Oath Bound (Book 3) (13 page)

Dingus stood at the
crossroads of Coom and Oo, in the dark across Oo from the big
veeklootz
—a
cypress, in Traders’—and watched the Treehoppers milling around in the light
from the torches they carried. They all dressed the same, in dark green tunics
embroidered with a stylized Ish leaping from something that vaguely resembled a
tree, and they all carried truncheons on their belts, except for one woman with
bright yellow-orange fur and a long, silky crest that went from sunset to
butter, who carried a little sword. She’d introduced herself as Captain Dar.

He’d left camp with every
intention of dealing with Laben the way Vandis had dealt with Everett a year
back, but he’d forgotten how far three miles was in city terms, and when he ran
into Sergeant Mee, his plans fell apart.

She’d wanted to know what
he was up to, and he doubted Vandis would want him to lie to the authorities.
Not, at least, beyond the tiny white lie he’d told Sergeant Mee: that he was
looking for a Hop to tell what Laben had done. He might have stretched honesty
a bit far with what he told her, too, to keep Tai out of it: that he had a
pretty good idea Laben was running pickpockets. Praise the Lady—if he could
praise Her that it actually
was
so horrible there—Laben’s shack bore out
his statement. The Hops piled up everything they’d found inside. He could hear
them talking about it, which would’ve meant more if he understood Ishian
better.

I should’ve lied more,
he thought.
I could’ve come back later. Smashed Laben’s face in for him but
good.

Fat. He was fat, with a
big gut that stretched the front of his tunic. Food stains all down his front,
too, the fat fucking bastard. What kind of person could have those blubbery
jowls and claim care of a kid so starved? Dingus couldn’t begin to imagine the
reasoning behind
that
rank piece of injustice and didn’t want to either.
Get his fists on Laben, shatter his mouth so he couldn’t eat a bite, he wanted
that
.
He could’ve left to get himself under control, but instead he stood here with
his hands in his pockets and watched.

Dingus didn’t give a shit
about the pile of stuff the Hops took out of that lean-to, slapped together out
of old boards; but he stood and waited, because when the Hops had knocked on the
side, at least a dozen Ishlings had come shooting out of a hole in the top,
like fuzzy comets, for the trees. He could see their eyes shining greenly out
of the dark when they shifted in the branches, and even more than he wanted to
destroy Laben, he wanted to make sure they were okay.

The Hops finished up and
took Laben away in manacles. Captain Dar pranced over to him on her toes the
way Ish did, pushing her soft crest out of her dark face. “The Treehoppers
thank you, Sir Dingus,” she said in her sweet, piping voice. “This goes a long
way, believe it or not. He’s amassed a significant quantity of property that we
know is stolen.”

“Well, you know,” Dingus
said, shifting his feet, and put his right hand over his heart so she could see
the leaf again.

“Ah,” she said, as if she
didn’t know at all, and left with the rest of them. Once they were all out of
sight, he walked across Oo to the little shack. It stank from the outside,
enough that he should’ve known not to look in, but he wanted to make sure no
Ishlings had remained.

“Uh!” he said, jerking
back from the door. He wouldn’t have wanted to shit here, let alone live.
Inside it was tiny, mostly bare except for a hammock sized for an adult Ish and
a tangle of reeking rags, tossed around from the Treehoppers’ search.
Kids!
Little kids in this fucking pit!
He let out a
hituleti
obscenity and
punched the side of the shack.

It toppled slowly to one
side. “Oh shit.” He tried to catch it, but it came to pieces, leaving slivers
in his fingers, and landed in a smelly heap. He kicked the boards, cursing
again, and above his head an Ishling gave a tiny, sobbing scream, quickly
muffled.
Nice going, you moron. Wreck their home while you’re at it.

He took a couple of slow
breaths, turning his face up to the branches. “It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t
hurt you, on my honor I won’t. Come on out and talk to me.”

Nothing happened.

“I know you’re there,” he
said. “I just—” A foul-smelling something splattered dead center of his
forehead. Luckily it wasn’t very big, and he didn’t get any in his mouth. He
grimaced, took out the hanky Vandis had taught him to carry, and wiped it off.
Well,
I had worse for less reason.
“I just wanna talk to you. I’m sorry I wrecked
your house.”

A voice like the song of
a tiny flute came down to him. A tiny, enraged flute. “That isn’t all you
wreck! You is kill Tai! I tells him and tells him he isn’t can talk to a Big!”

“Tai isn’t dead, though.
I can prove it to you.”

“Bigs,” said the Ishling,
still out of sight, “is big trouble.”

“I know it,” he said. “I’m
sorry for it, but if you come out and talk to me, I can show you why Tai didn’t
listen, and try to make it up to you.”

“Grown peoples isn’t
‘make it up’ to Ishlings. Ish or Bigs—they isn’t notice us even, or if they is,
they takes from us.”

Dingus breathed a couple
more times and said, “I know. I see how nobody notices. I see you sometimes
when I come for Tai. He tells me how it is for you guys and it makes me—”
Hurt.
It makes me hurt.
“It makes me think I need more Ishlings for friends.”

A scuttling sound came
out of the branches, and a moment later an Ishling gray with filth darted down
and clung to the trunk just above his head. In the instant it was upside down,
he saw: girl. She sat on her heels, pressing her knees together, and gazed down
at him from bright brown eyes. “Who is want Ishlings for friends?”

“Who wouldn’t? You guys
are tough and smart.
I
want you for friends. Anybody who doesn’t want
Ishlings for friends doesn’t know anything about Ishlings.”

“Well,” she said, and
stopped to think. A smile twitched her wide mouth. “Maybe you is thinking
right.”

He grinned. “You know I
am. My name’s Dingus.”

“I is Zeeta.”

“Nice to meet you,
Zeeta.” He scraped up every bit of his meager charm. “Tai isn’t dead. When
Laben thrashed him, he came to me, and if he doesn’t want to run away, he can
stay with me ’til I have to leave Windish. Do you want to come see him?”

“I can come?”

“Everybody can. That way,
if I try anything you don’t like, there’s a lot of you and only one of me. The
bigger we are, the harder we fall, right?”

“Is true,” Zeeta said.

“If you come, and you
decide you don’t like it by me, I won’t stop you leaving, but you’re gonna
leave with your belly full of good hot food, and you’re gonna be my friends
forever. That’s a promise. And if you decide you wanna stay…” He opened his
arms, like he was going to hug them all. He wanted to. “…well, it’d make me
real happy.”

She looked at him,
assessing. Finally she called out in Ishian, and the swarm descended.
Son of
a bitch,
Dingus thought, counting sixteen, including one not much more than
a baby.
I really know how to step in it.
He pulled his net bag from his
pocket and shook it out, spreading it down his back.

“It’s a ways,” he said.
“Hop on.”

They did, all of them.
Zeeta ended up having to cling to the front of his jerkin, and the littlest
wound her fingers and toes into his hair to ride the top of his head. At least
they didn’t weigh a whole lot. He sneaked them back through the woods, avoiding
the market and the main road, except to cross the river; he would’ve looked
downright weird to anyone who saw him, a long tall shape with over a dozen
little heads sprouting from it.

He walked into camp like
that, and Kessa and Tai stared, saucer-eyed, open-mouthed. “Here we are,” he
said. “That’s Kessa right there. She’s my friend, too.” The Ishlings scattered
through the camp, and Dingus shook his hands out—they were covered in red marks
from holding the net bag—and went to start a pot of water for noodles. He’d
heard more than one hungry stomach along the way.

Zeeta rushed to Tai. They
were the two oldest, it seemed, and they began a squeaking conference. Kessa
came to the fire, her eyes darting around at the kids, who explored the
contents of the tents and the storage pit.

“Don’t open the packs,
please,” Dingus said. “Friends don’t do that to friends.”

“What the hell did you
do?” Kessa demanded.

“I’m keeping my Oath.”

“I guess you are,” she
said, “but Vandis is gonna be pissed.”

Dingus doubted that. All
right, Vandis maybe wouldn’t have gotten himself into it in the first place,
and he probably wouldn’t be too happy when he got back in a fortnight and found
Dingus and Kessa with a bunch of Ishlings, but Dingus was willing to bet his
Master would be angrier with the situation than with him. “If he is, he is,” he
decided. “Won’t be the first time, won’t be the last.”

“They stink!” she
complained under her breath.

“We’ll deal with that
tomorrow if they stay.”

Tai said, “Forget Bigs
and Ish. You is more crazy than any person I is ever meet. What is you do with
all us, Dingus?”

“Uh—” He hadn’t thought
that far.

Zeeta said, “Stupid Tai.
We is pick pockets for Dingus now.”

“I isn’t think so.” Tai
gave him a long, measuring look. “We isn’t, is we?”

“Nobody picks pockets. Not
if they wanna stay with me. We don’t pick pockets here,” Dingus said.

Zeeta frowned. “Then how
we is going to eat? No work, no food.”

“If anybody works, it’ll
be me. Let me worry about food. No picking pockets. No stealing from stalls.
Stay away from the markets.
No stealing.
If you need something, on my
honor, I’ll help you get it.” Zeeta’s gaze picked him apart; she seemed to
think he was stupid, completely insane, or both. “That’s what it means when
you’re my friend,” he explained. “When we need something, we’ll work together
and figure out how to get it without taking things that belong to other
people.”

“You is listen.” Tai put
his hand on her knee where it stuck up. “I is telling you, he’s feed me. Right
now he is cook, see? I is trying to take from him, and I can’t. Instead he is
give to me. Over and over he’s give to me, and never is he ask for anything.”

“If you guys stay, I
might ask for some help, on account of there’s a lot of you, but it won’t be
stealing, or anything else bad or dangerous.”

“What about Laben?”
another of the girls peeped. She was a tiny thing as dirty as the rest, with an
empty eye socket Dingus couldn’t believe had healed as well as it had. She
clung to a little boy just her size.

Dingus smiled at her.
“It’s Vylee, right?”

“I is Voo,” said the
little boy, “and my sister, yes, she is Vylee. Laben is hurt her eye! It isn’t
work now.”

“You listen to me, Vylee,
and all you kids.” Dingus crouched in front of the twins. “Laben isn’t even
shit, that’s how low he is. He’s a low-down, dirty piece of worthless trash,
and I won’t let him near you again.”

Vylee’s remaining eye,
yellow except for the big black button in the middle, went wide. Dingus glanced
over at the water; it wasn’t near boiling, but there was some clean in a bowl
over by Tai, where the medical kit lay open. “Pass that stuff,” he said to
Zeeta, who pushed the box of equipment over to him. He stretched back to snag
the clean water. “C’mon, Vylee. I can’t fix your eye, but maybe I can keep it
from getting worse.”

He cleaned the socket as
best he could while the noodles cooked, and tried to learn all their names. He
didn’t do as well with that as he would’ve liked, but Reeb stuck in his head
just fine, especially after throwing shit at another Ishling—twice. They ate,
and although Dingus had expected chaos when it came time for bed, everybody was
tired enough that heads went down in a hurry.

Dingus settled in to sit
watch while Kessa and the little ones slept, but he woke up late morning curled
on his side, sweating, in a pile of seventeen Ishlings. He itched, whether from
the dirt or from the bites he’d gotten from the kids’ parasites testing him
out, he didn’t know. Lice and fleas, everybody had ’em, and Dingus had gotten
nibbled on a little in the night. He couldn’t move to scratch.

“Guys, I gotta get up.”
Nobody moved. They snored away, cheeping and chirping. “Guys! Please!”

Nobody moved. Dingus
tried to shift them, but he didn’t want to wake them up. Eventually Kessa
rushed out of her tent, scratching wildly. “Dingus!” she cried, tears in her
eyes. “Dingus, I got
fleas!
”

“No, you don’t,” he said.
“They tasted you a little is all. You’re not the right kind.”

“
Dingus—!”

“All right, all right,
help me up.”

She lifted Ishlings away,
and soon he was free, surrounded by cavernous, adorable yawns. He scratched
himself all over. “I’m going to the market.”

“
Now?
But—”

“I don’t have enough
stuff to get the bugs off everybody,” he said grimly.

“Let me go.” When he
scowled at her, she added, “Someone might recognize you. It’s less likely for
me, right?”

She might have a point.
He sent her off with his purse, bulging with most of his stipend, a stern
warning to keep her hand on it, and an extensive mental shopping list.

The Ishlings kept him on
the jump all morning, especially the baby. Her name was Peepa and he had to
rescue her at least four times: from his bark-soaking bucket, from reaching
into the fire, from a tree, from the bucket again. The kids ate everything in
the camp for their breakfast, leaving him not a scrap of smoked salmon, and
except for Tai, who sat hurting, they played a raucous game of Tag, the object
of which seemed to be to discover how many times they could make him be It.
Except for the few itchy bites, and no breakfast, he had a great morning. He
didn’t mind being It, especially since he got to surprise them all with how
well he could climb and jump.