The Black Palace Page 11

  Once she had chosen to free him, while they had still been in his chamber, he had insisted that they first lay down a circle of symbols to contain the work that the little worm would do. He had her fetch a jar of silver grains from one of his alchemical tables, where she had snuck a peek under the embroidered cloth. Floating in emerald liquid was the head of a man who had looked back at her and screamed in silence. Ashurbanipal had quickly called her back to him, for he had selected one of the many shields he had cut long ago to make the symbols he would use. As they had drawn the circle with the powder, he had warned her gravely that Solomon had done this too and for good reason, that to command the worm to break without these preparations of containment would risk rending open more of the world than she could see or fathom.

  Then, as Ashurbanipal had sat on his black throne within his silver circle, ready to proceed, she had lifted the worm from his bed of cotton as gently as a bubble, and had lain him on Ashurbanipal’s forehead plate right beside the attached chain.

  Ashurbanipal had closed his eyes.

  She had not known how to command the worm to break the band, so she had started in her native language by sternly ordering, “Break!”

  The little guy had nearly flinched, curling some. Otherwise, nothing had happened.

  So she had commanded him to break the band in Arabic, in Greek, in French, in Russian, but it had done no good.

  She had asked Ashurbanipal how to make it happen, and he had said that it had never been recorded, and he had opened his eyes, looking up at her in disappointment. She was certainly no witch.

  In fact, she had felt strangely wrong about trying to sound so witchlike by yelling commands at the fat little worm. So, returning to her native tongue, she had asked him sweetly and simply if he would please break the band for her.

  That’s when the plane of light had cracked. It had felt as if the universe had slit with a blast. She had found herself thrown back on the ground with ringing ears and sight too blurry to know for sure what she saw. It had looked in her daze as if Ashurbanipal’s body lay in a mess of gore, as if he had been sliced in half from the top of his skull down through his rib cage. His blood had seemed to smoke, and the flesh at his wounds had been charred.

  But Hava had scrabbled to her feet in search of the poor little worm, hoping and hoping that she had not hurt him, regretting such a risk to him. But there on the ground she had found him, still clinging to the broken band. He had looked unharmed and happy. Maybe he liked breaking things. She had taken out his bed of cotton and had placed him on it, and she had hugged him to her chest.

  Her hearing had been coming back to her with sloshing sounds. She had turned to find the horrific sight of Ashurbanipal’s body pulling back together, like one of those poor jelly creatures in the cavern might have collected itself around a meal. She had been frightened, and had felt bile rise in her throat, but she had not vomited. Instead she had gone to help him.

  He had lost a lot of blood all around him, but he had been reformed, and he had held his head in pain. She had asked him whether he could speak, but he had had trouble focusing on her. She had waited as he had tried to stand and had fallen back down. He had kept searching his brow for the band that was no longer there, struggling, asking whether it had truly happened. She had told him that it had, that he had been set free, and then they had both rested there for a little while, recovering from the blast.

  Then a tin can had hopped into the room from the open door, and it had fumed and would not stop. It had been a kind of grenade. It had surely been those Witchfinders. She had told Ashurbanipal that they must leave, that her enemies had come and that in his weakened state he would not be able to contend with them, for they were brutal and mighty. He had yelled over the growing, hissing cloud that another exit lay behind him through the iron maiden. She had grabbed the fur of his collar and tugged at him to that exit, and he had stumbled with her, escaping.

  And after he had guided her through the maze of halls and had pointed her onward, they had parted ways with only few words, Ashurbanipal first warning again about the precautions of the worm, and then wishing her great victory, calling her Hava who looses, Hava whom the stars favored.

  But such epithets seemed like a world away now, outside, as she slipped and trod down the hill toward a highway, hoping that someone would simply give her a ride into town.

  On her way, she saw a cat in a thicket of saplings, and she asked it to fetch its witch-mistress for help, especially if she were of the coven of Endor, but it did not respond, so it must have been an ordinary cat. Hava should have known that seeking help would not have been that easy.

  And then at the bottom of the hill, separating her from the highway that roared with passing trucks, a canal blocked her way. It brimmed and spit with rushing brown water. It was far too wide to leap across, probably too deep to wade through, and she saw no easy way over it. The road was only a stone’s throw away from her—she was that close to it and yet could not reach it. She wished at least that this part could have been easy, but she had to accept that nothing would be easy for her again after the events of this night.

  She tested the depth of the canal with a stick from the ground nearby, poking downward but finding no purchase. Either it did not touch the bottom, or the silt at the bottom was too loose. The strength of the current kept trying to knock the stick from her hand.

  She would have to risk leaping as far as she could and swimming the rest. If the canal turned out to be shallow, she thought she would be able to struggle and claw her way against the current and out of the water to the other side. If the canal turned out to be deep, she might get swept under and drown. Rather than try it, she could instead wander farther one way or the other and hope for a place to cross, or she could abandon her plan to hitchhike altogether. But the sight of her goal so near hardened her resolve. She wiped all other options from her mind. She would succeed now or die, a testing of herself she had faced several times already since her troubles began this night, and she would not surrender now of all times at the challenge of a ditch dug in the mud, by men of all things.

  But she did worry for Nachash, and for the worm. They had no desire that she knew of to risk death for resolve. She had to find a way to get them across first. She searched the ground nearby, the edge of a copse of birch, and she found a strip of flexible bark, the shape of a serving tray. She could use it to deliver them across. She wove her walking stick through splits in the bark, and she weighted down the underside with large clumps of mud to keep it level as it would sail across the air. She made a little bed of mud on top of the tray and molded the little worm’s cotton in it, securing him. Then she explained the plan to Nachash, telling him that she meant to throw them over the canal and that she promised that she would produce the strength to do it, even if it were all she had left. She helped him wrap himself tightly around the stick, which he seemed ready to do. If something went wrong, if she slipped or threw wrong, and if they hit the water, the stick and tray should be enough to keep Nachash and the worm afloat. They at least had a much better chance of survival than what she gave herself. She could not swim, as far as she knew. She never had.

  She found a good balancing point along the stick. Then she loaded it like a spear, skipped toward the edge of the canal, and with a scream threw with everything she had. The stick easily cleared the water, and as she watched its trajectory, she feared that she had thrown too hard and that it might hit the highway, or rebound onto it. The stick hit, and its far end stabbed into the soil safely on the other side, leaning like a roughly planted flag of victory.

  Hava breathed with relief. Then, with nothing else to consider, she backed up, and ran, and leapt. The brown water rushed over her head as fast as she could perceive it. She was under. The world jolted between roaring air and the silent, overwhelming weight of waves. She was bobbing up and down and getting carried off by the violence of the current. She reached and grasped, but nothing stayed in her hand. She tried to breathe, bu
t only water filled her throat.

  She was going to drown.

  The thought angered her, an anger that she had felt as an abandoned child, anger that she had felt at Ziggurat’s murder at the hands of the Witchfinders, anger that she had felt upon realizing that Seph and her conspirators were truly to blame. She punched and kicked at the rush of water, a thing that she could not defeat but that would feel her fighting back regardless, even at her death.

  But her feet did hit something, and her head was launched above the surface for a moment. She kicked off again and again and found the earth out of water with her hands. She pulled and kicked, and she managed to drag herself out of the canal.

  On her knees, she vomited brown water and heaved for air. She had no idea how far she had been carried or even which shore she wound up on. But if she were back on the wrong shore, she would simply try again.

  Once she caught her breath, she saw the highway and realized she had made it across. She walked upstream to look for the planted stick, and she found it. She knew she had many reasons still to be disappointed in herself, or to be distraught, maybe even to be embarrassed that such a small thing as a canal had nearly defeated her, but it was pride that she felt.

  She lifted Nachash from the stick and laid him over her neck again, and then she pulled the wad of cotton from the mud. The little worm was there, and he was safe. She again cupped him against her chest.

  She reached the edge of the road, and she waved at passing vehicles. Several trucks and cars slowed for her, and then, with quick looks from the drivers, sped up and passed her by. That’s when she realized how she must have looked to them: there in the dim mist, suddenly in the headlights, a young lady soaked and muddied in a dress that was a hundred years old, hair mangled across her face, a snake around her neck, looking as if she had just crawled up from the underworld, which she had. And then she knew how she felt about the way she looked: cold and vulnerable. Although she might have had some manner of conqueror’s heart—if Ashurbanipal had been right about what he saw in her—and although she might have had grand desires of razing a whole witch-kingdom from its very queen to the ground in vengeance and glory, she realized in that mirror-like moment, just after having nearly died in a simple ditch, that she was in fact nothing more than a lost, helpless girl with little idea of what to do next.

  But she continued to wave, for she would not quit until someone stopped, even if it were to arrest her. And a truck finally pulled over for her. Its rusted frame groaned as it rolled to her side of the road, and it hissed as it halted. A huge cage took up its bed, loaded with many other smaller cages inside, all filled with feathers and squawks. It was a chicken truck.

  She ran to the driver’s side as she tried to scoot Nachash down the nape of her dress against her skin to hide him from sight.

  The driver rolled down his window. He was an old man with thick skin and heavy ears. His eyes must have been poor, for he squinted at her and then showed surprise, as if it were his first real look at her.

  She asked him in her native language whether he could take her toward the lights, to that city ahead.

  He didn’t like the sound of her. He shook his head and spoke back in Czech, which she had learned some of from a family of fish mongers that Ziggurat would send her to barter with for different kinds of filled stomachs as part of her chores.

  She asked him in Czech for a ride into the city, to the oldest cemetery there, though she was unsure about the accuracy of her choice of word for cemetery.

  He told her instead that she needed to go back home to her mother.

  She said that her mother had just been murdered, and that she could only call on her extended family from a cemetery.

  He did not seem to like that answer much, but it was enough, for he said that she could ride in the back with the chickens and that he would stop to let her off as he passed Siroka.

  She asked him what that was, and he said it was a cemetery. Then she thanked him and, before climbing into the back of the truck, she asked what city this was.

  He asked her if she were crazy and then said that it was of course Praha, Prague.

  At that, she hurried through the back gate of the truck and nestled herself among the chicken cages, and she felt the truck lurch forward and continue on the highway. She was happy with Prague. She had heard of it as an old place that had always been home to witches and the many things that they wrought. There would certainly be Witches of Endor in Prague that she could call from a cemetery, her best chance at getting help.

  The chickens flapped and squawked about her but finally settled, and Hava felt a surprising warmth from them on either side, maybe by their insulating her from the wind. It was only after she began to warm that she became aware of the numbness in her hands and feet. She was shivering, and she did not know how long she had been doing so. Only now did she realize how close she was to freezing. Maybe one of the chickens could warm her more against her skin.

  First, before she could use both hands to remove one from a cage, she secured the worm’s cotton bed in a metal nook against the cab beside her. It took her a long time to do it. She wished that in her rushed escape she had not left his little lead box behind. She would have to find another way to store him soon.

  Then she removed her boots, which had tightened and offered some frustrating resistance. She would need to warm her feet with the chicken too.

  She opened the cage that sat right beside her, and she grabbed the feet of a hen who thrashed its wings in futility to get away from her. She was used to it from her duties in the coops at the House of Limestone, where they kept brown hens for food and black roosters for Ziggurat’s witch-work, and where Hava collected the eggs to feed to Nachash, who liked to swallow them whole.

  Hava brought the chicken back to her lap where she settled against the cab. She held it close while it calmed. She had her fingers buried in its feathers, and she had it sitting on her bare blue feet. It felt fluffy and dry. It was working. Her skin stung, but the pain of warming was nonetheless a pleasure.

  And in the empty cage beside her, in the straw, Hava saw to her surprise that there was an egg. She shouldn’t have been surprised at finding an egg with a hen, but she was anyway, perhaps because it reminded her of how the one called Gróa had hidden Ashurbanipal’s soul. While huddling to keep the chicken secure, she picked up the egg in one hand, and the cotton bed with the worm in the other. She knew how she could keep the worm both enclosed and hidden. She would empty the egg of its contents, perhaps by merely puncturing a hole in it, and she would thread and push his cotton inside it, and then she would help the worm crawl inside it. Once he was in, she would stuff up the hole with something simple, and she would feed the egg to Nachash. He would carry the worm for her in his belly.

  She knew that in a few days she could have Nachash regurgitate it before he digested the shell entirely, and then she could do the same thing again if necessary. Maybe Nachash wouldn’t like it so much, and maybe the worm wouldn’t either, but she hadn’t liked some of the chores she had been tasked with in her servitude, and now it was time that others served her needs. The worm was too powerful an ally to risk losing through carelessness, and Nachash was too sly an ally not to put to such use. Maybe if she used her resources wisely enough once she made it to the cemetery in Prague, she might be able to get the witches there to do more than just help her; she might get them to join her. At the death of Ziggurat, when she had been left once again in her life with nothing, being merely a captive of Witchfinders and possessing only her witch-mother’s familiar, she had used what little she had to multiply her powers tenfold. In the same way, she could use what more she had now—warmth, a ride on a truck, and a bond-breaking worm—to multiply them tenfold again.

  So she set to her work. As the truck rolled on and the city grew around her, she soon had the worm in the egg, and the egg in Nachash’s belly, and Nachash draped again around her neck. She put her boots back on. She saw through the cages that they were p
assing a cemetery, but the truck did not stop for this one, which was just as well, for it looked newer, and it had silly statues of pretty men with the wings of chickens on their backs. Hava knew of course that these were intended to be images of angels, but the stories old Ziggurat had told about them—creatures that were primordial among creation, the hosts of Lord Yahweh—made them out to be nothing like that, not winged, not tranquil, not attractive, not nice. And those stories had frightened Hava, when she had been younger and meeker. She had certainly never seen any such creature, but Ziggurat had said that there might still be some left in the world, one for sure, buried deep and sealed beyond freedom for all time. Hava did not expect that she would ever see one, but, though the thought still frightened her, she oddly hoped that one day she would.

  The truck later came to a stop by a huge wall that Hava could not see over. The driver called for her. Hava thanked the chicken for warming her and set it down by the open door of its cage. She would let it decide whether it wanted to go back in there. Then she jumped off of the bed of the truck and jogged to the cab and asked the man whether he had a candle and a match that he could give to her. He handed over only a plastic lighter and said a nervous goodbye as if he hoped that she would simply be gone from him without leaving behind any of the bad luck that had gotten her into the state she was in.

  She thanked him as he drove away. He had been kind to her, and she knew she could not yet repay the driver, but, like Ashurbanipal, she hoped to be able to soon. She owed even more to the gentle servant-boy of the Witchfinders who had risked his life to save hers, whom she had regretfully had to cut across the face. Perhaps when her vengeance was complete and her world set right again, if she reached that point alive and free, she would be able to offer such repayments.