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

by Aaron Buchanan

  In a few moments, I was ready. I still had my pattern on my arm for my cloak and verified the working status of the now-magic-spectrum-glasses with my own magic. Pulling the sleeve of my scuba jacket back from my forearm, I saw that the design glowed a bright hue of indigo.

  I peeked back over the hill and looked took in my surroundings. Trees. The trees were thick in this direction, much more so than they were back in the area of the monument. This forest was older; ancient and untouched. I gathered myself up from my supine position and walked unsurely into this part of the forest. This place reminded me of the name of the nearby town—Howenwald; the High Forest. Those who settled this area left this place untouched. Much of the neighboring countryside was forested, but it was all replanted with pines with what should have been various kinds of oaks and other hardwoods in addition to original evergreens. While not developed, there was nothing I had seen in the area that would suggest the name that it was given. Yet, here we were. It was also just dark enough that I could not see if I kept the sunglasses over my eyes. I settled on replacing them every ten steps or so.

  After about an hour of chasing down my would-be spy, relying upon flashes of purple and upturned patches of leaves. I was soaked in sweat, quivering with exhaustion and nearly at the point of returning to reevaluate my next move, I saw several moving purple objects passing between the trees in the distance. I kept my approach even quieter by writing a muting spell on the tongues of my boots—the only place dry enough for my Sharpie to write and not smear. What I finally came to was two-story cabin built into the side of the hill; around it walked six identical figures. I kept my distance, but each one of them was the same man who failed to fall asleep with my sleeping spell. Wearing my spectrum-glasses, I saw that each one of them shined in an almost lavender hue. These men were not just wearing magic—they were magic and that might serve to explain they seemed immune to mine.

  Could they all be some sort of mirror-version of an unseen magos? Furthermore, none of them was as muddy as my original quarry. He was likely inside. This meant that he was probably inside reporting on his findings. Reporting on me.

  This also increased the likelihood of tripping some kind of alarm. A forest this dense could hide spellcraft in plain sight and I might never glimpse. I resolved to sketch out a Post-It to Joy that would fly on the wind until it finally reached her. If something were to happen to me, the least I could do was tell her where I was and what I was doing in case I needed rescuing. Or my body needed recovering. The months of trepidation and caution were being thrown into the wind for the hope of finding answers about the box, but more importantly, for the vestige of hope that we could find Gavin.

  I let the paper fly into the wind and hoped it would not rain before it reached her. Even if it’d take a few days’ time.

  I left the foot-fall spell on my shoes, but used a squirt of Germ-X to wipe the design on my forearm just in case. It took the group of sextuplets a few moments to notice me, but by then my arms were up. “Ho there! My name is Grey Theroux. Uhm…take me to your leader?’

  I allowed myself to have my hands bound behind my back and gagged. I say allowed. While there were some things I could have done to prevent it, I did not think opening a hole in the earth to swallow them would declare my cooperative intent. And it might have an adverse effect on the cabin itself. That certainly would not make its owner very happy. Still, I had one trick up my sleeve.

  One of the strangers slung me over his shoulder and carried me inside the cabin. Another one patted me down and removed my writing instruments, tossing them onto the ground. Once inside, I was set on the floor. I leaned up against a plaid couch whose cushions gave away a manufacturing date at some point in the 1970’s. It also smelled of dust and mildew.

  The two duplicates who brought me inside stood near me, guarding. I tried to speak, but they would not remove my gag. A few minutes later, another duplicate—muddy, with a black jacket the others lacked—came into the living room where I sat on the floor. On his heels, an identical man took a seat on a glider-rocker that matched the plaid of the sofa. He was dressed in khaki pants that were too short and a black polo. His expression was one of consternation, even pain. Furthermore, his eyes actually had pupils and irises. He must be the original, and not a copy. He looked at me as intently as I looked at him, though he looked very nervous.

  “Call me Kuluc.” It sounded like he said his name was Cool Luke. “Why were you looking around that open area? And why did you follow Kuluc here?” His English was thickly accented, though not broken. He was African, but I wasn’t sure from where I should commit a guess.

  He gestured for the guard closest to me to ungag me.

  “Just out for a stroll. My name is Grey, by the way.” I remained still and smiled, hoping the charm I did not have much faith in would allay some of his concern. It did not.

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said, reaching for my bag and opening it. He fished out the peculiar chest and held it up, his pained expression flashing instantaneously to anger. “If you don’t explain why you’re here, I will decide you’ve seen too much and have you disposed of.” Cool Luke rubbed his hands together in a way that suggested he was not committed to that course of action; nervous, anxious, maybe desperate. It was because of this and his recognition of the artifact that I decided to tell the truth.

  “My name is Grey Theroux. I am a logomancer.” His eyes remained fierce and alight with something else; fear, I wondered? “I have no way of proving it, but I mean you no harm.”

  “You have to tell me where you received this!” Cool Luke demanded, crossing the room and holding it in front of my face as if I didn’t know what it is. For a split-second, I even thought he might strike me.

  I had to play this cool. Be calm or else he might lose more control over himself. “I…I don’t know what that is, but it was given to me by a man. An alchemist.”

  Cool Luke bit his lip and looked as if he were about to cry. The three duplicates around the room stared at their leader confusedly, wondering if they should do something. “No, no, no, no, no,” Cool Luke sat on the couch next to me, expelling a waft of dusty-mildewy air directly into my nostrils. I sneezed in response. Mucous began running down my nose and into my face. I sneezed again, and lost all pretense of grace. I tried futilely to wipe the snot on the shoulder of my jacket, but it was just enough out of reach because of how tight my arms were bound. Cool Luke threw a towel to one of his duplicates and it used the towel to wipe my face. The towel did not smell much better than the couch, but at least I no longer felt the urge to sneeze. “This man who gave it to you. Was his name Triolo?”

  I suddenly found myself feeling inexplicably guilty, as if Cool Luke were already rebuking me with his question. He knew full well who had given me the box. “I came to him looking for help. He offered it in the form of the box, though he did not know how to work it.”

  “That, I’m sure is the what saved you. If you’d known, he would have killed you where you stood,” Cool Luke was back up, pacing. “He is a very, very bad man,” he declared. “Evil. A caricature of evil.”

  I was incredulous. Although he seemed off-kilter, I blamed that on the disease. Yet, I had found the binders full of letters from the loved ones he had murdered. “He was sick. Very sick. He has cancer,” I stammered. Desperate for the alchemist’s help, I think I may have interacted with him naively.

  Cool Luke’s back was to me, but he swiveled to face me, “Yes! It was me who introduced the carcinogens into his bloodstream!”

  I refused to be on the defensive, so collected myself before I spoke again. “Then how are you any better than he?” I tried not to sound accusing as I asked. Meanwhile, I began working on unbinding my hand with the dabs of ink I hid inside the cuff of my jacket.

  “He is the one who killed me while I slept!” he shot back. I squinted at him, not comprehending. “At least, he would have. These doubles of mine you see are my homunculi. If I had not fashioned my first homunculus in
my place, it would have been me dead. I was forced to leave my home, send my mother and brothers on the run because of him!” Cool Luke was animated with fright. “You see, he drank himself celebrating my murder. I hid and waited for him to pass out. I extracted the carcinogenic properties from formaldehyde and fortified them. Then I put it into his wine. On the run, I went to my mother’s house and gave her whatever money I had and told them to leave this country!” He shook as he spoke now. Whatever had transpired between him and Triolo, it shook him to his core.

  “So,” I stitched this knowledge together with some guesswork—especially the spellwork involving the homunculi. Dad had mentioned it a few times. “You were his apprentice?” Though at this point the question was rhetorical. “Why did he want to kill you?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it’s because he couldn’t use me. Maybe he needed me for another of his projects.” He looked his most forlorn, “All I know is I can’t let him find me.”

  I healed him. He was on his deathbed in San Francisco. I extended his life. Still, I could not dismiss his attempts at reconciling with the families of his victims. “But…he had these binders full of letters.”

  “You saw those? He must be very sick to let you look at those.” Cool Luke left the room and returned with a newspaper. It was a San Francisco Chronicle page, with a headline that exclaimed, “Former mob informant’s family brutally murdered.” The name of the family in the article was DeLand.

  I was horrified and speechless, yet I had to know, “Has he killed everyone with whom he’s corresponded?”

  “All of them. Even children,” Cool Luke spat. And he put his head in his hands and sobbed.

  “Fuck,” was all I could manage. “I’m sorry Cool Luke, but I healed him. Not completely, but he’s mobile and lucid.”

  “There is no lucid for that man! Only madness!” he spat.

  That was when the first set of windows burst.

  My hands were free, but one of the simulacrum men jumped on me. Only after I crawled from beneath him did I notice that he no longer moved. Even if he were not a real man, his mortality was the same. Cool Luke—the real Cool Luke—was reaching for a book on the end table next to him.

  I chanced a quick peek outside to determine the direction the bullets were coming from. The gunfire let up so I had no idea from which direction it came. However, I saw the bodies of the other four homunculi in lumps on the ground. Behind a row of trees, I saw a maroon-clad arm reloading a semi-automatic rifle. The arm looked like it may have been the same Members Only jacket I last saw Triolo wearing.

  He began firing on the cabin again. My mind shot to the green tub I helped him carry out of Golden Gate Park. It was a weapons cache. And he needed me to distract Cool Luke long enough to make his approach. All the misgivings I had about Triolo sharpened into focus. Even the warning Zala gave me about Triolo’s instability and her even more dire warning delivered in my hotel to not trust him.

  If survived this, I would forever be skeptical of everyone I met from this point forward.

  The last two living duplicates crowded around Cool Luke to protect him. “Follow me!” he ordered.

  I obeyed, but only before grabbing my bag and stuffing the box back inside. We needed to cross the area of the front door, but it was still getting peppered with bullets, pinning us to the door frame of the living room.

  I planned for this. Not from this source, exactly, but when the doubles emptied my pockets of pens they deposited on the ground what I would need for a distraction. “Be ready to go!” I shouted over the gunfire. Chunks of wood splintered the air. I hoped for one more reload, or even brief pause. It came seconds later. “CREPATE!” I screamed. We heard the pens explode like little land mines. It was a trick I learned from my Enochian treasury and practiced four or five times since the discovery of certain spells I could activate with the spoken word.

  In the midst of the small explosions, we heard Triolo himself cry out. “Now!” Cool Luke jumped and rolled behind the island in his kitchen, sliding a rug as he went. I flanked him, but left one of the duplicates to cover me. The bullets came in a flurry once more, with intermittent curses. It was then I noticed what Triolo was doing. Each of the bullets shot from his gun was some sort of alchemic composition. It was melting the wood it came in contact with like butter. We did not have much time before the cabin would collapse upon itself.

  Cool Luke was pulling open a trap door and hurling himself down inside of it. I did the same after Cool Luke’s double followed him. I looked behind me to see that the double tailing me was staring at me with its glassy eyes, waiting for me to make my move. I jumped into the hole, just as I heard the wood snapping and crashing all around and above. The tunnel was so narrow that even for me it was a tight fit to crawl through. I did not look back however, wondering if we were beyond the foundation of the cabin. Thankfully, while it was cramped and narrow, it was boxed in with some sort of white vinyl or plastic to keep it free of earth and to allow extra use of whatever light source the tunnel had. I felt for my bag, relieved to find it still attached. I situated it to rest on my buttocks for the rest of the crawl through the tunnel.

  “Only about 200 hundred more feet,” I heard Cool Luke’s voice grunt from ahead of me.

  It would be a miracle if I came out the other side and did not want to vomit.

  Chapter 5

  We came to a small earthen chamber, no larger than five feet by five feet, on the other side of the tunnel. Looking more closely, I determined it was a mine shaft. Cool Luke and his doppelganger continued through the shaft swiftly and after a great distance I could make out that they had reached another small room up ahead. Cool Luke was pressing at a panel in the ceiling when I finally came out of the mine’s opening. He pushed it up and stepped to the side, letting the homunculus peer out. He looked at me and nodded with his head to the tunnel from which we came, “Phosphate mine,” he whispered.

  I had to give him serious respect for hatching this escape plan. Still, we were nowhere near safety yet. “Wait right there,” I was already grabbing a Bic from my bag and rewriting a cloak spell on my forearm. “Now you,” I motioned for Cool Luke to present his arm and I wrote the same spell upon it. “We’re in a field that extends for about two feet in diameter. If you go beyond that, we won’t be able to see each other. As for him,” I thumbed toward his homunculus, “it doesn’t seem like my magic works too well on them.”

  “No. It’s like a spell you’ve already written. It’s done. No additions or fixes, bub.” Cool Luke’s double ducked back in and gestured with is finger it was safe to head out. “He won’t be coming with us. There’s an old homestead with a barn. I have put my car in there. But we still have some ways to go. I’m sending him back to Triolo as a distraction,” Cool Luke nodded his head toward the homunculus. It hopped out of the hole, likely never to be seen again.

  Cool Luke waited about 30 seconds and lept up from the hole. “We don’t have much time.”

  There was no telling where Triolo was at that given moment, but having not heard any gunshots was a positive sign. Hopefully, he was rooting around the ruins of the cabin, looking for our corpses. There was a small hope that the last homunculus would be able to sneak up on him while he examined the wreckage and take him out. It was a very small hope.

  Cool Luke jumped through the brush and branches, leaping plants and logs in way that made it impossible to keep up. We were following a new ravine when he suddenly started to climb the side of the hill, side-shoe-step after side-shoe step. He must have remembered about my cloaking now because he slowed down once he realized that while I was in decent shape, I did not have his abilities to jump tall buildings in a single bound. We finally started to come out of the dense part of the forest.

  Gun shots echoed from the direction of the cabin. We remained silent, but I could still hear the crunching of Cool Luke’s tennis shoes. I hoped not muting his footfalls would not cause us trouble down the road, but instead settled on running as fast as I coul
d to keep up with Cool Luke.

  At last, we came to a road, hurried across it and into a cotton field. “Cool Luke, how much further?” I was winded, but not exhausted yet. I wanted to take a few moments to cover our tracks so Triolo wouldn’t be able to follow us. “I need to do something. There’s no way Triolo is moving this fast. I want to cut our trace back at the road.”

  He stopped, but did not turn around. “I’ll stay here. Hurry up and get back to this row and this spot. Hurry, bub!”

  I glimpsed him turning around to watch me. Cool Luke had prepared extensively for this day, even though he knew Triolo was somewhere dying. He still feared he would find him. Every misgiving I felt at meeting Triolo and dismissed was far too easy, almost as if the first time he knocked me out, he gave me something to slow my wits. Yet, why would he hand over the box?

  As I came to the point where we crossed the road, I waited for a car to drive by so I could begin the spellwork to prohibit any kind of tracing. Nearing completion, I heard rustling from the line of trees leading to the cabin. All the words written for this spell were ancient; unspoken and some of the most powerful I could conjure.

  With the last words finished, I looked up to see Triolo panting, wheezing, coming out of the woods to the road to my left. He was no less than ten feet away, but well outside the field of my spell. I was so very glad I muted my steps, and that I heard him coughing behind me.

  I retraced my steps to find Cool Luke. Paranoid about being heard, I said nothing as he came into view. Apparently, my visage bespoke that Triolo had traced us. Even so, I gave him a thumbs up—mission accomplished—and motioned him to lead forward.

  On the other side of the field, an old, dilapidated one-room house came into view. I had visions of sharecroppers from a century before living there, tilling the land. The barn was not only smaller, but also in worse shape than the house. The entire structure leaned a few degrees to the right and was about the width of a garage, though much longer than I was expecting. There was no going through the door, as at that angle, it would definitely not open. As if sensing my thoughts, “Around back,” he whispered. He took off some slats of the paneling and slid through. I followed suit. Inside was a Toyota Corolla from the 1990s. “Get in.” He opened the driver’s side door and bent to pull the trunk release. He went to his trunk and removed a vial of yellow liquid with a small paintbrush.