Detonation Boulevard (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 2)

by Craig Schaefer

  They rounded the bend, returning the way they came, and froze. A pack of men in olive tabards, with truncheons and iron manacles dangling from their belts, were combing over the wreckage from their arrival. Two of them poked at the torn electrical line like it was a snake that might bite them, while another three hauled on the metal table, trying to wrench it free from where it had fused with the side of a house. A sixth, dangling a lamp from a metal pole to shed light on the scene, spotted them.

  “Ho, strangers!” He pointed their way. “Halt and present yourself in the name of the militia!”

  Nessa and Marie didn’t need to say a word. They shared a glance, looked to the narrow mouth of an alley off to the left, and ran for it. Their shoes pounded the cobblestones as they raced down the jagged, twisting corridor, and the air was thick with the stench of rotting garbage and tossed-out chamber pots.

  “I probably don’t need to ask,” Nessa panted as they ran, chancing a quick glance over her shoulder, “but according to the books, they burn witches in Mirenze, don’t they?”

  “Big time,” Marie gasped. They burst out onto a side street, running parallel to the coast. They were beyond the friendly glow of the streetlamps now. Full dark, lit only by the carpet of strange stars and what remained of the moon. They stumbled to a stop, catching their breaths as they kept their ears perked, listening for the sound of pursuit.

  “I think they let us go,” Nessa said.

  She didn’t have to guess why, not when she could barely see her hand in front of her face. They were on the dark streets. The places the militia didn’t go at night.

  “Looks like—” Marie paused, getting her bearings, and traced the curve of the street with her fingertip like a sailor reckoning the stars. “Looks like if we go this way, we’ll meet back up with the roads by the waterfront.”

  “Do we want to?” Nessa asked. “Maybe we’re better off taking our chances in the dark.”

  Marie couldn’t argue that. She stared upward, looking for an alternative, and pointed.

  “The bell tower. Should be a church nearby.”

  “And considering these people burn witches, is that a good thing?”

  “If they’re open, we can plead sanctuary. I’ll give them the ‘lost merchants’ story—”

  “Marie,” Nessa said, “you are not good at lying. Let me handle that.”

  “If nothing else, we might be able to wrangle a cot for the night and something to eat.”

  They set off toward the bell tower, using its silhouette against the stars as a landmark to guide their footsteps as they headed farther into the dark. They’d traveled maybe a quarter of a mile when Marie heard rustling behind them. She turned, eyes sharp. The street was empty.

  Ten more steps, and the rustling was closer.

  “Nessa, did you—”

  “Uh-huh.” Nessa stopped in the middle of the street with her hands on her hips. “Who’s there? Show yourselves.”

  And they did, slinking from the shadows all around them, emerging from alleyways and dark corners. Figures in robes of skin and fur and masks of pallid bone, each carved to resemble some sort of animal. They circled Nessa and Marie in a slow, prowling pack, cutting off any chance of escape as they closed the net around them.

  “It insists,” said a woman in a wolf mask, giving a husky chuckle.

  “And so it receives,” said another, her mask beaked like a falcon. Blades of bone dangled from her wrists on leather thongs, like a pair of lethal talons. “How polite we are to our prey.”

  There were eight of them now, eyes wide and hungry behind their masks.

  A man, a mole snickering behind his fat-cheeked and bone-whiskered disguise, said, “We are kind to fools. But what manner of fools are these, dressed so strangely? If we peel their skin, will their insides be as unique as their outsides?”

  A cold wind gusted down the boulevard, kicking up leaves and stray rocks. Wooden shutters rattled as stray night birds took flight, squawking. Then a hush fell over the street like a heavy wool blanket on a winter’s night, stilling every sound, every movement, every thought and emotion save one.

  Fear.

  The masked figures slowly parted the circle, shoulders hunched and heads bowed to make room for a new arrival as she strode, imperious, from the shadows. She wore a dress of snowy white velvet that matched the bone of her mask, carved in the shape of a mouse. An ermine cape with a ruffled fur collar trailed in her wake. Opera gloves sheathed her arms to the elbows, and each white finger ended in a tiny metallic claw, glinting in the moonlight.

  “Mole, I’m disappointed. I taught you better than that. I taught you all better than that. Did you look upon these women with all of your eyes, or just the two you were born with? Did you smell with your heart? Did you touch with your intuition?”

  The woman in the mouse mask stood face-to-face with Nessa. She studied her, taking some silent measure, and lowered her voice.

  “If you had done that,” the woman said, “you would know to bow in the presence of greatness. The Owl and her knight have returned to us at long last. Just as I promised they would.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nessa said. “Have…we met?”

  “We have, and I’ve been waiting so long. I was starting to worry this night might never come.”

  She reached up, careful with her claws, and took off her mask. The woman underneath was somewhere in her early forties, her face showing the first real lines of age, her eyes the kind of tired that only comes from seeing too much of the world.

  “I’m Hedy,” she said. “I’m your daughter.”

  Thirty-Nine

  On a desolate rooftop, along a stretch of salmon-colored shingles, the air began to shimmer.

  An arm draped in tattered rags wrenched itself through a crack in the world. Then another. And a third, a spear made of gnarled bone prying open the gap. A woman’s form, drenched in black slime, forced its way out one agonizing inch at a time. Her flesh bubbled and ran like melting wax, hot as the occult chemicals that boiled in her veins.

  Savannah flopped onto her back and lay there, staring up at the canopy of strange constellations.

  “Memo to myself,” she whispered. “Unaided interdimensional translocation is viable. It also hurts. Excessively. Think I may have boiled off three to five percent of my body mass in transit. Internal organs slightly rearranged. Conclusion: find a better method of travel in future.”

  She rolled onto her belly, then pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, prowling along the rooftop. Tiny droplets of ink spattered the tiles in her wake, sizzling and casting off wisps of gray smoke.

  She dropped flat. In the street below, masks of pallid bone caught the moonlight, shimmering like moths’ wings. Roth and Reinhart were with them. The procession moved as one, heading away from the distant lamplights, and Savannah followed.

  * * *

  “I have so many questions,” Nessa said.

  “And I hope that I have answers,” Hedy replied, “but we’d best keep moving. We aren’t the only hunters who come out after sunset.”

  Nessa walked alongside her, marveling. Answers at last. The truth at last. Hedy hung her mask on her belt, turning her bare face to bask in a crisp night breeze.

  “So it was you,” Nessa said. “The book of spells, the tarot card—it was all your doing.”

  A frown creased Hedy’s brow.

  “Tarot? I’m not sure what that is. But no. If I had a way of reaching you, I would have done it ages ago. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried relentlessly. I only knew that you and Marie would reincarnate, and I hoped you’d either return to our world or find a way across from another.” She looked them up and down. “And I’m guessing it was the second option.”

  Marie glanced at her outfit. “I thought we could pass as foreign merchants.”

  “With those fabrics? What do you even call that?”

  “Polyester,” Marie said.

  “Fascinating. But I don’t think that story’s going to pass mu
ster, not unless you got much better at lying—”

  “She didn’t,” Nessa chimed in.

  “That settles that, then. Change of clothes for both of you, as soon as we get home.”

  “So, just to clarify,” Nessa said, “you’re…my daughter?”

  “Not by blood, if that’s what you mean. When we bring a witch into our fold, we declare our allegiance. A fledgling might be our brother, our sister, our cousin. These bonds are true as blood. Truer. You accepted me as your apprentice, and then…you adopted me. A declaration rarely made, and never lightly.”

  Nessa studied her as they walked.

  “You must have shown great potential,” she decided.

  Hedy stared straight ahead. Her voice rode on a high-tension line, strained as she fought to keep her emotions under control.

  “You made me great. As you promised you would. And I did my best to carry on your work. You really don’t remember anything? Anything at all?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. This must be difficult for you.”

  “Difficult?”

  Hedy brushed a curled finger across her eyelashes. A tiny damp pearl caught on her knuckle as her voice quavered, on the edge of breaking.

  “I watched you die,” Hedy said. “I was there. And I couldn’t save you. I couldn’t…”

  She trailed off. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and lifted her chin.

  “But everything is going to be all right now.”

  Quick feet pattered up a side street. A woman dressed in sleek brown leathers, a rapier on her hip, raced over to Hedy and jolted to a stop. She was in her forties, sallow-eyed, with short-cropped hair and sweat glistening on her freckled cheeks.

  “All three advance scouts reported in,” she said, gulping down air. “All clear tonight. Shouldn’t be any problems between here and the homestead.”

  “Thank you.” Hedy glanced to Nessa. “This is my knight, Gazelle.”

  Gazelle was staring, wide-eyed, jaw slack as she caught her breath.

  “It’s…it’s them. It’s really them.”

  “Did you think I was lying?” Hedy asked, the edge of a playful challenge in her voice. “It’s them. Tonight, we feast. We’ll break out the good wine for a change.”

  “This world has wine,” Nessa said. “I’m liking it more already.”

  “We are not entirely uncivilized,” Hedy replied. “So, what did you mean before? You thought I was sending you things?”

  Marie walked just behind them, and Gazelle fell into stride alongside her. The other knight kept giving her shy little glances.

  “Someone’s been steering us from the beginning,” Marie said. “We only saw the message that you and—that you and the last Nessa recorded because we were sent a mirror that could show it. Someone put a book of spells in a used bookstore and propped it up for Nessa to see—”

  “And impersonated me over a year ago to hide the device that ultimately helped bring us here,” Nessa said. “Whoever they are, they’re playing a very long game.”

  Hedy blinked at her. “You found practical writings in a bookstore? Is magic so common in your world that grimoires are spread freely? Does everyone practice the art?”

  “It barely exists in our world,” Nessa said, “outside of dreamers and the self-deluded. And those who do practice hide like rats.”

  “I’m afraid our current circumstances aren’t much better. We’ve had some setbacks of late.”

  The jumbled peasant houses gave way to the barred windows and stone walls of a commerce district. At the end of a slumbering street, Ionic columns carved from stout oak held up an open roof. Under the shade of the long rooftop, barrels lined long racks alongside towering wooden tubs and copper-screwed presses. Engravings on the portico, barely legible in the dark, read Fieri Olive Oil Company.

  “I had to rebuild the coven from scratch,” Hedy said. “It was just me and Gazelle in the beginning. Soon I realized we’d need a sound base of operations, one that could go unnoticed in the daylight hours. And, ideally, garner some legitimate income in the process.”

  “Sound indeed,” Nessa said. “I approve.”

  Hedy’s smile lit up the shadows. She led the way to the last wooden vat under the roof of the colonnade. The flagstone floor was sticky under their feet, drizzled with layers of ancient stains, and the air carried a sharp tang like old vinegar. She turned a wooden tap in the base of the vat—twice right, three times left—and pulled. The empty vat split along a seam in the wood, and the halves rolled aside on concealed metal casters to expose a stairway yawning beneath.

  “Home sweet home for the moment,” Hedy said. “Mind your step. Mole, Butterfly, stay behind and stand watch until the scouts get back. Everyone else, with me.”

  The stairway ended in a vaulted door. Jagged sigils had been carved into the wood, hundreds of them in a cascade, like a curtain of twisted snowflakes. Marie couldn’t read them, but they looked like a warning. Like sea dragons on the corners of an old map, marking the places still uncharted and wild.

  “What did you mean when you said you’ve had setbacks?” Nessa asked.

  Hedy pressed her palm to the knife-scarred wood. The door groaned wide.

  Her coven had made their lair in a natural cavern, deep beneath the city’s streets. Beadlets of cold water dripped from a spear bed of stalactites. Water poured down along one wall, a shimmering curtain over slimy rock, collecting in a curving stone trough that ran along the length of the cave. Candles had been lit. Hundreds of them, white and black and scarlet, fixed with clumps of melted wax to the trough’s edge and outcroppings and wherever else they would fit, twinkling in the dark.

  Hedy pointed to the waterfall, her blade-tipped gloves glinting in the candlelight. She played tour guide instead of answering Nessa’s question. “We tapped into a cistern, over on Salt Street, and channel the water in. Fresh and cold as a stone, all we need. The entrance is warded against scrying, and we have enough provisions stocked to hold out against a siege.”

  She rapped her blade-nails upon a long communal table at the heart of the cavern, lined with rough-hewn benches on either side.

  “And we have enough provisions for a proper feast, when the hour calls for it. And this hour does. Gazelle, see to it. Tell Boar I want her to use that recipe she’s been working on, with the good spices. And don’t spare the fresh greens either.”

  Gazelle clicked her bootheels, gave her a sharp nod, and darted toward an archway carved in the cavern wall. The woman only seemed to have two speeds, dead still or fast-forward. Marie caught her shooting one last curious glance her way before she slipped out of sight.

  Some of the enthusiasm faded from Hedy’s eyes. Her voice dropped, soft.

  “Not in front of the others. I…I made a mistake, Mother. And I may have doomed us all.”

  “How can we help?” Nessa asked. No hesitation.

  There was something different in her lover’s bearing, Marie thought. Normally Nessa had to be cajoled into helping anyone. Now she took on the gait of a corporate executive, called in to rescue a failing franchise. She strode at Hedy’s side, eyes sharp behind her glasses, taking in everything and everyone as if she was jotting down the tiniest details on a mental list. Hedy led them in the opposite direction, down a narrow tunnel where the earthy walls were corrugated like the bones of some prehistoric beast’s rib cage.

  It opened onto another cave, the stone bearing the marks of pick-axes where it had been dug out and widened by hand. A four-poster bed draped in furs sat upon the naked stone, alongside a finely woven rug and an ornate end table with an oil lamp. Condensation dripped from a stalactite above, pooling onto the bed’s silken canopy, drawing distorted water stains on the rich fabric. Opposite, tables lined the cavern walls, mismatched and jumbled together, piled high with odds and ends and strange devices. Gears and springs formed heaps alongside glittering stones and crystal shards.

  “My quarters, and my workshop,” Hedy explained. Her voice was tight,
her hands fluttering. “Leadership has its privileges. And its burdens. Though I think the coven is happy to have me not working on my inventions in the common hall anymore. They occasionally explode. Only occasionally, but really, it only takes one time—”

  Nessa put her hand on Hedy’s shoulder. Hedy fell silent in a heartbeat.

  “Talk to me,” Nessa said.

  “Since…since you died, I’ve focused my research on the Shadow In-Between. Looking for a way to find you, to reach out to you.”

  Nessa tilted her head. “Shadow In-Between? I’ve heard that phrase before.”

  “It’s where we draw our magic from,” Hedy said. “The liminal space between everything that is and everything that might be. That’s where we recorded the message for you. Anyway, there are these…people. They call themselves the Sisterhood of the Noose.”

  “Another coven?” Marie asked.

  “Nothing so elegant.” Hedy’s nose wrinkled like she smelled something foul. “They’re a murder cult, and they sell their services to any man willing to pay. They claim to worship a creature called the King of Rust, though I’ve seen no evidence that such a thing exists. They recently acquired an artifact—a candle that burns without respite and never melts down—and claimed it was drawn from a rupture in the Shadow In-Between. Well, obviously, I wanted it for my studies.”

  “Of course,” Nessa said. “What did you do?”

  “I did precisely as you taught me. I saw what I wanted and I took it.”

  Hedy led them over to the end of the row of tables. Wineglasses, carved from flawless crystal, stood stacked in an ornate pyramid. Each held a measure of water, their surfaces jarred by occasional ripples from nowhere. A single thin black candle stood in a brass holder at the heart of the pyramid, its wick burning bright.

  “I’m using purified water to measure dimensional instability,” Hedy said, gesturing to a thick open book alongside the display. It was lined with charts and graphs penned in a cramped hand, a flood of numbers and dates. “The candle…isn’t entirely here. Or more to the point, I think it exists in multiple worlds at the same time, in multiple points of space.”