TWENTY-ONE
IT WAS, OF course (because this is my life we’re talking about), not long after leaving the dead rogue, just after the last of the twilight faded from the sky, that we encountered the werewolf patrol. Fortunately, the wind was blowing toward us down the valley, and Piotr smelled them before they smelled us.
We were in the woods, which had thickened again past the cabin, and much closer to the valley floor than we had yet traveled. We hoped the forest there, with a greater proportion of leafy deciduous trees than the forest farther up, would help shield us from any vampires that might be flying through the night, and toward that end we actually got a break, for once. Thick clouds had rolled in from the west, making the night far darker than it ever could be otherwise in this moonlit world. (A torrential downpour would have been even more helpful—albeit annoying—as a way to keep down our scent, but that fortunate, we weren’t.
My first inkling of the approaching patrol was when Piotr became a boy, a pale lump crouching on the forest floor. “Get down,” he whispered. Karl dropped at once, and I followed only a second later. “A pack,” Piotr barely mouthed. I had to strain to hear him. He glanced at me. “Not Jakob’s.”
I fumbled for the crossbow, but he put his hand on my wrist. “No. Leave them to me.”
Just like that, he was a wolf again, and trotted downhill and out of our sight.
After a moment, I heard the murmur of voices, though I couldn’t make out the words. I tensed, ready to run, though I knew I could no more outrun a werewolf in wolf form through the forest than I could take to the sky (which was undoubtedly being patrolled by vampires anyway).
I shifted my weight, and a twig snapped beneath my knee. I froze. It was too dark to be certain, but I would have been willing to bet Karl was glaring at me.
The voices remained low. No one seemed upset or angry.
The conversation ended. Something came back through the trees toward us, announcing its presence first as two red eyes . . . and then changing shape. “They sensed us,” Piotr said. “But as I’d hoped, they are traveling south. They have heard nothing of what has happened in the palace. I told them the humans with me are loyal servants of the queen, sent as emissaries to Zarozje, and that I am escorting them at my mother’s command.”
“And they believed that?” I said.
“Why shouldn’t they? I’m the Prince.” Piotr turned his head away, looking back down the slope. “But now we must move even faster. Sometime soon they may encounter those who have been sent to track us, and once they know the truth, they will lead those trackers here.” He looked at the two of us again. “I will change into a wolf. Each of you take hold of my fur, one on each side. I can see in the dark. I can pick the fastest path. Otherwise, we’ll be slowed by your stumbling.”
A shifting in the air, and two red eyes looked at us. Since his body was largely invisible, it was disconcerting. But I told my primal brain to stop being silly, and as those eyes turned away, reached down, found the fur of his back, and grabbed hold. Karl took hold on the other side—I presumed; I couldn’t really see him—and then Piotr started forward.
I’d never before taken a stroll through a pitch-black forest with a werewolf as my only guide. It was like one of the trust exercises they make you do at summer camp to bond with your cabinmates. Piotr moved insistently forward at a speed that terrified me, knowing there were trees and rocks and deadfalls all around. Yet the ground remained relatively level beneath my feet, and though I stumbled once or twice, I just gripped his fur tighter and never fell.
I had no choice but to trust him, but I also had no choice but to remember what I had seen in the cabin, when Piotr had raised a bloody muzzle, eyes glowing bright as coals, guts trailing from his teeth . . . even if he spit them out a minute later and changed into a boy to complain they tasted bad.
Actually, that had made the whole memory worse.
Piotr chose that moment to stop and growl, which made my heart jump around in my chest like it was on a trampoline. He held that way for a long moment, his glowing eyes turned skyward. Vampires, I thought.
I looked up, but the overcast sky was as dark as the forest. There could have been a hundred vampires circling over us like vultures in a cowboy movie and I’d never have known.
Nothing swooped down at us and either dragged us away or sank fangs into our throats, though, so for all I knew, Piotr had heard geese flying overhead and had enough birddog in him to point.
The thought was silly enough to make me smile, which was what I needed right about then.
Piotr lurched forward again, and I had to grab his fur to keep from losing him. We hurried on through the dark forest for . . . well, I had no way to tell time, but it felt like a week or two.
Then, suddenly, Piotr’s fur vanished beneath my hand and I found myself touching naked flesh, which squirmed. It was an extremely disturbing sensation, and I snatched my fingers back. I sensed Piotr rising up on two legs beside me. “Carefully now,” he said. “There’s a ravine. We must go down the slope.”
He turned back into a wolf. I took hold of his fur again, and he led us cautiously down a slope I undoubtedly would have tumbled headlong down if left on my own in the dark. When we reached the bottom, I could hear water running near our feet.
We walked along the ravine a few feet, and then Piotr stopped. He turned back into a boy. “There’s a shelter here,” he said. “Wait.”
He stepped away, where, I couldn’t tell; but then I heard the sound of flint and steel. A moment later, light shone inside a . . .
Well, I guess you’d call it a cave, but that seemed to assign an undeserved grandeur to the dank hollow we stepped into. Still, it was, as Piotr had called it, shelter.
I glanced at Karl. Hollow-eyed, he looked as exhausted as I felt (and presumably looked, as well, though I couldn’t see myself). Piotr put the glass chimney on the lantern, which I now saw rested on a boulder, behind which was an ironbound wooden chest. He opened the chest and took out blankets and a packet of what proved to be dried meat and fruit.
I took the proffered food eagerly. The only reason I didn’t gulp it down was that both the dried meat and the dried fruit took a great deal of mastication. Piotr took a flask from the trunk and slipped out while Karl and I were chewing, and brought it back filled with ice-cold water, presumably from the stream I had heard (but never saw) in the ravine.
“We can only rest here a little while,” Piotr said. “Once the sun is up, we need to keep moving.”
“How far is it to Zarozje?” I asked.
“With luck, we could reach it by the end of the day.”
Karl frowned at me. “We aren’t going to the village. We’re going to the vampire castle.”
“At least a day’s travel beyond the village,” I pointed out. “In Zarozje, we can get proper supplies. Even weapons. Father Thomas will help.” Maybe, I thought, but kept that doubt to myself.
Piotr stared at me. Though he was in human form, I thought I still saw flecks of burning red deep in his eyes. “Zarozje,” he said. “Isn’t that where Elena was murdered?”
I couldn’t deny it. “Outside it. Yes.”
“I can’t go into a place like that!”
I couldn’t deny that, either. “No, you can’t. But I can.”
“You deliberately fled the village,” Karl pointed out. “Will that not engender a certain amount of distrust?”
“It probably would,” I said, “but Father Thomas doesn’t know that. As far as he knows, I was captured by the werewolves against my will, taken from the orphanage along with Eric. I’ll tell him I escaped the werewolves, and you escaped the vampires. He’ll test us with holy water and silver to ensure we’re human, then we’ll be fine.”
Karl looked unconvinced.
I decided to put my foot down. “I drive this quest now,” I said. “I’m the only one who can make it succeed, remember? And I say we go to Zarozje.”
Karl’s face went . . . frozen. “Very well,” he said, and that was that.
In the dark, as I lay wrapped in my blankets (I still had the one I’d brought from Piotr’s hideaway, and with a second one from the trunk in this shelter was almost . . . well, cozy would be stretching it, but at least not freezing), listening to Karl breathing slowly and heavily not far away, Piotr’s warm wolf-body between us, I was more honest with myself.
I didn’t want to go to the village merely to obtain supplies, though those would be nice. I wanted to apologize. To tell Father Thomas what had happened to Eric. To tell him it was, in a way, my fault.
I knew what Karl would say. Father Thomas was merely another of the Shaped, an off-kilter copy of someone in the First World, a computer programmer, maybe, or an insurance broker. I owed him nothing, and indeed, I potentially threatened his existence by doing anything that distracted me from my primary goal of gathering the hokhmah from as many Shapers as I could and delivering it to the wounded Ygrair so she could preserve the Labyrinth.
Oh, yes, I knew what Karl would say. But I didn’t care. I would do what I felt was right.
No matter what the consequences? some part of me asked the other part.
Yes, I told it . . . me . . . and then tried very hard to fall asleep.
Funny how that never works.
Karl woke, feeling a sudden absence. It took him only a moment to realize what it was: Piotr was gone, hunting perhaps, or patrolling, checking to make sure they remained safe from discovery. It was still dark, so he hadn’t been asleep very long.
Now would be the time to wake Shawna and proceed on our own, Karl thought, but he rejected the idea at once. First, because it would be futile. Piotr would track them with laughable ease. Second, because it might be fatal. While both Queen Stephanie’s and Queen Patricia’s forces were probably under orders to take the two of them alive, their encounter in the cabin with the rogue . . . who had revealed a most interesting ability that Karl thought explained much about how this world had come to its present sorry pass . . . had proved there were many other creatures loose in this world under no such compunction.
But the third reason was the most concerning. Shawna would not agree.
He reviewed his decision to complete the programming of the Shurak technology she carried, to give her the power not only to strip hokhmah from Shapers but to find her way through the Labyrinth to Ygrair’s secret world. He could not fault his reasoning. Their fates had hung by a thread; ensuring Shawna could carry on without him had seemed the prudent course of action.
In fact, if he were honest with himself, it was a course of action long overdue. He had been in peril many times since he had found Shawna, including the long weeks he was still in her world after she had traveled on to Robur’s, and with her programming incomplete, his death would have doomed the Labyrinth. Her death might not, since there could still be Shapers to be found as powerful as she (and the late unlamented Robur) somewhere within the Labyrinth, but Karl was increasingly convinced he did not have time to look for them. In the back of his mind, always, was the knowledge of how badly wounded Ygrair had been . . . and the memory of that bloody shirt he had left in Shawna’s world, just possibly providing the Adversary, who must certainly have found it, a big enough sample of the Shurak nanotechnology Karl carried to discover how to open Portals between worlds. Once he had that ability, he would not follow in Shawna and Karl’s footsteps: he would take another route. They might encounter him in any world, if that were the case, or they might not see him again until they reached Ygrair’s world . . . only to discover he had gotten there first, and their quest had already failed.
That risk meant time was of the essence (even though it was also variable, flowing at different rates in different worlds, and flowing very slowly indeed in Ygrair’s world, perhaps the only thing that had saved the Labyrinth from collapsing already), and that meant it was quite likely Shawna was the quest’s only hope of success.
And so, he would have to acquiesce to her new assumption of leadership. They would go to the village of Zarozje and wherever else she chose to go. His role had been reduced to advising her . . .
. . . and, he feared, trying to save her from the consequences of her own poor choices.
The mouth of their little cave was noticeably lighter than it had been when he woke. Dawn was coming.
He sat up as a wolf-shape blocked the light, then transformed into a boy. “Time to get moving,” Piotr said; and so the long day began.