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

by Craig Schaefer

  “Where did they go?” Nessa asked. “What happened here?”

  “You have to understand that reincarnation was baked into the original design for humanity. All humans reincarnate. Difference is, a human can reincarnate into anything, become anyone on any world. Each life is a completely new story.”

  “While ours are written for us.” Nessa shared a sidelong glance with Marie. “Along with our endings.”

  “But the Demiurge was frustrated. Kept seeing humans cycle back into the system and make the same mistakes over and over again. Figured there had to be a way to force some kind of spiritual evolution.”

  A man brushed past Marie’s shoulder. She jumped, spun—and stared down the empty hall.

  “I saw it too,” Hedy murmured.

  “You might catch a few echoes, here and there,” the old man said. “Don’t worry, they’re harmless. Just memories of the souls who lived here. Anyway, we picked one world, a single random choice out of the countless he’d built, for an experiment.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Nessa and Marie. There was something wistful in his eyes, wistful and bone-tired.

  “As it happens, same one you two were most recently born on. We put a wedge in the reincarnation process. Most people still recycled, but for people who fit a certain ethical standard—”

  “You keep saying ‘we,’” Nessa pointed out.

  “Me and Lucifer. I was in charge of building heaven. Lucifer was in charge of building hell. Humans who lived lives of compassion and caring for their fellow mortals came here when they died, and, well, you can guess what kind of people went downstairs. I’ll admit, the whole judgment system was sketchy and vague, and a few folks ended up in the wrong place once in a while, but we figured we’d fine-tune it once we got the system running smooth. Never really got around to fixing that.”

  “But if a bad person can reincarnate and become a good person in their next life, just by random chance,” Marie said, “what’s the point of condemning them to hell? They could be a saint next time around.”

  “Remember what I said: human conceptions of the cosmos are based on misconceptions. Forget what you’ve been told, hell was never meant to be a place of eternal punishment. See, we’d spotted trends. People reincarnated as blank slates, but they seemed to bring certain traits along with them. A kind-hearted person usually remained kind. And if someone was a miserable bastard, nine times out of ten they’d be a miserable bastard the next time around. Hell was meant to be a place of rehabilitation.”

  “Like a prison?” Marie asked.

  “Like a prison that actually did its job and tried to teach criminals a better way to live. Punishment with compassion. The idea was, souls would stay down there until they’d cleaned up their act. Then they’d get kicked back into the system. We’d watch their reincarnations and see if they turned out to be better people. If it worked, given a few thousand years of steady evolution, we might actually get a world filled with reasonably decent human beings.” He snorted. “Should have known right there that it was a lost cause.”

  There were more echoes around them now. Ghostly figures, like living glass, sitting on the divans and strolling along the golden concourse. They wore togas of white, and laurels sat upon their brows like grape-leaf halos.

  “I take it that the experiment failed,” Nessa said.

  “The experiment never started. I went down there after a while to see how he was doing. And to catch up—we were old friends from way back. Best friends, once. Anyway, he never even tried. He was just warehousing the humans, leaving them to run riot all over hell. You ask me, subjecting them to each other was the worst punishment he could inflict on them. He’d decided that humanity was hopeless, so he had spent all his time handcrafting what he hoped would be a new and better version. Humans two-point-oh.”

  “Demons,” Nessa said.

  “Mm-hmm. You ever meet a demon?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Then you know how well that turned out. Even at the time I think he knew how badly he’d messed up, but…well, pride’s a hell of a drug. We had the shouting match to end all shouting matches, and he told me he’d show me just how wrong I was. We haven’t spoken since. Far as I’m concerned, my door’s open, but again. Pride.”

  “So demons aren’t fallen angels,” Marie said.

  “Not remotely. I’m sure some demons claim they are, but demons lie. They’re a totally different species, different creator. And Lucifer had nothing to do with the thrones’ rebellion. His only rebellion was refusing to do his damn job. Last I heard, he got fed up and abandoned hell entirely. It’s still running, but nobody’s in charge anymore.”

  “You haven’t told us your name,” Nessa said.

  The old man stopped walking.

  He turned to face them. He seemed taller than he was, and a cold and distant fire burned behind his amber eyes.

  “I’ve had hundreds of names on hundreds of worlds. You would recognize two or three yourselves, but I won’t give them to you.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I would come down, now and then over the centuries. Just pick a world at random, wear a mortal face, and try to teach you people a little something. Lessons about compassion, about empathy, about taking care of each other. Nothing complicated. Love is simple. Then I’d leave. A few hundred years later, maybe a thousand, I’d check in. See if the seeds I planted bore any fruit. And do you know what I found, each and every time?”

  A hot wind gusted through the golden hall as his voice rose. His hand clutched his staff, raised it, then slammed it down against the marble floor with a crack that echoed to the vaulted arches.

  “They built things in my name. Temples and statues and laws. But only a rare few built anything in their hearts. No. What I saw were the wealthy, and the hateful, and the cruel using my words and my name to justify doing whatever they wanted to do. They would slap a book against their open palm and preach on my behalf, conning their congregations, conning nations into believing that they should despise their neighbor, turn away the needy, and persecute anyone different from them because I told them to do it.”

  The wind died down. The fire in the old man’s eyes flickered and died. He leaned against his staff, his voice softer now.

  “It got to the point that hearing my name on a mortal’s lips made me sick. And I know that wasn’t fair to the ones who were trying to do right, trying to listen. But a man’s heart can only be broken so many times before it stops healing. I just don’t go by any name at all anymore.”

  He turned his back on them.

  “And I don’t go down there anymore. Anyway, I like it better here. It’s quiet here.”

  * * *

  Rosales shot across the wet pavement, holding a mad angel by its throat. She hurled it into the cotton-candy stand, where it snapped a wing and fell limp in a pile of broken glass and splintered wood. To her left, Savannah had sprouted arms of black tar from her shoulders, arms tipped with jagged spears and scalpel blades, punching through bodies and filling the air with a flurry of torn, bloody feathers.

  “How many of these fuckers are there?” Rosales shouted.

  They fought in the heart of a circle of corpses. The masked angels kept coming. More closing in now, from the bones of the roller coaster and behind the Ferris wheel, drawn to the sounds of battle.

  Rosales was a whirling dervish, muscles aching and caked with hot sweat in her armor, the suit translating her punches into sledgehammer force. Another angel lunged at her, three-fingered hands hooked into dirty claws. She hoisted it into the air like it was weightless and then brought it down onto her steel-clad knee. Its spine shattered with a hollow crack. She tossed the twitching body aside just in time for another to leap onto her back, clawing at her helmet.

  A synthesized voice spoke calmly into her ear: “Warning. Suit integrity at seventy-seven percent.”

  “Doc,” Rosales called out, “this’d be a good time for some insight.”

&
nbsp; Savannah was performing field surgery, scalpel-tipped tentacles whipping through the air like the blades of a blender. A masked angel fluttered toward her, claws out. Before it could grab hold, her human shape broke, splashing to the pavement in an inky puddle, then flowed across the midway before popping up again.

  “Insight,” Savannah murmured. Her ink arms twisted around an angel, coiling like ropes, pinning its wings and dragging it close. “In. Sight. Yes. Good time for an experiment.”

  She sprouted another black tendril, this one thin as a needle. It slid, probing, into the captive angel’s ear.

  Rosales staggered past her, still trying to shake the maddened creature off her back. “No, it is arguably a bad time for an experiment.”

  Rosales wrenched herself free. She spun and snapped out one plated boot with a bone-shattering kick, crushing her attacker’s emaciated ribs. Two more had already sprouted up where the first had come from, latching onto her arms, trying to drag her down. She smashed their skulls together and dropped them to the pavement.

  Filthy wings fluttered. Rosales cocked back her fist—and then the creature shot past her, throwing itself onto one of its cousins in a flurry of mute rage. Claws tore into tattered robes and feathers. Rosales blinked at it, confused, and then the traitorous angel turned its face. Its eyes, burning through its featureless wooden mask, were blots of ink.

  She turned on her heel. Savannah had one tentacled arm coiled around a captive and an inky needle-probe sliding into its ear. Her other tentacle whipped loose and set a third test subject free, darkness spreading and blotting out its eyes.

  “I believe in working smarter, not harder,” Savannah said. “Now watch my back while I make us some more friends.”

  Thirty-Seven

  The old man led the way up a winding spiral staircase. The banister was made of one continuous strip of crystal, and it chimed when Marie’s fingers brushed across it. On the floor above, another boulevard of marble and gold awaited. High, arched windows looked out over a sprawling city below. It had been grand once. Mansions of gold stood tarnished and abandoned, windows broken. Dusty streets wound around copper statues caked with green patinas.

  “Just like hell wasn’t purely a place of punishment, heaven wasn’t purely a reward,” he said. “We wanted to see what would happen when a spiritually evolved person had longer than a human lifetime to study and grow. The hope was that they would enrich one another, and in a few hundred years we’d have an entire golden city filled with the best your species could offer. Then they would be recycled again—just like the inmates of hell, bringing their positive traits to the mortal world.”

  “Antibodies,” Nessa said.

  Off by a cluster of plush white chairs, the echoes of the past were gathering. A throng of them sat, wide-eyed, while a man in a toga delivered a silent lecture—his lips moving, his words lost to the mists of time. Across the hall, a painter was at work, his brushstrokes delivering invisible paint to a blank easel. Students, young and old, etched notes onto tablets of crystal and gold.

  “Think of it as…spiritual genetic manipulation,” the old man said. “If the experiment worked, we’d weed out the traits we didn’t want in humanity and encourage the positive ones. Then we’d expand heaven and hell to all the other parallel worlds, not just one. Perfecting the cosmos and, if we were lucky, starving the Kings of Man.”

  “So why is it empty now?” Hedy asked. “Where did all the humans go?”

  The old man pursed his lips. “I made a mistake. A simple misunderstanding of human nature.”

  Marie’s eyebrows lifted. Off to her left, shed togas and fallen laurels draped the floor at the foot of a sofa. A woman and two men writhed together, primal, biting at each other as their bodies thrust and bucked. Another echo with a crystal tablet walked past, not even seeming to notice.

  “Mortal lifespans aren’t a bug,” the old man said. “They’re a feature. Do you know what happens when you take someone who only expected seventy good years and hand them all of eternity?”

  Two echoes were fighting, rolling across the ground, hands tearing at each other’s togas. One man grabbed the other by the ears and silently slammed the back of his head against the polished marble floor, leaving smears of ghostly white blood.

  “First, the boredom sets in,” he said. “You can only contemplate the universe and study virtue so many times before you’ve had every thought you’re capable of thinking ten times over. Familiarity breeds contempt.”

  A long, gilded counter had been set for a party, with plates of snacks and a punch bowl. Echoes clustered around it, all smiles, nobody fighting. Marie almost sighed with relief, until she noticed the man on the counter. He’d been stripped and hog-tied, wrists and ankles bound behind his back.

  “Then,” the old man said, “the decadence sets in. Nothing left but the pursuit of sensation and pleasure.”

  One of the partygoers shoved the bound man’s face into the punch bowl. He held it there, laughing, as his captive fought and squirmed. The bound man went limp. His killer grabbed a fistful of hair and yanked his head out of the punch.

  A moment later, the drowned man sprang back to life, eyes flickering open, taking a deep, wheezing breath of air. The partygoers cheered like they’d just seen a clever magic trick. And the man gripping his hair slammed his face back into the bowl, drowning him all over again.

  “In a world where no one can truly die,” the old man said, “and where every wound is healed, decadence quickly becomes a thing more terrible than you can imagine.”

  “The best of humanity,” Nessa said, her voice dry.

  “It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t equipped for immortality, and I didn’t know how to give them that strength. Well, the Demiurge was in hiding, locked away, and even I couldn’t hear his voice anymore, so I had to make a judgment call.”

  “You shut heaven down,” Marie said.

  “And kicked everyone out. Heaven was a disaster. We had good intentions, but you know what they say about good intentions. And here we are. End of the tour.”

  The arch ahead drooped low, gilded marble formed in scalloped waves like a theater proscenium. The room beyond it was a tomb.

  Bas-reliefs upon the ivory walls echoed the carvings in the cathedral under Deep Six. The burning wheels, the tall and slender thrones, the images of the kings curled and writhing in eternal fire. Alien letters ran from top to bottom in careful rows, like Egyptian hieroglyphs. At the center of the room was an open-faced sarcophagus of solid, gleaming gold.

  The old man stood at the proscenium arch, venturing no farther. He gestured with his staff.

  “Two of the three faithful thrones picked the farthest, most remote places in the universe they could find and went to die alone. The third trusted the fortifications of heaven to keep his key safe. I stayed here with him while he starved to death. Mopped his brow, prayed with him. Promised I would stay behind and guard his resting place, keep the book safe.”

  “And yet you’ve led us here,” Nessa said. “Explain yourself.”

  “I think I’m just tired,” the old man said.

  “So you’ve decided to betray God.”

  His lips curled in a wan smile. “Does it ever get exhausting, assuming the worst about everybody? No, handing it over to the kings, that would be a betrayal.”

  “Do you really think what I’m going to do to him will be any kinder?”

  “Do you?” he asked. “I’m not so sure. I knew Sophia. Did I tell you that? I walked with her once. And then she created the Demiurge and from there…everything just went wrong. Went rotten. World after world of misery and hate and broken dreams, on and on. Gave you people free will, and you can’t go ten minutes without using it to bash each other’s skulls in. Maybe it’s time to end it all. The universe is broken. Maybe the best thing we can do for the sorry thing is burn it all down.”

  He held his staff in both hands, leaning on it, and turned his gaze to the gilded ceiling.

  “And may
be, just maybe, Wisdom’s not dead in her grave. Maybe she’s just sleeping. And if we clear the slate, maybe she’ll come back and start all over again. Get it right next time.”

  Marie stood over the golden sarcophagus. The mummified figure within was a twin to the one in the ocean cathedral, nothing but jerky-hide skin and moldering bone, bound by manacles of sapphire. In its rib cage, upon a bed of dust, sat a slim black book.

  “You’re wrong,” Marie said.

  The old man lifted an eyebrow but said nothing. She turned to face him.

  “Free will means that people can be good. People can choose to be good. But they need inspiration. They need heroes to look up to. They need to see great deeds to remind them that they can be great, too.”

  “You really believe that, don’t you?”

  “I believe it because it’s true.”

  She set one of her batons on the coffin’s rim. Then she reached into the sarcophagus and took hold of the sapphire chain. The manacles snapped open, twisting in her grip as she slipped them into the mirror bag.

  “And you might have given up,” Marie said, “but I haven’t. And I won’t. We’ll find a way to fix this, to fix everything. We’ll set the universe right.”

  The old man studied her. There was a faint twinkle in his eye.

  “Been a long time since anyone gave me faith. You haven’t yet. But keep on like that…you just might.” He looked to Nessa. “You wanted to know why I brought you here? One word. Hope.”

  “Hope,” Nessa echoed.

  “Besides, you might surprise me. It’s been a long, long time since anyone managed to surprise me.”

  Windows along the great hall exploded. Sprays of glass showered the marble, glittering like diamonds, and the air erupted with a flurry of dirty gray wings. A masked angel hurtled toward them like a screaming missile, claws out and curling. The old man spun and waved his staff, its arc drawing a trail of luminous white mist. The angel glanced off the mist like it was a brick wall and went tumbling, rolling across the marble floor. One of its wings broke with a hollow-boned snap.