Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because the Shaper had lost control,” Karl said. “Whatever kind of world he thought he was making, by making magic real, he gave away too much power. His world was a place of warfare and terror and enslavement and death.”

  I stopped. “Wait,” I said. “You’re saying a Shaped world, even if the Adversary doesn’t show up, can go . . . wrong?”

  “Do you have crime in your city?” Karl said. “Are there wars?”

  “Some,” I said. “And sure, here and there. But they’re contained . . .”

  “Do you like wars and crime?”

  “No, but there’s nothing I can do to . . .” My voice trailed away.

  “The Shaper,” Karl said, “sets up the initial conditions of the world. How much power they have to continue to Shape the world varies with the Shaper. Some have none. Those Shapers, although they remember Shaping their worlds—unlike you—then simply live within them, unable to change them further. Problems may arise that they did not foresee, and are powerless to correct.”

  “So if the initial conditions have chaos built in . . .”

  “Chaos will result.”

  “You said ‘some’ Shapers have no power left.”

  Karl nodded. “Other Shapers have a little power remaining, though if there are serious flaws baked into their worlds, they may not have enough ability to do more than protect themselves. It is very rare for a Shaper to keep as much power as you have kept. Which, of course, is what drew me to you.” He sighed. “It would have been far more useful had you also retained your memories of who and what you are. Still, if we are fortunate . . .” He stopped suddenly. “Uh-oh.”

  If there’s one thing you don’t want to hear from the semimystical guide who is attempting to spirit you from one world to another without attracting the attention of a godlike murderous Adversary, it’s, “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh what?” I peered past him into the fog. “Another bear?”

  “No,” he said. “Another unintended consequence of the way you Shaped the world.”

  At first I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then I realized that the fog down the road from us displayed a certain . . . solidity. And then I realized it wasn’t fog at all, but a wall of snow. As we moved closer, I saw toppled trees and shattered stone mixed in with it.

  An avalanche.

  “Heavy snow on warm ground, a layer of water forms, down it comes,” Karl said, as if I hadn’t figured that out myself.

  “Can’t we just . . . climb over it?”

  “It might not be stable,” Karl said. He looked up at the sky. “The fog is lifting. Let us wait until it clears a bit, and then decide how to proceed.”

  We sat on a rock, munching chips and (ugh) trail mix. The fog slipped slowly up the slopes, gradually revealing just how much of a problem the avalanche was going to be.

  The answer turned out to be: not as much as it might have been. The slide had wiped away the road and splashed up the other side of the pass, but it looked like it shouldn’t be too difficult to make our way around its tip, and presumably pick up the road again on the other side. The trees were thinner at this altitude, which helped. Once we could see where we were going, we began toiling up the eastern side of the pass, just beyond the farthest extent of the slide’s tangled mass of snow, rock, and splintered pine.

  There was, of course, a downside to thinner forest cover and lifting fog. About the time the sun began to break through the clouds, I heard a sound I was beginning to hate: the beat of a helicopter’s rotors, rising up from the valley behind us. Clearly the chopper and its keepers had been waiting for just such a break to resume their aerial reconnaissance.

  “Into the trees!” Karl ordered, and we both scrambled for the thin forest, but it didn’t seem like nearly enough cover, even after we did our best to cover the brightly colored backpacks with leaves, and crouched behind some rocks ourselves. If the helicopter flew right over us . . .

  . . . but it didn’t. It came into sight, but hovered a considerable distance away, in the direction of our overnight campsite. Something moved in the woods. I caught a glimpse of pink . . .

  Then I realized what I was looking at. It was our grizzly morning visitor, still carrying Karl’s poncho in its mouth. The bright splash of color must have attracted the attention of the observers aboard the aircraft. Not surprisingly, having a helicopter hovering over its head sent the bear hightailing downhill, back the way we’d come. The copter followed; maybe whoever was aboard thought the bear had raided our camp, and hoped it would lead them back to it. Maybe they just had a thing for bears. Maybe my Shaping was still helping to conceal us. Whatever the reason, the moment the helicopter was out of sight, we scrambled to our feet, grabbed our backpacks, and ran through the thin and spindly forest at the top of the pass to the much deeper, darker, and therefore more inviting forest down the other side.

  We reached that thicker growth just as the sound of rotors waxed behind us once more, and crouched among heavy, snow-laden branches as the copter thundered by, somewhere off to our right. We couldn’t see it, so I hoped no one aboard it could see us.

  “They won’t rely on the helicopter to find us,” Karl said. “Now that they have seen the bear with the poncho, they’re sure we came this way. Someone is almost certainly coming up the pass behind us on foot, and before long—if they are not already on their way—someone will be coming down the pass ahead of us. We must stay well clear of the road from here on.”

  He didn’t suggest I Shape the world again. Looking back at the avalanche debris, I couldn’t blame him. We could just as easily have been in its path.

  “What about more bears?” I said.

  “Grizzlies can have overlapping territories, so it’s not impossible,” Karl said, “but they need two hundred to five hundred square miles in total, so the odds are we will not see another one.”

  I stared at him. “You don’t know The Wizard of Oz and you’ve never heard of J.R.R. Tolkien, but you know random facts about grizzly bears?”

  “I know many random facts picked up during my journeys,” he said. “Also, the wizard of what?”

  I sighed. “Forget it.”

  “With pleasure,” Karl said. He turned and pushed on through the trees, without looking back. He moved faster than me, too, so he was soon twenty or thirty yards ahead, his blue backpack my navigational beacon.

  It occurred to me that I could easily step to the side and vanish from his sight, make my way back down into the forest, and . . .

  . . . what? Find a secluded cabin, and try to hide out for the rest of my life? Survive on nuts and berries?

  Nuts and berries was what trail mix was made out of. Blecch.

  I kept following Karl.

  As I had previously noted, all the trees looked the same, so I promptly lost any sense of direction, except for downhill: but since at times the slope petered out or reversed direction, even that would have done me little good if I were on my own. Instead, we navigated by Karl’s compass. He would find south, and locate the farthest tree he could see in that direction. We’d walk to it, then he’d repeat the process. It wasn’t fast, but it kept us more or less on the right course and, even more importantly, well hidden.

  Late in the afternoon, we left behind the last vestiges of my Shaped snowfall, and just as the sun slipped behind the mountains at the head of the valley, plunging us into the shadows that would become our second night in the woods (though it was still a couple of hours until what would have been sunset on the prairie), we came out of the trees onto the banks of a stream, flowing swiftly toward the east, no doubt to join the river that gave my city its name. If I had a boat, I thought, I could probably drift all the way home.

  Then I looked a little farther downstream, saw the foaming rapids, and amended that thought. Well, my drowned body could drift all the way home.

/>   The stream was too broad and deep to ford even where we were. The aforementioned rapids offered little hope of an easier crossing downstream. That meant we’d have to head upstream—and that, of course, would eventually bring us back to the road, which presumably crossed the river on a bridge. Which, I thought, would be a fine place for anyone chasing us to post a lookout.

  Karl clearly thought the same. He looked up at the sky. “We will rest here until dark,” he said. “It appears it will be a clear evening. Moonlight and starlight should provide enough illumination for us to find our way upstream to a crossing.”

  I nodded and sat on a rock to dig out my . . . I sighed . . . trail mix. Water wasn’t a problem, with the river right there, although Karl insisted we each drop a water-purification tablet into our canteens before we drank any of it. “Couldn’t I just Shape any impurities out of it?” I asked, as I waited in the gathering dusk for the twenty minutes the tablet needed to do its magic.

  “Possibly,” Karl said. “But based on past experience, there is a better-than-average chance you would sterilize the entire stream.”

  I would have argued, except I thought he was probably right.

  I had no idea when moonrise was (does anyone ever know off the top of their heads when moonrise will be?). It turned out to be about 8:45, or at least that was when the moon cleared the trees, and the moon turned out to be full. (Or had I made it full by wishing it would be full? Now that was a mind-boggling thought.) By its silvery glimmer we began to pick our way upstream, a slow, careful process, since the strange shadows cast by moonlight turned the gaps between the flat rocks covering the stream bank and the shadows under the trees as black as crude oil, which made the footing commensurately uncertain.

  Ahead, moonlight glinted off of glass and metal. We stopped. “An SUV,” I whispered to Karl. “It’s the road.” Then I saw a railing, and realized the vehicle was parked at the north end of a rudimentary bridge. If there was anyone actually on the bridge, I couldn’t spot them in the uncertain light.

  “We need that vehicle,” Karl murmured.

  I glanced at him. “Why?”

  “On foot, we will be caught.”

  “In a stolen vehicle, we will also be caught.”

  “But it will not be stolen. It will be an official vehicle, on official business. It may get us inside the gate at Snakebite Mine, and thus closer to the Portal.”

  “You want me to Shape whoever’s watching the bridge.” I shook my head. “No. The last time I Shaped a human, someone died.”

  “So do it better this time,” Karl said. “Learn. Shawna, we must get to the place where I can create a new Portal, and the sooner the better. But first we must destroy the Portal through which I and the Adversary entered your world. As I told you, I believe that will weaken the Adversary by severing his connection with the two worlds he already controls, and weakening the Adversary is crucial, because his power is waxing minute by minute, as his version of reality, imposed on those he Shapes, takes a firmer grip on this world. At some point, even if you remain at large, he may exceed you in power. But for now, you outmatch him. For as long as that is true, you must be willing to use your Shaping ability as necessary—and learn to use it better than you have so far. Or else the Adversary’s men will catch us, and kill you. Your world is already lost. But if we beat him to the next, that world, and many worlds thereafter, may yet escape his corruption.”

  A part of me cried out silently, asking what I cared about other worlds. I cared only about my own. But Karl’s grim words echoed in my mind: Your world is already lost. I thought again of my mom, and again pushed the thought away. It was too big and terrible to examine now. If not now, when? my mind demanded. But I left the question unanswered.

  “So, what do you have in mind?” I said to Karl, though I admit I said it begrudgingly.

  “There are probably two men, one on the bridge, one in the vehicle,” Karl said. “Their orders are most likely to watch for us, call in if they see us, and apprehend us if they can. They are unlikely to have been directly Shaped by the Adversary: they are merely doing their duty. You need to Shape them so that they remember their orders differently; to wait for us, to give us their vehicle, uniforms, and identification, and then to head downstream, evading their own apprehension for as long as possible.”

  I blinked at him. The glitter of his eyes in the moonlight for a moment gave him a strangely inhuman look, as though he really were some kind of robot. “That all made sense except for the head downstream part.”

  “The longer they remain out of contact with their superiors, the more time our ruse will have to work.”

  I looked back at the bridge and the SUV. “And you trust me to try this?” I said. “After the snow and the avalanche and the dead man?” Do I trust myself? was the question I was really asking, but he couldn’t answer that one.

  He didn’t exactly answer the question I’d asked him, either. “There is no other way,” was all he said. “But think carefully this time.”

  I took a deep breath. “All right, I’ll try.” I closed my eyes. This was the fourth time I’d consciously Shaped. Undoing the attack on the Human Bean had been involuntary. The first time I’d tried to do it had been the helicopter crew, and I’d really only succeeded with one of them. The second time had been the “cover-our-tracks” attempt, which had worked . . . though it had also caused an avalanche that could easily have killed us if we’d happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The third time had been convincing the bear that Karl’s pink poncho was far more interesting than we were.

  Think carefully, Karl had said. So I thought. I thought about what I’d felt, each of those other Shapings. The first time had been in a panic, but the other three . . .

  Each time, I had felt . . . something. Something new: strange, yet familiar at the same time, like a muscle I’d never used before that I’d suddenly begun to flex. (Which might explain the recurring headaches: they were akin to the morning-after pain I felt whenever I resumed working out at the gym after a long hiatus.) Now I recalled that fledgling sensation, reached for it, drew on it. I pictured, as clearly and carefully as I could, what I wanted to be true when we approached the bridge. And somehow, even before I opened my eyes, I knew I had succeeded—and not just because of the headache and momentary fatigue.

  Which didn’t mean at all, of course, that there weren’t going to be some unintended consequences. I was still new to this. I just hoped they weren’t on the scale of the avalanche.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s done.”

  Karl nodded. Together, we walked toward the bridge.

  After about thirty yards I spotted the man stationed on the bridge, my eyes suddenly distinguishing his form from the misleading mottling of moon-cast shadows. He had his back to us, but he turned as the flat rocks of the stream bank shifted and clacked beneath our feet, announcing our approach. I tensed. If my sense of accomplishment had been misplaced, he would call for help—or draw a pistol and try to shoot us on sight—but instead, he waved what seemed a friendly greeting at us, then walked toward the SUV.

  “So far, so good,” I said to Karl.

  He didn’t reply.

  We reached the bridge and scrambled up the bank to the road. As we did so, I heard the SUV’s door open and close. When we reached the top, both men were standing beside the black-and-white vehicle, which bore the word SHERIFF in capital letters on the door, with “Bear Valley County” in smaller letters underneath. “Glad you made it,” said the one on the left, who was a bit taller and stockier than the one on the right—which was about all I could make out of either of them in the moonlight, other than the fact the man on the right was black. “We were beginning to worry.”

  “You have your orders?” Karl said.

  The second man nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Going to be a bit chilly, but . . .” He shrugged, and started taking off his clot
hes.

  “You can have ours,” I said, as he stripped off his jacket and shirt, his compatriot following suit. Boots came off next, then they unbuckled their gun belts, laid them on the hood of the SUV, and took off their pants. When they both reached for their boxers, though, I said quickly, “No need for that.”

  They stopped. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

  I nodded vigorously. “Totally.” Then I glanced at Karl. He’d obviously have to take the uniform from the larger of the two. “Give us a minute,” I said. I took the uniform from the smaller of the two men and walked around to the far side of the SUV, where I quickly skinned out of my own clothes, shivering as I did so, and into the new ones. They fit perfectly—part of the Shaping?—even the boots. Then I rounded the SUV again and handed my jeans and flannel shirt to the smaller man, who pulled them on and replaced his boots with my shoes—good, practical sneakers, though I suspected even if I’d been wearing heels, he would have donned them if they fit. Which, I was convinced, considering how comfortable I was finding his clothes, they would have.

  “Well then,” said the larger of the two men, whose uniform had likewise fit Karl perfectly, and who now wore Karl’s borrowed black duster and snakeskin-banded cowboy hat, “we’ll head down the river. Good luck, ma’am. Sir. Hope your mission is a success.”

  “So do we,” I said.

  Without another word, they scrambled down the bank we had ascended, and began picking their way downstream, the clattering of the streamside rocks they disturbed soon lost in the rush of water.

  I looked at Karl. “Now what?”

  “We go to Snakebite Mine,” he said. He’d put the pistol he’d gotten from the helicopter on the hood beside the sheriff’s deputies’ weapons. He left it there, picking up one of the gun belts instead and buckling it on. “With luck, our borrowed vehicle and uniforms gain us easy access. With your help, I destroy the Portal.”

  “‘Drive up to the gate and see if they’ll let us in’ doesn’t sound like much of a plan.” I took the other gun belt, but didn’t put it on. I’d only shot long guns growing up, never a pistol, and the weight would have been annoying. Instead I opened the SUV’s door and tossed the belt into the back seat.