The bobbies continued down Gwydir Street toward whichever homeowner had called the cops. Maybe it was the parents of the twins for whom I performed my little fireball-trick? I could never know, but by some stroke of luck, it got Shred’s stalker into our grasp. I whistled for the others to climb over.
Gavin was the last to come.
“Stay here. I’m getting my cab back!” Pushan was about to turn the corner when he turned back to me and wagged his finger at me menacingly. “You owe me a new cell phone!”
Joy was brave enough to take a peek around the corner to watch Pushan’s approach. While I did hide the taxi, performing spellcraft on deities had to be a much more intense affair. It was very likely that Pushan saw right through my illusion, or, at least, knew where the vehicle was parked and would approach it regardless of my repellent.
A few minutes later, she hustled back over to where Gavin and I knelt beside our captive. “Quick, lift him up—Pushan’s coming with his taxi.” I imagined a fuming Pushan walking over to a car that didn’t exist and disappearing would have startled the policemen. I wondered how he got through so quickly—especially with the bearded man’s partner likely down the road.
The taxi pulled next to the cars that were already parked along the curb, Pushan bidding the cars around him to pass by—while cursing at them in Hindi. Pushan must have removed the Post-It with the binding.
Joy opened the back door and Gavin and I shoved the man inside, careful not to dislodge the dart in his neck.
“Pushan,” leading to my question, “will we be followed?”
“No, Grey. It was phenomenal,” Joy answered for him.
Pushan harrumphed, but added nothing.
“He just kept pace behind the two cops, crossed the street at the flat and flipped the other guy—who was still in the car, I guess—off. With both fingers. Except his fingers shot light. Like, blinding light!”
I looked at his eyes in the rearview and new he had to be grining. Whatever stories were told of Pushan, he was associated with the power of the sun. I smiled wickedly at the thought of Pushan’s solar-powered fuck yous. The bearded man’s partner would be blinded for the next several minutes. And who knows how long after that. I could have empathized, yet found myself snickering to myself.
“Where to now, boss?” Pushan asked.
I shrugged, spit-washing the cloaking spell from my hand. I wasn’t sure if twas safe to go back to the hotel, but we would certainly need to go back at some point. “I don’t know. Gavin—what do you think? Is there a place we can take this asshole and have some privacy?”
With the adrenaline rushing through him, and a solid lead to be followed, Gavin’s spirits had brightened considerably. “I know just the place.”
Pushan let us out at the Mill Road Cemetery and drove off with Joy’s cell phone so we could contact him when ready to depart. Cemeteries, in my line of work, were a place I was forced to frequent from time to time. However, this cemetery was lost. Or, at least, large patches of it rebelled against cultivation. Age erased inscriptions, grass overtook tombstones, trees conquered pathways. It was a stark juxtaposition of life and entropy. With the bearded man still asleep and cloaked, no one would notice the weight Gavin bore upon his shoulders in a fireman’s cary. Gavin must have been a competitive athlete at soe point. He was tall, but lithe and muscular. Given his trek through the woods by the trivium and his seeming lack of effort now, no one could question his incredible fitness.
The cloaking, by this point, was superfluous—there were no passers-by in the graveyard. It was the middle of the day, but it was exactly what Gavin promised: private.
“You know what you’re gonna do?” Gavin asked, setting our captive down on the ground, but propping him up against one of the gravestones.
I looked at man’s beard and face, imagining him without facial hair and hoping that would stoke some sort of remembrances. His hair was dark, but the beard had a nearly copper quality to it. His face was pock-marked underneath the beard, so much so that I knew I would have recognized him if I had ever seen him. I had not.
“Yeah. Hold up his head. I’m going to write on it.” I used Bill’s Quill and its matching inkwell. I stretched the skin on his forehead taut. It was a pentagonal pattern for truth. I bound each of his limbs, hands, and feet with triangular bindings to keep him still and submissive.
I pulled the dart from his neck and waited for him to return to consciousness.
He did so with a start. Had I not bound him, he almost certainly would have hurled himself at me. As is, though, he heaved his chest threateningly at me.
I was not an impulsive person. Far from it—I was the opposite; to a fault. Joy called me a “percolator.” Information had to be distilled and percolated through my mind before I casted judgment. Now, though, I stared at this man and tried to determine which question I would ask first.
“Where is my friend, Shred” The musician you followed from Portland Arms and kidnapped from Donald Tolliver’s home?” I took it for granted that the man before me wanted not only to lie to me, but injure kill me. His chest heaved even more and then held in place, trying to hold his breath until he passed out. “I can also keep you breathing,” I said, unamused.
The captive flicked his eyes up and down, finally realizing the full extent of how limited his movement was. He refused to speak. That I had not yet accounted for, so bent down with the Viceroy Rollerball I obtained from Smythson’s and wrote the pattern and words for speak.
“Where is Shred?” I repeated, though at that point maintaining my composure was a mounting difficulty.
“In a house,” our mystery man answered. By the sound of his accent, he was a Scot. Undoubtedly, he also knew he was under a truth enchantment as he intended to answer questions as minimally—yet truthfully—as possible. This was going to be a delicate and tedious process. But we had the time.
“Is Shred alive?” Joy bent over him and asked. I calculated what tack to take for the next question after he answered that one.
“Probably,” he replied snidely.
“Is he in a house in Cambridge?” Gavin asked, catching on to the fact were playing a game in some respects.
“Yes,” the bearded man responded. It was a game to him, though he had not quite figured out yet that he’d lost.
Six questions later, we had an address with the help of presenting him an online map application. An additional four questions allowed us to discover that Shred was being guarded by only two men.
“Who are you? What is your name?” The intensity of the moment overcame me. We were getting answers. Finally. I looked into his eyes, letting him know by my gaze that his mortality was a matter of serious question.
“Frederick Linden. Dr. Frederick Linden.” Linden realized four or five questions ago the futility in trying to evade questions. His haughty attitude had dissipated into churlish sneer. It was, ultimately, a look of defeat. Having him realize it allowed me to keep the anger welling within me at bay.
“Dr. Linden, for whom do you work?” Gavin posed.
“I work on behalf of humanity,” he spat and his look of superiority returned in an instant.
“Don’t we all.” I said, exasperated.
“No. The gods do not.” This was a gift of information meant to pique further questions. I’d bite, but only with the right question. Joy and Gavin both looked at me, then back to Linden. They, too, were trying to formulate their own questions—or set of them—to ask.
Joy held up her finger in a brief gesture, stalling for a moment before asking the question she was still forming. “Dr. Linden, who, specifically, has tasked you with this mission to kidnap Shred, kill Tolliver, and murder any other mages? And what is the specific name of the cause for which you fight? And lastly, who now wields the Sucikhata? Three questions. Do not cheat me.” Her voice trembled, but was fearsome, speaking with an authority I instantly respected.
Linden’s eyes suddenly flashed rage, but just as suddenly stabilized. “The
leader of my organization is Doctor von Ranke. If the Sucikhata is your name for the weapon, then he is the one who wields it. We cause is one of revolution against the slavery of superstition and evolution of our species. We operate under the organizational moniker of Revolve.”
I doubted I could ask many more questions without getting circuitous, backwards, non-truths. And if he knew where to find this von Ranke, there would be no way to get to him before he moved to his next target.
But there was one question I had in mind from the moment I shot him with my dart. “Dr. Linden, do you know who killed my father?”
For the first time since we began our session, Linden refused to look at me. “Yes.”
Chapter 14
Joy was up and on Linden in less than a heartbeat. Gavin restrained her, but it did not stop her from a barrage of words.
“YOU MOTHERFUCKER! YOU TELL ME WHO KILLED MY DAD!” she bellowed.
Not for the first time was I happy about the remoteness of our location.
“I did,” Linden rasped.
He was motionless, as he could only move muscles in his back and his neck. The exhaustion and frustration I felt in that moment coupled with the burden of knowledge just dropped on Joy and me was overwhelming. I laughed, knowing full well it was out of place, when I noticed the discomfort of Linden’s current predicament incised upon his pock-marked face. I sunk down, covering my face and my tears. This was not a reaction I expected to have. In the gravity of the moment, I found solace in vindication. Yes, my father had been murdered. And I had his killer right in front of me, at my mercy. Tears flowed freely and it was now obvious my laughter had turned to crying.
I sat in the grass of the cemetery that could well have doubled as a garden, rubbing the water from my eyelids and wiping it on my jeans. I sobbed harder because the word mercy seemed like the most foreign word I had ever learned. By the time I looked up, I saw that Gavin maintained a vigil over our prisoner. I used the bottom of my shirt to clear more tears from my eyes.
Joy took my efforts to regain my composure to recollect her own.
I cleared my voice, “Aside from following orders, why was my father’s—our fathers’—deaths necessary?”
Linden scoffed. “You magicians aid and abet the gods. That is reason enough.” The momentary look of shame all but disappeared. My father was keeper of the Sucikhata, and his murder was somehow tied to this Revolve’s plan to retrieve it. The minute I opened my vault and Gavin walked out with the weapon, I was expendable. More than that—now I was a target. Gavin had tried to keep Joy and me pacified with his Lotus-Eater. I we had remained at our apartment in Springfield, chances are we would have been eliminated by now.
I texted Joy’s phone so Pushan would make his way back to pick us up.
Gavin, in the meantime, was able to confirm that Linden’s organization poisoned Tolliver with polonium-210. No manner of healing would have cured Tolliver if he were exposed to the radioactive element from sundry and unknown sources. Yet, it was curious how Gavin was not also showing signs of radiation poisoning. They must have recognized Gavin’s role in stealing the Sucikhata and let him be.
This organization seemed to be made up of educated men, both intelligent and formidable. Yet, their penchant for blood and brutality undermined any good they claimed to work toward.
As Pushan drove slowly up a driveway that ended in a footpath to our right, a last question suddenly occurred to me to ask: “Where is the Well of Gods?”
Linden shook his head, finally satisfied he had nothing to divulge. “I do not know, Well-Keeper. But I understand you do?”
He didn’t know that I didn’t know its location. Maybe I was a part of their plan for the short-term after all. I kept my expression as passive as I could. There had to be something about Dad’s copy of Gulliver. Pouring over that book in the near future was suddenly of paramount importance.
“Let’s go get Shred. I’m done with this festering pile of shit.” In not bending over to wipe his bindings clear, it was a tacit order to leave him be. Let him rot. Granting Linden mercy of any sort was something above what I was capable, despite all I had ever read in my books and stories about finding room in one’s heart to forgive. There was no mercy, no forgiveness for Linden. The absolute most I was capable was leaving him there in the Mill Road Cemetery; immobile and cloaked. Given the privacy of the location, he would have to yell himself hoarse for someone to find him…and even then they would not see him. His best hope was to wait for rain or hoped he sweat off his bindings. The biting September chill made that seem unlikely.
I piled into the taxi behind Gavin and Joy. We relayed everything we learned from Linden to Pushan, including the address of the house were given. Pushan took us out to Mill Road and drove us to Shred’s location.
We had to assume that there were now three men in the house. While one man could, conceivably, be keeping an eye on our hotel room in case of our return, it was just as likely that they’d all be waiting at the house for Linden. Up until now, and virtually confirmed by the intelligence we’d gathered up until that point, Revolve not only disdained magic, but meant to kill anyone who used it.
I wrote out several sleeping spells and packed them into darts as we came out of Cambridge and to a more rural enclave called Madingley. Pushan fidgeted restlessly. We already told him that the Sucikhata must not be in Cambridge, so whatever vexed him was not clear. It was possible that telling him about von Ranke and Revolve was enough, but it was more likely he was concerned for his friends and colleagues.
I packed more spells into darts: one for flame and one for fog; and one I discovered shortly after my dad died in a scroll gathering dust in the corner of the alcove in the vault. I would keep it in a separate pocket, away from the others, and hope I wouldn’t have to use it.
The house we came to in Madingley was one of the few set back from the road, shrouded by a fence line, hedges, and trees that only let us glimpse a thatched roof on two-story house.
“Are you ready?” Pushan slowed to a stop at the entrance of the driveway.
“We are.” Thankfully, Gavin had already written out his own version of an obfuscation spell and sat near-far enough from me that he seemed to shimmer in the pale light of the day. I still wore my own spell, so only had to perform the same spell upon Joy.
Pushan rubbed at the rubber on his steering wheel in agitation, nearly breaking my concentration. I had just finished a final flourish when someone rapped on Pushan’s window. If startled, Pushan brushed it off quickly and rolled his window down.
“Yes?” Pushan asked the man.
He was tall—somewhere in the range of 6’5”, with caramel-colored skin, goatee, wearing a button-up shirt, tie, and vest. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, revealing sinewy arms and a tattoo of a symbol I did not recognize.
“Are you looking for someone, sir?” He spoke with a refined English accent that belied his physical appearance. In fact, nothing about his voice matched his build.
I tapped Gavin and Joy each on their knees and motioned toward the house. I pointed for Gavin to roll down his window, as I would not be able to take a clear shot through the plexiglass that separated us from Pushan. Once Gavin had the window down, I crawled over to him and he helped me out by hoisting me out by hip and thigh. I took aim and fired at the man’s arm. He slumped down immediately, hitting his head against Pushan’s window sliding down in a prism of blood.
I climbed out completely and onto the roof and half-whispered, “Get out! Now!
Gavin and Joy swung the car door open, leaving it open. Gavin came around to the driver’s side to help Pushan carry the robust man around to our door and lift him inside and quietly close the door.
“Come on!” I walked toward the front door of the home, pointed at Gavin and then Joy and then to the door. Gavin hopped the gate and, presumably, meant to approach through the back door.
Warily, I stepped to the side of the door and reached my left hand over to depress the thumb la
tch of the front door. I had no time to determine whether or not the door was locked when a gunshot burst through the door, splintering wood. Joy symmetrically on the other side of the door jumped down and I found myself doing the same. I crawled behind the bush to my immediate right that grew under one of the front windows. I pawed around at the ground, my feet, the bush for anything to throw but found no rocks or stones. I emptied the dart gun and used the handle as a hammer to shatter glass. Gunshots came through the window. I reloaded the dart gun, hoping the local constables were not already called. I waved at Joy and motioned for her to do the same thing to the window on her side.
Joy clawed around her and likewise came up with nothing. Instead, my fearless apprentice scooted closer to the window and knocked three times in quick succession. It was just enough of a distraction. I popped up, narrowed my sights on the shooter, and took my own shot. He collapsed on the floor.
Gavin was already kicking down the door on the other side and arrived just as Joy and I were checking the bottom floor for any other inhabitants.
Gavin bounded up the set of stairs and disappeared with utter disregard for himself. “Check the rooms on the right! I’ll take the left. Hurry!” I yelled after him. With my reloaded dart gun at the ready, I followed Gavin, though taking much more care ascending than he did. Joy flanked me with nothing more than ceramic pitcher she found in a bowl in the dining room.
She took the two rooms at the end of the all so we could meet in the middle.
“Over here!” Joy called out. Gavin and I both ran to the room from which her voice had come.
Shred sat on a dining room chair that matched the set at the bottom of the stairs. The rest of the room was empty, except for a rug upon which his chair rested. His shirt was matted with blood, his face swollen from beatings, and both he and the room stank of his own filth. Though his chest heaved with labored breath, he was mercifully unconscious. His hands were duct-taped behind him, while both of his legs were duct-taped to a leg on respective sides.
Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1) Page 15