Wordscapist, The Myth

Chaos is a beautiful thing

Manifold patterns and brilliant hues

Look but do not lose yourself

Beauty’s whim might cast you adrift

Just another flap of the wings

Just another random variable

The Historian

Sign and her beasts vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared, leaving behind a devastated scape-field, Jimmy Sau’s purple corpse, three very troubled wordsmiths and one completely terrified historian. Though the space warp had receded and all of us could move, it took a long time before anyone budged. Silvus stayed put on the ground, holding on to his scape-staff, almost curled around it. Zyx dropped to her knees, ashen and shaken, staring at Sau’s body. Lily looked grim, but in better shape than the other two. She was moving her lips, whispering words. She might have been swearing or weaving. I was too far gone to want to know which.

I had seen Sign. Finally. I had come face to face with the elemental and was still alive. Her words, ‘you are exempt’ echoed in my head like a triumphant requiem. I was right after all. Historian immunity! I promised myself never to be on a dangerous scape again. Even Historian immunity lasted only for so long. I finally summoned the courage to move, and found my knees a little wobbly. One of those hellcats had been barely five feet away from me. It’s difficult to walk away from an experience like that with steady feet. I went to my console and wound it back, checking to see how much it had managed to capture. Out on the field, Silvus finally got up, leaning on his scape staff. He was shaken to the core. He probably had never tasted defeat in his life. And he had never come so close to dying either. He half-staggered towards Sau’s body, still leaning heavily on his staff. A few meters away, he stopped. I guess whatever he saw convinced him that he did not need to go any closer. He summoned the support operations team with a shout, and they came running. I guess all the sound of what had happened had been contained within the space warp and the norms had not heard a thing. Silvus barked a few curt orders to them and they got busy. A couple of them started working on clearing the debris and two more zipped up Sau in a body bag and took him away.

Silvus asked Zyx, Lily and me to come with him to a makeshift tent that had been erected close to the scape-field. I had completed packing my equipment, and after handing it over to the one of the norms, I made my way to the fluttering tent. As I entered Silvus called out to me. Change of plans. I was to wait at the helipad, while the wordsmiths discussed whatever wordsmiths discuss in these situations.

I decided to spend some more time with my lenses and filters (these stayed with me), checking to see if everything was functional. Thankfully, nothing important had been damaged.

The scape and Sign’s appearance kept playing in my head. I shook with fear as I recalled the overwhelming terror I had felt at seeing her beasts leaping out of the scape-crux. Sign herself had numbed all thought. I could not even remember fear. It was like she had purged all senses and all I could remember were her words and how her liquid skin flowed with every frown and smile on her face.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had seen Sign and had walked with my life! I decided that when I was back at home, I would spend more time reading up on Sign’s appearances and how to keep oneself safe from her. My survival had been more fluke than anything else. I did not want to leave my continued existence to something as capricious as luck. I picked up my carry-all and started walking towards the helipad. The support ops guys standing there asked me to wait for the wordsmiths before boarding the helicopter. Used to being at the bottom of the word chain, I did not complain and stood around in the freezing wind, hoping that the wordsmith discussion would not take too much time. Bleak weather and landscapes tend to bring on bleak thoughts. As the horror of Sign’s appearance started receding, my mind turned to other disaster scenarios. I started wondering if Silvus was going to leave any witnesses alive. If there was to be a witness elimination program, then I would be the first to go. Historians usually top the list of acceptable losses. Each time a wordsmith went renegade, each time a scape went bad, there was always a historian casualty on the cards. I waited for the wordsmiths to come back, wondering what fate lay in store for me. Soon I saw the three approaching, Silvus in the lead, followed closely by Zyx. Lily was walking to the scape-crux, presumably to collect something.

I picked up my bag, impatient to get on to the helicopter. The cold, damp island was getting on my nerves and ironically I wanted to be back to cold, damp London. At least the combined bouquet of the London smog and the pea-soup sludge of the Thames would be infinitely better than this.

Silvus was the first to reach me and he motioned at me with a gesture. “Historian,” he said in a voice that was neither hearty nor warm, “I’m afraid we will be leaving you behind. I will need Zyx and Lily for the hunt. You are an unnecessary risk and must be terminated.”

The words were rather matter-of-fact and it took a couple of seconds for their meaning to sink in. I felt the cold seeping right into my bones, freezing everything up. I was right. They were going to kill me!

“It will be quick and painless. I have asked the support team to administer a lethal injection. Your body will be delivered to the Historian crypt and interred with full honours. I thank you for doing a professional and wonderful job. I wish it had worked out and you could have lived to tell the tale.” With those final words, he waved me a little goodbye and stomped off to the helicopter. I stood there looking at him go, with bile and sheer desperation rising up in my throat. I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I looked around, trying to see if there was any chance of escape. I was surrounded by armed members of the support ops team. The island had no cover and no other means of escape save the helicopter. One of the support ops guys came to take my backpack. I noticed a little thought nudging me in my head. I had been trying to ignore the voice, afraid that the fear of death was driving me insane. Finally, I let the thought in. It was a voice, a voice that sounded familiar. Lily! “Move to the scape-crux. I have left an untraceable teleport spell on it. You will find a pair of spectacles. Put them on and they will do the rest. Stay put at the destination. I will join you imminently.” Lily was trying to save me! I was not going to die yet!

Two of the support ops murderers came to guide me to the tent where their medic would be waiting with the injection. I figured that the tent was about 20 metres from the scape crux. I could make a break for it. I had never done anything physically challenging in my life and I began to wonder how I was going to run for it. The support ops guys looked in terrific shape and weren’t expecting any kind of resistance. I wondered if Silvus had woven a submissive spell around me. But then, I was a historian, I was scape-resistant. I decided that I did indeed have a chance of getting out of this mess alive. I had to run and I had to put in everything I had into those 20 metres. I said a silent prayer.

The entrance of the tent and all it implied was fast approaching. I waited till we came to a rough patch and then made my move. I stumbled and fell against the guard closer to the scape-crux. He had not been expecting a middle-aged historian to put up a fight and was easily pushed off balance. I did not tarry to make a point and took off for the runic rock. I had a head start on those guys, but they were far younger and in very good shape. 20 metres suddenly felt like a long way. I could sense them gaining on me. I scrambled to the rock and leapt across the last couple of feet, landing hard, almost knocking myself out. Luckily, the promised pair of spectacles was not too difficult to find and were placed on the rock itself. I grabbed them and almost fumbled as I put them on. I twisted around as I heard a sound. Through the tinted glasses, I could see the ops guy closest to me was within grabbing distance. I threw myself back, trying to avoid his desperate lunge. There was an ear-shattering crack that always accompanies a teleport and everything dissolved into nothingness. Swirls of colours and sounds exploded as my body was whisked across thousands of miles of space through a warp. An infinite moment later, I was alone in an abandoned warehouse. I went on my knees and threw up. I was always sick after a port, even if the port had just saved my life. I grabbed the spectacles and threw them aside, afraid that they would somehow port me elsewhere. I then went back to the important task of retching and throwing up.

I recovered after a while, looking around to see where the port had brought me. It was a dark, dusty warehouse. I could not make out much about what lay outside, and for the moment I didn’t feel brave enough to find out. There were some boxes around the place and a few farm implements. The standard rakes, shovels and crowbars leaned incongruously against the walls, leading me to believe I was in the midst of a farm. The smell around the place was a little weird though. It did not smell dusty and farm-like at all. There was an oiled, efficient smell to the place, like it was used often, and not for farming at that. Before I could try and lock down that sense of wrong-ness, there was another crack and a flash of light right beside me. My nerves were not at their best and I jumped at the sound, letting out a scream of alarm. I turned to see Lily Pendleton, a little dishevelled and winded, but otherwise alright. I did not know what would be appropriate conversation and settled for a ‘thank you’. She looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time and nodded. She was reasonably unperturbed given that she had just been ported through god-knows-how-many miles in a fraction of a second. She probably saved a lot of cab fare teleporting herself wherever she wanted to go. Me, I would be glad if I missed out on porting altogether for the rest of my life.

She got up and brushed herself off. Once again, I could not help noticing how tall the woman was. I watched her walk across the warehouse, checking for whatever security measures she had put up. I could hear her muttering certain words, no doubt weaving verification spells on the protection woven around the building. She seemed to know her way around the place and unerringly homed in on the most innocent looking objects, checking each and every spell that went into making this place untraceable.

Finally, she was reassured that there was no one following our teleport and that it had indeed been untraceable. “We are in a spot of trouble, Historian,” Lily said as she walked to a dusty window in the warehouse.

“Yes Mistress,” I said, wondering whether the Inner Council specialised in understatements. I had many questions in my head, but decided to wait for her explanation. I sat back, rubbing my bruised elbows and knees where I had skinned myself in my desperate lunge across the rock. I looked at Lily Pendleton, the Lily Pendleton, walking around, pacing like an Amazon on the warpath.

“I’ve called for a rescue team,” she said. I realised that she had not been aimlessly pacing around. She must have sent a telepathic missive to someone to come pick us up.

“Someone from the local Guild office, Mistress?” I asked, almost instantly regretting the stupid question.

“I said rescue team, Historian, not execution team. No, I did not contact the Guild. The team I called is from another organisation.”

“Oh, I guess that’s alright then.” I waited for a while. My curiosity got the better of me. “What really happened, Mistress? Why did you do what you did?”

“Silvus was not planning on an all-out hunt like Sign had suggested. He wanted to try again to capture the gift for himself. That man will not give up and will end up getting everyone else killed. I am done indulging his games. I’d rather not have another visit from Sign and her cats.”

Cats! Another fabulous understatement! I thought about what she had told me. It did not make sense. I asked the obvious question, “Sign said something about an elemental being loosed. I did not understand that part. Did we create an elemental?”

“Of course not!” Lily came as close to snorting as a lady could. She took two steps towards me and sat on her haunches, again managing to do it in a lady-like way. “Silvus, in his arrogance, failed to consider a very important fact. And that is why the scape went wrong.”

“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.

“What the hell happened to you?” Silvus barked at the demon, ignoring me or the threat of the quirt. It was so tempting to take him out then and there. But no, I’d waited so long. I’d wait some more.

The demon tried saying something that ended up sounding like stomach-churning slobbering. I saw that part of its jaw was missing and it could not really talk. I still could not get over the fact that Silvus had actually summoned a demon and was acknowledging that he had it working for him by having a conversation with it. He was drilling holes in his leaky boat, hoping that the water would run out!

Silvus made a disgusted sound and stared at the demon, no doubt lambasting it telepathically. At a gesture from him, the demon leaned forward and touched the orb. The orb glowed a faint green. Silvus apparently wanted the demon to transfer some information or memories to the orb. I was getting impatient, and you know what they say about keeping a woman waiting. “If you are done with your hoodoo, we really should be going. And yes, please tell the demon that it is under arrest too. Or perhaps I should execute it right here.”

“Patience, Amra. And you shall be rewarded. You are after all chasing the most powerful wordsmith in the world.” He said this with an almost absent-minded grimace, which could have been an attempt at a grin, still staring deep into the smoky crystal.

I could not believe the man’s arrogance. But I was willing to give him that much in his last free moments. I nodded my head with a slight smirk to let him know what I really thought of him.

“Then I’m afraid you are at the wrong place. A few hours ago, a scape was loosed that ended up with an anonymous wordsmith, in all probability a cipher. The scape captured the essence of the legend that we wordsmiths call the Wordscapist. Somewhere in this world, there is a Wordscapist.”

“A Wordscapist?” I could not believe the bullshit he was trying. “You think you can weave a fairy tale to skip out of this one, Silvus?”

Silvus had never been a patient one, and I could see a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. “Amra, do you think we’d weave a scape that almost hit a 200 on the CM just to toast some marshmallows? It was the biggest scape ever, and it was an attempt to create the Wordscapist. But then, it went wrong. If it had not, we would not be having this conversation. I would have been out there, changing the way the Guild, and even the CCC works.”

There it was again, that limitless arrogance. This man really knew how to get under a woman’s skin. The story sounded incredible. But then, Silvus was capable of anything. “You are saying this Wordscapist scape you tried got lost and ended up somewhere with a cipher. What happened?” I spoke slowly, like I would to a kid. A delusional, powerful, dangerous kid.

“Sign attacked. She killed Sau as a warning and set the rest of the team on hunting down the person the scape ends up with,” he spoke coldly, without emotion. He stopped, his eyes glazing over slightly. He recovered soon enough, and went back to staring manically at the orb. “I do not have a choice, Amra. I have to obey Sign or she will hunt me down, no matter where I am.”

I clenched my teeth, trying not to react impulsively. Sign! If one looked at it objectively, Sign did what the CCC did. She kept Continuum meddling under control, though her methods were a lot more direct. However, there was only one Continuum supervisory body and that was the CCC. That made Sign nothing more than a vigilante, elemental or not. And vigilantism was not something I appreciated. But what was weird about the story was the fact that Silvus was working for Sign. “Since when did the Mastersmith allow the Guild’s nemesis to give him orders?” I asked the question, not bothering to tone down the sarcasm, my quirt still ready to take whatever he might throw at me.

Silvus chose to ignore my question. His eyes had widened a bit at whatever he was seeing in the damned orb. He should not have ignored me. There are a lot of things that piss me off, but being ignored definitely was at the top of the list, along with other irritants like someone trying to kill me and someone trying to bullshit me with legends of a Wordscapist. I flicked my quirt and brought it down on the orb with a sharp crack. There was a hiss from the demon as my quirt made contact, followed by the sound of expensive glass shattering into a thousand pieces.

For a fleeting moment, the Mastersmith showed a surge of rage on his face. I was ready for reprisal as I whipped my quirt right back to his throat. He took a moment to recover as pieces of glass skittered over the period rosewood desk to fling themselves into the plush depths of the carpet. “That was unnecessary, Amra,” he fixed me with those dead eyes of his, “I was going to give you my undivided attention the moment I was done going through this creature’s report. It was of some relevance to our conversation.”

“Silvus, I am done with your games.” I said, my voice harsh and my teeth still clenched, the quirt almost quivering for release an inch from his throat. “I am here to arrest you, and I am not going to wait in queue to do so. You will come with me right now, or I am going to stun you and get my team to carry you out on a stretcher. Those are your options. Pick!”

“Amra, Amra, Amra. Such temper…”

I did not wait for the condescending bastard to finish and shoved my quirt at his throat, primed for a debilitating blow. Silvus was ready though, and my quirt froze where it was, an inch of his throat, stuck fast in some kind of a scape shield. I immediately sent out a mental alarm to my team.

“Amra, listen to me. Give me five minutes and I will explain. You are making a big mistake!” There was a slight strain in Silvus’s voice as he struggled to maintain the shield that kept my quirt from his throat.

“Your time is over, Anton Javier Silversmith.” My words came almost on cue, as three of my team members burst through the door, followed by five more. All of them had their weapons at ready. We were taking Silvus down, and my announcement of his identity had been a declaration of intent. The name ‘Anton Silversmith’ had an extremely long CCC record attached to it. He had been listed as a cipher, a wordsmith outside the Guild. Once the connection between Anton Silversmith and AJ Silvus had been made, everything else had fallen into place.

I could see the shock on Silvus’s face on hearing the name he had gone to such lengths to bury. He knew the game was up. He was flanked by two CCC operatives on either side, all of them armed and ready to shoot him in the head. There were four more who were flanking the demon, ready to take down the creature should it make any threatening movements. Silvus shook his head slightly, probably in a signal to the demon not to try anything. I pulled my quirt back and pulled out an electronic leash to slip around his thick neck. I walked around the table, gesturing to my team members to move aside, pulling the leash apart as I leaned over to put it on him. I saw his lips move as he said a word. The air seemed to warp as whatever he tried struggled and then died out. Realisation dawned on his face.

With a few movements of my quirt, I had set in place a perfunctory scape-freeze the moment I got in. And I had woven it right around the Mastersmith, with my inane-looking threatening gestures. In his arrogance, Silvus had failed to realise that the quirt was much more than a taser designed to shock wordsmiths into mute submission. I smiled at his expression and reached around him to clasp the leash closed. The leash was not long enough to encircle his thick neck, further thickened by the force-field he had woven all around his body. I moved the leash around to readjust the link. And while I did this, I was not watching Silvus. Big mistake.

The word he said blew open the force field he had around him. Said within the constraints of the force-field, it managed to escape the scape-freeze I had set. The entire force-field exploded, throwing me and everyone else in the room against the walls and the furniture. In the extended time warp before I hit the wall, I could see Silvus smile at me as he used the warp to say several words, mostly under his breath. As the warp formed, I realised that the freeze had been breached.

A moment later, I hit the padded wall and landed hard on the carpet. Almost immediately I heard the sharp crack of a teleport. By the time I had picked myself up, Silvus was gone. He had found the precious five seconds he needed to get his arse out of there. I looked around and saw the demon on the floor, bits of gristle dribbling down the wall it had hit during the explosion. My team were picking themselves up too, weapons covering the demon. A closer look revealed that it was just the husk; the body. The snatcher had made its exit, probably on its way to the nearest graveyard to pick up a fresh stiff. I picked up the ends of the leash and twisted them together, frustration boiling in me. I could see my team members set up a teleport trace, but I knew that there was no point. Silvus would not have left a trail. But now it was a different game. We had moved on from legal trap-laying to an all-out hunt. This was more my kind of game.

I sent out a mental missive to the CCC bulletin centre. The message was an instant all-points alert to all CCC operatives; AJ Silvus was to be apprehended on sight and terminated at the first sign of hostility. I did not have to be careful about bringing him in alive anymore. There would be no trial now. Using a scape against a CCC operative was one of the primal crimes and it earned the offender an instant death penalty. Silvus had made one mistake too many. There would be no going back now. This would be a hunt to the finish. One thought nagged me though. He had mentioned the Wordscapist. I had always considered it the wordsmith equivalent of an old wives’ tale. But with a scape reading of almost 200, Silvus might just have pulled off the insanity he had been spouting. I dismissed the thought. First, I would finish Silvus. And if he was right about the Wordscapist bullshit, I would hunt down that freak too.