Will of Shadows: Inkwell Trilogy 2 (The Inkwell Trilogy)

by Aaron Buchanan

  “Honestly, my priority right now is finding my friend—the arithmancer’s apprentice I just mentioned. Do you know of any way—magic or mundane—to locate someone?” It was important to me not appear to earnest. I already felt like I had been taken advantage of. Zala’s warning to not trust Triolo notwithstanding.

  Triolo tugged at the whiskers of his beard, as if noticing its existence for the very first time. Even now, it looked like hairs lazily painted on porcelain. “I have an artifact in my possession forged by an alchemist master many centuries ago that is supposedly able to find anyone, anywhere, no matter what…” His voice trailed off. There was obviously some catch.

  “Then what is the problem?” I acknowledged that what he said he had sounded too good to be true.

  “I have no fucking idea how it works.” He crossed the room to a square card table stacked with papers, trash, and other miscellany. Several of the papers he let slide to the floor. Triolo picked up an additional three-ring binder and held it aloft while he continued rooting around the table. He walked to his shelf to replace the binder from the table. The binder went toward the right side of the shelf, second-to-last. He paced around, stepping onto the raised platform where his bathroom was. There were four dark green plastic storage tubs stacked along the wall next to the door to the lavatory. He found what he was looking for in the second tub—without having to lift either of the tubs to inspect the bottom two—and snapped a lid shut.

  “This,” he turned a box, what some would call a chest, over in his hand, “is the artifact. I was told what it was for originally, but my mentor herself had no idea how to use it either.”

  Herself. Good to hear I wasn’t playing in an all-boys club after all. Still, I thought better than asking at that moment. Hopefully, I would have ample opportunities to ask him later…though the thought of writing Triolo letters gave me a shudder. “May I see it?”

  He held it close enough to his eyes, he went cross-eyed for a moment. I wondered if Triolo had a pair of reading glasses somewhere in the mess. He handed the box over. It was heavy, probably cast iron, and about eight inches in length and five in width. It looked just large enough to hold my Dad’s copy of Gulliver’s Travels and maybe one other novel. I scrutinized one side: symbols I did not recognize in the least. The next side looked like alchemy.

  Could it be?

  I examined the next side. While I couldn’t be entirely sure, these symbols looked like some form of arithmancy.

  On the fourth side were more unintelligible symbols. On the fifth something I did recognize, though I couldn’t immediately place where. The final side was etched with more symbols I know I had never seen.

  I jogged my memory. Alchemy. Arithmancy. The symbols I recognized had to be logomancy, even if I did not recognize the language. Could this box be forged of all magics? Extinct magics? Magic represented by The Triginta of which I had no idea?

  “Michael, this might do what you say it does,” I sat next to him on the futon, “but it could be more than that.” Triolo coughed for the first time since his surgery. It sounded wet and he doubled over in pain. The cancer remained, clutching to his very bones. “Ever heard of the Phaistos Disc?” I asked once he regained his composure.

  “You already know my line of work before this. I read books, but I was never an academic per se.” The way in which he said per se almost sounded like Percy and took me a moment to recognize what he had said. “You’re going to have to enlighten me.”

  “It’s a disc found in the early 20th century. At the palace of Knossos—“

  “Crete. I know Crete. I been to Crete,” Triolo interrupted. “Sorry. Please continue.”

  I continued, “There’s not much more to it, really. The disc has symbols no one recognizes. Not sure if it’s hieroglyphs or some syllabary letters representing a language. These symbols,” I angled the chest to the side to which I was referring, “these are the same as some of those from the disc.”

  “And you don’t know this language?” the alchemist inquired.

  “No. No one does. It’s never been decrypted. I recognize some of these other sides as being from your discipline,” I maneuvered the disc in my hand, tilting side-to-side, “and other magics. I think the Phaistos symbols are arranged in such a way that a logomancer carved them. Whatever this box is, it was created with collaboration with other magoi.”

  Triolo stood back up, wincing. He could not be descending back into the sickness so quickly, but whatever healing I had done, the disease had taken its toll. Given his history and his health, I doubted I should even ask the other question. “That’s what I was afraid of,” Triolo declared matter-of-factly.

  He knew I came here for his help, but even without his illness, there was something more at play. “You’re afraid you’ll have to help us?”

  “Yup. Because I have a good idea what we’ll have to do.” He stepped crossed the room back to his storage tubs. “And you’ll have to keep healing me. I’m terminal. No ways around it, magic or not.”

  “I can do that.” I was hoping his present devotion to the cause was motivated by a desire to make amends.

  He crouched uneasily next to one his tubs, pointing to one on the floor. “We’ll also need to take this storage tub with us.”

  Chapter 3

  The first thing I did when we came out of the Shadow Mill and my phone regained a signal was to take pictures of the three sides of the box I could not identify and send them to Shred and Joy. I hoped Shred would recognize one side as being associated with musimancy. The other sides, I hoped Joy could go ahead and start researching the symbology.

  Triolo took me through a footpath leading to Fulton Street and our best chance of quickly hailing a cab. I found myself biting back complaints, for while my build is slight, I still can pack a punch. But his mystery tub was extraordinarily heavy. Furthermore, he stacked a suitcase on top of it. By the time we got to Fulton, I was drenched in perspiration and the tips of my fingers throbbed from the unwieldy manner in which we carried his belongings.

  Triolo was in worse shape. We took a few breaks to get to the street, but he looked even more haggard in the light of day than I would have ever suspected. He was not tall man, perhaps 5’10” or 5’11”. He had since changed out of his robe and into jeans, a cabana shirt, and what was a bona fide maroon Members Only jacket that hung loosely on his wire-thin frame. When he walked it gave the distinct impression of a Claymation skeleton.

  Putting the tub and suitcase down on the sidewalk, I stuck out my arm to look for a cab. Two drive by, but the third and pulled over. Seeing the tub, the driver popped the trunk. As I helped lower the tub into the trunk, I smiled grimly at the thought of Triolo being a Claymation object: I supposed I was his animator.

  I helped Triolo into the taxi before getting in on the opposite side. “We’ll get my things from my hotel and check to see when we can catch the next flight to Boston.”

  He snorted. “Can’t go to Boston,” he turned to look at me briefly before looking back out his window. “You can. But I can’t.”

  “You mean, it’s not a good idea for you to go to Boston?” I tried to assess his body language. It wasn’t nervousness I read from him, it was resignation I thought.

  He turned to look at me once more, though it seemed as if he were looking at my nose or my teeth and not eyes. “I mean if I were to go there, we might make it out of the airport, but we wouldn’t get much further.” Seeing that I still wasn’t catching on, he said one more word. “Exile.”

  “So, San Francisco isn’t self-imposed” I wondered. The car was nearly back in Haight-Ashbury so the conversation wasn’t going to get much further before we arrived at the hotel.

  “I’d say not,” Triolo harrumphed. “Long story, though. Not one for today. Or tomorrow.”

  Nonplussed, “Where do we have to go then if it’s not to Boston and then somewhere?” I asked.

  The cab turned left onto Haight Street. “I would say go back and then meet me, but I’m not s
ure I’d get very far without you right now.”

  Traffic was light enough this early in the morning that we were already pulling up to my lodgings. I asked the driver to wait, then ducked back into the car to look at Triolo. “Where is it we’re heading then?”

  “There’s a place I know. A crossroads. I’m not supposed to be there, either, but I can go for a couple days, at least.” Triolo looked at the meter running and back to me.

  “New York?” I asked, thinking of the Trivium outside of Athens.

  “No. Oh no. Nashville. Now hurry up. Meter’s running!” he grinned, but it wasn’t a mirthful expression. It was unsettling. It reminded me that no matter his physical condition, his state of mind was another matter entirely.

  By the time I returned, the driver was waiting outside the car, one leg up on the bumper, with the trunk opened. “Your friend caught another ride. Told me to give you this,” he handed me the box. It seemed almost absurd to see it in the broad daylight, so quickly stuffed it beneath the flap and into my messenger bag. “He also said he would meet you in Nashville.”

  “Did he say how?” I had to know this was coming.

  “He said use that box.” He shut the trunk after securing my box of books and climbed back into the vehicle.

  He was dropping hints to get rid of me, but kept his motivations for separating from me to himself. Whatever those might be, I had a flight to book. Two flights, actually. I was calling Joy in on this one. This was the first lead we’d had since we returned from Cevennes. I was also inclined to reach back out to Zala, but wasn’t sure if she were not already engaged with some plan of her own. Plus, I was certain that if I offered her a cell phone, she either wouldn’t accept it or would lose or damage it soon after. Yet, so far she had an uncanny ability of keeping tabs on us. Trusting her remained an issue, but everything she said and did lent credence to the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” truism. And she had even followed me to San Francisco. Was she even watching me in that moment?

  “SFO, please.” The 40-minute ride to the airport, I involuntarily found myself turning the box over and over, burning the symbols of each side into my brain. Whatever it was, it represented our best hope in months of rescuing Gavin. Even if it did not do what Triolo said it did—whether he lied or was ignorant—there was something about the artifact that hinted at a much deeper power.

  I was actually appreciating the driver’s silence in my reverie, and was somewhat startled when he spoke to me. “Your friend. I don’t mean to offend, but he had a particular smell about him. I can’t place it, though.” We were already out of the city and heading toward the airport.

  “What do you mean?” Whatever he was referring to, I had not noticed it.

  “I don’t know. Oily?”

  It took me a second to connect the events of the morning. Gun oil. The tub we carried out of the park was full of weapons. Wherever Triolo was going, he said he needed that tub.

  I swallowed hard, suddenly aware that I might not be as smooth an operator as I thought. Assuredly, if anyone were getting played, it would be me. Letting Triolo live might have just doomed many more people to die. I felt my empty stomach recoil from the idea of Triolo trying to collect new binders and new letters. What had I done?

  Joy was catching a flight to Nashville on Saturday—two days from now. We agreed that the best place to research was from our house in Springfield, Massachusetts. I also needed her to research any locations around Nashville that could be the crossroads—almost certainly a three-way crossroads—that Triolo told me I needed to visit. After that, Joy would research the box and, if needs be, she could even take a drive to Windsor, Connecticut to visit the goddess, Athena, at the Solemn Ages rest home. We couldn’t be sure that she would be there. Communication with her in the past several months had grown scant over a difference in opinion we were having over a particular matter. More often, I found myself texting questions to Victoria—the goddess, Nike—in London. While no one was opening the Well of Gods again any time soon, the deities that had the wherewithal and wisdom to fear the machinations of rEvolve, were doing something about it, even if word was out that they had disbanded. While I came to learn that there were a great many gods who survived the ages, only a fraction of them were in any fit fighting state. Most remained underground. Some took Athena’s offer of protection. Most scoffed. Word had circulated that the weapon that could end their existence—a pyramidal dagger dubbed in Sanskrit, the Sucikhata—was now safely back in my vault, though it remained the source of contention between me and the goddess. As for the rest of them, they had nothing to fear but the slow passage of time. Athena and those who remained of her ilk were convinced this was only the beginning of peril for them. I fought alongside her and certainly agreed with her assessment of rEvolve: they did not go away with the annihilation of their leader, Von Ranke, as they might have us believe. They merely receded back into the shadows.

  Athena also suspected that there was more at play than a militant humanist organization trying to assassinate gods and usher a golden age of humanity. I could not guess what intelligence she based that on, but served to mold how Joy, Shred, and I have maneuvered these past months. We had cast our lot with the gods. If we were not already targets, we definitely were now.

  I was let off at the airport and waited an interminable length of time to purchase a ticket to Atlanta. I caught a few hours’ sleep on the floor at my terminal, and slept during the flight to Atlanta. While I wasn’t optimally rested, I wrote a mild incantation onto my left arm to enhance my senses for the four-hour drive to Nashville. By the time I fetched my luggage and my box of books, I regretted not shipping them home at once. I made a mail store my first stop after renting a car.

  Joy emailed me screen shots of various locations around Nashville that could be candidates for a trivium. After taking into account various factors Joy may not have thought of, I eliminated all but two. In the scheme of things, three-way crossroads were not all that common. Unfortunately, though, they were more prevalent than I hoped. I parked at the coffee shop next to the mailbox store and used the Google Maps app on my tablet to explore. I took the measurements of the Athens, New York trivium and tried to limit my search to trivia of roughly the same size. Additionally, the Athens trivium was steeped in Native American lore. That would take an extra layer of research, but I also thought it would sufficiently eliminate urban, and even suburban areas. This caused me to doubt the last two possibilities Joy sent me.

  I decided to widen my net. Nashville was Triolo’s destination because it was the closest airport to wherever we were to go. I widened my halo around Nashville, wishing I could simply buy a paper map and doodle on it as much as my heart desired. Technology was convenient, and addicting in its own right. While I was comfortable with its use, I was constantly reminded that all that it offered was in the ether; there was nothing substantial to hold between my fingers. There was something about the connection with a book, with a map that drew me to find wisdom, to find answers.

  I decided to focus on my second layer of research: native folklore. The sun was setting, so I made the choice to stay the night outside Atlanta and head north in the morning after, I hoped, having a better idea of where I was going. At about half past midnight, and only by following breadcrumbs through various online sources, encyclopedias, and wikis, did I finally have an idea of where to look for a trivium.

  A study of an obscure Choctaw myth led me to a road that connected the Mississippi River to Nashville by way of a path called the Natchez Trace. Reading about this ancient path that became a road led me to an encyclopedic entry about American explorer, Meriwether Lewis. Lewis was one half of the duo Thomas Jefferson sent across the continent on a fact-finding and mapping mission for the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and beyond. William Clark fared well after their return in 1806. Lewis, on the other hand, spent the next three years in, apparently, abject misery. Only three years later, after being assailed as a red-blooded, legitimate American hero, Lewis
killed himself under extraordinarily strange circumstances at a place called Grinder’s Stand—along the Natchez Trace.

  What’s more, that location outside of Hohenwald, Tennessee was a meeting-point of three different Native pathways. Upon closer inspection by satellite, it seemed like the likeliest culprit.

  I napped enough throughout the day, so wasn’t quite tired enough to fall asleep, and kept reading various local Cherokee and Choctaw stories, legends, and anecdotes about the middle part of Tennessee. Nothing else gave me more hope for being the correct site of the trivium than near Grinder’s Stand.

  I awoke to the soft buzz of my cell phone vibrating next to my head.

  “Morning. You got anything?” It was Joy. She sounded better rested than I, which probably owed itself to her predilection for gourmet coffee-binging.

  I pushed air up through the top of my lips in a sort-of sigh of indifference. What time was it? “I think so. Howenwald.”

  “Hole in wall?” I heard her take a sip from her cup.

  “Not Hole-In-Wall, though that is amusing.” I looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand next to me. It was a few minutes past seven in the morning. “Didn’t think of it like that. No—Howenwald. It’s a German word meaning high forest. It’s about 70-80 miles away from the Nashville airport.”

  “Why there?” This time I heard the clacking of a keyboard in the background. She was probably looking it up herself.

  I told her about the Natchez Trace and Meriwether Lewis.

  “Seems like a nexus of weird. Sounds promising. Worst case scenario, you investigate, find nothing, and go on to Nashville. Start looking into archives and historical societies. Maybe even talk to some real, live human beings.”

  Joy often politely ribbed me about my antisocial habits. She grew up around people and was allowed to adjust socially. I did to an extent, but even still was never very comfortable interacting in public. Recently, though, I allowed her to crack my shell a bit and take me out to clubs—and once she saw how uncomfortable I was—to movies, and festivals of various sorts.