Paladin's Faith, page 1
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PETER S. BEAGLE, AUTHOR OF THE LAST UNICORN
PALADIN’S FAITH
BOOK FOUR OF THE SAINT OF STEEL
T. KINGFISHER
Copyright © 2023 by Ursula Vernon
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 Uncle Roy
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
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by T. Kingfisher
ONE
Breaking into the Bishop of the White Rat’s office was far more trouble than it had any right to be, and Marguerite was a bit annoyed by it.
To start with, the room where the Bishop saw petitioners was not actually her private office but a suite of rooms set aside specifically for that task, so Marguerite spent three days staking out the wrong room entirely. Secondly, her actual private office did not have windows, but instead a series of ventilation slits that could not have been infiltrated by anything larger than a ferret. (Not that Marguerite wanted to break into a third story office from outside. She had done such things before, but they did not rank among her fondest memories.) Thirdly, the only way to reach the office was to go through the offices of a whole cadre of staff, all of which were fanatically loyal and most of whom worked late.
All of these issues might have been surmountable, if Marguerite could have, say, bribed the cleaning staff, but even that proved difficult. The Temple of the White Rat solved problems. That was their god’s entire purview. They were staffed with lawyers, social workers, healers, and organizers.
Apparently one of the problems they had solved was bribery. You couldn’t bribe a Rat-priest. (Well, you probably could, but only by offering to donate the money to the poor.) They were all genuinely good people who wanted to make the world a better place, and how obnoxious was that? You might be able to blackmail one, but Marguerite suspected that the Bishop already knew exactly who had skeletons in their closet and had taken steps to quietly remove the skeleton and brick up the closet door for good measure.
The general cleaning staff was made primarily of people fleeing terrible domestic situations, who were given a place to stay, food, and a wage as long as they needed it, and not even Marguerite was enough of a monster to try to blackmail one of those wounded souls. And the Bishop’s private offices were cleaned by the head of Housekeeping himself, who felt that no one else on earth could be trusted to clean the Bishop’s desk without muddling her papers, and who would have cheerfully slit his own throat if he thought it would make the Bishop’s life easier.
Really, it was enough to give an honest spy heartburn.
After examining the problem from all angles, including the roof of the nearest building outside the temple compound, Marguerite gave up on her initial approach. She’d hoped to rummage through the Bishop’s files first, but it looked like she was going in cold and hoping for the best.
Her next thought was to break into the Bishop’s bedroom, but that proved equally fruitless. The Bishop had a perfectly normal suite of rooms, guarded by an anteroom full of old women who sat in rocking chairs, knitted and played cards. They were delighted to see visitors, they were happy to chat for hours about their grandchildren, and they would not let a stranger inside the Bishop’s door for love or money. You couldn’t out-argue them and you couldn’t outlast them. If you tried, you were just the entertainment for the day. It was positively fiendish.
A trained guard costs a decent amount of money. A trained guard you can’t bribe costs an indecent amount. Or you could get a dozen old ladies, give them a warm, comfortable room to sit and play cards all day, pay enough that none of them have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, and you’ll still come out ahead.
It was such a Temple of the White Rat solution: Take two problems and use them to fix each other. Marguerite would have been in awe if she wasn’t ready to scream.
At one point, she actually sank so low as to consider making an appointment like a normal person. It offended her sense of craftsmanship. It’s also just a bad negotiating tactic. If I start out asking instead of telling, I become a supplicant, not an equal.
Eventually she gave up, disguised herself as one of the cleaners, snuck into the suite where Bishop Beartongue saw petitioners, and hid under a desk for three hours.
At least it was a nice desk. The wood on the underside had been sanded to velvety smoothness and then oiled. Marguerite found herself petting it. She was a sensualist at heart, and she had always had a weakness for interesting textures.
Still, she was glad when all the cleaning sounds had faded and she was able to stretch her legs and stand up. By the time an aide came in to make sure the lamps were lit, Marguerite was sitting behind the desk, in the big chair.
“Tell Bishop Beartongue that her morning appointment is here,” she said.
The aide looked like the sort of person who would correct your grammar while you yelled at him that the building was on fire. “But the Bishop doesn’t have a morning appointment today,” he said.
“She does now. Tell her that Marguerite is here to see her. Yes, that Marguerite.”
“But—”
Marguerite tilted her head back so that she could gaze down her nose at the aide. “The Bishop is a very understanding woman,” she said, in a tone that implied that this was not a trait that Marguerite shared. “I am certain she’ll understand that you, personally, kept her from receiving information that she has been waiting for…eagerly.”
The aide squeaked and fled.
Ten minutes later, the door opened again. The first person through was a big, mild-faced man with thinning hair and spectacles. This must be the Bishop’s private secretary. If Marguerite’s inquiries were correct, his name was—
“Rigney, you’re blocking the door,” said Bishop Beartongue from behind him.
Bishop Beartongue herself was a tall woman in her early fifties, with short, iron gray hair and the quiet confidence of a woman who knows where the bodies are buried. Her robes were the same material as Rigney’s and the aide’s, with only a narrow scarf-like vestment to indicate her rank.
“I am concerned that she may be an assassin, Your Holiness,” said Rigney. He filled the doorway, not letting her pass, while his eyes traveled over Marguerite. Spectacles or no, Marguerite suspected that he didn’t miss much.
The Bishop sighed. “If she was an assassin, I’d probably already be dead by now, Rigney. The only reason I’m alive is because I’d be so much more trouble for everyone dead.”
Marguerite put her hands flat on the table. “If you’d like to search me for weapons, you may. I’ve got a knife strapped to my left calf and a bodice dagger. I feel underdressed without them, but I’m telling you they’re there as a sign of good faith.”
Rigney narrowed his eyes. The Bishop thumped his shoulder. “There, you see? Gesture of good faith.”
“Also exactly the sort of thing that someone would say to make you let down your guard…Your Holiness.”
“Then she’s done so much homework that she knows exactly how much trouble I’ll be dead. Come on, Rigney. Marguerite and I are old…ah…what would you call us, my dear?” She smiled over her secretary’s shoulder. “We were not adversaries. I don’t know that we’re even acquaintances, given that we’ve never actually met. But you did me a very good turn once, and I have not forgotten.”
“Colleagues?” asked Marguerite, who had found herself in similar positions with other operatives in the past.
“Colleagues,
Rigney’s sigh conveyed a vast amount of information about his approval, lack thereof, and the things he was expected to put up with. He stepped inside and held out his hand. “If you could remove the knives, for my own peace of mind.”
“As you wish.” Marguerite extracted the bodice dagger, while the secretary gazed politely at the ceiling, and then the one strapped to her calf. (Her hairpins were also more than sharp enough to kill a man, but she left them in place. There was no sense in giving everything away.) She placed them on the table.
“And now,” said the Bishop, “I believe you’re in my chair. May I trade places with you? And then you can tell me why you are here, when you have been content to be officially dead for the last three years.”
Marguerite took a deep breath and rose. “I need your help,” she said.
TWO
If the Bishop was surprised, she gave no sign. She sat down and leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers together. “It is very likely that your intervention saved the lives of my borrowed paladins, once upon a time. I had been wondering when you would call in that debt. Nevertheless, we serve the Rat and even if a debt is owed, we cannot go against His will. I will have to know more.”
“I thought as much.” Marguerite had researched Beartongue quite thoroughly some years back. She was ethical to a fault, although her ethics were occasionally ruthlessly utilitarian. “I do not propose to keep you in the dark, although there are some limits on what I can say. I will not lie, my plan may put your people in danger. But I believe it is worth it.”
The Bishop made an inviting gesture with one hand. “I’m listening.”
“Well. I’m not sure how much of my history you managed to ferret out, but I took the name Marguerite from a fellow operative in Anuket City. I used to work for a consortium there, powerful merchants who…let us say…did not feel that the Merchant’s Guild was entirely representing their interests.”
Beartongue’s lips quirked. “I take it that matters did not end well, if you had to flee and take on a dead woman’s identity.”
“An understatement for the ages. My patron within the consortium was found hanging from a beam. It was ruled suicide, but it was not. His information network was thrown into shambles, and several were picked off before we knew what was happening.”
“And you’re certain it was murder?”
“I would bet my own life on it. And yes, I understand that when someone commits suicide, everyone stands around wringing their hands and saying, ‘But he would never have done that!’ But Samuel truly would not have. His sense of duty to his operatives would never have allowed it. He would have crawled over broken glass for one of his people, and too many of us were left exposed by his death.” It required no effort for her voice to fill with cold anger. The best roles had real emotion behind them, and this emotion was as real as anything she had ever felt.
Beartongue’s lips made a flat line. You understand, Marguerite thought. You would be right there on the broken glass beside him. You would never leave your people out to dry. And unless I have lost my touch completely, it’s one of your fears, too—that someday you will become so politically inconvenient that an assassin puts a knife in you, and what will happen to your people then?
She took up the thread of her story again. “At any rate, we were in disarray. We fled in all directions. Some of us took jobs with other groups. I did so myself. It was only later that I discovered that I was working for a branch of the very people that had killed my patron, and that there was still a price on my head.”
“I can see how that would be uncomfortable, yes.”
“You have no idea,” Marguerite said dryly. “I was actually doing quite well in my new position when another branch of it showed up and tried to kill me. It was quite a shock to my employers as well. Fortunately I was able to escape while they were still thrashing out the details.”
“Are you at liberty to tell me the name of this group?”
Marguerite licked dry lips. And here is where you throw the dice and hope that the good Bishop is not already compromised. Though if they can suborn the head of the White Rat’s temple, what chance do you possibly have? “The Red Sail.”
Beartongue frowned, but not in a hostile fashion. “The merchant fleet company? I thought their primary business was supplying salt from Morstone’s Sealords to the rest of the continent. I can well believe that they want to keep abreast of Anuket’s dealings, but I am surprised that they maintained a dedicated spy network in this area.”
Her puzzlement seemed genuine. Marguerite relaxed slightly. The bishop might be a very good actor—almost certainly was, in fact—but if she had been in the Sail’s pockets, she would likely have chosen a different tactic than ignorance. And she was entirely correct in her assessment. Anuket City, the fabled city of artificers, was arguably the greatest power in the region, but the Red Sail had access to dozens of regions and had only a passing interest in a small group of inland city states. “It was not what I’d call a dedicated network until fairly recently. I was the only one in Archenhold, so far as I know, and they were content to keep it that way. I passed information from here to the Sail, and if they did not tell me otherwise, on to a few old contacts in Anuket City. When things became a trifle…ah…heated here,”—Beartongue’s lips twitched in acknowledgment that she had been some of that heat—“I became a traveling trader, moving among courts and sending information back. At least I did, until someone realized that ‘Marguerite Florian’ was a loose end and decided to kill me.”
The Bishop frowned. “Obviously I’m sympathetic. If you need help getting away, or assuming a new identity, I suspect I can be of service. But I confess, Mistress Florian, that I don’t see what the Temple can do for you that you could not just as easily do for yourself. Particularly since if we do it, there will be a paper trail and a dozen people who might accidentally let something slip.”
Marguerite was already shaking her head. “That’s not why I came. I’ve tried that. I’ve even tried simply going to my contacts in the Sail and asking for amnesty. They were suitably appalled and tried to help, but the Red Sail is an immense organization. There are a dozen individual fiefdoms who are all scrabbling for power. If one group wants me forgiven, another will want me neutralized simply to spite them.”
“The right hand does not know who the left is killing,” murmured Rigney.
“Precisely. And unfortunately, the group that wants me dead have seen their star ascendant recently, so…” She spread her hands.
Beartongue sighed. “Just like politics between religious orders, then. Still, as fascinating as all this is, I am certain you did not break into my office merely to complain about a merchant company’s organizational flaws. Although given a bottle of wine, I’d be happy to expound on a few flawed organizations I know as well.”
“No, not just for that,” said Marguerite. Although I suspect that would be a delightful conversation. “Something is happening. The Red Sail has sent delegations here recently. Very recently. And it isn’t regular trade they’re after.”
Beartongue glanced at her secretary. Rigney shrugged. “There was a trade delegation from Morstone to the Archon last month, Your Holiness. We thought nothing of it at the time. Archenhold only produces a few things that they would be particularly interested in trading, and none in any great volume.”
