The Judas Line

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” (???) 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 shoulder. 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