Yatsar. If the boat went down, and Yatsar with it . . . this might be the last world he would ever enter. With the Portal back to the Shakespearean world and his own closed, and lacking Yatsar’s nanomites, he would find himself once more trapped, unable to continue his own quest to find and eliminate Ygrair.
“If we have any vessels strong enough to risk those seas, get them out there,” he said into the phone. “Planes, too. I want that yacht found, but do not board it. Track it. I want to know where it makes landfall. And I want a team prepared to move in the moment it does.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said. “We’ll do our best.”
“Do that.”
The Adversary pressed the button to end the call, and then stared at the map that graced one wall of the room. This world, like the original, was mostly water. If Shawna and Yatsar had risked a small boat in that vast expanse of blue to the west of North America, the location for the next Portal had to be out there somewhere. Capturing Shawna and Yatsar at this point would be counterproductive. The best course of action was to let Yatsar think he was safe, so he would open the next Portal—and then move in and capture him, and kill Shawna, before he could pass through it.
If the storm Shawna had somehow Shaped ended up killing both her and Yatsar, the irony would be . . . painful.
* * *
I had never imagined anything like the towering wall of water that appeared out of nowhere, invisible until the terrifying moment it raced out of the fog into the feeble illumination of our running lights. Amazon rode it up and up, as though climbing a mountain; teetered at the top; and then went racing down the other side, a heart-stopping descent into a watery canyon. At the bottom, Amazon’s bow plunged into a new wall of water rising after the first, and water and spray raced backward over the deck and crashed into us, leaving me soaked and spluttering, but at least not seasick—apparently, complete and total terror was a cure for me.
Frankly, I preferred nausea.
Julia looked as terrified as I felt, which was saying something. She punched buttons, and the sail began shrinking, to a quarter of its former self. I found out why as we reached the top of the next wave, and the wind hit us, a blast of air that felt as solid as the water had, and just about as wet, since it carried spray ripped from the surface. Bizarrely, the fog remained, though it swirled over the boat in tatters that slithered snakelike through the illumination of our lights. Lightning flashed, lighting the fog and the few yards of water we could see a ghastly camera-flash blue.
Under shortened canvas, we raced down another watery slope, battered the bow into the next wave, labored under the weight of water, rose again. Water poured around my feet, and looking down from the cockpit, I saw the floor of the cabin awash, stray objects floating in the foam. Julia pointed at the hatch. “Close that!” she cried. She pushed another button, and I heard the sound of pumps starting, before their rhythmic thump was lost in the shriek of the wind as we rose again to the crest of a wave.
I dropped to my knees in the water in the floor of the cockpit, and reached for the hatch. Karl knelt beside me. “Don’t start thinking we’re sinking,” he yelled urgently to me above the roar of the storm. “Concentrate on us not sinking! This boat cannot sink. Think it. Shape it. Make it true!”
“Did I do this?” I cried, finally getting a handle on the handle and hauling the hatch down: it was a complicated folding assembly but it slipped into place without difficulty, just before another dollop of water crashed over our heads and into the cockpit, where it ran out through openings I hadn’t noticed until then, kneeling next to them.
“Shaping the fog,” Karl shouted. “Unintended consequences. Enormous transfer of energy. Transformed that line of thunderstorms into . . .”
Into what, I didn’t hear, but then, I hardly needed to: the wind shrieking through the rigging as we crested another wave both drowned him out and finished—and put an exclamation point—on his sentence.
Metaphorically drowned him out. A literal drowning might still follow.
I crawled back to my place, held on, and set myself to believing, as fiercely as I could, that we weren’t going to sink, that Amazon could weather any storm . . .
A wave slammed over the coaming, hurled me sprawling to the bottom of the cockpit, water swirling around me. Julia shouted something. I couldn’t hear her, but Karl nodded and knelt beside me, opening a locker under the seats. “Tethers!” he yelled into my ear. “One end to the lifejacket, one end to the jackline.”
“The what?”
He snapped one end of the tether he had handed me to my vest, and another tether to his own, then snapped the far end of his tether to one of the lines I’d previously hardly registered, running along the boat’s gunwales from bow to stem. Julia had already tethered herself by the time I managed to get back into my seat and clip mine into place—just in time, as we plunged down the back side of another wave and buried the bow in the next one, the water pouring over us with so much force that, even holding on with all my might, I was almost swept up and out of the cockpit.
If that happened, would the tether hold me to the boat? Would I be able to pull myself aboard?
I resolved not to find out.
“Go below!” Julia shouted at me. “You can’t help! Karl knows how to sail—if anything breaks loose forward he’ll have to go fix it. You’d be better off in the cabin!”
I thought of locking myself in there, thrown from side to side, unable to see what was happening, water sloshing around my feet, rising—and shook my head violently. “No!” I shouted back. “I’ll stay here!” And concentrate really, really hard on my firm, total, rock-solid belief that Amazon will not sink.
Thinking about Amazon sinking conjured images of her sinking, and even thinking about that seemed to my panicked mind to make the boat wallow more heavily and recover more slowly. I closed my eyes. I focused fiercely on images of Amazon sailing triumphantly through the storm. I kept my eyes closed. I wouldn’t look at the waves . . . oof! One crashed into my face like a punch from a cold, wet boxing glove . . . I wouldn’t listen to the storm . . . What was that crashing sound below? . . . I’d just think, long and hard, about how solid and stable Amazon was, how nothing could sink her.
I visualized Amazon triumphant, the waves subsiding. I visualized us safe from, and undetected by . . . no, undetectable by . . . any pursuers, and as I did so, as I focused with all my might on safety and stability . . . something happened.
The storm still raged. The boat still tossed and wallowed and rolled almost onto her beam-ends—but as I dove deeper and deeper into the internal ocean of my mind, the outside ocean faded from my senses.
* * *
Karl hung grimly on to the coaming of the cockpit and watched Shawna Keys. Her eyes had closed, but her body had not relaxed into sleep: instead, she sat as tensely as he. She just wasn’t . . . present . . . any longer.
Another wave roared across the deck from bow to stern. He ducked his head as it washed over him, then looked at Shawna again. She remained unmoved, apparently unaware of the weather raging around them . . . the weather she had Shaped.
He still could not believe the power she had wielded. Raising a fog, and in the process, however unintended, a typhoon? After all she had Shaped in the past few days? He had never seen another Shaper who retained that much power after Shaping his or her world, or one who seemed able to recover from Shaping as quickly as she. But there is a limit, he thought, staring at her. And whatever she is doing now to keep us safe may be driving her close to it.
If that were the case, then just when . . . if . . . they got to where they were going, and really, really needed her Shaping ability . . . she might not have it.
But he dared not stop her. He had sailed in many oceans on many worlds, and this storm, he knew, could kill them at any moment.
He held on, and watched Shawna, and waited to see what would happen.
&nbs
p; * * *
Some unknowable time later I returned, slowly and uncomfortably, to an awareness of my body, feeling first cold, then cold and wet, and finally cold, wet, and aching, every muscle strained or cramping. The vision I had held on to for so long slipped away, but not like a dream, disappearing in an instant: rather, it faded slowly, the colors leaching, the images thinning, becoming translucent, blurred, foggy . . . gone.
Something else slipped away from me, too, something I didn’t have a word for. I felt . . . empty, lost, in a way I never had before. Something that had always been a part of me suddenly wasn’t part of me any longer: or maybe something I had been connected to, I suddenly wasn’t connected to any longer. I didn’t have words for it.
I didn’t have words for anything. I opened my eyes, blinked up the swaying mast, felt hands prying my fingers from the coaming. Then everything faded away: not like the images from my vision, but in the old, familiar way of passing out.
* * *
Though it was very, very early in the morning in Washington, D.C., the Adversary remained awake in his palatial room in the Emerald Palace, reserved for private guests of the First Family. He sat at an antique desk, looking at a computer monitor showing a satellite image of the storm that still raged off the coast of Oregon, its hurricane winds too much for even a Coast Guard cutter, far too much for helicopters and jets, all of which had been forced back to base. No empirical evidence existed to suggest where Amazon, the boat Yatsar and Shawna had commandeered, might be beneath that enormous swirling mass of cloud and rain and wind.
Yet the Adversary knew they were there; and knew, too (much to his relief) that Amazon was in no danger. Once more, he had felt a Shaping, even greater than the Shaping that had created the fog (and triggered the storm): an outpouring of energy he might have been able to match in his own world, but could not come close to mustering in this one, which he still, infuriatingly, shared with Shawna Keys.
So powerful was the Shaping that he did not even have to guess what she had done, the thrust of it communicated to him through the hokhmah they shared. He knew she had protected Amazon from the storm’s fury, changing the natural flow of wind and water, cloud and lightning. This Shaping was greater than the conjuring of a fog because it continued: he could still feel it, hours after he had first detected it.
Powerful indeed. But unless he missed his guess, once this Shaping ended, it would be a very long time before she could match it. Shaping took its toll, and Shawna Keys, he was almost certain, was burning herself out.
If this world were still solely hers, powerful as she was, she might have regained her ability quickly. But this world was no longer just hers. They were sharing its hokhmah, and that would interfere with her regaining her strength. It would take her a long time: with luck (his luck), more time than she had, for either he would catch her at last, and she would die, or Yatsar would escape with her through a new Portal. Either way, she would never Shape this world again.
All very encouraging. Less encouraging was the fact she and Yatsar had managed to vanish again. At sea, yes, and presumably somewhere under that swirl of white battering the coast. But where?
And where were they headed? Where was the second Portal to be opened?
All he could do was wait for the storm to clear, so that the forces he had committed to the search could resume their work.
He frowned. Or was it?
If Shawna’s ability to Shape this world waned as she exhausted herself, perhaps his would wax. Perhaps it already had. He knew he did not have full control, and thus could not change the things he really wanted to change—but could he perhaps move a little bit beyond merely Shaping the minds of people and animals?
He looked around the room for something small, something whose Shaping would not cause unforeseen consequences, and his gaze fell on the pillows on the bed. Filled with a light foam substance, they were firmer than he liked.
He looked at them, then closed his eyes. After five minutes, his eyes flew open again. He put a hand to his right temple, and muttered a curse. Then he got up and punched his fist into one of the pillows.
It remained, stubbornly, foam; and Shawna Keys remained, even more stubbornly, far more powerful than he—and also remained in Yatsar’s hands.
The Adversary had never seriously entertained the thought that Yatsar’s quest could succeed—until now. He lay down on the bed, rested his head on the disappointingly still-firm pillows, and, for the first time in a long time, lay awake worrying.
TWENTY-ONE
I WOKE IN the bed in the cabin in the bow, pale gray light streaming through the portholes, the boat swaying easily along through waves that, though I couldn’t see them, I could tell were mere ripples compared to the mountainous seas of the night before. I stared up at the pale wood of the ceiling for a long moment, then sat up . . . or tried to; my muscles didn’t want to obey me.
With an unladylike amount of groaning and grunting, I succeeded on my second attempt, and with an additional effort (and a couple of choice swear words), managed to haul myself fully upright on the third attempt. I walked/staggered to the head, emerged much relieved, and continued my unsteady advance until I reached the steps up into the cockpit. A glance into the aft berth showed a stationary lump under a red blanket. Karl or Julia? I wondered, then glimpsed a dark-skinned hand lying limp on the mattress. Julia.
That hopefully meant Karl was at the wheel, and not that he had been washed overboard and the boat was lolloping along on autopilot. Which, as high-tech as Amazon seemed to be, she probably had.
The companionway hatch remained closed, but after a moment’s fumbling I figured out the knack of it and swung it up and back out of my way.
Karl indeed stood at the wheel, pale and haggard beneath a thickly overcast, but non-threatening, sky. Scraggly whiskers had joined his neat mustache over the course of our adventures. Give him an eye patch, a headscarf, and a green parrot to squawk on his shoulder, and he’d make a fair pirate, I thought.
So, of course, I greeted him with, “Arrrr, matey.”
He blinked blearily. “I beg your pardon?”
I sighed. “Never mind. We survived, I take it.”
He nodded. “Thanks to you.”
“Me?” I blinked. “I passed out.”
“You did,” Karl said. “But do you remember what you did before that?”
I frowned at him. “I remember the storm hitting. I remember us putting on the tethers. I remember . . . holding on . . .” My voice trailed away. There was a . . . hole. A gap in my memory. Now that I’d cast my mind back, I could sense it, feel the shape of it, like the hole left by a pulled tooth, but I couldn’t seem to fill it, no matter how much I prodded it with my mind’s tongue (to carry on the rather disgusting dental metaphor). “I don’t remember anything else.”
“You Shaped us out of danger,” Karl said. “Most impressive. Despite the storm raging around us, the rain, the wind, the constant battering by the waves, and the violent motion of the boat, you plunged deep into your mind and held an image of the boat at peace. You were all but catatonic for two hours. And during that time . . . the storm calmed. Not everywhere, just in a bubble around us. Even the clouds opened directly above us, so the stars shone down. I could see the waves, as tall as ever, rushing by not fifty yards away in every direction. But they could not penetrate the bubble of safety you had Shaped for us, a bubble that remained even after you woke from your trance—after which you promptly passed out again. We sailed calmly on and emerged from under the storm just before dawn.” He gestured behind him. “It is still raging back there, somewhere. But we, I think, are clear of it.”
I stared at him. “I don’t remember doing any of that. It’s a blank.”
“I am not surprised,” Karl said. “And I fear . . .” He let his voice trail away. “Well, time enough to test that later. Right now . . . do you think you can take the wheel?”
“What?” I stared at him. “I’ve never driven . . . steered . . . helmed? . . . a boat in my life. Seasickness, remember . . . ?” My own voice trailed away. I didn’t feel the slightest bit seasick, though the boat was swaying far more than when we had first cleared the headlands sheltering the yacht club. Had I really been cured by terror? Try our terror-cured bacon. It’s delicious.
“Over it, are you?” Karl said, though he probably didn’t intend to sound like Yoda. “It sometimes happens like that. You have your sea legs, as the saying goes.”
“I hope I keep them,” I said.
“You might . . . but you might not,” Karl said. “Some sailors get sick every time they go to sea.”
I sighed. “I hope I’m not one of them.” In fact, I thought, I hope this is the last time I ever find myself in a boat on the ocean, on this or any other world, so it never, ever matters.
“Come around behind the wheel,” Karl said. “Fasten your tether first. The seas have lessened, but better safe than sorry.”
I nodded, and clipped the end of the tether, still dangling from my lifejacket, to the jack line. Then I eased around to beside Karl. “All right,” he said. “Take the wheel.”
Gingerly, I did so. Amazon suddenly felt like a living thing, in a way she hadn’t a moment before. The sails were no longer reefed, and I could feel Amazon tugging, eager to obey the pressure of the wind and swing much farther around than she was currently heading.
Atop the upright post supporting the wheel, a compass glimmered beneath a transparent dome. It showed our heading as a bit south of west. Karl pointed to it. “Keep this heading. West by south. That is all you have to do . . . well, that, and awaken me in two hours.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said nervously, staring down at the compass. It kept swinging back and forth around the heading Karl had indicated, never quite settling on it precisely or steadily.
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