“HE’S YOUR SON?” I blurted. “How is that possible?”
Queen Stephanie and the boy both looked at me. “How is what possible?” Stephanie asked.
“How can you have a son. . . . in a Shaped world?”
The boy’s dark-brown eyes widened, and he gave his mother a startled look. “She knows?”
Stephanie glanced at him. “She claims to be a Shaper, like me.”
The boy turned those wide eyes on me. “Wow!”
“Why does this startle you?” Stephanie said, returning her gaze to me.
“Because . . .” I groped for words. “Because . . . you and I are . . .” I didn’t want to say “real,” not in front of the boy, because that would imply he wasn’t. Though he wasn’t. Was he? “From the First World,” I finished lamely.
“Yes?”
“So . . . did you . . . Shape your son, or . . . ?”
“I had him in the usual fashion,” Stephanie said. “I conceived him in the usual fashion, as well.”
“Mom!” the boy said. He sounded horrified and embarrassed, like any other teenager who really, really didn’t want to think about the unfortunately undeniable truth that his parents, at least once, had had sex.
“Hush, Piotr,” she said, and he subsided.
“But his father . . .”
“His father, Geoffrey, was one of the Shaped, yes,” Stephanie said. “A fine werewolf, leader of the Briarwood Pack.” Her eyes and voice turned dreamy. “I fell in love with him the moment I saw him. So strong, in wolf form, and in human form . . .”
Piotr gave her an imploring look.
“We were married a year after I Shaped this world. Piotr was born the next year.”
My mind boggled . . . and my heart ached. Because all this meant that if my boyfriend, Brent, and I had carried through with our plans, and married, I could have been a mother, too.
That dream had crumbled when the Adversary entered my world, stole my hokhmah, and made Brent forget me.
And all of this surely put the lie to Robur’s claim, in the last world, that the Shaped weren’t real, that they were equivalent to the “non-player characters” of computer and roleplaying games. A human woman could not conceive a child fathered by anything other than a human male, could she? Wasn’t that the basic definition of being of the same species?
I had come dangerously close to forgetting the reality of the Shaped myself, in my efforts to achieve my quest . . . and my survival. In my own world, I had rewritten people’s memories, including my own mother’s—or the woman I remembered as my mother—and gotten some of them killed in the process (though I thought, hoped, that doing it to my mother had saved her). In the last world, I had not, for most of my time there, had any power, but I had manipulated and used the Shaped anyway, to the best of my ability.
The fact I had survived to come here and try to continue my quest argued that those efforts had been necessary. My quest, after all, was to save all of the Shaped worlds and their (potentially) billions upon billions of inhabitants.
But I should never lose track of the fact that the people whose lives I manipulated were every bit as real as I, however constrained and artificial the world in which they lived—a particularly apt description of this world, with its single inhabited valley surrounded by vast, unreachable wilderness.
Piotr was the son of a woman of the First World, and a man . . . well, werewolf . . . of the world that woman had Shaped. He was real. There he was, in front of me, looking like any other teenaged boy dressed in a fur-lined bathrobe (okay, admittedly, I’d never before seen a teenaged boy wearing a fur-lined bathrobe, but still).
“And now Geoffrey is dead,” Stephanie went on, her voice turning cold. “Murdered ten years ago, as I watched, by the woman I thought was my friend. Patricia, queen of the vampires.” That single word carried as much hatred as I have ever heard two syllables convey. “And so I ask you again: what mad scheme has Patricia come up with? How did she bring you into this world, and how does she think your presence can contribute to her seizing control?”
“My presence here has nothing to do with Patricia,” I said.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“So let me tell you the story.”
She glanced at her son. “Why not? Piotr loves stories. Don’t you, son?”
Piotr nodded to her, then turned his big puppy-dog eyes (I know, I know, but honestly, that’s what they reminded me of) toward me. “I do!”
So I told them a story. This story. The story of me losing control of my world, and fleeing to the next, and gathering the hokhmah of its Shaper, and (hopefully) slamming the door in the Adversary’s face, and then finding my way through the last world to this one.
Piotr—Prince Piotr, I guessed I should call him—listened with wide eyes, absorbed in the adventure, but his mother’s gaze was considerably more skeptical and calculating. “You can take the hokhmah of another Shaper?” she said.
“Not forcibly,” I said. Although I wasn’t sure that was true. After all, the Adversary had taken mine that way. But if it were possible, I didn’t yet know how to do it. “You have to give it to me freely. I know Ygrair taught you how to do that.”
“She taught us how to share it,” Stephanie corrected. “Which is how this world came to be. Patricia and I shared our hokhmah.” She grimaced. “To my everlasting regret.”
“So share it with me, too,” I said. “Your half of it, anyway, if that’s how it works.”
“That is exactly how it works. There were things I Shaped, and things Patricia Shaped, and a few we Shaped together. Among other things, I Shaped Patricia’s vampires, and she Shaped my werewolves. It was the only way I could become a werewolf and she a vampire.”
I frowned. “Then why don’t you just Shape her vampires to quit attacking you?”
“I would in an instant if I had any power. But I do not. Neither of us has had an iota of Shaping power since we finished the world and became . . . what we became. We used it all.” She frowned. “Or so I thought, until now. Patricia must have gathered enough to, somehow, bring you here . . .” Then her eyes widened. “Or make me think she brought you here.”
“What?”
“I understand it now! She didn’t bring you here. She couldn’t possibly have that much power, or she’d turn the werewolves against me, like you suggested I turn her vampires against her. But she had enough, just enough, to Shape you, tell you what you needed to say to convince me you really came from another world.”
She’d just called me a liar. I glared at her.
She ignored it, racing on. “She filled you with this nonsense about being a Shaper, about an Adversary, about a quest spanning all the worlds of the Labyrinth. The mere act of Shaping you was enough to make me feel the presence of a stranger in the world and send someone to investigate. A newly Shaped person, after all these years? Of course, I sensed it!
“She thought I would accept all this at face value and take you into my confidence, so you could spy on me, discover my defenses, and help her launch an all-out assault on my kingdom!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I snapped (probably not something one should say to a queen, but I was furious). “Everything I told you is true!”
“It cannot be true. Ygrair said nothing of the possibility of travel between the worlds.”
“Because she only gave Karl that ability,” I said. “And he . . . gave it to me.” Slightly accidentally, but still.
“And what makes the two of you special?”
I hesitated, then decided it didn’t matter if she knew. “Ygrair is not human. She’s an alien. Something called a Shurak. They had technology to access the Labyrinth. That’s how she put all the Shapers into it.”
A new thought struck me. The Shurak nanomites were carried in Karl’s blood. That’s how I’d gotten them: putting my cut hand into a pool of his blood. Karl had been taken by vampires. What if Patricia drank his blood? She might already carry the technology to open Portals.
Piotr was staring at me wide-eyed again. “An alien? What’s an alien?”
“A being from another world.”
“So you’re an alien?” he said.
“No,” I said impatiently. Then I stopped. “Well, yes. In a way, I guess I am. But that’s not what I mean. Aliens live on other worlds out among the stars.”
“Wow,” Piotr said. He looked at his mother. “You never told me that.”
“I never told you that because it’s not true,” she snapped. “She’s only parroting what Patricia Shaped her to say. It’s all make-believe, to try to fool me.”
“Then how did Ygrair discover the Labyrinth?” I demanded. “How did she pull you out of the First World and pop you into a world you could Shape as you desired?”
“Magic, of course.”
I blinked. “Magic’s not real in the First World.”
“Of course it is. How else did we end up here?”
“I told you . . .”
“Your story is make-believe.”
I fell silent. She thought she knew the truth, and so she rejected my version of it. And, yes, as Arthur C. Clarke famously stated, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But conversely, if you believe in magic, any magic is indistinguishable from advanced technology. She chose to believe it was magic, and because she believed that, she could not believe my story.
Which left me a suspected spy from a vampire kingdom in the heart of a werewolf kingdom. “How can I prove to you I’m not lying?” I said, a little desperately.
Stephanie shrugged. “Shape something.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I have no power here. Not unless you share your hokhmah with me.”
“Not going to happen.”
“If I truly am Shaped,” I argued, “that’s impossible anyway. But if you try, and it works, then it’s proof I’m telling the truth. So what do you have to lose?”
“Sharing hokhmah would require us to touch,” she said. “Patricia may have Shaped you with some ability to disrupt my hokhmah . . .” She stopped, and her eyes widened again. “That’s it! She’s Shaped you so that, if I try to share my hokhmah with you, she can disrupt the bond of loyalty binding my werewolves to me, perhaps even switching their allegiance to her!”
I didn’t know what to say. I had no way to prove she was wrong. She thought I was Shaped, and that was that. Her hatred of Patricia was driving her into conspiracy-la-la-land.
She smiled, then. It was not a friendly smile. It was the smile of a dangerous predator with its prey in sight, the showing of teeth in anticipation of some highly pleasurable rending and tearing. “Outside, the sun has risen,” she said. “But tonight, beneath the full moon, I will ensure that whatever Patricia intended, it will fail. Tonight, I will ensure your loyalty to me.” She leaned forward. “Tonight, you become one of us.”
I felt the blood drain from my face, and my heart stuttered. “You . . . you can’t!”
“Of course, I can. I can, and I will.” Queen Stephanie leaned back. “And once you are absolutely loyal to me, I will compel you to tell me the truth.”
“I’ve told you the truth!”
She looked toward the door. “Maigrat.”
“Your Majesty,” Maigrat said, coming to the table.
Piotr looked wide-eyed from his mother to Maigrat to me.
“Lock her up,” Stephanie commanded.
“With pleasure, Your Majesty,” Maigrat said. “Dungeon?”
“No,” the queen said. “She will soon be of the pack. In one of the more comfortable rooms. But she is to be guarded.”
Maigrat inclined her head. “Of course, Your Majesty.”
The queen stood. “Take her away. Piotr, remain with me a moment.”
“Yes, Mother,” he said, but his gaze followed me as, numbly, I let myself be led from the room by Maigrat.
She told Jakob their orders. Jakob looked at me, one eyebrow raised, then grunted and led the way out of the Great Hall.
Our path took us through a labyrinth of underground passages. I should have tried to memorize the twists and turns so I could find my way out again if I escaped . . . but the truth was, I did not think I would escape. In that moment, I thought all hope was finally gone.
So many times I’d been on the verge of death or failure, and I’d always found a way out. If there was one here, I didn’t know what it was.
I had no Shaping power. I was not where I could open a Portal to the next world—I had not even sensed where that would be. My only ally, Karl, had also been captured and might already have been turned into a vampire. I had no friends among the werewolves. Stephanie had rejected the truth and was so convinced that Patricia was behind everything that I could not imagine what I might say to change her mind.
And the course of action she had decided upon . . .
No one from the First World could be Shaped, but this was not Shaping. Stephanie herself proved that. Once in one of these worlds, we were subject to its physical laws, as the not-so-dearly departed Robur had found out so explosively and fatally in the last world. The very Shapers who had made this world had been successfully turned into the supernatural beings they craved—for whatever reason, and frankly, I didn’t get it—to be. I had no doubt that I, too, could be turned. And then . . .
In his human form, Eric still looked like the boy I had pitied and wanted to help (and use for your own purposes, my always-nagging conscience pointed out), but more than just his body had changed. His allegiance was no longer to Father Thomas and the church, but to Queen Stephanie . . . as mine would presumably be once I became a werewolf. I would belong to her. However much like my current self I might look in my human form, I would no longer be the person I was.
Will I still be a Shaper? I wondered. Will the Shurak nanotechnology still . . .
And then, suddenly, I felt a spark of hope.
I was not an ordinary human of the First World, or any other world. I carried within my blood the alien technology that allowed me to open Portals, that somehow—though I had yet to learn how to initiate it—allowed me to take the hokhmah of multiple Shapers. Would it allow me to be changed into a werewolf?
Maybe not.
It was a slim hope, but it was a hope, and I clung to it like a woman swept away by a tsunami might cling to a floating log. I’d never despaired before, and I would not let despair grip me now. I would try to escape, and if I couldn’t escape, I would resist the change Stephanie planned to impose on me, and I’d hope that what I carried in my blood would enable me to do so.
And if I were changed, I would do everything in my power to resist the bond to Queen Stephanie she expected me to form. That, too, might be weakened or prevented by the Shurak nanotech, by the fact I was from the First World, or by the fact that I was also a Shaper.
And not just any Shaper, I reminded myself. I’m the most powerful Shaper Karl has come across in his journey through the Labyrinth. I had enough power to set back time in my own world, power to shape the ocean, power to spare.
Bring it, bitch, I thought then, and it was a measure of how much more positive I was suddenly feeling that my mouth twitched at the appropriateness of applying that particular word to the werewolf queen. Maybe it was just empty bravado, but hey, empty bravado had already carried me through situations I’d never imagined when I was a potter in a small Montana city and thought my cozy dreams enough.
Ahead, the corridor ended in a door. I pulled myself free of Jakob’s grasp and strode ahead. I tried the latch; the door was unlocked. I opened it and stepped inside ahead of my guards. It was a minor display of independence, but it made me feel good.
The room beyond, aside from being windowless, was quite pleasant. A fire flickered in the fireplace, and a lantern burned on the mantelpiece. I wondered how a servant had gotten there before us. Perhaps they had their own passages that were more direct than the ones along which I’d been brought.
The bed, broad and four-posted, looked comfortable. The room held an unavoidable underground chill, but the fire would soon take care of that, and in any event, there were plenty of blankets—all red. There were also a small round table with two plain wooden chairs, two comfortable-looking armchairs facing the fire, each covered with what looked like deerskin, a bearhide rug on the floor, and trophy heads of deer and elk and even a moose on various walls. I use antlers in all of my decorating ran musically through my mind. Unfortunately, it seemed unlikely animated candlesticks, clocks, and teapots would be coming to my assistance.
Jakob walked across the room and opened the only other door. “The necessary,” he said. I hadn’t heard that particular euphemism before, but it seemed appropriate, because it certainly was. “There is also a tub, should you wish to bathe. Water will flow from the taps in the wall.”
“How civilized,” I said.
Jakob frowned, as if he didn’t understand why I’d say that, and returned to the main door. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside, and saw an armed and armored man—the first I had seen not dressed in one of the robes that allowed for quick wolf-changes, probably, I thought, because it was now day outside.
“Your door will be locked, and Frederick here will stand guard,” Jakob said. “If you need anything, do not ask him. Instead, use this.” He gestured me over, and I saw that, in the corner by the “necessary,” a curved metal tube descended from the ceiling, something I’d overlooked because it was the same unrelieved black as the stone walls. “Speak loudly into it. Someone will answer, and you may ask for whatever it is you need.”
“Except rescue,” Maigrat put in. She gave me a sweet smile, with no teeth, which she somehow managed to make even nastier than her usual pointy grin.
Jakob sketched a small bow. “Sleep well,” he said, straightening. “Tonight, you will become one of us. I look forward to running beneath the moon with you.”
“As do I,” Maigrat said. “As do I.”
They went out. The door closed behind them, and a key turned in the lock.
I tried to hold on to the flicker of hope and defiance I had managed to ignite in the hallway, but as silence fell, except for the faint crackle of the fire, and I found myself alone for the first time in days, that flicker sputtered.
It did not, however, go out. I still had hope, and I would cling to it.
But first . . . sleep.
I turned down the lamp on the mantelpiece, tossed my pack on a chair, stripped off all my filthy clothes, climbed under the multiple blankets, and despite my fears was dead to the world two minutes later.
I didn’t even have time to reflect on what an unfortunate metaphor that might yet turn out to be.