Saga of Menyoral: The Service Read Online Free PDF

about it.” Vandis waved it away. “If you run across him again, make it yes, Sir Reed, no, Sir Reed.”
    “Yes, Vandis. Is there anything else?”
    “No, you—”
    “You haven’t introduced us,” said the small man on Vandis’s right, with his hair caught back in a gray horsetail. He was only a little taller, and a lot slimmer, than Vandis. Vandis shook his head, chuckling again, and started to drink steadily and seriously.
    “I know him,” Santo said smugly from Vandis’s left.
    “And me and Evan are out in the cold,” said the man next to Santo, beaming a smile out of a neat, grizzled blond beard. He reached out his hand, and Dingus leaned over to clasp wrists. “It’s Dingus, right? I’m Jack Jackowsky, and that there is Evan Grady, and we all go way back with Vandis.”
    “Hi.” Dingus clasped wrists with Evan Grady, too, and straightened.
    “Come, lad, won’t you sit for a while?” Evan asked.
    “I thought—”
    “That’s only if you’ve not been invited .” The small Master grinned broadly. “Sit.”
    “Cup,” Santo said, sloshing a clay bottle of his own. He waggled his bushy eyebrows.
    Vandis held up a hand. “Santo. Come on.”
    “What? You were just, not even, I mean, ten minutes ago bragging on him. Don’t that make him old enough? You gimme your cup now, Dingus, and don’t you listen to this old fart.”
    “We’re the same age!”
    “You’re old at heart,” Santo shot back, and Vandis shook his head and went back to his drinking. Dingus folded his legs under him and handed over the tin cup he’d had hanging from his belt.
    “I’ll bet you think Vandis is a five-pound sack of assholes,” Jack Jackowsky said, grinning at him, while Santo poured out a little of whatever they’d been drinking.
    “No, sir,” Dingus said.
    “Jack.”
    “No, Jack. He’s pretty good to me and he don’t, I mean, he doesn’t hit me, never once.”
    “I remember when—”
    “That fucking Reed,” Vandis said angrily, staring down at the bottle in his hands. “That pomade-smelling piece of shit. I ought to thrash him. Raised his hand to you.”
    “Well,” Dingus said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Looking back on it, I don’t know that he was really gonna—”
    “He made you think he would. And then, then he jumped right to the conclusion that I’d been smacking you around!” Vandis’s hard face twisted. His fingers tightened over the clay bottle and for a moment Dingus thought he’d throw it. “I’d never do to you what was done to me. Never . That’s a hell I couldn’t visit on any kid.”
    “Old Man Dingus,” Santo explained, when Vandis trailed off. “You think Vandis got a bad temper, hell no, that guy’s legendary. He’s older than dirt, Old Man Dingus, and he’s got a mouth like a sewer, and a chip on his shoulder weighs about ten tons, and pal, he’d work that stick of his over little bitty Vandis like there wasn’t no tomorrow.”
    “I wasn’t ‘little bitty’.”
    “Yeah, you was. You was a little guy, you still are. But you was littler then. My Master, Fernando was his name. He was the nicest old guy I ever met and you best believe I loved him as much as any boy can love. He always told me, ‘Stay away from that Old Man Dingus, Santo, you stay away from him now.’”
    “Shea always told me the same,” Evan said. “She’d give me the back of her hand sharpish if I messed about, but it wasn’t that way.”
    Jack grinned again. “And I figured it out on my own after he gave me a taste my second year.”
    “Vandis came in late,” Santo went on, handing the cup to Dingus. “We was sixteen then, about sixteen, when the old man picked him up. He don’t always show up for Moot, but when he had Vandis he came. Surprised everybody coming in with this—there wasn’t too much of Vandis back then—he was just this little tobacco plug, moving like an old man himself. Well, he comes on Evan and me. We was playing some dice and we thought we was