Saga of Menyoral: The Service (18 page)
Read Saga of Menyoral: The Service Online
Authors: M.A. Ray
Knightsvalley
False dawn had just begun to gray the sky when Ding
us opened his eyes. The remembered taste of blood lingered on his tongue. Even the bare stone of the shelf hadn’t been able to draw the unbearable heat from his flesh.
It could’ve been worse,
he thought, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He could’ve screamed everyone awake with a night terror, or they could’ve heard his desperate fuck-moans while he ate his own heart, and instead he heard snores all around him.
Too bad that didn’t make him feel any
better. After the gore-stained murder images flashing and jerking around inside his head, he didn’t think anything could. He sat up, pulling his knees to his chest, and rubbed at his shaky, aching hands and forearms. Almost, he expected to feel them slick to the elbows. He wanted to sit next to Vandis, alone, and lean on the rock solidity of his Master, whether Vandis knew he was doing it or not; but that wasn’t an option, not with all the Squires and Masters up here, pressing on his consciousness and into his space.
“Are you okay?”
He whipped his head around to see Lukas Kalt, minus the dragon earring and his shirt, propped on one elbow in his bedroll and blinking sleep out of his eyes.
Dingus couldn’t force out a word.
No
, he wanted to say, but instead he snatched up his boots and walked, quickly and quietly, out of the mass of sleeping Squires to the firepit, where there was fresh wood and food lying ready for breakfast. He poked up the banked fire. At least there was something to do. Lukas followed him over, though, tugging a tunic over his disgustingly perfect torso.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.
“Nothing.” Dingus fed a few branches, thick as his wrist, into the flames.
“Come on, it’s just you and me here. What’s wrong?”
“I have bad dreams sometimes. That’s all.” And no matter what Lukas tried, Dingus wouldn’t say anything more about it. He went about the morning’s business: got the coffee on, started breakfast. Thankfully, Lukas didn’t have long to poke at him; only a few moments later, others stirred in their bedrolls, and before fifteen minutes had passed, everyone was up and at it. The shelf filled with chattering Knights and Squires donning shirts and jerkins, lacing boots, packing up bedrolls, and running up and down to find a place to piss. Dingus hadn’t brought a bedroll, so he sat by the fire, turning bacon as it fried in the big skillet.
The Masters ate first. He laid out more bacon, an
d when they all left, he hurried to the edge of the shelf to watch Adeon’s silvery head out of sight and mark the direction the
tulon
had gone. Then he returned to cooking.
He ate better than the rest of the Squires, who mostly poked
at their food. For once, he was far from nervous: he was eager. He did as many little morning chores he could think of to kill time, ignoring the fluttering of anxious voices, the shaky gestures of anxious hands, and the moment the sun moved that last degree in the sky, he dashed down the stone steps, the very first one, feet flying after his examiner.
Dingus tracked Adeon a
ll day. By the time he thought he’d made up an hour of Adeon’s two-hour lead, just judging from the freshness of the sign he followed, only three hours of daylight remained. At least Evan had gone the other way—he’d made sure to mark that, too—and he saw nothing he could pin to Arkady’s expensive boots.
H
e’d had to walk all the way up to the snowline on the opposite face of Baldhead before he’d found the copper medal, which he’d checked carefully for the number thirteen before squirreling it away in its pouch on his belt. Halfway down the mountain, Adeon had started rock-hopping, and the only way he’d kept the trail was by the sign in the spots of lichen on the boulders, which the
tulon
disturbed or scraped when the rocks moved under his weight. It had taken more time than Dingus would’ve preferred to pick up the trail again, because Adeon had taken off his boots. Luckily, by then he was well below the snowline, because there were plenty of small plants around and he was able to find sign where they were broken or crushed.
Adeon had circled the mountain and eased into the stream coming down on another face. The only way he’d picked that up was the long, silver-blond hair dropped in just the wrong spot. He thought he was gaining; silt still clouded the water where Adeon had moved downstream. Just to make sure Adeon was doing what Dingus thought, he ran up, waded through the icy stream, and found where Adeon had laid a false trail. Then he crossed back and ran downstream again, to the spot where he’d seen the hair. It didn’t take him long to find the place where Adeon had actually gotten out, on the same side. He’d picked a good spot, where the bank was clear of plants, but the big rock he’d climbed over still had a dribbled trail of damp.
I’m close!
Dingus thrilled. He followed the water spots a good ways, even over the hard ground. For half a mile at least, Adeon had dripped, still working his way around the mountain and down. If Dingus were any farther behind, he wouldn’t have caught it.
What almost screwed him, once he made it down past the tree line, was the Big Tree trick, a personal favorite of Vandis’s. The person pulling the trick would walk past a big tree, right around it, then backtrack and change direction so the tree hid the new trail. He went almost a mile out of his way before he noticed the dirt wasn’t sprayed out quite right from Adeon’s tracks. C
ursing freely in Trader’s and
hituleti
, he sprinted back to the tree and looked carefully for the place where Adeon’s scuff marks went back to normal. He checked around the tree and after a couple of minutes, found another trail heading straight down the mountain. In a few hundred yards he found the next-to-last of his medals, electrum.
The sign around it looked spanking fresh: crushed plants still oozing sap, a broken stick, an almost perfectly sharp impression of Adeon’s toes where the dirt hadn’t shifted enough to mar it. Dingus’s heartbeat sped. He’d been pretty sure, when he saw the traces of silt in the stream, that he was behind Adeon by less than an hour; now he was certain of it. If a person did thing
s proper, which Adeon surely was, it took time to lay down a false trail. If Adeon planned to lay another one—not a big “if,” since right now he bore straight back toward Knightsvalley, but an “if” just the same—Dingus might catch him at it.
Watch how you go,
he told himself, pausing to take a few slow breaths. He couldn’t do this as quick as he would’ve wanted, because Adeon still used every rock, every tree root, every inch of underbrush to his advantage. More often than not he had to look for top sign, but Adeon couldn’t be working much quicker than he was. Every so often there’d be a scuff in the dirt, sometimes more. After he’d checked to make sure there wasn’t anything he’d missed, Dingus put on a little speed, until at last, at the end of a long, faintly grazed trail, he saw Adeon.
The
tulon
walked backward, painstakingly approaching him, in the middle of pulling another trick. Dingus stood up straight and waited, trying to quiet his bounding heart. He was lucky as hell he’d found Adeon when he did, because night came on fast now: only about an hour ’til full dark. Then he would’ve had to camp and finish up in the morning.
When the
tulon
got within ten feet, Dingus said, “Sir Adeon.”
Adeon started. His blond horsetail whipped around as he turned and stared at
Dingus with his aquamarine eyes round as saucers. Less than a heartbeat he stared, and then he bolted.
“Hey
!” Dingus yelled. Faster than thinking about it, he gave chase. Adeon wove between trees, scrambled up big boulders, cut sharp turns. But even when he gained a little and tried to put down some hasty false sign, it didn’t fool Dingus. Doing it fast had nothing on doing it right. Unfortunately, Adeon knew how to run away; he didn’t just run ’til he couldn’t see Dingus and then hide, he ran and kept on running. Dingus, though, stood much taller, and he was younger than Adeon by a few centuries. When he lost sight, he didn’t lose it for long, and half the time he ran no more than ten feet behind the
tulon
—sometimes less, almost close enough to reach out and grab. He glimpsed Wallace, gaping at them when they flashed past, but he didn’t pause to wave.
They ran on, and on, and on: up high spots and down into low ones. Dingus gained space when Adeon slip
ped on moss, lost it when he tripped over a root and went flying. He didn’t even notice how it ripped his gloves and his hands underneath. He shoved back up and kept running. Adeon splashed through the stream he’d used to try to trick Dingus before; Dingus’s long legs propelled him clean over. His breaths felt thick, gasped into a roughened throat. He saw Adeon veer off just ahead, real sharp, and he couldn’t turn quite fast enough. He came so close to plunging off the mountain, his feet scrabbled dirt over the edge as he backed up. Again he ended up cursing his lost time, until he saw Adeon climbing squirrel-quick down another slope, not far away.
Dingus bolted after in a spray of dust and pebbles
. He saw where a stream used to go; it was all gravel right there, clear down the slope, and if Adeon had been thinking—but he might not have seen, going that fast. When Dingus made it to the brink there wasn’t a thought in his head. He flung himself over, left boot leading, and slid lickety-split down the wash, using the outside of his foot and his gloved fingertips to try to keep his left side away from the gravel. It hurt, especially when his hand gave out and his whole arm and side slammed and ground against the tiny stones, but it was worth the pain just to see Adeon’s face when he zipped past.
He groaned, collapsing
into a heap when he hit the dirt at the bottom. It took everything he had left just to get back on his feet, but when Adeon made it down he stood arrow-straight.
Please tell me we’re done,
he thought
,
panting heavily. The rush had started to wear off, and all over, he felt cuts and scrapes from whipping twigs and cutting too close to rocks and, of course, the big raw patches from the gravel.
Adeon rested his hands on his own thighs, bent over and breathing
hard as a bellows himself, but grinning, too. “
“
“
said. “
“” Now that everything was over, it hurt like a cast-iron bitch.
His jerkin had big holes up the side, and his sleeve was wrecked, too. He wasn’t bleeding so much as oozing. Even his leather breeches had started to wear away over his hip, and his gloves were out at the fingertips. He didn’t doubt he looked a mess, with all the bruises he’d already had. Adeon walked away into the sunset trees, finger-combing his hair, and Dingus followed.
the Prime Cloisters of the Order of Aurelius, just outside Muscoda City
After the upset of Longday, things fell straight back into the comforting predictability Sta
s treasured. Yesterday was the same as any other day in the Cloisters, Matins to Matins, and today the same, Matins to Sext. Nobody had said a thing about the beetle. He grappled with that during the night, sleepless. Why wouldn’t Brother Jerzy have told? If it had been any other monk, anyone at all, they would’ve gone screaming about it to everyone who’d listen.
Today, though—when he came to
the scriptorium after dinner and Sext Office, his little desk chair, with the armrest on the right, was empty. Brother Jerzy sat at his own big, slant-topped desk right next to the window. Stas looked at his desk, and then at the monk; back at the desk, then back at Brother Jerzy again. It didn’t take much work for him to bring out a hoot of dismay.
Brother Jerzy said, “Would you like to see something else, little one? Would you like to see how I paint?” He reached out his puffy hands, stained with ink, seamed with blue ropy veins, to Stas.
Stas’s nerves couldn’t stop him. He had wanted a better look at this since the first day. He reached up his own hands and let himself be settled into Brother Jerzy’s soft-but-bony lap, into the crook of his left arm. The desk had a big piece of vellum pinned out on it, gleaming in places where Brother Jerzy had done gilding yesterday: the streaming rays of the Bright Lady’s glory and the edges of the disk around Her face; Her crown, and the thinnest threads from the sketched face of Ciregor as he gazed up to Her. At the right, on the flat portion of the desk, were rows of tiny white dishes, each one filled with a brilliant color: red, green, yellow, beautiful deep blue. There was a bigger dish filled with white lead paint, and a small stack of empty dishes besides. Brother Jerzy had a row of brushes, too, each one tinier than the last, and a dry cloth next to a bowl of water.
“Let’s paint,” Brother Jerzy said, in his softest voice, and picked up on
e of the larger brushes. “This is ultramarine,” he said, dipping it into the dish of blue and wiping off the excess on the side. “I’m going to paint a beautiful blue sky for the Bright Lady, without a cloud in sight to drift in front of Her glory. Watch!” He stroked the brush over the sky, laying down a translucent wash of palest blue. Stas looked at him. “I know, it’s so faint now, but when it dries, in a very little time, we’ll put another layer, and maybe another. Then it will look brighter.”
He went on that
way, talking quietly to Stas, explaining what he was doing. Stas had at least seventeen questions already—and no way to ask them. He drank in everything he saw and heard, and still longed to know more. Jerzy worked on the painting until it was time for Vespers, with a break for dinner, of course, and still, Stas longed for more. He’d watched the althea shrubs, covered in pure white flowers with deep-pink throats, seem to grow off the page; he’d watched the tall spikes of snowy blazing star thrusting up among them, and the cream-and-brown hawk with bright blood on its chest, plummeting toward the flowers in a painful tangle of black crows. Questions, questions—but the greatest question of all was, “May I do it, too?”
T
he next morning, he ran to the scriptorium after Sext, but instead of a bare desk, he saw his silverpoint stylus and a small stack of parchment. His heart sank nearly to his toes, and he sat, miserably, in his chair.
He picked up the stylus and began to draw. He worked on the piece from Sext to Nones, Nones to Vespers, and again the next day, making every last detail as perfect as he knew how. Stas drew his wish:
dishes of paint, the stack, the water dish; a tiny picture of the fields; and his own two hands wielding the brush. Then he sat, looking at it and scraping up every last bit of courage in his frame.
The sky had taken on a pink tint by the time Stas slid out of his little desk chair and picked up the drawing. Vespers would ring any moment, and if he let it sit until Sext the next day, he’d never manage it. He walked the few steps to Brother Jerzy’s desk and tugged on the monk’s rough black habit sleeve. If Brother Jerzy was surprised, he didn’t show it. He acted as if Stas approached him with something every day, although this time was the first. “What is it, Stasya?” he asked mildly.
Stas held up his picture. Brother Jerzy took it, adjusting his spectacles, and Stas took a breath. “I,” he said. “I—I—I—” He squeezed his eyes shut. They burned, and he didn’t want to let a single tear escape. “W-w-w—”
Brother Jerzy waited. The gently urgent song of Vespers began to sound, over from the bell tower on the opposite end of the monastery. Stas made to go to the door, but the monk stopped him gently with an upraised palm. When the echoing bells fell silent, Brother Jerzy said, “Vespers can go on without us for a little while.”
Stas gasped in another breath. “I want,” he said, “to—p-p-p-p-
paint
.”
A slow, soft sigh came from Brother Jerzy. His warm hand cupped under Stas’s chin and raised it; Stas opened his eyes. Brother Jerzy smiled.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
