Wisdom's Grave 01 - Sworn to the Night

by Craig Schaefer

  He rounded a bend, expecting to see moonlight, and now he wasn’t in the tunnels anymore.

  Not in the Vegas storm tunnels, anyway. The walls transformed from smooth gray concrete to rust-red desert rock. From a level passage to a mouth leading down, and around, twisting as it narrowed. Bleached white bones littered the dirt at his feet. Down and around, and around again, and the tunnel opened onto a vast and murky cavern. Bats fluttered overhead on leathery wings, then fell silent. Daniel’s pocket light sputtered and burned out.

  At the heart of the cave, a small iron table waited with two ornate chairs. A ring of white candles pushed the gloom back to the edges of the rust-stone walls. The Mourner sat before a tea set, the kettle steaming hot. She turned her white lace veil toward him and beckoned him closer.

  “This is different,” he said. “Last I checked, your cave was about a hundred miles outside the city limits. Didn’t know the storm tunnels stretched that far.”

  “They don’t,” the Mourner replied. “I do. Come, sit. Join me for tea.”

  As he pulled back the other chair, her gloved and boneless fingers unfurled like the petals of a rose. She poured a splash of tea—hot, brown, and carrying the scent of hyssop on tendrils of steam—into both of their cups. Daniel eyed his teacup, wary, not reaching for it just yet. She lifted her own and snaked it under her veil. Slurping sounds echoed from her concealed lips.

  “Drink,” she hissed. “I didn’t bring you here to slay you. And if I did, you wouldn’t be able to stop me. So be polite and drink.”

  He weighed his options and settled on courtesy. The tea was an herbal blend, rich and woodsy.

  “Given that you just conjured me across the Sahara, I assume this isn’t a social call.”

  “I have a task,” the Mourner said. “One needing your wit. And if your wit fails, your cards, your wand, and your gun.”

  Daniel sipped his tea. “Since when do you get involved in the outside world? People come to you, not the other way around.”

  “Times are changing. And needs must. You are familiar with a man named Andre Lefevre?”

  “The guy from the Cooking Channel?” Daniel leaned a little closer, staring at her veil. “I assume you mean a different Lefevre.”

  “No. That’s the one. Our celebrity chef has come into possession of a special knife. You will steal it for me. Mark this sight, and mark it well.”

  She lifted the lid of the teapot. A gust of steam billowed out to form a white shimmering curtain in the air between them. With a twirl of her long, squirming fingers, the steam coalesced. It took on color and form, becoming a three-dimensional image that hung, slowly turning, in the open air. It was a kitchen knife, one that had fallen on hard times. Its wooden handle was cracked and wound with black tape, the blade pitted with rust.

  “I hope he’s not chopping veggies with that thing,” Daniel said. “What’s the deal? Enchanted?”

  “In a manner of speaking. This is a Cutting Knife.”

  Faust sat back in his chair. His eyes narrowed. He sipped his tea.

  “I’ve dealt with one of those. Recently.”

  “Yes,” the Mourner said. “And I’m told you succeeded admirably. The reward for good work, as the saying goes, is more work. You should be honored: there are only nine true Cutting Knives in all of creation, amid any number of lesser imitations, and you’ll have had the honor of wielding two of them. This particular one has been missing for centuries.”

  “Yeah? So how’d Mr. Heart Attack on a Plate get his hands on it, then?”

  “Ill luck and happenstance, and machinations from strange quarters. He has no idea what it’s truly capable of. Once you have the knife, bring it directly to me. You’ll likely find it concealed in his home. If not…well, this sort of thing is your specialty. Find it and take it, by trickery or force. You may enlist the aid of your allies, if you must, but you will not reveal a word we have spoken here, nor will you reveal who you are working for.”

  “That’s a lot of conditions for a job I haven’t agreed to do yet,” Daniel said. “Let’s talk about my fee.”

  A slithering chuckle emanated from beneath the Mourner’s veil. The lace rippled on a puff of hot breath.

  “You will bring the knife to me and be rewarded as I see fit. Or you will fail and die. Or you will refuse and die. Do you wish to die, Daniel?”

  “Honestly, I’ve been hoping to put it off for as long as possible,” he said.

  “Given that your name is marked among the damned,” the Mourner mused, “a wise choice on your part. Consider this task a step toward redemption, for you have been chosen to play a small part in a grand and wondrous design. Go. Hunt. And return with the knife.”

  The ring of candles died, snuffed out in a sudden gust of white-hot wind, and plunged the cavern into darkness.

  His pocket light flickered back to life. He sat in the ornate iron chair, all alone, in the middle of a storm drain. The vaulted concrete tunnel stretched dead ahead, farther than his light could shine, while fat black widows crawled slowly along the tunnel walls. Daniel took a deep breath, tasting the musty air, and let it out as a sigh of resignation.

  “Well, shit,” he said. He stood up and started walking.

  Fifteen

  Marie stopped at a liquor store down the block from her apartment and picked up a bottle of gin. A note from Janine waited for her at home, pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a strawberry. Game night, it read, don’t wait up.Chinese leftovers in the fridge if you want.

  Underneath she’d doodled a heaping bowl of rice, cartoon waves of steam rising up. Marie smiled. She had a little reheated rice and General Tso’s, the chicken and broccoli melting into a goopy but edible mess. Then she dug around in the cluttered fridge for something to go with the gin. A can of diet Sprite made a decent enough mixer.

  Janine’s mammoth and probably stolen book of heraldry sat on the futon, a bookmark with a sketch of the dead man’s tattoo jutting out from the thick pages. Marie had asked her to do a little research in the hopes of finding a historical meaning behind it. So far, no luck.

  A few fingers of gin performed alchemy, muffling Marie’s stress, transforming her anxiety to wistful longing. She rummaged through her bookshelf, tugging an old favorite from the row of dog-eared paperbacks—Swords Against Madness, by Carolyn Saunders. She’d read it a dozen times; the text held no mysteries, no new surprises, but the words wrapped around her like a warm and familiar blanket. It was comfort food for the soul. She sipped her gin and leafed through the pages, letting the story wash over her.

  A voice emerged from the hollow, she read, dripping with cold malice and amusement. Even in her green-steel armor, her mother’s sword riding on her hip, Talia fought a sudden shiver of fear. The swamp seemed to close in around her. Dangling tree boughs dripped down like black fingers, reaching for her.

  “Who ventures into my home?” asked the voice. “Who dares to disturb the Witch of the Challs?”

  Talia swallowed, her throat dry, and raised her chin. “A knight-errant, on a holy quest.”

  “Holy?” A faint chuckle echoed through the dead trees. “I see no symbol of the father church upon you. I see no brand of the Sacristines. By what god do you claim right of passage?”

  She touched her throat, tugging at the silver chain around her neck and fishing the symbol she’d been given out from under her breastplate. She held it high to catch the moonlight: a skeleton key, forged in cold iron.

  “By no mere god at all. It is the Lady of the Crossroads, the Lady in Red, who sends me forth to battle.”

  The response came on a whisper of acrid wind. “Well chosen. And you would pay a witch’s price for the wisdom you seek?”

  “For the knowledge to save my people,” the knight said, “I would pay any price.”

  Marie poured herself another glass of gin.

  She thought back to her dream, to the tattooed symbol in Nessa’s book. Of course Vanessa Roth wasn’t a witch. There was no such thi
ng, not in real life. But she was an anthropologist. She knew things. Marie didn’t dare go near Richard Roth again, at least not until she had her badge back, but nobody had said she couldn’t pay a courtesy call to his wife to ask for her academic insight.

  Besides, maybe she just wanted to see her again.

  * * *

  The next morning, Marie felt like an interloper as she walked the campus of Barnard College. She was more than a decade out of college herself, though she didn’t like to count the years. Walking among the crowds of younger women, hearing them talk as they roved in clustered packs, was a strange flavor of time travel. When she was their age, she was convinced she knew everything. In hindsight, she wanted to crawl under a rock and hide when she realized how little she knew about anything back then.

  And in ten more years, she thought, I’ll probably look back and marvel about how I didn’t know anything in my thirties. And ten years after that…

  A couple of helpful students played tour guide, pointing her way to the right classroom. She poked her head in, hearing Nessa’s voice for the first time since they’d met at her brownstone in the Village.

  “—August 14, 1791, a secret ceremony was held at Bois Caiman. One of the attendees was a woman named Cecile Fatiman, a mambo—that is, a priestess of vodou.”

  Marie stepped into the classroom and closed the door softly behind her. She lingered at the edges of the half-empty seats. While she’d looked like a fashion plate at home, Nessa at work was a figure just slightly out of time. She wore a long vintage skirt, a prim blouse, and a thin black silk scarf knotted into a dangly bow tie at her throat. Her eyes widened behind her owlish glasses when she glanced Marie’s way, and she smiled as she went on with the lecture.

  “Cecile, allegedly possessed by the goddess Ezili Dantor, sacrificed a pig while the crowd was regaled with prophecies of rebellion and freedom.” Nessa held up her right hand, her palm to the classroom like a court witness being sworn in. “The celebrants drank the pig’s blood and washed their hands in it. A symbol of their readiness to fight.”

  A few students stifled giggles, rolling their eyes at the melodramatic gesture. Nessa lowered her hand, casting another quick glance at Marie before turning back to her class.

  “That was the start of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in recorded history. One week after the ritual at Bois Caiman, tens of thousands of slaves rose up to join the fight. Less than a year after that night, rebels controlled nearly half of the island, thousands of slave owners were dead, and almost two hundred plantations had been burned to the ground. Now, what does that teach us? Anyone?”

  No hands went up. Nessa arched an eyebrow, cocking a lopsided smile.

  “Whatever the culture, whatever it’s called,” Nessa told them, “witchcraft is the traditional tool of the politically dispossessed. A court of last resort for those who have no other means of exerting power. If you’re looking for a revolution, look for a witch.”

  One student raised her hand. “But…Professor Roth, you’re not saying that the ritual actually worked, are you? I mean, the sacrifice didn’t magically make the revolution happen.”

  “Good question. And I’ll ask you one in return: does it matter? The ritual took place, and whether it worked by some sort of crowd hypnosis, the sheer fervor for freedom whipped to a boil, or, sure, ‘magic,’ the results were very, very real. And I believe we’re at the end of our time for today. Ladies, please read Leyburn, chapters eight through twelve, for Wednesday’s class. I’m not saying there’s going to be a quiz, but there’s going to be a quiz.”

  She smiled at the chorus of mock groans and stood behind her desk with folded arms, watching her students shuffle off. Marie walked against the tide, making her way toward the front of the class. Hesitant, heart pounding, her mouth suddenly dry.

  This is ridiculous, she told herself. I’m a police officer making a professional consultation. I’ve done this a hundred times.

  But not with her.

  As she neared the desk, Nessa looked almost as nervous as Marie felt. The professor’s eyelashes fluttered, and she awkwardly fiddled with the scarf at her throat.

  “Detective,” she said. “This is an unexpected pleasure. If you’re looking for my husband, I’m afraid he’s still out of town.”

  “No, it’s…it’s you that I want. To speak to. I mean, um, if it’s not a bother, I could use your professional expertise.”

  The professor’s demeanor shifted, a change in her eyes. She stepped around her desk slowly, her formerly anxious motions turning feline, graceful.

  “Do tell.”

  Marie produced a sketch on scratch paper. She had copied the curves and lines of the dead man’s tattoo with careful precision. Nessa snatched it from her outstretched fingers, unfolding it, peering closely through her glasses.

  “This was a tattoo on a suspect’s wrist,” Marie said, “and I’m not sure if the symbol means anything, but my gut says it’s relevant. I thought it might be a gang affiliation thing at first, but our gang-crimes division came up empty.”

  The classroom door drifted shut, leaving them alone together.

  “A tattoo,” Nessa echoed. “And the circumstances it was found under?”

  “I can’t go into any more detail, I’m afraid. It’s an active case. Still, Professor Roth, any help you could give us—”

  “Nessa.”

  Marie tilted her head. “Hmm?”

  “Not ‘Professor Roth.’ Nessa, to you. We don’t have to be formal here.”

  Keep it professional, Marie told herself. Keep it professional.

  “All—all right, Vanessa. You can call me Marie—”

  “No.”

  The professor closed the gap between them. Stepping into Marie’s personal space as easily as popping a soap bubble. She lingered there, as if she could sense Marie’s sudden discomfort. Savoring it.

  “Not ‘Vanessa,’” she said. “Nessa. My friends call me Nessa.”

  Nessa moved an inch closer, looking up at the taller woman. A delighted little smile played on her lips.

  “Say my name, Marie.”

  Since the day she put on her uniform blues for the first time, long before she earned her detective’s shield, Marie had been threatened more times than she could count. She had faced off against rampaging tweakers, pumped well-armed gang members for information, and had even piled onto a four-hundred-pound PCP addict and helped wrestle him into cuffs. Getting into trouble, and getting out of it in one piece, was part of her job description.

  Despite all that, she’d never felt like she was walking a razor’s edge quite like she did in this moment. Her assertiveness training from the police academy told her exactly what she needed to do: reestablish boundaries, and politely but firmly assume command of the interview.

  “Nessa,” she whispered, standing perfectly still.

  Nessa nodded and took one step back. Allowing Marie some breathing room, a reward for her correct answer.

  “Of course I’ll help you.” She looked back at the paper, squinting. “I have to say, it’s not familiar at first glance, but I don’t mind cracking the books for a good cause. I’ll call you as soon as I have something. Give me your phone.”

  “My—” Marie started to say. She’d arrived with her usual confidence. Shields up, professional mask firmly in place. By uttering just a few words, glancing her way, and controlling the distance between them, the professor had managed to throw her into a tailspin.

  “Give me,” Nessa said, holding out her hand, “your phone.”

  Marie handed it over. Nessa turned the screen toward herself, humming happily as she tapped away. She gave it back, showing Marie the new entry she’d made in her contact list: Nessa, followed by a phone number.

  “That’s my personal cell,” Nessa said. “And I texted myself your number, so I have it now. I’ll be in touch. Soon.”

  * * *

  Nessa sent Marie away, the detective looking bewildered and blindsided
. As the classroom door swung shut at her back, leaving Nessa alone, she stood frozen for a moment.

  Then she clutched a balled-up fist to her chest. She beamed and shifted from foot to foot in an impromptu, giddy dance.

  She’d spent the entire morning in a downbeat haze. Between yesterday’s insults, the denial of tenure, her rejected paper, and the indignities of a new day—yet another batch of students who couldn’t be bothered to think, compounded with the mental image of her husband in bed with some younger, prettier surrogate, not even having the respect to tell her he wanted an open marriage…she’d craved nothing more than to go back home, crawl under the covers, and sleep the rest of the day away.

  Marie’s arrival had changed all that. Nessa had started to convince herself that the odd spark between them had been a one-sided flight of fantasy. That there was no magic afoot, no strange connection, just Nessa’s own loneliness and frustration playing tricks on her.

  But she came to see me, Nessa told herself. She came to see ME.

  She still didn’t understand any of this. The euphoria she felt, the way she glowed when Marie looked her way. That delightful little fraying sound at the edge of Marie’s voice when she whispered Nessa’s name. But it was real. And it was wonderful.

  Nessa spun into a pirouette as she danced around her desk, laughing, catching herself. She felt silly but she did it anyway.

  “Something is happening, isn’t it?” she asked the empty classroom. “Something special. Something that’s never happened before.”

  She had never put much stock in gods or religion. Her own witchcraft was an agnostic and solitary pursuit. In that moment, though, she was certain of one thing: somebody was looking out for her.

  Sixteen