Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1)

by Aaron Buchanan

  “Coordinates!” Joy shouted loudly enough a middle aged couple sitting near us stopped what they were doing and scowled at us as much as their old-fashioned English sensibilities would allow.

  “Bingo!” I confirmed with zeal to match, though a little quieter. “But I have no idea how to put the numbers together. Do either of you?”

  “I think so. Give me your pen and pad,” Joy requested. As she wrote, I thought of my storage unites full of old books and how some of those books would have books of similar size missing pages of woodcuts. A minute or two later, Joy had written, and rewritten a few different attempts, but settled on this: 44°25′34″N 03°44′21.

  “Okay, Gavin, plug those numbers into a map app, please,” I asked him. He took the pad, placed it on his knees and began punching in the numbers.

  He looked up, and now it was his turn finally look something like happy. “Here we are ladies—Cevennes, France,” he held up his screen for us to look. Gavin’s smile looked strange on his face, but I noticed for the first time, his teeth were a little crooked. Still, it was a warm, endearing smile that one day I hoped to more than emulate.

  “So do we go there next or do we even need to?” Joy asked.

  “First item of business,” I explained, “is track the Muses. Try our very best to rescue them, if we can. Then we have to do something about rEvolve.”

  “What do you think that should entail?” Gavin asked, smile wiped clean.

  “I’m not sure yet, but I have no doubt they won’t stop until we’re dead. Question is,” and I wasn’t sure if I was saying this in attempt to come to terms myself, or if I was saying it for the others’ benefit, “—are we ready to kill, not out of vengeance, but out of self-preservation?”

  “That is the question. But is there a difference?” Surprisingly, it was Joy saying it, though I wasn’t sure if it was for her benefit or Gavin’s. Or mine.

  “I don’t know.” The conversation was one I dreaded having, but our circumstances were only moving us toward making decisions we had not yet come to terms. I thought back to Trivium and to Doctor Linden in the Mill Street Cemetery. I made the choice to leave Linden alive and with a likely chance to survive. As we moved toward finding the Muses and rEvolve, I started to believe it was not the right decision, or at least, would no longer be the right decision. I fully intended on making it deadly for them, and not us. “Seems like there has to be, but I’ve never had to kill someone. But in everything I’ve ever read, there’s big difference.”

  “I don’t think any of your authors were killers either.” Gavin shifted uncomfortably.

  “True,” I agreed, “But I think we have to consider the effect our decision will have upon our humanity. So we’re committing to wiping them out? For ourselves?”

  “And the gods,” Joy added, taking a sip of her coffee and reclining into her seat. “When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” she recited.

  At least she knew we were squarely staring down that abyss. And I had to admit—I wasn’t nearly as fearful of it as I thought I would be. At least I realized that might be a problem.

  In just over two hours, we made it to Paris with some sort of tacit agreement between us. We would do what needed to be done. Maybe this was one of the reasons why the magoi divorced themselves from the entanglements of religion: no divine fear of reprisal.

  A youngish man, no older than I, greeted us. The lanky, dark-haired man’s were sallow—a physical trait for someone my age who started smoking early into one’s youth. He was standing outside of a black Mercedes, holding a sign that read Theon Greyjoy. It took me several walks back and forth across the concourse of the train station before I realize I was looking at a Game of Thrones character’s name.

  “Henri?” I squinted, suppressing a smile. It was a television show which, without Joy, I likely would not have seen. It was that much more interesting that Victoria was an apparent fan.

  “Oui,” he nodded. He spoke in French, asking for our bags to stow in the trunk of the Mercedes. Whether or not Gavin or Joy could understand, I replied in kind. I asked him to drive us to his favorite restaurant and it did not matter what kind of food it was. While the French pride themselves on their gastronomy, Henri took us to a seedy sushi bar on Marcadet. Still, it was good and the three of us were just short of starved. Once we had eaten, Joy accompanied me to the ladies’ room to run interference for me while I performed a divination using the hairs from Calliope’s brush. I bought a map at the Magenta Station almost immediately after our arrival. It was large enough that my divination would give us a fairly accurate location.

  A knock on the door, “Excusez moi. J’ai besoin d’utiliser le toilette. S’il vous plait, ouvrez la porte!”

  Joy’s mind turned the words over a few times in her mind, but her knowledge of French was passable. She replied and asked, very kindly I might add, if the woman could come back in about five minutes. There was no reply, but neither were there any more knocks to disturb us.

  The town came into focus on the map. “Cernay-la-Ville. Let’s go!” I unlocked the door and stepping out. The woman was patiently typing on her cell phone and did not acknowledge us as we passed her by in the narrow hallway.

  Henri told us that though he was not familiar with that area, and that he had a hard time believing anything of consequence could be found in that direction. Even so, he drove us on, making one stop for me to find a map of the region, but found nothing finely printed enough for our purposes.

  While September in Paris was much more hospitable than London’s climate, the day was overcast and, apart from the countryside, reminded me of our drive up to Cambridge. I wondered how Shred was doing with Urania, and hoped that they had some sunshine and that Shred was entertaining the goddess with his music while he healed.

  I had a brief conversation with Henri about how he came into our employ. He was definitely not a god and did not know the gods retained him for our service. Rather, he was given our job by an acquaintance of his from his apartment building. With a little more prodding, though, I had to believe it was one who still had enough measurable belief in this world to warrant living on his own and who had significant control over his faculties.

  I asked Henri to stop the car, giving him permission to take a smoke break if he wanted. I had noticed his habit while at the restaurant and knew that it could be used to keep him distracted if things got a little weird. Unlike Pushan, though, Henri was entering into the situation blind. We had general ignorance on our side, but Henri was in danger. I felt very badly about placing him in harm’s way, but didn’t think much could be done about it. If the town was really as tiny as he indicated, I’d ask him to drop us off on the edge so we could make our way through on foot. That would keep him from getting shot at, I hoped. Smoking outside the car, I repeated what I had done inside the restaurant, paying as close attention to where the point of the hair landed on the dot that was Cernay-la-Ville.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say northwest corner of the village,” Joy was looking at the hair and coming to the same conclusion.

  “I’m not sure if that is going to be good enough. Even if there are only four or five houses or whatever, we’d be announcing our arrival the moment we stepped onto that street.” I checked the time on the dashboard. My phone battery was long since dead.

  “Either of you have a pair of sunglasses?” Gavin padded around his own satchel, coming up empty.

  “But they’re not using any magic?” I could not be sure what Gavin had in mind.

  “REvolvers aren’t,” he went on, “But I have a hard time thinking the Muses haven’t.”

  “All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings,

  and so, give them the power to pull ours.”

  —Aldous Huxley

  “When I used to watch TV, I used to watch these programs about space. They used deep space photographs from the Kepler; from the Hubble. I couldn’t help but make eyes out of nebulas and galaxies. Sometimes I
saw apparitions of a man’s face in the clouds of cosmic debris. And always eyes; eyes peering back at me from three trillion years ago. Knowing. Seeing. I wondered if it could be God or if it was alien? You know, massive alien life forms each a few galaxies large. I couldn’t’ help but wonder: were supernovas a product of their anger? Black holes products of their grief?”

  —Gavin Moniz

  rEvolve: 7

  In the eighth century of the Common Era, in the country we call Cambodia, the Khmer Empire was established when one man, Jayavarman II, declared himself the “king of the world.” He established one of his capital cities at Mahendraparvata. It was a holy place and for many years, the seat of his power. Though, once Jayavarman forsook it, the once proud beacon of his faith and his empire disappeared beneath the jungle. For nearly 1200 years, the city was lost. Though, unlike Mycenae or Troy, time had not ravaged its ruins. Unbridled nature had usurped civilization.

  The gods have long been untamed nature threatening to engulf the civilization we have forged for ourselves. Our own movement has its roots in the humanism of the Renaissance, nursed by Voltaire, and born into our world by the French Revolution. We were fostered by Darwin, nursed by Nietzsche, and empowered by Einstein. Yet, our vision was never so clear as when our founder revealed to us indisputable proof of the existence of God—and not just the god who had the ferocity and audacity to make himself first among his equals—but of the Greek Pantheon; Egyptian; Maori; the hosts of the heavens were filled with the beings. But the heavens they did not inhabit. For all the belief of mankind, our people had not the power, had not the will to truly place them in the firmament as they have now told us for unfathomable millennia. Our founder revealed to us that the gods were chief among liars. He taught us that they were the receptacles of all what was the worst within us. He taught us that we were better than they; that we always had been. He impressed upon us that the gods were unneeded and that they exist, only because those of our kind believed in them. He forswore to us our cause: humanity will inherit the firmament and the gods will forever be chained to the earth; and we would forget them.

  God makes threats. Humans make progress.

  Now, nearly fifty years removed from the founder revealing the truth to us, we no longer fight the ignorance caused by the gods, we fight for our own destiny. And the gods have no place in it.

  “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”

  —Thomas Merton

  Chapter 19

  I offered Henri the sum of €100 for his Ray-Bans. As it turned out, they were not honest-to-goodness Ray-Bans, but rather bought off a streetside refugee a few days before. He graciously gave them to me for nothing, but hinted toward whatever tip I deemed appropriate following our time together.

  Gavin etched out his patterns with Henri’s pocketknife. He blew off the debris and wiped softly at the lenses. “Who’ll be getting the honors?”

  “I’ll do it,” Joy volunteered. “Just tell me what I’m looking for.”

  “Hues of purple. Darker the better,” came his reply. Joy put them onto her face, removing them, replacing them, removing them once more.

  “You know, Gavin, you’re in phenomenal shape…” She pushed the glasses back up the bridge of her nose. I had meant to ask too, but Joy had noticed something with the glasses.

  “I played lacrosse in high school,” he shrugged, dismissively.

  “You know, I kept wondering the same thing—how are you in such great shape?” I asked, thinking back to the night we met in Trivium and his feats of strength we witnessed in Cambridge. “I thought maybe you did crew for Cambridge or something. It takes a lot to wind you.”

  I saw Joy’s eyebrow raise above the frame of the sunglasses. Sitting in the middle, I could not look at both of them simultaneously. Joy was leaning all the way forward, staring straight; meanwhile, Gavin looked uncomfortable.

  “Fine,” he capitulated. He lifted up his shirt, revealing arithmancy scrawled across his flesh. They were tattoos.

  I had heard of some magoi doing this, but my father steadfastly warned against it. He taught me that anytime you use magic you become that much more reliant upon it—rely on wits not magic. Plus, if someone were to cut out the skin, would you be able to recover fast enough to save your life? So, a tattoo for strength, if removed, would leave you too weak to recover rapidly enough. At least, that was his reasoning. Even more importantly, he told me that any other magic-user—and this included the creatures of The SUB—could track you unless you were to specifically use Bill’s Quill. It was in those early lessons that he told me that each wielder had his or her own signature. Thinking of Gavin’s etched glasses, I had to imagine that each one of us had our own hue of purple that marked certain magic as our own. To tattoo the flesh with spells was to make yourself forever visible to a potential enemy—and once an enemy saw your hue, your magic was forever identifiable, like a fingerprint. In our line of work, it seemed irresponsible to make oneself so deliberately vulnerable, and deadly stupid at worst.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Donald needed me. The last few months before… well, now, his health was deteriorating. Rapidly.” He exhaled sharply, perhaps overcome by the memories of hardship he endured with his mentor and lover. Maybe something else. “He knew I would need more physical strength than I was then capable, so he did them himself in Springfield . He was hesitant to imprint me, but with us trying to steal the obelisk, I would need the strength and stamina; so he relented. I plan on having them tattooed over enough to break the spell when we make it out of this.”

  Admittedly, I was very curious as I’d only ever heard of such things. But it made a great deal of sense: he was much faster and stronger than I presumed a man of his stature could possibly be. “How well does it work?”

  “It enhances, but there’s a price to pay. Physiologically. Unless I’m stationary for any length of time, I need to eat constantly. Not getting the calories I need affects me. I’m still able to do what needs to be done, but I’m always hungry. I’ve gotten to the point where I can just ignore it most of the time. But,” he looked at me, smirking, “I know it affects my mood. So, sorry for that.”

  Gavin’s mood swings bordered on the mercurial and were only barely masked with his apparently well-practiced stoicism. Now, it made sense. “Okay, though I think you should have them tattooed over soon. As in, as soon as we’re done here.”

  “It’s crossed my mind. Just hasn’t been time.” He turned to look out his window. We were coming upon where Cernay-la-Ville should be. “Look alive, I think we’re here.”

  The afternoon light shined on the narrow road. The countryside was dotted with farms and houses sparsely spaced. The closer we got to Cernay-la-Ville, some of the houses got closer together and melded into shades of white and beige. Henri drove slowly enough to the center of the village, so slow that a few motorists made their frustrations known by honking and curses we could not hear.

  “Ugh. The houses are too close together. We need to get out and walk.” I was staring out the windows, but turned to address Henri: “Henri, plait tirez la voiture sur.” Henri’s understanding of English was apparently better than I thought, as he was already pulling to the curb as my request was leaving my mouth.

  “Merci, Henri,” Joy managed to say, following Gavin out of the Mercedes.

  The sky was a drab gray, but the weather was significantly better than in England. It only took criss-crossing the village once for us—Joy and I, at least—to require removing our jackets. Gavin did not sweat at all.

  There were few people to observe us as we traversed the streets. A slender middle-aged man stepped out of his newsstand, lit his cigarette, in French he asked, “You look lost. Or looking for something?”

  My first inclination was to lie, but thought better of it. “We are looking for individuals who might appear out of pl
ace--not unlike us in that regard. We have reason to believe they are human-traffickers,” I answered in French.

  “Are you police, then?” he asked.

  “No, but they took someone we know. The police are of no help to us,” I replied. That much was true.

  “Not surprising,” he snorted. “But I have had a few new customers. Not that unusual.”

  This, at least, sounded like a promising lead. “What nationality were they? Could you tell?”

  “One did not speak at all. The other spoke French with a slight Belgian accent, the kind that’s used to speaking German.” He toked on his cigarette. “I did not much care for the look of his quiet friend: a muscular bald man with the nose of an Englishman.”

  That had to be our old friend from Cambridge. “Silly question, perhaps, but did you happen to see what kind of vehicle they drove? Maybe what direction they came from?” I inquired, stepping in behind to enter his tabaccheria. I gestured toward the brand of cigarettes Henri smoked and asked for a carton.

  “I did not see from where they came, but I believe they drove a white freight van. Citroen probably,” identifying the make of the van. He handed over the box of cigarettes.

  It gave us something even Gavin and I could look for. The speed of our walk increased and Joy was now staring more over the frames of the sunglasses than she was looking through them. At the end of Chemin de Senlisse, we came to a driveway where Joy finally got a hit.

  “Over this fence, through those trees,” she pointed, “I think I see fuchsia? Seems more reddish in hue.”

  I looked at Gavin, “You ready for some recon?”

  “Sure. Cloak me?” he requested.

  “Yes. I’ll get you,” I removed my only felt-tipped pen and wrote unseen upon his flesh in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Past the stone-and-mortar fence Gavin bounded over, I could see a single-lane driveway twist into a heavily wooded area. I took a few steps back from the gate, just in case there were any cameras subverting us. As a precaution, I used the same felt-tip to duplicate cloaking spells for both Joy and me. As long as we were all under spells I created, we would have an easier time making each other out—but only when we were next to each other. So, as we stepped back toward the gate, we failed to get any sense where Gavin was. I took stock of my bag: plenty of pens, an array of Post-Its, paper; Bill’s Quill, inkwell. I only had eight darts left to inflict sleep, two to confound, and one other dart I kept in a small zipper pocket within my satchel. Plus, I had the dart gun and a carton of Gauloises cigarettes.