Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1)

by Aaron Buchanan

  “Wait…what well? And my lineage? Why haven’t I heard any of this?” I was stunned that my father would hide such important information from me. “Why would he tell you?”

  Mania came and crouched next to Joy’s other side as we laid her back down on the ground. Until she spoke, it would be best to let the magic do its work. “You, Grey Theroux, are the Keeper of the Well of Gods. Your surname is Theroux, correct?”

  It might be impertinent to say tell a goddess who could eat my life essence of course, so settled on, “Yes, Mania. Theroux is my surname.” Even as the words left my mouth, it hit me. Theroux was an Occitane French word for someone living near a well. Dad never talked about my grandfather, but did say that he was his teacher for logomancy. Anything beyond the source of Dad’s knowledge was off-limits. Any time I even asked about my grandfather, my dad would either grow lived or completely sullen. He would shut down either way. He would retreat within his mind for days, hindering my lessons, let alone any father-daughter companionship. So, though I often wondered about my line beyond my grandfather, I learned to simply not ask. I never knew how many generations the family business went back. At one point, I even thought of going behind his back to dig up the information, but feared he would find out and stop teaching me altogether. In time, I learned to simply not wonder any more.

  Mania remained silent, apparently letting me work out my own thought processes.

  “Why did Dad talk to you about the Well? Where even is this Well?” In asking, I was also able to connect it, somehow, to everything else that had transpired.

  “He needed my advice. My price was information and he paid that price after I earned his trust. I am a goddess who once had many ears between her sons and daughters, despite that, I never knew of the Well’s location, nor can its location be divined.” Mania took the initiative and helped Joy, who did not say anything, but looked at Mania and digested every word. Joy was lucid and taking in the information in the same way I was. “What I do know is this: the Well is the spring from which all gods have come. There is a Well of Souls for your kind and a Well of Gods for mine.” Mania seemed to fade out of her corporeal form, but only a flicker. She leaned against a gravestone in a downtrodden posture.

  “I’ve heard of this Well of Souls.” Gavin walked between where Joy and I stood and Mania rested against the marker. “Temple Mount, Jerusalem. Both Islam and Judaism have records of it.”

  “Wait, Mania—if your kind,” I deliberated using the term, unsure if she would view my calling the gods her kind as offensive. “If your kind spring from this Well you mention, how is it that you do not know where the Well is?”

  “How well do you remember your first days and years, Grey?” Mania posed the question rhetorically, slumping her shoulders as she did so.

  It was strange to imagine gods and goddesses mirroring the same sort of frailty humans exhibited in our own infancy. Aside from the Indiana Jones movie, I remember coming across something about a Well of Souls in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Its citation lent credence to what Gavin and Mania were saying. This, in turn, led me to a new theory.

  “Mania, the god Apollo was murdered three nights ago. The weapon used to murder him was a three-sided pyramid, but long and sharp at the end like a dagger. It looks like it was made out of obsidian or something.”

  “The Sucikhata was shaped from Well of Gods itself.” Mania’s voice returned to its ethereal quality. I thought maybe the excitement of the day’s events exhausted her. Maybe the centuries exhausted her. “It is deadly to anyone formed from it.”

  Sucikhata was a word I knew: Sanskrit for sharp pyramid. A weapon that could kill a god was sitting in my vault for, likely, generations. And now, unwittingly, I was the Keeper of a Well of Gods I knew nothing about and that my father was too pained or concerned to inform me. In my head, I shifted through all the piles of books and manuscripts that were stored in that house or those that may have been squirreled away in the vault or even some other nook or cranny in the house.

  I looked at Joy, noticing the purple striations were almost entirely healed, though the smears of blood remained caked on her skin and made her black hair gummy.

  “You are well now, logomancer.” Mania came to Joy and caressed her cheek. “I wish you much speed, and much luck on your journey.” She put her arm down, reached into her gown, and held up necklace—with some kind of charm attached. Mania opened my hand and placed a necklace in the middle of my palm. I was reticent to accept her charm, but knew not accepting would certainly be against protocol. “For your journey.” She walked away from the three of us, fading as she submerged into the stone.

  The necklace felt strangely warm in my hand, but put the chain around my neck and clasped it together.

  “Yeah, so who was that lady?” They were the first words Joy spoke since her, for all intents and purposes, resurrection.

  I squeezed her tightly in an embrace.

  “Things wone are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

  —William Shakespeare, Troilus & Cressida

  “I have, for as long as I can remember, wondered not so much where souls go upon death, but where the come from to begin with? Is it the Universe’s own form of spontaneous human combustion? Instead of combusting, it humans?”

  —Gavin Moniz

  rEvolve: 4

  What we have learned:

  The essence of sentience is borne into this world via the Well of Souls. While no one culture will agree as to the creation—or formation—of the cosmos, most adhere to the concept of the soul. So integral was it to Egyptian belief that they believed the soul consisted of five distinct parts. The Egyptians were also the first known to suggest that souls derived from a single origin. Beneath one early Egyptian palace, it is said there was an underground domain from which the souls would be born from the Underworld. Even the deserts gods, Yaweh and Allah, claimed dominion over the Well of Souls on Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem. And so, this idea remained pervasive in many of the world’s religions. Even the objective Greek philosophers attempted to make reason with the idea.

  The gods themselves knew of this Well, for the soul was called forth from the ether—much like they themselves were. While many gods tried to usurp the Well for their own benefit—as more souls to worship them equaled unparalleled power—many still wondered at their own beginnings. So, these curious gods began searching the world over for the spring of their own existence.

  Some time after Jerusalem’s claim on the Well of Souls was disproven, the gods finally found what they searched for: the Well of Gods. They also found something they did not expect: there was a man there who tended the Well. He was a man of faith, but with no religion. These inquisitive gods took the form of men like they did in the epics of old and the gods called upon the Well-Keeper: “Why do you care for this well? It offers you no water, no nourishment?”

  The Well-Keeper derided them, for despite the gods’ efforts, he saw through their disguises: “My nourishment is knowledge. You wise gods should surely know this.”

  After many hours discussing the Well and the ways of the Well-Keeper, one goddess finally asked, “You have no religion, sir, but you are obviously full of faith. How can this be?”

  This Well-Keeper delighted in answering the gods’ many questions, but when he heard this he grew weary: “However misplaced and misguided it may seem at times, goddess, my faith is in my kind, not yours.”

  The goddess struck the Well-Keeper. Frightened, she and the other gods fled the man’s hovel.

  When the Well-Keeper’s daughter returned from the day’s journey into the nearest village, she found the lifeless body of her father. She buried him. And she tended the Well.

  “Your life happening again, without your ba being kept away from your divine corpse, with your ba being together with the akh…You shall emerge each day and return each evening. A lamp will be lit for you in the night until the sunlight shines forth on your breast. You shall be told: ‘Welcome, welcome, into your house of th
e living!’”

  —inscription from the Tomb of Paheri, Egypt

  Chapter 10

  Gavin followed our hatchback into Athens were we find a mom-and-pop diner with the audacity to actually be called Mom & Pop’s.

  Joy was alert enough to ask questions, so in the short ride from Trivium to Athens, I filled her in on the events of her seeming demise and her miraculous recover—Gavin, the arithmancer as well as what she heard from Mania was the first time any of us heard about Well-Keepers.

  I don’t think I had ever been so hungry in my life. Graciously, in addition to Mom’s meatloaf, I asked for two sides of bacon. Joy ate her burger and fries with reckless abandon. I made at stabbing her with my fork when she reached for the bacon. I eve grunted, calling to mind my even-more-ancient ancestors who dwelled in caves. She went for a piece of bacon a second time, but didn’t stop her. I was glad to have her back and I would buy a dozen more sides of bacon if she wanted.

  Gavin was not as peckish, but smiled and smirked his way through our mostly silent dinner. Once our bellies were reasonably full and Joy and I contemplated dessert, he posed his questions. “So, the Sucikhata has been kept in your family vault for generations and you had no idea? On top of that, your family have been some cabalistic order of protectors of some god-well?”

  “I can only tell you what I know. You’re going to ask me why I don’t know more, probably, but you have to understand, my dad just didn’t talk much about his past, his family, or even my mom, come to think of it.”

  “Really?” Gavin was incredulous.

  “That is pretty weird, Grey. Even by your standards.” Joy stacked and scooted some of her plates out of the way, perhaps making room for a dessert plate.

  “It is,” I conceded. “When I was little, I asked him and he would wall me out. I would ask my mom and she would just tell me she didn’t know and that I would have to ask him. I was young, but understood enough to stop asking.”

  “But surely there were little anecdotes or hints here or there?” Gavin’s arms were folded. He was resolved not to believe me. I could only do or say so much to convince him. When it came to it, it wasn’t him I thought I owed the answers to. It was Joy.

  “Nothing. It wasn’t just not talked about—it was off-limits. That’s the difference. When I was older, I came to understand that he just felt the past was best kept in the past. I wanted to know, respected him too much to push.”

  “That’s something I can understand, at least. I don’t want anything to do with my family either. I’d just as soon forget about them as well.” Gavin finally relaxed and took a long gulp of ice water, even chewing on some of the ice cubes.

  “This is about all I do have: my house—the one you were in—was a house my dad shared with his father, at least, and that the house had passed through inheritance at least one time before that. I did look up property records with the county. The house itself was built in the early 19th century. The vault, then, has been there since the foundation was first laid. The only other piece I have about the vault is that it was shipped from France. Whether or not it was made there, I have no idea.”

  “So, have you chased the paper trail for the house?” he asked.

  “County records for that house—for whatever reason—only go back to my grandfather as owner. They claim a fire wiped out records from before then. Odd situation.” I brushed my arms, not because I was cold, but because I was embarrassed. On so many subjects, I was well insulated from ignorance. About my own family and its history, I was almost completely in the dark.

  “So, there’s definitely nothing you can tell us about the Well. Or Wells, even?” Joy knew my house and my family dynamic well enough. She would not ask purely out of curiosity. She was hoping to spur my memory.

  I continued to ponder. Maybe a hidden room? Compartment? I’d read every manuscript and book in that house at least a dozen times. The vault? There just wasn’t anything there.

  Unless…

  The memory I used to unlock the vault: my father reading his antique edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I’d read the book, though not my father’s volume. Dad didn’t let me touch that one, so I read a copy from the library. When Dad died, I packed all the books and most other belongings and put them into a storage unit that served as one of my stashes.

  Joy and Gavin stared at me. I had gotten used to those kind of stares from strangers, but coming from them made me that much more self-conscious. Insecurity was something foreign to me. “I…I…” I stammered.

  “Wait,” Joy saw my discomfort and changed the course of the conversation. I was relieved. “Have you heard from Shred at all since he left?”

  “No. My phone was dead and I left it in the car to charge.” Saying nothing, I scooted out of the booth and went to retrieve my phone. I came back inside, waiting a few seconds for the smartphone to turn on. Returning to the booth, I set the phone on the table and waited the minutes it would take for the messages and voicemails to load. In the meantime, I flagged down the waitress and ordered a piece of rhubarb pie, hoping to keep the current awkwardness at bay. Joy ordered a piece of pecan, while Gavin sat back, leaning his head on the window, eyes closed.

  The same moment the waitress returned with our pie, my phone vibrated on the table with incoming messages. I waited a second more for any lagging messages before looking at the screen. “I have six texts. One voicemail.” And I began reading aloud: “First one: Landed. Been here 9 or 10 times. First time I’ll actually remember it. Second one: Portland Arms here in Cambridge a great little club. Played one song for open mic. Received many pints. Third one: In Tolliver’s Pembroke office. Nothing here. Tried to tease out hidden items. Nothing. Haven’t heard from you guys. Getting a little worried.” I paused, adding this guilt to my current state of mind.

  “I could have told him that.” Gavin kept his eyes closed. “Tolliver didn’t keep anything at school.”

  I continued reading: “By this point, I’m guessing something has gone to shit on your end. Hope it gets worked out. Headed to Tolliver’s flat. Would say there’s someone following me, but I’m hoping it’s just the years of illicit drug use catching up to me. If not, you might see some weird shit on the news. If you’re able to watch news.”

  I looked at Joy. She was the mirror-image of the guilt I felt. “Next text: Flat ransacked. Nothing left. Was searching. Someone followed here. Hiding to see who.”

  I looked up, seeing the final text. “The last one is just random letters he sent. F-j-h-k-l-l. No significance. There’s still a voicemail to check.” I put the phone down on the table, waiting for the message to play on speaker.

  “Grey. Joy. Just checking in with you guys. Haven’t heard shit from either of you. Hurry up and call me back. Things here are getting pretty damn odd. Fast.”

  I took up the phone and listened through the options until I could check the timestamp. He called at 3:13 a.m. That would have put him dialing at 9:13 his time. The date and time on the texts were all timed for when they came to the phone while waiting in the diner, so were of little value.

  I dialed his number a few times, while intermittently texting questions marks I received nothing in reply. I tried calling a few more times, but got no response.

  Everything that he sent in or texted were from about that time. The time in Athens, New York was just after six in the evening. He said he played a show at a local pub. That would not have opened until later in the afternoon. Everything must have gone downhill within just a few hours’ time.

  Joy leaned in close, a half-hearted attempt to leave Gavin out of the decision-making. “What’re we going to do?”

  “I someone ransacked the flat, then who did that did something to your friend…Shred, was it?” Gavin heard Joy’s question, but did not seem to take offense at Joy’s near-inaudible question.

  “Yeah. Friend of ours.” Joy had no reason yet to trust him, but she needed to understand that despite Gavin’s earlier subterfuge, if he wanted us dead, a
ll he had to have done was let it happen. For the time being, he was one of the few people we could trust. “He’s a musimancer. An old friend of my dad’s.”

  “So, you sent this friend of yours to look for Tolliver and now something has happened to him?” Gavin sat up from the window, looking less tired than he had moments before.

  “Yes. And now Joy and I have to go help him, if we can.” I turned to Joy, who was no longer hungry enough for pie, so instead dissected it with her fork. “Joy, I need you to go to my storage unit in Southbridge. Gavin, if you’re willing, I’d like or you to come with me to Cambridge.”

  “No, Grey—I’m coming with you!” Joy insisted rather loudly. The other patrons turned to look at us. I smiled at them and nodded. “Joy, I don’t trust anyone in my storage unit. You’re it. I’ll show how to break the wards and get inside. You’re looking for my dad’s old copy of Gulliver’s Travels.”

  “What about me—I don’t even have my passport,” Gavin protested.

  “You don’t need one. We’re magoi, aren’t we?” The waitress brought us our check and grabbed it to pay and leave.

  “But then I’m flying to England, right?” Joy asked pleadingly.

  “Okay. I’m in.” Gavin scooped up his jacket and folded it over his arm.

  “Don’t you have classes or something?” I reproved her, though I knew her well enough—her mind was made up.

  “Priorities, Grey! I told you I’m in this. I’m not saying I’m dropping out just yet, but I’m in this as your apprentice!” The word moxie is one of those often misapplied, but when it came to Joy, it was aptly used. She was quiet; she was sweet; but if something got her going, out came the moxie.

  “Book us some flights, then. Leave no less than 12 hours after our departure.” I settled the bill and met them by our vehicles. Joy took the keys was already putting my bag into the back of Gavin’s car and was scrolling through the screen of her smartphone.