The Word Guardians: and the Twisting Tales

by Lawrence Yarham

  “Which came first?” James asked glibly, switching into more of a work mode.

  “The autopsy will confirm,” replied the forensic examiner.

  “Then I guess we’d better get on with our ‘detective’ work,” he shrugged.

  “Yes,” Raelinn agreed. “Like Y’an said, the only way out is to go into the story.”

  “It feels like some sort of surreal escape room,” noted James.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Raelinn answered, crouching down and touching the blood with a finger.

  “It’s like a room of puzzles. Solving them enables an exit to be opened.”

  Raelinn held her finger up to her nose.

  “Blood, eh?” James observed.

  Raelinn ignored him but motioned to the examiner and the evidence bag she had collected. “May I?” she asked.

  The examiner shrugged and opened the bag. Raelinn sniffed over the top.

  “The blood on the knife is not the same as that on the deck,” she observed.

  “Wow! You’re good!” complimented James. “Whose blood do you think is the victim’s?”

  Raelinn gestured to the trail on the deck. “I would guess this, given the amount.”

  “Of course,” agreed James, feeling a little stupid for his obvious question. “That seems likely.”

  He looked up to the actors, talking among themselves. One of them stepped forwards and addressed him.

  “Detective? When can we all go back to our rooms? We need to get ready for our tour of the Valley of the Kings later today.”

  James rubbed his face and felt his stubble. He was exhausted. He didn’t know which day it was, how long he and Raelinn had been in the Void or when he had last had a decent night’s sleep.

  “My assistant and I will take notes now,” he said, playing along with the expected storyline. “Then, we’ll organise for a chaperone to be with anyone heading ashore. We just need to account for everyone’s movements.”

  “What? We’re all suspects?” asked the man, indignantly.

  “At this point, we’re just building a picture of what happened,” placated James.

  “Well, I can tell you what happened,” said an older well-to-do lady. “There was an argument between that man, his wife and another lady and the next minute, he collapsed on the deck, the knife sticking out of his chest.”

  “His chest?” asked Raelinn, puzzled.

  “No, it wasn’t like that at all, Aunty,” disagreed a younger lady. “You couldn’t have seen it from where you were sitting.”

  “But you did?” argued the elder lady.

  “Yes,” the younger lady retorted. “There was a bang, then a gunshot and then the lady collapsed on the deck.”

  James rubbed his face. “Gunshot, you say. And the victim was female?”

  “Oh yes,” enthused the younger woman. She seemed excited about the details. “Yes. It seemed odd, because the first noise came from the other end of the boat.”

  “Right,” James replied, struggling with the details.

  “It wasn’t a gunshot,” interjected an older man. He looked like the type of person who always had to be right in any argument. “These soldiers appeared from nowhere and hit the man on the back of the head with a piece of metal piping.”

  “You’re not a colonel by any chance, are you?” quipped James. This was quickly turning into a board game he remembered playing as a child.

  He stepped away from the salon and moved back over to the outline so he could talk with Raelinn without being overheard. The ethereal readers moved along with them, watching the crime story play out.

  “So, we have three different variations of the crime, each with different weapons and two different victims.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Raelinn agreed.

  “I agree,” James nodded. “It’s all messed up.”

  There was the sound of distant thunder. They looked behind the boat and could see clouds gathering quickly across what had been a clear sky.

  “Maybe the butler did it?” James added sarcastically. “We’ve got everything here, including the spurned love story.” Lightning flashed across the dark clouds looming behind the boat.

  “Hell,” he continued, thinking about the life that he would be potentially returning to, if they could ever get out of here. “If my wife gets her hands on me, I think I’d probably end up being the victim in one version of this story!”

  More lightning flashed, then the shadow of it remained behind, forming a crack in the sky.

  “This is a nightmare,” James added. “It feels like it’s pieces of different jigsaw puzzles all mixed together.”

  Raelinn looked at the sky behind them. Another streak of lightning flashed and touched down on the riverbank. There was a bang and an explosion of sparks rising from the ground. Then a dark line remained in its place.

  “The stories are not playing out as they should,” remarked Raelinn. “They are breaking apart.”

  “Yes,” agreed James, glancing back at the actors. He saw something for a moment, shadows hanging and moving behind different actors. He could see the different stories at play. At their edges, they were prickly, trying to move past each other and sticking, then giving way and jolting.

  “There’s different stories at play here,” he said. “I can see them. They are breaking apart, tugging the fabric of the realm too.”

  He watched the shadows as two of them rubbed together, then tugged at the structure of the boat. The wall of the salon warped in front of his eyes.

  He followed the edge of one of the shadows. It flowed, like a coloured gas across to the body on the deck. Another competing storyline was also flowing across it.

  “The storylines are competing for the body too,” he described. He looked through the different moving wisps and could see hints of different victims. “That’s presumably why there’s different opinions of what happened.”

  “I can see…” he continued. He focussed on one of the wisps. He saw a split-second moment of a scene. An Asian lady in battle with two other men. “Soldiers!” James said, matching up the story with what the older man had said. “And Y’an was here too!” he remarked. He replayed the scene back in his mind. “They were trying to kidnap an Asian man.”

  James looked back over to the older man. “Did you see an Asian lady and man here too?”

  The man looked confused for a moment. James understood what had happened. Another storyline had moved across him. Then the man retorted. “That wasn’t what I saw at all. What kind of fool are you? You’re no detective!”

  Raelinn looked at the man. “Then what are you expecting from us?” she asked defiantly.

  The ethereal readers moved over to the outline on the deck again. Raelinn followed.

  “That’s it,” she said, crouching back down close to the blood. “That’s what I couldn’t place.”

  “What?” asked James, moving over to where she was, still following the outlines of the competing stories.

  “The blood from the blade,” she said. “It’s not human.”

  “How do you know?”

  Raelinn looked at James with a ‘seriously’, stare.

  “Sorry,” he said, realising his stupidity.

  “You know,” she replied. “I get it. It comes with the turf. I’m a ‘vampire’”, she added dryly.

  “It’s from Orfeo’s soldiers,” she continued, switching back to the blood. “They are part alive, part dead. He keeps them that way to assure their loyalty.”

  “Wait,” James said, rubbing his chin. “So Orfeo has been here, too?”

  “No,” Raelinn disagreed. “I’d smell him. Our kind always know when others are near or have been around.”

  “So, Orfeo sent them, then?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  There was another flash of lightning. James felt he could see stars or something else in the background now through the slashes of dark in the sky. It was unnerving.

  “So maybe they came to k
idnap this man,” he said, reasoning out what he could see replaying in his mind’s eye. “I feel he’s important to Y’an, somehow.”

  “A Custodian?” asked Raelinn. “The kidnappings that Y’an told us about?”

  “Yes,” agreed James. This part of the story was starting to make sense. It washed over him for a moment. “So maybe the crime here is not what we’ve been sent to solve?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Raelinn agreed. There was a buzzing noise in her pocket and she pulled out something and looked at it.

  “Everything alright?” James asked.

  “Yes,” Raelinn replied, seeming a little agitated.

  “I think this,” James said, pointing to the outline on the ground and the actors, “is just the realm playing out a story.”

  “Except it’s broken,” added Raelinn.

  “Yes,” agreed James. “There’s multiple storylines all pushing and pulling for the same stage. It’s a conflict of sorts. But I think the crime we need to solve, and the culprit, is elsewhere.”

  “That I agree with,” nodded Raelinn. “We need to be elsewhere.”

  They overheard the actors muttering amongst themselves.

  “They are not real detectives,” the elder lady said.

  “Don’t know if they’re coming or going,” agreed the younger lady.

  “One minute it’s one man who was the victim, next it’s someone else,” huffed the older man. “Fff!”

  “Wait a minute,” said James, angrily, being taken for a moment by one of the storylines. He made to move over to the actors, but Raelinn grabbed him on the sleeve, holding him back. She waved her other hand in front of his face, to get his attention, just as another lightning strike forked its way across the sky.

  This time the fork hit the side of the boat, exploding as it did so, sending sparks and debris up into the air. They hung there longer than they should, trapped. Next to them, under one end of the fork, a doorway formed. It sat there, its outline fizzing and popping, while above it the shadow of the fork and the debris around it sat still, apocalyptically.

  “What’s happening?” asked James.

  “The realm is cracking under the strain of the conflicting stories.”

  A new actor appeared in front of them on the deck. He was a well-dressed European man and seemed oblivious to their presence. The other actors switched their focus to him. He moved to the outline of the body and knelt down carefully.

  “Now that’s a real detective,” remarked the older lady actor, approvingly.

  “The detective from the story,” remarked Raelinn.

  “Yes,” grumbled James. “Why do I get the feeling we haven’t done any good here. We haven’t solved anything.”

  “No, listen,” disagreed Raelinn. “This was just the start. The real story is elsewhere.” She grabbed his hand and gestured to the door.

  “Where does it go to?” asked James.

  “A location special to Orfeo,” replied Raelinn. “He’s summoned us.”

  “What?” exclaimed James. “That’s what the buzz was just now?”

  “Yes,” Raelinn admitted reluctantly.

  “You’re taking me to him?” James asked her, He gestured to the grip she still had on his hand.

  “No, James,” she replied, making a show of letting go. “You are free to choose where to go. But…”, she said, “I strongly believe we need to go there and solve the real crime. Figure out why these stories are all twisting and breaking. You have to trust me!”

  “You could also be handing me over,” grumbled James. “I thought we were friends!”

  Raelinn looked into his eyes and touched his face gently. “We are,” she reassured. “You need to understand. I am taking you to him, but I will not betray you. I promise. This is the only way.”

  “Yeah, well,” James grumbled in reply. “Orfeo gave me his word before, and it came to nothing. Why should you be any different?” He looked back at her, the disappointment evident on his face.

  “Orfeo is not a person of honour,” Raelinn replied, looking him in the eyes, again. “I had forgotten that too. You have re-taught me its value.”

  “Me?” said James, surprised. “I wouldn’t say I’ve acted honourably.”

  “You don’t see it, James,” she urged, touching his arm. “You do in so many ways. You’d just lost your way for a little while.”

  “You don’t know much about me, then.”

  “More than you think,” replied Raelinn. “How people act in the little, seemingly insignificant moments speaks a lot about their greater habits and character.” She smiled at him, gently. Her fangs bared but he could see the fondness she expressed. “You helped me out of the Void when I was lost in the story. Now I ask you to let me help do the same for you.”

  James nodded, touched by her words.

  “So, why do we need to go to him now?”

  “I gave him my word. And I am giving you mine now. I will not break that, James.” She paused for a moment. “No matter what you think of him, I am different. You have my trust and hopefully you can give me yours. I know that Orfeo wants me to bring you to him and it gives us the opportunity to find out more about the kidnappings. That’s what Y’an asked us to solve. Together.” She held out her hand in friendship, for him to grab it.

  “Ok then,” he agreed, taking her hand. It made sense. They had experienced the competing storylines, but this felt like a symptom. They had to go elsewhere to find the cause. They had to go to Orfeo, as much as he wanted to steer clear of that slimeball.

  He took one last look at the detective in the scene in front of them. “Good luck solving… whatever this is!” he said, glibly.

  The detective waved his hand in acknowledgement in their general direction.

  Together James and Raelinn stepped through the portal.

  Chapter 7

  Vigilantes exposed

  Somewhere underground, near the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Yas, Sam and Eddie were chasing Orfeo and his soldiers to try to rescue Akoni and Prana. Orfeo’s raft was ahead and just in sight, but the darkness of the tunnel made it difficult to make out details. They saw by the light of luminous trails in the walls, but there was also movement. The walls and roof partly collapsed as the sand worm passed through. It made it difficult for them to keep up their pursuit. They had to keep dodging and slowing to avoid falling debris.

  Yas and Sam knelt awkwardly on the carpet and had both conjured bows and a sliver of word arrows. Whenever Orfeo’s raft came in range, they sent a slew of arrows towards it. The soldiers on Orfeo’s raft sneered at them in reply, creating shields to deflect their shots and then rolled word bombs into the tunnel behind them. It created more of a challenge, Eddie violently steering the carpet left and right to avoid them.

  From what they could see of the raft ahead of them, Prana and Akoni were both bound hand and feet to each other in the middle, making them hardest to reach. Fortunately, they were also out of the way of any shots being fired. The soldiers guarded the rear while Orfeo stood still, unaffected by the raft’s bouncing and bobbing. He looked ahead, very still, meditative in nature.

  A word bomb exploded underneath Yas, Sam and Eddie and sent them flying upwards. They all shouted out in surprise. Fortunately, without a driver, the carpet continued along its previous path and they each landed back on the rug, bouncing up and down. They grabbed onto each other to steady themselves.

  “This is crazy!” shouted Sam. “We’re getting nowhere.”

  He sent fresh volleys of word arrows towards the soldiers. They were just too far away though, so the shots were ineffective.

  Yas agreed. He was right. The soldiers were doing a pretty good job of keeping them at bay.

  “Where is he taking them?” she asked, rhetorically. She was wondering if they could somehow head them off.

  “Maybe if we split up?” suggested Eddie, who now seemed back to his original self.

  “What’re you thinking?” asked Yas, interested in the idea.


  “I don’t know,” shrugged Eddie. “Can we create more carpets, maybe?”

  In response, the carpet started unknitting on each side.

  “No, no, no!” shouted Sam in response. “What did you do?” He shoved Eddie angrily on the shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” Yas reassured, touching Sam on his arm. “Look.”

  Two similar but smaller carpets started to form from the one they were on. They stayed alongside and moved in unison, knitting and forming quickly, only reducing the size of the one they were on slightly. Very quickly, they were fully formed.

  “What’s the plan?” asked Yas, crawling her way cautiously to the carpet on their right.

  “I’ll try to distract them,” suggested Sam. “You see if you can get past the soldiers.

  “What about me?” asked Eddie.

  “I guess… you can help me distract them. Provide cover fire for Yas.”

  Eddie nodded and then scrambled onto the remaining carpet.

  “Ok, go!” Sam commanded his carpet. He shot forwards, closing the gap between his and Orfeo’s raft, while dodging raining debris. He fired more word arrows. The soldiers shielded themselves while dropping more word bombs which rolled down the tunnel and exploded behind Sam.

  Eddie sped up behind Sam and then swung out to his left and up above his shoulder. It created enough of an angle that he was able to drop magic word balls down and behind the soldiers’ shields.

  Two word balls exploded and rippled word fragments outwards, narrowly missing Akoni. He ducked quickly to his left as they rippled over his head. The fragments shot past Orfeo, who turned and regarded the scene casually. Other fragments hit one of the soldiers in the leg. He winced, then growled up at Eddie. In reply, he conjured a large gun which he pulled down from his shoulder. He started to fire word slivers at Eddie, who swung about on his carpet, keeping up a barrage of his shots as much as possible.

  Unseen by the soldiers, Yas moved her carpet as far up into the roof of the tunnel as she dared. She moved overhead and then in front of Sam, keeping in the shadows as much as she could, while the two boys continued their firing below. She felt like they had a chance. She just needed to manoeuvre a little further forward and then she could drop down between the soldiers and Akoni.