SNARLS AND HOWLS and bloodcurdling shrieks pursued us up the steep, shale-strewn slope, which I guess was better than being pursued by the things making the snarls and howls and bloodcurdling shrieks . . . although I was pretty sure they would be pursuing in short order.
My breath came in short gasps as I struggled uphill in Karl’s wake. The trees were sparse and the flat black rocks shifted and slid beneath us, sliding downhill with an almighty racket that ensured the creatures below knew we were above them.
The sounds of battle dwindled to nothing. Silence reigned behind us. It wasn’t as comforting as you might think.
At least there’s moonlight, I thought, glancing up. Here, there’s always moonlight. The stars around the moon looked normal, the constellations the ones I knew from my world, presumably the same as those in the First World. Though from what Karl had said, these stars weren’t really stars at all, just a very-large-scale stage backdrop to give this pocket universe, this cosmological cul-de-sac, the illusion of infinity.
My thoughts returned abruptly to Earth . . . this version of it, anyway . . . as a rather large boulder dislodged by Karl came bounding toward me. “My apologies,” he said over his shoulder.
“No worries,” I said, with a soupçon, perhaps even a dash, of sarcasm. The rock leaped and crashed down the slope behind us for a good fifteen seconds.
And then, suddenly, the slope eased. Ahead of me, Karl straightened, walked a few paces, and stopped. I scrambled up onto the level ground where he stood. Together, we looked at what lay beyond the ridge.
“Wow,” I said at last.
“Succinctly put.”
We stood just a few feet from a sharp drop-off. Spread out before us was more of the valley—a lot more of the valley. It stretched as far as I could see, which was pretty far in the omnipresent moonlight. Fields, forest, rivers, ponds, and hills tumbled away into the indistinct distance.
Directly below us lay a lake, smooth as glass, reflecting the brightest stars and the moon back at us as though it were a mirror. Fields surrounded it and, unlike most of those we’d passed through, appeared cultivated. We could only see half of the lake from our vantage point—we’d have to get closer to the edge to see the rest.
Karl reached for my hand, which surprised me; and I took it, which surprised me even more. “For safety,” he said.
“I’m all for safety.”
Together, we edged forward until we stood at the lip of a cliff that might not have been perfectly sheer but was within spitting distance of it, although said spit would fall a long, gut-clenching distance before it hit anything. Directly below us, on the near shore of the lake, stood a village, a cluster of buildings surrounded by a wall of pale stone that shone in the moonlight. A few yellow lights burned here and there.
Other than the castle, it was the first inhabited place we’d seen since entering this world, and considering what had come out of the castle, I thought it reasonable to worry about what might live in the village.
But a howl sounded behind us, answered by one of those weird, blood-chilling screams. The werewolves and maybe-vampires were still abroad, and they had to know we’d climbed the ridge. The village had a wall around it. Behind a wall sounded exactly like where I wanted to be. So . . .
“There is a path,” Karl said. I glanced at him. He wasn’t looking at the village, and following his gaze, I saw what he had seen: two wooden posts, with a gap between them and, sure enough, what looked like the beginning of a trail.
He released my hand and walked carefully over to the posts. I followed. He held on to one post, and I held on to the other, and together, we peered over the edge.
The path descended a couple of hundred feet, switched back, descended another hundred or so, and continued in that fashion on down the rock face. Trees rose between the switchbacks. It looked steep, but not too terrifying.
Another howl.
At least, no more terrifying than whatever was coming up the slope behind us.
“I think we should take our chances with the village below,” Karl said. “Do you agree?”
“Fervently.”
We started down.
You might think, if you have never been pursued through the mountains by monsters, that going down a hill is easier than going up one. You would be almost right. It’s less wear and tear on the heart and lungs and more wear and tear on the legs, which start to ache in short order, and keep on aching. It turns out holding your body back to keep from tumbling headlong is hard work. But that’s what we had to do, because the slope of the path we followed definitely did not adhere to building-code requirements for a wheelchair ramp.
After ten minutes, I would have welcomed a mountainside to climb. After fifteen, I would have welcomed a sharp blow to the head to put me out of my misery. But the path went on and on . . . and on. Every once in a while, a howl or a shriek rent the air, but they were far enough in the distance that they were only mildly alarming, as opposed to breathtakingly terrifying.
Not long after we began the descent, I realized it wasn’t as dark as it had been, that the sky had begun to lighten and the stars to dim. On the one hand, that was a relief, because as day began, based on the previous night’s experience, the maybe-vampires would disappear. If the howling things were werewolves, presumably they’d run off as well.
Of course, if they weren’t werewolves, but just regular (if somewhat oversized and glowing-eyed) wolves, they might actually prefer the light, in which case, we were about to be exposed to everyone—or everything—in the valley.
Including whoever was in the walled village. Smoke now rose from buildings inside the walls, one of which had the unmistakable cruciform shape, not to mention the tall bell tower, of a church. Which was interesting. Did this world have Christian churches?
I hope so, I thought. In the last world, Robur, the Shaper, had set up a religion that worshipped the Shaper . . . which was all kinds of ick, for my taste.
However, Robur was not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead, so it wasn’t like pretending to be a god had translated into actual godhood. In my world, I’d copied over all the religions of the First World. I myself had grown up going to Sunday School. If this world had some version of Christianity, I’d feel right at home.
Also, a village with a church seemed unlikely to be friendly to either undead bloodsuckers or flesh-eating lycanthropes, so there was that.
We paused to rest our aching . . . or at least, my aching . . . legs. I looked back the way I’d come. Nothing. I looked down at the village. “They’re stirring down there,” I said. Traditionally, people seen from a height are said to look like ants, but we weren’t quite that high, so I thought they looked more like cockroaches as they moved through the streets and the village square. There was no sign they had seen us.
Karl looked up at the brightening sky. “Between the devil and the deep blue sea,” he said, almost to himself.
“Rock and a hard place,” I put in. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Torn between two lovers . . .”
Karl gave me a look I was becoming accustomed to: equal parts annoyance and . . . well, annoyance. A touch of amusement would have been a nice change, but I suppose the last of my examples, though it predated my birth, had postdated him by decades. “Since we’re pretty sure the things chasing us are on the side of the devil,” I hurried on, “I suggest we opt for the deep blue sea. Or at least the smooth black lake.” I pointed down.
A bloodcurdling shriek came from behind us . . . and above us. I twisted my head around.
Two of the winged things burst into sight, black cutouts of giant bats against the pale sky. “Run!” Karl shouted, leaping to his feet.
Below us, I heard faint shouts: the cockroaches—villagers—had obviously spotted the vampires, too, if that’s what they were. Karl and I charged down the trail, or charged as fast as we could without tumbling head over heels and either breaking our necks or plunging to our deaths. Unfortunately, that wasn’t very fast at all. Certainly not fast enough.
Another shriek, almost on top of us. Karl glanced up. His eyes widened. Then he twisted, grabbed me, and pushed me off the ledge.
For a horrifying instant I thought he had murdered me. I screamed as I plunged to . . .
. . . a relatively soft landing on my back in the thick, leafy branches of a tree that thrust out from the slope, maybe eight feet below. Staring up wide-eyed, heart pounding, I saw the flying things swoop down on Karl, grab his arms—they had arms themselves, as well as wings, and legs, too, and didn’t that make them six-limbed?—and pull him into the sky. I saw his pale face staring down at me as, without a word, he dwindled away and vanished along with his captors over the top of the cliff, in the direction of the castle.
I thrashed, struggling to pull free of the branches that had snagged me, but they gave alarmingly and dropped me another couple of feet, bringing my heart into my throat. I gasped, quit struggling, and hung there, helpless as a fly in a spider’s web. I had nowhere to look but back up the side of the rock face we had so laboriously descended, and just then, at the very top, I saw, staring down at me, one of the wolves, both like and unlike the one that I had seen when I opened the Portal the first time: unlike, in that it was smaller and slenderer; like, in that its eyes glowed the baleful red of hellfire.
I gulped. It stared down at me for a long . . . very long . . . nearly eternal . . . moment . . .
. . . and then it started loping down the path toward me.
My heart had not exactly settled from the falling-off-a-cliff surge of adrenaline and now it redoubled its efforts to break free of my rib cage. I stared up at the wall of stone. I couldn’t see the wolf on the switchbacks leading down to me, which was actually worse than if I had been able to see it because I knew I’d have no warning before . . .
The wolf’s head suddenly thrust out over the edge of the path. It glared at me with burning red eyes, aglow from within. It crouched and inched closer, until its front claws hung over the edge—still several feet above me, but all it had to do was leap and I’d be puppy chow.
Except suddenly it startled, head snapping up and looking to its left, my right. It yelped and scrambled back onto the path, turned to run—and I heard a meaty thunk. The wolf screamed, a disquieting howl of agony that suddenly became a hundred times more disquieting as it morphed into a human scream, as the creature reared on its hind legs and transformed into a naked girl, clawing at the crossbow bolt in her side, blood pouring down her pale flank and hip and thigh.
And then she collapsed, falling out of my sight.
I gasped, and realized I’d been holding my breath. A moment later, I heard the thud of running, booted feet. Two new figures appeared above me, a man and a boy, dressed in leather and long black cloaks, both carrying crossbows, both wearing silver crosses around their necks. The man looked over the side at me, and his eyes widened. The boy, though, stood staring down, presumably at the wolf-girl, whom I could no longer see. He dropped his crossbow, and his hand went to his mouth. Then he turned away from me, vanishing as he fell to his knees. The sound of retching filled the still morning air.
The man gave the boy what I judged to be a compassionate look, but then turned back to me with what I judged to be an aggressively noncompassionate one. He leveled his crossbow at me. Like the cross around his neck, the head of the bolt glinted silver in the dawn light.
“What are you?” he growled. He either spoke English or there was something to my thought, back in the previous world, that I would hear English in all Shaped worlds, that there was a kind of universal translator/TARDIS effect. In any event, I could both understand his words and intuitively grasp the unspoken threat that if I answered wrong, a silver-tipped crossbow bolt might fatally sprout from my anatomy, too.
“Human?” I said tentatively. It wasn’t that I was unsure I was human—heck, as a Shaper, born in the First World, I could have said I was more human than they were (although I didn’t). I was only unsure about whether “human” was the right thing to say to keep me from becoming a very dead pincushion.
“We will wait,” he said.
For what? I wondered. “For what?” I said out loud.
“For the sun to touch you.” He kept the crossbow aimed squarely at my chest but glanced over his shoulder. “Eric,” he said, his tone considerably softer than the one he’d used with me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, Father Thomas,” said the boy’s voice. He stood, bringing his upper body back into my view, then leaned over to pick up his crossbow. He cocked it and reloaded it as he stared down at me. “I didn’t . . . know . . . it would be like that.” He glanced to his right, where the body must lie, then resolutely averted his eyes, returning his gaze to me. I pegged him at no more than fifteen.
“I’m sorry, son,” said the man—Father Thomas—a priest, presumably? “But you saw her in her true form. A monster. A moment later, and she would have leaped at this one, and likely devoured her.”
I swallowed, then called, “Thanks, Eric.”
He ignored me. Again his eyes flicked right; again he averted them. “But now she looks so human,” he said to Father Thomas. “And so young. She looks . . . my age.”
“And there lies the danger,” Thomas said. “In human form, they and the vampires can lie and seduce and twist men’s minds. This one,” he, too, glanced to where the wolf-girl must lie, “is beautiful. And now you see her in human form, naked and alluring, and you cannot help but feel sorrow at what you have done. But suppose you had come upon her in this form, and had given her your cloak, and brought her into the village, thinking she was human. What would have happened?”
“Tonight she would change and kill as many of us as she could,” Eric said. “Starting with me.”
“Starting with you,” Thomas said. “Or, worse, she would not kill you. She would change you, and you would become the monster she was . . . and she was a monster, Eric. You saw it. You saw the beast hiding beneath that fair skin.”
Eric nodded miserably. “I know, Father. But . . . to kill something that looks so human feels so wrong.”
“It’s the world that is wrong, Eric,” the priest said heavily. “It has been wrong since the Pact collapsed. All we can do is God’s will, to the best of our poor ability. The rest is in His hands.”
Well, I thought, presumably he’s not the Shaper . . .
The branches shifted beneath me, and I grabbed the nearest with a squeak. “How much longer?” I called up, a little breathlessly.
Neither the priest nor the boy answered. They simply stared down at me, silent, morose—and armed.
The sun finally touched the peaks on the far side of the valley, and slowly swept down them and across the fields and forest of the valley floor. Very, very slowly. An interminable amount of time passed before the sun cleared the eastern mountains and its full rays found me in my birdlike perch—although birds usually perch more gracefully. I was more like a cat who had climbed too high and was now clinging to the top of a bendy tree, mewing piteously. Not that I was mewing piteously at the moment, but if Father Thomas and Eric didn’t do something to get me out of that tree pretty damn quick, I was going to start.
As soon as the sun touched my face—I blinked in the light—Father Thomas grunted and lowered his crossbow at last, handing it to Eric. He took the boy by the shoulders, turned him, and lifted his cloak to uncover a leather backpack. From it, he pulled a coil of rope. He turned back toward me and tossed down one end. “Take it.”
I didn’t need to be asked . . . okay, told . . . twice. I grabbed on as tightly as I could, and with that support, was able to find my feet on the branches and then scramble up the side of the cliff and back onto the path I had so precipitously departed (with Karl’s help).
I came over the edge on my hands and knees and found myself staring into the dead eyes of the naked wolf-girl, lying on her back with her head turned in my direction, the feathered end of the crossbow bolt protruding from her other side, blood pooled beneath her. I suddenly found it hard to breathe. I had seen her in wolf form, looming over me, eyes glowing red—but now, she just looked like a young girl. Her eyes seemed to be accusing me. I was glad to be hauled to my feet.
Father Thomas turned me to face up the path—I resolutely looked over the girl’s body—and held me there. “Bind her,” he said to Eric.
I didn’t see where it came from, but in short order my wrists were wrapped with what felt like rawhide cord. “I will finish your testing at the church,” Father Thomas said, now turning me around to face down the slope. “Walk.”
“Testing? For what?”
“Walk,” Father Thomas repeated, and pushed me forward. Eric led the way.
“What about . . . ?” I half glanced over my shoulder.
“I will send a burial party,” Father Thomas said.
In silence, we descended, and in that silence, I had time to ask myself the most pressing question on my mind: where was Karl?
Dead? My mind shied from that possibility. I could open Portals myself now, but I still hadn’t taken the hokhmah from a Shaper in whatever way I was intended to. I’d only received the hokhmah belonging to Robur, the self-styled master of the Jules Verne-themed world we’d been in . . . mind-bogglingly, just the day before yesterday . . . because I’d been standing next to him when he died. Based on that single data point, if I killed the Shaper of this world while standing next to her or him, his or her hokhmah would automatically flow into me—but I had no intention of becoming a serial killer of Shapers. That was the Adversary’s approach.
My goal—our goal, Karl’s and mine—was to peaceably take the hokhmah of this world’s Shaper: first, so it would be unavailable to the Adversary if he ever found his way into this world (we hoped we’d stopped him from doing so, but we couldn’t be certain), and second, so I could convey it to Ygrair, the mysterious woman at the center of the Labyrinth of Shaped Worlds, the one who had placed me and all the other Shapers here to begin with. According to Karl, if I brought the hokhmah of enough worlds to her, she would be able to use that gathered knowledge to protect all the worlds from the Adversary and drive him out of the Labyrinth for good.
It sounded like the plot of a straight-to-StreamPix sci-fi series, but that’s where I found myself. And if Karl were dead, I wasn’t sure I could do any of that.
I also didn’t want Karl to be dead because he was my friend.
I thought.
Sort of.
Although he had said, if anything happened to me, he’d just find another powerful Shaper to take my place. Bully for him. The trouble was, if something happened to him, I was extremely unlikely to find another alien-technology-enabled guide-to-the-Labyrinth to take his.
Now that I was no longer holding on to the tree for dear life, I had leisure to feel the scrapes and bruises from my plunge into it. Just what had Karl thought he was accomplishing? What if he’d misjudged, and I’d broken through the branches and plunged to my death? What if a bit of sticking-up branch had impaled or disemboweled me? What if I’d lost an eye? It’s only fun until someone loses an eye.
All the same, I hoped I’d have the opportunity to complain about his cavalier treatment of my person in person, and that he wasn’t currently being drained of blood or devoured in some unspeakable fashion . . . as I had apparently been mere moments from being devoured myself, if not for the timely arrival of the priest and the boy.
A priest, I thought. A kindly village priest, who, once convinced I am purely human, will no doubt apologize for my rough treatment, bind my wounds, and give me food and water and a safe place to sleep. Just the ticket.
Trouble was, I wasn’t getting a lot of kindly-village-priest vibes from the good father, which left open the possibility he might actually be more of a Spanish-Inquisition-type priest dedicated to rooting out infidels and/or witches and burning them at the stake.
I sighed. In the last world, I’d been briefly accused of being a witch and threatened with being tossed from an airship. At the making of good first impressions, I clearly had a long way to go. I wonder if there’s a world based entirely on sweetness and light? That would be nice.
But as we reached the bottom of the path at last and started along the broader road to the gates of the village, the lake glistening beyond a thin line of trees to our left, I saw the silver-tipped spikes topping the walls, the hinged pots clearly meant for boiling oil, and the crosses incised in every brick. In this world, clearly, as in the last—as in mine, for that matter, after the Adversary got hold of it—sweetness and light were in short supply.
Who would Shape a world plagued by werewolves and vampires? And why?
We passed through the gate. Ahead loomed the spire of what I was now certain was a church, where Father Thomas would decide my fate.
I wonder who’s deciding Karl’s?