Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “But her own kind never stopped searching for her, and eventually they found her. They attacked her in the First World, destroying the school. Ygrair barely escaped with her life. She fled into the Labyrinth with her few remaining students, set them free to Shape their worlds, and closed the Portal into the First World behind them. She thought she would be safe from the Shurak in here, while she regained her strength . . . but as I have said, she is not regaining her strength, but weakening.” He sighed. “And worse . . . somehow, one of the Shurak, a Shaper himself, has found his way into the Labyrinth. I stumbled upon him, two worlds ago.”

  Despite myself, I was intrigued by this bizarre tale. Maybe Karl really had been a playwright. “How did that happen?”

  “Clearly he infiltrated the school, posing as a student. Ygrair herself must have placed him in the Labyrinth, unaware of his true nature. She did not warn me of the possibility, so I do not believe she knew.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Based on what he did in the last world, he intends to steal the hokhmah of every world he can reach, stripping it from the Shaper, and then killing him or her and Shaping the world to serve his own ends. Each world he seizes is another denied to Ygrair, and as long as the Portals between them remain open, feeds more power to him. I can only believe that he means to eventually find and kill Ygrair, and take her place . . . but unlike Ygrair, who values freedom and creativity above all, and opened the Labyrinth to the Shapers to enable them to create a myriad of diverse worlds, he will make all worlds copies of his own, and set himself up as absolute ruler of all.”

  “Scary guy,” I said. There’s always an Evil Overlord . . .

  “He is,” Karl said. “And you have met him.”

  I blinked. “Wait. You mean the leader of the terrorists was . . . ?”

  “He calls himself the Adversary.”

  Well, that’s slightly better than Dark Lord, I thought. “He knew my name.”

  “You were both students of Ygrair. A fact he remembers, though you do not.”

  “And he’s . . . an alien.”

  “Your word for it, yes.”

  I remembered the man standing over me in the coffee shop. I remembered thinking he was going to kill me. I remembered the shock of hearing my name. What I didn’t remember was green skin, bug eyes, funny ears, or a bumpy forehead. “He looked human to me.”

  “So does Ygrair. She says the form is imposed by the planet.”

  Convenient. “And you just . . . stumbled on him?”

  “Yes, in the world before last, a world he had Shaped: tightly controlled, authoritarian, with himself as the supreme and unquestioned ruler. The amount of Shaping power he retained impressed me—at first, I thought he might even be the one I sought. But when I approached him, I . . . discovered the truth. I fled.”

  “And he followed you.”

  Karl looked down again, and I saw that now his fists were clenched. “Yes. I did not think he could. But he did. To the last world, and then . . .”

  “To this one.”

  He nodded.

  “To mine.”

  He nodded again.

  I felt cold. “If this is true—”

  “Every word,” Karl said.

  “—then you led him here.”

  “I did not mean to. I knew he had followed me into the last world, but I did not think he could follow me into this one.”

  “You led him here, and he killed my best friend.” My own fists had clenched: I could feel my nails digging into my palms. I stood up, for no reason except I could no longer bear to be sitting down.

  He lifted his chin, met my gaze squarely. “Yes. But you Shaped your world anew in the face of that attack, even though—as I have just discovered—you did not know you had the ability to do so.” He got to his feet, too, faced me across the table. “You have more power remaining to you than any Shaper I have ever seen in any other world. You have the power Ygrair needs. You are strong enough to hold the hokhmah of many worlds and deliver them to Ygrair. You are the one I was sent to find.”

  Right on cue, lightning flashed—but it wasn’t distant lightning, the first warning shots of an approaching storm. It lit the street like God’s own camera flash, and the thunder that followed sounded like a battleship’s broadside. An instant later torrential rain swept the cobblestones, a downpour so heavy it reduced the lights on the far side of Blackthorne Avenue to a faint glow in an instant.

  Then came the wind. If the lightning and thunder had been an exploding bomb, the wind was the shockwave. It slammed into the scaffolding at the front of the shop, and blew it apart as though it were made of matchsticks. I glimpsed one of the young men whirling through the air, head over heels, out of my sight. I screamed, flinging up my arms to protect my face, as my beautiful display window shattered and a steel rod exploded the glass tabletop, slamming into the floor not five feet from where we sat, splintering the hardwood and impaling the latest issue of Glazes and Greenware. Yatsar stared at the rod, then his head shot up. “Were you touched?” he shouted above the roar of wind and rain.

  I lowered my arms. “No, it missed me, but . . .” I stared at the broken glass, the water pooling on my once-beautiful, now horribly scarred floor, the metal rod still vibrating in it. “I can’t believe this is happening.” A wild hope leaped up in me. “This isn’t happening!” I shouted at the storm, but the window remained broken, the rain kept pouring in, and as if to mock me, lightning and thunder exploded above us again.

  “That won’t work,” Karl said grimly. “Not if you were touched by the Adversary.”

  “I told you—”

  “Not now,” he snapped. “Not by glass or metal. During the attack on the coffee shop. Did someone touch you?”

  I remembered the brown-haired young man reaching down to me, the shock as his hand touched my forehead, just before I made him and everything else vanish. “Yes, but only for an—ow!”

  Karl’s hand had shot out and grabbed my hand so hard it hurt. “Is there a back door?”

  “What?” I tried to focus. “Through the studio . . . why?”

  “Because we need to run.” He jerked me to my feet, almost pulling my arm out of its socket. “Now!”

  Another blast of lightning—and the lights went out.

  “My shop—”

  “Forget your shop,” Karl snarled. “If you stay here, you will die. Come on!” He grabbed the cowboy hat and duster. “Which way?”

  I led him toward the back room, into my studio, through it, the studio I’d wanted all my life . . .

  Or had I? If Karl were telling the truth . . . ?

  He couldn’t be! It was all insane gibberish, cooked up by some fruitcake who’d read so many fantasy novels he was starting to dress like a character in one, a delusion cobbled together from bits of myth (the Minotaur), science fiction (alternate dimensions), and a healthy dose of . . . what was the term? Mary Sue? . . . wish fulfillment. He wanted me to believe I was the special anointed one, the only one who could save the multiverse from the nefarious doings of the Evil Overlord. It was crazy, it was impossible, it couldn’t be real . . .

  And yet Aesha had died, and Brent had forgotten her. Everyone had forgotten her. Even my HiPhone had forgotten her. Rinaldo had disappeared. My clothes had been damp from a storm that hadn’t broken yet. Three hours had vanished from my life.

  Now the storm that had already struck once had struck again—and this time, it had arrived much sooner, much more powerfully, and seemed to be targeting my shop. Only Karl knew what I had seen, only Karl offered an explanation, however crazy it sounded.

  And so I fled with him.

  We reached the gray metal back door, slamming it open and bursting out it into the alley. My car, a brand-new silver Fjord Model Z, was parked there, underneath an overhanging tin roof that, miraculously, hadn’t blown away, and at l
east sheltered us from the rain—now mixed with hail, judging by the machine-gun rattle overhead—as we dashed to the vehicle. I climbed in and pressed the start button as Karl scrambled into the passenger seat, though it occurred to me if I’d been a little faster I could have driven off and left him behind.

  As I backed into the alley, turning the nose of the car toward 22nd Street, another almighty gust lifted the tin roof of the carport like a piece of paper and twirled it away into the rain. It smashed into a second-floor window in the back of the building across the alley, sending a glittering shower of shards to the pavement below.

  At the same instant, a white van skidded to a halt at the end of the alley, blocking it. How did they get here so fast? I thought, even as I slammed the car into reverse and backed full-speed toward the other end of the alley, which opened onto an access road inaccessible from the pedestrian mall. Even as the van dwindled in front of me its doors opened. Flames spat from gun barrels, but whether by luck or because the wind and rain defeated their aim, no bullets struck us.

  Then we reached the access road, and I jerked the wheel right, swinging the car around the corner. Gunfire blew the bricks in the wall above us into dust. I shoved the car into drive, and we roared off into the storm as if our lives depended on it.

  Apparently, they did.

  SIX

  IT’S AMAZING HOW quickly my doubts about whether Karl was telling me the truth vanished once people started shooting at me.

  I’d never been in a car chase before, but television had taught me to zigzag to throw off pursuers. Which I did: I knew the neighborhood well enough not to get myself trapped in any blind alleys, and I even drove the wrong way down a couple of one-way streets, although why I thought the men who had just tried to kill me—again—would hesitate to break traffic laws, I’m not quite sure. My windshield wipers made little progress against the pouring rain, driven sideways by the screaming wind, so visibility was less than ideal, but I didn’t hit anyone or anything.

  Considering no one else had seemed to be able to see just how bad the approaching storm would be, they’d reacted quickly enough when it hit. There were still cars on the road, but most people seemed to have headed for shelter. I wished we could. I dodged fallen trees and fallen power lines, drove through intersections where the streetlights had failed, and once passed a car flipped onto its side. My own car shuddered in outrage at the onslaught of the storm, but remained steadfastly on all four wheels.

  I pushed the radio button. Static crackled through the speakers instead of the soft jazz of my favorite station. I ran through all the other stations using the buttons on the steering wheel, never taking my eyes off the road, which—I swerved around an enormous branch skittering across the road as though alive—might have been suicidal. All local stations were off the air, although stations from the next city down the Interstate remained active. None of them were talking about the storm destroying Eagle River, but then, it had only struck a few minutes ago.

  I flicked off the radio. We passed a collapsed building, flames flickering in the wreckage despite the rain, people digging in the rubble. I slowed, thinking I should help, but Karl snapped, “Keep driving!”

  I gulped, swerved around a chunk of roof, and accelerated down the strangely empty road beyond. Two minutes later, the wind fell away to almost nothing. Ahead, light beyond the veil of rain promised an edge to the clouds, but the sky in the rearview mirror remained pitch-black, dust and debris swirling and twirling within it.

  “The Adversary has lost track of us,” Karl said. “For the moment.”

  “But if he can create a storm like that . . .” Seeing my knuckles white on the steering wheel, I forced myself to relax my fingers a little. “Where do I go? How can I escape him?”

  “He did not create the storm,” Karl said. “It arose naturally . . . well, unnaturally . . . because of the leakage of creative energy from the last world into this one, through the Portal.”

  “But he used it . . .”

  “Using something is not the same as creating it. He controls the last world, so he was able to Shape the energy that leaked into this one to a certain extent. But the storm will dissipate quickly now that he has unleashed it, and he cannot Shape its equal . . . not as long as you are alive.”

  “Then let’s keep me that way,” I said. I took a deep, shaking breath. “How do get away from him . . . from his killers? How do I get my old life back?”

  Karl had twisted around to look out the back window; now he turned forward again, and frowned at me. “You get away by fleeing,” he said. “Which we are now doing. As for how you get your old life back . . . I would have thought you grasped the truth by now. You do not.”

  I shook my head violently. “No! I won’t accept that. I have to. I just opened my shop. I have a boyfriend. My Mom . . .”

  “Have you listened to nothing I’ve said?” Karl snapped. “I told you—those things are Shaped. Real in this world while you are in this world, but lost to you now that the Adversary has entered it and stolen its hokhmah from you. This whole world is lost to you now. As your life will be if the Adversary catches you.” He peered ahead through the rain, now little more than a drizzle. “The faster and farther we get away from the city, the better.”

  “The freeway is just a few blocks—”

  He shook his head. “No. Back roads only.” He opened the glove compartment and peered inside. “Map?”

  “Not in there.” Who carries maps in the glove compartment these days? I pressed the NAV button on the steering wheel instead. A screen popped up out of the dashboard and lit with a map, the triangle marking our location crawling across it. Karl closed the glove compartment, and leaned forward to examine the screen. “Left, next intersection,” he said after a moment. “Three blocks, then right for four, then left again. Then straight out of town. Once we are in the country, we will pause long enough to consider our next action.”

  I felt like my next action should be screaming, but instead I drove, the storm falling ever farther behind us. Even after we ran out from under the rain, though, the streets remained empty, as if everyone were cowering inside . . . as if I’d fallen into some postapocalyptic science fiction novel where plague or nuclear war had wiped out most of the population.

  I tried the radio again. Still nothing about the storm on the out-of-town stations, but my jazz station had come back to life, though it wasn’t playing Charlie Parker. “. . . mayor has declared a state of emergency,” said a female announcer, whose ordinarily sultry voice I barely recognized in the shaken tones coming over the speakers. “Everyone is asked to shelter in place. Chief of Police Darrel Stimpson issued a statement a few minutes ago warning residents that a known terrorist has been seen in the city and may be using the storm to cover preparations for a major attack. Citizens are asked to keep a lookout for a 2017 Fjord Model Z, license plate reading POTTER, last seen . . .”

  I stabbed the OFF button, so violently I almost swerved off the road. “Terrorist!” I cried. “Is that you?”

  “No,” Karl said. “It is you.”

  “Me?” I shot him a look. He certainly looked serious. “But that’s crazy! I have a friend who’s a cop. The Chief of Police knows me. I went to school with one of his sergeants! I called the police just yesterday . . . about you! I’ve been to a barbecue in the Chief’s backyard!”

  “I doubt,” Karl said, “that the Chief of Police remembers that. For him, it never happened.”

  I felt a chill. “The Adversary?”

  He nodded.

  “But . . . how?”

  “He has your hokhmah. Though he cannot Shape this world to the extent he wishes, while you live, he can Shape it in small ways—and the easiest Shaping of all is to alter the perceptions of one of the denizens of this world, who, after all, are already Shaped beings. He can do it merely by speaking to them, in person, or by radio or telephone.”

&
nbsp; I remembered how, after I told Brent to believe me, he had suddenly stopped worrying about me and gone about his day. I remembered telling Carter Truman I was fine, and how he’d instantly accepted that. I had manipulated them both, as though they were nothing more than puppets . . . animated mannequins.

  “No doubt police responded to the shots fired in the alley,” Karl was continuing. “It would have been an easy matter for the Adversary to Shape them, to convince them to contact the Chief of Police, and then convince him to put the Adversary in touch with the Mayor.”

  “And he told them I’m a terrorist?” I said.

  “Apparently.”

  I shot an uneasy glance at the buildings lining the road. They looked deserted, but I felt like every window hid a spy, someone already reaching for the phone. My foot pressed harder against the pedal, but Karl said, sharply, “Don’t speed. It is suspicious enough that we are on the road at all when so few are. Our vehicle’s description and identification number have been made public. We must avoid drawing attention to ourselves.”

  So I lifted my foot again, and we crawled along at the speed limit, so slowly I wanted to scream (again). I came to a complete stop at every stop sign, waited patiently at every red light. We saw no more than half a dozen other vehicles on the road—none of them white vans, thank God—before we rolled past some run-down warehouses and a few empty lots surrounded by chain-link fences, and into the countryside at last, on a gravel road between stubble-covered farmers’ fields. A dark pine forest rose maybe half a mile to our left, broken here and there by the bright yellow of aspen.