Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1)

by Aaron Buchanan

  “Okay,” Joy turned back to one of the first pictures, “do you know what should go about here that’s missing?”

  “Lilliput. As in, there are always maps of Gulliver’s actual travels. Those aren’t there. None of the pictures seem like they belong.” I reached for the book and took it out of Joy’s hand. I paused at each woodcut, examining and trying to contextualize them within the story. None of them fit, though in terms of physical dimensions, they did fit into the book seamlessly. This means they were added, likely by my dad. Question is: why?

  “So, if these don’t represent anything from Gulliver’s world,” Joy mused, “what if they’re from ours?”

  It was a perfectly logical conclusion and one I was presently toying with, saving for the fact that I did not recognize the pictures. These were a forgery, perhaps reassembled by my father, or the pictures carefully reproduced onto bleached pages. If I had another copy of the same edition to compare and contrast, it might offer me some indication, but the new pictures were the hints, not the old.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. I don’t suppose you recognize anything. I swear I do, but then I notice something else that knocks my idea askance. I think the original woodcuts would have been labeled in some way, but they’ve been deliberately erased,” I said.

  Joy sat cross-legged on the floor. “Perhaps we should ask Victoria if she knows anyone?”

  I stiffened.

  “See if I know whom?” Victoria asked, coming through her front door. She was particularly good at sneaking up on people. I could see no wings, but her skills at stealth bordered on the amazing. Or annoying.

  “Someone who knows about old woodcuts or lithographs in books.” I turned to face her. Unlike our earlier meeting, Victoria looked, if not disheveled, then not as well put-together. Her face was not made up and she looked exhausted. She felt for an out-of-place strand of hair on the side of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. Of the gods I had yet seen, Victoria was in nearly the same state of health as Athena. Without the dangling piece of hair, I noticed her ashy complexion. Except, it wasn’t exactly ashy. According to legend, her veins would course with golden ichor, rather than blood. In any case, it had drained from her face. Her blood may be different, but her physiology was a rough analog.

  She sat, or rather, collapsed into the only empty chair in the room.

  “Pushan left,” I informed her, though I was sure she already knew.

  “He volunteered to conduct you safely on your journey here.” The goddess would rest soon, but she retained her composure, sitting cross-legged and straight in her Queen Anne. “It seemed to be more treacherous a journey than I had expected. For that, I must apologize.”

  I nodded at her apology.

  “Will he hide now?” Joy inquired.

  “Yes. Many of us have gone into hiding, but this is not to our advantage.” Victoria stood up and patrolled a small patch of carpet.

  I guessed that Pushan and other gods would be forced underground. I had not considered why that might be an unwise course of action. “Why isn’t hiding to your advantage?” It seemed impertinent to ask a goddess what plans she had, but her plans and ours would be closely aligned. Besides, as conscious as I was to their feelings, I couldn’t help but not that blasphemy for the gods stopped being an offense long ago—once humanity had, on the wholesale, chosen just a few gods to worship.

  Victoria looked at me solemnly, and stopped pacing. “We cannot tell if they have hidden themselves or have been made to disappear. It has proven difficult to tell the difference.”

  That was disconcerting.

  “So, you’re hearing of gods disappearing, but you can’t be sure if they have gone underground themselves or if they have been murdered?” I was trying to elicit more particular information.

  “Some of the murders we have confirmation. If others have disappeared from the same geographic location, we can only assume the worst.” Victoria walked to the kitchen and came back a moment later with a glass of water. “My contacts have all but dried up in most locations. I was not here when you arrived because I went to the British Museum,” she declared.

  I looked at her quizzically, seeing Joy mirror my expression. The only difference was I typically furrowed my brow, while she now cocked her head to her side.

  Pursing her lips, Victoria looked to be deliberating whether or not to reveal her secret. “Clio works there. She did not report to work.”

  I should not have been surprised by hearing that one of the nine Muses worked at a museum—let alone one of the foremost institutions in the world. If the Muse of history worked at the British Museum, then…

  “And the rest of them?”

  “They have retired to Cornwall. They have become quite frail. A few of them no longer possess their faculties.” I imagined a house of eight little old ladies tending garden and baking; maybe watching the skies and writing poetry. This world was truly in the throes of change. Humanity was already taking its next step, unbidden by an organization bent on forcing it. Victoria continued, “Once we finish here, I will evacuate them if I am able.”

  “If Clio has been taken,” Gavin asked, standing at the doorway, “then the Sucikhata and von Ranke have moved from the Far East to here. How is it that Revolve knows where to find you?”

  “They have had years to acquire intelligence on us. Perhaps even decades. If we hide, they may even know where we might go. It is reasonable to believe that they have been biding their time and have seized their moment once they had enough pieces in place to press their advantage.” Victoria sat forward in her chair, almost as if she were deciding if she should tell us anything more.

  Shred rose up from his supine position and was now sitting, hands clasped, on the edge of the sofa. He could not speak, but I could see that he was processing Victoria’s information along with, hopefully, anything else he may have learned from captivity or before.

  “If you ask me, I don’t think Revolve’s end game is to assassinate gods,” Joy said. “Though to what end?”

  She was right, of course. “With a name like ‘Revolve,’ I think we have to guess they are trying to revolutionize something.

  Shred motioned with his right hand, asking for something with which he could write.

  Victoria removed a pen and a small notepad from her clutch and handed them to him.

  He wrote the word: rEvolve

  “rEvolve?” Joy wondered. The spelling was stylized. “So, they are stylizing the spelling to emphasize the ‘E.’ So, ideologically, this is something like a revolution for evolution?”

  “Ugh. That’s terrible.” Gavin, still standing at the doorway, shuddered.

  “The name? Or the ideology?” I wondered.

  “Both.” He folded his arms. “Definitely both.”

  It did seem to indicate what we were dealing with; what we were up against: some new kind of fanaticism. “So, are we to gather that they are trying to usher us into some godless era of human evolution?” The theory took shape, and as soon as I said it aloud, I knew that, on the surface at least, that was the truth of it.

  “Dreadful.” Victoria sighed and slumped back in her chair.

  “Victoria. My book,” I held up the Gulliver book. “I think my father rebound this copy of Gulliver’s Travels after he replaced the original pictures with ones I don’t recognize.” I walked the book over to it and she received it tentatively. “I don’t expect you to recognize the pictures, but you might. Or maybe you know someone who would.”

  Victoria set the book on her lap, leafing through it with precision and care. “I believe, Grey Theroux, these are meant to be a clue only for you. A clue for you to find the Well.”

  “The Well of Gods?” I knew the answer full-well, though the existence of such a place troubled me.

  “Yes. What do you know of it?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I swallowed hard. My discomfort concerning the well, I realized stemmed from acknowledging that my father left me ignorant of its existence.
“Mania was the first person—being—I have ever heard mention it. My father never mentioned; never once brought it up.”

  “Then your father was protecting you,” Victoria proffered. Though she did not have Athena’s gravitas, Victoria had almost an administrative quality, however her presence invited warmth and trust.

  “Which means…” The ramifications were forming in my head.

  Joy vocalized them: “It means he’s known about rEvolve—or whatever threat they’ve posed for years.”

  Shred sat up and pantomimed playing a piano. He assuredly had something in his repertoire for firing up the neurons. I hoped.

  Victoria nodded and led him to a parlor adjoining her dining area. Gavin, Joy, and I followed and sat on the same style chairs that were in the room we had just come. Shred pulled the bench out and sat.

  Shred, clumsily at first, but then methodically tested the piano to see if it were in tune. It was. This was what he had left—an instrument for his voice. He might not ever be able to sing again, but sitting at the piano then, I knew that he would be fine. Eventually. The music was always his real voice anyway.

  Gavin and Joy took seats in the parlor. Victoria let the room to make us tea. Shred keyed at various notes, coaxing some scales; arpeggios or something. Shred owned a piano and several keyboards in his house, but I had never actually seen him sitting at his own baby grand.

  I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from him: Chopin? Rachmaninoff? Shred played and we listened. At first, Shred played to warm himself up—an acknowledgement that it had been years since he had touched a piano. Yet he played as if he were finding respite in each note. His warm-up included bits and pieces of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier—which made for a joyous, if not remarkable, intro. Victoria served each of us tea. We drank, and we listened. Shred’s composition was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was transformative. The ethereal combination of notes lingered in my ears, resounding past the music originating from the piano. Shred’s piece was potent and lifted my spirit, even sharpening my thoughts. I was inspired and unafraid of the consequences.

  Sipping the tea, I waded through my thoughts, grasping for any hints of what the woodcut pictures might indicate about the Well of Gods. Would knowing the geographic location help decipher the pictures’ message? Or were the pictures meant to indicate geographic location? No one spoke, even after Shred finished and left the room.

  Victoria finally broke the silence. “I know of a professor at Oxford who is a xylographer—an expert on old books; illustrations, specifically. If anyone can parse them out, it would be him.”

  “What about von Ranke and the Sucikhata?” Joy was rightfully worried, but it wasn’t as if anyone could forget the havoc it had wreaked.

  “I think it’s time to split into two groups,” Gavin suggested.

  “And I must try to save whom I yet can. I will leave you to it. Let me know what you four plan and I will make arrangements and accommodations.” Victoria excused herself and left our company.

  I raised an eyebrow, lifting my cup of tea toward Shred, Gavin, and Joy. “I’m thinking that Gavin and Joy, you head back to Cambridge with the book. Gavin going is obvious. Joy, you go too since if anyone is watching campus, you look like you belong there at least.” I pivoted toward Shred. “You and I need to find out whatever we can about the Well, but more than me trying to fill in the family history, we need to know if rEvolve is looking for it.” I put the saucer and cup of tea on the nearest end table and sat back, eyes shifting to my peers. “Since Mania first told me of it, I have been wondering not so much why my family were the Keepers of the Well, but why the Well would need to be kept. And why would my family, ultimately, leave it. I can’t help but think it’s part of rEvolve’s endgame. Us not knowing anything about it means we’re not going to be able to stop them, whatever their intentions.

  Shred still had Victoria’s pen and writing pad. He wrote the following words and showed them to us: We find von Ranke. I CURE HIM.

  I knew what curing was in this context. The song functioned very much like a Siren’s Song in that it lured the victim by pleasing the ear, coaxing euphoria, producing a kind of computer virus to the mind, destroying it. The musimancer also had to take great care to protect himself from it. Von Ranke would never recover.

  I nodded to him in agreement. Joy and Gavin looked flummoxed, but they did not ask what the phrase meant. I’m sure they could guess its general intent.

  Victoria came back, though dressed in an entirely different pantsuit. Her hair was also back in place.

  “Goddess,” Gavin addressed her, “where might we look for von Ranke?”

  “There are eight elderly goddesses under one roof on this island alone. Since we are working together, I will investigate one other potential target a few hours north. In the meantime, we must keep each other updated, please. Grey, I believe the Muses may have something to offer you in terms of information regarding the Well, though I cannot be sure.”

  I did not think that Victoria would have heard us talking about it, but apparently she had.

  “I will send you to them with my letter of introduction so Calliope knows to trust you. Speak only to her. My letter will also have instructions for what to do when you depart. While the others may have information for you, Calliope will be the only one to intercede for you. The others do not remember things very well from one moment to the next.” Victoria took a seat at a roll-top desk in the corner of the parlor, pulled a piece of stationery from a pile and began writing rapidly.

  Dementia of the gods; I did not believe this was a new phenomenon, necessarily. “Let’s go.” I turned to Shred who was holding up his pad once again. The words were too small to be read from afar. I grabbed it from him and read it aloud: Before we go, we’re going to Macari’s. Charing Cross Road. Buy a mandolin. Easy to carry. Surprisingly dynamic magic.

  What remained of the magoi would need whatever we could get our hands on to survive the coming days.

  “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

  —Seneca the Younger

  “I have a friend who keeps the remnants of his former religion in the trunk of his car. He showed me one day. There was a confirmation certificate, a crucifix, a picture of the Pope, some film about a saint. It was locked and hidden away like he was keeping his faith in the trunk like a cadaver. I think he was showing me as a way of asking me to help hide the body.”

  —Shred

  rEvolve: 6

  What we have learned:

  There are no mysteries which science cannot lay bare. The ancient Greeks knew full well that the lights in the heavens were not, like their old stories told them, gods and heroes, but rather lamps of distant worlds. These same Greeks also realized that the building blocks of life were atoms and that gods, on the whole, were altogether unnecessary—as one small kind of life form could, given time, exceed its obvious potential and become something entirely new. It took humanity millennia to take this to heart. But, once they did, the old stories were no longer used to explain what could not be explained to name what could not be named. Lavoisier renamed the world and all its contents; Darwin set his finches free—and in so doing, life. It was not a god who became death, but an American physicist. The building blocks of our very being are now utterly unraveled. Science even serves to rationalize the very substance of existence in our now proven Higgs boson: the “God Particle” responsible for creating matter in our universe. All of this is a testament to our superiority, for the gods are incapable of understanding even the most basic fundamentals of science. They do not speak its language, they cannot coerce its subtleties, nor make the far reaches of the firmaments obey them. They cannot co-opt science for their worship, for it undoes them so completely, so magnificently.

  Yet, here we are, erasing the last vestiges of this antiquated world and looking to make it anew. The story we now make is exquisitely and wonderfully true and it is our own.

&nb
sp; “A man can die but once; we owe God a death.”

  —William Shakespeare

  Henry IV, Pt. II, Act IIII, Scene 2

  Chapter 16

  While Shred was in the music store, I found a shop with legal pads and pencils for Shred. I also bought him a burner cell phone so he might converse with us via text. Hopefully, it would allow him to be more engaged in conversations. I’d never known him to fall into despair, but I know he did have his bouts of melancholy. He would write more music. And he might just find something else to sing for him.

  Shred med us at Victoria’s car. He was now wearing the fruits of his purchase—a t-shirt from Macari’s and carrying a case that assuredly held his new (or used) mandolin. His pants still had an unseemly amount of blood-stain brown and it was any wonder that the shopkeepers had not tossed him out for being a vagrant. However, the stack of money I had given him ensured he was treated well, I’m sure. Victoria spent her time booking us a train to Truro and advised to hire a driver to take us to Mousehole. She dropped as at King’s Cross with only about 20 minutes to spare. She did not tell us where she was going precisely, but it was best to leave her to her secrets.

  The evening grew dark and it became clear that we would not make it to Mousehole at a respectable hour. If von Ranke had his sights set on the Muses, then he would have already gotten to them shortly after Clio’s disappearance. Time was of the essence, but we were likely past coming to the rescue. More than anything, we were on a fact-finding mission and were to warn them to leave immediately. Making matters more perilous—the Muses eschewed most forms of technology, including telephones. And if something happened to them, Shred and I would divine some information about their whereabouts.

  We arrived in Truro at half-past nine.

  Our driver was reticent to drive us to Mousehole and wait for us, but the flash of a £100 tip coerced him into staying on past his shift. We were a short ways from the village of Mousehole when we came to the address Victoria had given me. I was surprised by the house as it was not so much a house, but a manor. It was not large enough to be lordly, but neither was it cottage-like as I had pictured.