Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  “I didn’t, not on my own. One of their number spoke up in my defense. At great risk to herself, no less—but she saw something she considered unjust and she wouldn’t be silenced. The others came around to her point of view, and I was given a rare second chance.”

  Gazelle clinked her cup against Marie’s.

  “You were the woman in question, by the way. You saved my life.” She raised her cup. “Cheers.”

  Marie sipped her wine. It was more bitter than sweet, going down in a wash of black pepper and almonds.

  “Your liege still scares the hell out of me, just for the record,” Gazelle added. “Anyway. I missed your big exit. Nessa sent me on a year’s wander, to find myself, and you were gone by the time I returned. I wanted to do…something in your honor, so I asked Hedy if I could become her knight.”

  “It does,” Marie said. “Honor me. A lot. So how did I die, last time around?”

  Gazelle flashed a grin. One of her canines was longer than the others, faded to a coffee-stain yellow.

  “Fighting. You sent twenty men to the shores of hell the day the Owl died, and it took twenty more to bring you down. They still tell stories about you to scare wayward children. You know, eat all your vegetables or the Blue Knight will come for you. We should all be so famous.”

  “Fat lot of good it did.” Marie’s fingers drummed against her cup as she stared into the scarlet wine-froth. “Nessa’s given up, Hedy’s given up, it’s just down to us. And what can we do? I don’t know any magic. I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve. I’m useless.”

  Gazelle reached out. The tip of her index finger hooked Marie’s chin and turned her head so their eyes could meet.

  “How dare you?” Gazelle asked. She sounded more tired than reproachful, worn down but still standing. “Don’t you understand how this works? Marie…what is the Knight’s role?”

  “I wish I knew. I’ve been trying to figure it out since we started this journey. At first I thought it was to uphold the classic virtues of knighthood—”

  “Slay your liege’s enemies, hound them without mercy, and bathe in their tears?”

  “See?” Marie jabbed a finger at her. “That’s what I’m talking about. Now in my world—no, in one corner of my world, in one particular time in history, it was more along the lines of ‘respect all weaknesses, and constitute thyself as the defender of the defenseless.’”

  Gazelle shrugged. “I suppose that’s one way of doing it. If you really want.”

  “What I mean is, there are lots of times and places and…well, now I know there are lots of worlds, and knighthood stands for something different everywhere we look. So how can I be the Knight, if nobody agrees on what that’s supposed to mean?”

  “I’m no expert,” Gazelle said, “but I think that means it’s up to you. A knight is supposed to be larger than life. A champion. And what’s the one commonality in all your lifetimes, no matter where or when you find yourself?”

  “Nessa,” Marie said.

  “Nessa.” Gazelle waved her cup in a circle and tossed back a swig of wine. “You know, back in the day, the Owl would have…her little fits, she called them. She’d sink into a mire of her mind’s creation and sit in the dark, still as a stone, staring at nothing. Hedy tells me that you were the only person who could pull her out of those lightless depths. You were the one who gave her hope when she couldn’t find any on her own. Maybe that’s your most important job right now.”

  “What if there isn’t any hope left?” Marie asked. “Nessa’s been poisoned, we aren’t the saviors Hedy thought we were going to be, we’re cut off from our own world, and it sounds like the Sisters of the Noose are getting ready to kick your doors in. I’m not seeing a silver lining.”

  “You’re a questing knight, Marie. And this looks like a quest to me. You know, I wasn’t one of the Owl’s apprentices, but she was never shy about sharing her lessons with all of us whelps. Painfully, sometimes, if we didn’t pay proper attention. She sat me down once, when I was frustrated by a simple cantrip, and shared a truth that I’ve never forgotten. She told me that all magic, real magic, begins in your heart. It employs the mind, but it all ignites with a spark, right here.”

  Gazelle poked a bony finger against Marie’s breastbone.

  “Witchcraft begins in passion. In hunger. In fury and darkness. When you approach the altar of magic, you can’t just come with a wish cupped in your open hands. You have to bring the fire.”

  “But I’m not a witch,” Marie said.

  “Every woman who fights for what she loves, every woman willing to war, and die, and burn to shape her world is a witch. Some just know more secrets than others. Nessa’s in the dark, Marie, and she can’t find the light without your help. Her fate, and yours—and I hate to say it, but ours for that matter—is all on your shoulders now.”

  Gazelle locked eyes with her, arched a single brow, and raised her cup of wine.

  “What are you going to do about that?”

  It was an impossible challenge. Lethal enemies at the gates, another inside her lover’s body and killing her from within. They were marooned a universe from home. Marie drank her wine. Her thoughts drifted to the stories she’d read as a child. Tales of knights backed into the most bleak and desperate corners, and the one thing her childhood heroines all had in common.

  They fought back, and found a way to win.

  Break it down, she told herself. This isn’t one vast problem, it’s a handful of them, all slamming us at once. All I need is a crack in the wall, one weak spot where I can start digging us up and out of here.

  When she found it, deep inside her heart, it looked a little like a spark. The spark of a bonfire about to ignite.

  * * *

  “We’re not going to die here,” Marie said to Hedy.

  Hedy’s mask glistened with mist from the cistern waterfall, and her slumped shoulders were stained and damp. She barely raised her head.

  “Marie, I just found my mother again, after decades of searching for her. And she’s going to die, and there’s nothing I or anyone in the world can do about it. Your determination is inspiring to some, I’m sure, but—”

  “In this world,” Marie said. “Look, you said you’ve been doing experiments for years, trying to cross dimensions, right?”

  Hedy nodded, silent.

  “And you’ve made progress, right?”

  “Not enough. That candle we took from the Sisterhood felt like it might have been the breakthrough I needed, if I had time to run experiments, but that’s not going to happen.”

  “Tell me something. Were you assuming that every parallel Earth is just like this one? Not in terms of history, I mean, in terms of how magic works.”

  Now Hedy looked up at her. Her eyes were small behind her mouse mask, curious and narrowed as she studied Marie’s face.

  “To build a functional model, yes.”

  “Okay. So, when you do this stuff you have to do before casting a spell, to keep the Shadow from getting in, is it obvious to anyone watching? Is it, like, something you have to say out loud, a chant, or a hand gesture or something?”

  “Depends,” Hedy replied. “There are over two dozen practical warding techniques. Some are more subtle than others. And it isn’t strictly always required—the most basic spells, the cantrips our fledglings learn, are too low-powered to run much of a risk.”

  Marie’s mind was racing, putting together memories, ideas, angles of attack.

  “We met some other magicians, in our world,” she said. “And here’s the thing: none of them said a word about any of that stuff. They didn’t warn Nessa, either, even when one of them found out she learned magic from a book, which is apparently super rare where we come from. I mean, that’s a topic that would normally come up, right?”

  “I would think so.”

  “Hedy, what if people from our Earth don’t get infected by Shadow?”

  Hedy sat up straight. Her fingers drummed on the mossy, water-slicked stone beside
her.

  “There would have to be a reason. I can think of three or four possibilities just offhand, and they’d all have to be subjected to testing. But Nessa was infected on your world.”

  “So why her and no one else? You said there’s no cure, that there’s nothing you or anyone else in the world can do about it. No one else in this world. What if that’s the point? That you haven’t found a cure because it’s something unique to our Earth?”

  “Getting Nessa home would be a first step in finding out. But I can’t do that. It’s beyond me.”

  “It’s beyond the resources you had,” Marie said. “You have us now. Maybe the things we know about our own world, the things we can tell you about how we got here, hold the key you’ve been missing. And I’m not just talking about getting Nessa home. Level with me. The Sisterhood. They’re closing in, and they’re whittling you down. Can you beat them?”

  Hedy’s eyes flicked across the cavern, to the stray witches milling around by the feast table, others drifting in and out of the tunnel leading to the larders. She dropped her voice to a whisper.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been putting on a brave face for the others, but…no. By this time next month, we’ll all be dead.”

  Marie’s hand squeezed Hedy’s damp shoulder.

  “Then let’s just leave. All of us. They can’t kill what they can’t catch.”

  She remembered Nessa’s words to her as they opened the gateway, and echoed them now.

  “Is there really anything keeping you here?” Marie asked.

  Hedy rose from the sodden stone, graceful, chin high as she basked in the icy waterfall mist.

  “No,” she said. Then she put her fingers to her lips.

  Her shrill whistle echoed off the cavern walls. Everyone jolted to a sudden stop. Bare faces and masks of bone turned her way, and more poked their heads from tunnel mouths, scurrying up to attend. Hedy strode to the heart of the covenstead with Marie on her heels and raised one hand high.

  “Hear me,” Hedy called out. “All endeavors are canceled, all schedules wiped clean. I will be seeing each of you with new assignments, and I expect you to treat them as if your lives depend on fulfilling them. Because they do. As of this moment, we have one and only one goal.”

  She lowered her arm and put her hands on her hips. Her eyes blazed with the glow of a challenge to be won.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Hedy said, “we’re going to find ourselves a new home.”

  Forty-Two

  “So this ‘electricity’—” Hedy said. She marched up the tunnel to her workshop, Marie at her side.

  “It’s the same stuff that’s in lightning.”

  Hedy snapped her fingers. “I knew it was possible to harness lightning! I just never had the time to dedicate toward exploring it. Pleased my theories are vindicated. So this card—this ‘bookmark’ that their machine used, it was covered in—what did you call them?”

  “Circuits,” Marie said. “And a tarot card—a card used for divination—painted on the other side. But Carlo Sosa’s cards, the ones they took from his suit, were bare on the back, so I think that bit was just to get our attention.”

  “And the circuits were made of gold?”

  “Gold is conductive,” Marie said. “Electricity can flow through anything, but through a nonconductive substance it doesn’t go very far. Other metals work, too. Copper is good.”

  “Copper is easier to lay hands on. But this still only helps in theory. Without seeing the actual patterns on the card, I can’t begin to guess at how it worked.”

  Marie had been pondering that. A memory sparked.

  “I know a way.”

  Hedy tilted her head at her as they walked. A leather satchel clanked on her hip, laden with glass vials.

  “But you don’t have the card,” Hedy said. “As far as you know, it’s still in that machine on the other side.”

  “Nessa learned a spell—her book said it was an old lover’s game played by witches—the Knot of Venus. I don’t suppose ‘Venus’ is a thing in this world, but basically it let us—”

  “Walk in each other’s imaginations. In your memories.” Hedy nodded. “We call it the Knot of Aeclyptus.”

  “Memories. And nothing said you have to be lovers to make it work. Nessa and I both got a good long look at the card. Cast the spell, walk back through our minds, and you can literally see it for yourself.”

  Nessa lay under the furs, red-eyed, staring up at the silken canopy. Her head lolled on the pillow as Hedy and Marie approached her bedside. Hedy reached under the flap of her satchel and plucked out a long, slim glass vial. Clear broth flecked with minty and pepper-red herbs floated inside.

  “First dose of your own remedy,” Hedy explained. “It won’t stop the progression of the disease, but it should slow it down considerably.”

  Nessa pushed herself up as she uncorked the vial. She gave it a sniff, dubious, then wrinkled her nose and tossed it back like a shot of whiskey. Her eyelashes fluttered.

  “Tastes like…apples?”

  “Good,” Hedy said. “The illness has a…well, let’s call it a point of no return, and it’s marked by your senses leaving you one by one. The ability to taste is always the first thing to go. I need you to warn me, right away, if that happens.”

  Nessa passed the empty vial over to her, looking suspicious.

  “And after the senses?”

  “Usually?” Hedy corked the vial and slipped it back into her satchel. “Sanity. I did make a slight modification to your original recipe, by the way. We need you up and fighting, so I tossed in some ground kholkab root. It’s a mild stimulant.”

  Nessa’s eyes went wide. Marie watched her pupils blossom.

  “Oh,” Nessa said. “Oh. I think I like this.”

  “In retrospect,” Hedy said, “‘mild’ might be a slight understatement.”

  Marie took Nessa’s hand.

  “We’re not giving up. Hedy’s going to find us a way back home. We’re all going home. And then we’re going to find a cure. But we can’t do it without you, Nessa. This coven—they’ve been demoralized, beaten down, they’ve spent weeks watching their friends die one by one. They need inspiration.”

  She leaned in and kissed Nessa’s cheek before murmuring in her ear.

  “They need the Owl. Can you do that?”

  A slow, lopsided smile crept across Nessa’s face.

  “Marie,” she said, “fetch my glasses.”

  * * *

  Marzio Catalano was the paymaster of Mirenze’s armory. He’d spent his life as a middleman in the ranks of the Imperial army, coasting along with the absolute minimal effort—too diligent to be busted down to a footman’s pay, and too bland to be promoted. That suited him fine. He had quarters of his own, a comfortable mattress, and he went to sleep every night with a full belly, satisfying all of his life’s ambitions.

  He woke from a nightmare he could barely remember, rubbery tentacles drawing him down under black waters. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he stared at his open window and the canopy of stars beyond.

  He remembered latching it before he went to sleep. A cold wind gusted across the wooden sill. It washed over his linens and sent a shiver down his spine.

  Faces loomed from the darkness. Masks of bone, staring down at him, and hands bearing long-bladed knives.

  “I…I upheld our bargain!” he stammered. “My men don’t light any lamps beyond the docks! I’ve given you over half the city streets. What more do you want from me?”

  Another figure emerged from the shadows, standing at the foot of his bed. She wore no mask. As he gazed upon her pale face and tangled hair, Marzio’s panicked fingers clawed at the mattress.

  “You,” he breathed. “It’s impossible.”

  “Did you believe that mere steel could slay the Blue Knight?” Marie asked.

  “I saw…I saw you burn.”

  He had been there that day, as a young soldier. He’d watched the witch fall, dead on the pyre.
He’d watched the knight make her final charge. And die, of a thousand cuts, before they threw her limp body onto the flames. Even back then, he’d had enough sense to hang back from a fight and let others do the hard work—and given the number of men who died that grim day, hacked to pieces by the Blue Knight’s blade, he credited his life to that decision.

  “My vengeance has been delayed for too long,” Marie told him. “I have come to lay waste to all that you hold dear. To turn your city into a tomb, home only to the festering dead. Your cathedrals will be reduced to piss-pots for the hounds of hell and your cemeteries prisons for countless screaming and anguished souls. But. There may be a way for you, and your children, to escape my wrath.”

  Marzio lay frozen, caked with icy sweat. He struggled to find his breath, and he spent it in a single word.

  “Anything.”

  “You have access to the city’s treasury. Tomorrow morning, you’ll put in an emergency request, claiming a shortfall in the soldiers’ wages. You will call for a wagon laden with gold and copper ingots, as many as the horses can haul, and direct the driver to the alley just north of Pepper Street. The driver will leave it there and depart.”

  “But…when my superiors find out, they’ll think I stole it. I’ll be court-martialed.”

  Marie loomed over him like a tombstone, her shadow falling across his face.

  “Would you prefer the alternative?”

  The coven had arrived through the window. They left by the bedroom door, after Marzio swore upon his grave and his mother’s and his grandmother’s that the order would be placed come first light.

  “That was…interesting,” Hedy said to Marie.

  “What was?”

  “That speech. Didn’t seem like you.”

  “Oh.” Marie chuckled. “It wasn’t. It was a monologue from a Carolyn Saunders novel. Skullthrax the dragon said it.”

  “Well, it certainly had the desired effect,” Hedy replied. “What’s a dragon?”

  * * *

  Nessa perched on the edge of a chair in Hedy’s workroom. She had an open book on her lap and raised a sheaf of parchment in each hand, the papers rustling as she waved in greeting.