Sworn to the Night
The Wisdom’s Grave Trilogy, Book One
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 / Sworn to the Night
ISBN 978-1-944806-08-8
Contents
Prologue
Act I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Act II
Interlude
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Interlude
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Sixty-Three
Interlude
Sixty-Four
Afterword
Also By Craig Schaefer
Prologue
Carolyn had been kidnapped twice in the past month, which was twice more than most people in a lifetime. Still, she didn’t complain. With a burlap sack over her head and the muzzle of a very large gun pressed against the back of her skull, she didn’t think her latest abductors were interested in hearing her grievances. They shoved her into the back seat of a car, squeezed between two men with cold, callused hands. She listened to the rev of the engine as they squealed away from the curb outside her house. An hour on the highway, then a second car, then—guessing from the whistling thrum of the blades and the lurch in her stomach as they lifted off—a helicopter.
“I’ve never actually been on a helicopter before,” Carolyn said. “Would you mind taking the bag off my head so I can look out the window?”
Nobody answered her.
“I’m a writer, you see. Learning from new experiences is very important in my line of work. Readers know if you get the details wrong.”
No response. She shrugged, sat back, and rested her handcuffed wrists in her lap. They hadn’t given her headphones to protect her hearing, but the chop from the rotors was only a faint droning vibration above her head. Reinforced cabin, she thought. Expensive. Ahead of her, from what she assumed was the pilot’s seat, a man finally spoke up.
“We have geomantic telemetry lock. Goetic wards online, firing in the ninety-percent range. Prepare for transition effect in three…two…one.”
The universe slid sideways. Carolyn’s stomach jolted, churning, as her seat jerked hard to the left and the engine screamed like a vacuum cleaner with a broken gasket. She smelled burning popcorn and spilled diesel. Then another scent, slipping vaporous fingers under her nose.
Roses.
The men were shouting at each other, their voices swallowed by the whining engine, and the helicopter slammed hard to the right. She couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t focus as the cabin began to spin. A riptide of adrenaline coursed through her veins and her flesh prickled, hot and wild like the flame from a butane lighter. The engine screamed louder, its mechanical roar blotting out the world as the cabin spun faster and faster, free-falling, then—
—nothing. Utter silence.
They weren’t moving. At all. The helicopter sat perfectly still. As her senses slowly returned, head reeling, she heard the blades spinning down. Carolyn breathed deep and fought a wave of nausea.
The men didn’t speak. They dragged her off the helicopter, shoving her head down, out onto the landing pad. The floor felt like plates of corrugated steel rattling under her sneakers as they marched her away. The air was chill, like the sterile cold of a museum, and it smelled like hospital antiseptic. They marched her through a doorway. A chair scraped back. Rough hands shoved her down. Then they ripped the hood away and she squinted at the sudden flood of light.
She recognized the room from every TV detective show she’d ever seen. Steel table. Steel chairs. Crumbling brick walls, and an overhead lamp that blazed hot enough to cause a sunburn.
“An interrogation room,” she said, “lovely. I assume that makes you my interrogator?”
The man in the corner, bald, with a hooked raptor-beak of a nose, wore a shoulder holster over his black turtleneck sweater. He crossed his arms and nodded to someone behind her.
“That’s all. Leave us.”
A heavy metal door whistled shut at her back. Then came the clank of a lever sealing them in. The interrogator stared her down.
“Carolyn Saunders,” he said. Like it was an accusation.
“You’d better hope I am, or you just kidnapped the wrong person.” She held up her cuffed hands. “Is this really necessary?”
“You’re more dangerous than you look.”
She snorted. “Please. I’m a sixty-four-year-old woman who writes fantasy novels and listens to NPR. I had a tuna sandwich for dinner with a glass of white zinfandel. How dangerous could I possibly be?”
He pulled back the chair on the far side of the table.
“You’re a storyteller.” He sat down across from her and spread his hands. “So tell me a story.”
“I can do that. One of mine, or one of the classics?”
“The Witch and her Knight.”
Carolyn pursed her lips and dropped her gaze to the table. She could see her reflection in the brushed steel, distorted and blurred.
“You want a fairy tale.”
“We want to know what happened. The truth. All of it.”
“Fair warning, then,” Carolyn told him. “This isn’t some sweet Disney bedtime story. This is a real fairy tale. With death, and blood, and suffering. And I never promise a happy ending.”
“Do you know where you are?” the interrogator asked.
“I don’t know where I am, but I suspect I know who you work for.”
The overhead lamp flickered, humming and browning out, and a guttural shriek echoed in the distance. The scream of a man having his life torn away, inch by bloody inch. When the room dipped into darkness, the interrogator’s face wasn’t the same.
In the dark, he had no eyes. Just two black, ragged sockets.
The light flooded back in. The scream died. The interrogator gave her a calm smile and folded his hands on the table.
“If you know that,” he said, “then you know this: we don’t care for happy endings around here.”
Carolyn swallowed, her throat suddenly bone-dry. Under the table she squeezed her hands together to drive away a tremor.
“You understand, I wasn’t there for most of the story,” she said. “I had to put it all together myself after it was over. Research, recollections. Interviewing the survivors, the few I could find, the ones who were still sane. I assembled the facts like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”
The interrogator’s chair scraped backward. He rose from his seat, brow furrowed, his gaze boring into her.
“Tell me how they did it,” he said.
He leaned in and loomed over her.
“Tell me how they killed God.”
Carolyn unclenched her cuffed hands and laid them flat on her lap. Her fingertips riffled against her legs, like a piano player getting warmed up for a performance.
“I do hope you’ll indulge an old artist. I’m fond of so many literary techniques. I’ve been known to break the fourth wall now and then. Sometimes I employ an unreliable narrator or two. I might even, if the story merits it, bring in a deus ex machina for the grand finale. But I always try to play fair with my readers.”
“The truth,” the interrogator said. “If you attempt to lie to us—even a single word—we’ll know. And you don’t want that.”
“Then I suppose I’d better tell the truth,” she replied with a slight pause, “and nothing but the truth. Now then, if you want to know the story of the Witch and her Knight, I have to start at the beginning.”
He sat back down, staring in expectant silence. Carolyn took a deep breath.
“We should do this properly,” she said. “So: once upon a time, in a magical kingdom, there lived a valiant knight. But she didn’t know she was a knight, not yet, any more than she knew that she was fated to die. And in this same kingdom lived a witch who would have been peerless in wit, power, and wickedness, but she’d fallen under a vile sorcerer’s spell—”
“Get on with it,” the interrogator told her, glowering.
“Never rush a storyteller.” Her eyes narrowed at him. “If you do, you might miss an important detail. So listen closely. And here…we…go.”
Act I
Baby Blue
One
The knight stood on a windswept hill overlooking the walls of Mirenze, the once-proud city in smoking ruin. Sunlight glinted off her steel armor, and she resolved herself to the mission ahead. There would be no turning back when she met the enemy, only death or glory—
Marie jumped as a hard knock on the car window jolted her from her daydreams. She closed her dog-eared paperback—Swords in the City of Coin, by Carolyn Saunders—and tossed it in the glove compartment while the window hummed down. The sounds of the street poured in: distant horns, a jackhammer pounding old pavement into dust, a cheap radio blaring top-40 rock from a second-floor window. A warm breeze carried a smell like soggy newspapers and cooked liver. Just another morning in East Harlem. A slim hand reached through the window and shoved a paper cup in her face.
“That fantasy crap’s gonna rot your brain,” Tony told her. “You ever read that Val McDermid book I gave you?”
Marie took the cup, lifted the plastic lid, and took a sniff. The scent of fresh bodega coffee, rich and roasted and black, kicked her brain into gear. She reached for the seat belt. Her shoulder holster bumped the seat, snug under her wool blazer.
“Murder mysteries.” She rolled her eyes at him. “I don’t get it. It’s like a bus driver reading stories about…driving buses.”
She blew on her coffee while he circled their car, an unmarked Lincoln sprouting rust marks like a teenager sprouted pimples, and hopped behind the wheel. He set his own cup in the console between them and shifted the car into gear.
“Not the same thing,” he said. “In a good murder mystery, you’ve got a perp, you’ve got a chain of clues, and the hero always gets the bad guy in the end. Everything makes sense and wraps up clean.”
“Oh,” Marie said as they pulled away from the curb, “so in other words, fantasy.”
“Smart-ass. So what’s on the morning agenda?”
Marie nodded to the dashboard. She’d taped up a photograph there, about the size of a Polaroid, captured from a website and run through a grainy printer. The young woman in the picture pursed her lips at the camera. She’d dyed her hair to match her neon-blue latex halter, front zipper pulled down to dangle below the valley of her breasts.
“I want to take a run at Eddie Li,” Marie said. “We know he was her last client. Alibi or not, he’s gotta have something we can use.”
Tony puffed his cheeks and blew air between his lips. He nudged the car into a stream of slug-slow traffic.
“We have other cases, you know.”
“It’s not far from here. Won’t take us long.”
He didn’t reply. She looked his way.
“It’s important, Tony.”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Fine,” he said, “fine. But then we spend the rest of the day working cases we can actually solve, all right?”
They headed east on 135th Street. The sun crested over the Harlem River, looming ahead of them like a sizzling egg yolk, and cast a hard morning glare down through the city canyons. Marie flipped the sun visor and drank her coffee. They rode in silence, listening to the occasional squawk of the dashboard radio. Dispatch calls and numbers. License plate checks and ambulance call-outs. The same-old rhythm of a same-old day. They rolled up on the shop, cherry neon sign reading Nails behind a glossy plate-glass window, and Tony circled the block looking for a spot to park.
“Place is jumping,” he said.
Marie glanced down at her own fingernails, unpolished and chopped short. “Springtime. It’s sandal season.”
The salon had just opened. The waiting area was full, clients watching television and sipping cucumber water. Marie made a half-hearted attempt at fixing her hair; a gust of stale wind had caught her on the way in, turning it into a tangled blond mop. Eternal bed head, her family curse. Tony was the Felix to her unkempt Oscar: lean, dark, suave, and accenting his chocolate-brown suit with an orange silk necktie like an urban peacock. That, and the gold shield clipped to his belt. Marie pulled her jacket aside to flash her badge at the front counter and asked in a low voice for a word with the owner.
Eddie Li received them in his back office, a shoe box with a cluttered office-surplus desk. A Tsingtao beer calendar hung tacked to a lopsided corkboard alongside a flurry of old schedules on curled pink paper. Eddie had a beer gut, a hairline in full retreat, and the guiltiest eyes Marie had seen all week.
“Thanks for seeing us,” she said, shutting the door on their way in. “I’m Detective Reinhart, and this is Detective Fisher.”
Eddie smiled too desperately, waving them toward the chairs on the far side of his desk with fluttering fingers. “Of course, of course, I always have time for New York’s finest. What can I do for you?”
She set the photograph on the desk in front of him. The girl in blue gave Eddie a seductive smile, frozen in time. The blood drained from his face.
“I already, I mean, I already talked to those other officers. They know where I was—”
“Your alibi checked out,” Marie told him. “That doesn’t mean you’re innocent. Her pimp kept exhaustive notes, Mr. Li. You were her last client the night before she disappeared. You were one of the last people to see her alive.”
He shook his head, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the picture. “Look, I made…I made a mistake, hiring an escort, but I barely knew anything about her.”
“You hired her twenty-seven times,” Marie said. “Twenty-seven times and no pillow talk? She never dropped anything abou
t her personal life, trouble she might have been having? Not even once?”
“My wife is leaving me.” Eddie squinted at the picture, shook his head again. “I’m already ruined. I don’t want any more trouble.”
Marie and Tony shared a glance. He leaned back and crossed one leg over the other, cool and casual.
“Eddie, c’mon, man. We know you’re a law-abiding citizen at heart. Like, I’m sure your bookkeeping is impeccable. If we checked, I bet we’d find you dot every i and cross every t. No shortcuts, no funny business.”
“Oh, no doubt,” Marie said. “There’s zero chance he’s hiding cash, or saving money by buying his salon supplies on the illegal resale market. Which is good, because if he did and we found out about it, that’d really jam him up.”
Tony tapped his chin. “Good point. And if the IRS got involved? That’d be a lot of lost revenue. I mean, it is sandal season.”
“All right, all right.” Eddie threw up his hands. “There was something…look, this can’t come back on me, okay? My name has to stay out of this.”
Marie leaned toward him. Hard and hungry-eyed, like a hawk spotting a mouse as it bolted for cover.
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