Six hours earlier Cain, Maggie, Alan and I had stood together in the dark warehouse, a single bare bulb from a small lamp providing a ring of light that perfectly illuminated the round table it rested upon. Alan had handed out Kevlar vests and provided a spread of weaponry large enough to take out the Latin American country of your choice.
Alan handed a laptop to Cain. “Here’s the schematics to the hotel, boss.”
Cain regarded the computer for a brief moment. “Once again you do not fail to impress, my boy.”
“You won’t need that, man,” I commented as I picked up a .45 and checked the sights. “All we need are the top three floors, 53 to 55. Everything else is the ordinary rich and famous.”
“You’re cute when you’re all authoritative and shit,” Maggie smiled as she struggled out of her chainmail and shrugged into her vest, her large axe resting on the table. I couldn’t help it; I stared at her charms out of the corner of my eyes. She caught the look and gave me a satisfied smile that heated up all my naughty bits.
Man, I’d been without proper company for far too long.
My eyebrows danced in her direction. “The Sicarii own the place and I made sure to learn everything I could about where Julian would hang his hat.”
Cain replaced his sunglasses with thick, black goggles, briefly revealing his disturbing Husky eyes. “What do you suggest, then?”
“A roof access would be best. There will be guards, but with our magic and a little surprise, we can take them down.”
“Four of us storming the battlements.” Maggie holstered a 9 mm and picked up a Tec-9. “I love it.”
Cain frowned. “Not to impugn your knowledge of all things Sicarii, but are you certain that is wise?”
I shook my head. “There are only two access points to the upper stories—a heavily defended private elevator that they can shut down in an instant and an equally well-defended stairwell. Then let’s consider the innocents staying in the hotel who could be killed or hurt by stray bullets.”
Alan piped up. “So what do we all do? I’m no frontal assault guy, no soldier. I’m just a realtor.”
Not just a realtor. Not with three Words. “We parachute down to the roof and take the access stairs to the suite levels.”
“How many Sicarii guards will there be,” asked Maggie, curling her braid around the top of her head and covering it with a black wool cap.
“At least two dozen.”
The two apprentices stopped what they were doing and tried to pick their jaws off the floor. “Two dozen highly trained assassins?” Maggie squeaked. It was off-putting to see a woman so big squeak like a mouse.
“At least two dozen.”
Cain grunted. “Then the need for a two pronged attack is paramount. One to provide a much needed diversion, the other to strike at the heart of the enemy.”
“How are we going to manage that, boss?”
“It comes to me that we must seek aid elsewhere,” Cain declared. “Perhaps a conversation with our employer would prove beneficial.”
“Second Man, Sicarius, what do you want?” Earth grated. The elemental towered over us, a vaguely human-shaped mass.
The alleyway between warehouses was dark enough to hide in, but there was enough light to see the elemental that had joined us.
Both Cain and I had used the Language of Earth to summon this creature, a being formed of concrete and brick that had a strange, plastic quality to it, allowing it to move without cracking or powdering. Normally it takes a while for Earth to answer a summons, but when we called, the elemental had come quickly.
“Shortly we will attack the Sicarii stronghold and retrieve First Water,” I answered, tasting the smell of the Language on my tongue. “We need to you to shake the ground beneath the building they hide in.”
A blobby head swung my way. “Shake? You wish to tear down one of your human-made earth structures?”
“No. We want you to move the earth around the building just enough to create a distraction. The building must still stand when you are done.”
“When?”
It was Alan who answered. “When I give the signal.” His vocabulary was good, but I wondered if Earth cared that a human butchered its Language with such a horrible accent.
“This will help secure the First Water?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Call. Earth will come. Then tell me which dwelling to … shake.”
Back inside the warehouse, Cain made some calls while the rest of us readied our gear.
Maggie gave me an inquiring look. “Why would the Sicarii worry about evacuating the hotel, handsome?”
I smiled, hefting a pair of half-inch ball bearings. “While the Sicarii are powerful, the hotel is filled with those they do business with, including former dictators, captains of industry, drug lords, etc. They can’t afford to let any harm come to their guests. No, after the first few tremors, the hotel will be evacuated for safety’s sake and the normal staff sent home. They will lock the place up tight as a security precaution.” I put the bearings into a pocket on my left arm.
“Then why attack? We’ll get slaughtered.”
“That’s the beauty of it. They might prep for it, but they really don’t think anyone would be so foolish as to try an assault. Julian has no idea that I’ve recruited Cain for this; he thinks I’m all by my lonesome, and that has made him complacent. They’ll be ripe for a surprise attack.”
I felt the heat of her as she came close. She smelled of female musk and lemons. “I love the way your devious little mind works, handsome.”
My grin was predatory. “The rest of me works pretty well, too.”
Her eyes grew wide and her voice husky. “Promises, promises,” she said.
Alan held up a disk of whitish putty, the size of an American silver dollar. Mounted in the center was a small, flat black box with a small metal ring set on the side. “If y’all could stop the foreplay and tone down the pheromone levels, I’d appreciate knowing what this is.”
I had no clue and Maggie just shook her head.
“That, my dear apprentices and colleague, is what most would affectionately call a ‘door buster.’ ” Cain stepped in to the light of the lamp, a cell phone glowing softly in one hand. “A disk of Plastique with a timed detonator. Simply attach the explosive near the lock plate of whatever point of egress you wish to harm, pull the pin and in five seconds any locking mechanism will yield.”
“When he talks, he gives me a headache,” I whispered to Maggie.
“I know. I’d consider giving him a shag if he could keep his words to one or two syllables.”
“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 capabi
lities, 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.
Chapter Thirty
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” (אמת) 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.
Cain had told me that every a magi could only Create a finite number of golems. A Twelve Word magus, he said, could conceivably Create up to fifteen or twenty, but not all at once. Apparently the golems would become progressively weaker if the earlier ones weren’t destroyed.
I had made two, using Create as well as certain herbs, the crafting requiring both Botanical and Word Magic. It was a sign of his trust that Cain had let me know which herbs to use.
Maggie and Alan raced like track stars, weapons at the ready, in the path of the golems, which had burst through the front doors. The heavy tempered glass shattered like thin ice at the impact of the speeding automatons.
The next five hundred feet of our descent passed quicker than I could’ve imagined as the rooftops of the city grew huge. My altimeter was ready to spring my chute at twelve hundred feet.
To my right, Cain’s chute deployed and he shot out of sight.
I hoped mine deployed or I’d discover firsthand what the term ‘road pizza’ meant. Once again images from below spooled into the back of my mind:
The Dagger Men in the lobby looked up in shock as flesh toned mannequins leapt with obscene grace across marble tile, two jumping twenty feet straight up to clear the railing to the upper lobby. The other two ran straight for the human guards, who let go with twin Mac-10s they had slung under their armpits. Bullets streaked out of the roaring weapons, many missing, gouging the priceless floor, but many hit the golems, shredding soft leather skin, bouncing off of steel skeletons.
They were still firing, taking turns changing clips, when the golems tore into them. One golem grabbed an arm—crushing ulna and radius like rotten wood—and ripped it off at the sh
oulder. The Sicarius screamed once before fainting dead away to lie in widening pool of her own blood.
The second gunman was more fortunate; the golem that attacked him merely rammed an iron fist through the bones of his face, bursting the eyeballs before the metal hand gripped the brain and squeezed. Dagger Man and weapon dropped to the floor.
An elevator door pinged and six more Sicarii joined the fight. One golem was knocked back fifteen feet by Force, landing high in a chandelier; the other was swarmed under four Strength-enhanced assassins who tore it limb from limb. A storm of rounds nearly decapitated the one jumping at them from the chandelier, which was already falling to the black and white marble floor.
From the upper lobby, the first two golems landed among the six assassins like deranged clockwork beasts, rending and tearing. The final screaming assassin mercifully fell to the rain of bullets fired by Maggie and Alan, who watched from the dubious safety of the shattered doorway.
My chute deployed, rapidly slowing my fall. Only a few hundred feet to go. Thermals from the buildings slung me to and fro, but I managed to stay on point, guiding the chute toward the helipad on the roof of the hotel.
A hundred feet from my target and I saw a guard walking the perimeter of the pad. I knew right then that he’d see me before my feet touched down. Hoping against hope, I spoke Strength, trailing an ammonia stench through the cold night air.
Twenty feet and I pulled the quick release on my harness, dropping hard on the center of the pad, my Strength-enhanced legs absorbing much of the force, but I felt an ankle twist and snap sickeningly, shooting fire up my leg as I rolled.
I looked up, .45 at the ready, only to see the guard with his weapon, an M16A4, I dimly noted, pointed at my face. I was about to die. The scene from below and inside would take me to the grave:
Two golems scampered up the elevator shaft the Sicarii had used; the damaged one (missing an arm and a head half-blown away) took the stairwell, followed by Maggie and Alan, who quickly lagged behind the nimble construct. The fourth golem lay scattered in pieces on the blood- and brain-soaked marble in the lobby.
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