Mightiest of Swords (The Inkwell Trilogy Book 1) Read Free

the kitchen and stared at my back door. It looked unmolested, but I’ve gotten to be too cynical a soul to do something stupid.  That’s a lie.  I do stupid things all the time.  One day the piper would come collecting.  I hoped that today would not be that day.  Still, I do try to avoid circumstances that truly, obviously stupid. Yet, I held out hope of finding the culprit, so found myself crawling into the kitchen sink and unlocking the window latch.  I popped out the screen and fell to the ground in a way that could only have looked comical to anyone observing.  My undignified grunting likely were not helping with any perceptions of normality.
                  From the backyard I headed around to my front porch. On the sidewalk that led under some rotting white-green latticework and up to my house, I wrote a spell to find a last-step. It yielded to point out to the road after the words rearranged themselves from the triangular pictogram into an arrow. It took me a moment, but I figured dodging traffic was worth it, so I put the Post-It with the arrow down in the middle of the street.  The word-arrow pointed down the street.  Whoever they were, they were assuredly beyond my ability to track. 
                  My initial faith in the fidelity of the vault was sound—no one could have made in there without my help. This means that someone had cast a powerful illusion spell to me and/or my vault to make it look empty as well as to hide themselves.  Those precious few moments I wasted the divination spells on the wall cost me something dear.  Given the time the thief needed to flee, the chances were that only one or two items were taken before the thief had to high-tail it out.  Maybe only one thing, since he or she maybe set a trap at my front door.
    The wind blew the front door of the house further open.  The smell of fall was in the air once that gust of wind reached my nostrils, incident blowing a few of the season’s first dead leaves into my hair.  I picked them out, realizing I would need to test for a trap and maybe find out something about the magic used to make it if there were one. That would go a long ways toward helping me figure out who took whatever was taken.
    I checked my mailbox. Current Resident and Valued Customer seemed to be living in my house and not paying rent.  There was a circular for a car dealership that did have my name on it: Grey Theroux.
    I slid the mail with my name across the threshold. Nothing happened.  Though it was a power known only to logomancers, written names contained their own kind of vitality and power.  Any trap set specifically for me should have triggered something.
    I looked down at the Post-It still stuck in my palm with the last-step trace for the thief.  He or she was likely still in a vehicle, as it was constantly reorienting to indicate direction—like a compass in an identity crisis. If not for the wards inherent to the vault, this type of spell would have fizzled as soon as the thief was a few hundred feet away.  This was an ancient magic’s way of marking the bills, so to speak.  I would get back to the arrow and the thief soon enough. I was in a hurry, but I needed to figure out what was stolen first or risk being victimized by…something.  I stuck the Post-It into my jacket pocket and walked to the porch, then the threshold, keep the advertisement with my name held out, transferring my energy to it so it would feel the brunt of a trap.
    A few paces forward and nothing happened.  As I inched toward the threshold, I felt suddenly enervated.  My knees buckled, but I managed to fall backwards and out of the way of the threshold.  I examined the woodwork for any markings, and seeing none, knew that wherever they were, I would only be able to examine them from inside the house. I wheeled the city’s trash can around to the window and climbed back through the kitchen window.  I stuck a Post-It on the back door and wrote