Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

                  That was when Victoria jerked to attention, hearing someone in the hallway.  

                  She walked to the window, whispering to me along the way: “I will fly down.  I can take this thing, too, but not all three of you.”

                  “Go!” I exhaled.  “We’ll figure this out!”  And then Victoria jumped.  I thought I saw translucent wings unfurling, but the cage and the ala inside made flight difficult.  I had no time to look as I closed the window and waited for the room door to open.    

                  I leaned up against the wall, and did not breathe.  Joy did her best to copy me.

                  When the door opened, three men entered the suite.  It was now well into the night, and none of them spoke.  They were all well dressed—suits, ties, and—the bald man in the waistcoat.  Though it was difficult to see, one of them looked like the man I had left in the cemetery in Cambridge: Linden.   The third man was slender, middle-aged with salt-and-peppered hair and a narrow face.  His face looked gaunt, his eyes sunken in a look of malnutrition.  This had to be Dr. Von Ranke.  

                  “Did you leave this lamp on?” Von Ranke asked his lieutenants.  “Never mind. I suppose I must have.”  His speech was very delicate and thickly accented.  “Get some rest, doctors.  Logic dictates the magician will no doubt be arriving to the coordinates within the next 24 hours.  Her friend’s life hangs in the balance.  Once she has gotten the message at her hotel, she will come.”

As an American hearing someone with a German accent speak, we often hear either a level of sophistication or something from fairy tales.  However, I heard Von Ranke’s sophistication in his diction and nuance.  He could just as easily have been presenting a paper to a room full of colleagues at a convention.  Instead he was talking about issuing me some message that would bring me to him.  Whatever that was, I did not think it could bode well for Gavin.  

“Of course, doctor,” the bald man spread himself on a couch and looked to close his eyes.

“In the morning, then, doctor?” This was the unmistakable voice of Dr. Linden.

“Yes, doctor,” Von Ranke confirmed.  Their usage of the honorifics was peculiar and a bit unsettling.  In a different context, I could imagine it in a Monty Python skit.  Here, it was nothing short of chilling.  Looking down, I saw my own skin breaking into gooseflesh. 

Linden excused himself from the suite.  The bald doctor on the couch was already snoring softly.  Von Ranke sat on his bed and stared at the window we had just opened.  I reached for my tranquilizer gun knowing it was already too late—Von Ranke was already reaching for his pistol.

“We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

But in doing that you save the world.”

                                                              —Joseph Campbell

“The gods were never the inspirers of Art.  It was always us inspiring each other.  Shred says there’s a musician and songwriter in England who lights the flame of his inspiration.  Joy, too, says that contemplating the Dutch Masters kindles something inside her, too.  I know this to be true—nothing gets me going quite like Tolstoy.”

                                                                                                       —Grey Theroux

rEvolve: 9

What we have learned:    

              In Lucerne, there is a lovely little church called, in the German tongue,
Hofkirche
.  It was unlike any other church, minster, or cathedral I have ever visited in my travels.  The place is more brightly lit, but the light is absorbed by an inordinate amount of black: black-painted pews, altars, anything.  There is also gold paint that trims and highlights, but the overall effect brings to mind the atmospherics of a funeral.  It dawned upon me there, Christians are not alone in this either: but the religious have been attending the same funeral now for thousands of years.  The church’s doors stand open, people come, but no one stays.  

                  Our kind have drawn the waters from the God Well.  The God Well will no longer sustain our thirst.  We are not threatened by the gods; not any longer.  They are impotent.  However, to carry out our next act is to hasten their demise.  This is not an act of impatience: this is a
coup de grace
.  This grants them the kind of mercy they were unwilling to give humanity; this not only will show us superior, but to close the Well will also prohibit any of their kind from being born in the future.  This is the most important aspect: we must not ever allow ourselves to be tempted to return to our childhood.

Moral convictions based on spiritual enlightenment and rooted in human experience are just as real and certain as mathematical deductions based on physical observations, but on another and higher level.

—The Urantia Book

Chapter 25

                  “THE BIRD IS GONE!” Von Ranke screamed.  The bald man jumped off the couch, reaching for his own weapon.

                  The suite was spacious enough that I wasn’t surprised he didn’t notice at first—especially given the hour. That he immediately reached for a weapon should not have been a surprise, but it was.  I found myself hitting the floor with such force that I knew they both had to have heard it.  Joy had a similar reaction.  Our timing proved fortunate as bullets sailed over our head, hitting drywall, and coating us with powdery residue.

                  “Someone is with us, Doctor!” Von Ranke thundered, as if an order to the bald man to also open fire.  

                  With little else to do, I started army-crawling to the window as the bald man headed to the door to block our escape.  My talent for words was likely unmatched in this world and the litany of curse words pouring through my brain only augmented my own personal legend.  I reached for my tranq gun and aimed it at Von Ranke as a set of chairs and other furniture blocked me from hitting Dr. Baldy.  My first shot arched over his head.  The trajectory of these darts did not match those of bullets by any stretch.  I tried to compensate and sent another dart…somewhere that wasn’t Von Ranke. As bullets started hitting lower to the floor, I rolled again, toppling a crouching Joy.  I jumped up, stood to full height and fired at the bald man at the door.  His eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped to the floor.  

It was only then that I noticed I too was hit.  I looked down to see blood blooming into a large flower on my thigh.  I dropped down to my good knee and rolled left, lying prone on the floor.  I grabbed for the Sharpie in my back pocket, hoping to write…something.  I was losing so much blood he had to have hit something vital.  I was blinking stars from my eyes, trying to stay conscious.  I knew I only had moments, before more henchmen came, and before I bled to death.  I tossed the tranq gun and my bag to Joy, hoping she’d have the sense to use something.  She did.

                  Joy flung the bag—and all of its contents—at Von Ranke.  He did not see it until it knocked the gun from his hand.  Joy grabbed me and helped me to the door while Von Ranke was fumbling to find his gun.  The door hit Dr. Baldy in the head as we opened to make our retreat.  The suites next to us were apparently empty, but other rEvolvers were bounding out of the stairwell and down the hallway running at full tilt.  We stood flush against the wall by the elevator, the rush of wind blowing our hair around our faces.   The Sharpie, still in my hand, I pulled my jeans down and wrote the healing spell on a small patch of flesh not covered in blood.  While I would heal now, I had no way to replace lost blood.  When the elevator dinged, the men fanned out of the door of the suite led by Von Ranke.  Guns fired, but we fell backward into the elevator.  I stared at the floor, not seeing Joy hit the down button.  The doors closed on the maelstrom and we readied for what could be waiting for us below.  

                  I was taken with dizziness, but knew to stop would likely mean to die.  

                  “Hit the emergency stop,” I ordered.  I noticed my pants were around my ankles, so hitched them up and began writing on the bottom of my boot: a levitation spell.  I dreaded it after Cernay, but didn’t see an immediate alternative.  Nevertheless, I only wrote one, then turned to write on the bottom of Joy’s shoe.  “Take it off.  Use it like a balloon.”

                  “Will one shoe carry me?” Joy asked, as I was already ascending and knocking the ceiling panel loose.

                  “It’ll go up.  C’mon!” I demanded.  “We need to go back up.”

                  “Are we going to jump off the roof?” she asked, and I entertained the idea for the briefest second.  

                  “We have to get back to the room—when you threw my bag at Von Ranke, you threw him the pictures from the book!” I was exasperated.  She was improvising and I didn’t blame her.  The problem was what the book contained.   “The symbol to open the Well is in the book.  He might be able to open it without me.”

                  “Shit!” Joy floated below me in the narrow shaft.

                  “Yeah, shit,” I reiterated.

                  “Grey—we can’t go back.  We have to get out.” Joy tried to reason with me.  I felt my blood pressure rising, helping to stifle her words in my already-ringing ears. 

                  The grip on the bootlace was cutting off the circulation in my hand.  She was right.  I let go of the boot in the same moment I grabbed a hold of a rung on the wall.  Joy floated just above me and did the same.  I wrote on the door with my Sharpie so it would open into the third floor.  I poked my head through quickly on one side, then back, then the other side, then back.  The floor was clear.  They were either on the top or the bottom.  Our only way out was through.  I wrote another spell on the room in front of me, saw that it was little more than a cupboard with a bed, then ran as swiftly as I could to the room next to it.  The window was small, but we could fit.  There was a tree a few feet out into the courtyard.  We would not be able to make the jump, but with could float out, up, and try to grab a branch.  

                  We did exactly that.  We were barefoot, but we jogged back to the car where Victoria and the driver waited for us.  I got in, and nearly backed right out when I saw that the raven was not only now out of the cage, but in the back seat of our vehicle.  It looked at me, but I collapsed in the seat and let unconsciousness finally overtake me.  

                  When I awoke, I was being carried in someone’s arms.  The pace was quick and my head lolled on my neck raggedly enough that I was jarred into full awareness.  Diomedes was carrying me into a house.  

                  “Put me down, please.”  I have always loathed the distressed damsel trope.  In my own life, it was something I had, until very recently, mercifully avoided.  Now it vexed me more than any physical wounds possibly could. Flesh wounds I could work on, wounded pride was something else entirely.

                “Hush.  I will put you down once inside,” he banged my head on the door jamb.  “You may have healed, but you must still be very weak.  You need food and water, and then more rest.”

                  Diomedes put me on a couch covered with a sheet.  It was not very comfortable.  “Dalton has the pages—we have to go back.   Now,” I ordered.  It sounded much more half-hearted than I had intended.  Diomedes was right, I had precious little strength left.

                  Diomedes sighed.  The sigh sounded much heavier than I would have anticipated.  Before all of this, it was so very difficult for me to ascertain the meaning and range of human emotion.  Diomedes was a god, sure, but he was a man once.  He likely would have dwindled into the ether, or, at the very least, grown old, feeble, and feeble-minded, if the power of Athena had not sustained him.  

                  Joy and Victoria came into the house with bags of take-out Chinese food.  “Something else has happened, hasn’t it?”

                  The room was then populated with other gods with whom we had dined the past couple nights: Jove, Shiva, Kali, and Cupid.  Cupid caught my eye.  Even before, he seemed oddly familiar, though he certainly proved himself affable.  In the meals before, every time he caught me looking his way, he smiled and winked at me; almost flirtatiously. 

                  “REvolve ambushed us at the hotel.  He stabbed Mercury as he slept,” this was Athena speaking, who just entered the room.  I was especially glad to see that she was alive.  “Thor was the first.  From what we could gather, his driver betrayed him.  Ganesh was summoned to the hotel lobby under false pretenses, but if not for him, the rest of us likely would have been ambushed as well.”

                  This was the message Von Rankehad meant that he sent me.  But I had to ask, “Were they drained or taken to drain?”

                  “No.  Which confirms they have enough of our blood,” Athena replied.

                  “Goddess, Von Ranke has the symbol to open the Well now.  We have to hurry.”

                  “We are near.  You will need to eat and recover some of your strength.” She looked for the first time like a much older woman than she had when she first appeared to me.  

                  “Wait—where is Shred?” it finally occurred to me to ask.  “And the ala?”

“He chanced remaining at the hotel to gather his wares,” Diomedes stated.  “He and I were working together at the time of the ambush.” I could not be certain what that meant, but figured it had to do with his composition.  Diomedes resumed, “He will meet us very shortly, I hope.”

                  “Here you go,” Joy put the box of rice and a tray full of chicken and vegetables on my lap, then handed me a set of chopsticks.  

                  “The ala remains upstairs.  It will not leave.  It has not spoken a word since we left the hotel,” Victoria declared.

This gave me food for thought in addition to the food I had just begun ingesting.   I turned my attention to Diomedes. “Dio, I know you were playing coy when I asked you about the old stories written about you.  Some of them have to be true, right?”

Diomedes did not eat.  His visage had metamorphosed into a much younger version of himself.  He expression was not that of youthful man—though his countenance implied otherwise—still, my spellcraft seemed to hold somewhere in his late 30’s or early 40’s.  “Grey,” he paused, “stories are just the memories of humanity collected. Once the present becomes the past, it matters not if the stories are true or if they happened one way or some other way.  It’s the way we choose to remember the memories that shapes us; there is little room for the truth there.”  

Diomedes had always been known for giving his friends great counsel; a few millennia with Athena probably did well for him, too.   I said nothing more while I ate.  Some of the other gods ate as well, but others ate nothing.  I’m sure all of them lacked an appetite after the night’s events.  I was weary, but there would be no time for sleep.  I began making my own patterns on my flesh: for strength, for acuity, and, even though I had never tried it before, for luck.

I made the same markings on each one gathered.  Midway through, Shred pulled into the driveway of the Chateau in which we were squatting and came inside.  After assuring us via tablet he had not been followed, he, too, allowed me to make the markings upon him.  Each of the gods were given more complex configurations and multiple patterns to ensure their effectiveness.  I also hoped Jove really could hurl lightning.  As for myself, I scoured my mind for what I could use, if I could not use darts.  

                  Only then did I go upstairs to speak with Zala.  Joy accompanied me.   The creature slept soundly in its cage, half-squawking, half-snoring.  I took a nearby vase and raked it against the iron slats.  Startled, it flapped its wings hard against the cage.

                  “Why have you not gone, Zala?” I shouted, fuming with resurgent anger.  

                  Zala bristled.  “Your father implanted me with a spell that traps me in this form.”

                  I inched forward to examine her.  Her odor was overpowering, but I refused to shrink away.  “Where?  And how?”

                  “His magic. He put something into my neck,” she responded, pecking herself.  “I feel it there.”

                  “And if I remove it, you will help us save The God Well?” I asked, voiced measured with equal parts skepticism and derision.  

                  “I can help.” It was not the answer to the call-to-arms I had wanted to hear.  Time, however, was short, and our list of allies even shorter.

                  “I will remove it, but only after we face Von Ranke; only after you’ve helped us all be rid of him.” I inspected the patch in her neck.  “There is no time to do it now, even if it would free you to shapeshift.”

                  “Will you swear it with your writing?” the ala asked.

                  I already had.  I showed her the pattern Sharpied onto my skin.  The truth pattern remained on my wrist. The idea that I might not survive the encounter to remove the spell occurred to me, yet Zala did not press the issue.

    “We need to leave.  Immediately,” the raven decreed.