Mark Stone - The Judas Line

“If you children are quite done with your sophomoric rantings, we have other pressing concerns. Alan, has our shipment of re-enforcements arrived?”

“While you were out earlier, boss.”

Cain nodded and pulled a small stack of three by five cards out of the pocket of his red flannel shirt. “Good. I think it is time for my fine friends to receive compensation.” To each of us he handed a card.

Maggie and Alan snatched at theirs eagerly, while I took a more cautious approach.

My eyes found the Word written there and it slid into my mind like a lover into an embrace, warm and gentle. Things shifted in my mind and I felt some part of me, part of my memory, evaporate like ice under the hot sun. I didn’t know what it could have been. The Word, however, stuck fast.

“Create. This is Create,” I breathed. A thirteenth Word! I immediately knew what I could do with this Word, the capability of making artifacts and wards. I knew that when I used it, it would smell like the ocean.

“Peace, you gave me Peace!” Maggie nearly screamed, outraged. She flung the card onto the table.

Peace? I immediately felt a near-overwhelming desire to snatch her card and add the word to my Vocabulary.

Cain simply smiled and said, “If you did not have the facility for it, my dear, the Word would not have taken root in your mind. While the Word might not have any offensive capabilities, never underestimate the power of a Word properly used.”

I gave Maggie speculative look.

She threw it right back at me. “What?”

My grin was sheepish. “Never met a female magus before, man; it’s such a new experience. Sorry.”

Smiling, she picked up the axe and whirled it around her body. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the axe humming, a steel blur with a sharp edge. Alan and I backed up before we could suffer an amateur tracheotomy. After a few seconds she slowed then stopped, setting the axe gently on the table. “When it comes to me, buster, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Her grin was toothy and savage.

“Damn,” I breathed, curiously aroused. “That’s for sure, Blondie.”

“Can’t read this one,” Alan said morosely, holding up his Word card. “Sorry, boss.”

“Not a bother,” Cain replied, unfazed by the Maggie’s demonstration. He handed another card to the stricken apprentice. “The magus’s inner landscape and talent determine the amount and type of Words that can be accessed.”

Alan took the card and read. A few moments passed before a beatific smile spread across his face and dimples appeared at the corners of his mouth matching the one on his chin. “Grace … it’s Grace.”

Cain flashed teeth and gathered the cards from both apprentices. “Excellent.” He turned to me, noting the look of longing on my face. “Come, I have need of your newfound Word.” With that, he walked into the dark and I followed.

Maybe his eyewear was a form of night vision, or maybe his blue-white eyes could see in the dark, but I was forced to hold onto his shoulder until he produced a mini-flashlight and flicked the switch. I could have used Vision, but I wanted to hoard my power for the trial to come.

An eight by five wooden crate rested a few feet away, a crowbar leaning against the rough planks. “If you would do the honors?” Cain asked.

Nodding, I hefted the crowbar and started prying the crate open. After a couple of minutes’ worth of effort, the side panel fell to the concrete with a resounding crash.

“What the hell?” I said.

“That is why I needed you and your new Word. These are our re-enforcements.”

A few short hours later Cain and I traveled to a private helipad where a copter and pilot waited. Maggie and Alan went to prepare for the ground assault on the hotel with our … re-enforcements and to contact Earth so it could simulate a quake. A few minutes after we took off, Alan reported that Earth had shaken the hotel quite thoroughly, shattering window glass on all floors and cracking pavement. Earth had stopped just short of collapsing the entire structure.

“I just live to surprise you, Cain,” I yelled back. To Maggie, “ Yellow, How’s it going? ” All of us used aliases while on coms. I was Green, Maggie Yellow, Cain Blue and Alan Red.

Her voice came tinny and small through the earwig set deep in my ear canal. “The building shook like an epilepsy patient, Green. Now all the rich and famous are streaming out like rats leaving a ship.” A pause. “Although with some of these folks, that’s an insult to rats.”

Alan chimed in. “It’s not helping that Earth cracked all the cement in front of the hotel. The limos are having a hard time of it, Green.”

“How much longer will the evacuation take, Red?”

“Everyone staying at the hotel has a limo, so it’s making for a tight squeeze, but it shouldn’t be too much longer.”

“Cain, how long can we hover here?” I yelled.

He checked with a pilot. “We have world enough and time, my young friend.” He dipped into a thigh pocket and pulled out two plastic vials. “Drink up; this will imbue you with the ability to withstand at least six or seven Words for about half an hour.”

I waved it away. “Already made an ointment that does the same thing!” I bellowed. “It’s smeared under my sweater and it lasts all day. Also, it absorbs at least a dozen if not two.” My mind went back to when Julian hit me with a Word from the Silver. “Providing they’re normal Words, that is.”

Silence. From behind his goggles, I could feel his implacable regard. “What?” Was it my breath? I use mints.

Still nothing, until, “I have walked this earth for such a length of time that millennia have been forgotten, seas have risen and fallen. I have beheld the Flood that formed the Mediterranean and destroyed fair Atlantis beneath its turbulent waves, sending Noah and his Ark spinning. It has been my privilege and honor to have taught magi throughout the endless centuries from Abraham to Charlemagne.” He sounded pissed.

“So?”

“So? So, I am the greatest practitioner of magic the world has ever known! Not even Merlin Demonborn, the Naphil of Camelot, could equal my status as a magi, yet you, you insolent little pup, have done something I had not even considered: create an ointment to counter magic that is of greater efficacy than any potion I could and have ever devised.”

“Yeah, man. So?’

“Sometimes you really piss me off, kid!”

Ten minutes later, while Cain still fumed, Alan gave us the green light.

I hollered at my companion, “Ready?”

“Ready, on your mark.”

“Go!”

We jumped.

Morgan

Freezing wind tore at my face, trying to scour the flesh from my skull. The thin plastic goggles preserved my eyes so I could see the city lights rush at me with the speed of inevitability.

I’d fallen five hundred feet, arms and legs spread. Another fifteen hundred feet to go.

My mind quested down down down to street level where Maggie and Alan had already started the ground assault.

In the warehouse, Cain had given me another Word: Seeing, and it smelled like Old Spice. With a touch and a soft utterance, I could see through the eyes of the willing. Maggie had been kind enough to let me See through her eyes to help co-ordinate the assault, if need be.

It went something like this:

Four golems jumped like spiders over the cracked and broken pavement, the word “emet” (???) inscribed in the chamois on the back of their heads. Instead of sculpting the creatures out of clay, wood or stone, Cain had procured crash test dummies, their light weight and articulation giving them a mobility and speed greater than that of traditional stone golems.