The Black Palace

  THE

  BLACK

  PALACE

  JOSH WOODS

  First Edition

  © 2018 Josh Woods

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For permission, contact author at josh.woods.author@gmail.com.

  ISBN 978-1-976751-66-0

  Although including some real names, settings, and historical facts, this book is a complete work of fiction. Any resemblances to actual events or persons, living or dead, are meant to be resemblances and not actual representations of events.

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to express his thanks to Melissa Woods, Pinckney Benedict, and Kermit Moore for their expert assistance in the writing of this book; thanks also to Clint Stevens, Leslie Stevens, Becky Morris, and Laura Benedict.

  Chapter 1

  DiFranco watched for signs of other Witchfinders at work in the dark of the tree line along the highway, hearing through her helmet speakers that she was near the rendezvous. But when she finally spotted them she saw far too many making too obvious a scene: truck lights and headlamps and a dozen armed men all focused on a witch they had on a leash-pole who was covered in blood and putting up a struggle. Something wasn’t right. A single witch wouldn’t require this many field agents, and they weren’t trying to hide the sight from passing drivers or local cops. And to add to it, DiFranco had been told nothing of any multi-squad operation in the works. She guessed that something big was happening tonight, and the Witchfinders Union must have wanted to keep it from her. They had only called her up within the hour and said that a captured witch had asked for her, and that they couldn’t get more answers until she got there. She needed answers of her own, so she pulled her sport bike off the main road and into the lot with them, dragging the turn and nicking sparks off her steel knee guard. She wheeled to a stop in front of their lights so they couldn’t miss her.

  “DiFranco—speak of the devil, and she appears,” said one of the men before she had even removed her helmet. “Everyone, bow down to the Union’s feathered glory.”

  It was Valentine. He was a top-tier Witchfinder—a sulfur-grade field agent like herself—but she considered him more than just snide, with his mocking the quetzal feather she had clipped in her hair since returning to the Union. She had decided to be ashamed no longer of that memento, and she had grown accustomed to the countless little comments like his over the years, about one thing or another, as if they sought to outcast her by inches. No, there was something more dangerous about Valentine. He always tried too hard to be a step ahead of her, and to enjoy it too much when he was.

  DiFranco killed the engine, kicked the bike up on its stands, and dismounted. It didn’t seem like Valentine was in charge of the scene at the moment, with so little following standard field protocol. Among the others she saw some lower-ranking field agents—two mercury-grades and one salt—but there were also a few equally ranked sulfurs, and some figures sitting in the trucks and SUVs whose sigil patches she couldn’t see.

  A couple of them brought the witch to her knees, and she began to calm, no longer shaking the clunky hand-trap that they had latched on her, connecting her arms.

  “This is a big show for just one witch,” DiFranco said to Valentine. “So she’s the talker you guys called me in for? You did bind her fingers first, right?”

  “She hasn’t been talking since they called you,” said the Witchfinder handling the leash-pole. DiFranco didn’t remember his name, but she had worked with him before at some point. She had given him her canteen and some of her ammo after he had lost his own pack to something that had pulled him up a tree.

  She said, “And she asked for me by name?”

  “Kind of,” Valentine said.

  DiFranco didn’t seem to recognize this witch as one she had captured in the past, though her features were obscured by her clotted hair and the silken layer of red that painted her. But amid all that blood her eyes were stark, staring back at DiFranco, unblinking.

  The witch tilted her head at her and spoke, saying, “Autumn leaves hit the ground like shattered glass, and you think I can’t hear the syzygy of Wormwood? The world will yawn like dawn. But won’t there always be one last queen?”

  That sounded like nothing more than occult gibberish to DiFranco. This witch was probably just trying to bait her into asking what that meant, to then draw her into a conversation, just to get DiFranco to reveal something that could be used against her, if only the hint of some regret, or some desire. She looked at Valentine accusingly to see whether this was the kind of talk that they had found so important.

  Valentine said, “Well, she was making a lot more sense earlier. We found her about thirty yards in the woods, hiding in the belly of a deer, all swelled up, and as soon as we killed it and cut her out, she started giving up intel.”

  “So she’s a Haruspex?”

  “Better yet, she’s a snitch,” Valentine said. “She knew about something stolen from the Vault tonight.”

  “That would be a first,” DiFranco said, doubting it. She should have been here on the scene from the start to confirm it. They had known she was near enough to call in, yet they had called a dozen others first. “So what was it the witches supposedly stole?”

  “The Union won’t say, which means it’s big,” he said. “This one stopped giving us anything to go on, and the guys from Inquisitions still have an ETA of four hours, so it’ll be a while before we know for sure. But now she’s kind of talking again, so that’s something.”

  “Because it worked,” the handler told DiFranco. “She said she would talk to the one who would plunge herself into the fire like a butterfly. So they called you.”

  DiFranco was stunned at that, stammering before she said, “Who did? Who said to call me about that?” She regretted sounding so vulnerable in front of them, feeling as shaky as she did, but she couldn’t help it. There was no way they could have known to call her from such a riddle. She had told no one—not a single living person—of the vision that had come to her in those two minutes and eighteen seconds as she lay clinically dead on the gurney, the vision of a beautiful figure of smooth skin, of feathers and paint, singing to her softly of some destiny, setting some mysterious charge on her, tlepapalochihua, to enter danger, literally to plunge the self into the fire as a butterfly. DiFranco had known the figure to be her mother, though she could not have remembered ever seeing her, for she was long since dead. DiFranco had nothing from her except the feather, still bright emerald, and the true name her mother had given her in that first and final moment together, and now this message. She would have told her father of it had she been able to, and she wished she could, because he would have been the only one who could have made sense of it, but she had told no one in the three years since it happened. She had not even told Psych Eval that it was why she returned to duty. No one in the Witchfinders Union could have known to call her tonight.

  But none of the other Witchfinders were answering her. They could tell something was off, and they just watched her now as if there were a gulf between them and her. But she was one of them, and she would prove it once again, as always. So DiFranco composed herself, and she stepped closer to the witch, keeping her hand ready on the grip of her holstered sidearm. She said, “Spill it, Haruspex. What is it you know?”

  The witch said, “When it’s anyone’s lot, it’s loss for all else. You’ll know too when your knees drag the ground tonight, sister caps with mine. One maidservant in a deep house of cedar, and the whole firmament can fall through a hole, but witches never see what comes its way for witches, not with a hundred forty-four thousand eyeballs, lent, owned, or stolen.”<
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  DiFranco eased back but felt tense all the same, still not knowing what to make of that talk, still wanting answers. She would stay out here all night with this witch if she had to, and with Valentine if she had to, though she preferred neither. “Valentine,” she said. “Tell me who said to call me.”

  “Relax, DiFranco,” he said. “It was a commissioner.”

  That seemed wrong. The Witchfinders Union did not, as a rule, micromanage over the phone from headquarters. Nothing was adding up.

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” Valentine said, watching her closely, relishing it. “They sent one into the field. He’s right over there.” He nodded toward one of the figures in one of the SUVs, and sure enough, in the dim light, talking on a cell, was a man who looked every bit the part of a Witchfinders Union commissioner: the short-brimmed fedora, the horn-rimmed glasses and tie, but built as solid as a wrestler. DiFranco had never seen this one in particular before, and they were almost never seen in the field anyway, but they always dressed alike, and they always gave the same name, Mr. Eisenheimer. They carried a library of credentials and badges, enough to run off local cops, and they outranked pretty much anyone in the Witchfinders Union whose job title didn’t include the word president.

  DiFranco said, “Then this isn’t just about a stolen artifact, is it?”

  “You really want to know bad, don’t you?” Valentine said. “Just pucker those sweet lips and beg me.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” she said. “I’m also considering kicking your legs out from under you and pistol-whipping your windpipe.”

  “It’s something big,” he said, eager to show off that he knew. “They haven’t announced it officially yet, but the Union is mobilizing all across the whole damned country, right now, from San Jose to Jersey. I bet you a million to one I know what’s going on. It’s going to be a raid, DiFranco. Tonight. They’re going to try another raid on the Black Palace.”

  At hearing that, DiFranco felt as if something knocked loose in her heart. She had tried for so long to stop thinking that he could still be alive in there. And she had given up hope of ever getting back in, because the only Witchfinder who had ever figured out how to open a doorway into the Black Palace was her father, Conrad, the great expeditionist, the icon, the martyr. Even he had said that you couldn’t get into the Black Palace unless it wanted you in. And the same went for getting out. And when he had stayed behind and told the squad to save themselves, he had told her specifically to leave him, to never try to come back in there, but she shouldn’t have agreed, and now she had a chance to get back in there. Because if a doorway opened that none other could open, and if this witch knew a message none other could know, all the same night, maybe he was still alive in there. She wanted to say it out loud, but she had stopped saying it altogether years ago, because they had all kept telling her to get over it, that it was nobody’s fault, that it was part of the job. Even the President of the Witchfinders Union himself had put his hand on her shoulder during her resignation and had told her that she could take some measure of comfort in knowing that no one, not the best Witchfinder, not even her father or someone like Sledge himself would live long cut off from a team in enemy territory, in the world of the witches, trapped alone in the trackless and unknown spaces of the Black Palace.

  She strained against her mind to say nothing in front of Valentine, but she needed to be in on this raid, and she needed to find out more from this witch, no matter what. But focused forward as she was, she noticed something. The handler with the witch’s leash-pole was looking away toward the commissioner’s vehicle like the rest of them now were, and the witch was looking up at him, and something was going wrong. And because it was thin, it was hard to see at first, but now DiFranco saw it. The witch was already whispering, just barely, calling closer, as she was certainly motioning with her fingers, unseen and unbound within the hand-trap, and the handler’s arteries were threading out of his own neck, without his knowing somehow, and they were swaying toward the witch’s mouth like a charmed snake winding in for a kiss.

  DiFranco drew her sidearm, and in that instant she knew she would lose her chance at answers, but she shot. She hit the witch with two rounds, flat in the chest.

  The witch dropped, but she began scooting away in the mud. Lead rounds weren’t enough for her.

  The handler dropped too, and he was seizing and spitting blood.

  DiFranco bolted after the witch, holstering her sidearm with one hand and drawing her single-shot pocket shotgun from her back-holster with the other. She pinned the witch under her knee and tried to identify and draw any one of the botanical rounds from her bandoleer of exotics shells—ash, aconitum, white oak, any of them—but the witch was thrashing and making it difficult. DiFranco would have to finish her fast. As soon as she caught a suitable shell, arbutus, and loaded it, she was gripped at the throat by something as thin and tight as a wire. It pulled. Her air cut off, and her blood constricted, and she was thrown on her back, and the witch was on her now, and the lullaby she sang made DiFranco feel like going to sleep. It was a lullaby from DiFranco’s childhood, mariposa, sueñes, sueñes, mariposa, and it was that soothing—even though she knew better—soothing enough that she would crawl into a bonfire just to take a nap, if it were there for her to do so, but DiFranco strained against her own mind again and plugged the muzzle of her loaded single-shot into the witch’s mouth and fired.

  The witch fell limp to her side. The wet arteries tied around DiFranco’s throat loosened. They were the handler’s, and they were being torn away from her neck by someone, and she was being helped up by a pair of hands. The other Witchfinders’ voices came in as if her real hearing was only now being restored. She stood and breathed and breathed, getting the blood flowing to her head again, getting the dizziness to go away, slowly. She saw two other Witchfinders putting needless follow-up rounds into the corpse of the witch, and a couple others on the ground trying to help the downed handler, but he didn’t seem to be moving now, seizing or otherwise.

  She heard a couple apologies, though she wasn’t sure from whom or for whom. They kept asking, “Are you okay?”

  Valentine said, “Well, so much for our talker. The commissioner’s going to be pissed.”

  DiFranco pushed his lingering hands off her waist. She could stand on her own now. She didn’t need them touching at her throat either. She was fine. “How is he?” she said to the Witchfinders helping the downed handler.

  One of them looked back to her and shook his head.

  DiFranco said, “What was his name?”

  “Bingham,” Valentine said. Then a little more loudly, for show, he said, “He still owed me fifty bucks. I knew he’d find a way out of it.”

  There were a few dark laughs at that. DiFranco knew that a certain type of Witchfinder dealt with things that way. She didn’t.

  “Uh-oh,” Valentine said. “Here he comes.”

  It was the commissioner. He had left his vehicle and was walking their way, all business.

  A young guy with a valise followed him only a couple steps behind, but he looked bothered. Maybe he had never seen a Witchfinder killed in the field before. Or maybe he had never seen a witch before.

  Even while still walking, the commissioner was giving orders to the others to clean up and clear out to the new rendezvous coordinates that were just sent to them, pointing at two of them to transport Bingham’s body and one of them to drag the witch’s corpse out with them.

  Valentine said, “Pardon me, sir. Should we be prepping gear for a raid?”

  “You’ll get the job details on site,” the commissioner said. “But yes.”

  At that, Valentine and the other Witchfinders moved with quick and excited purpose, and a couple of them were already in their vehicles and pulling away.

  DiFranco checked the screen on her smart-watch and didn’t find that any new rendezvous coordinates had come through for her, but she went toward her bike to follow the other Witchfinders anyway.

&n
bsp; “Not you, Miss DiFranco,” the commissioner said. “You’ll stay with me.”

  She paused and looked at him. He was cutting her out of the raid on the Black Palace. She just knew it. It was what they had been trying to keep from her. She didn’t know exactly why, but she could tell by the stonewall look on his face that he was ready to give harsh orders. Just to shake him for a weak spot, she said, “What did you tell me your name was again?”

  “We haven’t met,” he said. “I’m Mr. Eisenheimer. I’m operating as commissioner in this sector tonight, and we’re going to need you to stay with me. We need to set a post on a water-well that might be of importance, just a few miles up the road. Three field agents should be enough.”

  “A water-well? You’re kidding,” she said. “You can’t cut me out with distraction work. Do you even really have intel on a well?”

  “I’m not kidding because I don’t kid, Miss DiFranco. And we would know more if you had not executed the informant. But I know you did your part.” He looked back, past the young guy, toward the road, but he still talked to her, absently. “We all need to do our part. There are a lot of pieces in play tonight.”

  “They’re staging a raid on the Black Palace.” she said. With that, she had caught his attention again. “You don’t even have to pretend like you don’t know. That’s where the rest of them are headed. And it’s legitimate field protocol for me to follow them right now, no matter what you say.” She held up her smart-watch to show that she had him on that one. “I haven’t received any orders saying otherwise.”

  “The President’s body was just found,” Mr. Eisenheimer said with a snap. “And it wasn’t natural in the least.”

  He had made her hesitate, and he knew it. But he wouldn’t have lied just to delay her, not about something like that. There wasn’t a witch in the world who could assassinate the President of the Witchfinders Union, not through all his levels of protection and security. It had never happened before.