Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1)

by Aaron Buchanan

  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.

  This perplexed me. My dad never told me what it was, only that it had to stay in the vault. I’m not even sure if he knew what it was. It was not a true pyramid, as it only had four sides. IT was about eight inches tall (though I never saw fit to measure it, heavy, and black. It looked to be basalt, as every time I looked it over it reminded me of something I’d seen in the lava fields of Hawaii. Obsidian, maybe? Because it was so tall, it stuck in my memory as something too sharp for decoration. It was, however, peculiar, how the dust never seemed to settle on it like it had so much else in the alcove. I grabbed Shakespeare’s Quill, its inkwell and went back upstairs.

  I sat on the hardwood floor in the empty living room—still naked—staring at the lump of clothing and belongings. I examined the Post-It arrow, reset it, and saw that it always consistently pointed to the east each time I repositioned it. Hopefully, that magic would hold for just a little while longer. Something here lost me the strange black pyramid. What to blame? Nearly an hour of pointless analysis, I felt a dull throb pulsated through my lower extremities, my ass began to ache. I tried a divining spell on the belongings, but came up with nothing. I took each Bic pen and examined them more closely. I removed the blue and black tabs from the ends, pulled the ink out of the cylinders and noticed nothing amiss. I looked at my Sharpies. It was because of the now-setting sun glaring through my living room window that I noticed something odd about the cap of the black Sharpie. At first, I thought these were just incidental marks I made from use, or maybe even teeth marks. In fact, these marks fine—as if made with a fine tipped instrument of some sort. There were small numbers and runes. I squinted and made out small patters with additional letters and runes. I recognized a couple words of gibberish that held no meaning to a logomancer—but all sorts of meaning, I’m sure, to an arithmancer.

  Chapter 2

  “Someone has broken into our apartment and my house.” I was trying to quell the boiling vat of acid in my stomach and think levelly.

  Joy’s dark eyes blinked at me blankly. “What do you mean someone has broken in?” She was incredulous, but still spoke as if I might be pulling her leg.

  “Has anyone else been here that we know of? There are only about four people in the world I talk to in a given day. None of them would be the thief. Or thieves.” I still needed to explain to Joy the events of my day. Until she knew the story, I tried to appear less indignant than I actually was. I surmised that it wasn’t working, judging by Joy’s nervous laughter.

  Joy and I shared the apartment. Joy’s name was on the lease, and in return, I paid for more than my fair share of the rent, utilities, food. The paranoia was a flowering weed that went back since my father was murdered. Ever since, I needed the anonymity, and she needed…mothering? If nothing else, a friend. And our fathers were murdered while together, so there was certainly a bond.

  Joy’s father was my dad’s best friend. Professor Hansen was a philology professor at UMass. Supposedly, when I was eight, my father had heard that Hansen’s scholarship was impeccable. My dad used one of the manuscripts from the vault to entice him into becoming a consultant for my dad’s “business.” Of course, Dad didn’t let loose the pre
cise nature of the family business, but one day, Dad inadvertently picked up a dybbuk—a demon from the Hebrew belief system—and brought the spirit into Professor Hansen’s…where it tried to seize onto the professor and possess his body. Dad, as he told the story, spent the next several minutes getting beaten by a man who had likely never thrown a punch in his entire life owing to the skin splitting on his knuckles, spewing out blood all over my father. The key to subduing a dybbuk is confining it to a box. Trying desperately to stay conscious while not harming Hansen, and with someone else banging outside the door, Dad used an old boxy Rolodex from Hansen’s desk. It worked. He wrapped it in duct tape, sealed it in concrete and sunk it to the bottom of the Cobble Mountain Reservoir.

  When Joy’s dad came to, Dad explained in a way that could have only made him sound like a mad man. It wasn’t until he opened the door and handed the professor checking in on the ruckus a piece of paper that sent him silently on his way, that Hansen came fully to his senses. Instead of rage, or commensurate emotion, Hansen was overcome by gratitude. His wife was pregnant with their first child and he couldn’t wait to see their baby—and would never want to leave it without a father. That baby was Joy. While an older child by that point, my parents did a respectable job insulating me from the family business. But I do remember that Professor Hansen and my dad were the best of friends after that. All three Hansens were fixtures at my house over the next few years, though that seemed to end once my mom left. I never saw the Hansens or their toddler-daughter at our house again.

  I didn’t see Joy again until the funerals for our fathers. Whatever theory Joy maintains about whether or not their deaths were murder or mundane, they did, in fact, die together in the same house I refused to live. They were both sitting on the couch innocuously, staring at a TV screen. I’m the one who found them. This was nearly 20 months ago. The medical examiner chocked it up to carbon monoxide poisoning. The autopsy was inconclusive. By then, I had just turned 26 and had “home-schooled” for most of my adolescent life. Home-schooling at my house was really my logomancy apprenticeship. I had no friends to speak of and coalesced into the brainy, awkward girl I am now. I had no one to call, no one to confide; with whom to grieve. I befriended Joy. I asked her to help me investigate my house, to look for evidence our dads were murdered by something not belonging to the natural world.

  Joy’s mom was already dying of breast cancer when Professor Hansen passed away, and died only four months later. Joy was about to graduate high school and was a few months from starting at UMass. I came to stay with her. Call it post-traumatic stress, but the thought of living in my own house haunted me in a way that gave me fits of hysteria, leaving me unable to breathe. Joy decided to sell her parents’ house, so we moved into our apartment nearly a week after she made the decision to leave it behind. She humored me in my search for clues, even if she was an initiate into the wider, darker world. Still, I could tell she did not want to put much stock in any of it. She was 18 and fully intent on leading a normal life. Joy was a good kid, even if she were too eager to lead me into a life of normality, or just a slightly-less-awkward-at-social-gatherings life. Now, at 19, she was wise beyond her years. Not only wiser than I was at that age, but also probably wiser than I was on almost any given day.

  Joy sighed in exasperation, falling back into the couch cushion. “You know I don’t bring anyone here. You have me good and spooked by…everything, including some of your stories. There’s just no way.” She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, eyes closed. It was the exact same mannerism I remembered seeing in her father once or twice. In fact, her eyes were about the only thing that reminded me of her dad—her mother was Korean. Joy’s eyes looked entirely Caucasian, however, and her visage, while very pretty—to the point of seeing her disarm members of the opposite sex—she also could pass for either race. “Let’s go over the last week, then, Grey. Who’s been in the apartment? No one.”

  “You’re sure, no one?” I asked again.

  “No, no. Wait…” she paused, “there was a guy from maintenance who replaced the air filter on Monday.”

  I looked at the hallway where the intake was for the air conditioning unit. “There is profound genius in using the mundane,” I mused, getting up and fishing a quarter out of the old Ouzo can we used for loose change. With the screws unlatched, I let it drop to the floor on its hinges. “Get me a fork or something, will you? I don’t want to touch this. And a Sharpie. Fresh out of the package in my closet.”

  Joy brought me a fondue fork and used I used the Sharpie to write a protection grid on the fork. The thin nature of the fork limited the potency of the spell, but I hoped it would be enough. Once warded, I used the fork as a lever to pry the filter out. Lying flatly on the grid, the markings hit me like a kick in the head. “We need to get this out of here.” Using the fork, I pointed to one particular pattern painted with symbols, numbers, and gibberish. “This, Joy, is somebody trying to lull us into complacency. This mark here is called The Lotus-Eater. This is very articulated. What’s more, it’s folded together with other magic to extend the range of the magic’s field. Master-level work. It’s brilliant to put it on an air filter. We’ve been breathing in this spell for four days now.”

  “I suddenly feel fortunate to have been busy this week.” Joy pointed at the filter, “What’s the rest of it? The lotus mark isn’t even a quarter of what’s going on there from the looks of it.”

  “Something to actually make us breathe in the effects of the magic. I’ve seen The Lotus-Eater in one of my dad’s books. I have no idea exactly what it’s all about, though I’m willing to wager it has something to do with being susceptible to arithmancy. Particularly spells used to hoodwink people. Who knows what else, really.” I found myself staring back at Joy, rather than the filter, who had taken my words as warning and backed up a foot or two. “What did he look like? The maintenance man? Was it one that we’ve actually seen around? Like Tommy or that other Hispanic guy? I know there were a couple more.” I took the quick moment to look at the Post-It in my pocket. The arrow wanted to settle north, but I could tell it was losing its juju. We would need to start tracking very soon.

  Joy returned to the couch, made as if to sit down, but quickly thought better of it. “No. It was the new, attractive one. D-name. Dave or Darren or…”

  “Devin!” I remembered whom she was talking about. She was right, his attractiveness made him easy to remember. He looked almost Hispanic, but now that I was honing in on his image in my mind, analyzing, he seemed to have more of a Mediterranean look about him: dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, though not as much as many from that area of the world. Either his master underestimated his student’s ability to stick out in one’s memory or just did not care about the risk. “Well, I’m sure it’s an alias, but yeah. That’s who we need to look for.” I grabbed a garbage bag from under the sink and wrote a binding on it that would help negate the effects of its contents—I had plenty of canvas, so took great care in intensifying my magic to obliterate what would be inside. “Use the fork and help me push it into the bag.”

  Having disposed of the filter, I phoned Enterprise to have them meet us at the Green Way Apartment office. I made a point of offering an extremely generous tip if the driver were able to come within the hour.

  The arrow on the Post-It still pointed northward, but I feared it would be just another piece of scrap paper by the time we were able to drive out of the parking lot. “I have an idea. We need to get inside the office. Quickly, before the car gets here. Even if Devin is an alias, there has to be some kind of paper trail on the guy.”

  “Should we be so fortunate as to find an address?” Joy was keenly intelligent and in the right set of circumstances, sharply witty. We were able to find our common ground because, while she tended to fit in better with her surroundings, her intelligence and beauty had a way of keeping people at a distance. Instead of being a popular girl, she was the smart girl; instead of cheerleader, mathlete. I had long contemplated asking
her to apprentice, but never got up the courage. She had already lost so much happiness, taking her away from her collegiate career seemed excessively cruel. Besides, she still seemed at that age where making friends and racking up accolades were of paramount importance. I could never begrudge her that, either.

  “Yes.” I jimmied open the lock by sliding a piece of spellbound paper through the jamb. Even the deadbolt unbolted. The alarm went off, but I silenced it with a Post-It I only moments before wrote out. I left it on just long enough to short-circuit the alarm and cut it off from power. That itself might trip alarm at a dispatch office, so I knew we would need to hurry. Joy followed me into the office and I used the same jimmying trick on the filing cabinets to allow us to find the personnel files. There were six filing cabinets, so Joy thumbed through the drawers as I moved on and popped the next cabinet. Once through, I was looking through the last cabinet, though it was just too difficult to read, despite the ample light spilling through the blinds from the street lights. “Turn on that lamp real quick,” I told Joy, “I need to see something.”

  “Did you find it?” The lamp came on, blinding us both for a second.

  “I think so. I have the address,” I removed my cell phone from my pocket and took a photograph of it. I smirked, acknowledging that the address was to the north of us. “I need to check for something else, just to be sure.”

  “Hurry,” she whispered, “I think I hear someone at the door.”

  I stuck the folder in my jacket, and went to Joy to write my cloaking spell on her hand. Just as I was finishing my own, the door of the office came open.

  “Stop right there!” The security officer burst in, brandishing his pistol, but pointing it at the lamp, and not where Joy and I stood in silence. I grabbed Joy’s hand and tip-toed out of the office, leaving the guard to make sense of the mess we made.