Oath Bound (Book 3) (25 page)

Vandis straightened. “I
don’t fling shit.”

“Oh, no? Every day,
Dingus is telling us: ‘Vandis is gonna be here soon.’” Dingus’s voice came
pitch-perfect out of the tiny boy’s mouth, Dingus’s words, and it ripped at
Vandis like an animal’s teeth. “‘Vandis is gonna help us. He’ll know what to
do.’ And every day, what? No Vandis, the one the
Kunu
thinks is
Kunu!
”

“You don’t understand
what—”

“I isn’t?” The boy gave a
bitter, chirping laugh. “You isn’t understand what you do to him. I isn’t old,
and I isn’t smart, but I is see a little something. In all his heart Dingus is
love you the most, and he’s
break
every day you don’t come.”

“All right, I fucked up,
but if I hadn’t made the mistake I made, if I hadn’t left them here, you’d
never have met him.”

“I isn’t much. Dingus isn’t
understand that. When he’s having dreams, he’s screaming, is you know?” The
Ishling tipped back his head and mimicked again: Dingus crying out, every
syllable vibrating with panic. “‘Not Vandis! No, please! Vandis!’”

Anger washed to the very
tips of Vandis’s extremities: with himself, with the boy for grinding it into
his face. His hands tightened into fists.

“If it isn’t make him
angry, you know what I do? I is kill you. I want to stick my knife in your neck
for what you do to Dingus, and if he’s die, you die too.”

Vandis regarded him for a
long moment, the tiny creature with deadly intent written over every line of
his cat-sized body. Then he snatched out. With cat speed, the boy dodged, but
Vandis ended up with his tail in a fist, and he squalled like a demon when
Vandis pulled him off the chair. “Listen, Tai—it’s Tai, right?”

Tai screeched, dangling
head-down, and tried to curl his body up. Vandis grabbed the scruff of his neck
and lifted him higher, until they were nose-to-nose—though he kept his face
outside of Tai’s reach.

“Let’s get something
straight, Tai. Right from the jump.” Tai twisted, scrabbling at Vandis’s fist
with his tiny hands, but he quieted when Vandis said, “You love Dingus, don’t
you? You love him with every smelly inch of your scrawny little body, and you
know how I know?” He paused for effect. “I love him, too. I love him better
than my own blood, and if you think I’m about to let a bunch of louse-riddled,
ignorant old whores hang him for doing the right thing by you, you’re stone
stupid. If I have to snatch him from the rope a second time to save his life,
damned if I won’t. Are we clear?”

Tai hung, staring at
Vandis with utter loathing.

“You can help me and help
him, or you can work against me and hurt him. What’s it going to be? What
matters more? That you hate me, or that you love him?”

“You stupid old nithing
Big. Not even Dingus is knowing what he is done for me, and I is love him for
always. I can help you, but I is hating you.”

“You go ahead.” Vandis
set him on the table. “You do that. Just remember Dingus trusts me.”
Used to
trust me.

“He isn’t knowing much,
my Dingus.” Tai drew himself up straight. “He is
Tatcheegan Kunu,
but he
isn’t knowing how the world is go. I see you, Vandis. I see how you is.” He
bounded off the table and scuttled into the darkness on all fours.

Vandis went to lie down
with the rest, but he didn’t sleep much. When dawn came, he sat up, scrubbed at
his face with both hands, and decided to shave. That done, he walked over to
the legal district to scare up the best advocate in town for his boy.

the cloisters

Stas stood before Brother
Jerzy at his desk in the scriptorium, with all the mullioned windows thrown open
to catch the late summer. A breeze ruffled the edges of the parchment pages pinned
to dry and stirred the dust, fresh mixing with old. The fields outside the
window ripened and swelled with corn nearly ready for the harvest. “This is
beautiful work, Stasya,” Brother Jerzy said, smiling down at him.

Stas got a thrill of
pride from Brother Jerzy’s words. He himself was proud of the drop capital he’d
done, a large N at the head of the page, traced out with gilding, painted green
and blue. He had painted a vine that twisted around the letter and done his
best work yet on the blue trumpet flowers, bright at the edges, fading to white
around their tiny fleck-of-gold hearts. Round black eyes peeped here and there
through the curtain of leaves and flowers.

Things outside the
scriptorium could be bad, so bad, but Stas had painting. He had, always, an
escape to a quieter world, where it didn’t matter that he could hardly force
out a word, because in his little hands the tooth of a long-dead dog could make
gilding shine and a stylus or a brush could work magic.

Brother Jerzy touched his
head with a soft, paint-stained hand. “Now, what shall we give you for your
next project? You’ve done a lot of drop capitals. Would you like to try a plate
this time?”

Stas perked visibly. Yes,
he would, oh! he would. He’d be happy to paint as assigned, even. The prospect
of an entire page for his work put a delighted wriggle in his toes.

The head illuminator
smiled. “I have the pages, and they’re already dry. It’s the story of Saints
Novgorod and Alessandr—here they are. You can plan this afternoon.”

Stas nearly groaned.
Saint Novgorod’s story was a dull one; he and his Militant, Saint Alessandr,
had attained sainthood by sitting atop a pole for forty years, and being as
pure and holy and boring as two people could be.
They must have at least
argued,
he reasoned.
They were people, weren’t they?
He’d certainly
argued with Boris before, and over the silliest things, too. He wondered if it
would be blasphemy if he painted the saints bickering.
Probably.
He took
the pages back to his own little desk.

Brother Vadim had done
the illustrations. The drop capitals, an O, the largest, at the beginning of
the first page; a pair of black foxes peeked around the right-hand edge. The
fur the Brother had painted was so lush Stas wanted to stroke it—though of
course he resisted the urge. He always liked Brother Vadim’s clever marginalia,
the tiny animal scenes. The quiet young monk always put a few bees into his
paintings, and usually a proud hawk, too.

Stas flipped to the next
page. He wanted to look at all the pictures before thinking about what to
paint. If he could echo something Brother Vadim had made, so much the better.

Brother Vadim had done
ravens on this page, ravens and mice. At the bottom, under the text, he’d
painted a little mouse—on fire. Stas swallowed hard. He didn’t care for the
idea of anything on fire these days. The ravens flew up the left margin, and
caught in a bird’s claws, behind a confusion of wingtips, was another tiny
mouse with a halo inked around its thrown-back head. The mouse’s teeth showed,
and Stas thought its mouth looked miserable.

As miserable as Jan’s
mouth had looked.

He looked up at Brother
Vadim’s back, but the monk worked as usual, humming a chant under his breath
while he burnished gilding. Was it a coincidence? It must have been—just
Brother Vadim thinking about what had happened, that was all. Most times Stas
did that, put what he was thinking about in his work one way or another. When
he’d done the N he’d been trying to think of nothing but beauty, but the little
eyes had sneaked in anyway.

He slipped away from his
desk to return the pages to Brother Jerzy, and went to the cupboard to fetch
down his silverpoint stylus and some scrap paper to make sketches. It was a
beautiful day, and Stas wanted to sketch the saints on the pole outside,
today,
in the sunshine—but when he sat back from the sketch, he’d drawn what was on
his mind after all: a murder of crows encircled the men.

Windish

Dingus stared at the
nothingness of the holding cell’s wall, on the lowest platform in one of the
sequoias that supported the Hopper station. At least the cell had been built
for Bigs; across the hall there were four more, stacked on top of one another,
holding Ish. The building smelled like unwashed drunks: puke, body odor, piss,
and old stale booze. He did not look at the sailor snoring thunderously on the
shelf just below his eye level, who’d passed out and promptly shat his pants.
He looked at the rough plank wall and imagined himself with Ishlings, Kessa,
and Vandis.

He’d been here overnight
and all day today, shirtless, bootless, sitting in the stink and ignoring the
angry cheeping of the Ish prisoners across the way. He wished he could’ve
gotten the chance to introduce Vandis and Tai under better circumstances. Tai
was as mouthy as his Master. They’d either take to each other right away or
hate each other forever, and either way, it would’ve been vastly entertaining.
I’m
probably missing a whole lot of fun,
he thought, for the tenth time in the
last hour, and let out a sigh. Maybe they were having supper now. He hoped the
Ishlings weren’t having another food fight. Besides being wasteful, it was sure
to burn Vandis’s ass.

Then he got an image of
Vandis with mashed yams in his hair and sliding down his hard face, and
couldn’t help laughing. Whoever threw ’em best be running.

The door clicked open.
Dingus sat up quick, pressing against the bars to get a breath of the fresh
breeze that blew in, and before bodies blocked the door he caught a glimpse of
spectacular pink and purple: the sun sinking into the bay. “Here you are, Sir
Vandis,” said an Ish voice, and Sergeant Mee came in with an Ish chair, which
she set in front of the cell, and Vandis. Dingus’s eyes rounded, and he
clutched the bars. Once the sergeant left, Vandis kicked the chair aside and
came close, eye-to-eye.

“What are you doing
here?” Dingus asked.

“You’re surprised I’d
come to see you?”

“I thought you’d be with
the kids.”

“I spent a little time.”
Vandis grimaced. “They’re damned squeaky. I had to hire you an advocate,
though, so that was most of the day gone. You’re going to Culoo in the
morning.”

His stomach writhed. “The
prison.”

“That’s right.”

“Figures.” Dingus
frowned. “Well, it’s not the gallows, that’s something.”

“Yet,” Vandis snapped,
his face twisting into an angry mask.

Dingus bristled. “If you
think I’m gonna apologize, you better walk out now.”

“I don’t think you are. I
don’t think you should. I wish I’d been here to—”

“Got along just fine
without you.”

Vandis’s face relaxed and
he wrapped a hand around the bars, close enough to fill Dingus’s nose with the
smell of him. It was more comforting than Dingus would ever admit. “You’d
better believe you did. It was a tough decision you—”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Dingus…” Vandis rubbed
at his forehead. “I don’t think I heard that correctly.”

“It wasn’t hard at all.
Other than going with you? Easiest decision I ever made. It needed doing.”

He massaged his temple, a
sure sign he was getting a headache, which Dingus sort of felt he deserved.
“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘pick your battles’? Because I think that
would’ve come in handy here.”

“Sometimes you don’t get
to pick. Sometimes the battle picks you. They’re not little monkeys, Vandis!
They’re kids like any other kid! They deserve the Knights’ help!”

“I’m not arguing against
that. I’d call you the same kind of moron if you’d done this with human kids.
There’s only so much we can do. We can’t fix every—”

“That doesn’t mean we get
to stop trying! There’s nothing in the Oath about ‘only if I think I’ll
succeed!’”

“Are you telling me you
want to throw your life away over a little shit like Yatan?”

“‘Want’ is maybe a strong
word,” Dingus said, “but if all that needs to happen for little ones to be safe
is for one
dilihi
to die, it’s my honor. Compared to that, I’m not
important. ‘Even to the cost of my life.’”

Vandis pushed his hand
through the bars and vised it around Dingus’s forearm. “You’re important to
me
.
You might be ready to die for this, but I’m not ready to lose you—and I will
not
let you pay that price.”

“Could’ve fooled me!”
Dingus jerked back. “One time’s all I heard from you these long weeks! I
thought you were
dead
—and you can’t blame me for trying to do the right
thing even though you weren’t here to help!”

Vandis cursed,
creatively, obscenely, and at some length. He didn’t repeat himself once. By
the time he’d finished, Dingus was laughing.

“Can’t nobody cuss like
you and that’s a fact. So what’s felching anyways?”

“Never you mind. Look. I
know what the Oath says. I know you only wanted to make things right for those
kids, and even though the way you went about it was stupid as fuck, I don’t
think I could be more proud of you than I am at this moment. I’m just—not
prepared to—” But he stopped there, didn’t say any more.

Dingus had understood it
the first time anyways. “Yeah, I know. That, I’ll say sorry for.” They looked
at each other, and he added, “Same here, Vandis?”

Vandis cleared his throat
a few times. “When we get you out of this,” he said thickly, “you’re going to
pay through the nose. Tai—he is a prize little shit. He’s bitten me about ten
times. Look at this!” He pulled up his sleeve to show a few spots where Tai had
tried gnawing on him, and also a big bandage. “That’s all him. You are going to
pay.”

“You gotta flick him in
the forehead.” Dingus demonstrated with finger and thumb. “Like that. If you
can get him before he bites you, so much the better. Listen, you gotta watch
out for Peepa, she’s always in everything, and remind Reeb he’s not to throw
shit no matter how mad he gets. Be nice to Vylee, she’s real shy, but she’s so
sweet you just wanna kiss her little face. And Jooga—”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Take good care of ’em
for me,” he said, with a hard twist in his chest.

“Did you think I’d throw
them out on the street?”

“No, but—Vandis, there’s
no
place
for ’em. They got no families, and nobody’ll take ’em. What’s
gonna happen when you gotta leave?”

“When
we
leave,
there will be a place for them.”

“I was working on the
Salmon ladies. Think I about got ’em willing, but—”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Dingus’s eyes swam.
“Thank you.”

“They all say hi, by the
way, and this ugly old Big,” he said, gesturing at himself, “had better deliver
their magic man, or they’ll stick me with knives while I sleep and come to
break you out.”

“Tell ’em I say hi, too,
and Kessa. Tell ’em I said be patient and don’t stick Vandis.” He took in a
long breath and let it out slow. “That I’ll see ’em again. In the Garden.”

For a long moment, Vandis
looked at him with a face so miserable it didn’t seem like Vandis at all. His
head bowed.

Dingus pushed his hand
through the bars, scraping a little at the skin, but who cared? He laid it on
Vandis’s shoulder. “And you, too,” he said. “Don’t doubt it.”

Vandis put his own hand
over Dingus’s. “I won’t wait that long.” He turned on his heel and left. The
door slammed behind him, and Dingus leaned his head back against the wall of
the cell.

Prison! He’d almost
rather the gallows.

to be continued in
Saga of Menyoral: Summary Justice

coming 2015

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