Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “Of course,” said Smoak.

  “Very well, then.” The Adversary gave him a pointed look. “Shouldn’t you be taking charge of matters?”

  Smoak hurried out. The Adversary took one more look at the radar screen. The blip of the helicopter had vanished once it landed. He nodded once, then followed Smoak.

  * * *

  Karl put the compass into the breast pocket of the black duster. Then he picked up his backpack and pulled it on. “Ready?” he said.

  I didn’t answer. I kept staring after the departed helicopter.

  “Shawna,” Karl said.

  I still didn’t move.

  He stepped toward me, reached out a hand. “Shawna, did you hear what I said?”

  Anger suddenly boiled up in me. I slapped his hand away and turned on him. “Yes, I heard!” I spat. “I’ve heard every word. Just give me a fucking minute.”

  Karl’s mouth tightened. “We do not have a minute.”

  I folded my arms, glared at him. “Explain something to me. Eventually the Adversary is going to figure out we were let off up here. We’re just a couple of valleys over from his precious Portal. Why won’t he assume that’s where we’re going, and send this ‘cadre’ of his there to wait for us?”

  “The Adversary does not know I can destroy the Portal, and he knows I know that he can reopen it if all I do is close it,” Karl said. “He also knows it leads only back to the world we were in before. On that side, it is heavily guarded. If I were foolish enough to take you there, you would be instantly captured or killed. He has no reason to think, even if we are close to the Portal, that that is where we are headed.”

  “Are you saying it will be completely unprotected on this side?”

  “There will be some sort of guard, but if we are fortunate, it will not be members of his cadre—there are only a few of them with him, and he does not like to divide them. Any guards will most likely be people of this world, and that means you can Shape them.”

  Great. Twist more minds, destroy more lives. I hated being a god: a Greek Olympian kind of god, toying with humans . . .

  I changed tack. “What if you’re wrong? What if he has left members of his cadre there?”

  “Then we will change our plans,” Karl said evenly. “As we have several times already. You must trust me.”

  “Must? I have to follow you. That doesn’t mean I have to trust you. You could be lying to me. You could be as much of a threat to me as the Adversary. Why should I trust you?”

  I suddenly realized I had shouted that last question, and pressed my lips together. My words didn’t echo: they had fallen to instant silence on the floor of the forest, itself unnaturally quiet in the wake of the noisy departure of the helicopter, any birds or animals in earshot of that racket still cowering.

  Karl looked at me coldly. “If you do not trust me, then you should not follow me. Abandon me now. Hike into the mountains, or down into the lowlands—it makes no difference to me. I will leave you, and make my way to where I can open a new Portal into the next world, where once again I will find the Shaper, and hope he or she has the power to do what Ygrair needs done. You will at least buy me time, since the Adversary must find and kill you before he can follow me to the next world. Perhaps, if you choose to stay and die, you will buy life for the next Shaper I find with sufficient power to fulfil my quest. But choose. Now. Will you trust me, and follow me, and do what we must do to escape, and defeat the Adversary, or will you try to run back to your old life, even though that life is gone forever and you go only to your death?”

  I hated him at that moment. He had opened the Portal into my world. Had he never come, the Adversary wouldn’t have either. My world—my life—would have continued, peacefully, just the way I liked it—just the way I had Shaped it.

  But Karl had come to my world, and the Adversary had followed, and my old life was as dead as I would be if the Adversary caught up to me. Oh, Karl was right, I had a choice: I could leave him and take my chances. But even though I still didn’t believe that everything he had told me was true, I did believe him when he said that without him, I was as good as dead.

  “Fine,” I said sullenly. “Let’s go. I obviously have no choice.”

  “Not if you want to live,” he said, voice still cold.

  I spread my arms to take in the surrounding forest. “So, which way, exactly? I could die just as easily here in the forest as I would if the Adversary caught me. Do you know anything about wilderness camping and hiking? Because I don’t.”

  “I have trekked through many woods in many worlds,” Karl said. “I know the direction we must go, and as you saw, I have a compass.” He took a deep breath, then actually smiled a little, as though consciously ridding himself of his anger of a moment before. “Although a . . . what are they called? . . . GPS unit would be more useful, had those who created these packs only thought to include one.”

  I took my own deep breath, used it to push down my own fury. “Well, it was a pretty low-rent resort.”

  His smile broadened a smidgen. I hated him a little less. But only a little. “First, we must get farther in among the trees,” he said. “It is not impossible someone saw the helicopter and has a spyglass trained on us this very moment.”

  A spyglass? I shook my head and followed him deeper into the forest, which, as forests go, was rather scraggly. The thin undergrowth made getting in among the trees not a problem, but once we were out of sight of the clearing, I realized, looking around, just how much every tree looked like every other tree. Left on my own, I knew I would be lost in moments.

  Karl opened the map he had taken from the helicopter and spread it on a handy bush. Not a breath of air moved through the trees to disturb it. Karl pointed. “This is our valley.” He moved his finger a few inches south. “Here is the mine. As you can see, a road of sorts runs to it from the old logging camp where we landed.” He lifted his pointing finger from the map and swung it toward the woods. “If we go that way perhaps two hundred yards, we should find it.”

  “A road,” I said. “We’re just going to walk along a nice, exposed road while the NBI, and probably state troopers, forest rangers, and maybe by this time the National Guard and the Boy Scouts, are all looking for us.”

  “No,” Karl said. “We will parallel the road, in the forest, with great care.”

  “It would have been nice,” I said, a little of my earlier anger bubbling up again, “if you’d had a better plan for escaping once you contacted me.”

  “It is impossible to plan,” Karl retorted, “when the world can change around you without warning.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. After all, my original plan for today had been to make more mugs for the Human Bean.

  We set off through the trees, and my confidence in Karl’s non-GPS-reliant navigational abilities rose slightly when we found the road . . . well, track, really, rutted and so weed-grown it seemed clear no vehicles had been along it all summer . . . right where he said it should be. We set off parallel to it toward the south.

  At first the going was fairly easy, the ground more-or-less level, the undergrowth sparse. But that changed as the track climbed the southern flank of the valley. My heart thudded in my chest, I was breathing way harder than I liked, and my legs ached so much I wished I’d never started using an electric pottery wheel. If I’d spent the last ten years kicking one to keep it spinning, I might be in better shape now.

  At least throwing pots had given me strong hands, which would come in handy if I had to throttle anyone . . .

  I stared at Karl, or at least the back of his blue backpack, all I could see of him as he toiled uphill ahead of me. I still knew next to nothing about him. Where—and when, exactly?—had Ygrair found him? He had to have parents, siblings, a hometown . . .

  Or did he? Was he just another copy of someone from the First World, any memories of hi
s family, of childhood, of adolescence, Shaped by Ygrair, his personal reality altered just as I had altered that of McNally?

  Or maybe he had his own Shaped world somewhere, and even though he lacked the power to do what Ygrair needed done, had enough to undertake this quest of hers. He had evaded my question, when we first met, as to whether he, too, was a Shaper.

  So many questions. I would have loved to have asked them of him as we hiked, if not for the fact I had no breath . . . and a strong suspicion he wouldn’t answer them anyway.

  About four hours after leaving the landing zone, as we continued to toil uphill, switchback by switchback, parallel to the road, I heard another helicopter, distant, behind us. We had hiked several miles, but as the crow—or helicopter—flies, we were probably no more than two or three from the clearing where we had disembarked, though we couldn’t see it—or the approaching helicopter—through the trees: a good thing, since otherwise whoever was aboard it might be able to see us.

  Karl stopped and turned his head toward the sound of the rotors. I gratefully plopped down on a fallen log, took off my pack, and dug out my canteen. While I took a few good gulps, Karl placed his pack beside mine, then picked his way through the trees to the road. I saw him looking back down it the way we had come. He ducked back into the forest almost immediately.

  “I believe it has landed in the same clearing where McNally put us down,” he said as he rejoined me.

  I felt a chill. “They got McNally.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps they saw us on radar after all. It does not matter. What matters is that if anyone aboard that helicopter has any tracking skill at all, it won’t take them long to figure out which way we went. About two minutes after that the helicopter will be headed straight for us.” He paused. “Unless you can stop them.”

  I lowered my canteen and shook my head. “No,” I said sharply. “I’m not doing that again. Someone died the last time I did that.”

  “It is unlikely you can Shape people at this distance. But you might be able to do something else.”

  “Like what?” I demanded.

  “It is your world, still, at least after a fashion,” Karl said. “You can still Shape it.”

  “What do you suggest?” I said, with less heat: I was genuinely curious. If I could Shape the world without hurting anyone . . .

  “Our trail needs to be hidden. So hide it. Or plant a false one.”

  My irritation returned. “Well, that’s pretty much uselessly vague. How, exactly?”

  “You have to decide that,” he said. “You have to imagine it. Believe it’s true. You do not have to fill in all the details—the world will do that for you, according to its natural laws. Just imagine, fully, completely, that they cannot find our trail.” He paused. “As you imagined the track that led us into the forest from the main road, and the resort.”

  I blinked. “Are you saying those weren’t there until we needed them?”

  “I cannot say for certain,” Karl said, “but that is my belief.”

  “Then I did a piss-poor job of it. Or we’d have more to eat in our packs than trail mix.”

  “That’s because you did it, more or less, by accident,” Karl said. “You did not imagine it in detail. If you did it at all; admittedly, I may be seeing Shaping where there was none. But whether you created the clearing and the resort or not, I believe you still have power to effect some local change to the world to make it harder for our pursuers to track us.”

  Feeling like an idiot, but also feeling the urgency of doing something to keep us hidden from our pursuers, I closed my eyes. I imagined, as fiercely as I could, that we had left no trail in the woods, that we could not be tracked. I felt . . . something . . . a kind of unfurling of my subconscious. For a moment, I lost all sense of my body, as I went . . . elsewhere.

  And then, with a shock like a rubber band breaking, I felt my body again. My cold, wet body.

  What the hell . . . ?

  I opened my eyes.

  The sky had been clear and the air mountain-cool, but not cold, when I’d closed my eyes. Now clouds hung low above us, the temperature had dropped twenty degrees—and fat white snowflakes swirled among the trees, joining the six inches of snow already on the forest floor. No footsteps marred that white blanket, even though it must have snowed for hours to cover the ground that completely.

  Except, of course, it hadn’t.

  I was shivering. I wrapped my arms around myself. I not only felt cold, I felt exhausted and headachy again, fatigued in a way completely different from the ordinary physical tiredness of climbing the hillside. I felt as though I’d used up a large portion of some store of energy within me I hadn’t even known I’d had. I also, I suddenly realized, felt ravenous.

  Karl frowned at me. “Crude,” he said. “It will buy us time, yes, but such a large Shaping . . . the Adversary will almost certainly have sensed it. I did not expect . . .” His voice trailed off. “Perhaps I should have,” he said after a moment. “After all, if you did not have unusual strength, I never would have approached you.”

  I reached for my pack, and unzipped it. “Yeah, and have I properly thanked you for that?” I said as I pulled out the thin flat rectangle of a poncho, hoping I’d put enough sarcasm in my voice to register even on Karl. I unfolded the poncho and put it on over my red nylon-shelled jacket. Though bright yellow and definitely not flattering, it at least provided an additional snow-deflecting layer. Then I started digging in the pack’s outside pockets, trying to remember where I’d last put the trail mix.

  “You can thank me later,” Karl said absently, peering at me. Clearly I still needed to power up the sarcasm phasers a few clicks to penetrate his shields of obliviousness. “How do you feel?”

  “Tired,” I snapped. “Cranky. Cold.” Where the hell was that trail mix?

  “You have felt unusual fatigue before, in these past couple of days. And an occasional headache, too, I think?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “How do you know?”

  “Every time you Shape, it takes energy. Just now, you expended a great deal of it. You should eat something. That will help with the physical fatigue.”

  I suddenly remembered I’d put the trail mix in my coat pocket, not a backpack pocket, the last time I’d eaten some. I fumbled underneath the poncho, found the jacket pocket, and pulled out the package. I upended the remaining contents into my mouth. “Gee, I never would have thought of that,” I mumbled around a mouthful of nuts and berries.

  Karl looked up at the clouds, which hid the peaks that had stood out clear in the sunshine just moments before. “Your Shaping will cover our tracks, true enough, but it will cause difficulties as we ascend, and we still have to get over the ridge into the next valley. And the Adversary now has a general idea where we are. He may even . . .” For a long moment, he just stared silently uphill into the snow.

  I shoved the empty trail-mix package into one of the backpack’s pockets. There were a couple of unopened packages in the main part of the pack, but I thought I’d survive for the moment. “You didn’t finish your sentence.”

  He turned to me. “What?”

  “‘He may even . . . ’” I prompted. “He may even what?”

  “Remember,” Karl said, “you are not the only one who can now Shape this world. We know for certain he has Shaped individuals, as you have also done, to serve his needs.”

  “I wish I hadn’t,” I muttered.

  “Don’t be foolish,” Karl snapped. “If you had not Shaped the helicopter pilot, you would now be dead.”

  Like Tom Reed, I thought, but didn’t say. “So, if I can do this,” I gestured at the now-you-don’t-see-it-now-you-do snowfall, “are you thinking he might be able to do something like it, too?”

  “I do not think so . . . yet,” Karl said slowly. “I think . . . I hope . . . that your . . . stamp, let us say . . . upon the world, t
he fact that all of it was originally Shaped to your desires, will prevent him from making changes on this scale, at least for a time. But the more he Shapes individuals, causing them in turn to alter this world in ways that serve him, the more he will weaken that connection to you. It may be that his power will grow. While yours . . .”

  “While mine lessens,” I finished for him.

  “Possibly,” he said. He paused. “Probably,” he admitted.

  “Great.”

  “All the more reason for us to do what we can to weaken his power by destroying the Portal, and then leave this world, as soon as possible,” Karl said. He bent over, unzipped his own pack, and dug out his own poncho. “We should keep moving,” he said as he pulled the poncho, bright pink, on over the black duster. He looked ridiculous, but he didn’t seem to care. He took off his cowboy hat, slapped it on his thigh to dislodge the snow from its brim, then settled it back on his head. “Even though our tracks have been obliterated, the road we have been following will be an obvious route for them to send a patrol along. They have no vehicles, and we will be difficult to spot from the air in this,” he gestured at the falling snow and low clouds, “so I would expect armed men on foot.”

  With resignation, I settled my backpack on my shoulders. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  The earlier part of the hike had been tremendously tiring. Now it also became scarily slippery, cursedly cold, and wearingly wet—just all-around alliteratively annoying. The temperature, a handy thermometer built into one of the straps of Karl’s backpack informed me, was twenty-six degrees, mild enough that climbing kept us warm (even a little too warm), but cold enough that I knew as soon as we stopped we’d feel the chill in a hurry. Even though I was about as far from an outdoorsy type as you could get, I liked to read about grand adventures, and thus knew all about hypothermia. (Also altitude sickness, malaria, trench foot, Ebola, and plague, and how unpleasant death by drowning is—all of which I also hoped to avoid experiencing firsthand.)