Wordscapist: The Myth (The Way of the Word Book 1) (11 page)

     “And what fact would that be?” I asked the obvious question.

     She gave me a quick look and smiled. She was not going to answer that one. She rose to her feet effortlessly and went back to walking around. I decided to try my luck with other questions. “But, why did you choose to desert him now? You could have tried turning him over to the CCC.”

     “I do not want to cross Sign any more than is necessary,” Lily spoke off-handedly as she went about doing whatever she was doing, making gestures and moving things around the room. “She asked the three of us to search for the Wordscapist. Interrupting Silvus in his search might have ticked that crazy Elemental off. I’d rather not do that right now.”

     That made sense. But somehow, I could not ignore the fact that Silvus would have launched an all-out hunt for the both of us by now. Lily seemed to be able to read my thoughts, scape protection or not. She gave me a half-amused look as she spoke softly, almost to herself, “No worries, Historian. I’ll keep Master Silvus busy. While I had to keep up the illusion of Lily Pendleton, it was difficult to handle him. Now, I am going to have fun with that kid.” I almost shuddered at the murderous intent dripping from those words. But somehow, it did not make sense. “Illusion of Lily Pendleton? I’m afraid, I do not understand.”

     “Have you heard of ‘Zauberin’, Historian?” She turned and looked at me.

     “Of course! Who hasn’t?” Zauberin was the nom-de-guerre of the most powerful wordsmith of the Free Word; a mysterious figure who no one really knew much about. The thought came to me, as impossible as it seemed. It could not be!

     “Yes, Historian. Incredible or not, it’s true. It’s time for Lily Pendleton to retire for good. Zauberin is going to be very busy and I have no time to pussyfoot around anymore. This time, it will be all-out war. Silvus has enough on his plate with the hunt for the Wordscapist. He has murdered two of his council members and Sign eliminated his favourite enforcer. I have now officially defected and that just leaves him with that bimbo, Zyx. The numbers are depleted and he is vulnerable. I can’t think of a better time to strike.”

     "But, Sign?” The rest of the question was unnecessary.

     “Sign ordered the three of us to hunt for the Wordscapist. And none of us will dare do anything but that. But Silvus is now going to call for an all-out hunt for me, and for that matter, for you. He does not have to hunt us himself. In the same way, I am going to start a war against the Guild. I do not have to fight that war myself. There are enough able Free wordsmiths.” She looked at me and smiled, as if she were explaining elementary mathematics to a second grader.

     It was too much to absorb. I had been ported from an execution to the heart of a revolution. “And what do you want me to do?” I asked, the question almost a whimper.

      “I do not trust the Guild to faithfully record this revolution. And I want to ensure that every detail of this war is noted and recorded so that future wordsmiths can look back and remember the time when the Way of the Word was set free. You will be the historian of this war; the Free Word’s first and most important historian. I have already prepared a technical team that will provide you with the entire backup you need. Welcome to the Free Word, Historian!”

     “It will be an honour, Mistress,” I whispered the words. Fear has a way of arresting speech. I had heard enough about Zauberin’s legend to desist from raising any objections. I had just been told that I was to be the Free Word historian. But I could not quite ignore the irony of the fact that I had no freedom to refuse the offer.

Amra

     There are some things one dreams of. There are some things one waits for. Every once in a while, one might be fortunate enough to dream of and wait for the same thing. Even rarer is the time when this one thing that you have always dreamt of and waited for actually comes along. That time had come for me. And it was strangely bittersweet.

     I was not the type to wait for things. I believed in making them happen. I had spent my entire life accordingly, and the last decade and a half spent with the Corps had only further convinced me that I had been doing the right thing all along. I remember my first days with the Corps when the job was about observing and reprimanding. This was the balance that had existed between the Corps and the Guild, ever since the ill-fated day when the first wordsmith discovered that he could play with the Continuum.

     Before that, the Corps merely watched humanity trudge through its wearisome journey of evolution. There was a time when a team of two CCC agents watched all of mankind. But the Guild changed all that. Now, I had a team of 14 people. And I was just one of the supervising CCC officers assigned to our reality. There were four more; officers that is, not realities. The Guild had completely screwed up the number of alternate realities we need to look out for. Don’t get me started on that! But then, mankind was still pretty low on the CCC’s list. My boss, my Yen, had told me about this race that had powerful psychics who ended up ripping apart the space-time fabric each time they burped. That world had close to a dozen Yens and supporting teams monitoring the place. Earth, for all the brouhaha, still merited only one quarter of a Yen.

     There were two things that helped me change the way the Corps treated mankind, and more importantly the Guild. I did my bit of paranoia mongering and of course, the onset of the Silvus era helped tremendously. AJ Silvus was everything the Corps had been wary of when the Guild started tinkering with the Continuum. Silvus had broken half the laws in the book himself and had aided in the breaking the other half in one way or another. He and his team of murderers, necromancers and assorted trash had made the Guild a nightmare to control. His animal cunning had kept him from being discovered for a long time, but soon the ripples and tears on time-space were obvious for everyone to see. The Corps had to come down heavily and stop this outrageous monster. And I was the most obvious choice for the witch-hunt.

     It took me eight years of evidence gathering, surprise raids and several other such tricks to come up with a file that was enough to send Silvus to the Detention Centre for the rest of his charm-enhanced life. Just when I was taking the decision to close the file and come down on him, Silvus pulled off the biggest scape a wordsmith has ever tried to weave. I don’t know what it was about, but we had recorded a 175+ reading on the surveillance meters. I even had a signature verification on his weave pattern from the trace analysis we ran. There were three more signatures; those of Pendleton, Zyx and Sau. My entire file and all the work that had gone into it seemed quite redundant now that Silvus had gone and conveniently strung himself up. I could not begin to tell you how infuriating that is. But then, I am a believer in results, and I had Silvus now. I just wished the Continuum-messing bastard had done this earlier and saved me a whole load of digging.

     Silvus had been outrageously careless this time. He had not bothered with porting to Alter, the Guild’s favourite plane to meddle with Continuum. He had just woven whatever monstrosity that scape had generated right under our noses. I checked to see if he had managed to squirrel out an approval. Most Guild approvals passed through me and something in the range of 175 would need the Corps Yen’s approval; which would have taken months, if not years, of petitioning. Silvus had plainly not bothered with process. There was no petition filed, not even one for a minor scape; this ruled out the notorious ‘oops’ clause that he had used so many times in the past. The Corps process violation in this range itself could lead to lifetime imprisonment, if the scape he had tried had done enough damage to the Continuum. My file would ensure that the sentence was upgraded to an immediate execution. I would not settle for anything less. The only thing that was left to do was to catch the bastard. I had been expecting Silvus to run and hide. It came as quite a surprise when the stalkers sent word saying that he had turned up at the Guild headquarters in broad daylight. What game was the arrogant prick playing! But then, it did not matter. I was getting exactly what I had been waiting for all these years; AJ Silvus in a watertight case.

    I walked into the port chamber. The team was armed and ready. Weaponry was of personal choice and most of the team carried variations of automatic handguns. I did not bother with arms. I had my pulse-quirt and it did whatever I needed it to do with vicious efficiency. I could disable, maim or even kill with it. If Silvus tried to resist arrest, I would be sure to do all three to him, in that order. Slowly.

     I waited for the teleport team to set up the coordinates and waited for the port-window to open up. A few moments later, we were there. We had a port-centre just outside the Guild headquarters, for obvious reasons. It was just a question of crossing the street and walking into the Guild. I allowed myself a little smile at the irony of the front office board (“Smith and Sons, Realtors”). It never failed to amuse me. I had always hated the bitch who sat at the reception of the big fake façade of the Guild headquarters. I had been waiting for the pleasure of wiping that phoney smile off her face with a warrant for the arrest of the Guild’s sacred Mastersmith. I pulled out my quirt and the warrant as I approached the receptionist; prepared for a polite enquiry or violence, whatever came my way. Well, a girl can hope, can’t she?

     But then, Silvus always had a gift for spoiling things for me.

    "Miz Amra, I hope you have been well!” The bitch gushed all over the place. I hated the oh-so-correct ‘Miz’ and I knew just how ‘pleased’ she was to see me every time I walked in. “Master Silvus has been expecting you. He asked that you go directly to his office. I shall have your team escorted to the waiting room down the corridor. Should I arrange tea for them?”

      More games. Silvus would never give up. But then, I could take him by myself, Mastersmith or not. I told my team to wait in the designated area and walked to the office. It took a couple of minutes of trudging through too-plush carpets and overly long corridors. The Guild could not help flaunting the stuff. I was waiting for this year’s audit, though. It would be fun to dig up the Guild records with no Mastersmith to hide their dirt.

    Thinking of the Mastersmith, I wondered what he was planning to pull off this time. I kept both quirt and warrant in hand and followed one of those bouncer flunkies they hire as guards to Silvus’s office. Finally, we were at the door and I was shown in. The bouncer had some class, I’ll give him that. I walked in to Mastersmith Silvus’s trademark greeting, “Amra! It’s such a pleasure to see you, as always!”

     The first thing I noticed when I went in was that AJ Silvus looked haggard. He looked like he had had a really rough day; more like a week actually. He was in a rumpled suit that looked slept in, and had a three-day stubble. Moreover, Jimmy Sau was not around. Sau was like Silvus’s shadow, especially when us CCC folk were visiting him. I had been prepared to take both of them down, but I was glad to find Silvus alone. I walked right up to the table and laid my warrant down, right beside his damned divining orb. “Silvus, you are under arrest. Want me to read you your rights or would you rather I just give them to you as reading material for your first night in the detention centre?”

     He gave me a rueful smile. “You do not waste much time, do you? I just got back from the scape and here you are, ready to nail my arse.”

    “I have been waiting a long time, Silvus. I can’t begin to tell you just how much pleasure this brings me.”

    Silvus gave me a long, thoughtful look. I could almost see the thoughts leap in and out of that brilliant but twisted mind. He was trying to figure out how to deal with me. Given the corner he had painted himself into, he didn’t have too many options. The question was, would he dare?

     “I’m afraid I can’t come with you, Amra. There are things to be done.” He said this in a matter-of-fact way, as if he were telling me that he could not make it for a lunch date. I tensed a bit as I tightened my grip on the quirt. He was way too self-assured, way more than his usual irritating levels. Something was up.

     “Lucky for me I came prepared, Silvus.” I kept my voice matter-of-fact too, stepping closer. I felt him tense, anticipating my move. Quickly, before he could try any of his tricks, I twirled my quirt to stop right under his chin and flicked the safety off.

     He arched his head back, straining to keep his neck away from my quirt. He knew what it could do. Good! “Wait, I need to show you something,” his voice was a wee bit strained from his thick neck being stretched out, but he was still lacking the tension I was looking for. Definitely suspicious. “I promise, Amra, I won’t make trouble. But I really need you to see this.”

     He sounded sincere. But then, he was the Mastersmith. He could sound like my grandmother, and wouldn’t even need a scape for that. But he was waving a peace flag, and that was rare enough to make me wonder. I was not sure if he was stalling or whether he really had a rabbit hole woven out. I did not say anything, but moved the quirt marginally so that he could move without getting his throat crushed with a power surge. I saw his massive frame relax a bit. Good, I did have him worried. I needed him a lot more than worried though.

     He closed his eyes and seemed to be thinking to himself. “Thoughtscape!” the idea crossed my head. No, even the Mastersmith couldn’t pull that off! I tightened my grip on the quirt nevertheless. Suddenly I heard a sharp crack, and almost reflexively shoved the quirt forward. I saw movement to my left and turned, moving to cover this new threat. There was a demon standing there, freshly teleported in, but definitely not freshly dead. It was a body-snatcher, and the corpse was way past its expiry. The thing was disgusting, half rotten and falling apart at the seams. It also had patches of what looked like glass that had half melted into its skin. I could not help wondering why the body-snatcher was still clinging on to this ruin of a corpse. That is when the thought struck me full-force, “Silvus has summoned a demon in front of me, a CCC officer!” I knew then that he had gone completely crazy. I flicked my quirt back from the demon to the Mastersmith. I knew which monster was more dangerous. The pattern of the glass shards and the damage they had wreaked on the body looked vaguely familiar. I put the thought away for a later time. Taking on a rogue wordsmith and a demon at the same time required complete attention.