Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “But . . . why?” I carefully did not look at the not-empty boot, tried not to notice other . . . things . . . I was beginning to make out in the grass around us. “He blew himself up!”

  “Shaped,” Karl said. “The Adversary Shaped him to protect the Portal at all costs. I doubt the Adversary expected him to do something like this, though. Even the cadre members may not have known about it.”

  “But he didn’t protect the Portal,” I protested, “he destroyed it!”

  “Destroyed the Portal?” Karl said, refocusing on me. “Don’t be ridiculous. Only we can do that . . . at least, I hope we can do it.”

  “But it’s buried under tons of rock . . . it will take weeks to dig it out!”

  “Not once the Adversary has control of this world. He can Shape it in a heartbeat. We must not give him that opportunity.” Karl took a deep breath. “I think I can stand. Can you?”

  “Maybe,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure.

  In the end, we both managed it, though only by leaning heavily on each other.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Now,” Karl said. “You must Shape in a way you have not before.” He pointed at the jumbled mass of stone and twisted metal. “Open a tunnel to the Portal.”

  “But how?” I stared at the wreckage. “I don’t even know where it is!”

  “Don’t you?” Karl said. “Close your eyes. Concentrate. Feel. The Portal is a flaw in your world, a crack in its walls, a tear in its fabric. You can sense it if you try. Try.”

  “All right!” My ears were still ringing from the explosion, and my chest ached. But I closed my eyes and tried to push those sensations away, so I could concentrate on . . . whatever else I was supposed to be able to sense.

  For a moment, all I could sense in addition to the aforementioned ringing ears and aching chest were the assorted other strains and bruises I’d picked up over our two-day hike. Oh, that and the lingering bitterness of bile in the back of my throat from when I’d thrown up just minutes before. Was there anything else? I reached deeper . . .

  . . . and there it was. I might have put it down to . . . what were Scrooge’s words? . . . “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato” . . . if not for the fact I’d had little else to eat but trail mix for the past couple of days and had just thrown up most of that.

  Once I took note of it, I realized I had been feeling it for some time: a kind of . . . itch, or irritation, or disquietude, a feeling that there was something wrong with this particular place, that it wasn’t quite . . . right. It was the feeling I’d had as a kid walking past an old house in our neighborhood we were sure was haunted, except, of course, that had been imaginary . . .

  (My breath caught. Had my whole childhood been imaginary?)

  . . . and this was real.

  I opened my eyes. “That . . . wrongness? That’s the Portal?”

  “Wrongness?” Karl frowned, then his face cleared. “Ah. I suppose it would feel like that to a Shaper. I don’t sense it like that. But you are attuned to this world, and the Portal is an opening into another world, Shaped by someone else, so of course it would seem wrong to you. Yes, that is the Portal.” He pointed at the rubble. “Now imagine a path to it.”

  “I’ll . . . try.” I closed my eyes again and tried to empty my mind so I could flex that still-new Shaping “muscle.” My mind had just seen three people killed violently (and I might have been killed along with the third if I’d been a little quicker following the mine’s custodian), my ears still rang from the concussion, and one or two other disturbing things had happened in the recent past, so emptying it was easier said than done. But with less difficulty than I’d feared, my newfound power rose within me.

  The Portal was . . . there. Annoying, disturbing. I wanted to be able to reach it, so I could remove the irritation. I imagined a tunnel, solid stone, well-lit, the Portal at its end. I released the image.

  I instantly dropped to my knees, and then to all fours, all the aches and pains I’d pushed away suddenly rushing back to clobber me over the back of the head, along with a sudden wave of fatigue, as though I’d just completed an exhausting workout. “Ow,” I said. Then I looked up, and saw the tunnel: white stone, like something out of a Grecian temple, torches burning in sconces every few feet, an arched ceiling, and, at the far end . . .

  A rust-red door, bearing a white sign with KEEP OUT: DANGER written on it in faded red letters, completely out of character with the rest of the tunnel.

  “Well done,” said Karl.

  “But I . . . didn’t imagine white stone,” I said, staring at the tunnel. “Or torches. Just a . . . generic tunnel. Well-lit.”

  “When you do not provide details, the world provides them for you,” Karl said. “It drew some image from your mind, no doubt.” He held out his hand. “Come.”

  “Easier said than done.” What I really wanted to do was lie down. Right where I was. But I took his hand and, groaning, got to my feet.

  Together, we walked to the tunnel I had just conjured out of . . . well, not of thin air, I guess, but out of thick rock. Although the tunnel was marble, and I was pretty sure the rock tumbled all around it was granite. “Ill-geological, Captain,” I muttered, even though I knew Karl wouldn’t get it. Sure enough, he cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me. Which was perfect, so I felt overall the quip had been successful, even if I was the only one who appreciated it.

  We reached the Portal. That sense of wrongness was almost overwhelming. I wanted to . . . I didn’t know. I reached for the rusty metal, then drew my hands back again. “We have to seal this,” I said. “It’s . . . disgusting.”

  “Is it?” Karl gave me another quizzical look. “Fascinating.”

  Despite everything, my mouth quirked.

  He turned his attention back to the Portal. “Though this door is closed,” he said, “the Portal is open. If I opened this door, you would see into the storeroom of a rather primitive inn. We might also find ourselves facing an unknown number of armed guards, however, so I do not recommend sightseeing.” He put his hands on the door and blue light flickered over the surface, not all that bright, but somehow painful to my eyes all the same. He pushed . . . and the light steadied, flashed once, like a photoflash, and then vanished. “I have closed the Portal again,” he said, “but the Adversary can still reopen it.” He turned to me. “That’s where you come in. I believe, with your power, we can destroy it permanently.”

  “How?” I stared at the hateful door. “Do I just . . . imagine it doesn’t exist?”

  “That won’t work,” Karl said. “The Portal is a place where two worlds touch. It is not yours to Shape. If the Shaper from the world on the other side were facing you across the Portal, and you both Shaped it at the same time . . . then, perhaps, you could make it disappear. But the Shaper of the world through this Portal has been the Adversary since he stole the hokhmah of that world from the original Shaper and then killed him.”

  “Then how do I do it?”

  * * *

  Karl looked at Shawna Keys’ face, smeared with dirt, and hesitated, doubting his own resolve, wondering if he could even make happen what he thought could happen here. Once before, he had let a Shaper pour her power through his body. Ygrair, after placing within him the technology that enabled him to open Portals, had used her power and his combined to open up the Labyrinth, crafting what became known as the Graduation Portal, the gateway through which all the Shapers since had entered the Labyrinth to claim their worlds. And in the process . . . she had burned him out.

  Shawna had asked him more than once if he was a Shaper, and he had never answered. But now, he thought, he must. “Through me,” he said at last. “Just like the Adversary does, I carry within my body a . . . tool . . . from Ygrair’s home world. He brought his with him, but Ygrair gave me mine. It is that tool, that te
chnology, that gives me the ability to find, open, and close Portals. You have asked if I am myself a Shaper. Once, I was, or could have been. For now, I am not.” Though if I succeed in this quest, Ygrair has promised me that will change, he thought, but did not say. “But the technology within me can channel your Shaping ability. With your power, I believe I can destroy this Portal.”

  “What do I have to do?” Shawna asked. Her eyes burned red in the light of the torches her mind had subconsciously Shaped to illuminate the marble tunnel.

  “You must attempt to Shape me,” Karl said. “It does not matter in what fashion. Try to turn me into a frog, or a pig, if that amuses you. Try to convince me to spin in circles and spout gibberish. Try to make me burst into flames. I cannot be Shaped by you, because I am not of your world. But I can take the power you hurl at me and turn it against the Portal.”

  Shawna’s mouth quirked. “A frog?”

  “If it amuses you,” Karl said. He had offered the possibility because he knew the Shaper had a quirky sense of humor, even though he did not understand half of what she apparently thought were extremely funny witticisms. He did not care what she imagined him doing or becoming in her mind, as long as she fed him the power he needed.

  He also very carefully did not tell her one other thing, something he knew from when Ygrair had channeled her power through him to open the Graduation Portal.

  This was going to hurt him very badly indeed.

  * * *

  Despite the invitation, I did not attempt to Shape Karl into a frog. That seemed a bit harsh. Also, what if he was wrong, and the Shaping worked? A frog wasn’t going to be able to get us to wherever we had to get to escape the Adversary, and who knew if I would be able to change him back? (Could I really turn human beings into other animals, or was that Karl’s idea of a joke? It was hard to tell with him. Either way, I wasn’t going to risk it.)

  So instead I closed my eyes, reached for my Shaping ability—which was getting easier every time—and tried to do something very simple: give him a haircut. I’ve always hated graying ponytails on men: a little too Baby-Boomer-who-refused-to-grow-up for my taste (and trust me, around Montana, I’d seen my share of them). I imagined Karl with a trim business cut, and no mustache while I was at it.

  I let my Shaping power flow toward him. Once again, I felt a sudden weakness, but only for an instant. Then my eyes snapped open as Karl did the last thing I expected: he screamed.

  It wasn’t a shout, or a yell. It was a scream, the kind of scream an animal makes when it is injured. I stared at him as he lurched away from me, still screaming, and slammed the palms of his hands against the old door. This time that strange, eye-searing-yet-not-quite-real blue illumination crawled over him, flickering and flashing as though he were being electrocuted—and from the agony he clearly felt, perhaps he was, in some fashion. Then it steadied. For a moment he glowed, as though he were an angel come to Earth, the contours of his body so light-filled I could see it through his clothes, so that it seemed he stood naked before me: and then all that light, all at once, slammed into the Portal, vanishing into it as though being sucked away into a black hole.

  Karl was suddenly flung away from the door as though by an explosion, though I heard nothing. He landed on his rear end and skidded several feet across the smooth surface of the marble flooring of the tunnel I had Shaped. The red door swung open, and I tensed . . . but beyond it waited no guards, or new world. Instead, I saw only darkness, the torches of the marble tunnel picking up glints of damp rough stone and a rotted-looking wooden support beam.

  I ran back to Karl, and knelt beside him as he struggled to a sitting position. His nose was bleeding again, scarlet dripping over his still-extant mustache. His ponytail likewise remained unShaped. He raised a shaking hand to pinch his nostrils, and said in a voice that, as a result, was a dead-ringer for Donald Duck’s, “And that is that.”

  “I thought I’d killed you,” I said.

  “The . . . tool . . . within my body can use a Shaper’s power,” he said, still in that cartoon-duck voice, “but the power is . . . somewhat incompatible with my body itself.” He waited a few more seconds, then cautiously removed his fingers from the bridge of his nose. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. He ran his hand across the lower part of his face, which just smeared the blood, giving him the alarming appearance of a vampire who had recently fed. “The Adversary will have felt that, for certain. He knows exactly where we are now. We must move fast.”

  “Suits me,” I said. I helped him up, and together we limped back down the marble tunnel and out into the darkness of the main compound. “So the next step is to get to where you can create another Portal?”

  He nodded.

  “And where is that?”

  He sighed. “The technology implanted in me only gives me a general sense of the direction in which it lies, at the moment,” he said. “I will be able to locate it more precisely as we get nearer to it. I do not know exactly how far away it is, yet, but I can tell one thing . . . it is not close.”

  “How not close?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” Karl said. “It could literally be the other side of the world.”

  TWELVE

  I TURNED MY head to stare at him: since he still had his arm around my shoulders for support, his blood-smeared face was disconcertingly close. “The SUV,” I pointed out, “is not going to get us to the other side of the world.” I nodded in its direction. One headlight was smashed from its encounter with the fence, and its hood was slightly crumpled up, giving it a dishevelled air. Never mind the splatter of blood and brains on the driver’s door, which would also seem likely to attract notice. “If it even runs.”

  “It will run if you believe it will run,” Karl said.

  I grimaced.

  “But we cannot keep it long in any event,” he continued. “An official law enforcement vehicle is not exactly inconspicuous even when it isn’t damaged and blood-splattered. We must dispose of it, find different transportation, and try to escape further detection.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  Karl stopped then, and pulled his arm away. “Wait a moment,” he said, and limped ahead of me to the SUV.

  “Why . . . oh.” I stayed where I was, wanting to look away but finding myself unable to, as he pulled the corpse of the man he had shot away from the SUV’s splattered side. The blood on the white door and pooled on the ground looked inky black in the yard light’s illumination. I swallowed, and only moved forward, gingerly, after Karl came around the front of the SUV and climbed into the passenger seat. I tried not to step in the blood and tried even harder not to touch the gore drying on the vehicle’s side, and as a result got into the driver’s seat very awkwardly. But at last I was in, though even there I had to view the world through red spatters on the driver’s-side window. “You’re right,” I said, as I pressed the Start button. The engine roared to life at once; nothing mechanical had been mangled, at least. “We have to get rid of this thing.”

  Karl only nodded. He was digging in the glove compartment, and a moment later pulled out a plastic package of tissues and began using them to clean the blood from his face at last.

  I backed up, turned the wheel to reorient us, and drove out through the shattered gate. At the intersection with the main road I turned left, certain without asking that deeper into the mountains, not down the valley toward the foothills and the city, was the only course open to us. “What will the Adversary do next?”

  “I have no way of knowing.” Karl wadded up the bloody tissues and stuffed them into a pocket in the door. “Except the broad strokes, which I saw in his own world and the last. He has already begun Shaping your world into a totalitarian one.”

  “With himself as the ruler?”

  “With himself as God,” Karl said. “He demands the Shaped beings of his world owe him absolute, unquestioning obedience.”

 
The road was beginning to wind as it climbed up the head of the valley, but I shot him a quick glance. “God? Really?”

  “Effectively,” Karl said. “Humans seem to have an innate need for religious belief. Those who reject religion per se usually find something else in which to believe just as fervently, such as a political party, and often with as little—or far less—empirical evidence. The Adversary takes advantage of both those impulses. He Shapes humans’ innate religious belief into a belief in him as a distant, unapproachable, but perfect Deity, and also Shapes that built-in human quality into a fervent belief in the absolute rightness of the system of laws he has imposed. The world then runs itself as he wishes it to, without him having to take a particularly active role. The Deists of the First World used to speak of God as a kind of master watchmaker, who set the universe in motion, then just let it run. The Adversary makes that view of God a reality.

  “He is not human himself, remember, and he comes, in the First World, from an alien world which believes it is a utopia—but which in fact is a stagnant, totalitarian hellhole. His goal, so far as I can tell, is to impose versions of that alien ‘utopia’ on all the worlds of the Labyrinth. He objects to free will. He objects to individuality. He objects to anyone thinking things he does not want thought. He objects to anyone living in ways of which he does not approve. He objects to people saying things he does not want said. He objects to what he calls disorder. He objects to what he calls untidiness. He objects, in short, to human liberty.”

  I took a moment to digest what was, after all, one of the longest speeches Karl had ever given. “How do you know all that? You only met him two worlds ago.” Which was one of the stranger sentences I’d ever spoken out loud, but I was becoming inured to such outlandishness.

  “I know he comes, originally, from the world that Ygrair fled, and she told me what kind of world that was,” Karl said. “I saw his ultimate vision of the perfect world when I stumbled upon his own. And I saw how he goes about altering another Shaper’s world in the Shakespearean one I came to yours from. I have seen enough.”