EIGHTEEN
WE LEFT THE river when we reached more level ground, following a trail of sorts that Piotr seemed to know intimately but I wouldn’t even have noticed if I’d come across it on my own. We moved quickly and, for the most part, silently, since we had no way of knowing what sentries or patrols might be about.
Yet, we saw no one. The sun reached its zenith, and we paused under an overhanging shelf of rock in a narrow space between two forested hills. A spring trickled water down mossy rocks in the shadows. Piotr lapped from the pool it made. Karl and I cupped our hands beneath the stream and drank. The ice-cold water tasted wonderful. I was thirstier than I’d realized.
“Making good time,” Piotr’s voice said behind us. I turned around to see him sitting cross-legged on the ground. “We’ll reach my hideaway by nightfall.”
“Surely others of your kind also know about any ‘hideaway’ you know about,” Karl said.
“Nope,” Piotr said.
“Why not?” I asked.
He leaned back on his hands, unfolded his legs, and stretched them out in front of him. I sighed and decided I might as well just ignore him being naked from now on. It seemed less stressful. “You’ll see.”
“Is there food there?” I said. “Because I’m starving.”
“Sure, there’s food. Although I could run down a rabbit for you right now . . .”
“Could we safely light a fire?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll wait.” Rabbit tartare didn’t appeal.
“Let’s keep moving, then.” He flowed back into wolf-shape and led us out into the woods once more.
As the afternoon passed, we wended our way through the forest, forded the river again at a shallow place, and then climbed the valley slope, higher than I’d yet been, still following a barely-there trail that Piotr alone could see. The climb through thick forest offered no view of anything until, suddenly, as the sun neared the snow-covered peaks to the west, we came out into a clearing, turned, and saw the whole valley spread out before us.
Back the way we came, everything looked wild, but directly below us, and stretching to the north, were the Lands Between, dotted with farms and villages. From here, it wasn’t as obvious as it had been below that they were largely abandoned and in ruins. Smoke rose into the declining sunlight from a walled town that was probably miles away—another of the fortified villages like Zarozje, I guessed.
Far to the north, a huge mountain shoulder stretched out into the valley. That had to be the ridge above Zarozje, although we were much too far away to see the village. Another day’s journey beyond it lay the castle of Queen Patricia, guarding the southern border of the kingdom of vampires. We’d made it this far without being captured and dragged back, but could we keep it up?
Lost in the view, I didn’t realize the others had moved on until wolf-Piotr yipped from behind me. I turned to see him on the far side of the clearing, standing in orange sunset-light, and Karl Yatsar looking back at me impatiently. I crossed toward them. They didn’t wait, plunging ahead into the trees.
We climbed for another twenty minutes, during which time the sun dropped behind the peaks and shadows gathered, though the sky remained bright. The climb became progressively steeper, and then, suddenly, we came out of the trees to find ourselves looking up at a sheer cliff of black stone.
Piotr turned left, trotted along the base of the cliff, turned toward it—and seemed to vanish into thin air. Karl glanced back at me, his face a pale blotch in the deepening twilight, and followed. He, too, disappeared.
I hurried to where I had last seen them and found myself looking into a cave. I put a hand against the cold stone and peered into the darkness. “Karl?” I called softly.
“Just inside,” he said. “Waiting for light.”
As though he had conjured it into being, a yellow glow sprang to life about twenty feet away, at the end of the tunnel at whose mouth I stood. I followed Karl to where the passage opened into a slightly larger chamber, to find Piotr, in boy form, just placing an oil lamp on a rough wooden table, illuminating his secret den.
Perhaps twenty feet long and a dozen wide, it boasted a pinewood table, two accompanying chairs, and a low, wide bed, built of peeled logs lashed together with rawhide, gray woolen blankets and two red pillows piled at one end of a cloth-covered mattress. Past the bed was a fireplace, carved into the wall, already laid with wood and kindling. Rough wooden shelves in the opposite wall, next to the table, bore some loose piles of clothing and a few covered woven baskets. At the far end, a long crack, running from ceiling to floor, glistened with running water, which first pooled in a carved stone basin on a pedestal, then, overflowing that, vanished into an opening in the floor.
The whole cozy arrangement puzzled me. Why would a boy who could turn into a wolf need a bed—especially one of that size? Why would he need a table, and even if he had gone to the trouble to make one—since he certainly couldn’t have lugged it up here—why would he need two chairs, in his own private hideaway?
Piotr pulled a dark-green robe from one of the shelves, slipped it on, and cinched it around his middle. Then he took flint and steel from the table where he had set the lamp and knelt in front of the fireplace. A few flicks of his wrist, and a flame appeared and grew.
I expected the air to grow smoky, but it didn’t. “A natural chimney?” Karl said, before I could.
Piotr stood and turned toward us, grinning. “Yes,” he said. “I told you this place was perfect.”
It was. And in a Shaped world, that made me suspicious. “And you just . . . found it?”
“Yes,” he said, “but not here.” He must have seen my puzzlement, because he laughed. “What I mean is, I found it on a map, tucked away in the palace library. And it’s not on any of the maps given to the regular patrols.”
“But your mother knows about it,” I gently pointed out. “She has to. She’s the Shaper. And this cave, with a spring, and a natural fireplace . . . if this wasn’t Shaped by her, she must have had it constructed at some point.”
“Well . . .” Piotr looked down at the floor. “I think she . . . when she and my father . . . I think they used to come up here when they wanted to . . . um, get away.”
A lover’s hideaway, for when she didn’t want to have to deal with being queen, but just wanted to be a woman . . . werewolf . . . in love. That explains the perfect-getaway vibe.
“Then it is not secret at all,” Karl said, in the disapproving-voice-of-doom he was so good at. “We should not stay here.”
“Mom doesn’t know I know about it,” Piotr said defensively. “I never told her I found it. There’s absolutely no reason she’d send anyone to look for us here.”
Karl continued frowning, but he said nothing more. I wasn’t particularly sure I trusted Piotr’s assurances either, but the fire was already taking the chill off the place, and I was starving and footsore, and here there was water, and a bed with blankets and pillows, and . . . “You said something about food?”
Piotr nodded. “Human food!” he said. He went over to the shelves. From one of the baskets he pulled out a small wheel of cheese, covered with wax. From another, he took something long and narrow, wrapped in cloth and glistening with what looked like salt. “Cheese, sausages, things that stay good forever,” he said.
“A long time, maybe, but not forever,” I said dubiously. “How long have they been here?”
He laughed. “Just a few months. I didn’t mean they’ve been here since my parents used to come here. I brought them myself, not that long ago. I like to hunt, but I like human food, too.”
From elsewhere on the shelves, he produced a knife and proceeded to cut each of us a good-sized wedge of the cheese and several slices of the sausage. The cheese was solid and sharply flavored, like a well-aged cheddar, and the sausage greasy and salty and absolutely wonderful. Sitting at the table, I ate my share, then ate more, then washed it down with water from the spring.
Then I looked at Karl, seated across from me. “All right,” I said. “Now, tell me what happened to you, and I’ll tell you what happened to me, and then let’s figure out what we do next.”
Piotr, who was sitting on the bed, nodded eagerly. “I’d like to hear your story, too.”
Karl sat back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Very well,” he said. “When the vampires took me . . .”
As Karl told his tale—minus the deeply embarrassing interval he had spent under the thrall of Seraphina—he studied the werewolf prince, Piotr.
He knew it was possible for Shapers to have children with the Shaped citizens of their worlds, but he had never encountered it in a world like this, where two Shapers had conspired to effectively Shape each other, albeit indirectly. The fact the boy was a werewolf was one thing. The fact he was not constrained by the Shapers’ will that the transformation from wolf to boy and back again should only happen at night, beneath the full moon, was another. It implied that he had inherited his mother’s Shaping ability: that, given training and offered a place in the Labyrinth, he might even be able to Shape a world of his own.
Ygrair had never suggested to Karl that such a thing was possible. That troubled him. He had been blindsided by ignorance more than once since he had found Shawna and enlisted her help in his quest to save the Labyrinth from the Adversary. What else had Ygrair failed to tell him? Or what else, and this notion troubled him even more, did she herself not know about the Labyrinth?
That very day, he had told Shawna that while he was not all-knowledgeable, Ygrair was. He had always believed that to be true. But every time he encountered some situation for which she had not prepared him, it raised these doubts he did not wish to entertain.
To be fair, his preparation for this quest had been, of necessity, rushed. Ygrair had arrived in her Shaped world both seriously wounded and seriously enraged. The physical wounds had healed themselves quickly—Ygrair was not human, after all, no matter how much she might appear to be one. Even if her human body were destroyed, it would eventually reconstitute itself, and she would be reborn. She was, effectively, both immortal and invulnerable . . .
Or so he had always thought. But this time, it quickly became apparent that she had suffered some other kind of wound, not to her human appearance, but to her alien core. The Shurak, her own people, whom she had somehow gravely offended, though he did not know exactly how, had attacked the school in the First World. She had thrown into the Labyrinth the only two Shapers who were still there and sufficiently trained to Shape worlds of their own. One of those had been Shawna Keys. Unfortunately, the other had been the Adversary, because she had not realized then that he, too, was Shurak, and that he had been the spy who had summoned the attackers.
As the school burned around her, she had fled into the Labyrinth herself, but at the very moment of her escape, she had been struck by some kind of weapon that acted upon her like a virus might act upon a human, weakening her, slowly corroding the core of her being—specifically, that part of her which had opened the Labyrinth. As she had explained it to Karl, a thread of her being ran to every Shaped World, but as she weakened, those threads were attenuating. If they snapped, all the Shaped Worlds and all the billions of Shaped people and creatures within them would dissolve back into the extradimensional nothingness from whence they had arisen, and every Shaper would die.
Wounded as she was, she could not rebuild those threads herself, she had explained to him. Instead, she needed someone to gather the Shapers’ knowledge of their worlds, their hokhmah, and bring it to her. Fortified with that gathered hokhmah, she would have both the strength to pour new power into the threads linking her to the Shaped worlds and the strength to fight off the infection of her soul caused by the Shurak weapon.
Karl Yatsar, who had first found her when she crashed on Earth so long ago, who had served her since, and to whom she had long ago given the ability to travel the worlds as her emissary and observer, could not gather that hokhmah himself. Though he longed to possess the power (for his own selfish reason), he was no Shaper. But, she said, she could give him the ability to seek out Shapers, to sense them within their worlds. Once he found one powerful enough, he could enlist him or her in Ygrair’s great cause.
Do this for her, Ygrair had told him, and when he returned, she would at last make good on her promise to make him a Shaper in his own right.
He had thought long about what kind of world he would create. It would be the world of his youth, for the most part, though with poverty and disease and war eradicated. Within that peaceful world, he would happily take up residence, living his life quietly, thankfully, and joyfully with the woman whose face he still saw in his mind’s eye every night as he fell asleep, and every morning when he woke: his long-dead fiancée, Laura.
Of course, she would only be a Shaped copy, and he had worried how that would eat at him over time, should his dream ever come true. And yet, strangely, Shawna Keys had given him new hope. Shawna Keys had somehow Shaped herself (which was not supposed to be possible) to forget that she was a Shaper, to forget her life in the First World entirely. Until Karl had entered her world—and, hard on his heels, the Adversary—she had thought it was the First World, the only world, and the people around her were real friends and family and lovers and acquaintances and strangers. She would have lived on in happy ignorance if circumstances had not conspired to prevent it.
It was now his hope that Ygrair could tell him how Shawna had accomplished her forgetting, so he could copy her feat, and live with his Shaped version of Laura in blissful ignorance of the truth . . . and with no memory of all the horrors he had seen in all the Shaped worlds he had visited, and all those he had yet to visit.
At the conclusion of Karl’s recounting of his adventures in vampire land, he fell silent, gazing at Piotr with a contemplative expression. Piotr, as it happened, had fallen asleep, curled up at the foot of the bed. I guess changing back and forth, battling other werewolves, and running through the forest was just as exhausting as being threatened with being turned into a werewolf, rescued at the last minute, and tramping through the forest in the wake of a werewolf prince. While it was true that I, at least, had managed to stay awake during Karl’s narrative, it was a near thing.
I yawned, and the sound brought Karl’s gaze toward me. He looked almost surprised, as if he’d momentarily forgotten I was there. “So what’s the . . .” I yawned again, even more widely. “ . . . the plan?”
“We must get the hokhmah from both Shapers,” Karl said.
“Well, duh. But how?” I shook my head. “I was right in front of Stephanie. Close enough to touch her, like the Adversary touched me in the Human Bean. That’s all it took for him to steal my hokhmah. But I had no idea how to do that to Stephanie, or even if I could.”
“I have been remiss,” Karl said. “My assumption has always been that most Shapers, once told the tale and convinced you, too, were at Ygrair’s school, would gladly share their hokhmah with you so you could take it to her. I have always believed she was universally beloved by her former students. As recent experiences have demonstrated, that is not the case.”
“You think?”
“Coercively drawing out and copying another Shaper’s hokhmah is intrusive and, it has always seemed to me, immoral,” Karl continued, ignoring my sarcastic aside “A kind of violation. Equivalent to theft at the least, perhaps even to rape. But it seems we must resort to it.”
“I must resort to it, you mean.” I remembered what I had felt when the Adversary had taken a copy of my hokhmah. Had he then succeeded in killing me, he would have had full control of my world. And yes, it had felt . . . well, I didn’t know what rape felt like, thank God, but it certainly had been intrusive, obscenely so.
I didn’t like the idea of being the one forcibly seizing a copy of someone else’s hokhmah any more than I had liked having mine forcibly seized. But what choice did I have? It had to be done to, literally, save the world—or rather, save the worlds, all of them, all of however-many-there-were Shaped worlds within the Labyrinth.
“Of course,” Karl said.
“So,” I said. “Can you teach me?”
“No,” he said.
I blinked. “Then—”
“However,” he continued, “the Shurak technology within me can teach . . . no, program, I think, is the word more commonly used for such things? . . . the Shurak technology within you.”
I sighed. “I’ll look for a knife.”
He looked puzzled. “What?” Then his expression cleared. “Oh, you think you need my blood again. No, this is not like that. You just have to let me hold your hands.” He offered his own across the table.
I took them. They were warm and callused.
His fingers tightened on mine. He closed his eyes. “I just have to access . . .” he murmured, then fell silent.
For a moment he stood perfectly still. Then his eyes opened and looked straight into mine, and, in that instant, I felt something like an electric shock, so sharp and sudden I snatched my hands back from his and jumped up, my chair falling backward with a bang.
The sound woke Piotr. He raised his tousled head and blinked at both of us. “What’s going on?”
Neither of us answered. Karl kept his eyes on me. I stared at my hands, flexing them.
And just like that, in my mind appeared the knowledge of how to strip a copy of the hokhmah from an unwilling Shaper. I could not have put it into words, but I knew how it could be done, what it would feel like, and how to overcome resistance if it were offered.
I could do it. I knew I would do it.
And, possibly, hate myself for it.
Piotr was still staring at the two of us, head turning left and right. I took a deep breath. “Nothing important,” I said, in belated answer to his question. My exhaustion abruptly redoubled, as if a heavy blanket hovering above my head had suddenly dropped around my shoulders. “I have to sleep.”
“You take the bed,” Piotr said. He got up, pulled off his monk’s robe, put it back on the shelf, and then flowed into wolf-shape. He curled up by the fire, nose to tail, and his eyes closed almost at once.
Mine closed moments later. After pulling off my boots, I stretched out where I was, on the side of the wide bed closest to the cave wall and fell asleep in seconds.