The last (and first) horse I had ridden, on an “equestrian adventure” at a dude ranch not unlike this one, had clearly carried one too many touristy sack-of-potatoes tenderfoot along the same trail one too many times, because it had spent the entire ninety minutes trying to scrape me off against every handy fence post and tree trunk along the well-worn path. Since I had been sneezing and sniffling and watery-eyed the entire ride (for it was then that I discovered my allergy to all things equine), it had not been a fun time for either me or, I suspect, the horse, who against all odds had failed to dislodge me.
I had high hopes the animal Karl led, saddled and bridled, from the barn (where I dared not venture if I wanted to keep breathing) would be different, since I could Shape the beast to be docile and obedient—even if I couldn’t Shape it to be non-allergenic.
Or could I? Karl had discouraged it, but maybe . . .
I focused on the horse at Karl’s side, reached out, and imagined very hard that this horse would no longer produce the allergens to which I responded so strongly.
To my horror, the horse stumbled, dropped to its knees, and fell onto its side, its final breath whooshing out in a long sigh. Karl jumped back as it collapsed, stared at it, then turned and glared at me. “What did you do?”
“I thought . . . I know you said I couldn’t Shape myself so I’m not allergic . . . but I thought maybe I could Shape it so I wasn’t allergic to it . . .” My head hurt again, but that wasn’t why I felt awful. “I didn’t mean to kill it!”
“I never realized how much of a menace an untrained Shaper could be,” Karl muttered. He bent over the horse’s corpse and began stripping it of saddle and bridle. “Whatever substance within the horse’s body makes you allergic to it was clearly necessary for the horse’s continued survival. Your attempt to make the horse into something to which you are not allergic removed that substance, and killed the beast.”
“Proteins,” I muttered. “Allergens are typically proteins.”
“I have heard that word but am unclear as to its meaning,” Karl said. He had pulled off the horse’s bridle and set it aside. “Help me with this saddle.”
I went to him and together we tugged it out from under the animal’s dead weight. Morbidly, I noted I wasn’t tearing up despite standing right next to a dead horse. So the Shaping succeeded, I thought. Kind of.
“I’m surprised you know the word ‘allergy,’” I said. “You’re a lot older than you look, aren’t you?”
“Subjectively, I am the age I appear to be,” Karl said. “But time has little meaning in the Labyrinth, and does not flow the same from world to world. As to my vocabulary, I have learned many words I did not know when I was younger. Haven’t you?” He took another look at the dead horse. “You must learn to fully consider the possible consequences of your Shaping,” he said. Again. With a sigh, he hefted the saddle and bridle and trudged back toward the barn.
The dead horse, which I had killed with a thought, bore mute witness to the fairness of his reprimand. At least this time my attempt at Shaping had only killed a horse, and not a human being. I felt almost as guilty about it, though. The helicopter copilot would have captured me, the young man from the house might well have shot me or Karl. This horse had done nothing to threaten me. Making me sneeze shouldn’t have been a death sentence. Human beings turn to gods to assuage their guilt and find forgiveness, I thought. To whom do gods turn?
But then, as Karl kept telling me, I wasn’t a god, despite the powers I had in this world given me by the mysterious and alien Ygrair. It sounded like she was far closer to a god, or goddess—and she had her Adversary, her Lucifer, trying to overthrow everything she had created . . . although, come to think of it, she had apparently stumbled on the world-making possibilities of the Labyrinth by accident, which raised the uncomfortable notion that she might not have any better idea of what she was doing than I did, and like me, was just making it up as she went along.
Well, I thought then, to be fair, making it up as you go along, trying to do the right thing, and failing as often as not pretty much describes human existence. That was the path we followed, whether we believed in a god or gods or not, or, apparently, were the next thing to one.
Karl seemed to be taking a long time to bring out another horse. I looked nervously over my shoulder at the trail we had followed into Bow and Arrow ranch, then looked past the house to where a large gate beneath an arching sign marked the main entrance. The well-lit drive to that gate, and what I could see of the road beyond it, was paved. Just past the gate the road crossed the river on a low bridge, streetlights at each end, and then disappeared into the dark forest, presumably on its way to the highway. If the Adversary had figured out where we’d gone, he and his unShapeable minions could show up from either direction at any time.
I listened hard. No helicopters, at least.
Karl finally emerged from the barn leading another horse, a chestnut mare who shied when she saw her dead stablemate. Karl calmed her—apparently, he had a good rapport with horses without resorting to Shaping—and led her to me. The mare rolled her eyes at me, clearly distrustful: I reached out (very cautiously this time) to Shape her into being calm and trusting and eager to carry me wherever I wanted to go. After that, she didn’t flinch even when I sneezed three times in quick succession, the nasal explosions not doing my headache any good. I sniffed and wiped my suddenly streaming eyes, while Karl returned to the barn for a mount for himself.
He emerged leading a big black gelding, whose reins he looped around a handy fence post before helping me climb up onto my mare. “I thought you said you had ridden before?” he grumbled as I awkwardly clambered into the saddle, with way too much grabbing of the horn and a considerable amount of unladylike grunting, the weight of the backpack making the whole thing even more difficult than it would have been anyway.
Though the mare was much smaller than his horse, I still found her girth uncomfortably broad. I remembered that feeling from my lone trail ride all those years before. I also remembered how sore my muscles had been . . . and how chafed my inner thighs had been . . . by the time even that short ride was finished. And then, of course, there had been the . . .
“Ah . . . CHOOO!” I wiped my nose, blinked my watering eyes, and stared owlishly down at Karl. “I have ridden before,” I said haughtily. My voice had that odd trapped-in-a-barrel sound you get when every available empty space in your skull is filled with snot. “But only once.” I sneezed again. “For obvious reasons.”
“Oh, this should be enjoyable,” Karl muttered. He unhitched his gelding, swung into the saddle with practiced ease, then tugged the reins to turn the horse toward the far end of the ranch. “Follow me.”
I pulled at my own reins, expecting my mount to fight me like that long-ago jaded trail-ride steed, but my Shaping, for once, seemed to have worked perfectly: the mare turned almost eagerly, and together we rode after Karl toward the pine trees that rose beyond the paddock.
“So . . . where are we going, exactly?” I called to the horse’s ass in front of me (and Karl, too).
“The goal remains the same,” Karl said over his shoulder. “To keep the Adversary, his cadre, or those of this world who now consciously or unconsciously are carrying out his orders, from capturing us before we can reach the place where I can open the second Portal. Riding on horseback into the wilderness for a time seems like a good way to complicate pursuit . . . although,” he added sourly, “leaving behind two dead men and one dead horse rather undercuts my hoped-for element of stealth.”
“Then we shouldn’t ride very far before we change modes of transportation again,” I said, hopefully.
“Agreed,” Karl said. “But we will want to give the impression we have ridden much farther than we actually have.” He patted the breast of the leather jacket, which I guessed meant he’d put the map in an inside pocket. “This hiking trail intersects a paved road a few miles w
est of here. We will dismount on that road, then you will Shape the horses to continue along the trail, which continues on the far side of the road. Walking on the pavement, we will leave no tracks, while with luck, the horses will lead any pursuers several miles astray. We will hike along the paved road until another means of transportation presents itself.”
“What about food? And . . .” A yawn gripped me, followed by another sneeze. I wiped the back of my hand across my nose. “Sleep?”
You could have gotten food from the house, my brain pointed out.
Not after what I saw on the porch, I snapped back.
“After we have released the horses . . . perhaps,” Karl said.
Perhaps? I didn’t like the sound of that. What with hunger, exhaustion, and that slow-fading headache that took on fresh life every time I Shaped anything, I was getting very, very close to needing a “for sure” when it came to food and sleep. Aspirin wouldn’t hurt, either. (It would be counterproductive if it did.) What time was it, anyway?
I glanced at my watch. 3:47 a.m. Splendid. What better time for a nice horseback . . .
“Ah-CHOOO!”
I wiped my nose again, massaged my temples with my left hand, sighed, and let my horse follow Karl’s horse without any more talking, unless sneezes, coughs, wheezes, and sniffs counted as communication.
A short distance past the fence we clattered across the river on a wooden bridge, then plunged into the forest. I might have fallen asleep as we plodded through the dark woods, if not for the aforementioned sneezing, coughing, wheezing, and sniffing. Plus that damnable headache. Instead I simply hung on, sunk in misery.
We finally reached the promised road at . . . I checked my watch through bleary eyes . . . 4:38 a.m. This late in the year, sunrise wouldn’t be for almost three hours: we still had lots of darkness.
The road was paved, all right, but barely: its asphalt, cracked and potholed, clearly hadn’t been properly maintained for years. Still, it wouldn’t show our footprints, and that was the main thing. Karl jumped lightly down from his towering gelding, then helped me get down from my much shorter mare, not-so-lightly and with a lot more groaning (and, of course, another sneeze).
“Now,” Karl said. “Carefully—carefully!—Shape the horses so they continue to follow the trail. According to the map, it ends at a campground, where they will surely be found and cared for, so you needn’t worry about their welfare.”
“As long as I don’t screw something up and kill them both on the spot,” I muttered, but the instructions seemed simple enough. I was almost too tired to think straight, but I concentrated, and after a moment both horses neighed and trotted across the road and into the woods on the other side.
After that Shaping, of course, I was even more exhausted, and my headache had gotten worse again. At least I still had a little water and a bit of (gag) trail mix in my backpack; I finished off both. Karl also ate and drank. My nose cleared rapidly with the horses gone, although one more sneeze shook me as I shoved the canteen and trail-mix package, both now empty, back into my pack. I sighed, wiped my nose and eyes with my sleeve, and then said, wearily, “Which way?”
“Right,” Karl said. “Left would lead us to the main road we went to the ranch to avoid.”
“And right takes us . . . ?”
“According to the map, in about seven miles it leads to the small community of Elkjaw.”
“Seven miles.” I shook my head. “I won’t make seven miles.”
“We will camp as soon as we are far enough from here to make it unlikely anyone following the horses will find us. Perhaps a mile or two.”
“A mile or two.” I took a deep breath, and exhaled it in something that wasn’t quite a groan, but only thanks to extraordinary self-control on my part. “Wonderful.”
A mile isn’t really that far to walk. Or even two. But my butt hurt, my head throbbed, my legs ached, my thighs stung, and I’d been sneezing for two hours, all thanks to the horse; I had assorted aches and pains from a long day of hiking, followed by a short bout of being almost blown up; I was cold; our last camp, the one where the bear found us, had been a very long time ago, and . . .
Well, that night, a mile was a very, very long way to walk.
So, of course, we went two.
It was after five-thirty when Karl finally led the way off the road along a streambed, a trickle of water running musically through ranks of rounded rocks. Even if someone followed the road, searching for signs of our leaving it, the streambed would defeat them. I applauded Karl’s foresight. I applauded even more the fact that at last we were going to stop.
We didn’t bother setting up a tent. The night was clear, not to mention almost over, and the sleeping bags warm. We spread them out on a grassy patch next to the streambed, I crawled into mine, and within seconds I was dead to the world.
I woke to bright light, blue sky, and nose-nipping cold. In my sleep, I had pulled most of my head into the bag, but I blinked over the edge of its mouth, then hauled my arm out and looked at my watch: 9:26, which meant I’d slept less than four hours. Not enough—not nearly enough—but better than no sleep at all. Barely.
Now if only we could do something about food . . .
I sat up. In the shade, frost glistened on the grass and weeds of our clearing. Karl wasn’t in his sleeping bag, which wasn’t too surprising, since it was rolled up tight. I took advantage of his presumably momentary absence to find a privacy bush, shivering as I squatted. Then I went down to the little stream to wash my hands—a rather numbing experience—and refill my canteen, dropping in another of the water-purifying tablets.
Karl appeared from the direction of the road. “I watched for half an hour and did not see a single vehicle,” he said. “Nor have I heard or seen aircraft. If anyone is searching for us in this area, they are not being obvious about it. I think we can press on.”
“We’d better,” I said. “I’m out of trail mix.”
“As am I,” said Karl.
We packed up our sleeping bags, pulled on our packs, and headed back up the streambed to the road. Just as the little bridge—really just a culvert—came into sight, a bright-red car rumbled over it, heading toward Elkjaw. I froze, but the car was only visible for a second or two, and the driver didn’t even glance in our direction. I heaved a sigh of relief.
“Just a random traveler,” Karl said. “Probably.” He looked up at the sky. “Perhaps, though, we should now parallel the road under the cover of the trees, rather than walking on it or on its shoulder.”
“Couldn’t I Shape a passing driver?” I said. “Get him to pull over and give us a lift?”
“Alter the mind of someone driving sixty miles an hour along a winding mountain road?” Karl said. “Splendid idea. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Nobody likes a sarcastic mystical guide,” I muttered.
The day hadn’t warmed much yet: our breath came in clouds, which caught the morning sun as it finally cleared the mountains. Only once did we hear another car approaching, and we tucked ourselves deep into the shadows of the forest until it had trundled past.
I was wondering exactly how we were supposed to “obtain transportation,” when, unexpectedly, the opportunity presented itself, in the form of a dark-green car parked in one of those “scenic turnouts” that feature a wooden railing, a garbage bin, and a sign identifying whatever scenery it is you are supposed to be admiring. (Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, there’s an outhouse.) In this case, the scenic object in question was Fortress Mountain, a lonely peak whose side facing us featured sheer, red cliffs and upthrust spires that resembled (if you squinted just right) the walls and turrets of a medieval castle. The road had been climbing steadily since we’d started along it (a fact to which my aching calves could certainly attest), while a valley opened to our right, so the scenic turnout gave an unobstructed view out over several miles of forest t
o the picturesque pile of rock.
On the other side of the fifteen-year-old Chevre sedan that had pulled into the turnout, steam rising from its tailpipe as it idled away in an environmentally unfriendly manner, stood a big, black-bearded man in a leather coat, holding a camera that sported the longest telephoto lens I’d ever seen anyone try to use without a monopod. Though the sun, just peeking up from behind Fortress Mountain, cast the distinctive cliffs into shadow, it also created a striking silhouette, which he was apparently trying to capture.
“There’s our ride,” Karl said.
“We’re just going to jump in and steal it?” I said.
“No,” Karl said. “That would raise flags. You need to Shape him, just a little. He needs to think the car is ours, we drove him out here so he could take some pictures, and his plan is to walk into town once he’s done. Can you manage that without also convincing him he needs to jump over the railing or gouge his eyes out?”
“I’ve spoken to you before about your sarcasm,” I said. But I felt nervous all the same as I reached for my power. I very carefully formulated what I wanted the man to believe, as if I were crafting one of the short stories I had been (slightly) famous for in high school. I reached out and touched the man’s mind. A few hours’ sleep seemed to have helped replenish my power a little; I didn’t feel any pain or sudden surge of exhaustion, just a slight . . . pressure . . . inside my skull, as though I were mentally pushing through some kind of thin, stretchy barrier. The man took another photo, then turned and waved at us. “I’m good!” he called. “Thanks for the ride! I’ll probably be out here a couple of hours before I walk into town for lunch.”
“Have a great time!” Karl said. He walked over to the door and graciously opened the driver’s door for me.
“Thank you,” I said, wondering why he was being so gentlemanly. I paused before climbing in, looking over the car roof at the photographer. “Can’t wait to see your pictures!” I called.
“Sure!” said the man. “Next time we . . .” He blinked. “Um . . .”
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