The Moonlit World Read online

  DAW BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS THE NOVELS OF EDWARD WILLETT

  WORLDSHAPERS

  WORLDSHAPER (Book One)

  MASTER OF THE WORLD (Book Two)

  THE MOONLIT WORLD (Book Three)

  THE CITYBORN

  THE HELIX WAR

  MARSEGURO (Book One)

  TERRA INSEGURA (Book Two)

  LOST IN TRANSLATION

  Copyright © 2020 by Edward Willett.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach.

  Cover illustration by Juliana Kolesova.

  Interior design by Fine Design.

  Edited by Sheila E. Gilbert.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1863.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756417154

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  For my best friend in high school, John “Scrawney” Smith, in memory of all those after-school writing sessions.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Edward Willett

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ANOTHER BOOK, ANOTHER round of acknowledgments!

  First, the usual suspects:

  Thanks to my wife, Margaret Anne Hodges, and daughter, Alice, for putting up with a husband and father who spends as much time thinking about fictional worlds as the real one. (Shadowpaw, our black Siberian cat, doesn’t seem concerned one way or the other, as long as he is fed regularly and petted on demand.)

  Thanks to my editor and publisher, Sheila Gilbert at DAW Books, for, as always, finding the flaws and asking the questions and providing the suggestions that help me make the book better.

  Thanks to everyone else who is part of the family of DAW Books, which is, if I might paraphrase Pangloss, “the best of all possible publishers.”

  Thanks to my agent, Ethan Ellenberg, for his support and efforts on my behalf.

  A special thanks to the Saskatoon Public Library. Much of The Moonlit World was written while I was writer-in-residence there, and even if the latter part of the residency ended up with me as writer-in-residence in my own residence, providing writing advice virtually, I thoroughly enjoyed my time working with Saskatoon writers. The writer-in-residence program is an invaluable service not only to local authors but to the writers chosen for it, since it provides substantial support for a period of time as they work on their own projects. I was honored to be chosen.

  And finally, thanks to you, dear reader, for following Shawna Keys’ adventures in the Labyrinth to this point. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride!

  PROLOGUE

  THE SILVER CANISTER gleamed inside its glass-walled cabinet like a precious artifact in a great museum.

  The thought gave the Adversary some slight amusement—as much amusement as he allowed himself. Any thief who might think it valuable and spirit it away would be sorely disappointed. The canister held nothing of intrinsic value in this world, but something of immeasurable importance to the Adversary: a bloodstained shirt, immersed in liquid nitrogen.

  Any thief who spirited it away would also die, painfully, over as long a period of time as the Adversary could arrange. Ordinarily, he found torturing a citizen of a world he could Shape a pointless exercise because the Shaped weren’t real human beings, merely simulacrums of people of the First World. Since the primary purpose of torture was to elicit information, and it was far easier to simply Shape someone to tell him what he wanted to know, why go through the mess and bother and waste of time of inflicting pain on them? (It was different, of course, for denizens of the First World, who could not be Shaped.)

  However, the Adversary would have been the first to admit—had there been anyone to admit it to—that when it came to matters related to Shawna Keys (whose world this had once been), the thrice-damned Karl Yatsar, emissary of the criminal who called herself Ygrair, and Ygrair herself, his emotions were unprofessionally engaged. Yatsar had not only helped Shawna escape this world, he had destroyed the Portals: the one leading to the world into which Shawna had fled, and the one leading back to the last world the Adversary had seized, which had been modeled on the work of a human playwright called Shakespeare.

  The shirt in the shining canister, stained with Karl Yatsar’s blood, offered The Adversary his only hope of someday opening a new Portal and continuing his advance through the Labyrinth of Shaped Worlds to bring Ygrair to justice. And so, should anyone interfere with that, he would take what catharsis he could find in their slow, brutal punishment, Shaped creature or not.

  The Adversary turned from his contemplation of the cylinder to the empty laboratory surrounding it. In the morning, the members of the team he had assembled—and Shaped—to reverse engineer the nanomites contained in the blood on the deep-frozen shirt would arrive and begin their research.

  It would take time: months at the least, possibly years or decades. Shawna Keys’ version of Earth boasted the same technological know-how as the Earth of the First World—which, from the Adversary’s view, and that of the Shurak, the once galaxy-ruling race to which he belonged (and from which the nanomites had originated, in the distant and interdicted past), was but a baby step up from stone knives and bearskins. Unfortunately, he could not simply Shape the level of technology he wanted into existence because he hadn’t a clue how the technology worked. He was just a . . . he supposed “cop” was the closest word English offered for his profession.

  What he could do—and had—was Shape the brightest minds of this world to focus on the problem. Eventually, they would crack it. Eventually, they would provide him with the technology the criminal Ygrair, a Shurak like him—though, like him, currently trapped in a human-like body, with all the limitations that imposed—had given to Karl Yatsar: the technology to open new Portals.

  Once he had that technology, he would no longer be
limited, as he had been at first, to following Yatsar from world to world. Instead, he would blaze his own path through the Labyrinth, moving ever closer toward its center—toward Ygrair.

  And once he had her, and the stolen Shurak technology that had opened the Labyrinth to her, all these worlds would crumble back into the quantum foam from which they should never have arisen in the first place.

  He returned his gaze to the gleaming cylinder. No, he would no longer have to follow Karl Yatsar. In fact, he would backtrack to the world he had first Shaped himself and force the second Portal out of it into a world he had not yet visited. But should his path intersect with that of Karl Yatsar and Shawna Keys somewhere along the way, he would very much enjoy visiting upon them some version of the torture he had already imagined for the hypothetical thief.

  He turned away from the canister and walked to the exit. Research would begin in earnest in the morning. Shawna Keys and Karl Yatsar had won themselves a reprieve from his attentions, nothing more.

  He turned off the lights, plunging the bloody shirt in its gleaming cylinder into darkness, went out, and closed the door behind him.

  ONE

  THE NEW EXPERIENCES travel offers are said to broaden the mind. I’d had rather more new experiences (and more mind-broadening) than I really cared for since exiting my own world, pursued not by a bear but by the Adversary, and I’d just added a new one I could have done without: being shaken awake in the dark inside a ruined thatched-roof cottage and told, “I think we’re going to have visitors from the castle.”

  I admit, I didn’t immediately know a) who was shaking me awake, b) why I was lying fully dressed between far-too-thin blankets on a cold wooden floor, or c) what castle? But it all came rushing back in a moment. In order, a) was Karl Yatsar, the mysterious stranger who first revealed to me that the world I used to live in was one I’d Shaped into existence (though I didn’t remember doing it) and told me I had to flee it due to the encroachment of the aforementioned Adversary (who killed my best friend and would have killed me if I hadn’t instinctively reShaped the world to save myself); b) was because, just a few hours previously, we had entered this world from the Jules Verne-inspired one we had just left, sealing the Portal behind us, and this cottage had been close at hand and offered at least a modicum of shelter; and c) was the castle across the valley, around whose towers we had seen mysterious winged things flying. “Visitors” from that castle seemed unlikely to be good news.

  Unless . . .

  “Is the Shaper in the castle?” I asked Karl. “Maybe he or she sensed our arrival. Maybe we should just let ourselves be captured. Or walk over there and knock on the gate.”

  Karl—in the dimness, just a dark form bending over me, outlined against the stars shining through the hole in the roof—straightened and turned away. “I do not know.”

  It was so rare for Karl to admit he didn’t know something I almost stammered my response. “You . . . you don’t know if . . . if we should let them capture us, or you don’t . . . ?”

  “I do not know if the Shaper is in the castle.” His silhouette against the stars changed shape as he turned back toward me. “I cannot tell.”

  “I thought you said you could always sense the Shaper’s whereabouts when you entered a new world.”

  “I always have. This time I cannot.”

  I sat up, emitting only a minor, ladylike groan. “So what does that mean?”

  “I do not know.”

  Two times in a single conversation. Utterly amazing.

  “So why do you think we’re going to have ‘visitors’?”

  “The flying things have been patrolling. One of them flew over, then turned and flew over again, lower. Then screamed and flew back toward the castle.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I had to admit.

  “No. There could be more of them at any moment.”

  “Right, then.” I got to my feet. I hadn’t slept nearly enough, soundly enough, on a soft-enough surface, or with enough covers. But I’d slept, and our journey to the Portal in the world we had just left had been a leisurely one, so I felt I could function. I quickly rolled up my bedroll and tied it to the top of the backpack I’d brought with me from the last world. (It was nice to enter a world with clean clothes, food, and water, not to mention a good sharp knife and, at the very bottom of the pack, a pistol and ammunition, instead of arriving with nothing, like I had in the last one.)

  We hurried out of the cottage. The road to the castle, covered with crushed, pale-white stone, shone in the moonlight.

  Wait. What? I blinked up at said moon. It hung, full, and bright, in exactly the same spot in the sky it had been when we’d first entered this world, hours ago. That’s weird.

  And that wasn’t the only thing that was weird. That moon was huge. Way bigger than it should have been. The way the moon looks when it’s rising or setting, except that’s an optical illusion. This one looked that big even though it wasn’t too far off the zenith.

  “We must not stay on the road,” Karl said. “If that flying thing returns with reinforcements, they will see us for sure.”

  The overgrown fields associated with the cottage lay on the side toward the castle. In the direction we turned rose a ridge, covered with a forest of towering pines whose tops glimmered in the moonlight but at whose roots pooled darkness, into which the white road plunged and vanished.

  The forest did not look like the sort of place I wanted to be forcing my way through in the middle of the night. “If we leave the road, we’ll be lost in no time,” I pointed out.

  “Are you saying we are not lost now? Do you know where we are?”

  A fair point. I sighed. “All right. I guess the forest it is.”

  Fortunately, it wasn’t as dark in the forest as it had looked before we entered it. The moon, shining between the spindly trunks, painted the needle-strewn floor with long streaks of silvery light, enough to show us our way. And although it’s true we didn’t know exactly where we were going, the direction we needed to take was abundantly clear—away from whatever might come out of the castle.

  The ridge, though not terribly steep, was not not steep, either. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other and not turning my ankle on one of the fallen branches or loose, flat stones that littered our path, hearing Karl’s steady breathing behind me. I remembered how much more out of breath than him I’d been while climbing a mountain pass back in my own world. Clearly, a few weeks of healthy outdoor activities like running for my life and being shot at had toughened me up.

  I’d had no way of knowing, when we’d begun our journey, what time it was. “Middle of the night” seemed to cover it. But clearly it was more like “very early morning,” because almost without my being aware of it, the forest became less black around us, the first hint of the coming dawn—though that full moon continued to shine, in exactly the same place in the sky.

  Geostationary orbit? I thought. But that made no sense, for something the size of the moon. What would that do to tides?

  Unless, in this Shaped world, the moon was much smaller . . . say, the size of the Death Star. (Not that I had any idea off the top of my head just how big the Death Star was supposed to be or how big it would look if it were in geostationary orbit. Once again, I missed the Internet.) But even then, weren’t geostationary orbits only possible at the equator? Were we at the equator? Since I was distinctly chilled, I thought not. But this wasn’t the real world, it was a Shaped world. So anything was possible . . . wasn’t it?

  A world lit by an extra-large moon hanging motionless in the sky sounded crazy. But so did the idea of a world based on the works of Jules Verne—a world where you could literally journey to the moon in a spacecraft launched from a giant cannon—and I’d just come from such a place.

  The trees thinned and the light continued to slowly wax as we approached the top of the ridge. By uns
poken agreement, we then paused and looked back down the way we had come . . . just in time to see four winged creatures alight in the yard of the cottage we had fled. Enough light now finally filled the sky that I could see them clearly. Though it was taking its own sweet time about making an appearance, dawn couldn’t be far off.

  My eyes widened as the creatures folded their wings and changed shape. Suddenly, four people stood by the cottage, all naked: three men and a woman. One of the men had dark skin, the others were pale. Two of the men disappeared into the cottage. The dark-skinned man and the woman stared up the ridge in our direction.

  The snowy peaks on the far side of the valley to the west suddenly turned bright orange, as though set on fire. The sunlight had touched them, but it still had to crawl down them and across the valley floor before the sun itself rose above the peaks shadowing us to the east.

  The men emerged from the cottage. A discussion ensued. Faces turned toward the sunlit peaks across the valley, then turned in our direction, looking up the ridge. They can’t see us, I told myself. Not in this light. We’re too low on the ridge to be silhouetted against the sky.

  But I still got chills. “They can’t see us, right?” I asked Karl, seeking reassurance.

  “Humans couldn’t,” he said, which didn’t exactly provide it, because although the naked quartet down there currently looked human, minutes ago they’d all been winged and furred.

  “Can Shapers Shape intelligent nonhumans?” I demanded.

  “Of course they can. I told you about the elves and dwarves I have encountered. And remember the giant wolf you saw when you first opened the Portal.”

  I wasn’t likely to forget that monster running toward me along the white-stone road, eyes glowing red.

  “You thought it was a werewolf,” Karl said.

  “Those things down there aren’t werewolves.”

  “No. But if within this world there is one nonhuman, intelligent race—werewolves—there may very well be . . .” His voice trailed off as the woman broke into a run in our general direction and leaped into the air, body reshaping itself in an instant into one of the bat-like creatures, arrowing toward us.