ELEVEN

NIGHT FELL, AGAIN.

Karl sat in the chair at the table, arms folded, staring at the door, determined that he would remain awake until someone came to replenish the food, water, and wine.

He woke to daylight streaming through the window, lying on the bed, with no memory of how he’d gotten there.

There was fresh food and water.

And still, no one came.

---

We rode all night. As dawn broke, we camped again, this time in a large house, missing chunks of wall and all of its doors but with a roof over it, which was a good thing, since it hadn’t stopped raining. After steaming by the fire for a while, in the company of the pack . . . most of them, though not all of them, had put on their robes, but a few seemed to think bare skin was better when wet and, honestly, I was so happy to be warm, I barely noticed . . . I crawled into one of the cots and fell asleep almost instantly.

I woke around noon. The rain continued to pour down. I mostly spent the afternoon sitting in a rotting old armchair by one of the unshuttered windows, looking out at the gray landscape. I worried about Karl for a while, and then I started wondering about Maigrat and Eric. Almost as though my thinking about them had summoned them, they suddenly appeared, materializing out of the mist, trudging toward the house in the unrelenting rain.

The werewolf-robe Eric wore was almost identical to the priest-in-training robe he had worn in Zarozje, so that he looked mostly unchanged, even though I knew that wasn’t true. Maigrat, on the other hand, looked (still) miserable and angry.

Eric walked a few paces behind her, head down. He did not look to me like someone who felt honored to be part of the pack. I wondered what Maigrat had said to him, in the time they had spent apart from us, when he had changed from wolf to boy again. Jakob had said he would no longer think the way he’d thought before he was changed, and certainly he had attacked Thomas without hesitation when we’d made our escape from Zarozje. But it also sounded like Jakob knew very few humans who had been changed—and if it was indeed considered an honor within the kingdom, all of those humans would have wanted to be changed. Eric had been changed against his will, in express violation of the Pact these werewolves claimed to still uphold.

I hoped I’d have a chance to talk to Eric, but though he certainly saw me by the window as he approached, he walked by me without meeting my eyes, even when I called his name. Maigrat, however, gave me a malevolent glance that promised she would love to talk to me, whether I wanted to hear what she had to say or not.

Which was why—shortly after a lunch of surprisingly savory stew featuring rabbits caught by some of the pack who had remained in wolf form during last night’s journey—she found me, once more seated on the old chair by the window, where I’d resumed staring out into the rain. (It wasn’t StreamPix, but it was better than staring at a wall, which was the only alternate programming available.)

“How long have you been a spy of Queen Patricia’s?” Maigrat said by way of greeting.

“I beg your pardon?” I said, because you have to say something when someone says something like that. On the other hand, the last thing she had said to me, back on the shore of the lake, had been how much she was looking forward to eating my entrails, should Queen Stephanie grow bored with me, so perhaps this was progress of a sort.

“I have been thinking about you,” she said.

“I’m flattered.”

She ignored my feeble sally. “You must be a spy because, otherwise, we would not have been sent to capture you.” She leaned forward, way forward, hands on the arms of the chair so she could thrust her face almost nose-to-nose with mine, grinning in an entirely nonhumorous fashion. I noticed for the first time that even in human form she had remarkably large and sharp incisors. “I look forward to watching your interrogation,” she almost purred. (Wrong species, but right word.)

I pushed myself back into the chair, but it didn’t open up nearly enough of a gap between us for comfort. “Not a spy,” I said. “I told you. I’m just a stranger. From outside the valley.”

“And I told you,” she said, “that there is nothing outside the valley.” To my relief, she straightened.

“Queen Stephanie knows otherwise,” I said. I hope. “Apparently, she has not chosen to share that knowledge with you.”

Maigrat growled, and again I was struck by how adept, even with human vocal cords, the werewolves were at making animal noises. “You keep believing that.” She turned away and started toward the door.

“Have you always been a werewolf?” I asked her retreating back.

She spun to face me again. “What?”

“Were you born to . . . this?” I gestured at her. “Like Jakob? Not made, like Eric?” It’s a failing of mine to want to push any exposed buttons I come across that are attached to someone I don’t like, a category of people into which Maigrat had definitely inserted herself.

She recrossed the space between us with remarkable speed, eyes blazing—literally; sparks of werewolf red glinted inside her otherwise human pupils. “I was not made,” she snarled. (Again, quite literally.) “I was never human. I am of the true stock of the people of the wolf. Your kind . . . you humans . . . you long to be us, but very few of you are acceptable to the pack because very few of you are worthy. You, for example,” her tone dripped contempt, “will never be one of us.”

“And Eric was?” I said. “Worthy, I mean? The boy who killed your sister?”

“That is different, and you know it,” she said. “He deprived me of my family. He left a hole in the pack. Now I have deprived him of his family and filled that hole.”

“He has no family,” I pointed out. “He’s an orphan. And isn’t the pack supposed to be his family, now? You haven’t deprived him of his family, you’ve given him one. He killed your sister, and by your lights, you’ve rewarded him.”

Maigrat’s eyes blazed red, as red as they did when she was a wolf, and she bared her unnaturally sharp teeth, so that for a moment I feared I’d find out how effective human-form werewolf teeth were for throat-ripping. Instead, she spun away, robe swirling, and disappeared in the direction of the main room of the house, where the others were congregated.

The pack members, I’d noticed, didn’t really like to be apart from one another for very long. I, on the other hand, was quite content to be elsewhere, and managed to keep myself mostly separate from the werewolves for the rest of the day.

The rain let up late in the afternoon, and it began clearing in the west. As the sun set, its final, fiery sliver made an appearance in a gap between two peaks, black silhouettes against the brilliant red sky. I was admiring the view when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Eric standing in the doorway, head down.

I hurried toward him, intending to give him a hug, but he flinched and backed away, and I stopped. “Eric, I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Better than fine.”

“But . . . what they did to you . . .”

“It’s a great honor,” Eric said. He didn’t say it like he meant it. “I’m so strong now when I’m a wolf. I can hear and see and smell things . . . it’s amazing.” Again, he didn’t sound amazed. “I came to say thank you for your help when I was a boy. It was misguided, but I believe you meant it kindly, although Maigrat says you only did it to find a way out of the village.”

I winced inwardly. I had meant it kindly, but I’d also needed to escape Zarozje.

“Is the pack welcoming you?” I said, remembering what Maigrat had said, and also, conveniently, changing the subject.

“I am part of it now,” Eric said, which didn’t answer my question.

From the other room came Jakob’s shouted, “Time to go.”

“Eric . . .” I said, but he had already turned and fled. By the time I emerged from the house, he’d changed into wolf form with the others who would travel in that shape tonight. Jakob sat astride his usual horse, holding the reins of my mare. She gave me a doleful look in the twilight as I approached. I greeted her with a friendly sneeze.

“Tonight, we will cross the border of Queen Stephanie’s kingdom,” Jakob told me as I mounted.

I sneezed again, wiped my nose, and said, “And then how far to the palace?”

“There is no palace,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.

The sky had almost completely cleared, the clouds hightailing it before some powerful upper-level wind that did not make itself felt in the valley. The full moon, locked eternally in its Shaped place in the sky, shone down brightly. We passed two villages where lights blazed atop high walls, staying well clear of them. We also passed three villages that were dark ruins, barely visible in the moonlight.

We passed fields that seemed well-tended, but no lights shone in the associated houses. Presumably, the farmers lived in the nearest walled village.

An hour passed; two. I felt hyperalert, wondering if we would be attacked again, but I was still deaf and blind compared to the werewolves. Maigrat suddenly appeared, naked and pale in the moonlight, in front of Jakob and me. “Rogue,” she said. “Feeding. Farmhouse on the right. Two hundred yards.”

“Take him,” Jakob snapped, and Maigrat flowed back into wolf-shape and loped off into the darkness. Two others accompanied her. I couldn’t tell if one of them was Eric. I hoped not.

“Feeding?” I whispered to Jakob. “On what?”

He gave me that “are-you-an-idiot?” look I’d come to know so well, and I knew, as I had already known but had hoped I was mistaken about, the answer to my question.

Ahead of us, there were sudden snarls, howls, and the most horrible shriek I had ever heard, a high-pitched sound like an entire classroom of third graders scraping their fingernails on a blackboard at once. It set my teeth on edge and my body sprouted goosebumps. “What was that?” I gasped.

Jakob responded by spurring his horse to a gallop. For a second, thinking he had left me alone, I considered trying to escape the pack, but a quick glance around showed that one of them, in wolf form . . . Embry, I thought . . . was behind me. I gave him a wave, sneezed, and trotted after Jakob.

Ahead, as I neared the farmyard, I saw the wolves circling something on the ground. Jakob had dismounted. The other unchanged werewolves were holding the horses.

I reached the yard and saw what the wolves were circling.

It was a naked man, clutching his arm, dark blood running between his fingers and dripping down its length. His eyes glowed red. His lips were pulled back in a snarl as feral as Maigrat’s had been earlier, revealing gleaming white fangs.

His arm wasn’t the only thing smeared with blood. His mouth was, too, and on the ground . . .

On the ground lay a child, a girl in a white dress, golden hair spread across the ground, sightless eyes staring up at the never-changing moon.

Her throat had been torn out.

I swallowed hard, gorge rising.

Suddenly, Maigrat was human again. “Caught him in bat form,” she said to Jakob. “Tried to fly, but I got a mouthful of his wing.”

“The girl?”

“Dead when we got here.”

“What was a child like that doing out here alone?”

“Wasn’t,” Maigrat said. She glanced back at the house. “Parents and a toddler, probably her little brother, in there. All dead . . . torn apart. Not just their throats. If I hadn’t seen this thing sprout wings, I would have thought it was a werewolf did it.” She shook her head. “Don’t know what a family like that was doing out here at night. Traveling between villages, maybe, something went wrong, couldn’t make it to safety before sunset. Took shelter, but it wasn’t enough.”

Four dead, I thought. An entire family. This little girl must have seen her mother and father and brother die, torn apart in front of her, she tried to run, but she only made it this far . . .

And then I felt anger . . . fury . . . directed at the person I sought to meet. Who could Shape something like this, a world where unspeakable horror like this was even possible? Who would think of such a world as a place where they wanted to spend the rest of their lives?

Jakob got down from his horse, walked over to the naked man. “Do you serve Queen Patricia?” he said.

The man spat on the ground. “She is nothing to me. I serve the Protector.”

Jakob cocked his head to one side. “The Protector? Who is that?”

The man laughed. “You’ll find out soon enough.” He stood, then, his naked body smeared with blood that looked black as tar in the moonlight, and I saw to my disgust that he was sexually aroused. “The Protector is stronger than your queen, or the vampires’ queen. The Protector will rule this valley. The Protector will kill you all.”

“Perhaps,” Jakob said. “But you will not live to see it.”

He nodded to Maigrat. She melted back into wolf-shape—and then the entire Pack leaped at the man.

He changed in an instant into a giant bat-creature, but the werewolves pulled him from the air and . . .

I swung myself out of the saddle and dropped to my hands and knees, vomiting into the weeds of the yard as the dying rogue’s screams, mingled with wet rending and tearing sounds, echoed from the walls of the farmyard. Jakob paid me no mind, his gaze locked on the pack.

One of whom was Eric. Stomach emptied, I sat on my haunches, and saw him, in young-wolf form, raise his head and look in my direction, muzzle wet and glistening in the moonlight, something long and stringy hanging from his teeth.

Suddenly, the wolves backed away from the carrion, spitting and heaving, like cats trying to rid themselves of hairballs. Maigrat emerged from the pack and turned human. She wiped her hand across her bloody mouth, making a black smear in the moonlight. “There’s something wrong with that one,” she choked out. “All vampires taste terrible, but that one . . .”

“We’ve heard that before when rogues are taken,” Jakob said. “Pull everyone back. It’s time to move on.”

I got heavily to my feet. There was a canteen attached to my saddle. I retrieved it, rinsed my mouth, spat, and rinsed again.

“Mount up,” Jakob commanded behind me. “We still have a long ride before we reach the border.”

I did as I was told, and, as we rode from the farmyard, kept my eyes straight ahead, not wanting to see what was left of the rogue or his child-victim . . .

. . . but it did little good. My imagination filled in the blanks.

The sooner I’m out of this hellish world the better. If Stephanie is the Shaper . . .

She had to be. Why else would she have gone to all this trouble to capture me?

But Queen Patricia had gone to just as much trouble. Stephanie had snared me. Patricia had snared Karl. What if Patricia were the Shaper, and I was heading farther away from her, and Karl, with every passing minute?

We’ll cross the border tonight. The werewolves will take me to their queen. Then I’ll know.

Until then, there was nothing I could do but ride, sneeze occasionally, and try not to think about the dead child in the farmyard . . . the naked man, smeared with blood, aroused by his own human butchery . . . and the sounds the wolves had made as they tore him apart.

I was not very successful.

---

On his third night as a prisoner, as the mantelpiece clock struck midnight and Karl stood on the balcony, staring up at the moonlit wall of the tower, wondering if he could climb it, someone at last appeared—not through the door, but behind him, hovering in midair on black bat-wings, illuminated by the lamplight from his room.

Karl felt more than heard the thing’s arrival, spun, and took an involuntary step back. Black-furred and humanoid but with the head of a bat, and prominent fangs, it was a creature of nightmare—and although Karl had seen more than his share of nightmare creatures in his journeys through the Labyrinth, this one exuded an exceptional air of menace. It could hardly do otherwise, with pinpricks of bloody light shining deep within its eyes. Not to mention that faint hint of corruption in the blast of air from its wings, which he had first noticed when flown to the castle.

Karl stiffened his spine and forced himself to hold his ground after that initial involuntary retreat. “Who are you, and what do you want? Why am I here?”

The thing bared its fangs, but the answer to his question came from behind him.

“You are here because Queen Patricia wants you here,” said a female voice, and he spun to see the locked door opened at last, and a woman standing in it, framed by torchlight in the corridor beyond. She wore a sleek black dress, the clothing equivalent of the bat-creature’s black fur, cut so low her full breasts were barely contained. Her skin was pale as moonlight, her lips red as roses, and Karl felt an unaccustomed surge of desire that shocked him, even though the red sparks in her eyes were proof enough this was just another Shaped creature. The Shaped held no attraction for him. Only one very real woman ever had. And yet . . .

He licked his lips. “And you are here to take me to her?”

“I am.”

Karl glanced over his shoulder. The winged bat-creature had landed on the balcony and folded its wings, which made it look rather more Satanic than less. “And why is . . .” he started to say, “it,” thought better of it, and instead continued, “ . . . he here?”

“To ensure you do nothing foolish.” The woman stood to one side and swept her hand across her body, indicating Karl should step through the door.

Breathing heavily, trying to tamp down the completely unwarranted lust his body seemed to be committed to and was currently expressing most uncomfortably, he edged past her. She did nothing to get out of his way, so that, unavoidably, he brushed against her breasts. He gasped, the contact almost bringing him to orgasm.

She laughed, a sound that made him want to turn and ravish her right there. And then, like a light switch being flipped, his desire vanished, though its physical manifestation took moments longer to subside. He stepped back from her as though she’d pushed him. “What are you?” he whispered hoarsely, but of course, he already knew the answer: vampire, or this world’s version of it.

The ancient legends of vampires did not make them sound sexually appealing in the slightest, but clearly the Shaper of this world—Queen Patricia, perhaps, though he still had no inner sense that the Shaper was anywhere near—was working with more recent source material.

The ability to irresistibly seduce your food source so that it willingly came to you to be drained of blood clearly had advantages to vampires, now that—as his head cleared—he thought of it. Apparently, it could be turned off as easily as it, and he, had been “turned on,” to use a phrase he had heard in worlds based on more recent versions of the First World than he remembered.

Not for the first time, Karl wished he was more familiar with the popular culture of the past few decades in the First World, on which many of the worlds he’d already visited had been based. Shawna seemed steeped in it. The last world they had been in had drawn on the works of Jules Verne, whom he had at least heard of. The Shakespearean world from which he’d entered Shawna’s had been something of a relief in that regard, although the necessity of framing all conversations in iambic pentameter and ending with a rhyming couplet had become wearying over time.

“What am I?” she said. “I am the queen’s lady-in-waiting, sent to bring you to her. My name is Seraphina DeWinter. So if you have quite recovered yourself,” her eyes flicked toward his crotch and back again, and his face heated, “we should proceed to the throne room. Follow me.”

Karl had emerged from the room onto a landing of a spiral staircase that wound around the tower, both up and down from his prison. Looking back into the room, Karl saw the back of a naked man as he pulled a belted black robe from the wardrobe and put it on. When he turned toward Karl and Seraphina, Karl saw that, like her, his face was extremely pale, and he had remarkably red lips. If he wanted, could he arouse desire in me, as well? Karl thought.

Karl had been in many worlds he did not like, in his search for a Shaper strong enough to journey from world to world and gather the hokhmah of each to take to Ygrair and save the Labyrinth. A world where the Shaped beings had the power to give the desires of his body primacy over his will and intellect, though, was a new level of horror. He felt disgust, at himself, at the vampires, and at the Shaper who had created them.

Whom, he suspected, he was about to meet—though his body had betrayed him another way, if so, since the Shurak nanotechnology within it had so far failed to recognize his proximity to her.

His eyes narrowed as he thought about that, while following Seraphina down the stairs and then through grand hallways and narrow corridors, in turn being followed by the menacing man. Perhaps I cannot register her power because she has no power, he thought. Perhaps she used all of it in creating her world, holding nothing back, and it has not regenerated.

If that were the case, this could be a world that had spun wildly out of the control of its Shaper. Of all the worlds he had been in that he did not like, those topped the list.

They entered a hall much broader and higher-ceilinged than any they had gone through before. Two men in black surcoats over gilded hauberks, iron-helmeted, wearing swords and holding halberds, guarded a massive double door that stood open. Candlelight spilled from it, brighter than the flickering torches illuminating all the castle’s corridors they had passed through thus far.

They reached the door, and despite himself, Karl gasped a little at his first sight of the throne room.

“Candlelit” described it in roughly the way “bright” described the disk of the sun. More candles than Karl had ever seen in one place lit the vast space: candles in tall silver candelabra lining the pillars that held up the vaulted roof, more candles in more candelabra attached to the pillars, candles in wheel-shaped fixtures hanging from the ceiling, and huge candles, as big around as a man’s arm and half as tall as Karl himself, between the pillars lining the approach to the throne, and, a dozen to a side, framing the throne itself.

The floor and roof were black and the candles were white, but the pillars were blood-red, as was the intricately carved wood of the throne, on a four-step dais at the far end. Behind and above the tapestry, an enormous Gothic window stood open to the now-night air, the motionless full moon centered within it. Below the window hung a tapestry depicting the castle as Karl had seen it on first entering this world, lit by the moon, windows aglow, black, winged shapes soaring around its towers.

A sculpture topped the throne’s high back: a black bat, wings spread, mouth agape to reveal ivory fangs. Its eyes, enormous rubies, glittered red.

The man who had helped escort Karl to the throne room bowed at the entrance and departed, leaving him to approach the throne, and the woman on it, in the sole company of Seraphina, the lady-in-waiting. He could see no one else in all that candlelit space. Perhaps court was not in session, or perhaps all of the queen’s retainers had other business this night.

Or perhaps, he thought, Queen Patricia, as the Shaper, has some notion of who I am, or, at least, that I come from outside her world, and does not wish that information causing confusion and consternation among her Shaped minions.

He would find out soon enough.

He and Seraphina crossed the black floor, footsteps echoing off of the distant walls. The candles were so numerous he could feel their heat, as though lit fireplaces burned all around, but he could also feel the cool mountain air flowing into the hall through the open window. It made many of the candles flicker, but none, so far as he could tell, guttered out.

The woman on the throne wore a black dress as low-cut as his escort’s, but with a high collar that glittered red—inset with rubies, he guessed. She had the same pale-white complexion and blood-red lips, and he felt renewed doubt. Perhaps Queen Patricia was not the Shaper at all, but another Shaped creature. The Shurak technology within his blood, infuriatingly, still gave no clue.

He gathered himself, preparing to speak—only to stumble to a stop as, through the open window, a bat-winged creature burst into the throne room. This one swept down and landed between him and his escort and the throne, the blast of air from its wings making him close his eyes and turn his head. When he turned back, the winged creature was gone and instead a naked man, with skin almost as black as the fur of the creature he had been a moment before, stood before the throne.

The man bowed, straightened, and said, “My apologies, Your Majesty, but there is news.”

The queen, who sat askew, leaning her elbow on the right armrest, legs nonchalantly crossed, waved a languorous hand. “Yes, Nicolas?” she said.

“The pack that attacked the village of Zarozje two nights ago has crossed the border into Queen Stephanie’s realm,” the naked man—Nicolas—said.

“And is the erstwhile companion of this one,” she indicated Karl, and Nicolas glanced over his shoulder, “still with them?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Nicolas said, returning his attention to the queen.

Karl stiffened. Shawna had been taken by werewolves two nights ago?

“You have done good service, following the pack from afar since Antoine’s attack on them failed,” the queen said. “I give you command of his flight. He will be engaged in . . . other duties.”

“Thank you, Majesty.”

“You are dismissed.”

The man bowed, and then in an instant flowed back into winged shape and flew out through the open window, blowing a blast of warm, fetid, graveyard-smelling air into Karl’s face in the process.

“Now,” said the queen, straightening in her throne and assuming a more regal air, “who are you, and how did you come into my world?”

Karl walked forward to answer that question, but his mind, for a moment, was elsewhere.

The werewolves had Shawna.

I hope she’ll be all right, he thought. Our quest has hardly begun.

Then he looked at the vampire queen on the blood-red throne and wondered if perhaps his concern would be better focused on himself.