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

  Bring the Fire

  The Wisdom’s Grave Trilogy, Book Three

  by Craig Schaefer

  Copyright © 2018 by Craig Schaefer.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Design by James T. Egan of Bookfly Design LLC.

  Author Photo ©2014 by Karen Forsythe Photography

  Craig Schaefer / Bring the Fire

  ISBN 978-1-944806-15-6

  Contents

  Prologue

  Act I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Interlude

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Interlude

  Act II

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Interlude

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Interlude

  Forty-One

  Interlude

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Afterword

  Also by Craig Schaefer

  Prologue

  “A trilogy,” Carolyn said, “has rules.”

  “Aren’t you going to turn around?” her interrogator asked.

  The floor of the interrogation chamber thrummed under Carolyn’s feet, carrying the echo of mighty engines far below. The cramped brick walls, painted a shade of pea-soup green from one of her childhood nightmares, closed in around her as the last wisp of cool air fled through the open door at her back. The heat stole her breath, her voice, as beads of sweat gathered on the prickled skin of her arms.

  “I thought you wanted to meet the King of Rust,” he said. “Demanded it, no less. It’s a little late for second thoughts.”

  One corner of his mouth curled, cruel and eager.

  “Go ahead. Turn around.”

  She braced her cuffed wrists against her legs and slowly turned in her chair.

  There was no one behind her. The bulkhead door hung open, gazing out upon a desolate corridor of corroded metal sheeting and thick, black-iron rivets. She looked back at him. The interrogator’s hooked beak of a nose twitched as he snickered.

  “You should see the look on your face,” he said. “Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Destroying hope is just a thing we do around here. A little parlor trick to pass the time. No, I’m afraid the king is far too busy to waste his valuable—”

  He paused. Frowning now, as he touched a finger to his left ear and stared down at the brushed-steel face of the table between them.

  “My lord? Yes. Yes, of course. Right away.”

  The interrogator blinked and looked back to Carolyn.

  “I stand corrected. Get up. He has an opening in his busy schedule. He’s not coming here, though. We’re going up to see him. This is a rare honor. For your own sake, I suggest you behave appropriately. Good things come to those who please the Kings of Man.”

  The legs of Carolyn’s chair squealed as they slid back. She offered him a wry smile, mustering some black humor to cut the edge of her anxiety.

  “Trying to offer me a little more hope, so you can yank that away, too?” she asked. “Please. Like I told you, I already know how this story turns out. I die at the end. Well, not the very end. Probably a chapter or two before the final page. Someone else is going to have to write that part. Hopefully a better writer than me, just for posterity’s sake. I’d like to be eulogized by someone who isn’t a hack.”

  “There are all kinds of deaths,” he told her. “Fast and easy ones. Slow ones. Very slow ones. Play your cards right, maybe you’ll get to choose.”

  Her cuffed hands gestured at her glass of water. Only a tepid half-inch remained in the glass, with a paper-thin slice of wilted lemon riding on the surface.

  “Can I bring my water?” she asked.

  He rose to his full height. A long-nosed Luger pistol rode in his shoulder holster. An obvious affectation, she thought, the weapon of choice for every Nazi on the silver screen.

  “There’s barely anything left. Why not drink it here?”

  She scooped it up between her hands, carrying it close to her chest.

  “I’m not thirsty yet,” she told him. He shrugged and led her out.

  When they brought her in, she’d had a bag over her head. Now she saw the labyrinth her captors had walked her through, an endless maze of sheet-metal corridors with hard grilles lining the floors and oblong bulbs, penned under wire-frame cages, shedding dim white light down from above. Corrosion seeped through the slabs of metal, turning the edges mottled yellow and orange, like some vast corruption festering behind the walls was trying to force its way in. Bulkhead doors sprouted here and there like metallic blisters, no symmetry, no rhyme or reason behind their pattern.

  The engines thrummed in the distance. And above their drone, muffled behind rust-tinged walls and almost too soft to hear, a man screamed until his voice gave out. Carolyn clutched her glass closer to her chest, gripping it like a talisman, and kept her eyes straight ahead as they walked.

  The interrogator gave her a sidelong glance. “I’m curious. Have you figured out where you are yet?”

  “I was brought in on a helicopter,” she mused. “But we didn’t land so much as move…sideways. Ezra Talon, the Salesman, created an engine that could open a gateway between parallel worlds. He based it on a design that one of his former incarnations had built into a suit of armor. I think you people came up with similar technology and incorporated it into your vehicles. It’s the perfect kidnapping scheme: even if an eyewitness sees you snatch your victim, good luck tracking you once you’ve left the planet.”

  “Correct so far,” he said.

  “So we’re not on my Earth, not anymore. That humming sound, the vibrations I’ve felt since we began—that tells me we’re on a vessel of some kind. An ocean liner? An airplane? No. There’s no ocean sway, no turbulence. We’re in motion but through a medium that’s utterly still.”

  She gave him an uncertain look.

  “Given those facts,” she said, “I might guess we’re in outer space.”

  “And if you did, you’d be close. But wrong.”

  They turned at a junction and he led her down a flight of corrugated metal steps. He gestured with a sweep of his arm, inviting her to face a long gallery window set into the wall, reinforced glass framed in rusted steel. Carolyn turned, staring out into the dark, and froze.

  “Now do you see?” he
asked.

  An infinite darkness thundered beyond the glass. There were no stars, but there was light. A storm in the vast distance, painting the darkness with streaks of putrid yellow lightning and auroras that shimmered in venomous green. The lightning took the shape of runes, sigils the size of planets, before flickering dead. When Carolyn closed her eyes she saw their aftermath imprinted on her eyelids, brutal shapes in pale white that reminded her of dinosaur bones.

  “Of course,” she whispered. “What do you build for the monster who has everything? You create a ship that can go anywhere.”

  “The kings are far too grand, too vast to be confined to a single world,” the interrogator said.

  “Ezra’s machine moves people from Earth to Earth, passing through the Shadow In-Between. The ocean of potential, of raw magic, the space between everything that is and everything that might be.” Carolyn pointed to the window. “But we’re sailing inside of it. Inside the Shadow. You’re a tiny hop away from any world in all of creation.”

  He led her along the gallery and drew her attention to the window on the other side. They weren’t alone. Two more vessels, vast as battleships, sailed through the darkness. They were cut from the same mold: bulky bodies with sweeping metal wings and long, thin necks leading up to a bulbous deck, looking like bloated, cancerous swans. Ribs of jagged metal festooned one of the ships, spears and blades bristling from every blister in the steel. Ragged crimson pennants trailed from spear hafts, drifting in the void. The other ship was caked in rot. Furry mold clung to the steel, patches of bilious corruption that turned Carolyn’s stomach, and every surface untouched by mold was buried under layers of grime and neglect.

  “Flagships,” the interrogator said. “The King of Wolves and the King of Lament. The others will be arriving soon. It’s rare for them to meet in person like this, but under the circumstances…”

  “Circumstances?”

  “The reason we took you. The story we all want to hear.” He flashed a toothy smile. “The story of the death of God. We want—we need—to know how it happened. And what became of Marie Reinhart and Vanessa Roth after they committed the ultimate murder.”

  “I never said that’s what happened, did I?”

  “Are you claiming it isn’t?” he asked. “Remember, as I’ve already demonstrated, I’ll know the second a lie passes your lips. You don’t want to make that mistake again.”

  “I claim nothing. Only that this is the last story I’ll ever tell, and if you owe me anything, it’s this: let me tell it the right way. No jumping ahead, and no spoilers.”

  His nose wrinkled. He held his silence.

  “As I was saying,” she explained, “a trilogy has rules. The first book sets up the characters, the stakes, the setting. In the second book, tragedy strikes. We see our heroines face their darkest hour—in this case, the destruction of Deep Six. As the station collapsed, Nessa barely escaped. And she escaped without Marie, who was sucked out into an alien ocean. The dimensional gateway fell shut at Nessa’s back, never to reopen.”

  “But Reinhart wasn’t dead—not yet, anyway. Correct?” he asked.

  “That’s right. An emergency return built into her armor whisked her to another parallel Earth. Lost, alone, but alive. Of course, Nessa didn’t know that. And she was dying, infected by raw Shadow. The spell book she’d been given by her unknown patron was revealed to be a death trap, designed to kill her the moment she started mastering magic. She had three vials of a serum that could hold off the infection’s progress. Three vials, three days left to live. Three days left to live, and her lover, and her entire life’s purpose, had just been stolen from her. She had nothing left. Nothing but her hatred.”

  “What did she do?”

  “A trilogy has rules. And while things take a turn for the worse in the second book, they have to get even darker as the third begins. This is the last time I get to do this, ever, so let me start it correctly.”

  “If you must,” he replied.

  “Once upon a time, a little girl was fascinated by fairy tales. She saw how they existed to teach important lessons. To be courteous to strangers. To stay to the path and walk with caution. And to never ever steal from a witch.”

  “Not the opening I expected.”

  “Then she grew up,” Carolyn said, “and discovered she was one. Not just a witch, but the Witch: a fictional character brought to life and doomed to an endless cycle of rebirth and violent death. Her faithful knight was gone, presumed dead, lost across the wheel of worlds. Her unseen patron turned out to be a traitor, and the book of spells she thought a priceless gift had poisoned her body and soul. Once again, just as it had in every lifetime before this, all that she loved had been stolen from her. But Nessa remembered those fairy tales. And she remembered what always happened when someone stole from a witch.”

  “Which is?” he asked.

  “Retribution. Merciless, cruel retribution. With three days left to live, Nessa resolved to make the entire world pay for her pain, starting with the man who had sent her and Marie on the run in the first place. And after him, she had a long list of people who needed to die for their sins against her, and she’d burn as many as she could before her light went out. If she could manage it, she’d wash her hands in the blood of every last man on the list. All the way up to the top…”

  Act I

  Are You There God?

  It’s Me, Nessa.

  One

  Dawn broke over the desert. The news broke on its heels, electronic transmissions racing faster than the sunlight.

  The woman on the screen was pushing thirty, with a peroxide smile and blond hair that came in a bottle, and she was wondering how she’d ended up here. Stuck in the boondocks of morning television, with no way to climb up the ladder and a line of identical clones waiting to take her job if she ever fell down a rung. So she smiled, she read the teleprompter, she smiled more, and she prayed she could get through the week without another zoo-animal special interest segment. Last week an ostrich had pissed on her sandals while her smug cohost kept a safe distance on the set.

  “Here’s something a little offbeat to spice up your morning coffee,” she said to the camera. “Everybody expects to see flying saucers zipping around the Mojave, but do the guys at Area 51 know about this?”

  Smug Cohost gave her a grin. “That’s right, Sandy! We just got this footage courtesy of our affiliate in Spanish Springs. And it appears to be…well, just take a look for yourself.”

  The footage came from a cell phone, one of a half dozen held up in a tight cluster of witnesses. The camera jerked, taking in the spectators along the street, cars stopping, people poking their heads and their phones from the doors of tract houses. Then up to the sky, zooming in on what they were all murmuring about.

  The object in the sky only held in clear focus for a couple of seconds. It was a small, dark blur; then the light hit just right and the camera captured it in perfect clarity.

  A woman in a long, dark dress, riding sidesaddle on a broom.

  The broom flew overhead like a comet. The phone shook, the flying woman’s image dissolving into a blur once more. Then she slipped out of sight behind the rooftops.

  “Looks like Hollywood is at it again,” the cohost chortled. “Viral marketing, anybody? No word on what they’re promoting, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing all about it in a couple of days.”

  Sandy stared at the monitor. The prompter was feeding her the next line, something about how they were doing amazing things with computer graphics these days, but she wasn’t reading it.

  “Or,” she said, “we just saw a woman flying on a broomstick.”

  He blinked at her. Then he turned up the wattage on his smile and tried to cover.

  “Boy, they’re doing amazing things with those computer graphics these days, huh?”

  “We should say that the footage came in five minutes ago,” she said to the camera, “and it’s one of dozens of pieces that have just been submitted to our affiliate s
tation. All of which, as far as we can tell, were filmed by ordinary area residents.”

  “Heck of a publicity stunt,” he said.

  She didn’t know why she couldn’t play along. She’d seen more than her share of hoax footage. Pie-tin flying saucers, furry-suited would-be Sasquatches. The footage couldn’t be anything but a trick.

  Except.

  Except for one fleeting tenth of a second, in the middle of the moment of clear focus, the woman had looked down and fixed her gaze on the camera. Her face was still a blur, too distant to make out, but Sandy felt her stare as if it had pierced through the lens, across the miles of hot dusty desert and shimmering air, out from the monitor and straight into her eyes. A secret message, one the man beside her couldn’t see.

  “We have no other information at this time,” she said to the camera, “but we’ll keep you updated as the situation progresses.”

  “But it’s obviously a hoax.”

  His smile didn’t reach his eyes anymore. It felt like they were playing psychic tug-of-war. As much as she wanted it to be real, for reasons she couldn’t give voice to, he needed it to be a lie.

  “We have no other information at this time,” she repeated.

  Her cohost took a breath. His eyes went bright again, his grin plastic.

  “Moving on, right after this commercial break it’s time for another visit with Zookeeper Brett and his wacky, wonderful animals!”

  * * *

  Storms brewed over the Midwest, and a C-130 Hercules carved its way through the roiling gray clouds. The cargo plane rocked on a shudder of turbulence. Inside, the armored belly of the hold had been converted into a mobile command station. Screens lined the walls, giving readouts, scrolling status reports, tracking glowing pins on a vast neon-green wire-frame map of the United States. As Harmony Black paced the padded floor, chin down, fingers pressed to the throbbing ache behind her forehead, a young man’s voice echoed over tinny speakers.

  “Okay, so our contacts at NBC are squashing the Roth footage, and Senator Mundy is on the phone with FOX right now. Looks like they’re on board too. CNN is running it with the morning news cycle. I mean, that cat’s way out of the bag. CBS is running it, too, but the good news is pretty much everyone is treating it like a viral PR stunt.”