Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3)

by Craig Schaefer

  “And the third?”

  “Working on it,” Tricia said. “We’ve got a line on the book, just need someone to go pick it up.”

  “But you still haven’t explained why you poisoned Nessa,” Marie said. “What’s the point of all this? What are you trying to do?”

  Nadia’s hologram seethed. The vines twisted, strangling the gilded worlds, crushing them as the golden light turned emerald and black. The spheres became broken gemstones suspended in a net of obsidian barbed wire.

  “Shadow sickness is incurable. Nessa has had enough time to come to grips with her impending death. She knows there’s no escape, and she’s highly motivated to make her mark before she goes. We always are. No one knows myself better than I do, Marie, which is exactly what makes Nessa the perfect instrument of my will. I know how she thinks, how she reacts, what she’ll do when given a limited range of options. So, in order for my plan to succeed, I had to do just that: remove her options, taking her pieces off the chessboard one by one until all that remains are the moves I want her to make.”

  One by one, the hologram worlds crumbled to dust. Emerald powder rained down into Nadia’s open palm. It pooled, turning liquid, turning scarlet. The image drooled between her fingers like the lifeblood of the universe itself.

  “Nessa will find the keys to Elysium. And then…furious, dying, with a rage hotter than the sun and nothing left to lose, Nessa will do the only thing Nessa can do.”

  Marie took a halting step back. She grasped for words, for the breath she suddenly couldn’t find.

  “She’s going to kill God,” Marie whispered.

  “And you’ll be here with me, safe, alive, and at my side where you belong.” Nadia’s lips curled in a familiar lopsided smile. “Sorry, darling. This time, I’m the one who gets to slay the dragon.”

  Interlude

  The interrogator led Carolyn through a bulkhead, the edges of the thick door caked with rust. It whined shut behind them, sealing them into a narrow stretch of corridor between two reinforced doors, the floor lined with a metallic grille and baking under hard overhead lights. Condensation clung to the steel-plate walls, and a smell of mildew hung in the stagnant air.

  He had mostly been listening in silence while they walked, with Carolyn trailing behind him. Now he glanced back, looking her over with a glimmer of awareness in his eyes.

  “So that’s why we were never able to find Marie Reinhart. She never went back to her own planet. Out of curiosity, was Nadia’s theory about breaking the cycle correct? Is Reinhart still alive, with her, or—”

  “No spoilers,” Carolyn said. “I thought we were going to see your boss?”

  The interrogator gestured to the windowless door before them. A heavy wheel was set into the thick steel, like a bank vault. Or an airlock, with nothing beyond it but the freezing void of space.

  “Remember, you asked for this.” He glanced down. His eyes narrowed, and he pointed to the sleeve of her sweater. A spot, dark and about the size of a dime, stained the fabric near her left wrist. “You have a cut.”

  She shrugged. “Might have banged myself up on something when they brought me in. Don’t ask what. I had a bag over my head.”

  “No.” The hook of his nose wrinkled. “And I looked you over when you were brought to the interrogation room. That happened after you arrived.”

  “I’m in my sixties; if I can go a single day without injuring myself, I’m ahead of the game. Last week I pulled a muscle getting out of bed. And this place isn’t exactly up to OSHA standards, in case you haven’t noticed.” She turned her hand as much as the cuffs would let her, looking it over. “It’s shallow, already clotted. I don’t need a bandage.”

  “I didn’t offer you one,” he replied, turning his back on her.

  He took hold of the wheel. It groaned, a high rasping sound, as it slowly turned in his grip.

  “I suggest you remember your manners,” he said. “You are about to enter the presence of royalty.”

  Carolyn’s stomach clenched, tight as a fist. Her heart hammered, and her fingers squeezed the glass of tepid water between her frail hands. The door swung wide. The interrogator gave her a mocking bow and gestured with a flourish. Like a convict marching to the electric chair with no last-minute pardon in sight, she stepped into the king’s chamber.

  She had prepared herself for every horror she could think of. Darkness. Fire. Torment and misery incarnate. A creature, foul and twisted beyond imagining.

  The room was warm. The air smelled like an ocean breeze tinged with exotic spice, and soft lights cast long shadows along the wood-paneled walls of a modest study. Her feet touched down on piled shag carpet, money green, as a song she knew by heart played on an antique phonograph. Peggy Lee, the venerable songstress, crooning “Why Don’t You Do Right?”

  “Isn’t that,” her host asked with a rich baritone chuckle and a nod to the phonograph, “the eternal question?”

  The King of Rust reclined in a leather armchair, beside a varnished side table bearing a brandy snifter and cut-crystal glasses. Two more chairs, smaller, sized to fit a human frame, faced him to form a cozy nook.

  He was beautiful.

  Even sitting, he towered over her, easily twelve feet tall. His appearance was alien, but his individual features echoed the most idealized parts of the human face. His head was long, smooth, like an Easter Island carving, but his eyes were big and rich and deep, his cheekbones high, his features blessed with the kind of symmetrical perfection that supermodels dreamed of. A robe of russet silk draped his body, dangling open to bare the hairless alabaster skin and sculpted muscles of his chest.

  A mist clung to his body. It was an aura of faint light, sparkling golden motes following the gentle rise of one long and three-fingered hand. He gestured to the phonograph. It slowed, Peggy Lee’s voice drawing out into a long, garbled, single note, distorting until it stopped dead. The room fell silent, save for the soft and relentless tick of a clock.

  Behind her, the interrogator shut the door.

  “Please,” the king said, “won’t you both join me? Sit down.”

  Carolyn settled into one of the chairs, cradling her glass on her lap. Her interrogator took the other. He shifted, uncomfortable, staring down at his shoes.

  “We can be comfortable here,” the king said. “Uncuff her.”

  The interrogator gave him a nervous look. “My lord?”

  “Do you think an elderly fantasy writer poses you a threat? Because I know you’re certainly not saying she poses me a threat.”

  The interrogator wisely held his silence. He leaned over with a tiny key and unfastened the handcuffs before taking his seat again.

  “Enjoying the story so far?” Carolyn asked, rubbing her sore wrists.

  “Hanging on your every word,” the king replied.

  “I know. I had my suspicions at first,” she said, jerking a thumb at the interrogator, “but once I saw the earpiece, I knew for certain that ‘the king is always listening’ wasn’t just a figure of speech. I’m betting his lie-detector routine was a fake, too. You were the one who caught me when I bent the truth, and told him to call me on it. You probably passed him the questions you wanted asked, too. You were my real audience.”

  “I find it convenient, and amusing, to work through human proxies. Before we continue, I must know something. I’m curious: am I what you expected to see, when you walked through that door?”

  “Honestly? I was expecting horns and a pitchfork,” Carolyn said. “Something ugly, something gross. In retrospect, though, no reason I should have.”

  “So you’ve figured it out? You know what the Kings of Man truly are.”

  “They say God created man in his own image,” Carolyn mused. She stared into the king’s golden eyes. “But before he made man…he created angels.”

  “He should have stopped there,” the king replied.

  “The carvings in the cathedral under Deep Six gave it away,” she explained. “Resting place of one of th
e ‘three faithful thrones.’ Through his act of sacrifice, the epitaph said, ‘the nine kings are defied.’ But the body rotting in that coffin looked an awful lot like you.”

  The king leaned to his side. His fingers delicately uncorked the snifter. Brandy spilled into a crystal glass, kissing the air with its aroma.

  “There were twelve of us, in the beginning,” he said. “The Twelve Thrones. Vessels of God’s power, instruments of his divine will. Brothers until the bitter end.”

  “Nine of you tried to pull a palace coup. Three stayed loyal.”

  “And I mourn them still. Can I interest you in a glass?”

  “I’m good with water,” Carolyn replied.

  The king arched one hairless brow.

  “Carolyn Saunders, saying no to a drink? Now that’s an unexpected twist.”

  “We’re closing in on the end of the story,” she replied. “I need to keep my wits sharp, to tell it just right.”

  “After, then,” he said.

  “And before the firing squad. I’m curious, too. Are you going to kill me yourself, or have your errand boy here do the job?”

  The king gave her a polite chuckle. He sipped his brandy.

  “What’s that thing you were saying earlier?” he asked. “Right. No spoilers. Don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

  “Cute,” Carolyn said.

  “But please, do continue the tale. I assume this is the last we’ve seen of Marie Reinhart. Taking her final bow, to step out of the story and spend the rest of her life as the consort to a different Knight’s Witch.”

  “Bad assumption.”

  The king tilted his head. His eyes narrowed to reptilian slits, squinting at her.

  “She was stranded on a distant world with no way to return home,” he said, “and surrounded by a literal army while her lover was in the final throes of an incurable disease. Surrender was Reinhart’s only rational choice.”

  “Only rational choice, sure, but you’re forgetting something.” Carolyn cracked a dry smile. “When you run out of rational choices, sometimes you need to get good and crazy. And when it came to fighting for Nessa’s life—even stranded a world away—Marie didn’t know the meaning of the word surrender.”

  Act II

  The Symmachy Encore

  Twenty

  Marie was a statue carved from ice, threatening to melt on the red carpet of the throne room. Or shatter into pieces.

  “You can’t…” she breathed. “You don’t even know if Nessa can pull it off. You have no idea what’s going to happen if she succeeds—”

  “That’s the thrill of it,” Nadia told her. “We don’t, do we? Who knows what happens when the creator of the universe dies? Do we chug along without him? Does the wheel of worlds come crashing down like a house of cards? I’ll tell you this, though: I’m done, we are done being trapped in this endless cycle.”

  “What if it’s the end? The end of everything?”

  “Then we’re still set free,” Nadia replied. “No more reincarnations. No more needless suffering, no more pointless death.”

  She took a step closer to Marie, her eyes bright and fervent. Her gauntlet trailed ripples of hologram static, luminous electronic noise.

  “No more losing you,” Nadia said. “So we still win. In the end, no matter what happens, things are finally going to change. We finally get our happy ending.”

  “What if nothing changes? What if God dies and the first story keeps repeating without him, and all of this was for nothing?”

  “Not for nothing,” Nadia told her. “Because if nothing else, we finally get what we deserve. Justice. He did this to us, Marie. Every single time we’ve been murdered, our love and our memories shattered, our lives erased from the narrative, that’s another layer of blood on that bastard’s hands. He did this to us. And he needs to answer for it. He needs to be punished. I know you agree with me.”

  “Not at this cost,” Marie said. “Not if it means losing Nessa.”

  Nadia held out her open hands, one living mercury and the other pale flesh. The fire in her eyes faded to something wistful, almost soft.

  “You only say that because you haven’t accepted the truth yet, Marie. Nessa is standing right in front of you. Same woman. Different life. Do something for me? Close your eyes.”

  Marie’s world went dark. She stood there, eyes closed, the throne room dead silent. She felt Nadia move against her, hot breath washing across her throat.

  “Whose voice is this?” Nadia purred in her ear.

  Marie didn’t answer.

  “Inhale,” Nadia told her. “Breathe deep. Who do you smell?”

  She smelled clean, fresh linen. The tang of Chanel perfume, and the aftermath of a storm. The mingling of scents carried her a world away, to the bedroom of Nessa’s brownstone in the West Village. It was the scent of the first night they spent in each other’s arms.

  “That’s not fair,” Marie murmured.

  “I’m never fair. You said it yourself, I’m a monster.” Nadia’s arm curled around her. The fingers of her unsheathed hand trailed slowly up Marie’s spine. “I’m your monster. Who touches you like this, Marie?”

  With her eyes closed, nothing but scent and voice and touch, she could have been back in New York. Back in a time before her entire world flipped upside down.

  “Say my name,” Nadia urged her.

  “Ness—”

  The word slipped from her lips, almost free before Marie caught herself and bit down on it. Nadia’s response was a rich chuckle in her ear as her fingers curled around the back of Marie’s neck, stroking gently.

  “Good girl. Now…would you do something else for me, Marie? Just a tiny thing.”

  Marie nodded her assent, inhaling Nessa, feeling her presence in the dark behind her eyelids. Nadia’s hand tightened on the back of her neck, just like Nessa’s often did. Just a little. A proprietary touch.

  “I want you,” Nadia whispered, “to get down on your hands and knees and kiss my boots.”

  In the instant before Marie flinched, before her eyes flicked open, one of her knees almost buckled. It was just a tiny betrayal. But she knew it, and Nadia knew it, and Nadia cackled with delight as she pulled Marie into an embrace.

  “So close,” Nadia laughed. “You see how easy this is going to be? I know this is all strange and upsetting and new, Marie, but all you have to do is give it a chance. Give me a chance. You’re going to be happy here.”

  What scared Marie more than anything was that Nadia was right. Not maybe right. Not probably right. She was right, and when Marie closed her eyes, it was easy to trick herself into thinking she was back in Nessa’s arms. After a month with Nadia, a year, would she even know the difference?

  And while she was tricking herself, the real Nessa was out there, all alone, dying, and departing to make her final stand without her Knight beside her. Marie’s jaw tightened until it shook.

  What makes a knight? she asked herself.

  She’d grappled with the question ever since her awakening. Was a knight defined by her liege, her cause, the code she upheld? What made those things worthy? She’d spent her childhood reading tales of imaginary knights, stories of valor and chivalry. She had witnessed Gazelle’s devotion back in Mirenze, her willingness to hold the line and die in battle so her coven could escape. And Marie’s own decision, as she pulled her to safety, that being a knight meant not leaving anyone behind.

  She wasn’t leaving Nessa behind, either.

  Escaping this place was impossible, but Marie knew three things for certain. A knight always fights, never quits, she told herself. A knight never abandons her liege. And a knight finds a way to do the impossible, or dies trying.

  She forced herself to relax. Let her jaw unclench, her hands rising up to rest on Nadia’s hips, holding her like they were about to slow-dance.

  “It’s funny,” Marie said. “Back on the road, not long after we left New York, Nessa and I had an argument. She was wild and free, like she is, and I
was still acting like I had to follow all the rules. She told me that she thought a little anarchy would be good for me.”

  Nadia smiled, nuzzling her nose against Marie’s shoulder.

  “With all due respect to my other incarnation, I think you’ll find my empire a much more comfortable fit for you. This is a place of order and discipline. People who obey the rules—my rules—tend to thrive under my wing.”

  Marie sidestepped, easing Nadia along with her. Turning slightly as they moved a few inches closer to the edge of the red carpet.

  “I don’t think I took what she said to heart, at first. You know how stubborn I can be.”

  “Oh,” Nadia said, “do I ever.”

  “But a little anarchy has a practical application sometimes,” Marie said. “You know what really decides nine out of ten battles, when you get down to it?”

  “Ruthlessness?” Nadia asked. “No. Determination.”

  “The element of surprise,” Marie said.

  She bent one knee, sprang backward, and spun toward the closest member of the honor guard, throwing all of her weight into a punch. His nose shattered under her knuckles, spattering her fist with blood, and he crumpled to the floor. Her other hand lunged for his belt as he fell and snatched the pistol from his holster. It was bulky, heavier than her service piece with a texture like ridged cold plastic against her palm.

  Marie pressed the gun against the side of her head and put her finger on the trigger.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “I swear I’ll do it. Anyone takes one step toward me and I will blow my brains all over your fancy carpet. What was it you said, Nadia? I kill myself a lot.”

  The room erupted in drawn guns, confusion, the other guards moving to protect their mistress until Tricia raced to Nadia’s side.