Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  He heard about the voice, the sudden appearance and disappearance of a giant white statue, and the death of Captain Arneson, crushed to the floor of the arena. He heard how Karl Yatsar had appeared at the base of the block of stone, and how he had been pursued by the second man who lay dead, both of them vanishing from the others’ sight. And he heard how, somehow, bright sunlight had flashed out over the amphitheater for a moment, though the fog had never lifted—and then of the fall of the second dead man from the block of stone.

  The Adversary looked up. He could not see the top of the block. “Climb up there,” he ordered. “See if anyone is hiding on top.”

  But even as he ordered it, the island shook again, and with a sound like a thunderclap, a crack ripped across the arena floor. The Adversary and his cadre members staggered. The stone block began to sink into the ground with a grinding noise. The arena floor, now two separate plates of stone, tipped toward it. In a moment both the Adversary and his followers would slide helplessly into the abyss he could see opening.

  He reached out with his Shaping power to stop whatever was happening, but the power rebounded. Somehow, this island was not something he could Shape: he had no connection to it, though he had seized the hokhmah of the rest of this world. He did not know how that could be, but it left him with no choice.

  As suddenly as he had arrived, he departed, taking his followers with him.

  * * *

  Karl clung to the crumbling block of black stone. Behind him, the altar split in two with a sound like a rifle shot, and then shattered into shards and dust. Below him, the Adversary vanished, along with his two followers. Unless Karl missed his guess, the entire island would soon follow.

  He had to get off of it.

  A worthy and necessary goal. How he could achieve it, however, remained unclear. Amazon, the boat on which they had arrived, had, the last time he saw her, been aground on a rock . . .

  Hmm. That rock was part of this island, which clearly was rapidly losing its independent existence, now that the place where the worlds touched had relocated, and one of the Shapers whose subconscious had created it had left this world entirely. Which might . . . just might . . . mean that Amazon, if not too badly damaged, would come afloat once that rock vanished.

  A thin strand of hope to cling to, perhaps, but the only one at hand.

  As the black stone block sank lower, it tilted. In a moment Karl would fall.

  Instead, he jumped.

  He landed with a bone-jarring thud on the tilting granite, an impact that surely would have broken bones if not for the fact that the “granite” was now so soft his feet and knees left divots in it as he hit it and toppled forward. He scrabbled up the slope before the incline grew so great it would send him sliding into the seething, grinding maelstrom of earth and dirt into which the entire island seemed to be devolving, collapsing from this pinnacle down to the sea. A ring of flat flooring still existed just beneath the cracking walls of the amphitheater. He paused there, panting, to take stock and to strip off the useless and heavy leather jacket.

  The iron gratings sealing the exits from the amphitheater had melted away, along with all the doors. The openings remained, though, including the one that had been sheltered by a pillared portico, the one he’d assumed led to the stairs they had not climbed, which should be the most direct route to the beach. He ran for it. The remaining bit of floor disintegrated beneath him as he leaped into the brick-lined tunnel. The stairs stretched down before him into darkness, but he still had his flashlight. He flicked it on and dashed down.

  The stone of the stairs became softer and softer beneath his feet, until he was leaving footprints in it. The evil statues decorating each landing now looked like unformed clay from Shawna’s pottery workshop. He ran faster, risking a broken leg or worse, as a thunderous rumbling behind him spoke of collapsing ceilings and walls.

  One landing was smeared with blood and bone, strings of intestine, and dark-red lumps of tissue, scraps of cloth and leather and chunks of twisted metal scattered in the gore. All, presumably, that remained of the missing members of the group that had come in pursuit of them. He could not imagine what had so . . . enthusiastically . . . destroyed them, but was more than pleased that with the island’s dissolution it was not waiting for him, too.

  He reached the landing where he and Shawna had taken the door through which they had heard scratching. The door no longer existed, and the corridor beyond it had collapsed. He ran on. Somewhere ahead, the stairs ended, and he would have to pick his way down the raw stone face of the natural cavern . . . if it had not collapsed already.

  But when he reached the end of the steps, he saw light to his right, a rift in the mountain slope that had not been there before. Rather than plunge farther down into darkness, he turned and clambered up the gentle slope to that opening. As he hauled himself out into the open air, a rumble behind him spoke to the wisdom of that decision. He clung to the ground as it shook, and then, with a great heave, like a bedspread flicked by some celestial giant, the entire mountain burst outward. Karl felt himself flung up, and out, and waited for the killing impact against the stones below, or the stones all around him, but suddenly there were no stones below or surrounding him, nothing but wisps of gray dust, vanishing even as he fell.

  He plunged deep into seawater, black as soot, but softer than rock, and fought his way to the surface. Immediately he struck out, fearing a vast undertow as the island subsided, but instead, the water smoothed, the black muck within it vanished, and within seconds, he found himself swimming in the open ocean, as calm and unsullied as though the island had never existed . . . which, in a fashion, might well have been the case.

  He trod water, and looked around. A white speck perhaps half a mile away beckoned. He could swim that far.

  He had to swim that far.

  His clothes dragged at him, but he had always been a strong swimmer, and he had had occasion to practice the skill more than once in the worlds through which he had journeyed in his service to Ygrair. A little more than half an hour, he judged, from when he set out, he reached the white speck: Amazon, listing and low in the water, but not beneath it. He hauled himself aboard and lay for a long moment panting, staring up at the blue sky. His hand stung: he lifted it, and saw the gash across the palm he had inflicted on himself in his first attempt to open the Portal, still oozing blood. Then he rolled over, pulled himself upright, and began assessing Amazon’s condition.

  Twenty minutes later he knew: it wasn’t good, and if he ran into more bad weather, he might not survive, but he could salvage her. What had seemed a killing gash in her hull was not as bad as it had seemed. While he could not stop it from leaking, he was able to slow the intake of water using the tools, waterproof glue, and fiberglass sheeting he found in one of Amazon’s lockers. He silently thanked the absent Julia for her care in stocking her precious vessel. He wondered what had happened to her.

  Amazon’s rigging remained intact, her mast upright. Her pumps still worked. How long her batteries would continue to provide power he did not know, but there were strange panels on her deck that he believed made electricity from the sun—he had seen such things in other worlds—and a mechanism beneath her hull (discovered as he swam beneath her as part of his inspection) which, he believed, must generate electricity from the flow of water. With luck, there would be power enough to keep ahead of the leak.

  He could not sail her across the Pacific. The best he could do was to sail back to the mainland. Then he could begin the long journey to where he could make a Portal . . . for he could already feel that the connection now lay east and south of his present location. He desperately needed to get to Shawna, but it would be days or weeks before he could join her, assuming she still lived.

  And if she did not . . . ? He did not like to consider it, but he already knew, from the existence of the strange island, that the next world’s Shaper was also remarkably
powerful. If Shawna Keys were lost to him, perhaps that Shaper—who, at least, would surely remember Ygrair, and the training she had provided—would be strong enough to do what must be done . . . even, perhaps, strong enough to destroy the new Portal he would create before the Adversary could come through. The Adversary had taken this world, but if Karl could ensure he went no farther into the Labyrinth, he was more than welcome to it.

  Karl lived. Therefore the quest lived. As he had through all the long decades since he had met her, as he would to his last breath, he would serve Ygrair, in the certain hope of the reward she had promised him.

  With stars blazing above him, Karl Yatsar sailed into the night.

  * * *

  The Adversary stood beneath those same stars on the deck of the USS Bonhomme Richard. No one had returned from the island except for him and the man and woman of his cadre whom he had spirited away as it collapsed. Shawna had escaped from the world . . . but Karl Yatsar had not. He still lived within it, somewhere. The Shurak nanomites within the Adversary’s blood knew it, and therefore, so did he.

  He did not understand why the Portal had vanished after Shawna passed through it. He did not know how Yatsar had escaped the island. But no matter. Yatsar had to go after Shawna, which meant he would have to open a new Portal. With the disappearance of the strange island, the location where this world and the next intersected had no doubt shifted. Yatsar would have to travel to wherever that interface now existed. The Adversary would try to capture him before he got there, of course, but even if Yatsar succeeded in opening a new Portal, he could not keep the Adversary from following him unless he could find the Shaper of the world into which it opened and convince that Shaper to help him destroy the Portal, as he had enlisted Shawna to destroy the Portal from the last world . . . and even then, only if the new Shaper were as powerful as Shawna, which seemed unlikely.

  In any event, he would not have enough time. With full control of this world now his, the Adversary would know the moment the new Portal opened. He would enter the new world hard on Yatsar’s heels, capture him, and claim the nanomites within Yatsar’s body for his own. Then he would be able to open Portals at will, and the Labyrinth would fall, world by world, until the Adversary faced and defeated Ygrair, finally meting out to her the punishment she so richly deserved for her blasphemous actions of so long ago.

  The Adversary could have Shaped himself back to the Emerald Palace, instead of lingering on the Bonhomme Richard, but it seemed a waste of energy. In the morning, he would have himself flown back to the mainland, and there begin Shaping this world in earnest, into a copy of his own, a human version of the orderly Shurak utopia. He would reconstitute his cadre, if he had time before Yatsar opened a new Portal. However many cadre members he had when that Portal opened, he would take them with him into the next world.

  Of course, he would continue to bend all of this world’s available resources to the capture of Yatsar, but even if Yatsar could not be apprehended, his quixotic quest was ultimately doomed to failure: if not in this world, then in the next . . . or the next.

  The Adversary looked up at the blazing stars. In this world, he knew, they were mere lights, a painted backdrop; but in Reality, one of them lit his home world. He wondered which one it was, and if he would ever return to it.

  Then he turned and went belowdecks.

  * * *

  I sat up, wincing, pressed my hand to my bruised flank, took a somewhat painful breath, and stared around.

  I was still on an island, but rather than cold gray mist and rising ranks of stone seats surrounding me, I saw green and gently waving grass sloping down to a dark pine forest, over whose crowns I saw the blue and sparkling sea. I looked over my shoulder, and there saw more pines, climbing up steep slopes to an upthrust fang of bare white stone.

  A stone’s throw to my left, a stream gurgled along a reedy streambed. Bobbing on a tall cattail in the cool breeze, a bird sang a trilling waterfall of melody.

  I stared around. Apart from the bird, I seemed completely alone. “Karl?” I called.

  My voice seemed to travel no distance at all. But it caused the birdsong to pause, and in that pause, two things happened: the island shook, the ground heaving like a seasick sailor—and I heard a strange sound behind me, a throbbing, thrumming sound, like and yet unlike the helicopters whose thunder I’d come to hate so much.

  I looked around again, then scrambled to my feet as the white peak suddenly shattered, rock showering down from all sides into the forest as the thunder of its destruction reached me. Swinging around that crumbling peak came the largest flying machine I had ever seen, an airborne improbability that looked like a ship’s hull held aloft by a veritable forest of masts, each topped by two whirling rotors. Two propellers, fore and aft, drove the impossible monstrosity through the air.

  The ground again heaved beneath me. Trees writhed and toppled in the forest. The bird vanished in mid-trill, like a popping soap bubble. The stream stopped gurgling, the water audibly slurped down into the ground, which suddenly felt spongy beneath my feet.

  The flying machine descended toward me, the thunder of its propellers shaking the air. Rope ladders appeared over the side, and figures began to descend them.

  The grass withered away, leaving bare dirt, now so soft I began to sink into it. I reached desperately up toward the flying machine as it hovered above me, the wash of its rotors tearing at my clothes.

  The hillside had become quicksand. I was up to my knees, up to my waist, up to my . . .

  The nearest descending figure, a man in an old-fashioned sailor’s uniform, was suddenly right above me, one hand gripping a rope rung, the other reaching down. He clasped my wrist and pulled me up onto the bottom of the ladder as, with a roar, the island simply fell away beneath me, collapsing into the sea, turning to dust as it fell, vanishing entirely before it hit the water.

  As I was lifted up and up from the suddenly empty ocean below, for the first time I saw the giant flag in the bow of the flying machine, flapping furiously in the wash of the giant rotors: a standard black as pitch, bearing a golden sun.

  I recognized it.

  Toto, my mind whispered, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Edward Willett is the award-winning author of more than fifty books of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for adults, young adults, and children. Ed received the Aurora Award for best Canadian science fiction novel in English in 2009 for Marseguro; its sequel, Terra Insegura, was short-listed for the same award. In addition to writing, Ed is an actor and singer who has appeared in numerous plays, musicals, and operas, both professionally and just for fun.

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