Wordscapist: The Myth (The Way of the Word Book 1) (15 page)

     Akto gave me another one of his looks. He definitely specialised in those. I managed to keep my cool and eyeballed him right back. When it came to bluffing, I had few peers.

     “The gift of the Word allows you to change reality, using only words. You can change the way people feel; you can change objects; you can make things happen; and in some cases, you can even create things out of nothing. It is like magic, only much more complex. It is not merely knowing spells. It is about using words to shape the world around you. That is what the gift of the Word allows you to do. And anyone with this gift is called a wordsmith.” I gulped as I heard those words. It was one of those moments when all your life comes into perspective and you realise what it’s all about. I wondered how many other wordsmiths there were. I wondered what more I could do with this gift. Not now! Ask more! Find out more!

     “And you think I am one?” I asked, trying to give him one of his long, hard looks. It missed by a mile and then some.

     “Yes. You have the stench of a wordsmith about you,” he said, “You’re not just a smooth talker; you’re gifted. You might not know it yet though. Or maybe you’re one hell of an actor. I’ll find out soon enough.”

     Damn it! He was too close to the truth for comfort. I had to distract him! More questions! “You mentioned magic. You mean to say, magic is real?”

     “Magic is nothing but a simple form of weaving wordscapes, using pre-woven scapes called spells,” Akto stopped me with a gesture before I could interrupt him, “A wordscape or a scape is made of the words a wordsmith uses when weaving reality, changing it, sometimes even creating it. Each wordscape is independent in intent, and must be woven using words that have to be uttered by a wordsmith. These words have to be powerful and said right to have the intended effect. Sometimes, some of these scapes are recorded and the words are passed on to other wordsmiths who just repeat them. Thus, they become spells. Do you understand now?”

     Memories came back, swooping into the new structure I was learning. It felt right. It was the right word. Wordscape. And wordsmith. I liked the ring of it.

     “You are much more than a wordsmith, boy,” the voice commented dryly. Christ! Here I was coming to grips with being a wordsmith, and already I was much more than it. I asked the voice to shut up again, especially because Akto was doing a repeat of his do-you-understand rather irritably.

     “Yes, I guess. It kind of makes sense, even if it’s tough to believe,” I muttered, trying hard to come across as a belligerent norm, “So wordsmiths are like powerful magicians who can just create any spell they want?”

     “Yes, you could say that. They work with words and the essence of their meaning. They do not need spells except when working on group scapes.” He continued, almost expecting my question, “Group scapes are coordinated efforts where multiple wordsmiths are required to pull off the scape. In this case, they work with predetermined spells to ensure that they are doing the same thing.”

     “And the Guild manages all this coordination?” I asked, playing the part of the bright student who suddenly sees it all. Deep inside, I felt a rush as I understood the implications of these words. I was finding it really hard to keep a straight face. 

     “The Guild controls most of the scapes woven in our world. It controls the entire world that is linked to the Way of the Word. It spots and recruits all those individuals with the gift who can become wordsmiths. The Guild also trains these wordsmiths and employs them in various tasks across the world.”

     I felt slightly sick at the thought of an organisation that recruited and trained wordsmiths, and then employed them to do ‘tasks’. “What are these tasks?” I asked, knowing almost intuitively what the answer would be.

     “They control the way our world works. They decide what happens and who gets to be in power, which group gets to propagate their ideas and which one gets slaughtered for theirs, which war happens and who wins in that war. The Guild controls the whole world and every power group running a country or company worth two cents.”

      I stared at the sea, now bright blue under a cloudless sky and a bright sun. I took a swig of lukewarm beer and let Akto’s words sink in. No wonder I had such trouble sticking to a job. The one organisation that could recruit my talents had not ‘found’ me yet. ‘Controlling the world’ sounded pretty attractive. I had to know more about this setup. I pumped Akto with another question, “This man who died; Andy, your brother; he was with the Guild?”

      Akto like me was staring at the sea, chugging his beer. He continued staring at the sea, which was fine by me, as he spoke, “Andy was with the Guild, yes. He could not stick for too long. He had funny ideas about free spirit and independent thought. The Guild does not encourage that kind of talk. Andy joined up with the Free Word, an underground movement of sorts, a bunch of renegade wordsmiths. Joining the Free Word automatically means a death sentence from the Guild. Andy lived a charmed life for six years, escaping multiple attempts on his life. But then he kept upping the stakes. He kept working on bigger things. The last scam he was working was to uncover something illegal Silvus, the Guild Mastersmith, was up to. It was supposed to be a big deal. With Silvus arrested, the Guild would weaken considerably. But then poor Andy ran out of luck.”

     More pieces fell into place. The diary, the words, Andy’s death. I believed in free spirit and independent thought too. But I was not anything like Andy, I realised. He seemed to have been a real hero, which I was not. I valued my well-being way too much to want to be a hero. Heroes ended up dead or worse way too often. A thought hit me. “Illegal? Arrested? Do the cops know about the Way of the Word and everything you told me?”

     Akto chuckled at the thought, “No. Not your cops. The Guild has another agency doing their coppering. It is called the Continuum Control Corps. Silvus was up to something that would have got him into trouble with the CCC. Andy was after proof when he set out from home a year or so back.”

      Both of us spent some more time contemplating the ocean. I could almost feel a third person in the group… the voice in my head. I could feel the comfort and camaraderie you share in a group when engaged in this kind of activity. The sea, the sand, the beer (even if it was warm beer). I did not stop to consider the implications of getting pally with a voice that had invaded my mind and consciousness and that commented on my thoughts and actions with the air of a disapproving school teacher. But I did relax a bit. I laughed aloud at the fact that in the midst of all the crazy things I had discovered from Akto, an opinionated voice in my head seemed perfectly normal. That got me a strange look from Akto, but I waved it away with a don’t-mind-me wave of my hand.

      I settled into a more comfortable position, shifting the sand to form hollows for my elbows. However, a nagging thought kept coming back to me. I decided to ask Akto, no matter how silly it sounded.

     “Akto,” I called out, letting the word hang in the air, continuing to stare at the sea.

     He looked at me in response, waiting for me to complete the unspoken query.

     “I guess this stuff is all pretty secret. I hope you are not going to kill me because you told me all this.” I felt pretty stupid saying it, but then it was always better to know.

     “I will kill you if I find out that you have lied to me. If not, I will not harm you. If your story is true, you were the last one to see my brother alive. You helped him send word to me. You were there for him in whatever way you could be and you have now come down all this way to see me and give me his notebook. And it looks like you are in trouble with the law because of that incident. It looks like I owe you for whatever you did. You shall stay with me as my guest for a while. In the meantime, I will make my own enquiries about you. For your own sake, let us hope that you have not been lying to me.”

     I had lied to Akto alright. I had lied about my gift. I watched Akto swigging his beer nonchalantly. I tasted my beer. It was lukewarm and tasted flat and bitter. I looked at the sea too. Suddenly, the waves weren’t so charming after all.

CHAPTER 8

A Voice in the Head

Wishes are horses

And horses run wild

Hold on for the ride of your life

Remember?

Wishes don’t heed to whistles

Slick

     I came back to my room after my conversation with Akto. Beyond a point, my mind had stopped registering words, let alone concepts. Fortunately, Akto hadn’t had much more to say. He saw me off with an invitation to the Saturday night market, to his stall. “You will come, yes?” was the way he had put it. The look he gave me let me know that the invitation was to be taken pretty seriously. I guess I had no choice but to turn up at his lantern stall (whatever that was), later that evening. But then, I had always wanted to come to Goa and do all this, I told myself. “Not like this,” the voice in my head piped up. The me-voice. The other voice stayed silent.

     The other voice, the intruder. I had yet to figure that out. Now seemed like a good time. I was back in my room and I could talk aloud without having people misunderstand or call for the loony-bin with a side order of straitjacket.

    First, I needed a shower. Another one. Goa was muggier than Bombay, and that was saying something. Plus, I was still overcompensating for the blood and gore from two days before. I consigned myself to another hot-and-cold shower. Given the hotel, the hot didn’t last for very long. After a while, I discovered that the water didn’t either. As the lukewarm water ran out slowly, in unsteady spurts and bursts, I tried to rationalise the voice to myself. We all have a little voice in the head, the one that tends to speak up with advice, comments or completely irrelevant reactions. I had my little voice too. It had a lot to do with what I had started thinking of as ‘the gift’ ever since my conversation with Akto. It spoke up when I was in trouble or was considering a shortcut, and in most cases, it gave me ideas that led to solutions that were simple enough, though of slightly dubious morality. I had a love-hate relationship with the voice, thankful for its advice and resentful of the way it helped me in. It had a lot to do with the name I had been given by friends and foes alike, ‘Slick’, a label that had long since almost replaced my real name. Slick defined what that voice was and what it had made me; efficient and a little too smooth.

     The voice that had been with me since last morning was a new one, though. It had nothing to do with who I was, or what I believed. I could sense the identity it had. And it was not mine. It gave me information at times that was news to me. While this was useful, it was also very disturbing. In this new crazy world I was discovering, I had no clue what such a voice implied. Was I possessed? Was I going crazy? Was this just the “Gift of the Word” emerging in full-flow? At the thought of full-flow, the shower gave up on me. The last trickle of water gamely ran down my face as I ruefully looked up. I towelled myself dry and walked out; almost reluctant to start what I knew was going to be a strange confrontation.

     How does one confront a voice in the head? It wasn’t saying anything right then. Could it hear my thoughts? I absent-mindedly fiddled with the TV remote and flicked through channels, thinking up introductory lines to the conversation I was planning to have with the voice. “Hello there, disembodied voice, anybody home?”

     Nothing seemed right. Nothing sounded right. I was planning out a conversation with a voice in my head.

     I switched off the TV and lay back on the bed, thinking about that entire conversation with Akto. What I could not get over was the sheer magnitude of the secret world out there. Here we were, poor little ‘norms’, who went about our lives in complete ignorance of this society of ‘wordsmiths’ who had us all strung out like puppets. And to make matters worse, I was not even a ‘norm’. I was a ‘cipher’. Damn it! I was none of these things. I was me and I had 24 years of life to prove it!

     The voice started up, right on cue, “Damn right, you are. You don’t fit into their petty definitions, laddie. There’s a lot more to you.” Bingo! I had the voice right where I wanted it, alone in a room with me.

     “Go on and tell me then,” I egged it, abandoning the interrogate-the-voice strategy for the moment. “Tell me more about all that I’m supposed to be. I’m pretty clueless and all this information is not really helping me understand what I’m about.”

     “Hmmm,” the voice went. “Fine then, I will talk to you. I don’t have a choice. I’m stuck in your head, and I don’t have the time to let you fool around and learn by accident.”

     Jesus! Someone was stuck in my head!

     “Do not go crazy about it, boy. You have nothing to fear from me.”

     And it could hear my thoughts!

     “Of course, I can hear your thoughts! I am in your head! How stupid are you?” it asked this rather matter-of-factly.

    I tried to think a thought silently, but ended up tying myself in knots over it. I gave a big sigh and fell back on the bed.

     “You don’t need to think up a thought. I have been hearing all your funny preparations to talk to me. It was most amusing, I must say,” the voice chuckled. I decided to ignore that.

     This part came out sounding more English than Scottish. I had to figure this out sooner than later. And the voice was the first link in this crazy situation I needed to resolve.

      “I have a name, boy,” the voice growled.

      Brilliant! Now the voice had a name too! “What do you call yourself, then?” I asked.

     “Alain’s the name. Of the Vorto clan, the finest of the old wordsmith clans.”

     “Alain of Vorto?” I asked.

     “Alain de Vorto,” the voice said, a tad too grandiosely. “I’ve also been called the Wordscapist.”