I LOOKED AT the spot on the map I had pointed to. It was far off to the west, down a long side valley—the Sacred Vale, apparently.
“Four or five days’ travel on foot from here,” Father Thomas said. “But if the Lands Between are no longer beset, it will be an easy trip.”
“But they are still ‘beset,’” Karl said. “By the rogues.”
“Followers of this ‘Protector,’” Stephanie said, frowning.
“Some of whom have the ability to change their appearance,” Patricia said, also frowning.
“The restoration of the Pact will mean nothing to them, because they bear no allegiance to the queens,” Karl said.
“But what are they, exactly?” Patricia said. “Again, this illusion-casting ability sounds like something a vampire would have, yet you said the one you encountered looked physically more like a werewolf.”
Piotr nodded. “And he tasted . . . wrong.”
I looked around the group. Only Father Thomas seemed the slightest bit surprised or disturbed by that last sentence. The vampires and werewolves just frowned.
“Wrong how?” Stephanie said. As opposed to, say, a horrified, “You ate him?” which, you know, an ordinary mother might have said if her son had confessed to cannibalism.
“He tasted . . . of old blood. Dead blood. He looked like a werewolf, but he tasted like a vampire.”
Jakob, though he was standing some distance away, reacted to that, coming forward. “The rogue we killed, the one who devoured the farm family, who also professed to be ruled by this ‘Protector,’ also tasted wrong.”
“But you also said ‘Vampires taste terrible,’ after the attack on us,” I blurted, which perhaps was not the most diplomatic thing to say at that moment, considering we were in the throne room of the vampire queen and the vampires outnumbered the werewolves by a considerable number.
“It’s true,” Jakob said, eying the assembled vampires, who eyed him back. “All vampires taste terrible. But this one tasted terrible in a different way; like Piotr said, a wrong way.”
“Werewolves taste terrible, too,” Dracula said.
“We Shaped it that way,” Stephanie murmured to me. “We didn’t want them to develop a taste for each other.”
“So these bad-tasting rogues are not something you two Shaped,” Karl said. “They are the work of the Third Shaper, who styles himself the Protector.” He tapped the map. “Whom we will find at Mother Church. I feel him there.”
“Or her,” I said.
He inclined his head. “Or her.”
I glanced around the gathered group. Those not in the know were looking puzzled, especially Father Thomas, at this talk of “Shaping” and “Shapers.”
“But how can there be a third Shaper?” Stephanie demanded. “How could Patricia and I not know of such a person until now?”
“We will not know until we confront the Protector,” Karl said.
“Four or five days?” I said to Thomas.
He nodded.
“It does not have to be four or five days,” Patricia said.
Karl, for some reason, winced.
I frowned. “I don’t . . .” Then I realized what she meant. I should have twigged sooner—I’d seen it often enough. “Your vampires can fly us there?”
“In a single night.”
“It is not a pleasant way to travel,” Karl warned.
“But it is fast,” Patricia countered. “And it will keep you clear of any—as Karl put it—bad-tasting rogues. With the Pact restored, Stephanie and I and our forces will work jointly to clear these monsters out of the Lands Between, so they can be repopulated, the villages and farms restored. But that will take time. Months. Years, perhaps.”
“It will, indeed,” Karl said. “And if this third Shaper has already sabotaged your intentions for this world once, I think you can be certain he, or she, will attempt to do so again. And if some or all of these rogues share the power of illusion demonstrated by the one we encountered . . .”
“If they’re like vampires,” Patricia said, “there will be a variety of powers we must beware of—and we have no way of knowing what they are.” She shook her head. “This is infuriating. We Shaped the world we wanted. How dare this interloper interfere with that? And at the cost . . .” She took Stephanie’s hands again and finished in a whisper, “ . . . of so much misery.
Stephanie smiled a little moistly.
Karl cleared his throat, apparently more uncomfortable with all this display of naked emotion than he’d ever indicated he was with this world’s frequent display of naked flesh. “So,” he said, “the sooner we confront this person, the sooner your world will be restored to the way you want it.”
I wondered about that. I was sharing hokhmah with Stephanie and Patricia, as the Adversary had shared mine when he had touched me in my world. He had needed to kill me—or drive me out of the world, which is what actually happened—to have unfettered control over the Shaping of my world. If I took this third Shaper’s hokhmah but he or she survived, wouldn’t he or she still have at least some limited power to act against Stephanie and Patricia? Especially since this “Protector” seemed to retain some Shaping ability, while they did not?
Father Thomas suddenly spoke up. “I do not understand this talk of Shapers. Of which there are, apparently, three.”
Surprisingly, it was Piotr who jumped into the breach. “It is just another word for ‘ruler,’” he explained . . . okay, lied. “Someone who shapes a realm to his or her liking, as rulers have done throughout history.”
Oh, well done, I thought.
“But where does it come from?” Thomas said. “I am, if I may be slightly immodest, a well-educated man, and it is not a word I have ever heard.”
I gave his mind a push.
“Oh!” Thomas said, interrupting himself. “Of course! I just remembered. An old text, one I have not thought of in years. Pre-Cataclysm. That was, indeed, a word used for ruler.”
And then I realized what I had done. I hadn’t even thought about it. His unretouched memories seemed likely to be inconvenient, and so I’d simply rewritten them. Why not? He wasn’t real, was he? Just a Shaped person. A copy . . .
All my agonizing about the morality of that kind of modification apparently had no effect on my actions. Is this who you’ve become? I asked myself.
And if so, given time, and more worlds, what else would I become? The absolutely corrupt tyrant I’d already reflected absolute power might produce?
No! I vowed. I just I have to think before I Shape. I have to. Because every time I Shape someone else without thinking, I’m Shaping myself, too; maybe into something I do not want to be.
“We queens tend to be somewhat archaic in our thinking and speech,” Stephanie said.
“Yes,” Patricia said, “we do.”
They must have guessed what I had done, but neither made an objection. Why should they? Certainly, the only other Shapers I’d met so far—the Adversary and Robur—had had no qualms about Shaping the denizens of these worlds. Nor did Karl.
Only me. And my qualms were quite quickly becoming quiescent. Perhaps the only reason I still had any at all was because I couldn’t remember Ygrair’s training. A far as I could tell, in her school, concern for the Shaped was not only not part of the curriculum, it was actively discouraged.
Which, once again, raised my never-far-from-the-surface doubts about Ygrair, the spider at the center of the Labyrinth’s web, the one Karl insisted was the epitome of goodness.
I took a deep breath. Once more, I had no choice but to drive on, despite the fog of ignorance and doubt shrouding the highway ahead. “Well, if that’s settled,” I said briskly, “let’s get to planning. Who will come?”
“I have already said I will,” said Father Thomas. “I will serve as the representative of all of the priests remaining in the Lands Between. We must know the will of Mother Church.”
“Mother Church may no longer be in the church’s hands,” I said carefully.
“Then I must know that, too.”
“The members of the pack who are here now,” Stephanie said, “are those I chose to protect me. They can certainly protect you.” She nodded to them. “Jakob, Maigrat, Zikmund, and Embry, when he returns from delivering my message to my forces outside.”
“And me,” said Eric.
“You left the pack without permission,” Jakob said, with one of his remarkably-good-for-being-in-human-form imitations of a wolf’s growl.
Eric neither cowered nor backed down. “I disobeyed no orders, and I had good reason. You ripped me from my home and family. Yes, I admit, that, too, was for good reason—but all the same, I could not leave that wound unhealed.”
Jakob growled again, but he said nothing more. Maigrat looked like she would have liked to, but Stephanie gave her a queenly look, and she, too, subsided.
Then Piotr looked his mother in the eye. “And I am going, too.”
She stiffened. “Piotr. You are the prince. You cannot—”
“You can’t stop me, Mom. I think I’ve already proved that.”
I winced, waiting for the parental explosion, but Stephanie, after glaring at him for a long moment, suddenly relaxed and lowered her gaze . . . which among werewolves, I guessed, as with dogs, was the equivalent to a surrender. “Yes,” she said. “I guess you have, at that.” She sighed. “Just please be careful.”
Piotr said nothing. Only I, of those present, knew he had no intention of returning to his mother’s side. I wondered if I should say something. I decided I should not. He had earned the right to make his own decisions and his own mistakes.
“Dracula will come with you, as my representative,” Queen Patricia said. “And Seraphina.”
Karl reacted to the choice of Seraphina with a visible start. “Your Majesty,” he said, eying the lady-in-waiting, who raised an eyebrow at him and smirked in return, “I would prefer . . .”
“I do not care what you prefer,” Queen Patricia said.
“Will Dracula and Seraphina be among those carrying passengers?” I asked, while Karl subsided into silence.
Dracula and Seraphina’s icy return gazes were answer enough. I could Shape you to force you to carry us, I thought, but then recoiled from the idea, my second thoughts after Shaping Thomas fresh in my mind.
Instead, I said, “Well, then. We need vampires to carry . . . um . . .” I did a quick count. “Nine of us.”
Dracula surveyed the various vampires in the candlelit hall, standing with the unnatural stillness that seemed to be one of their abilities. In fact, I had almost forgotten they were there. “I will select . . .” he began.
“Not tonight,” I said hastily. “I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m exhausted. A day’s rest. Even two. If I’m going to face this third Shaper, I need to be at full strength, and right now I’m more at the end of my rope.” I touched my neck. “You might say I’m feeling a little drained.”
Patricia didn’t apologize. I didn’t expect her to. Instead, she said, “I don’t like leaving this usurper in place one minute longer than necessary.”
“Nor I,” said Stephanie.
“Two days won’t make any difference,” I said. “And . . . well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I insist.”
The queens exchanged glances. “Very well,” Patricia said, after Stephanie acquiesced with a nod. She turned to Dracula. “My heart, will you look after gathering supplies, as well as choosing which vampires will provide transportation?”
“Of course,” said Dracula. “We will depart from the tower room the night after next. With the additional load, it will be easier to launch from a height.”
“We cannot go straight to Mother Church,” Father Thomas said. “Please. I must first go to Zarozje and tell them what has transpired.”
“They cannot let down their guard,” Karl warned. “The gates must still be closed at night; the guards must still patrol the walls. The murder of humans found abroad after sunset has been entirely the work of the rogues. The reforging of the Pact we have achieved here will have no effect on the rogues’ reign of terror.”
“They might think about blocking that underwater door, while they’re at it,” I put in, wondering if the cliché about closing the barn door after the horse was gone existed in this world.
“I do not expect them to lower their guard,” Father Thomas said. “But I can give them hope that in the not-too-distant future, they may be able to. And hope is something we have not had in a very long time.”
“Very well, we’ll go to Zarozje first,” I said quickly, forestalling any possible objections from anyone else, and reemphasizing the fact that I was now the one in charge.
And then I felt a surge of wonder at that thought. It’s true. I am the one in charge. I decided we would take time to rest before we continue on the quest, and the others agreed. I’m the only one who can carry the hokhmah of other Shapers to Ygrair—and now I can not only open Portals, I can find Ygrair on my own. I can already Shape this world. I’m the most powerful person in this room.
Yes, I answered myself, and remember what you were thinking just a few minutes ago: power corrupts.
“Thank you,” Father Thomas said.
“Would you and Karl join Steph and me in my private quarters?” Queen Patricia said.
“Of course,” Karl said.
I saw Piotr staring at us, and knew he longed to come, too, but I ignored him.
Patricia’s quarters proved to be disconcertingly non-medieval. If it had had a few modern appliances and a big-screen TV, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in my own town of Wind River, Montana.
“You’ve redecorated, Trish,” Stephanie said as she gazed around the room. “I like it.”
“Thanks!” Patricia said. She busied herself retrieving wineglasses from a cabinet at one side of the room, and then drew a bottle of wine from another. She uncorked it with a very modern-looking corkscrew (an easy way to open wine bottles would definitely have been something I’d have Shaped into my own world if I’d decided to go historical, so I approved the anachronism), and poured each of us a glass of, appropriately, blood-red wine: far too rich a wine to have come from the kind of grapes that would grow in this valley’s climate in my world, reinforcing my suspicion that one or both queens were long-time wine snobs.
Karl and I took the couch and Stephanie and Patricia took the chairs. Dracula loomed by the fireplace. Clearly, Patricia had no secrets from him. I remembered Athelia, in the previous world, whom Robur had likewise Shaped to accept the truth of her world with equanimity and to have unbreakable trust in her Master. But the two of them hadn’t been lovers . . . though Athelia might have wished they were.
“How can there possibly be a third Shaper in this world?” Patricia said without preamble, the moment she had seated herself.
The question was directed at me, another sign, perhaps, that my being-in-chargeness had been recognized. All the same, Karl answered: totally fine, I decided, since he’d been to far more worlds than I had.
The insight he had to offer, though, was less than scintillating. “I do not know,” he said. Again. “I have never encountered such a thing. But neither have I previously encountered a world with two Shapers. I would suspect the one is somehow a function of the other.”
“We were the only two Shapers who entered this world,” Patricia said, emphasizing each word. “You know what that process is like. There’s no way a third Shaper could have entered surreptitiously because there was nowhere to hide. The primordial world initially exists as a featureless plane extending only a few feet in diameter from the Shaper. Or in our case, Shapers. There is nothing outside that small circle until the Shaping is begun.”
Stephanie nodded her agreement.
Karl may have known what that was like, but I did not. And yet, just for a moment, I had a mental image of standing in just such a blank, featureless place, then reaching out and . . .
It was gone. Memory, or imagination?
Stephanie glanced at me. “The two of you entered our world surreptitiously. Could this other mysterious Shaper have entered the same way?”
“No,” Karl said flatly. “The ability to open Portals is jealously guarded by Ygrair. She gave me that ability, and I, in turn, passed it on to Shawna. No one else has it.”
Delicately put, I thought, since I’d gotten it by sticking my hand into a puddle of his blood on an altar dedicated to human sacrifice.
“Then how?” Patricia demanded.
Karl spread his hands. “I do not know.”
I grimaced. Karl had now used that previously rare statement so many times since we’d entered this world it risked becoming his catchphrase . . . you know, if someone ever made a TV series about our adventures. Not knowing what was going on had become the theme of this entire adventure.
I jumped in. “Well, then, I guess we’ll just have to ask her . . .” (I flicked a smile at Karl) “ . . . or him.”
“Not very satisfying,” Patricia said.
“Not satisfying at all,” Stephanie said.
I couldn’t argue, so I sipped my wine instead. Unlike our situation, it was very satisfying. And suddenly, I felt completely exhausted—so exhausted, my head dropped forward, and I jerked it back, blinking.
“You’re falling asleep where you sit,” Stephanie said to me, in a Mom-like tone I was pretty sure Piotr would have found familiar. “Trish. She’s right. She needs rest. She’s only human.”
That stung a little. Better a human than a shapeshifting or undead monster, I thought, but wonder of wonders, stopped myself from saying out loud. I had the queens’ hokhmah. I understand how they had Shaped this world. I just didn’t understand why. What about werewolves and vampires had appealed to them?
Well, it could have been worse. It could have been zombies. And then I mentally shuddered. And in some other world, it may be!
Patricia studied us. “Karl in the tower room, again, I think. Shawna in the east wing? The werewolves can make their own arrangements, can’t they, Steph?” she added, glancing at her fellow Shaper.
She nodded. “They’ll return to the camp.”
“Great,” I said, stifling a yawn. “Somebody, show me the way.”
Twenty minutes later, I was sound asleep in a very comfortable bed in a room with all the charm of a funeral parlor, all heavy velvet drapes, dark tapestries, and black furniture.
I did little for the next two days except sleep and eat and talk to the queens. It was nice to chat with someone with some of the same cultural references as me, even if they’d left the First World some fifteen years before I had. Karl had no opinion on the best Star Trek episodes, the best Beatles tunes, or the failings of Return of the Jedi compared to The Empire Strikes Back.
Unfortunately, neither Patricia nor Stephanie were huge musical theater fans, so the work of Stephen Sondheim still wasn’t up for discussion.
I hadn’t realized how deeply exhausted I was until, at last, I was able to relax. I slept many, many hours. I also ate huge amounts, Patricia having Shaped her vampires so they could enjoy food despite being undead. (I now had within me the knowledge of how their digestive systems worked to eliminate the food they ate simply for pleasure, since they took no sustenance from it and thus it was never digested, but I tried not to think about it. And that went double for the having-babies thing, which I also understand in every revolting detail.)
Two nights later, Karl, Stephanie, Father Thomas, Piotr, Patricia, and I were in Patricia’s quarters, waiting for Dracula to tell us all was prepared, having (speaking of food) a final, and very fine, dinner. As I washed down a delectable baklava with, alas, water (drinking alcohol before embarking on our journey seemed a bad idea), the door opened, framing Dracula. “All is prepared,” he said.
“Thank you, my heart,” Patricia said. She drained the last of her wine (she wasn’t coming, so it didn’t matter if she drank, I thought a little sourly), then stood. “There is no reason for delay, is there?” she asked the rest of us.
“No,” said Stephanie.
“None,” said Karl.
“Let’s mount up,” I said, because who else was going to insert the appropriate movie-dialogue clichés into the conversation? “Let’s do this thing,” I added, for good measure.
Karl ignored me, of course, but Patricia and Stephanie gave me identical exasperated looks. It was nice to be appreciated.
Karl seemed to know where we were going; he took the lead, and a few minutes later, we stood in a comfortably appointed room high up one of the towers. “My cell when I was first brought here,” he said to me by way of explanation. “And my chamber, these last two nights.”
“Not bad, as prisons go,” I said. “Very comfortable-looking bed.” I womanfully refrained from looking at Seraphina as I said it.
“Still a prison,” Karl said shortly.
The vampires Dracula had assembled waited on the balcony, which curved around a large portion of the tower’s circumference and thus was big enough to hold us all. Each of them wore a leather harness I saw immediately would hold us tight to their bodies.
Dracula pointed me to one of the vampires. I smiled at him as I approached, because clearly, we were about to be intimate. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Shawna. You’re . . . ?”
“He is Vasili,” Dracula said. “He cannot speak in this form.”
“Vasili,” I repeated. “Well, Vasili, shall we take a flight together?”
Pact. Solid. Shaped it that way, I told myself firmly—but my heart still pounded as the bat-winged, blood-drinking, weirdly cold monster strapped me to his chest. And it’s just possible, Shaper-in-charge though I might be, that I screamed like a little girl as we leaped off the balcony into thin air.