by Ray, M. A.
“I don’t think we can,” Kessa said, glancing around, as Dingus shook his head.
“They’re behind us,” he said.
Vandis asked, “How many?”
“Four.”
He sighed and undid the slipknot that held his purse to his belt, and then held up the purse and jingled it. “Come on and get it then,” he said.
The first bandit snorted. “That’s no good out here. You’ve got other things we want. Take off the packs.”
“Do it,” Vandis said to his Squires. “It’s only stuff.” He suffered a momentary pang for the Xavier legacy, riding in its blanket at the top of Dingus’s pack. Thank the Lady, they did what they were told.
“Now the clothes. Everything you’re wearing. Especially you, sweetheart,” he added, leering at Kessa.
“That’s going a little far, don’t you think?”
“We don’t want all holes and blood in our new clothes,” said another bandit, with a gray and crooked grin.
“If you’re going to kill us anyway, tell me why I should give a flying fuck about your new clothes,” Vandis said, wrapping his right hand around the hilt of his own short sword. He heard Kessa gulp and saw that she did the same with hers. If they didn’t come through this, dying with a sword in her hand was about the best she could expect. He was just as worried for Dingus; not a chance the boy could lay hands on his rolled-up swords in time. He looked flushed, and Vandis hadn’t figured he’d be frightened of dying, not since he’d faced down Big Mike, but his teeth were chattering, and he was breathing erratically, in short, deep gasps.
“Because if you don’t,” the first bandit said, “you’ll get to watch what happens to them two.”
Vandis drew his sword. Kessa was going for hers when one of the bandits at their backs gripped her arm. She yelped and tried to shake him off, and then Vandis caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his right eye, and heard somebody hit the dirt. Kessa! he thought wildly, spinning to follow it. As he turned there was a ripping sound so ugly he cringed.
Dingus—crouched over the bandit who’d grabbed Kessa—turned to the side and spat a clump of meat from a mouth ringed with bloody foam. A crazed laugh barked out of his skinny chest. The whites of his rolling eyes were shot with red. Kessa lay flat on her back, starting to struggle up when Dingus sprang at the bandit directly behind, inhumanly fast, grasping at the flesh of the man’s belly with clawing fingertips. The grabber thrashed on the ground and clutched the hole where his throat had been.
The first bandit breathed a curse. Vandis threw himself flat, knocking Kessa back down. “Play dead,” he whispered under the screams of Dingus’s second.
She pulled herself fetal, covering her head with her arms: not quite playing dead, but not presenting anything that could be interpreted as a threat, even to the most animal brain. Blood pattered onto Vandis’s cloak. Dingus bellowed a wordless challenge, throwing his arms wide, his fists full of guts, and Vandis shuddered. He’d convinced himself so firmly that Dingus didn’t have the berserkergang—his soft-voiced, shy, intelligent boy. Don’t do this to him, he prayed. Take Your hand off my boy, please…
“Kill him!” the first bandit screamed through Her silence. “Kill that kid! Five to one!” They tried. More than one trod on Vandis and Kessa. The air tasted rank and metallic. Vandis flopped limply to his back, concerned for Dingus’s safety. One look made the worry seem absurd.
Dingus moved at nightmare speed, a swift terror of raking fingers and bloody teeth, so blindingly fast Vandis could only focus enough to see him clearly when he stopped to kill. Not one of those rusty swords touched him. Vandis had known, from a story here and there, to get on the ground, but he hadn’t realized the sheer, impossible power the berserkergang would bestow. Dingus tore the arms off a wailing bandit, helped him down with a kick, and stove in his chest with three heavy blows of a booted heel. He dodged the sword blade seeking his vitals to sink his teeth between neck and shoulder on another with an audible crunch. His whole thin body curved into the bite. The next heartbeat red mist stained the air where he’d torn flesh free, and the next he had the bandit’s back to a tree, doing something Vandis couldn’t see, but that made blood drip from his elbows.
The remaining bandits made the worst mistake of their lives: they ran too late. Vandis wished they’d gotten wise a little sooner, because Dingus saw them go, dropped his latest, and darted off after like his feet had wings. A moment later he roared, but distantly. There was a bubbling, dying moan nearby—the one who’d been eviscerated. With his bare hands. Fair winds!
Vandis reached over and squeezed Kessa’s shoulder. Her back was to him, but he could see her whole body trembling. She peeped miserably as she swallowed back her sobs. “Kessa,” he said, as soothingly as he could, which wasn’t very. He felt awful himself, and much more frightened than he wanted to let on: afraid of Dingus. Who wouldn’t be? Afraid for him, too, because to go from gentle boy to raging monster in the space of a heartbeat would mess with any kid’s head. What am I going to do?
“What happened to Dingus?” Kessa choked. “Why’d he do that, Vandis? He got blood on me!”
“He got blood on everything, honey.” For a very long moment Vandis lay there, staring up at the ragged swath of blue sky visible through the bare treetops. Then he said, “He didn’t mean to. He—he’s—” He stopped. What do I say? Finally he settled on, “He’s different. From you and me, I mean. Something touches him that doesn’t touch us.”
She gave a final, convulsive shudder, gulped and gasped, and said calmly, “Whatever it is, I think it should leave him alone.”
“Damned straight.”
Frostily, She said: At least you’re alive to complain, My own.
I’d rather be dead than see what he’ll go through when he comes out of it.
That’s unacceptable. I know what I’m about. You’re going to have to trust Me.
I don’t think much of Your grand design, Lady. Not if You’re planning to destroy my—
There, he stopped himself again. He didn’t dare to think of Dingus that way. He couldn’t dare, but the word rang through his mind anyway. She would have known; no matter what, even if he’d been able to stop himself, She would have known.
Your son?
He’s not, though.
You’re meant to love him.
When he thought an inarticulate curse Her way, She didn’t answer.
“Can I get up now?” Kessa asked.
“In a—” He flinched at the cry that tore through the forest, almost a wail, a vibrating shout of total dismay that could only be Dingus coming back to reality. “Now’s okay,” he amended. “Let’s go find him.”
Dingus wasn’t hard to find. All Vandis had to do was follow the red spatters on the ground. When they reached him, he was on his elbows and knees, puking his guts up next to a corpse so badly mangled it looked like a bear had gotten to it. Maybe it was that he’d appeared so huge a few minutes ago, but he looked diminished, somehow thinner than before. He didn’t seem to hear them come up. His head sagged low between his shoulders and his breath came hard; one hand almost squeezed into a fist, but it only went so far before he moaned and let it fall flat.
He retched again and Kessa blurted, “Oh, Dingus! Oh!”
“Go ’way!” His expression stretched like he was about to cry, but he vomited instead. Once he’d emptied his stomach, he sat back on his heels and went to wipe his mouth—except his hands, arms, and sleeves were coated with gore. The blood was all around his mouth, down his neck and throat. It soaked his jerkin and spattered over his breeches. Forget his hair. It was in his eyebrows, and Vandis didn’t want to know what was on his boot. He swallowed hard and turned a chalky-white, glassy-eyed face toward the two of them. “Are you okay?” he asked dully.
“We’re not hurt,” Vandis said. “Are you?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at his hands as if shocked they belonged to him, then lifted them toward Vandis. “My hands hurt bad.”
“I don’t know.”
“Try for me.”
Dingus obeyed, staggering to his feet. Once he got there, though, he swayed heavily, like wet laundry on the line. “Kessa,” Vandis said, hurrying to wedge his shoulder in Dingus’s armpit. It ended up south of the mark; Dingus stood over a foot taller than Vandis did. “Come on. There might be others hanging around, and we want to be somewhere else right now.” Gamely, Kessa dragged Dingus’s other arm across her shoulders. She didn’t even complain about the mess. As they started away his head lolled forward. “Oh no, Dingus,” Vandis said, thumping the skinny chest. “Don’t pass out now. Help us a little more today, just a little more. You’re heavy. If you pass out we’re not going to get ten feet.”
Dingus squinted at his feet. “Trying…”
“Good. That’s good. Talk to me.”
“What’ll I say?”
Vandis signaled frantically to Kessa with his head, getting her to go right, deeper into the forest and away from the trail. “Tell me what it was like,” he said, even though, gods, he didn’t want to know.
Dingus’s throat worked. “Hot.” They managed a few more steps. “… so hot …a fire inside me …and good. Better than coming, ’cause it just …didn’t stop. On and on and on.” He gave a drunken, ecstatic laugh and sagged further at the knees, but as quickly as the mirth had come, it was gone. “It was a wrong thing,” he rasped.
“You couldn’t help it,” Vandis said, and he didn’t see how the boy could have. Not with the Lady’s hand pressing on him. “If you’d stopped yourself, we’d all be dead.”
Dingus didn’t say any more, and a moment later consciousness went out of him like a flame blown out on a candle. They pulled him along, toes dragging on the ground, for what seemed like a league, but really wasn’t more than half a mile. When they found a stream, they laid their burden out on the bank; the weight was off Vandis’s shoulders, but not off his heart.
Life Is Beautiful
The Orphan House
Quite a lot had changed for Stas in the past year. He hadn’t grown the least bit taller, and he certainly couldn’t speak any better. Actually, his stammer had gotten worse, and he only really communicated with Boris anymore, because Boris would wait patiently all the time it took for him to say something aloud. Because of that, he’d been able to refine the hand-language he used with his friend to say nearly anything necessary. They spent so much time together they must have seemed attached. By now they functioned as a unit: Stas did the thinking, and Boris did the talking.
He’d lost a couple of his baby teeth and started getting freckles everywhere his skin was exposed to the sun, and something very odd had happened to his eyes in the past few months. Doubtless it was something Father Yuri would want him to take to Brother Bozidor at a dead run. He didn’t understand it at first, but it didn’t seem as if anybody else saw the same world Stas was seeing these days. He felt absolutely positive nobody else could see the lights.
At first it disturbed him. The day it started had begun completely ordinary, like any other harvest day. They’d gone out to the fields like usual, to dig up potatoes before the ground froze. It hadn’t been particularly sunny or cloudy, merely a day, and then Stas blinked, and everything was—different. All around him the plants were lit from within by a soft blue radiance; the insects shone their own ferocious little sparks, and all the other boys, in the depths of their chests, carried a gently pulsing blue glow. When Stas looked down at his own small self, he saw that same blue. He was drenched in it, saturated with it. Even his broken fingernails burned blue, and that light stood out from his body at least an inch. The awful scar he’d had from grasping that wire was completely gone.
He only figured out what it was when he stepped on a big, striped potato beetle with his bare foot. It was the size of one of his toes, and quite aside from the unpleasant crunch and squishy feeling afterwards, when he lifted his foot there wasn’t the slightest glow from the bug that had burned so brightly a moment before. The light was life. Now, every morning when he opened his eyes, he saw life everywhere around him, life and death. When they pulled the potatoes, the light faded from them with aching slowness, and when he cracked a flea or louse, it was like a candle snuffed in the chapel. He didn’t really want to do that, but when he stopped he was tormented with itching. He had to look away when he cracked them. The truth was, it fascinated him to watch them crawling about, so bright, on the bedding and the other boys.
He still didn’t understand everything he saw. When he really concentrated on looking, he started to see other things that must be alive. They were so tiny he could hardly see how they shone. There were the things zipping back and forth in a puddle of water, and the thousands of motes on everyone’s skin, and great clouds of them glittering in everyone’s bellies. The hole in the privy was blinding. Are they bugs? What are they for? he always wondered. What do they do all day? and a hundred other things about them. Stas lived with a constant edge of fear that someone would find out how he saw, but what was to find out, really? Besides, the world was more beautiful than he’d ever noticed before. Even Brother Bozidor and Brother Marek carried that lovely blue light in their chests. He hugged the beauty to himself, the wonderful secret that lit his ordinary, forcefully plain, dirty world.
And then today.
“My stomach hurts,” Boris had said this morning.
Stas would have laid down money, if he’d had money, that it did. After the cow kicked Boris in the belly yesterday, he wouldn’t doubt that it hurt, and though he didn’t know quite what was going on inside his friend, he did know it was nothing good. The blue in Boris had burned down dim and dimmer by the hour; his skin grew paler and paler, and he breathed so quickly, so shallowly, Stas wondered how he could get any air at all. They still had to work, but Stas had pasted himself to Boris all day, watching him get paler and sweatier and more confused, watching him refuse dinner and supper too. Watching the light go low.
By the time Boris collapsed, Stas had worked himself into a mental frenzy. Brother Marek took one look at Boris on the dirt floor of the dormitory, so pale, his chest going up and down faster than anyone’s ought to, and told Brother Bozidor to send for the man who built the pyres. “He’s bleeding inside,” Brother Marek told his Mendicant in a flat voice. “No hope. Let’s put him in the infirmary before he dies.”
“We can’t have corruption in the dormitory,” Brother Bozidor agreed, and while Stas stared with stinging, wet eyes they picked up Boris and took him away. Now I’ll have nobody at all, Stas thought over and over. When the Brothers came back to the dormitory and blew out the candle he lay down on his pallet like all the rest, following the rules, but even the lights standing out in the darkness couldn’t ease his mind. The pallet next to his lay empty, and even though he saw the pests crawling about in the blanket and inside the pallet itself, he didn’t see Boris’s comforting glow.
He felt so helpless, so alone, it made him sick. Everyone else breathed slowly, deeply, and Stas couldn’t sleep. He held himself still, didn’t flinch, didn’t move, even while the fleas bit at the insides of his legs. Tears slid freely down his temples and into his ears. If Holy Naheel watched out for her children, what did that make him? He couldn’t even remember having parents. What did it make Boris, sweet simple Boris, who, as far as Stas could tell, never got cross and never had a bad thought about anyone in his whole life? It should’ve been Stas behind that stupid cow, which always was mean anyway. Boris was the best person he’d ever met, the best in the world even though he was only about six or seven, the same as Stas. It wasn’t fair. He curled onto his side and pulled his blanket over his head, shaking with the immensity of his misery and the effort of holding in his sobs. Stas was small, and he’d felt small, but he’d never felt quite as minuscule as he did at that moment, tiny and
scared and alone for always ever after. Alone, he thought, and then sat quietly upright. Boris is alone. He’s going to die, and nobody will be with him when he does.
He pushed his blanket aside, scooted forward until his feet touched the dirt floor, and looked back over his shoulder. He couldn’t see by the lights inside alive things, so it was still pitch-black other than the blue, but his sight let him make sure all the rest still lay on their beds, asleep. It let him slip between the rows of pallets without kicking anyone. He didn’t care what the Brothers said every day in the chapel about staying pure, never touching a dead thing, never eating anything from an animal. If Boris was going to die, if his chest was going to go dark, Stas, at least, would be there with him when it happened. He’d seen Brother Marek drinking milk, Brother Bozidor sneaking into the cheese house to have a bit even though it was all supposed to get sold. If that was all right, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t sit with his friend. Of course, if he got caught they’d do their best to make him see why, but the threat of punishment didn’t matter to Stas, not when he compared it to how much Boris mattered.
There were only three doors in the Orphan House: the big door to go in and out, the big door to the chapel, and the little door to the infirmary, which was at the end of a long corridor, as far as possible from the places where everyone went about his business: dormitory, common room, and kitchen. It was absolutely as far as one could go from the chapel and stay inside.
The life-lights of the bugs let him see where the walls were when they crawled around. It worked fairly well, too, since there wasn’t really anything in the way of furniture, especially in the corridor, so there was nothing to bump into in the dark. Stas crept down toward the little door, wondering how he was going to get it open without alerting the Brothers that he was awake, out of his bed, and trying to get into an unclean place. When he got close, he stretched out his hands until he touched the wood, and then felt carefully around until he found the latch. He could only just reach it, and when he pulled it back there was a snap that seemed terribly loud.