"I could certainly tell you're not undead – if nothing else your little friend Jojo would have noticed, his holy sense is for positive energy and he gets nervous when someone blocks it."

"Huh." Puzzled headtilt. "You say that like 'holy sense' is a... category of thing? That people frequently have? What does it detect usually, if his is commentworthily atypical?" 

"Paladins all have something like it. Usually it detects Evil, but sometimes someone will turn up detecting Chaos, or positive or negative energy, or poison. I've heard some dwarven paladins can detect precious metals, but I'm not sure how far to trust that, it's the kind of thing people would say anyway."

??? The university quartermaster is a saint by the definition of the local high-touch gods and Fenthick isn't ???? 

"I see. ... No, you know what, I probably don't see, every time someone's told me a new fact about what the word 'paladin' means I've thought I understood and then the next one makes no sense whatsoever. I'm coming around to a hypothesis that it's something we simply do not in any way have on my planet which is amazing because we really have a completely unreasonable number of things." 

"A paladin is a divinely appointed warrior under a sacred oath. No more, no less. The gods sometimes choose people for other paths; the most common is that of the cleric, an empowered priest with more potent spellcasting but less in the way of battle prowess. I myself am an oracle, a divine spellcaster who bears a physical or spiritual curse through which he channels power." He tugs down one of his white gloves, revealing thick burn scars on his hand, then replaces it. "I am fortunate that mine is so limited in scope."