Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1) (7 page)

Joy placed Bill’s Quill in my right hand. I slid it in to writing position. “I’ll hold the inkwell. One dip per word?”

“Maybe not even. I think I want to make the triangular pattern line up with the sides of the trivium. Keep that in mind.” In the distance, I thought I heard a car door shut, as if he or she were being trying to be discreet about it. The crunches of the frosty ground and Joy’s steps made me doubt myself and I dismissed it.

I focused my will and began writing the first word in Latin for find. “Ink?” I asked as I finished.

“Okay,” she replied and slid the paper slowly, likely taking care to not get the whiskers into the word. I heard the
click
of the LED keychain she bought back at the strip mall. “Go.”

I wrote the second word in Greek and once assured the ink was still strong, she turned the paper and I wrote the last word in Sanskrit. “Should be sufficient, I hope.”

“Grey—it’s not doing anything. The words look right. They follow the angles of the trivium. Wait. The whiskers are changing. Like…disappearing.” Joy sounded shocked.

“What’s happening?” I asked helplessly, not wanting to move for fear of jostling the spell-paper.

“They’re changing color. They’ve gone white.  Some were gray, but just as many black. Now they’re all white. Clear. Almost translucent.”

That was not what I expected to hear. “If there is no life in the hairs, then there is none in the body. He’s dead.”

Simultaneous to the word
dead
leaving my throat, I heard running and felt myself bowled over in a tackle. As soon as I regained some equilibrium, I had every intention of clawing my assailant’s eyes out!

“DOWN!” the tackler yelled. I struggled and stopped altogether when I heard the first gunshot.

Two more shots popped from somewhere distant, with any echoes falling mutely on the trivium. I let myself be pulled, hoping it was Joy doing the pulling, but knowing it wasn’t.

“JOY!” I screamed. Tears chocked my voice as I screamed it again, desperately: “JOY!”

“She’s gone!” The man’s voice roared. “I’m sorry! We have to get the hell out of here!”

I was at a loss; dumbfounded. I’d defeated ogres, occultists, a banshee, all manner of demons, as well as one pissed-off gogmagog while on a working vacation in New Orleans. In that moment, I was helpless. Blind and frozen in panic; seized by the impending grief I knew would soon feel.

“I’m getting you out of here!” he commanded.

Something within me snapped into alignment, mentally. “The quill! DO NOT LEAVE IT!” I shrieked.

More gunshots. Six breaths later, and I heard my would-be savior heavily, chest clearly heaving. “There! Hang on!” he spat. He heaved me over his shoulders in what felt like a fireman-carry and took off at a full spring, using the central monument to cover our run away from the direction of the gunshots. He cut hard enough that I almost fell of his shoulders to his right. He caught me sliding and hitched me back up.

I had no sense of direction, but felt myself thrown into a vehicle that was not our rental hatchback Chevrolet.

More gunshots. One struck the vehicle and I thought it ricocheted.

“DUCK!” the man demanded and I was inclined to listen. The car started and even the back tires seemed mired in wet earth, I felt the vehicle give once it hit the pavement and we were going at top speed away from my apprentice’s body.

My best friend’s body. This hurt worse than the burns.

My rescuer let me cry for what seemed like ages. He did not interrupt. He did not console. I found myself crying like I never had. The stranger did not so much as offer his sleeve to dry my face. Of course, I would have never accepted. Meanwhile, the v-neck Joy picked out for me was drenched in snot, spittle, and tears. I had Shakespeare’s quill, but no ID, no change of clothes, no money. I was entirely at the mercy of the man who rescued me.

Once I had stopped blubbering long enough, I turned off the waterworks long enough to ask, “Who the fuck are you, man?” I took solace in the comfort that he was running the heat. Septembers were not supposed to be that cold. Of that I was sure. “And who was that back there?”

“This probably won’t bring you much comfort, but you would recognize me. I was working maintenance before…” he began.

“Devin. The arithmancer.” I pictured his face.

“Apprentice. Gavin. My actual name is Gavin. And you aren’t supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be back there sitting in your apartment. Binge-watching
Gossip Girl
or something. Hunting evil spirits. Anything but this.”

Guilt briefly overtook me as I considered what he said: if we never inspected that air filter in our apartment, Joy would be alive. But, that just wasn’t the way of things. Not for me, at least. “Tell me, you son of a bitch—you tell me what the hell
you’re
doing here and you tell me why that little girl back there is dead and why we had to  leave her!” Just saying the words brought me to boiling. I was shaking with rage and starting to snivel again. Not out of sadness: fury.

“Calm down, please.” Gavin’s tone was even, soothing even. It neither soothed, nor calmed me. But it did remind me to think through the situation without acting out on my emotions. “You know I’m the arithmancer’s apprentice, then. Well, he’s dead. The arithmancer.”

“Tolliver is dead. Yes, I’ve learned that.” He had no way how I was able to learn the name and his fate. But I took small pleasure in reminding him that I was more than capable of getting what I needed.

“Right. Well, Tolliver’s dead. Those people who shot your friend? They murdered my master as well as your friend.” Gavin did not slow down, and only barely did so to take curves.  I clutched at the handle on the ceiling. Part of me wondered if he were doing it on purpose.

“She was my apprentice,” I told him, even if she had just begun. Or, just committed to begin. The study behind the craft she actually began the minute she stepped foot on a college campus.

“Well, call it fortune if you want, but since she was the one holding at light, they shot her first.” While Gavin’s words were meant to give solace, his tone, his demeanor were stoic. Whoever Gavin was, I already disliked him. His dispassionate manner was not allowing me to swing the pendulum any other way. The fact that he had just saved my life kept me from dismissing him, though. This was the second time this week that saving my life was necessary. The trauma of my predicaments kept the realization from wounding my pride. Still, it was a habit I was planning on kicking very soon.

Before I could lose myself to another round of misery and sulking, I concentrated on the situation at hand. The two most important people in my life had been murdered over the past two years. I had no reason to think the two were related, but I was beginning to suspect they had to be. A master arithmancer was among the body count. Maybe he was among the last of his kind, like my dad was, to his knowledge, the last logomancer. There could be more, safely resigned to the shadows, but that was where they stayed. If there were more, maybe they had the right idea.

“Okay, Gavin—why were they there?” I had no way of knowing if he was capable of answering. “We came to find Tolliver. He’s dead, and they killed him. So they’re back there for some other reason.”

“I’m not sure. Whoever it is, the sniper back there isn’t the one we need to be afraid of. I think he was put there to watch the trivium. Maybe prevent anyone from using it to figure out what’s going on. Maybe, he’s there just to pick off the mages.”

He coined the English term for us. Arithmancers obviously had less affinity for the history and language of the crafts. “Wait. You guys are the ones responsible for stealing the pyramid in my vault. That means you murdered Apollo!” I accused him, suddenly remembering the events that led me here to Trivium.

Gavin said nothing. I hope that meant he felt guilty. A full two or three minutes passed before he replied. “It’s true—I lured him to our flat. He…likes the youthful men like me,” he finally admitted. “But Tolliver wanted Apollo to
heal
him. Tolliver was afflicted by something we had never seen. We’d been all over the world looking for anything. Threatening Apollo with that pyramid was his last hope.”

Where did Tolliver receive the notion to look in my vault for his method of coercion? “Gavin, who gave him that idea? To force Apollo to hill him?”

“It was his…idea?” He hesitated, realizing that there was no possible way the idea originated from Donald Tolliver.

I never knew Apollo, but an old god past his prime would have seen through a trap, surely? “So, someone came in, killed Tolliver and then used the pyramid to kill Apollo?”

“Yeah. Exactly, really. I was downstairs, helping to set the trap when…” he explained.

I interrupted: “Wait—you guys actually planned to, like, bind him there? No way that would have worked,” I demurred.

“Well, never even got the chance to try. By the time I got up the stairs, both Tolliver’s and the god’s body were engulfed in flame. There was this stench of something I’ve never smelled. Chemicals or something.” The car decelerated and came to a halt. Gavin put the car into park.

“So, Tolliver’s killer came, killed the only witness—your master—then ran the pyramid through the distracted Apollo. The pyramid seems to be the prize the murderer was after all along.” I clenched my hands. There was something about staring off into the blank blackness of my eyes that helped me to arrange the facts more quickly than I would have otherwise. “Then he set the blaze. Some sort of chemical fire to dissolve the bodies, I’m guessing?”

A chemical fire would explain how it repudiated the water I sent into the bubble that kept it from spreading.

Whether or not he could read my expression, Gavin confirmed: “I managed to set up a field around the fire to contain it enough so the neighbors would be safe. We had already cleared everything out. He originally intended to come to Trivium so he could find out where the affliction had come from. I came here anyway, hoping I could find out…something.”

“I think you did.” I swiped at the bandages on my eyes, wishing in that instant to tear them off. Instead, what I felt was numbness. “Find out something, that is.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” For just a moment his calm, impassive exterior cracked and hinted at his own suffered misfortunes and suffering.

“Whoever did this isn’t just out to kill gods,” I responded. “The magoi are fair game, too.”

“The Doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer the wickedness; the theologian all the stupidity.”

—Schopenhauer

“”Destiny was invented by those afraid of their own thoughts.”

—Joy Hansen

rEvolve: 3

What we have learned:

Humanity must make sense of chaos. Our ancient, pre-human ancestors most assuredly began the fascination with counting—for it put order to the chaos. While it did little to keep out the darkness, it made sense of the world they observed. Our human ancestors continued, but never fully realized the powers of numbers, or that numbers could, in fact, lend themselves to keeping the dark at bay; even fashioning a world greater than what was then capable of men to perceive.

The poet, Ovid, tells us that mankind alone is the sole creature able to lift its neck to the sky and worship the gods. Though, long before our ancestors were able to conceptualize the gods and worship, they were looking to the skies in wondrous admiration. The first counters were also inclined to count the stars, but the numbers grew too large and the counters grew too weary. Their children counted, and their children too. None could number the stars.

As that first human-like species gave way to ours, we lifted our necks to continue that tradition. We counted and were stymied and gave credit to the gods and continued worshipping them. Another 100 millennia passed and these humans’ dissatisfaction with being unable to count the stars never ceased; even more, they yearned to touch them and dreamed of one day reaching them.

This desire angered the gods. Again, the gods misunderstood humanity. Men had already harnessed the powers of words, but it was the distance between men—not the gods, not some magnificent tower—that hindered humans from understanding each other. Despite humanity’s lack of communication, the numbers enhanced their lives. And the numbers alarmed the gods. Humans used numbers to build and still found time to observe those stars that could not be counted, and hoped that one day the deed would yet be accomplished.

The gods saw that they could press this skill of humans into something for their own purposes. The gods claimed to reveal the secrets of numbers (which were not, by then, secrets at all) and turned men to their advantage:
build us temples and we will build you civilizations
.

Men built and built and they honored the gods—but so too men. The Great Pyramid of Cheops, that most enduring of human temples, was built for a man who was made god. The gods forbade this. The centuries were used to count; to build. Stars were observed, days were counted; temples and palaces and empires all were built. Numbers played an indispensable role in this . Whereas humanity learned to tap the power of words, we eventually grew to harness the power of numbers too. Temples were not just built and dedicated to gods for the first time in millennia. Temples were built to men and to women; to knowledge. Numbers helped man build bridges both literal and figurative. The numbers also helped to bring water to their cities and even give them food.

As civilization grew to modernity, the stars were still not fully reckoned, but our species reached into the very heavens themselves. And there we found no gods waiting for us like we were told. The gods themselves could never reach the heavens.