Oath Bound (Book 3) (21 page)

Dreamport

Since he’d come back from
the Lucky Strike, Vandis hadn’t been alone for a moment. It’d been an endless
fortnight. Damn Adeon, anyway, for having stepped into the mess hall from the
hospital at the moment Vandis’s foot had touched the bottom step. Trying to
sneak past the
tulon
hadn’t been one of his brighter ideas. Now he’d had
an escort every time he wanted to use the privy, and a Knight standing outside
the door every time he walked into a room.

They’d ganged up on him
even today. He stood under threatening clouds outside a fancy cookshop with a
vague representation of a flying fish—he
thought
it was a flying fish—on
the signpost, kissing his eighty-ninth baby of the day. “Lady’s blessings on
her head forever,” he said, forcing a smile onto his face, and the baby’s
mother beamed.

“Thank you, Sir Vandis,”
she said. “I know your blessing will shield her. She’s been so sickly.”

“The Lady shields
everyone who comes to Her earnestly. There’s nobody more earnest than a baby,”
Vandis told her, but his stomach churned saying it. He’d felt the fever on the
baby’s skin. “Bring her to the Knights’ Headquarters. The hospital there is
always free, and Doctor Westinghouse is one of the best in Rothganar.”

“Thank you, Sir Vandis.”
There were tears in her eyes when she said that. Vandis managed another smile,
somehow, but he cracked a little on the inside.
Help her, would You?

Do have a little
faith,
She snapped.

Well, I’m sorry. It’s
just fucking depressing. I can’t actually make anything better for any of these
people, and they keep coming to me like I can.
His mouth strained to smile
again at the next petitioner, an old man supporting his right side with a
crutch. “What can I do for you, uncle?” he asked, keeping his voice even.

“Oh, Sir Vandis, it’s my
leg…”

And on and on and on. Vandis
hardly wanted to eat anymore. He didn’t even know what was good to eat at this
jumped-up place. He hadn’t chosen it; when he’d said he wanted a meeting, his
Knights and Hendrick’s priests had gotten together and presented the two of
them with dinner reservations, for which Vandis was now half an hour late—and
the crowd only grew.

He blessed people for
what had to be at least another twenty minutes, under Hui’s intent scrutiny,
until at last the door to the cookshop swung open to reveal, not another departing
patron who would
of course
want Sir Vandis’s blessing, but Adeon.

“Clear,” the
tulon
pronounced.

How fucking long does
it take?
But he raised his hands to include everyone in the still-growing
throng and gave a rote benediction so bland that he would have, before what
happened on the lift, slapped himself for it. He left Hui to deal with the
protests and ducked inside.

It wasn’t as terrible as
he’d expected. The décor was fairly simple, tending toward quality rather than
ridiculous ostentation, and had a distinct nautical feel: shiny brass trimming
the bar and accenting the dark wooden stools and chairs. “Good choice,” he
muttered to Adeon, who twinkled.

“I think you’ll like
Hendrick,” was all he said. He ushered Vandis to a table at the back of the
cookshop, where a youngish man sat on one side, an open bottle in front of him.
He stood and leaned over to clasp wrists with Vandis. His clothes were plain,
and he had dirt under his nails, and hair cut practically short, if slightly
neater than Vandis wore his.

“It’s good to meet you at
last, Sir Vandis,” he said. He sounded younger than his weathered face looked,
a pleasant tenor voice, and his grip was firm, but he didn’t press like the
greeting was an arm-wrestling match. He was taller than Vandis, but who wasn’t?
“I’m glad the doom-crows didn’t rob me of the chance.”

“Just Vandis. So am I.”

“Then you’d better call
me Hendrick.” Naheel’s new High Priest sat again, steadying himself on the edge
of the gleaming table. His nose stood out pink, and the wine bottle was half
empty. There was no glass. “Hope you’ll forgive me,” Hendrick added, when
Vandis took a seat across from him, probably catching the direction of Vandis’s
eyes.

“What for? I’m the one
late.”

“Understandably,”
Hendrick said.

“Sure.” Vandis raised a
hand for a drink of his own. He recognized the wine Hendrick had been tippling:
a dry red out of Brightwater, not at all to his taste. He wanted whiskey. Adeon
intercepted the waitress. “The fact remains that I’m late.”

“I’m forgiving you for it.”

He had to give Adeon his
drink order, and the
tulon
passed it along as if he treated Vandis like
a baby every day—which he had been. Vandis suppressed a tired sigh.
It’s
only because they care,
he told himself, like he’d been telling himself
since the incident a week and a half previous, when he’d snarled at Evan’s
young Henry that he was
perfectly capable
of bathing unescorted, thank
you very fucking much, and gotten a jab in the temple from his Lady for it.

“You’re taller than I
thought you’d be,” Hendrick said.

Vandis wiped the scowl
off his face. “Taller?”

“Oh, yeah. Everyone’s
always saying ‘Vandis is so short, Vandis is shorter than a little kid.’ But
you’re not that short.”

“That’s your second
bottle, isn’t it?” he asked.

Hendrick laughed and blew
a note across the top. “Third.”

Right. Not even going
to try to catch up with you.
Vandis’s whiskey arrived in a glass, and he
took a judicious, deliberate sip.

Hendrick laughed again
and swigged from his wine bottle. “Bright Lady!” he said, wiping his mouth on a
sleeve. “I’ve been nervous, that’s part of it. I’m nervous now, if you want the
truth.”

Vandis raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve been High Priest
for less than three months. ‘Hey!’ they tell me. ‘Vandis Vail is in town! He
wants to meet with you!’ Your reputation precedes you with a battleaxe.”

He raised both eyebrows.

Hendrick picked at the
label on his bottle, hunching slightly. “So—ah—what did you want to talk
about?”

“Lech Valitchka.” Vandis
took another sip of whiskey to burn the name out of his mouth.

“Rat fucker,” Hendrick
said, surprising a laugh out of Vandis.

“Oh yeah.” Vandis rotated
his glass. “So I guess that means you’re not going to freak out if I say
something needs to be done about him.”

“We’re going to Conclave.
Didn’t you know?”

Vandis sat back in his
chair as Adeon and one of the House of the Sun’s under-priests brought food
across the dining room.
I don’t even get to choose my own dinner?
Aloud,
he said, “I know. Conclave doesn’t have any real authority.”

“So what are you saying?”
Hendrick’s brow wrinkled.

Adeon set Vandis’s plate
in front of him with a flourish. A fish cutlet, breaded, and some kind of
bacon-rice-cabbage thing. It looked tasty, so he didn’t complain.

Hendrick got the same
thing. “I didn’t get to order,” he said sadly.

“Safety first,” said the
middle-aged priest who’d brought it, and Hendrick sagged.

“What’s the good of being
High Priest if they don’t listen to you?”

“Search me,” Vandis said.
He got out his cutlery and cut off a piece of fish: cooked just so, flaky and
tender at once, but damned if he wouldn’t sooner have a whole fish caught not
an hour before, roasted on a spit over a crackling campfire, with two wide-eyed
kids for company. He imagined telling them the story of what had happened on
the lift. Kessa would gasp in the most gratifying way, he was sure, and
Dingus—well, Dingus would pitch a fit, but that would be satisfying, too. Then,
chewing his bite, he remembered
menyoral
and the food soured on his
tongue.

Another thing to conceal
from his boy. Another way to lie into a trusting face. Maybe he’d just have
done with all that. Dingus was an adult, technically, however hard Vandis tried
to see anything other than a wounded little boy in his hazel
hitul
eyes.
Maybe when the time came, when they’d had a couple of days together, he’d just…
sit Dingus down and tell him all of it, from the very beginning. But a couple
of days, first, before he had to wipe the trust out of Dingus’s eyes forever.

He took a deeper drink
from his glass, cleared his throat, and repeated, more emphatically, “Conclave
has no authority. Not to solve the kind of problem Lech has become. Conclave
has the power of influence, not of temporal strength. Are you taking my meaning
here, or do I have to spell it out for you?”

Hendrick swallowed
audibly, larynx bobbing under a white face. “That sounds… drastic.”

“No, son,” Vandis said,
pushing his age, his experience, up against Hendrick’s youth and newness to the
position. He remembered being that fresh. “What Lech did to us—to my Order, to
your Church—that was drastic.”

“Don’t forget Disa,”
Hendrick murmured. His plate might as well have held the secret to eternal
life. “She got lucky there.”

“She had Gudrun there.
And her own sweet self.” Vandis smirked when he said that, and Hendrick snorted
a laugh.

“You’re the only one I’ve
ever heard refer to Disa as ‘sweet.’”

“She’s a hard-ass old
bat, but you get used to her.”

“I know. I’ve been having
dinner with her once a week. Just like my mother did.”

“Your mother?”

“Solveig,” Hendrick said.

“He killed your mother.”

“Well, it wasn’t—”

“You’d better believe it
was him. Sure as if his hand were on the sword that struck your mother’s head
from her shoulders. Lech Valitchka killed your mother, Hendrick. He spilled her
blood, and for what? No other reason than he disagreed with how she served the
Queen they both professed to worship—and you don’t need to think he wouldn’t do
the same to
you
in a heartbeat, either.” Vandis watched Hendrick’s eyes.
It was always in the eyes. He saw the thoughts running across Hendrick’s eyes
like they were written on a ribbon sliding through the High Priest’s head, and
he pushed, unwilling to lose the younger man. “Not even a moment’s thought
would he give to wiping you off the face of the earth, you and all your people,
just like he tried to do, is still trying to do, with me and mine. Easier for
him than taking a shit.”

“Vandis…” Hendrick
fiddled with his spoon. “Vengeance belongs to the Queen.”

“When vengeance and right
come together, we get this lovely little thing called justice,” Vandis said,
lacing his fingers.

Naheel’s young High
Priest drained his bottle to the dregs and rose from his chair, wavering a
little under the wine’s influence. “Do what you need to do. I won’t stand in
your way. Farewell, Vandis.”

“Good meeting you,”
Vandis said.

“Yes. It
was—informative.” Hendrick left. The under-priest scuttled after him,
abandoning a similar dinner. Adeon lifted his own plate and came to sit at the
table opposite Vandis. To his credit, he didn’t speak, only finished his
cutlets and rice in silence. Vandis nursed his whiskey, morose, loath to leave
the relative peace of the cookshop for the people probably gathering outside.
They were more miserable than he had ever known, groaning under the weight of a
world with no magic but what Vandis carried in his veins—Vandis and Dingus,
that was. He shuddered internally when he pictured another mob out for his
boy’s blood. And his own. Not even whiskey quelled the thought.

“Are you going to eat
that?” Adeon asked, indicating Vandis’s full plate.

Vandis pushed it across
the table to him, and he dug in with every appearance of pleasure. How he ate
so much and stayed slim as a boy was beyond Vandis, who’d already begun to
soften after only a month of riding a desk. Just as well he wasn’t hungry.

When Adeon finished, the
two Knights stood and joined Hui outside. It was a slow drag of a walk back to
HQ under a wretched drizzle that did nothing to deter the petitioners dogging
Vandis’s every step. He referred them to real help wherever he could, and sent
them away with a blessing when he couldn’t, too often by far for his taste.

Up in the main office,
Vandis whipped by Jimmy’s vacant desk, desperate for space, ignoring his secretary’s
greeting from the file room and the letters that slipped off the top of the
in-tray in the wake of his passing. He shut his door firmly in Adeon’s face and
leaned against it, scrubbing at his face with both hands.

Unseen, a letter slipped
off the desk and fell into the crack between furniture and floor, a letter with
a pauper’s seal in cheap red wax, a letter franked from Windish.

Feej Park, Windish

Dingus walked back to the
tiny peninsula with his hands in his pockets and Tai on his shoulder. He’d been
down the Hopper station for the third time since they’d come to the park; once,
the day after they’d gotten there, to talk to Captain Dar about keeping the
Ishlings on public land; the day after that to talk to Commander Jezlee about
the same thing; and today, a couple weeks on, to answer a few questions about
Laben—who’d just happened to float up in the harbor overnight. That worried
Dingus, even though he wasn’t under suspicion now that he’d talked to the
earnest young Hop assigned to the case, and even though Dar had given him a
relieved thumbs-up as he left. She’d spent almost all her free time up at the
camp, and he for sure appreciated her help. The kids were getting used to her,
especially since—after the first, disastrous time she’d come, in her uniform
tunic—she’d switched to civilian clothes.

He tried not to think
about Yatan, but after the questions he’d been asked, he was hard put to keep
the tiny old Ish out of his head.
What am I going to do?
Even Tai’s
chattering away in his ear couldn’t drive the question away. If he’d thought
taking the Ishlings out of the city would help, he’d have taken them, but he
thought maybe it was better to be here, with the Hops close by. And now he had
less than a fortnight to think of something, just in case.

His stomach hurt. He
hadn’t felt too hungry lately, but that wasn’t all bad; he didn’t think the
money would last until Vandis got back.
Soon. Only a few more days,
he
told himself, but it wasn’t real encouraging, on account of Vandis was already
late. They were gathering all the food they could, but seventeen little kids,
Dingus had found, were not an economical proposition. Just this morning, he’d
had to send Kessa to drop more coin on noodles and soap. They’d even sold the
goat. He walked through the park, up the path to the peninsula with Tai
jabbering the whole way, too lost in his own mind to enjoy the scenery, let
alone the Ishling’s talk. At least he hadn’t been dreaming. That would probably
change any night now. He was so worn out he couldn’t imagine the nightmares
staying away for long.

“Dingus!” all the
Ishlings squealed when he and Tai came through the pines. It was his signal to
go down on one knee and open his arms, which he did, and
that
was the
Ishlings’ signal to sweep over him in a furry wave of warm little bodies. They
knocked him on his ass every time. Today they bowled him over flat, covered his
face in Ishling kisses, and squeezed him in tiny Ishling hugs, until he was
breathless with laughter. It never failed to remind him of
why
.

He sat up in the middle
of the swarm. “Oof! Okay, guys—enough for now. What are you doing today?”

“Kessa is meet the Salmon
ladies,” Zeeta said, and fifteen other voices chimed in to explain. He laughed
again at the cacophony of chitters and cheeps.

“Hang on now, hang on,”
he said, holding up his hands. “The Salmon ladies? What Salmon ladies?”

“Thems,” Voo said,
pointing toward the firepit, where two Ish women sat with Kessa, who had a pile
of embroidery in her lap. She’d been trying to put names on all the Ishlings’
tunics, and running into trouble with the spelling. He didn’t blame her.
However you were supposed to spell “Vylee” was a mystery to him. He stood and
walked over with Tai skipping behind, and when he stopped, Tai scrambled back
to his shoulder.

The two women wore loose,
salmon-pink robes that rippled like silk when they stood to greet Dingus. “Why,
what a wonderful job you’re doing here!” exclaimed the older of the two, in a
thin, whispery voice. “Everything an Ishling could need—barring a mother and a
big-mama, of course.” She tinkled a little laugh. “You must be Dingus.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said,
and resisted the urge to demand who
she
was to judge his work.

“I am High Priestess
Meep, and this is Leega.” She indicated the younger woman and fingered the
fine, polished wooden pin on the high neck of her robe: the Salmon of Plenty.
“My, my, yes, beautiful work. Hello, little one!” she said, spotting Tai and
giving him a jaunty wave.

Tai wrinkled his brow,
answering the wave with a disbelieving stare, until Dingus jiggled his
shoulder. Tai cleared his throat. “Hello,” he said. “Ma’am.”

“And how are you getting
along here?”

“Oh, I is—very much fine,
ma’am, is nice. Dingus is very much nice, better than Laben, yes, and he—um—he
is treat us very much nice, and he is tell us we isn’t to steal.”

“And when you do steal?
What then?” the Salmon Priestess asked brightly.

“We isn’t,” Tai said,
sounding confused. They hadn’t stolen, not once; Dingus had kept his eyes
peeled for it. “Dingus is tell us we isn’t to do it, and we isn’t.”

“But surely—”

“Why is we do it when
Dingus is telling us no? When the
Kunu
is tell you not to do a thing, is
you doing it?”

“Well, no. Of course
not,” Meep said, her eyes wide with shock.

“There you is.”

“Tai, go play with the
other kids, please,” Dingus said, his voice coming out squeaky with suppressed
laughter. He exchanged bemused glances with Kessa, making a note to ask what
Kunu
meant.

Tai said okay and hopped
off his shoulder to join the others, who’d fallen into a game of Tag—their
favorite—a little ways off. Dingus was relieved they weren’t digging worms
today; they looked clean, and their skinny bodies were starting to fill out. He
grinned at them.

“They’re all healthy,”
Leega ventured, calling his attention back. “No parasites, no swollen bellies.
There are some old fractures, and of course that little girl’s eye—”

“Vylee,” he said.

“Yes.” She smiled. “No
infection there, though. It’s healing beautifully.”

“You’re working miracles here!”
Meep trilled. “Salmon’s work! So! What can we do for you?”

“I—” Dingus shook his
head. “I didn’t expect that. If you can swing it, we could use food. These
little guys are always hungry.”

“I imagine so! Tomorrow
we’ll come with food, and a religious instructor for these poor unfortunates.”

“Oh.” Dingus frowned. It
wasn’t like he could come out and say no. The Lady wouldn’t care for that.
“Well, I think I got that covered, but—”

“Excuse me?”

“Ma’am, I got my own
religion, but they should have the choice. I just thought, maybe, if you could
also give ’em something practical along with it, it’d help ’em out more.” He
laid his right hand over his heart to show his leaf, watched their eyes go
wide, and took a deep, steadying breath. It was for the kids. “See, I’m a
Knight of the Air, and I been giving ’em some woodcraft and all, and also a
little letters and manners and how to live honest, but I can’t do it all at
once. Maybe if you could teach ’em some more letters, or figuring, with the
Salmon stuff, that’d be good.”

“Letters. Figuring.”

“Yes, ma’am. None of ’em
can read much, let alone write.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t be
out of order,” the priestess said with a little laugh. “After all, we school
Ishlings, but we’ve never really— All the same, I catch your meaning! It’s a
grand experiment, seeing if children without family can, in fact, be raised to
function in society.” She beamed at him.

“Uh—” He didn’t think he
could even begin unwinding that one. He forced a smile. “Yeah.”

She patted her palms
together delightedly. “Oh, this is so exciting! Come, Leega, we must prepare
everything for tomorrow! You can count on Salmon Temple, dear boy, oh, yes!
Until tomorrow!”

“See you then,” Dingus
said. Leega smiled at him and touched his hip—as high as she could reach—and
they left, with much waving and chirruping from Meep. He turned to Kessa.
“Well, that was different.”

“Was it ever,” she said,
shaking her head. “That old Meep is crazy as a bag full of bats. Leega seemed
okay. She checked everybody over, you know, medically.”

“That’s good. I been
wondering how I was gonna get ’em looked at. Wasn’t a real healthy life they
had. I better go tell ’em how they gotta have manners tomorrow.”

“You should’ve seen Reeb
earlier. I’m just glad he missed.”

“Aw, not again!”

“Again. I spanked his
little butt for it though.”

“I guess I better go over
the shit rules, too,” Dingus said.

He was just working into
a lecture on The Rules, attended by seventeen Ishlings lounging on the rocks
they’d arranged in a circle, when a tall Rodanskan, thirtyish, with a sailor’s
kit bag over his shoulder, a neat blond beard, and woad tattoos curling up his
arms walked into the trees.

“Are you Dingus?” he
interrupted.

“Yeah, what’s it to you?”

“I is liking your
pictures!” Zeeta cried, bouncing up from her rock to grab at the distraction.

The sailor sent her a
tight smile, and thrust something at Dingus: an envelope, sealed with Vandis’s
arms in bright blue wax. Dingus seized it. “Boy,” the sailor said, “why are you
not where Sir Vandis thinks you are?”

“Didn’t he get my
letter?”

“I don’t know, but I have
this one, and I don’t find you at the address Sir Vandis has put on it. I am
here to help, but I want you to tell me—”

“Long story.” The
envelope was franked to “Sir Dingus Xavier, in the care of Lady Tikka daughter
of Koelar, 558 Sequoia Street, Windish.” It was heavy, and jingled.

It wasn’t Vandis’s
writing on the envelope. Dingus half shredded it to get it open, hands shaking,
heart stuttering.

“Who’s it from?” Kessa
asked.

“The Knights.” His voice came
out shaky. He pulled out the letter, scattering coins.

“Oh, no, oh, no, oh,
Dingus!” she whispered.

“Dingus,” it read, in
Vandis’s sloppy, spiky hand.

“It’s from Vandis,”
Dingus told her, his heart slowing a little, and read on.

I’m
going to be in Dreamport longer than we discussed. Despite a royal ban, the
Aurelian Order has continued aggressive action against the Knights in general,
and me in particular. The Watch has told me not to leave the city while their
investigation, such as it is, remains open. I would have told you in person,
but I know you understand that I am a man of my word, and as such, cannot come
to collect you and Kessa just yet. Keep your eyes open and your nose clean.

I’ll
see you soon—

Vandis

That’s it? That’s all
he’s got to write me? What about “I’m okay”? Something!
Dingus shook the
remains of the envelope, hoping for more, but there was only the money. He bit
out a curse and kicked a rock, which did about as much good as he could’ve
expected, plus gave him a sore foot.

Kessa touched his arm.
“What’d he say?”

“He’s not coming!” Dingus
wanted to hit someone. He wanted to hit
Vandis.
He wanted Vandis to come
back so he, Dingus, could hit him in the fucking face.

“Sir Vandis is delayed,”
said the sailor, not unkindly. “I am here to do him a favor and stay with you
until he can come. He’s worried for you—but I think maybe he should be more
worried than he is.” He looked around at the Ishlings with a wry face, and
shrugged. “Oh, well, it’s an adventure. My name is Haakon.” The kids took
further advantage of the interruption to pepper Haakon with questions about his
tattoos.

Dingus didn’t care. He
sat on the rock he’d kicked and stared, unseeing, at the letter.
He sends me
a note, some money, and a damn nanny.
And
they took another whack at him
besides… he could’ve gotten hurt for all I know, and here I sit!

Tai hopped into his lap.
“You is looking sad, Dingus.” The Ishling reached up and pulled at the corners
of his mouth, trying to stretch it into a smile. “This is better!” Tai said, but
when he took his hands away Dingus’s mouth fell again. “You gets a letter from
Vandis. It isn’t making you happy that he is make this for you?”

“No,” Dingus said,
“because it says something stupid.” He wadded it up in his hand, thinking to
toss it away, but he couldn’t. He hung his head. He’d felt so sure Vandis would
come back and help him figure out what to do, and instead, Yatan would be here
in ten days. He still had no ideas, and even if he’d had a thousand times the
money Yatan had told him he owed, he wouldn’t pay that old shrunken head a
single bit. It was the principle of the thing.

Tai said, “Is we eating
soon, Dingus?”

“Are you hungry?”

“We misses dinner for the
Hops. Now is almost supper, yes?”

“Close enough. Let’s go
get it started.”

“Hey-la-hey!” Tai
cheeped, leaping up to his shoulder.

Dingus moved through the
supper preparations in a miserable daze and picked at his food when it was
ready. Haakon charmed everybody, and tried to charm him, too. “You’re a damned
fine cook, boy,” would’ve worked, except that he felt so low he could hardly
muster a thank-you. He washed dishes in the same daze, gave baths, and just
before the sun went down, checked for parasites and combed fur. Somehow he
managed to tell a story, though five minutes later he couldn’t have said which
one he’d told. Even the bedtime hugs couldn’t shake his malaise.

When everybody was down
for the night, Dingus went out around the rocks and sat down to watch where the
firelight wouldn’t interfere with his night sight; he was already settled when
he realized he had Tai’s fuzzy body in the crook of his arm. It’d be too much
work to get up, put sleeping Tai on his bed of blanket and pine needles, and
calm him when he woke up again.
Never mind,
Dingus thought, scooted
down, and shuffled Tai onto his chest.

Heavy footfalls came from
the camp. A pair of rough, salt-stained boots stopped next to Dingus. “All you
do, and still you sit watch?” Haakon asked, low.