Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1)

Mightiest

of Swords

The Inkwell Trilogy 1

Aaron Buchanan

Acknowledgements

              The writing of this novel was a fairly swift affair. That is, the first draft. To feel the beckoning of the Muses is invigorating; drafts and edits stultifying. Now that the first of the trilogy is complete and the second novel nearly finished, I can say that without the following people, I would not have made it this far with some semblance of dignity intact. So, a hearty thank-you to my dear friend, Mohammed Taheri, who read each chapter as I completed it and fanned the creative flames along the way with pep talks and encouragement. Also, many thanks and kudos to my life-long best friend, Jeff Clark (and his wife, Brandi for proofreading) for planting the seeds to get me writing. It’s been a few decades since we crafted our own fantasy worlds, so it has been an intensely gratifying experience putting a new world to paper with you there for encouragement and ideas.

Also, thanks to my sister, Karen Buchanan for reading through my first (and very sloppy!) draft and giving me initial feedback. Likewise, thanks to my very dear friends, Abby Brueggen and Camille Massey, for taking the text for a test drive!

Furthermore, I’d like to send my gratitude to my friend, cousin, and Springfield, MA native, Matthew Terry, as well as my friend from Cambridge, England—Paul Goodwin (who is a fantastic musician who sells albums you should check out at paulgoodwin.com) for the geographic expertise.

I would be remiss to not thank my wife, Brandi, her dad, Tracy (who also encouraged me to write the novel AND contributed heftily to my Kickstarter campaign for the album cover), and my children, Jack, Sophia, and Athena who serve to inspire me every bit as much as the Muses themselves.

Lastly, thank you to those of you who contributed to commissioning of the cover artwork: Chris Parrot, Bobby Best and Outhen Phothisane, who gave much more than I could have ever hoped just to see a dream get off the ground—
viri, vos estis optimi
! Also, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed via Kickstarter and to Roman DeSimone for the virtual typesetting!

It’s been a longer process than I would have thought, but I’m pleased with the final product and I hope you will be as well.

Cover artwork by Alan G. Brooks

Prologue: Two Years Ago

             
For nearly six weeks, Guy Theroux’s life had been reduced to a North Face hiking pack, six pair of underwear, six pair of socks, to pairs of jeans, the Garmin GPS unit, some pens and pencils, and his notebook. When he was a younger man, traveling from place to place was a rugged experience. The days of casual Victorian holidays relegated to the past. The 21
st
century, however, has been exceedingly kind to the process. It made his errands that much easier. Even if he knew completing them and returning home spelled his end.

              Guy faced a rocky crag somewhere in the wilderness of France’s Provence region. Getting here, he was forced to recall memories he usually tried very hard to keep buried in deep recesses of his mind. Between those recollections and the bugs buzzing, flying, landing, crawling upon him, his ever-pervasive paranoia was ratcheted up beyond capacity. There was just a feeling of someone or something following him that he could not shake.  He would finish in Provence and finish his business in London before flying home to Massachusetts. Still, he was happy to have at least mailed back part of his work to Professor Hansen for safe-keeping. If it came to it, it would be just enough for Grey to make some sense what was going on. Of who she was.

              Hanging on to whatever branches that could bear his weight, Guy descended into the valley, picturing his daughter and smiled in spite of the toil and weight of what was to come. Grey was much thinner than he thought was healthy, though her cheeks always had a way of looking full and healthy. In fact, she was a close-replica to her mother. Guy already raised the flood gates, so letting in more hard-to-manage memories through wasn’t much extra. The woman he barely knew who came to his house seeking his help, and though she never would have asked for it—his protection. She was there just over a year before moving on. They started as allies and turned into lovers. But there was certainly love there eventually. To think of his daughter now and how much she looked like her mother, well…maybe that was the kind of pain he would never be able to bury. Grey was, in a way, a gift of life from a woman marked for death. More than that, Grey was a totem of love between them.

              Like her mother, Grey’s hair was coal-black. Grey wore it longer, however, and it framed her face in such a way that it made her features softer than the angles of her face would have otherwise appeared. It was almost peculiar then, that Grey took so much after him in terms of her personality. Interacting with other people was something she was better at than he, but they both had a tragic kind of awkwardness about them. It was some small comfort that that oddness—coupled with her profound intellect—that kept potential suitors at a distance. Before Guy removed her from school, her teachers would drone on about her unapproachability and unwillingness to stop asking questions. By his own estimation, it wasn’t teachers or books that educated: it was curiosity.

              Besides, her intelligence was more likely to be noticed than misunderstood the older she got, so Guy elected for the safety and anonymity whenever possible for his daughter. The isolation helped speed along her apprenticeship: the magic of the word. Just the July before, Grey proved she was ready to step beyond the title of apprentice. Grey left Springfield without Guy’s notice. She intercepted a message meant for him and drove to Vermont. There, she dutifully fought and subdued an
ala
spirit. Grey even spent time investigating why a creature typically confined to Slovenia and the Balkans would show up in the Green Mountains. While she never found that answer, Grey was ostensibly prepared for what the world would bring her way. Even if she entombed the
ala
and brought it back to him to ask what to do next.

              She was nearly a master. And that meant Guy Theroux had work to do to prepare Grey for curating the Well. He, himself, had only been in this valley once—and that was when he first learned about his own station as Keeper of the Well. Now, he was able to put together enough of a guide for Grey that she could ably take the mantle…if even to best fulfil one’s duties was to do nothing.

              Guy would put together the notes he mailed to Hansen with his own, then give it to Grey and hug her as long as she would let him. Peculiar things were already afoot, unrelated to the lambda magoi. He just hoped there would be enough time for him to tell her he loved her and to call her the Keeper of the Well.

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”

—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“I imagine generations of ape-human hybrids looking blankly at each other until one day, some child of these apes looked up at her parents and said something akin to, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

—Grey Theroux

rEvolve: 1

What we have learned:

Since the first ape expressed belief, gods were formed.

At first, the gods were simple. Sun. Moon. Death.

Many of these gods were horrific; a few noble. More often than not, these gods were self-serving, and did little to meddle in the affairs of humanity. From the first appearance of
homo sapiens
some 200,000 years ago, the gods’ affairs trumped those of mortals; humanity suffered for it. Why else would it take us 200 millennia to write the first word?

The first man who depicted the sounds with scratches or dashes was the first man to triumph over the gods. It was knowledge that could be given to his son and his son’s son, and his son’s son’s son, transmitted through the millennia. 

The gods grew kinder. 
Only sacrifice your infants, your infirm
, they said.  They let men plant seeds and saw to it that the soil beneath them obeyed the men.  They gently hinted at animal husbandry.
We have our blood, you must have yours
, they said,
we give this to you
.

So mankind turned those words of knowledge into words of the gods. And their sacrifices grew greater as men used words of the gods to war against each other, flooding the gods’ bowls with the sacrificial blood of warriors, as well as innocents.

Though distracted by writing down the gods’ words, the words themselves still held power for men.  The gods engorged themselves on blood and worship, growing complacent and entitled.

Men, too, grew tired—but not complacent.  They crafted words for themselves and themselves alone.  And these words became power. 

In due course, the words of many of the gods grew obsolete and impotent faced against the words that men had crafted for themselves.  Homo sapiens sapiens needed the gods less and less. Their words had forged power into knowledge—which is itself the greatest kind of power. 

Many gods died during the first words of men.  Many more have since been slain by oblivion alone. 

We must, however, use more than our words, more than our knowledge to murder the rest.  In this lies the salvation of humanity

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with god, and the Word was a god.

John 1:1,
New World Translation

Chapter 1

              I always use flowers to reset my mind: daffodils and tiger lilies; memories of memories that lead me to calla lilies.

              My house is ancient by American standards. The vault beneath is ancient even by Old World standards.  The hinges on the vault were, themselves, incredibly thick—hinting at just how thick and impenetrable the vault actually was.  When I was a kid, I used to imagine teams of ogres or giants wrestling with the vault door to steal the treasure inside.  Though, back then, I hardly thought of what the vault contained as treasure. 

              I flashed an image of my father across my mind’s eye and let the intonation of nostalgia color the memory:
it is Easter Sunday and I am watching him read a book
—Gulliver’s Travels. 

              The sound of something heavy and metal scraping along something else heavy and metal reverberated through the door, vibrating the basement floor.

             
It is my first day of first grade. I am nervous and a little sick.  I sit at my desk at the back of the class. I vomit on my dress and onto the floor. It’s even in my hair. The puke is inexplicably made of pink and blue stars. I laugh. 

              A second lock releases with a hiss of air and metal-on-metal grating even further into the vault door. 

             
I am swimming in the lake behind the vacation house. It is marshy and I fear what hides behind the reeds. I have never seen it, but I know I have smelled it many times. I am 15, fearless and invincible, so I dare to tread water, kicking tangles of seaweed at my feet. I feel a hand move up my leg.

              The clanking of the last lock gave and made my feet shake more severely than the two times before. The door swung open fully, letting the electric light of my basement wash into the corridor.  The light did not penetrate far enough.

              Those who know me—and I mean, really know me—always ask me about what kind of pens I use. The invention of the ball-point pen may very well have proven to have saved my life no less than a dozen times. If Bic only knew, I would endorse them for free. I always carry four or five Bic ball-points in an inner pocket of my black leather scuba jacket. I carry two Sharpies (another endorsement deal I’d readily make), a small spiral notepad, and three-inch square Post-It notes. I love the neon ones best, but was currently down to the basic yellow ones. 

              Pen in hand, I wrote
light—lux—licht
in a triangular pictogram and put the Post-It in the palm of my hand. My hand flickered on, more like a bright candle than a flashlight, and I shined it down the corridor leading into the hold of the vault. The corridor itself was actually larger than the hold itself, but I have never questioned its design, though I often asked my father where it came from. My father never gave me a straight answer, just, “from the Old World,” or something even more smart ass-ish.

              I stepped into the alcove at the end of the walkway and stared.

              Everything was gone. It had been nearly a year since the last time I had stored something here and now it was gone.  All gone. I came to get the quill, but the space was devoid of even the clutter that seemed worthless. I took out my Sharpie and began writing a divining incantation directly on the wall. It said nothing of who had been there. I started with my usual languages in triangular pictograms, Latin, Greek, High German, and expanded it out with more complex pictograms that included those three, plus Old Norse, Sanskrit, and Akkadian.

              Nothing. What I just wrote was intense and potent, but yielded no answers. Logomancy is rooted in language and the written word, with the words growing more powerful depending on the language, the pictogram, and the will of the caster. The dead languages, because their power is not diluted by their speakers, offer the greatest chance at potency. The more complex the pattern of the pictogram, but the practice gets time-consuming.  Besides which, the understanding and mastery of multiple languages is often a hindrance.

              One of the manuscripts I kept in this vault contained 17 words from the proto-language. Only about half of them are useful, so I have mostly forgotten the others, but I kept the manuscript locked away in this vault. Along with a great many more useful artifacts and manuscripts.

              A memory-locked vault was supposed to be the safest place in the universe.  Yet, I had been robbed.

              “Fuck!” I cursed loudly.  Sound did not carry well in the vault, due to its construction.  The echo of my curse pierced my ears, making me wince in pain. I maintain a more extensive vocabulary than most—and in several languages—but there was simply no equal to
fuck
in times of supreme frustration.

              The hinges of the vault swung closed as quickly as it had sprung open once I exited and bounded up the steps—three at a time—and rushed through the kitchen and what would have been my living room if I actually lived there.

              The front door was opened.

              I took one quick step forward and stopped so suddenly, I felt a popping sensation in my hip.

              Open doors, I have learned the hard way, are invitations. Most often they were invitations to parties I did not want to attend.

              Inspecting the door jamb from a presumably safe distance, I looked for writing.  Any kind of writing. Whatever was happening, it was not logomancy, though it was impossible to be certain just then. Truth was, I had no enemies that I knew of and certainly none whom I would think knowledgeable and capable enough to pull it off. I had no idea with whom I was dealing.  Prudence would be the safest route. I walked back through the kitchen and stared at my back door. It looked unmolested, but I’ve gotten to be too cynical a soul to do something stupid.  That’s a lie.  I do stupid things all the time.  One day the piper would come collecting.  I hoped that today would not be that day.  Still, I do try to avoid circumstances that truly,
obviously
stupid. Yet, I held out hope of finding the culprit, so found myself crawling into the kitchen sink and unlocking the window latch.  I popped out the screen and fell to the ground in a way that could only have looked comical to anyone observing.  My undignified grunting likely were not helping with any perceptions of normality.

              From the backyard I headed around to my front porch. On the sidewalk that led under some rotting white-green latticework and up to my house, I wrote a spell to find a last-step. It yielded to point out to the road after the words rearranged themselves from the triangular pictogram into an arrow. It took me a moment, but I figured dodging traffic was worth it, so I put the Post-It with the arrow down in the middle of the street.  The word-arrow pointed down the street.  Whoever they were, they were assuredly beyond my ability to track. 

              My initial faith in the fidelity of the vault was sound—no one could have made in there without my help. This means that someone had cast a powerful illusion spell to me and/or my vault to make it look empty as well as to hide themselves.  Those precious few moments I wasted the divination spells on the wall cost me something dear.  Given the time the thief needed to flee, the chances were that only one or two items were taken before the thief had to high-tail it out.  Maybe only one thing, since he or she maybe set a trap at my front door.

The wind blew the front door of the house further open.  The smell of fall was in the air once that gust of wind reached my nostrils, incident blowing a few of the season’s first dead leaves into my hair.  I picked them out, realizing I would need to test for a trap and maybe find out something about the magic used to make it if there were one. That would go a long ways toward helping me figure out who took
whatever
was taken.

I checked my mailbox.
Current Resident
and
Valued Customer
seemed to be living in my house and not paying rent.  There was a circular for a car dealership that did have my name on it: Grey Theroux.

I slid the mail with my name across the threshold. Nothing happened.  Though it was a power known only to logomancers, written names contained their own kind of vitality and power.  Any trap set specifically for me should have triggered something.

I looked down at the Post-It still stuck in my palm with the last-step trace for the thief.  He or she was likely still in a vehicle, as it was constantly reorienting to indicate direction—like a compass in an identity crisis. If not for the wards inherent to the vault, this type of spell would have fizzled as soon as the thief was a few hundred feet away.  This was an ancient magic’s way of marking the bills, so to speak.  I would get back to the arrow and the thief soon enough. I was in a hurry, but I needed to figure out what was stolen first or risk being victimized by…something.  I stuck the Post-It into my jacket pocket and walked to the porch, then the threshold, keep the advertisement with my name held out, transferring my energy to it so it would feel the brunt of a trap.

A few paces forward and nothing happened.  As I inched toward the threshold, I felt suddenly enervated.  My knees buckled, but I managed to fall backwards and out of the way of the threshold.  I examined the woodwork for any markings, and seeing none, knew that wherever they were, I would only be able to examine them from inside the house. I wheeled the city’s trash can around to the window and climbed back through the kitchen window.  I stuck a Post-It on the back door and wrote an incantation to trace magic.  Nothing.  At least the thief had not touched the back door.

Coming up to the open front door, I kept an eye on the trim, examining it vertically, horizontally.  I checked the floor. Something in the door jamb caught my a wadded up piece of paper stuffed in the jab. 

Grabbing it would likely stun me in the same way as it had when I tried to cross the threshold.  I used one of my Bics to pry it out.  It landed in front of me on the porch.  I needed to examine the wadded-up spell, but also could not allow myself to succumb to its spell.  I was at an impasse.  I elected to write out a small magic-shield on a piece of paper torn from my notepad and stick two Bics through it like the world’s worst hazmat tool.  I managed to get it unfolded and just glimpsed some of the runes when my pinky finger accidently grazed it.

I awoke from the sleep spell some 10 minutes later without so much as a mild headache. Thankfully.  This was not particularly strong magic for someone who had also managed to confound me down in my vault. That magic, coupled with this hasty spell likely meant that the thief was not working along—that he had a more adept partner, but one not present in my house during the robbery. Perhaps this partner was the get-away driver? Though there was no way of being sure, this had me believing I was dealing with a master and an apprentice of some sort.  The speed and deftness by which the thief exited my house also implied a younger person. And while they were out to rob me of…something, they were not intent on killing me. The apprentice could have just s easily made the spell kill me as stun me. He or she just wanted to slow me down. That also meant the master was confident I could not follow them.

This left me with the last two questions: how was the master able to confound me and what was stolen out of my vault?

I took a moment to fish out the Post-It leading me to the culprit stashed in my pocket.  It was moving slightly, but not stationary; walking perhaps. I crammed back into the pocket next to my keys.

Something struck me then. I had just had my jacket dry cleaned. I picked it up from the cleaners yesterday afternoon. I stripped off the jacket, emptied all the pockets. I looked over my notepad, my dwindling supply of Post-It notes. A pack of gum contained no surprises. Car keys exactly as they appear, even once I popped the fob open to check the battery compartment. I looked my jacket over thoroughly, hoping these bastards had not harmed my lovingly fatigued brown leather scuba jacket. I tugged at the lining and found it just as secure as the day I had purchased it.

I stripped down further, scrutinizing my v-neck tee, then my jeans; my bra, my panties. 
All of these items were items I would notice if they had been messed with, right?
Naked, I walked to the bathroom to examine my skin in the mirror. A blemish on my abdomen; one on my shoulder; there was just the scar that ran from my left knee cap about midway through the calf. Nothing unusual to see. Someone performed a confounding enchantment on me that should have been erased the minute I walked into the vault.  Someone carrying out magic powerful enough to stymie my vault and maybe have even have found some way to invade my body made me very uneasy. I was shivering, but I did not think it was due to the cool air on my flesh.

I drew the light-spell directly on my hand and went back to the basement. If there was something on my person that caused the vault to appear emptied, then checking out the vault naked would allow me to see it in its reality. I hoped. I returned to the basement, unlocked the vault, though not writing a few more pictograms on my skin to protect from magic, harmful forces, and unwelcome eyes—there was an outside chance that the culprit remained and was only hiding. I walked through the corridor and saw everything exactly where it should have been an hour before.

I exhaled sharply a sigh of relief before muttering, “Okay, what’s missing?” I thought about why I had originally come to my house: to fetch my quill.  The past few months had me especially on edge and increasingly paranoid.  Though I had no reason to, necessarily, feel that way I had the nagging feeling like my magic was being tracked—and magic work with the quill was untraceable. Thankfully, it was exactly where it should be. Whatever was missing had to be something in the open and obvious. The alcove was only about six feet high and 10 feet across. That means it would not be one of the many manuscripts lying dustily untouched on the shelves and floor. One more scan around the alcove and the realization slowly crept up, formed, and finally allowed me to recognize: I was missing the black pyramid.