminded him of his emptiness.

  Prayer reminded him of what he had become, however briefly, when the god had died. The sword, though, the sword was still good.

  After practice, he joined the others in the washrooms, sluicing the sweat and grime off his body. For creatures who sometimes lived in sewage, rats were fastidious about grooming, and the Rat’s servants were no exception. This, at least, Stephen could admit was an improvement over the temples of the Saint of Steel. The god had cared a great deal about battle, but not so much about washing up afterward. Hair still damp, he emerged from the baths, looked up at the sun and realized it was time to go and meet the healer.

  Three

  The healer in question was a middle-aged man with a creeping bald spot across his skull, and long-fingered, delicate hands. Stephen had not met him before, and extended his hand. “Stephen.”

  “Brother Francis.” He looked Stephen up and down with sharp, kind eyes. “The Saint of Steel?”

  Well, it was obvious enough what god he had served. Stephen still wore the cloak with the god’s insignia on it—the stylized sword, the gold flames, the hand holding the blade and pouring golden blood down the length. All the broken paladins did. The Temple not only mended them, they replaced the cloaks once a year with new ones, the symbol already embroidered onto the back. The Rat had accepted their offer of service, but did not require them to forget who they had been.

  Stephen had not forgotten. Neither, apparently, had anyone else. “It is, yes.”

  “You’re one of the berserker paladins.”

  “I was, yes.” Stephen gazed over the healer’s head. “If you are concerned that I am dangerous, you may ask the Bishop to assign a different guard.”

  “You’re a large man with a sword,” said the healer, surprising him. “Of course you’re dangerous. I believe that’s the point.”

  Stephen felt his lips twitch. “You have me there, Brother.”

  “I still think it’s all foolishness,” grumbled Brother Francis. “I’ve never had a problem in Weaver’s Nest. They’re good people, they’re just poor and desperate.”

  “Three severed heads were found in the river in a month.”

  “Yes, but they know me.” Brother Francis waved his hands, as if to indicate that severed heads were either inconsequential or one of the normal hazards of the job, Stephen wasn’t quite sure which.

  I believe I can actually feel the individual hairs turning white on my scalp. “Nevertheless, the Bishop feels that it would be wise to take precautions. Shall we go, Brother?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  A heavy satchel of remedies lay at his feet. Stephen picked it up automatically and the other man smiled.

  “Well, if you don’t mind doing the heavy lifting. I’m not quite as young as I was.”