The Judas Line

white, humpy, craggy boulder turned out to be a patch of rock barely sticking up out of the sand, blasted and glowing red in my Vision.

Slowly I crouched a few feet away and dug my fingers into the warm sand near a shoulder-high, musky, earthy-smelling scrub.

The rattling, clackety Language of Earth ushered forth from my throat, tumbling out to land on the surface of the ragged rock. Almost immediately it vibrated, raising a cloud of dust and grit that tickled my nose.

“Back so soon, scion of the Sicarii,” rumbled the stone as it began to rise out of the ground, shedding sand and insects.

“I am not of them, not for a long time.” My voice was dry as the seared air, while the ground trembled beneath my feet.

“Long time you say? Hardly such, I was not even fully covered.” Humor belled through the boulder’s voice in an explosion of subsonic mirth. When the rock finished rising, it stood far above my head, a scarred monolith leaning over far enough that I felt a twinge of fear for my precious self.

“The box, you still have it?” I asked through the smell of cut grass.

“Of course. Do you want it back?”

“Please.”

Crack! The boulder split from top to bottom, a wide fissure yawning open and spitting out a black metal rectangle the size of a shoebox. It tumbled to the ground at my feet, landing with a heavy thump!

No seam, no hinge … nothing, just an iron box with a small handle welded to the long side. Leaning over I grasped the handle and put some starch into lifting the thing, which weighed a good fifty pounds. “Thank you.”

“A task to keep such a thing as crafted Earth safe is no task at all, considering the short amount of time served. I promised you a task, Sicarius, but it was over too soon. Some information, then, to help you.”

“I am no longer of the Sicarii,” I clacked back, the hated name proving more than a little irksome.

“To the Sicarii you were born. Of the Sicarrii you will always be, whether you desire the name or not. Remember this, though: Forgetful Water seeks you and Water talks. It always talks. It will never be quiet and will never stop searching, despite its dreamy, absentminded nature. Your brood sire has made sure.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier, when I summoned you in Kansas?”

“You did not ask.”

“It is information I could have used then. Why tell me now? And how did Julian get Water to do his bidding?”

The elemental began to sink into the sandy soil, slowly disappearing. “You were owed. As for your brood sire, he has come into possession of Primal Water and has used it to make a bargain with all Water for its release.”

Primal Water? One of the First Four Elementals? So ancient they had no language. Those First Ones were created by God and imbued with His divine spark. The knowledge that Julian had found Primal Water sent a shiver down my spine.

Before the boulder could vanish, I asked, “When did he find one of the Old Ones? When did he make his bargain?”

It was strange, hearing the grating Language of Earth grow soft. “A very short time ago. Not even long to humans. Less than a cycle of rain in this desert.”

So, perhaps a few months back. That would explain how I was found. Wherever I had touched water, be it a puddle or a swimming pool, Water would know and inform Julian.

Water talks.

Chapter Seven

Mike

While watching a crooked pillar thrust itself out of the sand and growl at Jude, who growled in return, I kept worrying that my heart would stop. It’s not every day that you hang around and chin-wag with the local geology. The strange thing about the whole incident was how used to it I was becoming.

Heck, the nighttime world had been rendered in glorious shades of green, red and gold, thanks to the Vision Word thingy, spell … whatever. Imagine looking at green sky with pinpoints of gold! A little garish for my taste, but nonetheless breathtaking. Who knew that three colors could combine to create such an amazing amount of variation?

My eyes still wandered over the landscape while Jude chatted up the talking rock, and I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of it splitting open and spitting out what looked like a black shoebox. For a while Jude talked to it in that strange tongue (it sounded like he was gargling with gravel); then it sank back into the ground.

Swinging the heavy box in one hand, Jude hustled us both back to the car. “I’ll drive us to El Paso, man. We’ll get a hotel room there.”

In Kansas, Jude had said that El Paso ‘was like Milwaukee, but without the charm.’ I’ve been to Milwaukee … I was less than thrilled. Lucky for me we arrived in the middle of the night, so the electric lights made the town glow with faerie fire and hid its less admirable face.

“El Paso might be a black hole,” Jude said as we pulled into the parking lot of a Motel 9, “but it’s a heck of a lot better than Juarez.”

Our room in the motel was a little bigger than the one in Kansas, but the mattresses must have come from the same supplier because they were similarly hard as rocks.

While Jude took the first turn in the shower, I grabbed the manila envelope and crushed my backside on the bed’s hard surface. Printer paper slid into my palms and I began to read.

The Happy Voice

It took weeks for me to adjust to the Words rattling around my cranium, the feeling of power they gave me. Meanwhile, my half-brothers and Burke contented themselves with verbal torment, but the assassination attempts had stopped, at least for a while. For the first time in years I found no taint of poison in my food or drink, no tripwires at the head of stairs and no weakened balcony railings. I had become irrelevant in their eyes, but that didn’t stop me from exercising caution. There was no telling when they would grow tired of my presence and try erase me from the world.

Professor von Andor trained us in the uses of the Words. I do not know who had taught him because he was Wordless, yet he knew all about their uses-how intonation, inflection, volume and intent shape the power of the Words, shape their efficacy.

Of course the only Word I admitted to was Healing, the only one I could practice in front of the others lest they realize my deceit. Being the simplest of all Words to master, it required only volume to increase or decrease its potency. Strangely enough, despite the ease of use, it was the most practical Word of all. Nothing like breaking your arm and Healing it to convince oneself of that fact. Despite its usefulness, however, the one thing it could not do was regenerate lost tissue. You lose an arm; you’ve lost an arm, no take-backs.

I practiced the other Words on my own, within the confines of my room-in the walk-in closet with clothes taped to the walls to muffle any noise. I needn’t have worried; the others were practicing in their own rooms and I doubted they would have heard a stampede of elephants considering the racket they made.

So, in the darkness of my closet, I rolled those Words around in my mouth like marbles, spitting them out with different inflections at different volumes, noting their effects and committing those effects to memory. Some Words, such as The Walls (which protects the magus’ mind from tampering) could not be practiced alone; I needed others to hone my facility with them. Others like Aspect, Vigor, Strength and Clarity had effects that were readily apparent. Thankfully the others masked the smell of my magic as they exercised their own Words.

The Professor often chose me as a guinea pig so Burke could practice Forgetting. Depending on the volume and inflection, Forgetting had the potential to erase a full day’s worth of memories. An Adept could fine-tune the Word to make the target Forget as little as the last five seconds.

“What?” I asked when I noticed everybody staring at me, wrinkling my nose at the smell of black