Changes

by Mercedes Lackey

  He sensed Dallen “smiling.” ::Yes.::

  ::Like . . . makin’ me think ’bout things a certain way. Makin’ up m’mind for me, pushin’ me t’think one thing’s good, ’nother’s bad.::

  Dallen seemed delighted. ::Yes.::

  ::Ye didn’.:: Actually, he was delighted too. There it was, proof that he was still his own person.

  ::Tempting, especially when you were wallowing in a swamp of delusions of inadequacy, but no. You had—have—to remain you, Mags. All I ever did was give you very, very rapid training so that you didn’t go insane as your Gift blossomed. And at any rate, the time when I could do that so freely is passed; I can still teach you things if I have to, but never with that freedom and ease.:: He sensed mixed feelings now, both pride and a little regret.

  He decided to blunt the regret with a joke. ::Huh. Well, hellfire. I was hopin’ ye could git me through them Courty Graces horsecrap wi’out hevin’ t’ strain m’skull.::

  ::Perhaps we can work on your speech,:: came the sarcastic reply.

  Mags smiled even broader. ::My dear old Companion,:: he said, his mental voice reflecting letter-perfect diction and grammar. ::I fear I must disagree with you. What you are taking for ignorance is part of the persona of the thick-as-a-brick games-player that Nikolas wishes me to cultivate. The less cultured I sound, the more people underestimate me.::

  He paused, eyes still closed, grinning at the mental silence. ::’Tis also harder’n hell,:: he admitted. ::An’ it don’t seem like me, if ye take m’meanin’. ::

  :: . . . what about those words you make up?:: Dallen finally asked.

  ::It’s on account’a I’m a bonehead, an’ don’t allus ’member what th’ right word is, so I come’s close as I kin.:: That comment nettled him a little. He really did try, after all. ::People figger it out!::

  ::I suppose they do.:: Dallen sighed. ::All right, I don’t think that our quarry is anywhere around you, and at the moment we have no real direction to go in, other than that you sensed they still had a job to do here and were not going to leave until it was done. I am going to try to put my thoughts together and think in what part of the city they might be. You pursue those little thieves.::

  ::Not thieves, so much,:: Mags corrected him, opening his eyes, and starting to stretch to get all the kinks out. ::The bastiches owed ’em an’ not like they was gonna get paid.::

  ::Point taken.::

  Mags stood up, careful to remain in the shadow of the chimney. ::How you plan to try and figger out where them new bastiches is?:: He paused. ::We need a name fer ’em. Think on’t wouldja?::

  ::All right.:: Dallen sighed. ::This is the part of the job I never really enjoyed. I’m going to do something that—eventually—you are going to be able to do as well as I can. It’s just not very pleasant in this case, and you don’t have the experience that I do to do it yet.:: There was a pause. ::I am going to attempt to put myself inside their skins and think as they do.::

  Mags froze. He was getting better at thinking, because the implications of what Dallen had just said were all racing through his mind.

  ::Tha’s . . . ugly.::

  ::Yes.::

  ::Tha’s kinda how I figgered out how t’get t’them kiddies.::

  ::It’s exactly how.::

  ::An’ how I handle Bear an’ Lena an’ Amily. I could—::

  ::Not yet. You have the raw talent, the reasoning ability, you just don’t have the experience. You will, and when that day comes—::

  He waited. Finally Dallen finished the thought. ::When that day comes, I will be both proud, and terribly, terribly sad.::

  He let that roll over in his mind a moment. ::Sad ’cause . . . when I know how the baddest of bad people think . . . when I kin think like they do . . . I ain’t ever gonna be completely happy or . . . comfortable . . . or . . . ::

  ::Secure,:: said Dallen, sadly.

  ::That. Not ever again.::

  ::Yes,:: said the creature closest to him in the whole world. ::And you can decide you don’t want that—::

  ::Why would I?:: he said, somberly. ::Some’un’s gotta. Hellfires. Might’s well be me. I got you t’keep me from goin’ crazy, eh?:: He blinked, as a moment of epiphany came upon him. ::Hell . . . fires. Thet is the kinda Herald I’m a-gonna be. Not th’ runnin’ about country. Not th’ tellin’a laws. Not—all the rest of’t. This. This is gonna be m’job.::

  ::And that, O my Chosen, is why I Chose you.::

  11

  Mags lurked outside the abandoned building and waited for his quarry to return. He had already scouted his way in and had already trapped all their clever little exits. Well, they were clever if you were a little child; not so clever if you were an adult and a predator. He wished he had more time; he didn’t want to do things this way, but in the long run, he’d have done them a favor. Tal and the other men in that special unit of the Guard agreed. The first adult that wanted to put any effort into taking them would have them, just as he would have them. The bunnies would not be escaping this warren.

  He even knew where they were: at a rag-and-bone seller, someone who would accept the clothing that had been unceremoniously ripped apart by the Guard. He knew what they planned to do—sell enough to buy a meal and eat it on the spot, because it wasn’t safe to have food here now that it was summer. More gleaning of their surface thoughts proved that they had learned summer could be as perilous a time as winter. They’d learned that they couldn’t hoard food in warm weather the hard way twice, once by getting sick on food that had spoiled and once by being swarmed in the night by mice and rats.

  It was safe to store what they’d gleaned from the Agents’ house—and although they had gleaned what they had thought was the best, the boys had gone back to the house again and again until they and the rest of the neighborhood looters had picked it clean.

  In one way, they were right to feel relatively safe. The part of the cellar they’d claimed as their own was very difficult to get into if you were adult-sized, and it was hard to work your way through the half-collapsed walls to get there. You had to know exactly where you were going, or you ran into dead ends. An adult determined to trap them would probably do one of two things: either catch them as they went in or came out, or set fire to the whole cellar, clearing the way. They weren’t thinking of that, of course. To their minds, it would be impossible for anyone to know they were in there in the first place.

  Of course, they had not come up against someone like Mags: small, agile, trained. He would have been able to pull this off even without Mindspeech. With it? This was not so much a challenge as a chore to be gotten over with. He was not looking forward to what he was about to do to them.

  These children weren’t good—but they weren’t bad, either. They would steal anything they thought they could take, but they were also living on the edge of survival, and what they stole meant the difference between living and dying. They had no love and no loyalty to anyone or anything outside their own little family, but they had no hatred for anyone else, either, except the brief, bright hatred that burned when someone cheated them or robbed them—because being cheated or robbed meant an empty belly. He certainly understood them. They differed from the Mags of the mine in only one way. Up until last winter, they’d had a mother.

  She might not have been a good mother, but she fed them before she fed herself, and she gave as many kisses as cuffs. That counted for a great deal down here.

  As he had learned when he was here as a blind beggar, Haven wasn’t perfect, even as Valdemar wasn’t perfect. There were places these children could have gone for help, but they either didn’t know about them or didn’t trust them. That was true of a lot of the sad stories down here.

  And . . . if everyone who needed help came for it, would the help run out? The places that distributed food as charity often did. Shelters frequently had to shut their doors in bad weather, because there literally was no longer room inside to move. How would—how had—three small children who could not even hold their
places in line fare?

  When your options were steal or starve . . . you couldn’t exactly call those “options.”

  But right now, Mags needed to focus.

  There were plenty of hiding places around the remains of the basement that gave him a clear view of where the children would come in. It was dark, but not completely, and the children would probably have a rushlight with them. Even they couldn’t thread their maze at night without some kind of light. So Mags crouched in a space where two tottering wall fragments had met, a space where it was unlikely he’d be seen in the dim illumination of a rushlight.

  Mags waited, hunched down and resting, patient, every so often allowing his shields to drop a little so he could look for those Agents. That was what Dallen had decided to call them, and it was just as good as any other name to Mags.

  He got no brushes of that now-familiar feeling of the shield-surrogate they wore, but as the moments became candlemarks, he finally did sense the children approaching.

  He froze in place. They didn’t seem particularly sensitive, but there was no point in taking chances. If they guessed he was going to ambush them, they’d bolt, and it would take days for him to track them down again.

  They weren’t talking today, but he sensed the sleepy content in all three of them that came from a full belly. Good. That was exactly what he wanted. He needed them to be off guard and unready. If there had been a real predator hunting them now, they’d be tied up in sacks before they even reached the entrance to their maze.

  They wormed their way into their shelter, thinking of nothing but the comfortable pallets they’d made out of the bedding that the Guards had taken apart. He followed behind them, silent as a snake. They started whispering to each other now, feeling completely secure. And in their minds, why shouldn’t they? So far no one had found them in here—except the mice, the rats, and the bugs. And even if someone did, there were three ways of escape besides the way in. Mags felt them letting their guards down further.

  There was even a better source of light than a single rushlight in their shelter, as he had discovered to his amazement. You couldn’t see it until you were in their hidden corner, but they’d managed to create a little fireplace, and there was still plenty of wood in this building to scavenge. It was how they had survived the winter.

  That was going to work in his favor.

  Even though he felt a sickening guilt for what he was about to do to them. They had reached their “home” and were settling down on the beds. He heard them talking, not bothering to whisper. They were making plans on where to take some of the ruined boots and shoes tomorrow. Not the same rag-and-bone man that they had just sold things to; they were smart enough not to make anyone think that they might have more loot cached. He listened with his ears and his mind, pausing just inside the last twist of the path while they bickered. The eldest wanted to go quite some distance away; the girl whined that it was too far. He waited until they were fully engaged in their little argument, then slipped into the room.

  “Shet it!” he shouted, before they even realized there was someone else with them.

  Three pairs of startled eyes met his.

  “Ye’ll be takin’ it where I tell ye,” he growled, contorting his face into a snarl.

  They froze, but only for a moment.

  The girl moved first; with a high-pitched shriek of terror that nearly split his head in two, she dashed for one of their exits, and she screamed again when she found it blocked. Well, actually, it was more than merely blocked; Mags knew tunnels and tunneling, and it had not taken him long to find the way to collapse the rubble so that the exits had literally vanished. The little girl didn’t know what to do; she only stood there and screamed in terror. The two boys rushed him.

  He backhanded the younger into the pile of bedding, taking care to throw him rather than hit him, and grabbed the elder by the throat, pulling him close so the boy could see his face. “There’ll be none’a thet,” he growled, and used his free hand to pinch the boy’s mouth shut when he squirmed and tried to bite. “Nor thet, ye demonspawn. Yer mine. Sooner ye decide thet’s th’ way it’s gonna be, th’ less I’ll heveta beatcha.”

  Now the girl and the other boy swarmed him; it was brave, but pathetic. He felt sick inside as he deliberately terrorized them. This was a horrible thing to do to anyone. This was what had been done to him—

  ’Cept the blows an’ the beatin’s were real and meant t’hurt, he tried to remind himself. But the rationalization felt . . . hollow.

  He did the best he could to turn what looked like blows into deflections, always sending them tumbling to keep from hurting them too much, but it was almost a candlemark later when the three of them finally stopped fighting or trying to escape and huddled together on the pile of bedding, cowed and terrified.

  He looked them over. The two boys moved to protect their sister. Good. That was the control he needed. He reached for the sobbing girl-child, slapping the other two out of the way, and before she knew what was happening, he’d snapped a collar and leash on her.

  “Now,” he said, squatting down on his heels to glare at the three of them. “This’s how it’s a-gonna be. Ye do what I say. Ye do ev’thin’ I say. Yer my gang now. An’ iffen ye don’ do what I say—” he pulled abruptly on the leash when the child was off-balance, and the little girl sprawled onto the floor. “—then this bit has some’pun ’appen to ’er.” He let his lips curve in a lazy smile, while inside he cringed and felt so sick it was all he could do not to throw up. “Now, I dunno what that some’pun’ll be. It’ll d’pend on where we is, an’ what ye was s’posed t’ be doin’ fer me. Mebbe she don’ get no supper. Mebbe she gotta sleep i’dirt. Mebbe I fin’ some’un then likes liddle wenches . . .”

  They were old enough to know exactly what he meant, and all three of them froze in terror.

  “So,” he said blandly. “Yer gonna do what yer tol’. An’ right now, thet’s t’come along’a me.”

  With the little girl crawling on hands and knees ahead of him and the boys, now thoroughly cowed, trailing behind, they emerged from the ruin.

  “Where’re we goin’?” the eldest quavered, when the younger boy crawled out and stood up.

  “Shet it!” he snarled. “Ye’ll see, soon ’nough.”

  There were a number of places he could have taken them, including the shop, but he knew that Nikolas would never tolerate how he was going to handle these children. If it had been an adult—given what they needed to know, Nikolas would have terrorized them himself.

  But not a child.

  So for now, he had a different goal in mind.

  The same house where the Agents had killed their predecessors.

  The little girl began to fight and utter a thin, high wail when she saw the place. He grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her a little. “I said, shet it.”

  “Bu-bu-bu—” she blubbered. “They’s—they’s gh-gh-gh-“

  “Ain’t no ghosts,” he scoffed. “I been squattin’ ’ere an they ain’t no ghostes. So shet it.”

  Before he had gone stalking the children, he had prepared his squat, thanks to Tal and his squad. Tal had been far more pragmatic about the plan than he had been.

  “Look. You’re going to scare them. Well, they’re scared that much most of the time, and if they’re not, they should be. When it comes right down to it, unless you do this, they’ve got three futures. They die of privation. They die by someone’s hand. Or—maybe—they survive. Like you survived in the mines. Reckon up the odds for yourself.”

  There was a good, sound cellar here, one with only one door in and no windows. It was perfect for his purposes. He had already gotten the keys to the place from the Guard—anyone coming around now was going to have a rude awakening to find the place locked as tight as it had been open before. The turning of the key in the lock caused a thunder of deep barks to erupt on the other side.

  The little girl would have screamed if he hadn’t had a precautionary hand at h
er throat. Instead, she shook where she stood.

  “Down, Dammit!” he growled, reinforcing the command with a mental one. The dog—a huge fawn-colored mastiff, whose name really was “Dammit,” dropped to the ground. He shoved all three of the children inside and locked the door. “You—” he barked, pointing at the younger boy. “Kitchen. Git th’ food onna table. Now.”

  The boy scuttled off and returned with the old, splintery basket full of broken meat pies and burned sausages and grease-soaked loaf ends Mags had bought from a vendor. Mags pulled open the hatch to the cellar and gestured roughly. There was a lamp burning down there; the two boys went down the stairs, followed by Mags, followed by the girl on the end of her leash. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Mags whistled, and the dog came down in a rush.

  There were three pallets down here, a couple of empty buckets, and one full of clean water. There were also iron rings in the wall over the pallets. Mags hauled the girl over to the pallets and shoved her down on one, then tied her leash to the iron ring above her.

  “Guard!” he told Dammit—who had been borrowed from Tal. An exceptionally well-trained animal, he would no more harm these children than fly, but they didn’t know that. And he would guard them. Nothing would get past him.

  Dammit whined, his thick tail thwacking the dirt floor. Mags turned to the children.

  “Ye got food an’ water an’ bed,” he snarled. “Use ’em. T’morrow, yer gonna work.”

  Then he thumped his way up the stairs, slamming the cellar door closed, shooting the bolt home.

  Now he had them. It was just a matter of—not breaking them, but bending them.

  And he felt so sickened by all he was going to have to do that he could not wait for it to be over.

  The next three days were exhausting for the children. Without letting them know what exactly they were doing, he had the boys running all over the city, carrying meaningless messages until they could barely stagger, while the girl was put to such simple household tasks as her strength would manage. He had a plan, and he figured it was a good one.