Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

I would extrapolate that Shred would trust these gods for good reason, even it upset me he had told her about my vault before consulting with me first. Chances were, she already knew about the vault, anyway. Nevertheless, people never talked about my vault and I found myself itchy by the prospect.  Even more so since the arithmancers who stole it obviously knew about it.  That meant someone had mentioned it in front of the arithmancers. Yet, for all their conniving at my apartment and at my house, I could have been the one to give away its existence for all I knew.

I put that aside: Apollo was no more a target than Zeus or Hermes or even Marduk or Osiris, for that matter.  Athena as a target would make sense, because removing her would cripple the gods’ abilities to care for themselves, but this was something else.

“It was a test. A trial run, if you will. Apollo was just to see if the pyramid worked as a weapon against the gods.” I found myself on the edge of my—I believed a Queen Anne—chair.

“I am so very glad you father named you after me. You are as clever as he boasted,” Athena declared, sounding genuinely pleased.

“So, if Apollo isn’t the end game, then some other god—or gods—are.” My dad had locked the pyramid away for safe-keeping and I let someone make off with it. I felt guilty and responsible. On one hand, I might have spared Apollo the indignity of what most who lived at Solemn Ages were forced to endure. On the other hand, it was sad and senseless; it did not matter by what one set his or her moral compass: it was murder.

“Assuredly. This means all my kind are in grievous peril.” Athena paced the room, clearly agitated. “I am not at all be sure if we are the targets, but we must presume that we are based on the evidence we have. I am certain that these are not just arithmancers looking to make a name for themselves.”

“My love, what you are saying is unthinkable! The magoi have remained on the fringes for nearly 500 years. Why would this man want to kill the foundations of belief for so many in this world?” The man’s voice was gravelly, yet louder than at any point since entering the apartment.

“Yes, Dio, the arithmancers wish to carry this out,” Athena spoke directly to her male companion. “To what end, I cannot yet say.” Now there was despair in her voice. It had been there the entire time, but her elation at getting to finally meet me face-to-face covered it up. The idea that someone would set out to murder gods was something she understandably found very burdensome. Many of her peers would not be able to understand the danger. And if Athena had been the one murdered, this place—Solemn Ages—would disappear.

This realization was like a new layer of gravity was suddenly placed upon the earth. It was heavy and the comfortable chair in which I sat was suddenly much less comfortable.

“So, what do we do?” Joy spoke, breaking the pregnant silence in the room.

“As you by now recognize, Grey, your father kept the pyramid in the vault for a reason and are now learning why that was the case. We have to find this arithmancer and his apprentice and put an end to them.” The voice was authoritative, and one again, louder than I expected. It was Dio.

Shred finally chimed in, “I’m not sure what his motivations are, other than the obvious.”

“Like, is he just trying to go all John Lennon/Imagine?” Joy asked, I assumed rhetorically. “‘And no religion too?’”

Shred, apparently, could not help himself as he followed up Joy’s quote with his own rendition of
Yoo-hoo-ooo-a-ooo
, but moving on as if it were just a compulsion. “Could there be something else going on?” Shred asked. I thought I could make out him rubbing his stubble from wherever he sat. Or stood.

“Grey has mentioned an end game. We cannot yet conceive what that might be.” Athena stood nearer to me, pacing close by. “But we do know the culprit. We know where that he lives in Cambridge, England. He might think he is safe enough to return there.”

“If I were him, there is no way I go back, but someone should go check it out. Treat it like a crime scene,” I add.

“Someone should go. I will go.” Dio’s voice sounded like it was coming from the same direction as Athena’s. I imagined his arm around Athena’s shoulders.

“I’ll do it. I’ll go check out his flat in Cambridge,” Shred volunteered. “Put my ears to the ground. Buy some beer, tickle some fancies, jam with some locals.”

Something about Tolliver and his apprentice’s plan didn’t quite sit right.  “I don’t think Tolliver has left the U.S. yet.”

I’m not sure how, but I felt the others’ eyes on me. Joy was the one who prompted, “Okay, Grey, please share with the rest of the class.”

“If Tolliver means what we’re suggesting, then Solemn Ages is an obvious target. Not only because he could use one of you to, maybe, track down the whereabouts of other deities, but any havoc wreaked here would be a devastating blow.” I had no salient logic to back my assertion up, but there was a way to confirm his where he got off to… “Goddess, might you have gotten anything from the house in Northampton that might have belonged to Tolliver or his apprentice? If he had been staying there for a while, there’s no way he could have gotten all his hair out of the drains. There’s no way to be that thorough with spellcasting unless he dismantled every piece of plumbing!”

“You’re very perceptive, Grey. Diomedes extracted some whiskers.” The goddess was definitely sitting now and seemed more at ease, though urgency never left her voice.

Diomedes. Now things made more sense. This gave me a whole new line of thought to keep me occupied when I had some spare moments. Hopefully, those spare moments would come on a beach somewhere delightfully warm.

“I am giving these whisker s to Joy. You will be able to divine his whereabouts based on these hairs?” Athena surely had some idea how it could be done, so was likely trying to ensure I was personally capable of doing it. With the help of a brand new apprentice, I had my doubts, but Joy had, by her own admission, already begun her secret apprenticeship to me without me even having noticed.

“I think we can, yes.” I turned to where I believed Joy to be sitting, took a piece of paper from my pad along with a Bic and waved her over to me.  With plenty of light and free from pain, she directed my hand much more easily.

“What am I supposed to be watching, Grey? The whiskers aren’t doing anything.” Joy let go of my right hand the second I stopped writing. She should have seen the whiskers moving to make an arrow the same way the vault-divination had worked.

“The whiskers budge at all?” I concentrated, pouring more of my will, myself into completing the spell.

“They, I don’t know…vibrate, but don’t do anything else.” Her answer was disheartening, but not unexpected.

Tolliver had predicted that I would try this. “He’s obscuring himself. We won’t get an answer like this. But I have an idea.”

“Good. Most of the Olympians live in assisted living apartments on the far side of this campus. They are now on strict lockdown. They are not allowed to leave. They are not taking any visitors, but they will help me secure the campus in the meantime.” Diomedes was a man once upon a time, yet here he was. I wished to the depths of my being that I could see him. He seemed quite advanced in age, but obviously still lucid.

What he said inferred an answer to a question I wondered since first learning of Solemn Age’s existence. “You do take visitors here, then?” I tried to hide my earnest, but was fairly sure I failed in that regard.

“Yes. I do not fear the gods who live in these buildings. Oblivion, to them, would only be a favor.” Athena sounded somber, wistful. For an immortal goddess who had whiled away millennia, how strange it must feel for her to discover that immortality was not what it once was. “I realize you are unable to see, so I will tell you: I hire local caregivers. We need minimal medical care and the caregivers are not aware of the true reality of this place. Your own father set in place the wards that protect us from others finding out our identities. We do our part to keep up appearances. Enough gods pass away that the employees do not seem to notice our longevity.”

“Gods die?” I had little regard for decorum. There was more than enough knowledge sent my way in the past few hours to addle my brain enough for me to get away with being unseemly.

“Oh yes,” Diomedes blurted. “Last week Hakewa passed.”

“Who?” It was a name which I had never heard.

“Precisely,” the goddess answered. “She was of the Hopi people. When her last believer died, she passed back into The Well.”

“The Well?” Joy beat me to the punch, finally rejoining the conversation.

“That is a conversation that will have to wait for another day as well.” Athena likely did not mean to sidestep the question, and her tone was not dismissive. It seemed a talk she would want to have with us at some point. Just not then. “For now, you must make preparations to perform your divination or whatever else you said you have an idea. Shred has a plane to catch.”

During the conversation, I had heard some beeps from his cell phone, but did not think much of it. At first, I thought he was just tuned out since he already had the information we were learning. He was booking his plane ticket to England.

“Joy—we’re going for a ride. New York.” I knew it would work. It had to work.

“Yay!” Joy exclaimed, though half-heartedly.

“Not city,” I corrected. “Upstate.” Dad always told me about this place and every time he mentioned it, he made it sound like an ace up his sleeve. I hoped it might be our ace. I spent the next several minutes outlining our next step. She agreed with my plan in and in the short-term, offered me enough of a confirmation of the site’s strength that she confirmed my hope.

Chapter 6

Shred drove us back to Springfield. The ride was strangely quiet, as questions filled the air but did not get asked. Shred stopped at the bus station so I could retrieve a second stash from one of the lockers.

On the way back to his house, Joy could no longer stand the silence or contain her questions. “I thought Athena was a virgin?”

That was not the first question I would have expected.

“I’m sure she still is,” Shred replied. I’m sure he was smirking in the same manner I had seen thousands of time. His mannerisms had a way of coming across as boyish, even roguish. Shred didn’t keep up with romantic relationships very well, but I’m sure his charm netted him innumerable relationships of the short-term and carnal variety.

“I think,” I took a guess, “the gods don’t need sex like people need sex; Zeus notwithstanding. I think, with them, they are more just companions who love each other, without the fulfilment of that love.”

Shred harrumphed.

“Unless they…do everything but sex?” I amended.

No harrumph. I guess that was the likeliest scenario.

“But Diomedes was just a Greek hero, right? Is he just in
The Iliad
?” Joy uttered, ever-curious.

“No, he has a lost epic.” I suddenly wondered how lost that epic truly was. For someone like me, the thought of re-discovery of a lost epic was the stuff of which dreams were made. “But there are smaller bits and pieces that tell his story anyway. He was basically exiled from Argos after the Trojan War and ended up in Italy with the Palladium he and Odysseus stole from Troy.”

“Athena-statue, right?” Joy wondered. I mentally awarded her a gold star, wondering to what depths we could plumb her knowledge of the Ancients.

I always figured she was more the math/science girl. Turns out her brilliance is well rounded. “Right. When he died, the locals deified him. The Palladium was taken to Rome for centuries and there it stayed. I think I remember reading somewhere that it Constantine the Great took it to Constantinople because it made a city a city unconquerable.  Worked for a while, I guess. When it fell, no one knew where the Palladium had gone. It just disappeared from record.”

“So, what you’re saying is, after Diomedes was deified, basically he and Athena never parted?” Joy was connecting the dots as fast as I could make them. “Well, that’s sweet, really. She’s sort of cursed, I guess, to this loveless existence, but…” she trailed off, seemingly moved. “Their love found a way.”

Shred started singing the lyrics a song whose title bears a similar sentiment.

“Is that Lionel Ritchie?” It wasn’t an actual question, and neither did Shred treat as one since he kept singing. “Wow, Shred, never knew you were such a fan.” And Joy was right, as there was an obvious poetry to the situation.

Still, Athena’s words struck me:
passed into The Well
. I know I had read something about a well—or wells—at some point. And I know for a fact that I had heard Dad mention them multiple times.

By the time Shred’s fetching rendition of the song dulled into a bored falsetto, he was pulling into his driveway.

“I’m going into the house for my stuff. You guys need a bathroom break? Drink?” Both front doors had opened and closed, but Shred reopened his door to speak to me.

“Nah, we have to go grab some of our own supplies anyway.  We’ll see you in a while. Text me updates,” I requested. The back doors opened and climbing out was less taxing.  Shred’s drive back was much gentler of a ride.

I heard his front door shut as Joy walked me to the rental car we left parked at Shred’s. I only let her lead me to rear end of the hatchback before I shrugged her off and led myself to the passenger and climbed inside—taking great care to duck my head down enough to sit and not bang my head.

              Once on the road, we found a strip mall to buy an additional change of clothes, toiletries, and what tasted like the greatest cheeseburgers in the history of humanity.  One sad point of influence I am guilty of exerting over Joy is that she entered our living arrangement as a vegan and as, of late, become a dedicated carnivore. 

              We made our way along the Taconic State Parkway toward New York. We were an hour away or so from nightfall, and a bit more than that from Trivium. We spent the time conversing about some of the history I knew of the magoi; and of magic. The basics of performing magic was both simple and complex. Complex, in that the logomancer’s facility with particular languages needed to be complete. We could get away with only understanding a few of the most ancient words—like the proto-language—because those words were the lingual equivalents of nuclear missiles; whereas a modern spoken language shoots pellets.  Each situation called for the nuances of potency. So, Classical Latin or Greek, even Akkadian provided the basis of many spells because of their mid-level potency. Even more ancient languages—like Sanskrit or Egyptian were possible, but transliteration of their languages into Roman or Greek letters made them virtually impotent. Unless one had the time, writing hieroglyphics was immensely impractical.

Any magic must also be made in a minimum of three—the Greeks realized this and incorporated the theorem into the identity of their goddess, Hecate. The caster’s will was paramount. Besides the Rule of Three to perform spells, there must also be a “battery” to power the spell. Most logomancy worked off of will. Not only is Hecate referred to as the “triple-goddess” and depicted with three faces, but her very name itself infers the Greek word for
will
. But this was such a matter of concentration and intention, that anyone discovering our magic by accident was virtually impossible.

“Are there any spells that can be accomplished without writing?” From the sound of the road underneath and the proximity of passing cars, we were in a less-populated area. Joy took the curves at much lower speeds to keep me from falling over or hitting my head. There were no freeways where we were going, no simple ways to get there.

“There are, I’ve heard. But none from logomancers. Our domain is words.” I did not resume the conversation and Joy seemed content to ruminate on what we already discussed. Or something else altogether.

“We’re in Athens. The Sun is setting.” Joy broke a silence that could have only lasted minutes. Our destination laid just beyond Athens, New York. The true history of where we were headed is not the type one would find in a history book. Even to me, what Dad told me was one of his taller tales. Even when Athena gave me more information back at Solemn Ages, if not for the source, seemed hardly credible. The area called Trivium had long been sacred land, even to indigenous peoples, though much of that history was lost when those peoples were lost.

“Okay. Go ahead and pull over and punch in the coordinates she gave you.” She swerved over hastily. Luckily, I was already loosely grasping the door handle and was able to steady myself.

“Done.” Joy accelerated and I the polite feminine English voice of her phone’s GPS told us to continue on our present route.

Back at Solemn Ages, Athena escorted us to Shred’s van in what must have been an abbreviated tour of the grounds. She also told the story of this area to us as she did so. When America was still in its infancy, our forefathers invited many of the old gods, though they probably did not realize it. These learned men gave new place-names throughout the colonies, and in doing so, invited the gods by speaking their names.

“There is only one Athens in the Old World,” the goddess explained. “And that is in Greece. However, in this New World, there are 24 towns named in the city’s honor. That city, is of course, named for me. Whether or not these founders intended to worship me, by honoring my name, they did. They called to me.”

“When the Greek immigrants came in the 19
th
century, they settled the village of Athens in New York. I sent my own chosen newcomers as caretakers to them, knowing full well the magical grounds that lie nearby. These new settlers found the triangular crossroads as well-worn paths in the forest, with a small glade in its center. They called their enclave Trivium.”

It was there that the knowledge my father bestowed upon me took over. Dad said he had only been there once before. He said that over time, the woods were cleared, yet the trivium remained as a meeting place of three roads. The inhabitants of Trivium laid down cobblestones to mark the convergence of the points, as all points leading to it were dirt and sod worn by wagon wheels. The inhabitants took their preservation of the peculiar trivium seriously. They named and renamed the roads; plowed the dirt and paved the roads. All the while, the angles remained a perfect isosceles triangle. Very soon, the village elders installed a false cemetery in the middle of the glade to further protect the area into posterity. The village elders were said to have been buried there, but no one dared to till the earth beneath the trivium and affront the powers that Trivium knew dwelt there.

By Dad’s account, it was equal parts tall tale and campfire story. What I did know was: the trivium was the most robust focal point for magic in North America. Magic performed there was as potent as one could make in North America. There was something inherent to the earth there that the ancient natives noticed and preserved until they could no longer. I wondered if one were to dig deeply enough, maybe its arcane mysteries would be revealed.

The addition of Bill’s Quill to the equation also gave me great hope for divining the arithmancer’s location.

Traffic was light on the road that led out of Trivium, as I heard only a couple vehicles pass us by, and one angrily leapfrog us, honking his or her horn.

“I just passed the trivium. I’m going to pull into a cornfield I saw right before it to keep the car sort of hidden.” Joy pulled to the shoulder and turned around. She slowed down and I felt the crunching of gravel and loose dirt under the wheels of our car. “BUMP!” she warned.

“Too late.” My head hit the roof of the car, but was otherwise fine. Maybe such a jolt would even knock my sense of sight back into whack. “How far a walk is it going to be. I’d like to walk without accompaniment, if at all possible.”

“A few hundred feet back. Manageable. Stick close to the edge of the pavement, you should be fine.” Joy exited the vehicle, cuing me to do the same.

“I’ve never been here. Tell me what you see.” A few years back I had gotten curious and looked it up on Google Earth. I wanted the landmarks she described to meld with what I already held within my mind. I breathed in the not just cool, but cold air. It was disarming and immediately lost enthusiasm for envisioning the trivium. “Never mind. Too cold.” I stuffed my hands into my scuba jacket—which had, by virtue of its quality craftsmanship survived the steam burns without even the slightest warping—and tried to keep my teeth from clattering.

“Good,” Joy locked her arm in mine to walk me to the road’s edge. “I was just going to say that it’s a cemetery. That’s about it. Some trees, a field, and a cemetery in the middle of the road. Weird.”

“Does the triangle look as perfect as I was told?” I asked.

“Uhm…” she sounded tentative, “yeah, I think so.” We came to the macadam of the road and she let go. There’s a big monument in the middle of the cemetery. Tall, with an obelisk.”

I tripped.

“Watch your step,” she advised, surely realizing I could not, exactly, watch much of anything. I could more careful. “The focal point of the cemetery seems to be that monument.  It’s weird…”

“Weird how?” I scuffed my shoe and tripped once more, but recovered quickly enough, Joy didn’t acknowledge.

“I don’t know. Just doesn’t feel like any graveyard I’ve ever been to in my life. And I’m not just saying that because we know the graves are empty.” Joy’s voice receded behind me, giving me ample room. I just hoped she warn me before I stepped directly into a headstone.

“How many graveyards have you been to?” I inquired, honestly curious.

Joy’s chuckle echoed strangely. There was no humor in it. Most people only came to these places one someone died. Even fewer return to visit the lost. Yet, in this place, I felt, too, felt askew; unseen forces at work. “Stop. I’m going to take your arm now through the graveyard.” I obeyed and felt the tugging of my hand set to my side. Joy locked her arm in mine.  “Going.”

I moved slowly, putting my free hand on some of the gravestones. The old, rough surfaces offered me no secrets magically rendered.

She stopped us. “This monument doesn’t have anything written on it.” Joy let me go and I heard frosty ground crunched underfoot. “No. Nothing whatsoever. It’s, like, eight feet tall. I’d say about four feet across for each of the four sides at the base. Hey, there’s a car coming.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me down. Evidently, I wasn’t bending low enough, because her hand pushed down on the back of my head. I heard a vehicle slow down and take the angle of the road to my right and back toward, I believed, the direction of Trivium.

“Okay. Let’s do this. Get out the paper,” I instructed.

“Not going to write directly on the monument?” I heard her tearing paper from a legal pad, despite her question.

“No. Not necessary. Besides, I’m writing with the quill. That just wouldn’t work.” I knelt down and felt the paper she placed in front of me. “Put the whiskers in the middle of the paper in front of me. I need you to direct my hand and rotate the paper with each word.”