“What are you doing in a library?” Ellen's voice came from behind Grom as he sat at a table, staring at an unopened book.

  After getting measured for his armor by the blacksmith and placing his order, he’d headed to the library to do some long delayed reading.

  “Reading,” Grom said with his typical surliness.

  “In my professional opinion,” Ellen said, coming up beside him and tapping the book. “It works much better with the book open.”

  “Don’t!” Grom said, slapping her hand away before she could crack the cover.

  “Why not?” she asked, reading the cover for the first time.

  “Oh, ‘ A Beginner's Guide to the Pantheon,’” she read. “Isn’t that a bit below your, uh, clericfullness?”

  Grom shot her a glare.

  “I figured I’d start here,” he explained. “A much lower chance of being smited.”

  “I’m still not sure that’s the right word. What about smoot? Smote?’”

  “I’ll pray on it and get back to you,” Grom said, dripping with sarcasm earning a laugh form Ellen.

  “What are you doing here?” Grom asked in return.

  Ellen showed him the book in her hand, a treatise on the language of the outsiders.

  “Brushing up on my language skills,” she said. “For… academic purposes of course.”

  “Of course,” Grom said, scooting his book a little further away from hers. “We’re just a right bunch of heretics aren’t we?”

  “Hmm,” Ellen said. “Bill seems to be getting pretty devout.”

  “Gods, don’t bring that up. Please.”

  “I’m not happy with it either. He hardly pays attention to me at all now.”

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  “What is wrong with you?” Grom asked. “First you want to break up with him, then you wanted to impress him, and now you’re mad he’s ignoring you.”

  Ellen sighed.

  “Women want to be desired,” she said, in her teaching tone. “That doesn’t mean we want to sleep with everyone that wants us.”

  “You’d know better than me,” Grom said.

  “You seem to be doing alright in that regard,” Ellen said.

  Grom laughed.

  “I don’t think a relationship based on lies is one to commend. I should end it before I get any deeper into all this.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Ellen agreed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to try to learn telepathy.”

  “Telepathy?” Grom echoed.

  “Yeap, that’s the primary mode of communication these… entities use, the language I was speaking before is essentially a pidgin.”

  “Have fun with that—and don’t read my mind if you figure it out,” Grom said.

  Once Ellen left him, he worked up the courage to open his book. No smiting, smoting, or even smooting occurred when his fingers touched the cover.

  He let out a sigh of relief.

  “Let’s see…”

  He searched through the index, looking for the chapter on Cland. The index doubled as a table and each name was accompanied with the domains of the god in question.

  “Aalodin,” he read aloud. “Light, healing, and polygamy… that’s an interesting choice.

  “Abstorin, stone, building, and patience…. Boring.”

  He skipped ahead, looking for any that were interesting that he might actually want to pledge his service too.

  “Dionaea, lies, trickery and blasphemy. Well, that’d be a good fit,” he said with a chuckle.

  He’d gone too far and jumped back looking for Cland and read, “Cland, bravery, integrity, and justice.”

  After that he spend a few minutes trying to contain a belly laugh in the quiet library.

  Once he’d settled down, he read the brief entry on the god and felt more and more nervous about the whole affair as he went. There was even a section on ‘Notable instances of divine judgement,’ i.e. smiting.”

  “Well, I’m dead.”

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