I WOKE TO morning light and a strange feeling of silence and solitude.
I sat up and stared around.
The little house was empty of priest, mysterious guide, and teenaged werewolf alike. Not only that, their packs and blankets had vanished, too.
I was alone.
I got up and went to the door. The clearing around the farmhouse was as empty as the house. So was the shed.
I raised my hands to my mouth, intending to shout the names of my companions—then thought better of it. I didn’t know who or what else might be in earshot. That something was, I had little doubt, because it seemed to me that whatever had caused the original inhabitants of the farmhouse, and Father Thomas’ village, and who knew how many other villages, to simply gather their belongings and march peacefully away had come again during the night and spirited away the other members of my party.
The question was, why had I been left un-spirited, and the answer seemed obvious: because I was a Shaper, and had the hokhmah of the rest of this world tucked away in my head, or my bloodstream, or wherever the Shurak nanotechnology stored it. Whatever power had been exerted on the others simply had not worked on me.
My nighttime thoughts about the sundering of the Fellowship returned. If I were this story’s Frodo, it seemed I had been left without even my faithful Sam (a comparison I was pretty sure Karl would have hated, had he ever read the books). There might well be a metaphorical Mount Doom waiting at the end of the Sacred Vale . . . and yet, it was to the end of the vale I had to go. I could feel the pull of the potential Portal in that direction and sense the third Shaper. I only hoped I’d find my spirited-away companions there, too.
I went back into the cottage, pulled some dried meat and fruit out of my pack, and ate a meager breakfast while I considered my course of action. My hand shook a little as I raised a piece of pemmican to my lips. Stop that, I told myself. This isn’t the first time you’ve been on your own in a strange world. You succeeded in Robur’s world. You can succeed here, too. You’re better prepared, and you have an ability you didn’t have there—you can seize another Shaper’s hokhmah just by touching them. You don’t have to wait for someone to blow them up while you’re standing next to them.
All of which would have been more reassuring if not for the memory of being locked in the rogue’s larder just a few days before. If not for Piotr and his unexpected (to the rogue) ability to take wolf-shape during the day, our clothes might now be on that shelf in the rogue’s cabin, our bones part of the interior decoration.
So, travel by day, take shelter by night. I finished eating and packed up my blankets. There was a pump in the farmyard. I pumped it hard a few times and then let the ice-cold water cascade over the back of my head before filling the wineskin I was using as a canteen. After shouldering my pack, I slung the wineskin on its thin leather strap over one shoulder, so it hung at my hip, made sure my knife was loose in its scabbard on my belt and my little crossbow was cocked and loaded, took a deep breath, and started west.
A trail led in the right direction from the farmyard. I hesitated before taking it, but given the thickness of the underbrush, I really had no choice. Reasoning that no monsters would be around in the daylight—or at least, if they were, they’d be ordinary people, and I was armed—I set out along the path.
I had, not surprisingly, slept in, so the sun reached its zenith only an hour or so later. I didn’t stop for lunch, gnawing more pemmican and a wedge of hard, strong-flavored cheese as I walked, washing it down with water from my wineskin-canteen. More trails joined mine from elsewhere in the woods, so that my path soon began to widen and look more like a proper road . . . which I guess it was, because in midafternoon I topped a low rise and saw in front of me a village, or the remains of one. It had an untended air, and nothing moved on its narrow streets. I approached it cautiously. Sure enough, it was as empty as Zarozje had been. I poked my head into a few shops and houses but saw nothing useful. Like Zarozje, like the farmhouse, it had been stripped of pretty much anything portable.
There was no church—perhaps the village was too small for one to have been built, and a circuit-riding priest had once ministered to the needs of the people. I looked around uneasily at the black, gaping, unshuttered windows, the cracked walls and falling-in thatch, and was glad to leave the place behind.
Every so often, as I walked, I would try to reach out with my Shaping ability, but it remained utterly blocked. I might have the hokhmah of the original Shapers of this world, Patricia and Stephanie, but I could make no use of it here.
What’s the point of godlike powers if they’re always being blocked by this or that? I wondered petulantly.
Since I was heading west, the setting of the sun in front of me was rather like the play clock on a football field, warning me I only had so much time before I’d be assessed a penalty—which in this case might involve being eaten (a penalty like that in football, I reflected, would probably greatly reduce the number of time-count violations).
I started looking for possible shelter, and didn’t have to look very hard, because as I came around a bend in the road, I found myself at the top of a substantial rise. Down at the bottom of that rise stood another village, but this one bustled with life—human life.
Smoke rose from chimneys, children ran and played in the square, men and women moved hither and yon, carrying this and that, and the sound of laughter and talking carried to me in the still, chill, almost-evening air. Although on this side of the village the forest through which I’d been trudging came up close to the buildings, on the other side, of which my elevation gave me a clear view for several miles, I saw sizable and, as far as I could tell from that distance (and with my limited knowledge of any agricultural activity not involving apples, the raison d’être of my hometown of Appleville, Oregon), well-tended fields of ripe wheat. Farmhouses nestled among those fields. The road I was on emerged from the village’s far side and continued on through the fields to the dark, distant line where the forest resumed and another ridge rose, blocking my view further west . . . except for the giant, snow-covered peaks that Patricia and Stephanie—as I knew from their hokhmah—had Shaped to be literally impossible to cross, and which the lowering sun was about to touch.
I also knew this valley would end in a cliff, at the top of which, on a plateau, stood the ancient edifice of Mother Church, and behind which had once been (in the fictional history of this world) the beginning of a pass through those mountains and a road to the world outside.
And somewhere up there, near the church, behind it, possibly—maybe even likely—in the mouth of the closed pass itself, I would be able to open the Portal to the next world and leave the vampires and werewolves of this one behind forever.
First, though, I had to survive another night. I studied the village again. It looked safe enough. Lights were beginning to glow behind windows. It had no wall, so clearly the people did not feel threatened by whatever might haunt these woods by moonlight.
But like the abandoned village I had seen earlier, this one had no church, even though this village was larger, with proper stone buildings here and there and a sizable cobblestoned square with a pump at its center. Within that square, toward the western end, there were new cobblestones that did not match the old ones, made of a paler rock . . . and they limned a suspiciously cross-shaped area of considerable size.
Clearly there had been a church. Now, there wasn’t one.
This is Sacred Vale, I thought uneasily. Why is there no church?
The sun slipped behind the mountains. The sky remained bright, but the temperature dropped precipitously. I shivered and made up my mind. I’d risk the village.
I was seen, almost the moment I started down the path between the towering trees that had been my companions all day (I would rather have had my old ones back). A small boy playing by a tree stump gaped up at me, then turned and ran into the village, crying, “Stranger! Stranger!”
Stranger danger, I thought. I felt like someone should praise him for being so careful, except since I was the stranger in question, the danger was more likely to be coming at me than from me.
I kept walking, but I kept my left hand on the hilt of my dagger and the index finger of my right hand on the trigger of my crossbow though I also made sure to keep it pointed at the ground.
By the time I reached the edge of the village, there were about twenty adults waiting for me, with a fringe of small children behind them, peering around and in some cases between their legs. I stopped and waited for someone to say something, which someone, in the form of a rotund man with a beard that was only slightly too brown to make him a perfect Santa Claus, did.
“Greetings,” he said. “I am Reeve Gregory Krause-Snow. Who are you?”
“Shawna Keys,” I said. “I’m . . . a traveler.”
“A traveler?” He raised eyebrows which, unlike the beard, not only had the requisite Santa Claus bushiness, but were also bright white, matching the second half of his surname. “From where?”
That was easy. “The village of Zarozje.”
“Really?” said the reeve. “A late arrival, then?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Your fellow citizens passed this way two days ago,” Reeve Krause-Snow said. “By now, they are in their new homes in Abrahmville, the Protector’s city.”
“Their new homes.” Go with it, I told myself. “Yes,” I said. “I was away when they left but am anxious to rejoin them.” And as much to satisfy my own curiosity as because I knew Father Thomas would want to know, if I ever found him . . . “Who was leading them?” I asked.
“A priest,” the reeve replied. “Father Thomas, I believe his name was. Accompanied by a very large young man.”
A rogue. No, two rogues. One to take the appearance of Father Thomas, to lure the villagers out of Zarozje. But what was the purpose of the second one?
The reeve turned and spoke in a low voice to a young blonde-haired woman standing next to him. By now the sun had descended far enough behind the mountains that stars pricked the twilit sky and the ever-present moon grew ever brighter. Since I knew what kinds of things might be roaming the forests very soon, if not already, I awaited their decision with bated breath.
Reeve Krause-Snow turned back to me. “You are welcome here,” he said. “And on the morrow, my daughter, Emma,” he indicated the young woman, “will personally guide you.”
“Um, thanks,” I said, startled by the offer. “I don’t want to be trouble.”
“It is no trouble,” said the young woman. In my own world, I would have pegged her as college age. She smiled. “I have been Chosen. I must make the journey anyway.”
“Indeed, you must,” said the reeve. “We are all so proud of you.”
“Thank you, Father,” Emma said.
“I accept,” I said brightly.
“You will stay with us tonight,” Emma continued. She held out her hand. “Come! I will show you the way.”
The others dispersed, their curiosity satisfied and, no doubt, suppers to get and bedtimes to arrange. They moved away in leisurely fashion, not at all like people who feared ravening creatures of the night might come loping and/or flying into their village at any moment to rend them all limb from limb. It made a nice change from Zarozje, to tell the truth.
It was a short journey to the reeve’s house, a substantial two-story structure with diamond-paned windows, through which glimmered candlelight. Emma Krause-Snow led me up the steps and through the front door—which was not locked or armored and had no crosses hammered into it, I noted, unlike every door in Zarozje—and into an entrance hall. Stairs rose directly in front of us. To the left, a fire burned merrily in a flagstone hearth, inside a large room whose ceiling was spanned by dark wooden beams. Down the short hall, copper pots gleamed in what could only be the kitchen, from which wafted the most mouth-watering smells. No pemmican tonight! I thought.
Emma led me up the stairs. “We will share my room,” she said, opening one of the two doors in the upstairs hall. “There is a second bed. It belonged to my sister, Tabitha.”
I glanced in. Two narrow cots, each covered with red woolen blankets, shared the tiny space, clearly meant for sleeping and nothing else. “I don’t want to take your sister’s bed,” I said.
Emma laughed. “Oh, there’s no need to worry about that. She doesn’t need it. She was Chosen last year. I was so jealous. But now it’s my turn.”
There was that term again: “Chosen.” I tried to damp down the bad feeling I was getting. Probably picked to attend a prestigious school or something, I told myself, but it was hard to make myself believe it, since I knew that, however pleasant and pastoral this little slice of late medieval life might seem, mysterious disappearances and a known population of rogue werewolves and vampires did not seem an auspicious combination.
“What exactly does being ‘Chosen’ entail?” I asked carefully.
Emma gave me a surprised look, eyes wide and white in the dimming twilight from the windows at each end of the hall and the faint, warm yellow glow now shining up the stairs from the main room below. “You don’t know?”
“It is not something we have in the Lands Between,” I said, which was true, as far as I knew. “And I have just arrived.”
She laughed again. “Of course, I’d forgotten.”
You forgot I just arrived, when I just arrived? There was something off about everyone I had so far met in the so-called Sacred Vale. It worried me.
“The Chosen are those young people selected to serve the Protector in his great house at the head of the valley,” she said. “Every six months, ten young people are Chosen from across the Sacred Vale. From some villages, no one has ever yet been Chosen. The fact two have been Chosen from our village, in succession, is a great honor. And two from the same family? First Tabitha, and now me? Unheard of. My parents are beside themselves with pride.”
Alarm bells were going off in the part of my head that remembered reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
“How long do these young people stay in service to the Protector?” I asked.
“Oh, a while,” Emma said vaguely.
“So Tabitha will come back?”
“Of course,” she said. “Eventually.” She turned away. “Supper will be ready soon. Let’s go downstairs.”
The evening was pleasant, but, like the people, odd. Reeve Krause-Snow and his wife, Jacqueline, seemed supremely unconcerned about the fact that within six months both their daughters had been taken from them by the Protector. “We are thrilled,” the reeve said. “And honored. Aren’t we, my sweet?” He took his wife’s hand.
“Of course, dear,” she said.
They were equally unconcerned about the fact their village was completely unprotected from any marauding vampires or werewolves that might pass their way.
“There’s nothing like that to fear here,” the reeve said. “The Protector protects us.”
“Is that not why you and the other villagers of Zarozje came here?” Jacqueline inquired. “To escape the depredations of such monsters in the Lands Between?”
Not exactly, I thought, but I smiled and said. “Yes, of course.”
Jacqueline put her hand on mine. “Then please relax, Shawna. You are safe in the arms of the Protector, and safe in this house.” She sat back. “Now eat up. You, too, Emma, before your meat grows cold.”
My concern was not enough to keep me from eating. It was enough to keep me awake for a while in the narrow bed, with Emma breathing deeply and contentedly just a few feet away, but eventually I, too, slept, and woke to enjoy a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread before my new friend and I set out on the next leg of my journey to what she called the House of the Protector and I knew from the Shapers’ hokhmah within me should be Mother Church.
I’d tried to raise the subject of the missing village church at supper the night before and had gotten nothing but blank looks. The word “church” seemed to have no meaning for the people of the Sacred Vale: they’d clearly been Shaped. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that the Protector was the third Shaper I sought.
But what was he playing at?
And I knew for certain it was a “he,” now. I even had a name. Emma had confirmed it that morning over breakfast, calling him “Protector Abrahm” as she enthused again about how wonderful it would be to serve the great man in his own house.
We left as the sun cleared the trees, Emma bidding a surprisingly—to me—cheerful farewell to her parents, who embraced her with big smiles on their faces and whose tears seemed more related to overwhelming pride than sadness at her departure. I carried my pack but had, at Emma’s urging though against my better judgment, tucked my dagger away in it, along with the crossbow and its quiver of quarrels. Instead, I held in my right hand a stout walking stick, a gift of the reeve. Emma carried her own pack, just a leather pouch slung over one shoulder, and her own walking stick, twin of mine.
The sun warmed our backs as we walked west, the birds sang, the air held a pleasant autumnal crispness, and if not for the fact my companions had vanished, I knew this world was plagued with man-eating monsters, and I still had to gather the hokhmah of the Protector, find Karl, open a new Portal, and escape to another world where I might face even worse dangers, I’m sure I would have enjoyed the walk.
And, in truth, those concerns were distant enough that I did enjoy it, a little . . . okay, more than a little. Emma was a pleasant traveling companion/tour guide. “That’s Emma Lake,” she said, pointing to water glittering through the trees to our left. She giggled. “No relation.”
We passed other lakes, interesting rock formations, and, of course, villages, walking through the center of half a dozen over the course of the day, each of which had a suspiciously vacant spot right where I would normally have expected to see a church. No one seemed suspicious of us, though, unlike when I’d appeared at Emma’s village. (Maybe the crossbow I’d been carrying that first night had had something to do with that.) Instead, they just cheerily greeted us. “Chosen!” Emma would call, and the villagers would grin and clap and shout congratulations.
All of them.
Without fail.
The Sacred Vale seemed to be vying with Disneyland for the title of “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Not that this was Earth. Or, at least, not the original Earth. But then, neither had my world been, and unlike this one, it had actually had Disneyland.
The thing was, I couldn’t really see why everyone was so happy. The suspiciously churchless villages were pleasant enough, but primitive. A lot of backbreaking work seemed to be going on, and a lot of animal husbandry involving a lot of manure, and, in general, just a lot of the sort of thing that I’d always tried to avoid. So why was everyone so happy?
“Tonight we will rest in the hostel at Goodwater,” Emma told me as we left behind one of the villages (which had the unlikely name of Eyebrow; her own village, she’d told me, was called Elbow, for no reason she knew). The sun, now in front of us, was dipping once more toward those towering snow-covered peaks. “We will reach the House of the Protector late tomorrow afternoon.”
“Is it a nice place, this hostel?” I said. A comfortable bed and a good meal sounded appealing after a day of walking.
“Oh, yes,” Emma replied. “One of the nicest. All the Chosen from the eastern part of the valley stay there while traveling to the Protector’s House. We will journey the rest of the way tomorrow in their company.”
“Are only young people Chosen?” I asked.
“Occasionally an elder will be so honored,” Emma said, “but, in general, yes, it is the young people. Young people are stronger workers!”
“And what kind of work will you be doing, exactly?”
Emma shrugged. “I don’t know. Cleaning and serving and suchlike, I guess.”
Just how many cleaners and servers and “suchlike” does one house need, no matter how big it is? I wondered. And why would it need a fresh batch every six months?
I didn’t ask. But my Spidey-sense . . . Shaper-sense . . . was tingling.
It tingled even more when, after reaching the hostel in Goodwater—a comfortable, sprawling, one-story building of wood and wattle—we sat down in the common room with three young women and two young men, all likewise Chosen from various villages, though none came from the villages we had passed through on the road. Not one of them expressed the slightest doubt about whether or not being Chosen was an honor, or what might await at the end of the road, or why a fresh batch of Chosen were needed every six months.
“I’m not Chosen,” I said to them, “but I would love to serve the Protector. Do you think, if I present myself with the rest of you, they might accept me as a . . . volunteer?”
Much discussion ensued. No one had an answer, but no one seemed much troubled by it, either. “I say give it a try,” Emma said, finally and cheerfully.
There was a general chorus of agreement to that from the cheerful . . . always cheerful . . . almost annoyingly cheerful . . . young people.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” a young man named Zachariah said (cheerfully). “They won’t let you serve the Protector and you have to get a job in the town instead.”
“Good point,” I said (also cheerfully, although my cheer was considerably more forced than theirs). I kept to myself what I thought the worst that could happen would really be.
After a comfortable night and a hearty breakfast, we were on our way again, the whole party from the hostel traveling together. We passed through several more villages, and picked up another two Chosen, so that as the sun once more touched the now much-nearer-and-thus-higher western mountains, there were nine of us trudging along the road, along with other traffic—drovers of sheep and cattle with their flocks or herds, wagons laden with cabbages, itinerant knife-sharpeners, that kind of thing.
For some time now I’d been able to see our destination, atop the cliff capping the western end of the valley. A path switchbacked up the mass of stone to what looked like an enormous Romanesque church from my own world.
The big double doors between those towers were shut. Light glowed through the rose-shaped stained-glass window high above those doors, and through windows in each of the towers. It had an almost fairytale appearance in the twilight, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t deserved. Patricia’s castle had had a similar glittering look the first time I’d seen it, and it hadn’t been welcoming at all when I finally got there.
As we drew nearer the cliff, I could no longer see the church. The cliff itself was separated from us by the stone wall of the Protector’s city, aka Abrahmville. When we’d first seen the town, from atop a ridge now far behind us, we’d been high enough I’d been able to glimpse, over the top of the wall, the town’s rather impressive (by this world’s standards) stone buildings, topped by bright-red roofs. Now, though, the wall formed a formidable barrier, battlemented and forbidding.
Two-story doors of black wood stood open at the end of the road we had followed for so long. Guarding it were armed and armored men, two on either side, silhouetted against torches in sconces behind them.
Extremely aware I was not, in fact, one of the Chosen, I held back for a minute, stepping behind a tree to take my crossbow out of my pack, load, and cock it. I slipped it back into the pack, out of sight but still easy to grab in a moment, then ran to catch up with the others.
Running with a cocked and loaded crossbow in a backpack probably violated all kinds of best practices in the safe handling of pointy medieval weapons, but I’d been feeling increasingly naked without some kind of weapon. I would have liked to have put my dagger back on my belt, too, but none of the Chosen were wearing weapons, and I had a feeling I really, really didn’t want to stand out.
I tensed as we approached the gate, but the guards waved us through with what looked like bored contempt. I wasn’t about to take offense. With my new companions, I hurried through the forbidding gate into the town beyond.
There, in a small courtyard with brick buildings on all sides, lamps on their corners casting yellow light across the cobblestones, and only one exit, an archway revealing nothing but a narrow street, we were met by a big, bearded man wearing a black robe with a scarlet belt. His feet were bare beneath it, and I was willing to bet the rest of him was bare beneath it, too, so he could transform in an instant . . . into what, I wasn’t sure, but he looked enough like the appearance-shifting rogue Piotr had killed to have been his brother, which worried me.
“Chosen?” he rumbled. “To me.”
We crowded over to him. My heart was pounding. While Emma and the others thought I’d be welcomed, I didn’t share their confidence. Patricia and Stephanie had both sensed the opening of the Portal and my entry into their world. What if this mysterious third Shaper, this “Protector,” had sensed it, too? What if he could sense my presence, and knew I was near?
If he did, he apparently hadn’t ordered black-robed guy to keep an eye out for me. “My name is Thaddeus,” he growled. Literally. “You will follow me.”
And just like that, the young people around me changed. They’d been laughing and pointing at things, joking and commenting and goofing around and generally acting like a group of high-school kids on a field trip. But now, as though someone had flipped a switch, all that stopped. They went quiet. Quiescent. Dull-eyed. After a second’s shock, I tried to emulate them.
“Single file,” said Thaddeus, and they complied without a word, and so did I, though my heart was pounding harder than ever. I made sure I was the rearmost person in line as we followed him through the archway deeper into Abrahmville. I remembered the terror I had felt when Dracula had surprised us, the seductive pull of Seraphina, the illusion of Queen Stephanie . . .
And suddenly I knew how it had been done—how all of it had been done. Including the spiriting away of Karl and Piotr and Father Thomas.
At Zarozje, two rogues. One to take on the appearances of Father Thomas, another, like Thaddeus here, to exert another kind of glamor . . . call it the glamor of obedience. The villagers of Zarozje had quietly packed up their belongings, including the treasures of the church, and followed their new leaders into the lands of the Protector, without question or suspicion.
This same coercive power explained what had happened to Father Thomas, Karl, and Piotr the night they vanished from the farmhouse. From outside, a rogue had called everyone inside to come to him, and they had responded. Presumably because I now had the hokhmah of the original Shapers of this world within me, I was immune. Fortunately for me, the rogue had been so arrogantly sure of his power he had not checked to make sure everyone had emerged.
It seemed I was immune to Thaddeus’ glamor, too—unlike the Chosen, who had suddenly become mindless cattle, entirely in his thrall.
And cattle, it occurred to me, suddenly and sickeningly, were food.