Page 134 of Paladin's Faith

“Like hell I will,” said Shane, and threw himself out the window.

The courtyard below was cobbled with gray stone, which had gone almost pink in places where red mud had dried across it. There was a line of laundry stretched across one side and a half-dozen chickens pecked away in the corner. He had plenty of time to notice this, because he appeared to be hanging suspended in midair.

Well, shit.

“Levitation,” said Wisdom behind him, its voice slightly strained, “is instinctive in demons. I believe it’s an outgrowth of how we move in our birthplace.” Shane felt a hand lock around his ankle and drag him backward into the room. “It’s much more difficult to do to another person. Fortunately, the channel between us makes things easier.”

It dropped him on the floor. Adrenaline washed through him, belatedly, setting his muscles trembling, and he felt the battle tide trying to rise. He pushed it down reflexively, then thought, Wait, why? Perhaps I can force it to kill me.

He’d been fighting the black tide for so long that it took a moment to make himself reach for it instead. But it rose around him at last, shot through with red, and he pushed himself to his knees as the world went slow around him.

Draw the sword and run at Wisdom. Hilt in the right hand, get its shoulder in the left. If you can get the blade around its back and run it through, then you can drive yourself onto it as well. There’s a good two feet of blade left, it’ll be enough to kill you both.

He lunged.

“Stop,” Wisdom said, in the brisk, exasperated tone of someone telling their dog to get off the bed this instant.

Heat exploded inside his chest and burned the battle tide to ash. Shane felt as if he’d been kicked by a mule with hooves of fire. His charge turned into a stumble and he went to his hands and knees at the demon’s feet, gasping for breath. Even his lungs felt seared and raw.

Wisdom sighed. He watched it walk away, then return. It knelt beside him and pushed a cup of water into his hands. “Drink.”

He drank obediently. The pain subsided, but he didn’t seem quite able to stand yet. He fell over on his side instead.

The demon gazed down at him, shaking its head. “I apologize,” it said. “I have little experience with this yet, and I clearly used too much force. I did not actually mean to cause you pain.”

Strangely, he believed it was telling the truth.

Wisdom crouched down and got an arm under his shoulders until he could sit up, back against the wall. On some level, he knew that the demon’s touch should have made his skin crawl, but it only felt like human hands.

It got him another cup of water, then sat down cross-legged across from him. He drew a deep, rasping breath. It no longer hurt, but he could feel the connection burning like a brand between them.

“There are any number of ways that I could force you to serve me,” Wisdom said. “But they are all unpleasant, and I don’t particularly wish to be that sort of god.” It gazed at him, thinking the gods knew what behind its host’s eyes.

Shane rubbed a hand over his face and took a sip of water.

“Do you want me to hurt you?” asked Wisdom. It sounded almost plaintive, a question rather than a threat.

It came to Shane that the demon found him as baffling as he found it. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “No.”

“Are you sure? You want so badly to serve, paladin. It’s all right there.” It cocked its head and he could actually feel the pressure shifting inside his chest, as if it was running its hands across his heart. “If I tortured you until you had no choice but to serve me, you’d…feel less guilty? Really?”

Shane opened his mouth, found that he had absolutely no words, and closed it again. The demon’s question nudged up against things in his soul that he had always suspected were there and had spent his life carefully ignoring.

But oh god, he could imagine it so clearly. A baptism of agony, and then…then it would no longer be his fault. Not even the Dreaming God could blame him for having fallen from grace. No more guilt, no more gnawing fear, only a dark and near-infinite freedom to be what he was made to be, the weapon in the hand of something like a god.

It would be so very wrong to want such a thing as that.

The pressure eased. Through the connection between them, Shane realized that he’d managed to shock the demon.

They never warned us about that in the Dreaming God’s temple. He could feel a laugh rising in his throat and fought it back. The temple spent a great deal of time on how demons would try to tempt you. They hadn’t covered what to do when the demon hadn’t expected to tempt you.

“I suppose if it’s what you truly require, I could do it,” Wisdom said uncertainly.

Shane closed his eyes. “No,” he said, partly to Wisdom, partly to the darkness behind his eyelids, “I don’t want that.”

And then, so quietly that he wasn’t sure if he heard the words or felt them through the channel: “Humans are so damn complicated.”

He shouldn’t laugh, but he did. Probably that meant he was damned for real. “When you write your holy book,” he said, “I suggest putting that on the first page.”