THIRTY-ONE
FOR TWO DAYS, Karl waited.
No one answered his shouts, but three times, bread and water appeared, slid through a small square opening in the bottom of the door. Whoever brought it was nothing but a brief silhouette against the flickering torchlight.
A couple of times, that torchlight went out, but it always came back: torches being renewed and relit, Karl thought. He tried shouting, but no one answered.
Nor did they talk much amongst themselves, after the first moments when they had all awakened from the strange, dreamlike state in which they had been ensconced.
Piotr had immediately changed into boy form. “What happened?” he asked, his young voice tense with worry.
“My guess,” Karl said, “is that we have been victimized by another kind of vampiric glamor. Like the terror Dracula exudes, or the seductiveness of Seraphina, but one that engenders blind obedience.”
“I didn’t experience either one of those,” Piotr said. “What do you mean, the ‘seductiveness of Seraphina’?”
Karl started to answer, reflected on how young Piotr was, and changed direction slightly in his response. “She was able to deflect my suspicions of her,” was all he said.
“I have never heard of a glamor of obedience,” Father Thomas said. “Nor had I heard of a glamor of illusion like the one you ascribed to the rogue you encountered in our valley. There are clearly more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.”
Karl raised an eyebrow. Had Shakespeare existed here before the Great Cataclysm, or was that just another of the odd echoes of the First World one tended to encounter in the Labyrinth?
“I felt all was happening in a pleasant dream, until I came fully alert here,” Father Thomas concluded.
“Me, too,” Piotr said.
“My experience, as well,” Karl said.
“But then, why isn’t Shawna with us?” Father Thomas asked. “She was in the cottage, too. Was she taken elsewhere?”
“I suspect she was not affected,” Karl said.
Father Thomas’ face was only a dim, pale oval in the darkness, but Karl sensed him frowning. “Why should she be immune?”
“You know she is from a different world.”
“Yes,” Father Thomas said. “I accept that. But so are you, and you were affected.”
Karl said nothing. Father Thomas remained ignorant of the true nature of his world, and he did not think either Shawna or Patricia or Stephanie would appreciate him attempting to enlighten the priest. It could destroy the man’s faith, and what purpose would that serve? Karl and Shawna, if all went well, would eventually depart this world. Father Thomas had no choice but to continue to live in it, and his place in it was priest and protector of his village. He was here to save his villagers, if he could, and return them to their homes. Knowledge of the Labyrinth, of the existence of myriad worlds, of the fact that his world was only a couple of decades old in reality, that everything he thought he knew about it was a make-believe, a fiction concocted by the queen of the vampires and the queen of the werewolves out of scraps of romantically nonsensical tales they had heard in the First World . . . such knowledge would destroy him, if he accepted it, and likely turn him against Karl and Shawna as blasphemous liars if he did not.
Karl had argued with Shawna about the reality of the Shaped citizens of the world they entered, claiming they were not real in the same way as citizens of the First World, that their fates were nothing they needed to be overly concerned with as they pursued their quest. And yet, faced with Father Thomas, a flesh-and-blood man in whose company he had now spent several days, he did not want to hurt him.
“Maybe it’s just because she’s a girl . . . a woman, I mean,” said Piotr.
“That is most probably correct,” Karl said immediately, even though he knew it absolutely was not.
Father Thomas still sounded dubious. “Perhaps. I hope you are right, and she was not affected. Might she be able to rescue us?”
“One woman against the Protector, his forces, and this rather secure structure?” Karl said. “It seems . . . unlikely.”
But once again, he was saying something he did not believe. Because if there was one thing Shawna Keys had shown, since he had identified her as the Shaper of her world, approached her, and seen how much Shaping power she could bring to bear, it was that she was surprisingly resourceful.
After that, they had little to talk about. Piotr, complaining of being cold, returned to wolf form and remained that way. Father Thomas went back to sleep. Karl sat on his cot, his back to the wall, and stared at the door, as if by sheer force of will he could cause it to open and the mysterious third Shaper to summon them.
His exerted will, of course, had not the slightest effect. As Shawna continued to drive home to him as her own abilities grew and she moved beyond needing his assistance to complete their quest—or, at least, his assistance to open Portals, find Shapers, and take their hokhmah—he was not a Shaper.
Succeed in the quest, and Ygrair had promised he might yet become one. But sitting in the dark dungeon, ignored for that first day and then a second . . . for one of the few times in his journeys so far, he almost despaired.
Then the door opened.
Piotr tensed and crouched, growling. Father Thomas, who had been dozing, sat up. Karl got to his feet.
Two guards stepped in. They carried drawn swords, but wore no armor, garbed instead in black robes with scarlet belts. “Lord Abrahm wants to see you,” growled the first. “Up.” He pointed his blade at Piotr, and from the glint of it in the torchlight, Karl could tell it was silvered. “None of that. Human shape, now.”
Piotr growled again, but then flowed up into his boy-shape. Father Thomas got to his feet, too.
“Let’s go,” said the first guard. The second guard stepped to one side, and Piotr, Father Thomas, and Karl stepped into the corridor. A third guard awaited them there.
One for each of us, Karl thought. An honor, I suppose.
To the right glowed honest lamplight, steady and bright, unlike the flickering light of the torches that illuminated the corridor to the left. The light poured down a winding, spiral staircase. “Move,” said the first guard, who seemed to be in command, and they all started toward the stairs.
“Where are you taking us?” Karl asked.
“Into the presence of the Protector,” growled the commander. “And mind your behavior. Now be silent.”
Karl clenched his jaw and held his tongue. He followed the guard up the stairs. Father Thomas and Piotr trailed him, and the other two guards brought up the rear. He could feel the presence of the third Shaper somewhere up above . . . and the place where the Portal to the next world could be opened.
Shawna Keys, he thought, where are you? Because this is where you need to be.
They climbed toward the light.
“Into the presence of the Protector,” one of those other shadowy figures answered Karl. “And mind your behavior. Now be silent.”
Karl and the Protector! I thought. A twofer. Or a fourfer, actually, since now I knew one of those figures was Karl, I recognized another as Father Thomas and a third—the naked one, of course—as Piotr. And the place of the potential Portal was close, too. Very close. If I played this right, I could seize the hokhmah from Abrahm, open the Portal, grab Karl, and get the hell out of Dodge in the next few minutes . . .
. . . and leave the Protector to continue “choosing” young people from the villages of his private valley. “One to be changed, seven for feasting,” Thaddeus had said. One to be changed into a rogue. The others food, maybe even for the one who had been changed, who, in his or her first famished frenzy, would gorge on someone who, moments before, had been a friend.
Perhaps my thought that Abrahm could not Shape the physical world to any great extent was true. Perhaps he only had the power to influence and control the Shaped. But that word, “only,” held immense possibilities for evil.
I remembered Emma unprotestingly letting her head be tilted back so Thaddeus could rip out her throat and how she had then screamed at me for killing Thaddeus and saving her life, unshakable in her belief in the goodness of the Protector, in how much she had been honored in being Chosen to “serve” him. I remembered that and felt something I hadn’t felt in a long while: something I hadn’t felt even for Robur, who had crafted his world as an endless wargame; something I hadn’t felt for anyone except the Adversary, who had stolen my world from me and murdered my best friend before my eyes: hatred.
Not fiery, all-engulfing, lava-hot hatred, but the cold kind, the icy kind, the kind that freezes all emotion except for itself.
I took a deep, shaking breath, gripped my crossbow, and let that hatred drive me down the corridor, toward the steps Karl and the others had just climbed.
Though the shape of the enormous space into which Karl ascended in the company of Piotr, Father Thomas, and the three guards was unmistakably that of a church, no religious iconography remained within it. Instead of the crucifix that must have once adorned the back of the apse—which, Karl saw, was part of the mountain itself, bare gray granite—there was a double door, twice the height of a man, made, apparently, of gold, bearing intricate carvings. He could not see them clearly from where he was. The light that had poured down the stairs came from a single, wheel-shaped fixture far over their heads, in which at least two dozen oil lamps burned, but its glow barely reached the apse, where candles flickered but more confused the eye than illuminated.
In any event, Karl did not really care about the decorations on the door. What interested him the most was the sudden certainty, flowing through the Shurak nanomachines in his bloodstream and delivered like a punch in the gut, that it was through those doors that a Portal into the next world could be opened.
In front of those golden doors and potential Portal, where once the altar would have stood, there was, instead, a throne. It, too, was made of gold.
On it sat a young man. To his right, on a lower chair, sat a young woman.
Urged forward by his captors, Karl could see that the throne, like the door, was intricately carved. As he neared it, he identified some of those images: stars, the moon, lightning bolts, and oak trees, and above the man’s head, a rising sun, its rays of light rendered in crystal, sticking up like icicles from the throne itself.
The smaller chair on which the woman sat was comparatively plain: gilded, upholstered in red, but otherwise unadorned except by the young woman herself. She was, Karl had to admit, quite a striking adornment, being clad in a flowing, sleeveless white dress with a golden collar, the dress slit far enough up her side to make it arrestingly clear she wore nothing beneath it. Her hair, as gold as her collar and the chair, was piled into an intricate mass on her head, held there by combs that glittered with emeralds and topazes.
By contrast, the man on the beautiful throne was . . . underwhelming.
Though his height was hard to be certain of, since he was seated, Karl had the distinct impression that, standing, he would be considerably shorter than Karl himself. He also looked considerably pudgier, although to be fair, short rations and a great deal of walking over the past few months of his life had left Karl far leaner than he had been when he had lived in Ygrair’s palace.
The man’s hair was an unremarkable shade of brown. His face was average, the only distinguishing characteristic being a nose that seemed too small for the broad jaw and forehead. His ears stuck out. He had freckles.
His clothing, on the other hand, echoed the over-the-top opulence of the throne. He wore a tunic and trousers of sparkling white, adorned with gold braid and a red sash and a diamond pendant. He wore a gold collar and a gold crown. He had rings on each finger. His high boots were bright red.
He looked, to Karl, like a man playing at being something he was not. And yet, this surely had to be . . .
“Kneel before Protector Abrahm, Lord of the Sacred Vale, Creator of Good, Scourge of Evil,” said the commander of the three guards, and pressed hard on his shoulder to emphasize the point. Karl knelt on the first of the four steps leading up to the once-apse. Beside him, Piotr and Father Thomas were likewise forced to their knees.
Abrahm gave a languid shooing motion with his hand, and the guards stepped back from the three kneelers. The woman looked at them as though they were spots on her immaculate dress.
Father Thomas was staring around him, his face anguished. “What have you done?” he said, his voice choked with emotion. “You have desecrated Mother Church! You have violated the holiest—”
“Quiet,” Abrahm said, with no heat in his voice, but with something else, something that made Father Thomas cut off in mid-speech.
He Shaped him, Karl thought. And so it was confirmed, not that he had had any doubt: the Protector, Abrahm, was the third Shaper.
“I brought you here,” Abrahm said, his female companion turning her gaze to him adoringly as he spoke (a sure sign, Karl thought, that she was also Shaped, because Abrahm did not appear to him to be adorable in the slightest) “because of the curious manner of your arrival. It has been a long time since anyone journeyed into the Sacred Vale from the Lands Between without being guided here by my followers. And the last ones who did, some months ago now, certainly did not enter the vale hard on the heels of my Veil of Protection being activated by an incursion of the Imperfect. This leads me to believe that originally you three were traveling in the company of the Imperfect. Such a thing has not been known since I successfully shattered the precious Pact of the Imperfect Queens. This concerns me. You will now tell me exactly how you traveled here, and more importantly, why.”
Karl said nothing. He was working through what Abrahm had just said, extracting what he could from it to better understand how Abrahm viewed the world he had at least some limited ability to Shape. In any event, he certainly had no intention of telling the man the truth. Piotr stayed silent as well, possibly fuming at hearing his mother, Queen Stephanie, described as “Imperfect.”
Abrahm glanced from Karl to Piotr, then turned to Father Thomas. “I am now your ruler, and you will obey me in all things.”
“You are now my ruler, and I will obey you in all things,” Thomas said dully. “Of course, Protector.”
Karl, though he had seen the work of Shapers many times, still felt chilled at the ease with which Abrahm stripped Thomas of the core of his being—his unwavering belief in God and the Church—and instantly replaced it with unwavering belief in Abrahm.
“Now answer my questions.”
Thomas proceeded to do so, telling Abrahm of their journey to the Sacred Vale in the company of werewolves and vampires, how those companions had been prevented from entering, how they had continued on foot, how he had come to try to find out what had happened to his village and other villages, but how Piotr and Karl and Shawna had come for reasons he found obscure. As he spoke, the woman yawned, looking bored, but Abrahm listened intently.
Thomas revealed, of course, that Piotr was the werewolf son of Queen Stephanie, and that caught Abrahm’s attention. He looked at the boy with one eyebrow raised. Piotr, with remarkable self-control for one so young, Karl thought, had as yet said nothing. “And yet you made it through the Veil of Protection?” he said. “Interesting . . . but I will examine that later.” He looked back at Father Thomas. “It is this ‘Shawna Keys’ who interests me most. Tell me more.”
Obligingly, Father Thomas told him how Shawna Keys had come to his village, how she had claimed to be from outside the valley—from another world, in fact—how she and her companions had managed to restore the Pact, and how she had strange abilities to influence others and had even performed miracles: with his own eyes, he had seen her conjure clothing out of thin air.
“But she is not with you,” Abrahm said, narrowed eyes glittering in the candlelight.
“When we felt the call in the night,” Father Thomas said, “and in a dream approached your holy presence, she did not come with us.”
“Indeed?” Abrahm sat back. “Immune to the call and capable of making things out of thin air?” There was an unmistakable thread of excitement in his voice. “And claims to be from outside the valley . . .”
His eyes focused on Karl and Karl braced himself for whatever questions were about to come. Abrahm might try to Shape him, as he clearly had Father Thomas. It would not work, because he was of the First World. But if he could convince Abrahm it had worked, he might be able to . . .
But then, a disturbance. From far back in the hall came the sound of a door opening and closing again. The young woman brightened, peering into the distance as though hoping something more exciting was about to happen than had happened so far, as footsteps hurried the length of what had once been the nave.
Abrahm looked up from Karl, frowning. “What is this?” he called, his voice booming in the vast space.
“My apologies, Protector.” Karl turned his head to see another guard in a red-belted black robe—a woman, though a particularly tall one, this time—come up beside him. She bobbed her head by way of salute. “There may be an intruder in the House.”
“An intruder?” Abrahm’s eyes flicked to Father Thomas, to Karl, then back to the female guard. The young woman beside the throne straightened, clearly intrigued. “Tell me more.”
“Thaddeus, of the First Company, was murdered by a woman who infiltrated a party of food,” the guard said. “The food, of course, reported it. We are searching the grounds, but it is possible she was able to enter the crypt—Thaddeus’ keys were taken.”
“A party of food?” Abram said. His eyes flicked to the young woman at his side. “The one arriving tonight?”
“Yes, Protector.”
“Were any of them harmed?”
“Who?” the female guard said, sounding puzzled.
“The food!” the Protector snapped. “One of them is not food. She was Chosen to be changed. Were any of them harmed?”
“No, Protector.”
“And you think this mysterious, murderous woman could be in the crypt?” Abrahm’s eyes moved again, as did the young woman’s, over Karl’s head, to the stairwell in the floor. “I presume you are searching it.”
“Yes, Protector. A squad has just entered it. If she is down there, she will be forced . . .”
“Nobody forces me to do anything,” a woman’s voice said, and Karl closed his eyes and took a deep breath. End game, he thought.
Shawna Keys had arrived.