Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  “All right,” I said. “You also said he’s out to get Ygrair. But they’re both aliens from the same world. If Ygrair is also an alien . . . how do you know you can trust her?”

  Karl said nothing for a long moment. We had reached the top of the hill we’d been climbing. The trees had closed around us again, pressing close like the bars of a wooden prison, and the road was now just a rutted track, so narrow that if we met anyone we’d have to drive half off of it to allow room for both vehicles to pass.

  “Because,” Karl said, as I slowed, “all those things he hates are the things that Ygrair holds dear. Her love for liberty is why she fled her own world, and she realized, when she discovered the Labyrinth, that the freedoms her world despises are the very freedoms the Labyrinth enables to thrive. Absolute freedom is what she offered the Shapers—like you—that she trained in the First World . . . like you. As you would know if not for your infuriating loss of memory.” He sighed. “While I am sure you find all this fascinating . . . as you no doubt did the first time you were told, during the training you have forgotten . . . what matters in the here and now is that the Adversary is the Adversary, Ygrair is the one who gave you this world to Shape, the Adversary has stolen it from you, and now Ygrair needs you to save the worlds of other Shapers—and the Labyrinth itself—from falling under his sway.”

  After that, Karl was done talking, closing his eyes and reclining his seat. I wished I had the memories he had been so horrified to discover I did not. I might not have felt quite as much as though I were surfing a tsunami if I had my own experiences with the mysterious Ygrair to draw on. I wondered if I’d met Karl before, too. He hadn’t said anything to indicate I had . . . so where had he been, while I was supposedly being trained by Ygrair in the First World?

  Somewhere without The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, or anything else that happened in the twentieth century, as far as I could tell. Which didn’t sound like my idea of a wonderful world, but to each his or her own, I guess.

  The road continued to narrow, to the point I began to worry it would simply peter out and we’d have to back out of what had become a trap . . . possibly right into the arms of whatever forces the Adversary might be rushing to his suddenly sealed Portal. I stopped. “Let’s see that map.”

  “Hm?” Karl blinked and straightened. “What?”

  “Map,” I said. “Have a nice snooze?”

  “I was not asleep,” he said, “only thinking,” which I didn’t believe for a second. He reached into the back seat for his pack and dug the map out of it. I studied it by the glow of, appropriately enough, the map light. (Since I always used the map app on my phone for navigation, I’d never actually used a map light to read a map before. On the scale of the new experiences I’d had in the past couple of days, it ranked pretty low, but still.)

  As I’d feared, the road wasn’t on the map. As far as it was concerned, the road only went one way from the mine site, the other way, which we hadn’t taken. That part of the road crossed over into the next valley, a much broader one, and there connected to a proper highway along which small towns were strung like beads a few miles apart.

  I pointed this out to Karl. “Our best hope of finding new transportation might be one of those towns,” I said. “If turn around . . .” I glanced at the dashboard clock: just after 1 a.m. “We could be in one of them before dawn.”

  “But we may run into pursuers,” Karl said. “And even if we do not, if we abandon this vehicle in a town, it will be found sooner rather than later, which will help the Adversary track us. Better we take the road before us, and find a place to lose the SUV along the way.”

  “We’ll take the road less traveled by, and that will make all the difference?”

  Karl gave me a puzzled look. “What?”

  I sighed. “Frost.”

  He frowned, leaning forward to look at the windshield. “I don’t see any. Surely it is not that cold.”

  Oh, right, I thought. Robert Frost wrote in the 1920s. Much too hip and up-to-date for Karl Yatsar. “Never mind.”

  Karl leaned back. “So. We have a plan.”

  I folded up the map. “Your definition of plan, as noted before, is very different from mine.”

  “In what way?”

  I shoved the map at him. “Plans involve careful . . .” I hesitated, but couldn’t think of a different word . . . “planning,” I finished lamely. “Not just, ‘Oh, look, maybe that’ll work, let’s try that, and then we’ll wing it from there.’ That’s not a plan. Also, I thought you didn’t believe in plans.”

  “I did not say that. I said they do not survive contact with the enemy. Nor will this one, should our enemy find us. But as a plan for what to do next, it is acceptable.” He shrugged. “Everything is in flux. And remember, ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.’” He glanced at me. “Robert Burns.”

  “I know,” I said. And so do you, which is interesting. I tried to remember when Burns had lived. Early nineteenth century? No—earlier, late eighteenth.

  “I am glad to hear it.” He looked pointedly at the steering wheel. “Shouldn’t we be moving?” He raised the back of his seat to emphasize the point.

  I sighed, and put the vehicle into gear.

  As I drove, I thought about the man and woman Karl had shot. (Since there was still blood on my window, I didn’t have much choice.) I’d discovered something, watching the two members of the Adversary’s cadre die, followed by the horrible death of the caretaker: I wasn’t nearly as bloodthirsty as I’d thought I was. I’d actually told Karl to shoot the guards. I’d thought I wanted revenge for the attack on the Human Bean. I’d thought that desire for revenge had burned away any qualms I had about killing. I’d thought I wouldn’t feel anything for those two black-clad guards, because they weren’t even from my world, because they’d been brought into my world by the Adversary to help him seize control.

  I’d thought all those things, and I had been wrong. Karl had told me that they were once just ordinary people. They hadn’t chosen to serve the Adversary, they’d been Shaped to serve him—to practically worship him, if Karl told the truth. They were as much victims of his Shaping as the copilot of the helicopter had been of my own.

  And this Ygrair, who supposedly valued human liberty, had put Shapers like me and him into the Labyrinth, where we had the power to bring into existence worlds filled with human beings—and then wipe away their free will. Freedom? For the Shapers, certainly. For those whom they Shaped . . . not so much.

  Karl Yatsar wanted me to think Ygrair was the good gal in all this, valiantly striving to protect the Shaped Worlds from the depredations of the Adversary and the rest of her alien race. And maybe, relative to the Adversary, she was a little closer to the side of the angels. But she definitely wasn’t one of them.

  Whatever the dead man and woman had become, they were human beings. They had, somewhere, families, loved ones. They’d grown up . . . or at least had memories of growing up . . . and had had friends, and made mistakes, and done good things and bad things, made good choices and bad ones, laughed, and cried, and made love . . . had done all the things that every human being did.

  And now they were dead.

  Karl had killed them, not me, but I still blamed myself for their deaths. Which was stupid: the only way they might not have died would have been if I were already dead, because then Karl wouldn’t have come to the mine to close the Portal.

  Or they might still be alive if I weren’t a Shaper, I thought, but if I weren’t a Shaper, someone else would be sitting here now trying to escape . . . or else the Adversary would have already taken over, and I might already have been Shaped along with everyone else in this world. Like them, I would have been a helpless victim of powers not only beyond my control, but beyond my ken.

  That, I decided, would have been far worse. I stiffened my spine, both figuratively and (because I
was slouching and my back was getting sore) literally. I was a Shaper. I had power. And it was way better that I still be alive and those poor Shaped saps from the Adversary’s original world be dead than the other way around. Selfish of me, perhaps, but there it was. And if someone else had to die . . .

  Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe we’ll find this second Portal and escape this world, and I’ll never have to worry about killing someone, or someone being killed on my behalf, ever again.

  It was a nice thought. But so was the thought that the next world might be a world of unicorns and rainbows. I didn’t believe for a minute that it would be (although I supposed it wasn’t impossible a particularly sappy Shaper had chosen to make it one), and I didn’t believe for a minute that the violence that now seemed to follow me like a lost puppy had ended.

  The moon-cast shadows of the trees were black as carbon. The road ahead, at the limits of the headlights, led only into darkness.

  THIRTEEN

  “THE ROAD AHEAD led only into darkness” was such a nice metaphor for my state of mind that I was almost disappointed when a sign appeared a few minutes later, glowing bright green in our headlights. I slowed, and stopped a few yards short of it. There were two names and distances on it: MOOREVILLE 20, with an arrow pointing left, and BOW AND ARROW RANCH 32, with an arrow pointing straight up. “Mooreville is one of the towns on the map,” I said. “Turn left?”

  “What is Bow and Arrow Ranch?” he asked. “Have you heard of it?”

  Oddly enough, I had: a friend of Brent’s had spent a couple of weeks there during the summer, and had told us about his outdoor adventures in excruciating detail one night at the Human Bean, made bearable only by the beer and the fact that that night’s otherwise execrable band (The Tosspot Turkeys) had been so loud I’d only heard one word in three. “It’s a dude ranch.”

  He glanced at me, eyes glinting green in the spill of light reflecting from the sign. “A what?”

  “You’ve never heard of a dude ranch? Dude, you showed up on my doorstep in a duster and cowboy hat!”

  “They were not mine. Enlighten me.”

  “It’s a ranch where dudes—city people—pretend to be cowboys,” I said. “They ride horses and go camping and sleep on air mattresses in fancy tents and eat gourmet food prepared by a private chef—you know, just like cowboys do.”

  “Horses,” he said. “Would there be horses there now?”

  “Where else would they . . .” I realized what he was thinking. “Oh. I get it. We need to do something unexpected. Our pursuers will expect us to head to the towns. They won’t expect us to head deeper into the mountains on horseback.”

  “Would you?” Karl said.

  “Not if I knew one of the two people I was chasing was allergic to horses.”

  He frowned. “You are allergic to horses?”

  “Yes.”

  “So much so you cannot ride them?”

  I sighed. I was afraid he’d ask that. “No,” I had to admit. “Just enough I’ll be sniffling and sneezing and wiping my eyes the whole time.”

  I reached for the map. The road we had followed to this point might not be on it, but the road we had just intersected was. It showed that the road to Bow and Arrow Ranch wound through a series of canyons. Just like the road we’d taken into Candle Lake Resort, this was clearly a back road: the main access marked on the map was from the Interstate we were trying so studiously to avoid.

  I took a closer look at the terrain. We still needed to lose the SUV. If the road through the canyons ran close to a big enough body of water . . . nothing showed on the map, but maybe, I thought, that doesn’t matter. I closed my eyes. I pictured a deep lake . . . no, an old quarry. Steep sides, full of water. Drop the SUV in there and it might never be found . . . I reached for my Shaping ability.

  I Shaped.

  Pain exploded behind my eyes and I jerked back, gasping, my head slamming hard against the headrest. “Ungh,” I said. Then, for good measure, “Ohhhh . . .”

  “What did you just do?” Karl said sharply.

  I licked my lips, unable to speak for a moment. Then I took a deep breath, the ache in my head subsiding, and brought my head forward to look at the map again. “There,” I said, pointing a shaking finger at a small blue rectangle. “That’s an old quarry, full of water now. The road runs right by the other end. We can dump the SUV there.”

  “That was foolish,” Karl snapped.

  “Why?” I asked, and winced. My own voice seemed to be hurting my head for the moment.

  “It was another major Shaping. Though it did not involve the Portal, it may have been sensed by the Adversary.”

  “Can he pinpoint it?” I said.

  “Probably not. But—”

  “He already knows we’re in this area. Losing the SUV should be worth the risk.”

  “Even if that is true,” Karl said, “such a major Shaping after the power expended back at the mine . . . it hurt you, did it not? And fatigued you?”

  I couldn’t deny that: he’d seen how I reacted. “Yes,” I said reluctantly.

  “You have enormous power. As I have told you many times. But you have also used it—a lot of it—over the past few days. It is not unlimited. It will regenerate, with time, but we do not know how often we will absolutely need it, or for how long, before we can open a new Portal and escape. The pain and fatigue are warnings. Do not Shape on a whim.”

  “It wasn’t a whim,” I said stubbornly. “We need to lose the SUV.”

  “But there might well be a natural place where we could hide the SUV, without you having to Shape anything,” Karl said. “Or a less major Shaping might have done the trick. Creating an entire quarry . . .” He shook his head. “Impressive. But a terrible waste of energy.”

  “Impressive. Powerful.” Anger swelled in me. “You’re right. I’m damned impressive, and damned powerful. I made time jump back three hours, made it snow, made that tunnel, gave you power to seal the Portal, conjured a quarry. So why am I running? Why am I only trying to hide from the Adversary and not trying to attack him directly? We sealed the Portal to weaken him. Shouldn’t I take advantage of that? If I defeated him . . . killed him . . . I’d have the hokhmah of my world all to myself again. I could undo everything he’s done.” I glared at Karl. “If you think I’m strong enough to save the Labyrinth, why do you think I’m too weak to save my own world? Let me go after him. If I can kill him, we could stay here while you teach me whatever it is I’ve apparently forgotten, train me. When I’m ready, then we could enter the next world, and . . .”

  But Karl was already shaking his head. “No, Shawna,” he said, the sorrow in his voice genuine and unmistakable. “It’s too late. Though you are indeed strong, so is the Adversary: strong enough that when I entered his world, I hoped he might be the one to do what Ygrair needs done, before I realized the magnitude of my mistake. And in addition to strength, he also has immense experience and knowledge. He remembers his training. He has already Shaped two worlds to his will, and even with his currently limited ability, has begun the process of Shaping this one—and the more he Shapes it, the stronger his ability to do so will grow. You would be killed, by police, or military, or some random stranger, before you could get anywhere close to the Adversary in this world. And even if you faced him—then what? You cannot Shape him, or his cadre. It is impossible.”

  “Forever? My power and knowledge will grow—”

  “If you and I escape this world, if we can stay ahead of the Adversary long enough, if you can save enough worlds, if you deliver the hokhmah of as many worlds as possible to Ygrair . . . then she will deal with the Adversary.”

  “Fine,” I said angrily. “And once she’s done that—will I be able to rescue my world? Return it to the way it was?”

  Karl didn’t answer for a long moment. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Maybe?”
<
br />   Karl sighed. “In truth, I do not know.”

  I tamped down the rage that flooded into me then, or tried to. After all, I’d just conjured a giant hole in solid rock and filled it with water. Who knew what damage I might do if I lost my temper? Don’t make me angry. You won’t like me when I’m angry.

  And then I thought, And before you get too full of yourself, maybe you’d better be sure you actually did just conjure a quarry out of thin air. Because objectively, all you’ve really conjured is a small square of blue ink on a map. That thought made me smile, and my anger ebbed. I reached for the gearshift. “Bow and Arrow Ranch it is,” I said, and we rolled down a slight incline onto the new road, just enough wider and less-rutted than the one we’d left, apparently, to rate it representation on the map.

  Unless . . . unless that road should be on the map, had been on the map, but I had needed it to not be on the map to help hide our trails, and so it had vanished from, not only our map, but all maps . . .

  How do true gods keep it all straight? I wondered.

  Then I snorted. They have staff. I wonder where I could hire a few angels, cheap?

  A few minutes later we crested another hill, and there it was: a huge, water-filled, abandoned quarry, exactly as I had pictured it my head. Its appearance awed me all over again. I’d done that?

  Its appearance also meant it was time to say good-bye to our purloined, smashed-up, bloodstained ride. Since the road, as I’d specified, made a sharp left-hand curve at the bottom of the hill, to run alongside the quarry, and (as I’d also specified) there was no guard rail at the bottom of the hill, we simply parked uphill from the quarry and reenacted our attack on the mine gate, after removing our backpacks, the extra gun belt, and the pistol from the helicopter from the back seat. I put on the parking brake and shifted the transmission into neutral, rolled down all the windows, and then got out into the chill night air. The moon beamed down at us from above, and its perfect reflection in the mirror-still water of the quarry beamed up at us from below. The sky blazed with stars: I’d forgotten how many more stars you could see when you weren’t in the city. A satellite sparkled, arrowing across the sky—one of the big space hotels, probably. I’d always wanted to go to one. I’d planned to reward myself with a space trip once the shop was established and successful.