The Black Palace Read online

  “A box,” Jan said. “A little box. It’s not here.”

  Sledge picked up something from the floor near the throne. “This it?”

  Jan ran to him, saying that was it, thanking him. It was a small lead box.

  But as soon as Jan took it from Sledge, he turned it over and over and searched on the ground, and said, “It’s empty. Oh, this is bad. This is really bad. They took it.”

  “What was it?” DiFranco said. “What’s the deal?”

  “I don’t know what it was. It was sealed.” Jan found the lid on the floor nearby too and looked at either side repeatedly. “We are really fucked now.”

  Sledge said, “What do you mean you don’t know what it was? Cough it up, kid, or you’ll get my help.”

  “They signed it over to me, but they didn’t tell me anything, and he made me sign a blind-eye form so I couldn’t research it. He said I was just supposed to keep it while I accompanied Mr. Eisenheimer, just nine hours, just tonight. That was it. He said it was a big deal, an automatic promotion to Under-Curator at the Vault. They were proud of me.”

  “Who made you sign?” DiFranco said. “Where? At the Vault?”

  “No,” Jan said, now seeming like he wished he hadn’t said as much as he had, reluctant to say much more. “The vice president. I mean the president. We met him on the tarmac. He was boarding.”

  DiFranco said, “Turenbor?”

  Jan nodded.

  “Before or after he assassinated the real president?”

  “Who did?” Jan now sounded even more worried. “He did?”

  “Wait. Which president are we talking about?” Sledge said. “Of America, or the Witchfinders Union?”

  “The Union.”

  Sledge said, “Oh, shit. That’s serious.”

  “And you don’t have any guess what was in that box?” DiFranco said. “Not the slightest inkling, mister scholar, mister paranormal architect?” She knew he had a specific idea. If she did, she knew he did.

  Jan said, “Maybe a conjecture, but not a legitimate one. It wouldn’t even count as a hypothesis. I would have known if R and A had any record of it, any record, ever, let alone if we had possession. Everyone else would too. Ask any expert. Even Conrad wrote that it didn’t really exist.”

  DiFranco took the lead box from him and held it so they could all see the Hebrew lettering. “Go ahead and say it out loud. Unless you want me to.”

  Jan took the box and looked down on it in shame, and said, “The Shamir.”

  “What the fuck is that?” Sledge said.

  “The stolen artifact.” DiFranco was studying Jan’s face for even the slightest tell, for even the slightest indication that he had been more than a patsy. She said, “It means we’ve been set up. From both sides. It means we just did our jobs as delivery boys, and we were suckers the whole way, even Eisenheimer. And I was the biggest sucker of all. I was the linchpin. Goddamn, Turenbor knew exactly what he was doing. And now we’re loose ends.”

  “Drop it!” Sledge screamed and drew his pistol.

  It startled DiFranco as much as it did Jan, who instantaneously dropped the lead box, and DiFranco knew that Sledge was going to kill Jan right away without any more discussion. She turned to look but saw that he was focused elsewhere.

  Standing in the portal of the iron maiden was a man, wearing the heavy hide of a bear, its horrid teeth coming down over his brow like a crown. He had an Assyrian beard and a battle-tested face, some kind of ancient warrior. He leveled the point of a spear in their direction, and he looked happy to see them.

  DiFranco drew on him too. With her off hand, she pantomimed holding out an imaginary spear and dropping it to the floor and said, “Surrender. The. Weapon.”

  “Don’t shoot him. He doesn’t understand,” said Jan.

  But his eyes did seem to liven as if he got the message, or as if he enjoyed it. He chuckled and said, “Molon labe.”

  Sledge said, “Oh, we got a smart-ass, do we? See if this translates.” And then he opened fire.

  DiFranco did too, quickly emptying her clip into him.

  He was hurt by the impacts and was forced to throw his spear at them imperfectly. It caught the flap of Jan’s coat, pinning him into the floor. Jan screamed, but did not look wounded.

  DiFranco reloaded and realized that she was beginning to run low on ammunition.

  But the warrior had fallen to his knees, and, quite dead, he dropped backward over his shanks, lying twisted and still.

  “Now who’s the big badass?” Sledge said.

  With the witch’s ring, they now were so close to getting back out of the Black Palace, and they had lingered too long in this chamber. DiFranco now just wanted to flee. They could confront the conspiracy against them and sort everything out later if only they could get back to the flooded cavern and get back out to the normal world. They just needed to flee.

  She told them that. “Let’s get out of here. Now.”

  Jan had wiggled out of his coat, leaving it skewered to the floor, and he said, “What did he do with Hava? Where is she?”

  “Yeah, hold up just a second,” Sledge said to DiFranco. “I want to find out what’s with this guy. I at least want to commandeer one of those swords on the wall before we go.”

  DiFranco was going back to the door, telling them to come with her, but Sledge and Jan were walking toward the body.

  Then the warrior rolled up to his knees again.

  Sledge and Jan stopped.

  DiFranco yelled for them to come with her.

  The warrior’s face was pallid, his teeth outlined in red. He wiped the blood from his mouth and smeared it down his beard. He stepped one foot up, then the other, and he stood.

  “Oh, yeah?” Sledge loaded a shell from his exotics bandoleer—which was on its way toward empty—and he leveled his sawed-down shotgun at the warrior. “Let’s see how this blood-sucker likes a load of oak splinters and mustard seed in the old ticker.” Sledge shot, and he hit the warrior in the heart with a visible crater.

  The warrior arched back from the impact and then steadied himself upright again.

  “Okay, not a vampire,” Sledge said.

  No, he wasn’t a vampire, and that meant that DiFranco didn’t know what he was or how to kill him, and that meant Sledge wouldn’t know either. It meant it was really time to run. She yelled at them again to come with her, and this time Jan grabbed his valise and came to her.

  But Sledge didn’t. He drew his Saxon blade from his pack sheath, holding it out, along with his stolen round-shield, in a wide stance of challenge. “Let’s see what you got, motherfucker.”

  The ancient warrior stepped over to a nearby rack, and he ran his hand past sabers and scimitars and claymores and gladiuses and giant two-handed swords, and he picked out a tiny little carving knife. He held it up and grinned at Sledge.

  Sledge turned around and ran to join DiFranco, saying, “Okay, let’s go.”

  They rushed out of the room, and they began to flee down the corridor. DiFranco had the passing thought that this was one of the few times working with Sledge that she had seen him do something she would fully classify as smart. And she was glad to be on their way toward real escape.

  But close behind them an explosion went off.

  DiFranco dropped for cover.

  She huddled there against the wall, guarding her head from any debris. She didn’t know what it had been, but she didn’t get hit by anything. She was picked up by the arm. It was Sledge, taking her and Jan along at his loping gate, saying that he had thrown a fragmentation grenade into the room behind him at the alchemical lab to make the bastard think twice about following them.

  They went bright with their flashlights again and tried to double-time it through the halls. They abandoned their tactical movement and were now just going as fast as Sledge could bring up the rear. But he wasn’t fast. He limped in stiff-legged bounds far slower than earlier in the night, and DiFranco and Jan had to keep stopping and waiting for him to
catch up. If she had not heel-kicked him in that old injured knee, the knee she herself had once helped mend, he wouldn’t be having such problems. They might have made it out already if it hadn’t been for her. They wouldn’t be trapped in the Black Palace in the first place if it hadn’t been for her. But she needed to move, not think.

  Jan stayed close to DiFranco as they retreated. She would begin to take a turn where the corridors forked, and Jan would correct her by consulting the growing map on his arm, and he was right every time, for soon they had made it back to the hallway with familiar doors, past the hole she had blown into the wall. And then in their rush DiFranco soon smelled the clammy air from the flooded floor they sought ahead.

  She paused to check on Sledge, because she no longer heard his distinct jog of clinks and huffs. She saw him though. He stood by the first door they had knocked on, the one that had roared and clawed on the other side.

  “I can see the bastard,” Sledge said. “He’s coming up behind us.”

  “Then let’s keep moving,” DiFranco said to him.

  “You keep going,” Sledge said. “I need to buy us some time.”

  She would not have it, if he was thinking what she was thinking. She would not have him stay behind to hold off that warrior. She would not have him sacrifice himself. She would not have Sledge do what her father did for her, and she wished her father had not done it either.

  She screamed this as a simple, “No.” She didn’t know how else to say it all to him, but something in her tone or her face must have communicated it, because he seemed to catch the idea.

  And just as quickly, he shook it off and said, “I’m coming with you. Just throw me the damned hand.”

  That surprised her. So she tossed the witch’s hand to him.

  He caught it, and he held it to the Lazarus lock at the door.

  It clicked.

  He pushed open the door and hurried away from it, toward her, saying, “Go, go, go,” and making pushing motions with his hand, trying to get them to run away as if a bomb were about to go off.

  The roaring was coming up behind him, but so was the warrior, whom DiFranco could now see too, scorched from the grenade but nonetheless stalking toward them up the corridor.

  She waited for Sledge to catch up, but he was yelling, “I said go, goddamnit!”

  Jan splashed through the water, running ahead.

  A freight of fur barreled out of the door and wrecked into the wall. It tossed its head and snorted through its great blunted snout and threw its thewy limbs heavily about itself to catch its footing again, its bulk filling the breadth of the corridor. And then it stood with its head against the ceiling, and it roared as if shaking off lost ages of ice, enraged at being kept alive without a sow left on the entire planet. It was a cave bear.

  It was answered by the roar of the warrior, and then by his heavy laughter. He stood ready with his little carving knife, filled with a strange delight.

  They rushed at each other.

  Sledge had made it to DiFranco now and was trying to tug her along, away, but she couldn’t help wanting to see the two battle, a clash of things pulled out of nature by the cruel works of witches but now with the chance in full atavism to be simply what they were.

  But Sledge was right in screaming that they needed to get the hell away from that brawl, and she went with him. They hurried down the ramp and joined Jan in the flooded cavern, and they followed his well-recorded lead blindly but safely around the drop-off of the lagoon, past the dead body of Seph, and, quickly enough, back to the original wall they had come through.

  The sounds of roaring and screaming out of that far corridor echoed all around them.

  There, stopped at that wall, their lights revealed nothing different. It was the same unworked rock, no sign of their doorway ever having been there. Sledge tossed the witch’s hand back to DiFranco, and she tossed it to Jan, and she said, “Open it back up.”

  Jan said, “Me? I told you I didn’t know how to do it. It might not even be possible.”

  DiFranco gritted her teeth, not knowing what to say. That was the whole point of chasing down the maidservant to get the witch’s ring in the first place. But this wasn’t his fault. She took the hand from him, and she pressed it to the wall, and she held it there, hoping for something to happen.

  Nothing happened.

  She leaned in close to the ring, and she told it under her breath to open, to just open, to just let this one thing work in her favor, that’s all she asked. It wasn’t even for her. It was for her partners. She just needed it to work.

  And nothing happened. The stone of the wall was cold and still.

  But the hot-blooded sounds of thrashing battle came nearer out of the corridor and splashed into the flooded cavern.

  DiFranco kept looking at the wall, at the ring, at the wall again. She wondered what it would take, what it wanted from her.

  Sledge said, “Whatever you’re doing, you need to do it faster. They’re coming our way.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jan said. “They’re going to fall in the drop off.”

  And the sounds of splashing and fighting at DiFranco’s back turned to plunges and cries. But with great grunts the fight resumed, much nearer.

  “Oh, my god,” Jan said. “They made it.”

  Sledge said. “DiFranco! Seriously. You need to hurry the fuck up.”

  Even the cave bear’s violent panting was audible now. The two had fought their way through the lagoon and would end up against the wall with them.

  DiFranco was going to get them all killed in mere moments if she didn’t get the doorway to open. She kissed the ring like she had seen Seph do, and she told the ring to open the doorway, and still nothing happened. Then she put her lips to the wall, and there up close, so that no one else could hear, so that she herself could barely hear, she whispered to the Black Palace to grant her this, please. She asked it to have mercy, and she said that she was sorry, that this was all she asked, that she had been wrong to enter danger, that she had been wrong about everything, that the Witchfinders had lost and the witches had won, and that if this doorway opened for her she would never seek a way back into the Black Palace again, never try to find her place in the world again, never plunge herself into the fire as a butterfly ever again. All the Black Palace had to do in order to make her give up and fade away for the remainder of her life was to open this doorway right now and let them leave.

  A strange, slow voice said, “This place knows what you are. And it will not let you leave.”

  DiFranco turned, and she saw that it was Jan who had spoken to her. In the eyes, in the face, he looked distant, and he held tight to the map on his arm as if it throbbed, as if he had been urged to speak.

  “That’s enough. We gave it a shot,” Sledge said. “Now we need to get the fuck away from here. Move out!”

  He pulled DiFranco away from the wall, which seemed to stare back at her with blankness, as if with the cold contempt of a god.

  And Sledge pulled Jan too. DiFranco had no choice but to snap out of it, to see the immediate peril of the moment, for they were close to the cave bear and the warrior in grips. The pair were as soaked and shaggy as a thunderstorm.

  The beast was on all fours, slipping backward through the water, and the warrior drove forward with heavy steps, turning the head of the cave bear this way and that by its open jaws, its teeth already nailed clean through the warrior’s palms but only serving to give him greater hold. The cave bear would stumble and then crawl back up, and then swipe through the warrior’s torso and throw his blood away from him, and the warrior would fall to one knee at the pain of it, and then press himself back up, and gain ground again, and laugh with wild ecstasy.

  And they worked toward the wall, just as DiFranco, Sledge, and Jan were trying to slide past them, back toward the three mouths of the corridors. DiFranco was sprayed in the face with splashing water and flung blood. Sledge ventured his boot forward, unseen, and kicked the warrior’s stepping heel,
as strangely unfair as it seemed. It took away the balance the warrior had expected, sending him to the floor under the weight of the cave bear. It was close enough that Sledge nearly got pulled down too, but they edged past the fight and made it back to the three archways.

  With few options left, DiFranco chose to lead them the way upward, taking the corridor marked with glyphs as the night sky. And DiFranco gave one last look back to see the cave bear gnawing into the guts of the warrior as he screamed on his back and stabbed at its eyes. And then DiFranco left the fight behind, and took this new rising path with a nightmarish resignation, climbing toward the Gate of Thorns and the high halls where her father wandered, plunging herself deeper into the Black Palace, just like it wanted her to.

  Chapter 8

  Hava climbed with one hand through mud, her other hand cupping the worm to her chest on its bed of cotton, while Nachash coiled safely around her nape like a necklace. She pulled at old roots to bring herself out of that narrow space of wet earth, and then she was finally free of the passageway. She was no longer a captive in the Black Palace. She was outside.

  A heavy rain must have recently ended. Small trails of water found their way down the hill in front of her, and the ground steamed with mist. Low clouds glowed with the lights of a city ahead, though Hava did not know what city she was looking at or where on the globe she had emerged. The air felt like the dark hours before dawn. It smelled like moss.

  Behind her she saw that she had climbed out of a hollow in the base of an old tree that clung black and twisted to the hillside. A droning train of sounds and lights meant that a highway was nearby, a short walk away. She looked at herself to find that her dress was a mess of muck, and she pulled clumps of soil out of her hair, and she felt the dirt smeared over her face. She wouldn’t make a very presentable hitchhiker, but she began her walk down the hill toward the highway regardless, because now she would have to find her own way despite her disadvantages from this point forward.

  Ashurbanipal had shown her the path out of that segment of the Black Palace, leading her himself for a short time before pointing her onward alone. She had wanted the nearest exit to a town. He had offered to show her higher doors to grander gateways to grander places, but she had insisted on merely the nearest. He had apologized that the nearest door to such a place would be a rather undignified tunnel that would take her just beyond the foothills of Lysa Hora to the outskirts of the city of old King Boyya. Hava did not know what that was but was happy to accept it, though at their parting Ashurbanipal had said that his guidance had not yet been full payment of his thanks to her for his bodily freedom.