Of Deeds Most Valiant: A Poisoned Saints Novel

Healing one man from a mortal chest wound and then a woman from a compound fracture is more exhausting than they tell you. There’s a reason we’re meant to build up our piety before we arrive at battles and plague towns. A reason we’re trained rigorously in dedication. That I was already almost drained before my arrival here is doing me no favors. But my heart thrumming every time I see the Vagabond Paladin, and the careful work I must do to deny myself so much as a single touch of her had been helping … until last night when, despite myself, I slipped. Even so, I sleep until well into the morning.

When I wake, everyone is drinking tea without me.

My eyes find the Vagabond immediately. She’s taken time to clean her face and fix her braid; her arm is draped over her dog’s body. His rib cage moves enough that I know he is breathing, though his lungs hitch badly. There’s tightness right through her posture, and there should be. We are in a hell.

Not the hell, obviously, but there are hells and then there are hells.

The problem with hell is that it makes demons. Creates them the way we were so sure that this place could make Saints.

What I don’t see, to my relief, is pain in how Victoriana sits. It pleases me even more when her eyes snag on mine. My heart kicks in my chest like a fresh-caught fish.

“It’s a code,” Sir Coriand insists, opening his hands to the others.

They’re in a rough circle — all but Hefertus, who snores raggedly beside me. The Vagabond must have spelled him off when she woke. I’m still not fully myself. I don’t like that. I need to be battle-ready and instead, there is weakness in my limbs and fogginess in my mind and this strange lightheaded softness infusing everything.

Last night keeps invading my thoughts — both the good and the bad of it. I must shove it away roughly. I am a knight of the God, not a boy with his first beard. I dare not moon after a woman when there is work before me.

But I feel her beside me, still. I feel the thrill of waking with my hands against the warmth of her clothing and my nose against the softness of her cheek and I do not want to forget that one precious, forbidden moment that was mine. It is the only moment I may ever have like it.

One of the golems lurches in from the side — the hideous one made of rags and bones. Its rags are stuck to it as if they had been dipped in bone glue and stuck on, but then the sea air had its way and the edges of the rags peel and pick up dust and gravel wherever they touch the earth. Some have stripped almost entirely off, hanging shaggily around it and exposing sticky bones beneath — some human, some beast, all bleached or boiled nearly white. I swallow roughly at the sight of it. The exposed bones are not too different from the look of Victoriana’s exposed radius last night.

The creature shoves a mug into my hands and I meet its glowing eyes. Is it a soul in hell inside this terrible constructed body of rags and bones? And what would it have of me if it could speak? Would it plead for death to free it — or would it want life poured into its empty spaces?

I take the mug in trembling hands and mouth a blessing over it.

“Once we crack the code, we can turn the room again and open the next space,” Sir Coriand says. “And with the clock ticking down, this must be our priority. No more sleeping. No more eating.”

Sir Owalan looks up from a light gruel he’s eating — likely given to him by the Engineers, as they’re the only ones with supplies. He looks thinner and more hollow-eyed than ever, as if he is a candle being burned down. He takes one more defiant mouthful and something flickers in his shadow. It seems to build somehow, as if it is darkening, growing.

I frown and look toward our miserable light source — the bas-relief wall — but I see nothing that would change his shadow. Just his, no one else’s. Perhaps a bird flew past the carved-out holes. I don’t believe it, but I have no other way to explain what I just saw.

“Should we turn it?” the Vagabond asks quietly.

“Of course we should!” Sir Sorken rumbles. “The only way out is forward, my lass.”

He is leaning back against the stairs, seemingly at ease as he sips his tea, face freshly shaven, hair brushed back neatly. Both Engineers are brilliant men, but I’ve known enough brilliant men to know that sometimes practicality escapes them. If your head is too high in the clouds, sometimes you can’t see the dirt.

“This place is not making us Saints,” she says quietly, and she’s not looking at them. She’s looking upward, where those hideous statues of us stand.

“We look like Saints in these statues,” Sir Owalan argues.

“Do we?” she asks. “Do those even look like us? Or is it just another twist of the mind? Like the door twisted our sin so that the doubt I confessed twisted into terror? Now we’ve all confessed to murder. What is it twisting us into with that?”

“Metaphysical arguments and the great philosophies are a wonderful pastime,” Sir Sorken announces like he’s the first to ever have noticed this. “But they are hardly of value to us now. We are trapped in the earth with few supplies. A clock is ticking. We do not know what happens when it runs out, but we do know that the last time we opened a door, this room spun. If we open another door, another wall will twist over this great open space that faces the sea. It has but a series of narrow stained glass windows and we will not be able to escape through them, but if we twist it a third time, then the open door will face the sea, and if nothing else occurs to us by then, we might fling ourselves into it and escape that way, or twist the room a final time and return to how it was set up before, and then stride grandly up the stairs and back into the world. Or, we can sit here and argue until we are nothing but bones and no one but Cleft and Suture will ever know our fates.”

I glance again at the golems. What would happen to them if we all died? Would they tunnel through the rock and go their own way? Or would they sit down here and wait for the next party of fools to open the door and slip down below? Could anyone open it from above when it was twisted as it was right now?

“Perhaps we could scale the wall and find the open door, even if the stairs don’t lead to it anymore,” the High Saint says quietly, but he doesn’t look like he likes that idea.

Beside me, Hefertus wakes, sits, and stretches like a big cat. He is entirely at his ease.

“We have no climbing gear. We have no other option but to go on,” Sir Sorken says gently but firmly. “You all know this. Dithering about it is merely wasting time.”

“Besides,” Sir Coriand agrees, “Don’t you want what we came here for? The Cup of Tears? Sainthood?”

“I do.” The High Saint’s words sound like a vow. His eyes are too bright. I don’t trust eyes that bright unless they’re in love. Even then. “I want it with all my heart.”

“Well, there you have it then,” Sir Coriand says as if he is offering us all a good gift. He’s not. “This is a puzzle box. A very large, very clever one, but a puzzle box all the same. And puzzle boxes guard important treasures. What, I ask you, is more important than a relic of the God and possible Sainthood?”

“Nothing,” the High Saint agrees. He’s staring off into the distance at some glory the rest of us do not see, his knuckles white around the bowl in his hands. I do not like how his shadow flickers with every breath he takes.

“We still haven’t solved the problem of who is killing people,” Victoriana says calmly.

I feel a little thrill at her relentless bravery. It is so like her to state this in the open, as if a murderer — if there is one — isn’t worth worrying about offending. I remember how her breath hitched when I healed her. How that tidy hair had spilled everywhere. I must look away for a moment before I can look back.

When all eyes turn to Victoriana, she lifts an eyebrow. “The Seer did not kill herself.”

“Perhaps the power of the God turned on her as it turned on Sir Kodelai when he abused it,” Sir Owalan says, unconcerned.

He slips the sleeve of his robe down where a knife is still sticking luridly through his flesh. He should tend to that before it becomes infected and does irreparable damage. If he thinks that I will heal it…

I pause, guilt washing over me. It is not for me to say who received the God’s healing. If he asks, I will not deny him, self-inflicted though the wound may be.

“Some people are not as dedicated to the God as they ought to be,” Sir Owalan says gravely.

I snort at that.

“And does that usually result in decapitation?” the Vagabond asks, her eyes wide with feigned innocence.

Sir Sorken laughs, and down here in the bowels of this place, it does not sound like a nice laugh.

“There are no murders happening here,” he says as if he is a judge rendering a verdict. “And now, children, we have a puzzle to solve before time runs out.”

“What happens when the time runs out?” the Majester asks uncomfortably. I do not think he meant to be a murderer. I think he thought he was a mercy-killer. Or perhaps this place has driven him mad. His hands still tremble and there are green shadows around his mouth and under his eyes.

Even so, I feel my skin creep when I look at him.

“What puzzle?” Hefertus asks, stretching again before standing and working the strap on his sword belt.

“We do not know what happens, Majester, but it cannot be beneficial,” Sir Coriand says. “Look at the trial we already faced. Perhaps we have only one chance to solve this box or we will perish here. And if that is true, we ought to hurry. As to the puzzle, Sir Hefertus, we refer to the etching showing the sun moving through its courses.”

Hefertus grunts. “Oh, well we all know what that meant. Not much of a puzzle.”

He is greeted by stillness and silence except for the whistling of the breeze through the cutouts in the stone.

He looks around slowly, his brow furrowed. I barely suppress a grin.

“Is something wrong?” Hefertus asks.

Sir Coriand sets down his bowl of tea, a slightly bemused smile on his face. “Are you saying you know what the etching means, Sir Hefertus?”

In answer, Hefertus whistles an odd tune, a little breathy and lilting. It does not suit the mood at all, though it reminds me a little of what he was playing on the organ. A dirge if ever there was one.

“Is there any of that tea to go around?” he asks when he is done.

Sir Sorken snaps his fingers and one of the golems lurches into action, attending to a kettle. It is only then that I realize they are burning rags to heat the kettle. Some of them look a little too familiar and my stomach twists. Have … the golems haven’t pilfered from the dead to light their fire … have they? That cloth looks very much like the Inquisitor’s cloak.

Hefertus accepts the mug and drinks like a man badly in need of a brew, and I stand unhappily, striding away to stretch my legs and clear my head for a moment. I still don’t feel quite right. My heartbeat is too fast, my lungs sore, every bone in my body aching — though especially the arm. I think perhaps I am feverish. The whole world feels hot. Far too hot. As if the sun has taken against me, though I cannot see even see his face.

“Is he going to tell us or what?” I hear the Majester’s anxiety creeping into his whispered question, but I don’t look at him.

I don’t look at anyone. I just need a little air. Just a little. I make my way to the cutout bas-relief and put my nose and mouth to a hole too small to even shove a hand through. I feel like a prisoner looking longingly at a floor drain.

“The sun marks are times of day, obviously,” Sir Coriand says. “But how did you get musical notes from that?”

Hefertus whistles a single note. It’s not his usual clear, melodic whistle but a breathing one that sounds more like the wind than a song. I close my eyes and let the cold air blowing in from the sea wash over my face, and I treasure that scent of salt and pine trees. It feels so far away and yet the same wind washes over them and washes through this rock prison and over me.

Hefertus’s whistled note fills my ears, seems to grow.

But that’s not it at all.

His note simply matches the wind as it washes into the room.

“Something about the shape of the rocks outside and the bas-relief and the tide must change the sound of the wind whistling in,” Hefertus is saying. “Or maybe it’s none of that. Maybe it’s magic.”

“The tune you whistled?”

“It’s just the notes the wind makes as it runs through the carving. In the order of the times on that little chart.”

In the silence, I hear quiet feet approaching me. I grit my jaw, but even though I was ready, I flinch when a hand drops lightly on my shoulder.

“Are you well, Poisoned Saint?”

The Vagabond’s voice is like honey on my tongue and sun on my face.

“I beg you. Remove your hand,” I gasp out as quickly as the words can form.

Forsworn, forsworn, forsworn.

My mind chants the word but though I know what it is meant to be, it still sounds like “lost” to me and I want to reach out and take it back. I want to take back her touch that flies away and leaves my shoulder cold. I want to snatch her hand in mine.

“I am well enough,” I manage, not wanting to reject her kindness entirely, but I dare not look at her.

“But he already whistled it and it did nothing,” Sir Owalan is protesting in the background. “So it can’t be the answer.”

“I think it’s meant to be played,” Sir Coriand says. “Would you try to play it for us, Sir Hefertus? On the pipe organ?”

I know my friend will say yes. To him, playing a song is as natural as breathing.

“You could take one of the golems if you like. Suture, perhaps,” Sir Sorken says. “You might need to tear out of there very quickly and a golem is a help for that.”

“I can trust my own two feet,” Hefertus growls. If he hadn’t decided before, he has decided now.

“Then do it and do it quickly,” Sir Sorken is saying. “And as for the rest of us, brothers, I suggest we say our morning prayers, have a quick tidy, and be ready. Last time a door was opened there wasn’t much time to waste, hmm?”

I should wish Hefertus well. I should do exactly what Sir Sorken suggests and tidy up a bit. I do neither of those things. I keep my face pressed to the cold stone. I breathe the scent of freedom from the salt of the sea and the scent of courage from the lady paladin hovering beside me and I pray.

God have mercy on me. God have mercy.

“I will try to heal your dog before we go into the challenge,” I tell her when I feel I can speak again. “I should have about enough strength for that.”

“No.” Her refusal comes too quickly.

I’ve had no reason to doubt her in all of this.

I have reason now.

My eyes flick open and I see the look in her eyes and the way she shutters them to try to hide it. She is afraid to let me heal the dog. She is hiding something.

Queasiness settles in my belly and I feel my face twist.

“Why do you doubt me?” I ask her in an undertone. “Why will you not allow me this?”

In the background, the others have decided on communal prayer. Their chant is like bone broth on a cold morning. It comforts me even from afar. The familiar words wash over my mind; the familiar chanting lines echo in my heart.

“I do not doubt you,” she says, but her gaze is held by mine and it is dancing with lies.

“You do. Your dog needs healing but you will not let me touch him. Are you afraid I’ll kill him because he bit me? Have you not seen I do not lash out in vengeance?”

“I do not doubt your mercy.” Her voice is small. She breaks the hold of my gaze and cinches her breastplate straps a little tighter. She checks the fit and buckling of her boots.

“But you reject it,” I say quietly, and still she does not meet my eyes.

Her silence feels like a knife.

“Why have you taken against me?” I press.

I think I might know. She judges me for last night. She knows I have taken pleasure in touching her, denying my calling and staining us both with guilt.

I bite my lip.

She shakes her head in denial, but there is shame all over her face and I know I put it there. It was I who touched her, I who whispered endearments to her in the darkness. My belly feels like I’ve swallowed a rock. My head is swimming.

“I apologize,” I whisper. “Most humbly.”

She opens her mouth and her face twists with vulnerability, but just when I think she will confess something to me, she shakes her head again and thrusts a water skin at me.

I take it, angry enough at myself that I grip it too tightly. I do not know what to say. I am awash with disgrace.

She stalks away and begins to tidy her things, wrapping up the cloak, stretching her muscles, checking over her sword. I watch her every movement, my eyes catching on the wear of her straps and clothing. She’s ragged and poorly repaired. Impoverished.

I have faith in the God, but why does he require so much from his servants? Holiness, they say, is why he demands it. Sacrifice purifies the heart. For if you have given up riches or physical kindness or freedom from pain, then it is not hard to give up the temptations to evil thrown in your path. Why grasp for power when you’ve denied yourself riches all your life? You can see how hollow it is, just as you’ve seen how hollow are the riches that others have. Why steal wealth when you’ve given up kind touches and gentle closeness as I have? To turn your back on cold silver is easy in comparison, trivial even. That’s the theory of it, and in practice, it has worked. Set your feet on the path and start to walk down it and the other path grows more and more distant, more and more inconceivable.

I know all this. And yet I want all the world for her. Even if she is as tarnished with guilt and wanting as I am. Maybe she is right. Maybe there is more evil walking among us than just what is in this place. Maybe we’ve brought some here with us. The golems, for instance. Murder in the heart of one of our ranks. I suck on my bottom lip and try to think.

I’m surprised when a movement catches my eye. It’s the Majester, approaching me with a twisted expression. He’s guilt and shame and misery, and he should be. He should be. Plenum Hexilan — the Inquisitor — was a bright, vibrant man. He should not be dead.

I find I’m trembling when he reaches me. It’s not for me to judge. But I am judging. It’s not for me to say how the God directs vengeance. And yet, I want him to direct it here.

God have mercy on me.

“I can’t think,” he confesses to me in an undertone, laced with the melodic prayers of the others. “It’s twisted my mind, wrung me into a killer. Ruined me. I can no longer be a paladin. I took off the raiment today and I’ve given the Engineers my sword.”

My eyes widen as I see he wears no scabbard.

“I want you to have the map.”

He shoves it into my hand and his haunted eyes come so close to mine that I can smell the fear on him rolling off in waves.

“Map?” I ask.

“You healed me. That means you were me for a moment. Surely, you saw. Surely, you understand. I’m tainted, Poisoned One. I’m misshapen right through the marrow. You should have left me dead.”

“I did not,” I say through gritted teeth.

His eyes look into mine, hollow and furious. “My life wasn’t yours to preserve. It wasn’t yours. He told me to kill. Don’t you see that? Did you see it when you were me?”

He sounds almost like a child pleading with me, and I don’t know why I feel tears so close. It makes no sense. I feel no pity for him. I feel no harmony with a cold-blooded murderer — no longer a knight, holy or otherwise. Not now.

And yet I have to blink very hard to hold them back when he pleads, “He told me.”

And then he’s gone, back turned to me, and hurrying to rejoin the prayers of the others, and I’m left gaping.

I tuck the map into a pocket.

With my heart open and my chest constricted, I look to the Vagabond Paladin. I wasted all the healing on the Majester — insane now, perhaps, or so guilt-ridden he’s of no use to anyone. It should never have been for him. I should have swept down to that platform and lifted her beloved dog and healed him right there.

Mayhap that is why she resents me now.

When she bends her head and bows in morning prayer, I can hardly hold my feet back as they move me slowly, obliquely toward her. She has told me she rejects my healing for her dog. But that is not up to her. I will show compassion on whom I will show compassion and if that is a dog, well then, so be it.

And I know this is unwise. If Hefertus were here, he would hold me back and raise a very distinct eyebrow. If we are to fight again, I should be fit to fight, and I won’t be if I do this.

But Hefertus is not here. And within me, something tugs me forward and will not let me go. Something good, I hope.

Because as her sweet voice recites the Prima Dolce morning prayer, I kneel beside heavy paws, and lay my hand on a brindled head, and I feel where the skull is fractured, feel the butterfly breath threading through a doggy nose. And I close my eyes and pray.

God grant your healing to this dog. Let me take upon me his woes, let me take upon me his pain. Knit him together as you have from the first.

Like always, it starts as warmth in my heart and spreads out to my fingertips, and then — for one ghastly moment — we are woven together, dog and man and — God forfend, what is that?

My eyes pop open. I’m staring into wide-open, golden doggy eyes. But that’s not what I’m seeing. I’m seeing distinctly three different beings. The dog, yes, with the scent of warm grass in his nose and a deep affection for Victoriana in his heart — you and me both, canine. But also the specter of a barrel-chested knight with sharp eyes and surprise highest in his emotions. He opens his mouth in wonder at the same time that I gasp at the third thing. A dark, twisted, painful presence. It bites my mind and heart like molten lead droplets hitting the skin.

I cannot think. I cannot reason. Fear floods my bowels and chases up into my throat and I’m choked by it, I’m gasping with it. I violently throw it away from me. No.

But for that moment — that bare moment — I am the dog who wants nothing more than to run in the grass with the wind in his face.

I am the old paladin with pain in my bones, pain in my heart, and a fierce, protective love for the girl with the brown eyes — a love so strong that he cannot simply walk away.

And I am the demon with a heart full of wickedness and it bubbles up and it boils over, and my mind begins to scream at the terrors it teases out and the horrors it suggests as it whispers and calls to me by name.

I’ll flay you alive and eat you, my treasure. I’ll gobble you up and smack my lips.

“What have you done?” I whisper.

Her eyes snap open and meet mine, and the faint glow that surrounded her as she prayed bursts like a soap bubble. She looks down at the dog, up at me, and for a moment our faces match.

We wear twin expressions of betrayal.

“What have you done?” she asks, and she sounds as if her heart is rent in two.

And then the floor lurches and the walls around us turn.

Her dog leaps to his feet and barks, one sharp yap.

Down the hall somewhere there is shouting, but I hardly care.

She is no Vagabond Paladin. Just as I feared. She is no paladin at all, for no holy knight would permit a demon to live. No servant of God would dwell with it — let it sleep at the foot of her bedroll, feed it from her hand, hold its broken body on her lap and shed tears.

I turn to the side, go down on all fours and heave, and then the room stops turning. The darkness of the bas-relief carved picture is gone, facing the dormitories now, the former arrow-slit windows face the corridor to our first trial, and in both their places are long stone slit windows that run from floor to ceiling and are filled with stained glass in yellow and red and blue and green. The thick base of the stairs blocks some of the space that should have been window, but the ones left make up for it. They flood the room with beams of colored light. I crane to look and see the edge of the fountain around the bulk of the stairs, now twinkling with rainbow colors. And when I look back, a golden beam washes over the Vagabond as she beholds me with terrible hurt in her eyes.

“I’ve seen what’s at the heart of you now,” I growl. Whatever affection flamed in me before is morphing into horror. Early flickers that I thought were love are now abhorrence. I can’t stand the sight of her.

She juts her chin out. “And you’ve found one more thing that you can’t forgive?”

Her tone tests me as if she thinks can challenge me into forgiveness. As if she thinks she can make me bend by declaring the opposite of the truth.

She is wrong.

Beside her, that terrible demon disguised as a dog sinks low, tongue out and lolling, butting her thigh with his head as though demanding affection.

“I will not forgive this,” I snarl back, and the hurt in her eyes is no less than the agony in my heart. The way she pales is no less than the way I do.

And then the result of what I have just done washes over me and I collapse onto the floor. My last thought is that I hope I do not land in my own sick.