Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  By the time the boy was dressed, Ree realized he couldn’t leave him here. Not like this. Not alone and dazed and hurt. But Ree had nowhere to go. And if anyone saw him . . . Especially with the dead man in the alley. The dead man killed by a hobgoblin.

  If the boy refused to turn Ree in, they would hurt him. They would hurt him more.

  Ree swallowed. “You know this part of town?” he asked.

  The boy nodded. “I squat three blocks down—” He hesitated, as though he wanted to give Ree some kind of title.

  “Call me Ree. And let’s go. You gotta rest up, and we don’t want no one finding us.”

  As they approached a rickety tenement building, the boy looked over his shoulder at Ree. “I live there,” he said. “In the attic.”

  Ree nodded, not knowing what else to say.

  The boy looked longer, as if waiting for an answer. “My name is Jem,” he said.

  “Jem,” Ree repeated.

  And Jem smiled, a brief, startling smile that made him look, of a sudden, much younger and much too old.

  He turned away and walked fast, ahead of Ree, a new spring in his step. He took Ree up a steep, crooked staircase that climbed partway outside the building. Then he climbed up to the attic, a space made usable by some enterprising street rat. Jem’s meager belongings sat in a neat pile by the hole in the roof Jem had used as an entry.

  Despite his injuries, despite being human, he climbed nearly as well as Ree. Ree bit his lip. No point feeling jealous.

  Jem was all human. He could do odd jobs for a copper coin, or get himself ration chits. Ree had no such advantages. But it was Ree who was unhurt and Jem who was ready to pass out.

  “Get yourself down, so’s I can clean you up,” he said.

  Jem nodded. His eyes, too big for his thin face, never once left Ree’s face as he lay down. But there was no mistrust in that look. No fear.

  How can you look at something like me, and not fear?

  “I ain’t going to hurt you any more’n I can help,” Ree said roughly. “That big bastard cut you up good, and it’s gotta get cleaned up or you’ll get sick.” He had seen what happened to wounds that were not cleaned. He knew the putrid wounds, the fever. No one deserved to die like that.

  Jem swallowed, but he still watched as Ree dipped a rag into the water bucket. When Ree touched the rag to one of Jem’s bloody welts, the boy gasped, and clenched his fists into his hair.

  Ree supposed that hurt less. He tried to be gentle, but he had never tried to mend anyone’s hurts before. He was better at killing.

  He flinched from the thought, but looking at Jem’s wounds, he could not summon up as much regret as he wished. He just hoped the big bastard had not torn Jem up too bad inside.

  But Jem still got sick. His fever rose till he burned to the touch, and he twisted and talked in his sleep.

  Ree stayed with him. The rat part—the animal part—wanted to go away. There was a horror of disease. Of death. Death and disease both attracted predators.

  The human part of Ree was scared, too. How could it not be? He held onto Jem’s hand through the day, and tried to quiet his screams, his mumbles. Tried to still his panics. And hoped no one heard. No one came.

  What would people think if they found a hobgoblin and a human youth?

  Ree talked to him through the day. Told him silly things. Sang to him, ballads he barely remembered hearing—in his mother’s house, long ago. And Jem looked at him with wondering, blue eyes.

  And never showed fear. Never fear. A twinge of fear from Jem, a twinge of horror at Ree’s strangeness, and Ree would have been free to leave, free to go in search of a new hideout. Free to become a wild creature again. To forget he’d ever been human.

  But Jem looked at him with confidence and trust and, in his brief moments of lucidity, grinned at Ree’s jokes, smiled at them. Or reached for Ree’s hand for reassurance.

  So Ree stayed. And when he went out at night to refill the water bucket and steal food for them both, he always came back. Perhaps he was fooling himself. Perhaps he was using Jem to make himself feel human.

  But he could not possibly live knowing how Jem would feel if he didn’t come back. The idea of Jem’s betrayal and disappointment was more than Ree could bear. It would have stripped Ree’s soul bare of what humanity remained.

  So he went and he came back. Sometimes, he caught rats. One good, fat rat made a meal when he skinned it and cooked it over a tiny fire.

  In the past, Ree had eaten it raw. But Jem would have been shocked, scared. For the sake of Jem, Ree had to be human and eat with human manners, as he hadn’t since the night the magic had changed him.

  And each time, each time out, Ree feared he would be caught. Not just for his death, but because Jem might think he’d been abandoned.

  There were more patrols now, and searches. Patrols that came too close for his liking talked about the killer hobgoblin, the one who’d killed the soldier, and how Emperor Melles himself was offering a whole gold piece for the hobgoblin’s hide.

  The thought made his stomach go all queasy. Not all those soldiers would make sure he was dead before they started skinning him. And there were worse things . . .

  Jacona had become a rat trap. Holding Jem’s hand, as Jem slowly became stronger and more confident, Ree realized he could not stay in the city. Like his warehouse, it had become a trap.

  The problem was, he did not know how he was to escape. The work gangs had not just hauled water to cisterns and replaced all the work that used to be done with magic. They had built a new wall around the city, to keep the hobgoblins out. The wall went all the way to Crag Castle, Ree had heard, and soldiers guarded it all the time. Jacona was a fortified rat trap.

  No matter how busy the roads were, everyone who went through one of the gates was inspected. Ree had seen the frozen dangling corpse of a merchant who had tried to smuggle his son-turned-hobgoblin out of the city. He did not know if the man had died of the hanging or if he had frozen to death. Ree shuddered at the thought of what the patrols would do to Jem if they found them together.

  He did not want to think about it. But he had to escape. It would be safer for Jem if he was just another human, with no rat boy to make him a criminal. Safer for Jem to be alone again. And safer for Ree, even though he had no idea what lay beyond the walls of Jacona.

  Oh, he knew there were farms, and farmers, and roads that went to other cities. And he had heard there were wild places where a rat boy might be able to live without humans always hunting him. But he had never seen anything outside Jacona, never been beyond the tenements and warehouses of the poorest districts.

  How could he escape?

  The aqueducts had been broken by the winter storms after the magic began to die. The sections near the city walls had been knocked down by the work gangs who built the wall.

  Ree had heard that no one knew when—or even if—magic was going to come back, so there had been no reason to keep something that would not be useful without magic. He had wondered sometimes if he would eventually change back without magic, but that did not seem likely.

  As for the drains . . . Ree shuddered. The patrols would not go there. That was where the Changerats and the even weirder hobgoblins had gone. The ones that were all teeth, claws, and poison. Like the patrols, Ree did not want to know what had become of them. And yet, it might be his only chance. A slim chance at life, as opposed to the sure death that would come to him if they found him in Jacona. And to Jem if they found him sheltering Ree.

  But first he had to wait for Jem to be well, for Jem to be well enough to survive on his own.

  “You’re leaving?” Jem asked. He managed to look about two years old and very confused.

  Ree nodded. Jem had stood up two days ago and he looked strong enough to survive, strong enough to do whatever he had done before meeting Ree. Why was it that Ree could not meet his eyes, and found himself looking at the floor as he said, “Stay away from the soldiers, Jem. You are—” He stopped sh
ort of saying that Jem was too pretty to be safe. He had not thought it, not thought it at all the whole time they had been together. Not consciously. Not with his rational mind. He had not. Jem was just . . . Jem. Ree looked up and caught a disturbing glimpse of broad blue eyes, like a summer sky. Threatening rain. “They are not . . . They do not have the restraints of the local patrols. They answer to no one.

  “Jacona will be safer for you without me. You could stay here, get work, that sort of thing.”

  Jem made a sound. It wasn’t quite a sigh or quite a sob, but it had a bit of both and more of frantic urgency. Ree looked up.

  Don’t let Jem cry, he thought. Don’t let Jem cry. He is just young and hurt and recovering from a lingering illness. His crying meant nothing. And yet, I don’t know if I can bear to watch him cry.

  Jem looked like he was trying very bravely not to cry. He was biting his lower lip, hard.

  Don’t let him ask me to stay, Ree thought. I can’t stay. I can’t.

  But instead of asking, Jem whispered, “My mother left me, on the street, when I was four. She gave me a sweet and said she would come back. She never—” He shook his head.

  Ree started to say “Better than—” meaning to say better than have your mother sell you to a customer when you’re barely thirteen. He remembered the fear, the frantic humiliation. He remembered being told about it, being sent to the room. He remembered running away.

  For months, before, he’d noticed his mother’s customers casting looks at him. There were men who didn’t seem to care if you were male or female, provided you were a young thing, whose services could be bought. Who could not complain. There were men who didn’t care what they did. Like that soldier, with Jem.

  But as he was about to tell Jem this, Ree stopped. Because all through it, he’d been afraid Jem would follow him, Jem would come with him—that Jem would get caught by the patrols and hung outside the city walls to freeze to death. Or worse, now summer had come. And suddenly he wondered if his mother had been afraid of what would happen to Ree, if one of her customers found him. If one of her customers treated him as the soldier had treated Jem.

  For the first time, he remembered his mother’s face that day, without flinching. And it seemed to him there was concern in her eyes, overlaid with a harshness she had put there, a false harshness. He remembered she hadn’t told him who the customer was. Or anything about him. Or how much he paid.

  She’d told him just enough to make Ree run away and be safe.

  Ree bit back tears, and forced harshness upon his features. He stepped close to Jem and did his best to growl, in his most threatening hobgoblin voice, “I’m tired of you. You’re human and slight and weak. I don’t want you with me. I can travel quicker alone, with my fangs and my hobgoblin senses, and my claws.” He saw Jem look startled, scared, and he felt as though his heart were bleeding, but he pressed on. “If you come with me, I’ll kill you. Like I killed the soldier.”

  Without waiting to see Jem’s expression, to see the further devastation his words had brought to it, he turned around, he jumped out the window—he skittered and ran his way to the ground.

  Running through the shadows to the abandoned washhouse, whose drains fed to the sewers and drains beneath the city, he wished he could remember how to cry. And he half-hoped a patrol would find him and kill him.

  The washhouse was quiet, in shadows. No patrols in it, more was the pity.

  Ree remembered it pretty well, from when his mother had come there with him, when he was very small. He didn’t want to think of his mother. It hurt even more now.

  He bent to the manhole and prized it open, his claws making short work of it. He had told Jem the truth. He would travel faster alone. And besides, if he got caught, he would die alone. He was a hobgoblin. A . . . thing. Part animal. He had no right to the company of a true human.

  Jem would be safer without him.

  Ree wondered if there was anywhere he could be safe. If a thing like him deserved safety.

  The drains beyond the manhole smelled acridly of old waste. Ree stared dubiously into the shadows. Nothing came racing out to eat him.

  Ree climbed gingerly down into it. Rusting steel rungs had been set into the shaft, so people had once come down into the sewers. That helped. He wasn’t the first. And there would be some way to get around down there. It couldn’t be all vertical tunnels and precipitously small shafts.

  He hoped there were no guards on the outlets.

  Ree listened for anything that might mean an attack. All he heard was water, dripping, trickling, and gurgling. He smelled more than water, even though last night’s rain would have washed a lot of the worst away.

  Once there had been spells on these drains, cleaning them so that only water flowed out at the end of them, spells to turn everything else into heavy dark mulch the farmers bought for their fields. Ree remembered watching them trade for the mulch at last summer’s fair. Now everything went out to the river, although work gangs had built weirs to catch the worst of the solid stuff.

  The rungs ended, leaving Ree’s feet dangling. He used his hands to lower himself to the bottom rung, and stretched. His feet touched solid ground.

  He sighed and let go. “Bit of a drop at the bottom,” he said. And realized Jem wasn’t there. He had got in the habit of talking to Jem. Of relating his actions to him. Even when he went out alone to hunt, he would come home and tell Jem everything.

  Home . . . when had Jem’s crash pad become home?

  But it wasn’t the place. It was because Jem was there. But Jem wasn’t here. Jem would never be here again. And that was as it should be. Ree had no right to risk Jem, no right to—

  He cut the thought off, and listened and peered into the darkness.

  This part of the drain was quiet. Ree saw and smelled nothing animal. If there were Changefish in the water, he had no way to tell.

  With no real idea which way to go, Ree decided to follow the flow of the water. There was a walkway along the side of the drain that must have been built so workmen could get in without having to walk in the water.

  He walked in silence, senses straining for a hint of danger. There was none. Once, he heard animal squabbling far off. Whatever made it, it was too far distant to be a danger to him.

  When drains joined the one he was in, narrow bridges crossed the channels.

  He crossed them, following his drain and the water, hoping that it would lead to an outlet that would take him out of the city, away from Jacona. If he had not been always listening, sniffing for danger, it would have been an easy walk.

  He did not know how long he walked, or how far. Darkness and the constant sounds of water played tricks on his senses, making it seem that he had been walking forever, and sometimes like no time at all had passed. Apart from the bridges where new drains joined his, everything was all the same.

  Finally, the darkness began to lift. Ree hurried toward gray, eager to be out of the never-ending blackness. Soon, light glinted off the water, the chilly white light of moonlight. Ree hurried toward the light. Then stopped.

  There was something there, at the grate waiting for him. Something big. As he drew closer, his heart started pounding. A hobgoblin had been tethered to the iron grate that sealed the drains. It looked looked partly like a snake and mostly like too many teeth. Its head swung back and forth at the end of its tether as it tried to reach him.

  Ree gulped. He jumped back. His claws all came out. But he thought of himself—of how the soldiers would kill him on sight. And he did not want to do that to another hobgoblin. Whose fault was it, if he had chanced to be near a snake, when the changes came? It had not asked to become a hobgoblin, any more than Ree had.

  “You don’t have to hurt me,” he said, and his voice came out small and frightened. “You’re like me. I’m like you. I mean you no harm.”

  Slowly, he stepped toward the thing, toward the grate. The eyes, amid the teeth, glinted, he thought, with a hint of understanding.

  He
thought he was safe and then the creature launched. Ree just managed to jump out of reach, flatten himself against the wall, while the thing’s too-sharp, too-many teeth closed near his bare arm.

  “Why—” Ree yelled.

  “You are nothing like me, kitten-rat boy. Snakes eat the likes of you,” the creature spoke, hissingly, through its many teeth. “And my life is spared because I’m important and I can kill the likes of you . . . vermin.”

  Ree was pinned against the dank wall. Moving either way would bring him within reach of the thing’s teeth. He could not go out. He could not go back. He could rush toward death or stay here till he starved.

  He would never see Jem again. Ree flinched from the thought, because it was stupid. He would never see Jem again anyway.

  Just then he heard a scream. He turned, at the same time the snake creature did.

  Jem stood in the tunnel, away from the snake’s reach. He had a crossbow. And he was screaming, a scream of rage through clenched teeth, as he pulled the string back on the bow.

  The snake thing tried to jump, but it was tethered. And it moved a little too late. The bolt entered the mouth between the rows of teeth.

  There was a roar and the thing jumped in the air. Then fell, and was still. And the smell came.

  Ree didn’t remember falling on his knees. And he didn’t remember Jem approaching him. He had put the bow on his back, and he had a quiver with bolts. His hands were free. He held onto Ree’s upper arms and pulled Ree up onto his feet.

  “I know you told me to keep away from soldiers, but I saw the crossbow right at the entrance to a bar as I was following you,” he said. “It was on the floor, near a table full of soldiers. I only had to go in a couple of steps. They never saw me.”

  He spoke very quickly, as if Ree would reproach him for disobeying his orders. But Ree’s mind could only hold onto the central fact, the central surprise of the last few minutes. He looked up into Jem’s big blue eyes. The eyes that were looking anxiously at Ree.