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

by Aaron Buchanan

  Joy stopped swinging completely and when Sean tried rocking it into motion again, she put a hand on his leg. “I know what you mean. My mom was Korean. She basically said something to that effect to my dad at one point. I didn’t really get it until I started college. Least, that’s when I actually gave it some thought. Not much. But some.”

  Shred looked up, stopped playing on his silent keys for a moment, but resumed soon after.

  “Are you trying to reason out what’s been going on? If you have any ideas about the rEvolve thing or This Triginta thing, please do tell.” Up until that point, it was difficult for me to imagine Cool Luke thinking much beyond the present. It was not that he was unintelligent—quite the contrary, actually—it was that he was a man of the moment. It’s where he resided. He already said Somali didn’t or didn’t much use the subjunctive mood—would/could/should. Culturally, it made sense for him.

  Cool Luke put his feet up on the railings, slumped his shoulders and relaxed completely. “Maybe that the idea of apocalypse is the catalyst for our extinction. But also our greatest triumph, bub.”

  Joy stood up from the swing and put her back to the railing directly across from my chair causing Cool Luke shifted his feet over a little. “And the reason why our culture is so in love with the idea of the apocalypse is because, deep down, we know that being as comfortable as we could only mean the end of us?”

  His walks did well to clear his head. Perhaps he was more deeply troubled by the prospect of rEvolve than on anything else going on. I thought often about this group, but had yet to realize any sort of conclusion about them. “REvolve was working to create an unstable world within. What if they are, in fact, still around and they want to use that to create the change and force people to either thrive or die? Give up their gods, give up their fears, and embrace the future?”

  “Has Shred told you what we’ve found out?” Sunderlin stared at Cool Luke and me through the railing. I did not realize when he came back near us, but he had done an excellent job of sneaking up on us. At least he was smiling. It helped to defuse the awkwardness of his sudden appearance. Joy, meanwhile, looked down on him from her position, holding her arms.

  Shred looked over at us and shrugged. He was in the middle of his own thought processes, and since he already had a good idea of what was going on, he paid us little mind and went about composing whatever he was composing.

  “No. He hasn’t told us anything about what’s going on. Cool Luke, meet Lou Sunderlin. Lou Sunderlin, meant Cool Luke.” I introduced them, and saw that Cool Luke offered his hand through the porch railing and Lou actually took it much more quickly than he had anyone else’s.

  “Yes, the alchemist’s apprentice. I have looked forward to meeting you in person. I trust my letter to you set you on the right track to Tennessee?” Sunderlin did not climb the stairs to join us on the porch. He stayed on the ground where he was comfortable.

  “It did. Thank you for your help. The cabin was exactly where you said it would be.” Cool Luke offered him a smile and a nod of appreciation.

  “It was Meriwether Lewis’ cabin, you should now.” The old man now seemed pleased with himself. I wondered if this was how people acted when the claimed association with famous people. “I stayed there myself about 40 years ago.”

  At least that explained the 70’s area furniture of that cabin. Yet there was nothing in there that would have indicated the kind of age he was suggesting. “How is that possible? It was much too modern?”

  Sunderlin met my eyes and gave me the same look he had just given to Cool Luke. He was a man proud of his accumulation of secrets. “Master Lewis lived much longer than what the history books tell you. He was geomancer. And that means he could use the abiding power of the Green Mother to prolong his life.”

  “Is this what you’ve done?” Joy did not have the same tone of levity the rest of us had. It made me wonder if she were suspicious of Sunderlin. Shred vouched for him, but she didn’t know that I asked Shred about him already.

  “Yes. I would say astute, but I’m probably not as old as you would like to think. I’m only 106.” Sunderlin stepped back and raised his arms up so we could look at his entirety.

  It was much older than I would have guessed. I would have said 80 at the oldest. Yes, he looked sort of wizardly, but that did not necessarily imply an age. “106? No, that is plenty more than I would have guessed. Does that mean that Lewis lived,” I did the math in my head, “an additional 80 years or so past when he was said to have died?” He was 35 when he died. So could it be possible that he, too, lived into his 100’s?

  “Much longer. He did not die until 1903, 100 years from when he and William Clark set out on their journey to map the West.” Sunderlin stepped closer and held on to the railing, beaming.

  That would have made Lewis 129 when he died. Humans can live to 120 without the use of earth-magic, so 129 was quite feasible, even if it was mind-boggling to think of Meriwether Lewis alive in the 20th century. “How is it that you have come into this knowledge?”

  “I have his journals, young lady.” His pride seemed to dissipate in an instant, though.

  “Wow. That hurts my head a bit. Cool.” Apparently satisfied, Joy sat back on the swing and did not stop Sean from rocking.

  Shred’s pained expression remained. He knew what I was going to ask him about. This present conversation was merely a distraction at the moment.

  “I’m sorry, but I think I’m due to stretch my legs now. Shred, come with, will you?”

  “Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

  —W.H. Auden

  “I find it strange that when one commits an act of evil, it summons more evil as if to feed on it. Even more strange is how well Evil personifies, yet good never does.”

  —Grey Theroux

  Bar Sinister 1606

  While his company of actors, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, rehearsed his latest, Macbeth, William Shakespeare was wondering through a forest path outside of Birmingham.

  Will also knew he was being followed.

  Humans were really quite easy to deal with and he already had several ideas for what to do with those who would rob him.

  What he heard, however, were not sounds not made by humans. Nor were the sounds made by any kind of stalking animal.

  He stepped forward a few paces, waiting for the whispers to begin anew. After several additional paces, they did. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and brought out a stylus and hunk of wax-gum he broke off from the greater lump in his knapsack.

  Though the moon had since abandoned him, he wrote out his spell for light on the wax. His waxen torch lit, he threw the gob of wax to the ground and set his knapsack to the ground next to him. They had to know he was about to transform from prey to predator. If they had any intelligence whatsoever, they would know to attack now, before he was ready.

  He climbed into the nearest tree and marked six bits of wax-gum and placed them on the fold of his bag as he finished. He would only have seconds now…

  While these creatures were just as sure to operate off scent as they were sight, the four of them pounced on the duplicate of himself he had fashioned. It was not a spell his father had ever taught him, but he knew it well enough to add its formula to his journal. The script was formed by Master Kelley, and though he remembered so very little of his time with him, the language of the angels he recalled fluidly. At the very least, it made him feel more comfortable about the time he spent with Master Kelley.

  The creatures below his perch on the tree limb scrabbled on the forest floor for something that was not there while William tossed the additional lit waxen globs onto the ground around them while they were distracted.

  “Ho, there!” William called down to them.

  The wodewosen were more frightening in their appearance than he was told, easily calling to mind their Cthonic origins. Two-legged, and nearly as tall as he, they paced frantically on their knuckles remi
niscent of something simian, spitting and clawing at the air around them they could no longer penetrate—the trap was sprung. Their heads were elongated in a mockery of human anatomy, though their teeth were an uneven, jangled mess that crossed unevenly in their mouths. And their black skin beneath their hair gave off some new scent now that they were trapped in William’s circle.

  He knew not what evils, precisely, they had perpetrated, only that their kind was known to feast on infants left to die of exposure in the cool autumns and winters of Warwickshire. William was not sure who could be considered more evil in that scenario, but decided in favor of his own species. Any further harm the wodewosen could undertake would desist. Also, the magical properties these beasts would yield to the formation of William’s own spellcraft was invaluable.

  As the wodewosen paced and climbed over each other, the supposed wild men could perceive what was about to happen. From William’s perch, he dripped hot wax from his candle directly on to the beasts below and dropped another ball inscribed with his most powerful sleeping spell.

  Once unconscious, William dropped down in their midst and used his stylus to mark on the hardened wax on their bodies.

  Instantly, each mummified, giving way to a quick death.

  He removed a blanket from his knapsack and wrapped all three desiccated corpses up and placed them into his bag. They were not as heavy as he anticipated, for which he was exceedingly glad.

  It was the last portion of the recipe Francis needed to fashion the enchanted quill of which they conceived.

  With it, despite his brother’s attempts to hide its existence, he knew what he must do.

  It was no small thing. In fact, it smashed his heart to pieces. But the shadows were just another manifestation. What Francis and Master Dee failed to realize was the other symptoms of a dying world the shadows brought with them: plague, famine, death. These were, according to many faiths, the harbingers of the apocalypse. What these texts did not say, however, was precisely how to avert the apocalypse. Selene knew. And even if she and Will were no longer on romantic—or even lustful—terms, he knew it had to be done.

  The village of Bereft would be consumed, but only after they were able to lure as many mages to the sanctuary as possible.

  And then they would die.

  But the world would live.

  And the good men tomorrow had their feet in the wallow

  And their heads of brawn were nicer shorn

  And how they bought their positions with saccharin and trust

  And the world was asleep to our latent fuss

  Sightings swirl through the streets like the crust of the sun

  —David Bowie, The Bewlay Brothers

  Chapter 16

  Shred had to presume what I wanted to speak to him about. I did not think he could be the kind of musician he was without being more empathic than most people. Perhaps too empathic. When it came to my mother, I left the pain and bitterness in the past.

  “Okay, so, Shred, I can tell you’re not happy about what I might have to talk to you about, but you need to know: I’m not angry. At all.” The cabin was several hundred yards away at that point. Even the lake was out of sight as we walked along a deer trail in the woods. “Athena says you know about my mother. And The Triginta…”

  He stopped. He still looked uncomfortable, but he finally wore a look of resignation signaling that this was the topic of which he was afraid to tell me. Perhaps he was reassured by my promise of not being angry.

  Surely he had to understand? I did not know my mother. Not even her name. Nor did I know anything about her family or even about my father’s family, for that matter. How many people, I wondered, could call his or her family a fiction?

  When it came to it, even with characters in books, I at least I knew their names. I had a family fortune in a number of banks across the world and my father left a ledger with some safe-deposit boxes as well. He intimated that it was old money that sat collecting interest, and that our relatives had left it to us. No matter the questions I put to him as a child, I was reproached, rebuffed, redirected. When I was old enough to realize the toll those questions took on him, I stopped asking.

  I searched for answers on my own for a few years—checking the ledgers, making a map of banks and deposit boxes with pins on a corkboard—but saw no pattern, no clues. There were no keepsakes, identifiable heirlooms, or even documents of any kind.

  Shred began tapping on his keyboard. It spoke: “Not nearly as much as you might think, really. Those days were a blur for me. But I do remember her, Grey.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “First and foremost—she was not a woman to fuck with.”

  That was a bit surprising. What I remember of my mom was a woman who loved to smile. But, looking back, I could see that it was never a skill she mastered—as if she never did it much. The few times I remember someone taking her or our picture, her smile seemed like a façade. “Is she alive?”

  Shred did not resort to his iPad. Instead, he shook his head no.

  There was a tree that had recently fallen over and supplied a good place to sit once I had broken off a branch. As I did so, Shred typed.

  “The Triginta is us. There are some who reign us in. These are the ones who give orders to kill.”

  Cool Luke already told me that once a master elevates an apprentice it’s not just that the old master steps aside—the old master had to die. Was this how it happened?

  “These magoi killed my mom?” The branch I broke off the tree continued to be broken into smaller and smaller pieces in my hand while Shred typed and his computer-generated voice answered.

  “No. She’s the one who they sent to kill excess mages.”

  “Whoa. What? You’re saying my mom was some kind of mage-assassin?” I stopped cracking the branch between my fingers. Three minutes before The Triginta was just a peculiar, untrustworthy cabal of magoi. Now, not only was I one among them, but my mom used to be their hired killer. Who had she killed before coming to my father?

  Shred made an audible uhm, followed by additional taps on the screen of his tablet.

  “She was the Wayfarer.”

  Before I could ask “What’s that?” he was typing once more.

  “Not a mage. Someone bound to service. Don’t know much of anything more other than it’s like an office or something.”

  “But, then, why was she with my dad?” I looked at Shred and he handed his tablet to me while he broke off another small branch and sat down beside me.

  He gestured for me to give him back the tablet. “She was hiding from The Triginta. Eventually, something happened. Guy never told me what, exactly, just that she had to leave. He protected her as long as he could.”

  “She left to protect me?” The voice from the tablet had not finished the words, but since he was close enough I read each word as he typed.

  He looked at me, annoyed. “And your dad. Probably. Mostly you.”

  “So, you’re telling me the magoi elite have an assassin called The Wayfarer and that she eventually defied them and had to go on the lam?”

  “I don’t know if the Wayfarer refers to something to do with them or if it’s something else entirely. I wasn’t around much those days. Spent most of my time drunk and on the road. I wasn’t the kind of friend your dad needed back then. Shred slumped his shoulders and held his tablet at his knees, looking off into the dense brush in front of us. But yes—she was marked.”

  “And you don’t know why?” I was receiving more information about my family than, perhaps, I ever had before. Yet, it was not enough. Besides Shred, who was there to ask? Would Sunderlin know anything? It seemed Sunderlin had remained on the periphery of the magical world for the past half-century. He might now some things about The Triginta, but what were the chances he knew anything about my mom?

  Shred pursed his lips and shook his head no.

  “Then do these elite few have a new assassin?” It was bad enough that Triolo was a psych
opathic, schizophrenic mob-assassin-turned-alchemist. Could my mom have been something like that?

  Shred nudged me. Apparently my slow air intake was more like gasping.

  He typed again. “Almost certainly. But I don’t know who replaced her.”

  “And all this is why Dad never had anything much to do with other mages? Why you’d rather spend time with the local harmless denizens of The SUB than with those of us who work magic.”

  “Yep. Any day of the week. Present company excluded, of course.”

  Which brought me back to Sunderlin. He would have been too old to be an assassin. And how he cut himself off from the rest of the world and went through such great lengths to hide himself spoke volumes about where he might stand. “Can we trust Sunderlin then?”

  “I think so. He’s on the fringes like we are. He’s just as skeptical of the other members of The Triginta as we are,” said Shred’s singsong-computerized-voice. Shred had obviously reached the same conclusion I had.

  “What do we know nothing about these magoi who tell the rest of us what to do?”

  “The call themselves The Cor.”

  The Triginta was already a Latin term. I looked over at Shred’s screen he had typed cor. It was the Latin word for heart. “The Heart of the Magi. How very presumptuous.”

  He smirked, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed.

  I looked to him, waiting for him to make eye-contact. “Shred, one more thing—what was my mom’s name?”

  ***

  “Penthesilea Bowness. Penny.”

  Sunderlin stood on the stairs, looking at me, beseeching me with a compassionate gaze devoid of malice.

  The others waited patiently for our return. Cool Luke jumped up waving his hands to the chair and back to Sunderlin, “Please, sit.”

  Sunderlin did just that, and stretch out his hand to mine and clutched it.