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.
ALL THE AGES OF MAN
by Tanya Huff
Tanya Huff lives and writes in rural Ontario with her partner, four cats, and an unintentional Chihuahua. After sixteen fantasies, she’s written two space operas,
Valor’s Choice
and
The Better Part of Valor,
and is currently working on a series of novels spun off from her Henry Fitzroy vampire series. In her spare time she gardens and complains about the weather.
“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.
:So you keep saying.:
“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.”
:You are a Herald. More importantly, you are needed.:
And that was why they were heading northeast, out to the edge of their sector to meet with Herald Jennet and her greenie. To accept said greenie from the older Herald and finish out the last eleven months of her year and a half of Internship. The courier who’d brought the news of Jennet’s mother’s sickness had also brought the news that the Herald able to replace her was already in the Sector but way over on the other side of a whole lot of nothing. It was decided he’d start his circuit from there and Jennet would backtrack the much shorter distance to meet up with Jors.