Saga of Menyoral: The Service (7 page)

“I can do whatever I want,” she said airily.

“Oh, sure,” Dingus said. “You can. But ‘can’ and ‘should’ live in two different countries.”

She stopped dead and folded her arms across her breasts. When he turned to look at her, she scowled. “You don’t get to tell me that stuff. If you don’t want—”

“You know what? Fine! You do anything you want, but don’t come crying to me after.”

“I never did. That was all your idea,” she snapped, and stomped back to the party.

Dingus let out a frustrated growl and walked away, or started to. “Hey, Dingus! Wait!” he heard Wallace call, and then Tony dashed out in front and turned a gleeful face toward him, hands spread partway out, shaking with excitement.

“Holy shit! Dingus—that was
awesome!
”

He blinked. “It was?”

“Hell yeah!”

Wallace came up a little
bit past, turning the three of them into points on a triangle. “Wasn’t it just!”

Tony laughed and jumped up and down, a foot at least, throwing a sloppy haymaker in the air. “Bam! Like that. Oh man, I’ve wanted to paste him one for years!”

“Well,” Dingus said slowly, “wasn’t quite like that. More like—” He demonstrated what he’d done, a quick punch that snapped from the hip and right back again, the way Grandma and later Vandis had shown him.

“Damn!” Tony said. “Damn! You’re so fucking fast, man! You’re a hero, is what you are! You know how many guys he’s messed with? Him and Bruno. My first year…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“Held him down and farted on his face, they did,” Wallace said. “They went for him all the time. Mind, I’m bigger, but that didn’t stop them much. Fatty Walleye, that’s me, or just Fatty, even though I’m not so fat as I was.”

“And I’m Squirrel Nuts.” Tony made a face. “I mean, okay, I know I’m kinda squirrelly, but come on.”

Dingus thought again, for a long, long moment, and then he broke into a smile. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Thingus,” he said. “I’m Thingus.”

Fort Rule, Section One: Special Units

“From the hip, Eddie,” Krakus said. “That’s how you get your weight into it. Watch my side.” He hefted the axe he’d snagged out of the armory and gave it a wicked sidewise hack at around neck height, slightly exaggerating the snap in his hip, then followed through, adding, “And on the backswing. Watch again.” He repeated the motions three more times, swing and backswing. Then he laid down his axe, tucked the crushed-fairy ring in his breeches pocket, and said, “Now, you try.” He circled behind Eddie Jablonsky and put his hands on either side of the massive boy’s back.

Eddie looked down over his shoulder, his brown cow’s eyes huge and liquid. “I’ll hurt you.”

“If you do, it’s on me,” Krakus said. “Go on.”

Eddie swung, followed through.

“Try again. Less in the shoulder, more from the hip.” They worked on it for half an hour, under the beating near-Longday sun, before Krakus felt just the right shifting of muscle in Eddie’s torso.
“Just like that!” he crowed. “You feel that?”

“I felt it!” E
ddie said, beaming. “That’s how it’s supposed to feel, isn’t it?”

“Exactly.” Krakus beamed, too. “Do it a few more times for me, I want to make sure you’ve got it.”

Eddie did it beautifully five times in a row. By now sweat lathered his bull’s hide, and Krakus told him to go take a water break, and then come back and try it on a few of the dummies. Krakus needed water himself, and while Eddie sucked down half a barrel, he got a bucket and filled it from the well. After he’d drunk his fill he stripped off his tunic and poured the rest over his head. When he looked down at himself he grinned at the muscles that were starting to reappear on his body. Okay, the belly hadn’t completely disappeared, not enough to see his abdominals yet, and his chest hair was grayer than not, but he had pectorals again, instead of floppy man breasts.

He enjoye
d working with Eddie and the others here. They were doing him a world of good, and he’d like to think he was doing some for them, too. He turned to see Eddie looking his way, that gigantic axe in hand, and flashed the kid a thumbs-up.

Eddie grinned and squared off against one of the training dummies.
He swung, just right, and the straw-stuffed head bounced away. Less than a heartbeat later, his backswing crunched into the dummy’s chest, shearing off the top.

Krakus whooped. “Dead as a doorn
ail! Keep it up!” He leaned against the well to watch, relishing the others who stopped to watch, too.

“Hi, Father Krakus,” said a sweet voice at his back, and he couldn’t suppress a smile as big as Eddie’s axe. He turned.

“Hello to you, Miss Nadia.” Bright Lady, she was beautiful, just Krakus’s speed. The knee-length tunic that was part of the women’s uniform couldn’t hide the swaying of ample breasts or the hourglass nip of waist. The loose pants underneath couldn’t cover the perfect swell of ass. The way she moved just … called to him. He hadn’t done anything about it—she was younger, not a child, maybe twenty—decades younger than Krakus, but she made him feel as randy as a seventeen-year-old. The only difference between her and an ordinary girl was that her skin … well, she was blue, her face and hands at least, a deep cerulean, and the red that should have been the inside of her mouth was purple as blueberry stains.

I’ve been missing out all these years,
Krakus thought, not for the first time since he’d noticed her noticing him.

“Will you help me, Father Krakus?” she asked, and the purple end of her tongue touched full violet lips.

“Of course, sweetheart,” he said. “Anything you need.”

Her smile glowed
, white, white teeth between those lips. “I have to get something out of the storage shed—but it’s just up so high, I can’t reach.”

He smiled again, too, slowly. “Lead the way.”

In the corner of Section One, there was a huge storage shed with a few tiny parchment windows to let in the light, and he followed her inside. She shut the door, closing them into the dim, and pointed to a wooden crate on a top shelf, in the back. Krakus knew his part in this game. He reached up to fetch the crate; he didn’t know what might be in it, or care, and when he turned around, he could’ve written a rhapsody about blue, the vision standing in the weak light from the parchment-covered window was so marvelous.

Dust motes made a soft curtain, swirling around her body: the heavy blue brea
sts with blueberry-stain nipples, and her hair, Bright Lady, her hair, blue as the dome of the sky on an achingly clear summer midnight, spilling in waves over the healthy glow of her skin. She looked at him almost shyly from under deep blue lashes and rested her hands on her thighs, framing the indigo shadow between her legs.

“Glory be,” Krakus blasphemed in an undertone, and tugged at the lacing that held his breeches up. She smiled.

He knelt down on the dusty floor and worshipped. She didn’t taste of blueberries, but disappointment was about the farthest thing from his mind, and when her knees went to jam, he eased the sky beneath him and made it last. He left a milky star trail across her breasts and sat back, reluctantly, on his heels, stroking the warm firmament of her belly while she lay loose and sighing.

“You were amazing,” she murmured.

“You say that to everyone.” She wasn’t a virgin, hadn’t been one. A girl like this in a compound filled with soldiers … wouldn’t be, especially since she’d probably been here at least as long as Krakus had.

“Pretty much
,” she admitted, “but this time, I mean it.” She cast around for something to wipe off her chest, and her legs opened, showing purple. “Could we do it again soon?”

Krakus looked down at his lap, then back at her. “How about now?” The door didn’t lock from the inside,
but he didn’t worry about getting caught, not really. Being one of the Heads had its benefits. He hadn’t dipped into Lech’s pet project before now, but he didn’t care anymore what Lech knew or thought.

She pushed up to her knees, smiling her stellar smile, and threw her arms around his neck. Her flesh pressed against his from shoulder
to knee, and her mouth sealed over his.

Some days, it was damn good to be Krakus.

Knightsvalley

Vandis woke, as dawn stained the sky above the trees, to the smell of morning and of coffee; to the song of birds and the crackling of sausages in the pan; to Dingus’s muttering. Vandis frowned at that before he realized Dingus was hashing out a story under his breath, backtracking, tweaking words. An amused smile worked across Vandis’s face. “ … Oda was very jealous … no, Oda envied the Queen of Heaven, and He put Himself between … no, dammit, I don’t like that, blocked, blotted out … ”

“Morning,” Vandis said, sitting up.

“Coffee’s ready,” Dingus said, holding a mug in his own hands. He took a sip and went back to his barefoot pacing. “He put Himself—He sneaked, yeah, one day He sneaked in between Naheel and the world, slow, so at first She didn’t notice Him blotting out Her light…yeah…”

“Slowly.”

“Huh?”

“Not ‘slow’. Slowly.”

“Right, thanks…blocking out Her light?”

Vandis shook his head, smiling again, and rose to fetch himself a cup of coffee. On the way, he prodded Kessa lightly with a toe. “Up.”

She groaned, rolled over, and pulled her blanket over her head.

“Up,” he repeated, nudging her with a bit more force.

“It’s still dark,” she protested, muffled in the blanket.

“No, it isn’t.”

Kessa grumped her way out of her bedroll and shuffled off to the latrine. He got his knife, speared himself a sausage, and ate it against the backdrop of Dingus’s mumbling. Vandis had a full day ahead, and officially opening the Moot that night was the least of what he needed to do. He swilled three cups of powerful coffee, ate two more sausages, and then tugged on his shirt and jerkin. Kessa came back while he was lacing his boots. After she poured her own coffee, she sipped it and grimaced. “I don’t know how you can drink so much of this,” she said.

“Wakes up the blood,” Vandis said, standing to buckle on his belt. “Behave yourself today, hear?”

“Yes, Vandis.”

“If anybody touches you, what do you do?”

Kessa rolled her baby blues, but she grinned over it the way she had every morning since they’d come to Knightsvalley. “Make sure he draws back a stump.”

“Exactly
right,” he said, adjusting his jerkin a little so it didn’t bunch up under his belt. He patted her shoulder. “Dingus.”

“Hmm.”

“Socialize.”

“Uh-huh,” Dingus said, in that teenager way of his: I’m busy and I’ll say yes to make you go away, but I’m not going to do it.

“If you don’t,” Vandis told him, “I’ll find out.”

“He won’t,” Kessa said sweetly. “Nobody wants to be around him anyway, he was such a jerk last night.” Dingus stopped pacing to glare daggers at her.

Well,
Vandis thought,
glad I’m leaving.
“See you guys tonight. Dusk, down at the beach. Don’t forget.” He met Wally on the way out, holding hands with a girl—Pearl’s Squire, he remembered, Francine or something. Tony Scalietti trailed them, wearing the loudest patterned jerkin Vandis had seen since Santo was a kid.

“Good morning, Vandis,” Francine said, and the boys nodded and echoed her.

“Looking for Dingus?” he asked, secretly pleased.

Tony said, “Yeah, he up yet?”

“He never sleeps past dawn.”

Francine said, “Thanks, Vandis,” and the kids moved past him into the pine copse that hid Vandis’s favorite campsite. He made sure he got it every year; he
preferred the privacy.

He walked through the forest until he came to a spot where he could see the sky through the treetops, bounced on his toes a couple of times, and jumped into the air. After almost thirty years, the transition from leap to flight felt as easy and natural as breathing. By now he simply assumed he’d fly. It hadn’t been that easy the first few dozen times, and never mind the landings he’d had back then, but now the air shaped itself around him like his favorite jerkin and streamed out behind, propelling him along. Vandis
shot above the trees. As he dipped lower to fly over the lake,
Beautiful day,
he said to Her.

That it is! Are you ready to open Moot, then?

Ready and waiting. Damn, but it’s always good to be back here.
His face ached with a smile when he zipped close to the water, close enough to raise a wake.

It’s certainly a wonderful place, My own. Better, if you don’t mind My saying, since you’ve had it in your charge.

Cleaner, for sure,
he thought. One of the first things he’d done when he was elected Head was order that all trash be buried or burned. Under Vandis, the Knights cleaned up after themselves.
It was good when I was young, too, though. I had my friends.
He lingered a little to trace a pattern with the spray, enjoying the chilly dawn that flooded his lungs and blew back his hair, and then pushed himself high again to soar over the booths and tents near the Assembly Hall.

They were such good lads until you got hold of them.
She snickered, and he laughed aloud.

Hang on
half a minute, my Lady.
The touchdown was the tricky part, or had been. He had to slow his upper body just a little and pull his feet ahead of his shoulders, and at first he hadn’t had the abdominals for it. More than once he’d plowed his face into the dirt. Now he crunched down, curling and releasing in midair so he could land on his feet and spreading his arms for balance. His legs bent, absorbing the shock. He straightened, raked his hands through his hair in a vague attempt to tame it, and walked slowly toward the booths to buy a little more time to talk to Her.
Sorry, I can pay attention now.

Funny old world, though, don’t you think? Dingus has fallen in with Santo’s and Evan’s lads.

It doesn’t surprise me. They were always good at giving a damn for no reason. Makes sense they’d pass it on to their boys.

I wouldn’t say they had no reason!
She said.
After all, My own, you were a right little wanker, but you were always good for a bit of fun. I’d say Wallace and Antonio have got their reasons, same as Santo and Evan had theirs.

He laughed again.
That should probably worry me!

I wouldn’t worry.
She sounded thoughtful.
Dingus hasn’t the devil in him like you had!

They’re smarter than we were, anyway,
he decided. The fair buzzed around him.
Wish I had more time to talk.

There’ll be time later, My own,
She said, caressing his mind with the affection in Her Voice: a weird sensation, if he could call it that, but far from unpleasant. She always called him Her own, and he was, all the way.

Vandis hooked his thumbs over his belt and walked to a stall selling eggs to order. He chose scramble in a blanket and ate it slowly to give himself an excuse to shoot the breeze with the cook. By the time he walked away, he’d collected a couple of interesting bits of information: there’d been a riot in the slums outside Dreamport, and somebody had taken a jab at killing Akeere’s High Priestess. He laughed to himself, thinking of the likely fate of whatever dumb bastard tried for Disa, as he walked over to Alexei the Scrivener’s booth. Alexei was a Muscodite expatriate. Mostly he did up souvenir scrolls or letters for Squires who couldn’t write, but at least once a year he had something special for Vandis: a book. It was usually another copy of Naheel’s scriptures, but sometimes it was
The Life and Rule of St. Aurelius
.

Where Alexei had gotten his contact, Vandis didn’t want to know. He suspected the younger man was an apostate Aurelian, but that might have been because he was losing his hair and it looked something like a tonsure. In any case, Vandis had his money ready when he came to the booth. “Morning,” he said.

Alexei looked up from his work and greeted him. “Happy Longday, Vandis. Here for your order?”

Vandis jingled his purse. “
Same as always. What do you have for me?”

“It’s
Sun and Steel
this time. Work of the highest quality, visually interesting,” Alexei said, rising from his canvas folding chair. “Let me fetch it for you.” He disappeared under his small table and rummaged in a saddlebag, bringing out a cloth-wrapped book.

“Thanks,” Vandis said, and handed over his money.

“If I were you,” Alexei said conversationally as he counted change, “I’d have a look at that straightaway. As I said, the work is of the highest quality…” He leaned close and gave Vandis a few silver royals back. “…but very disturbing in places.”

“Al
l right. See you around.” He tucked the wrapped book under his arm, planning to glance over it at dinnertime when he could sit down. He certainly wouldn’t be eating; Vandis walked around the fair, buying food from this vendor and that one and eating it slowly in view of the booth, chatting with cooks, counter girls, and other Knights who came to buy. By dinnertime, he had a stomach fit to burst and a fairly clear picture of what was going on around Rothganar. He heard, of course, a lot about Muscoda, and sadly added a few names to his mental list of the people they’d lost; about a new Matriarch on the Council of Windish; Snorri Jarl of Jarls lying on his deathbed up in Rodansk and his son impaled by a narwhal; the desperate need for more funds and supplies in the refugee camps the Knights ran outside Brightwater. He heard snatches of personal gossip: weddings, babies, who was fucking whom, deaths, and whose daughter was just so smart she ought to be a Squire at seven years old, no fooling.

He made a stop at a smith’s portable forge to order a set of knives; he planned to give t
hem to Dingus after the Oath of Service. That done, he headed back to his campsite on foot, feeling too full to fly. Near the edge of the campground, he heard someone call his name. “Vandis! Hey, Vandis!”

When he looked around, he saw Hui running toward
him. “Hui. Have you seen Pearl yet? She’s been worrying over you.”

“Not yet. I
have to tell you something. I got hung up with the City Watch in Dreamport. Did you hear about Disa?”

Vandis grinned. “
I did. I feel sorry for whomever it was that took a crack at her.”

“It was Aurelians,” Hui said, and the grin slid off Vandis’s face. “They came to Headquarters. They came for you.”

“Anyone else hurt?”

The young Senior shook his head. “W
e handled it. Someone died at the Cathedral. Disa got a whack on the head, but listen, there’s more. They went to the House of the Sun, too. They killed Solveig and five or six of the priests. They burned everything inside.”

Vandis wished he hadn’t eaten so much; suddenly it seemed as if everything congealed into an icy ball, stretching his stomach.

“I don’t understand it,” Hui went on. “Why’d they try after their own people?”

“They didn’t.” Vandis unconsciously tightened his grip on the book.

“But they worship the same Queen.”

“No, they don’t. The Naheel who lives in the House of the Sun isn’t the same Naheel who beats down on Muscoda. They’re just coming out in the open with it.” And Lech Valitchka hated Solveig nearly as much as he hated Vandis. That was saying something; Valitchka’s sunken, faded blue eyes
had about bored a hole through Vandis’s head at the last Conclave of Pontiffs. The feeling was absolutely mutual. Vandis had never in his life been so tempted to strangle someone. If the Order of Aurelius went rogue—well, it looked as if they already had. “Thanks for telling me. Go find Pearl.”

Hui jogged off
and Vandis continued to his campsite. He’d half expected Dingus to be there, but to his relief, the campsite was empty. He made coffee. His two Squires did a pretty good job taking care of him, but Dingus always made it a little too weak. While it boiled, he unwrapped the copy of
Sun and Steel
he’d purchased. The book was copied in Muscodite, which Vandis could get along speaking, but couldn’t read. He hadn’t bought it for the text; the books Alexei brought him were special, with a coded system of illumination meant for Vandis’s eyes. The frontispiece was a bright image of Ciregor’s apotheosis, but in the background the illuminator had painted a hawk being brought down by a murder of crows. Vandis drew in a breath and began to examine the book: illustrations, drop capitals, marginalia.

T
hey were trying to kill him. That wasn’t much of a surprise, given what Hui had said, though he couldn’t deny the tiny margin illustration of the white crow—Lech, of course—standing with bloody beak on the corpse of the hawk—meant as Vandis—gave him a shiver.
Let him come
, he thought, but it would never be Lech’s own hand wielding the sword. The fat white lapdog that represented Krakus Bartowsky snoozed at the corners of pages, though not, like he’d been before, at the white crow’s feet.
A falling-out?
Vandis wondered.
Or is Krakus away?

Sometimes the picture code was a little vague, but there was nothing vague in the white crow perched on the belly of a black hound. It was Kasimir, with the white markings
that resembled a crown around its head; its tongue lolled and its eyes were half-shut in bliss, and the white crow bent its beak close to its ear. Before, the crow had always been behind the dog, or next to it; but now it sat atop the dog, right over the entrails, and it chilled him more than all of the other illuminations put together.