THE SILVER CANISTER gleamed inside its glass-walled cabinet like a precious artifact in a great museum.
The thought gave the Adversary some slight amusement—as much amusement as he allowed himself. Any thief who might think it valuable and spirit it away would be sorely disappointed. The canister held nothing of intrinsic value in this world, but something of immeasurable importance to the Adversary: a bloodstained shirt, immersed in liquid nitrogen.
Any thief who spirited it away would also die, painfully, over as long a period of time as the Adversary could arrange. Ordinarily, he found torturing a citizen of a world he could Shape a pointless exercise because the Shaped weren’t real human beings, merely simulacrums of people of the First World. Since the primary purpose of torture was to elicit information, and it was far easier to simply Shape someone to tell him what he wanted to know, why go through the mess and bother and waste of time of inflicting pain on them? (It was different, of course, for denizens of the First World, who could not be Shaped.)
However, the Adversary would have been the first to admit—had there been anyone to admit it to—that when it came to matters related to Shawna Keys (whose world this had once been), the thrice-damned Karl Yatsar, emissary of the criminal who called herself Ygrair, and Ygrair herself, his emotions were unprofessionally engaged. Yatsar had not only helped Shawna escape this world, he had destroyed the Portals: the one leading to the world into which Shawna had fled, and the one leading back to the last world the Adversary had seized, which had been modeled on the work of a human playwright called Shakespeare.
The shirt in the shining canister, stained with Karl Yatsar’s blood, offered The Adversary his only hope of someday opening a new Portal and continuing his advance through the Labyrinth of Shaped Worlds to bring Ygrair to justice. And so, should anyone interfere with that, he would take what catharsis he could find in their slow, brutal punishment, Shaped creature or not.
The Adversary turned from his contemplation of the cylinder to the empty laboratory surrounding it. In the morning, the members of the team he had assembled—and Shaped—to reverse engineer the nanomites contained in the blood on the deep-frozen shirt would arrive and begin their research.
It would take time: months at the least, possibly years or decades. Shawna Keys’ version of Earth boasted the same technological know-how as the Earth of the First World—which, from the Adversary’s view, and that of the Shurak, the once galaxy-ruling race to which he belonged (and from which the nanomites had originated, in the distant and interdicted past), was but a baby step up from stone knives and bearskins. Unfortunately, he could not simply Shape the level of technology he wanted into existence because he hadn’t a clue how the technology worked. He was just a . . . he supposed “cop” was the closest word English offered for his profession.
What he could do—and had—was Shape the brightest minds of this world to focus on the problem. Eventually, they would crack it. Eventually, they would provide him with the technology the criminal Ygrair, a Shurak like him—though, like him, currently trapped in a human-like body, with all the limitations that imposed—had given to Karl Yatsar: the technology to open new Portals.
Once he had that technology, he would no longer be limited, as he had been at first, to following Yatsar from world to world. Instead, he would blaze his own path through the Labyrinth, moving ever closer toward its center—toward Ygrair.
And once he had her, and the stolen Shurak technology that had opened the Labyrinth to her, all these worlds would crumble back into the quantum foam from which they should never have arisen in the first place.
He returned his gaze to the gleaming cylinder. No, he would no longer have to follow Karl Yatsar. In fact, he would backtrack to the world he had first Shaped himself and force the second Portal out of it into a world he had not yet visited. But should his path intersect with that of Karl Yatsar and Shawna Keys somewhere along the way, he would very much enjoy visiting upon them some version of the torture he had already imagined for the hypothetical thief.
He turned away from the canister and walked to the exit. Research would begin in earnest in the morning. Shawna Keys and Karl Yatsar had won themselves a reprieve from his attentions, nothing more.
He turned off the lights, plunging the bloody shirt in its gleaming cylinder into darkness, went out, and closed the door behind him.