Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar (24 page)

“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.

“You followed me?” he said.

Jem nodded.

“Through the streets and the tunnels you followed me? All alone, you followed me?”

“Wherever you go, I go,” Jem said.

Ree blinked, wondering what he had done to deserve that kind of attention, that kind of devotion from someone like Jem. From someone brave enough to follow a hobgoblin through tunnels infested with worse creatures.

From someone brave enough to steal from soldiers after what had happened.

“I’m a hobgoblin,” he said. “Not . . . human.” A coward, who ran from everything. Who killed when he was scared. When the animal took over.

“Nonsense,” Jem said. He managed to look sterner, more adult. “You’re human, Ree. You’re good. You saved me. Without you, I would have died.”

“I killed the soldier by accident,” Ree said. “Because the rat in me got scared. I didn’t even know—” He shook his head. He did not want to remember lying under the soldier as he died. Did not want to remember the blood dripping onto him.

Jem shrugged. “Maybe. But no one forced you to free me. No one forced you to stay with me, to take care of me.”

Ree swallowed hard. “What else could I have done?” Too many memories, too many things he wanted to forget. The bloody welts on Jem’s body, the way he had just . . . given up. . . .

“You could have killed me,” Jem said. “You could have done what the soldier did.”

Despite the years of being hard, of showing nothing, Ree flinched. He could never . . . not with anyone who did not want him as much as he wanted them. Even though weakness was dangerous, he could not be angry at himself for flinching, for showing emotion. Jem was safe. He could show his true self to Jem.

If Jem saw Ree’s weakness, he did not show it. He pointed at the snake. “You could have done what he would have done. You’re human, Ree. And I will follow wherever you go.”

Ree shook himself. It seemed to him he’d been living in a long nightmare and just awakened.

He edged past the body of the snake thing, trying not to look at it. He took a deep breath, and extended his claws. “Let’s get out of here.” The bars in the grate were set wide, to let debris through. They should be far enough apart.

Jem nodded.

 

To Ree’s relief, the grate was wide enough for him to slip through, even if he did lose some fur on his shoulders and hips on the way.

He and Jem stumbled out of the river, into the moonlight, looking at a strange new world that held nothing they knew. Low, rolling hills stretched to the darkness of mountains, and the silver moonlight gave it all the look of a ghost land.

Ree sought Jem’s hand at the same time as the boy sought his. Their hands met, warm and moist. They stood there a moment, rat boy and street rat, facing a world of dangers they could not begin to anticipate.

“Well,” Ree said finally. “Guess we’d better get going. Got a ways to go and a lot to learn.”

“Yah.” Jem squeezed his hand. “Got a whole world to find, out here.”

They walked into the moonlight.

“I
’M too young for this.”

Although Jors had spoken the words aloud, thrown them, as it were, out onto the wind without expecting an answer, he received one anyway.

“Doesn’t make it any less true.”

:You are experienced in riding circuit,:
his Companion reminded him.
:All you must do is teach what you know.:

Jors snorted and shifted in the saddle. “So
you
keep saying.”

Gervais snorted in turn.
:Then perhaps you should listen.

“I’m not a teacher.”