The Black Palace Page 13

  Jan said, “But don’t you just want to see what’s in it?”

  “Well,” she said, considering it. “I guess I kind of do. But I need to keep watch.”

  “Is there anything out there running towards you right now?” Sledge said.

  “No.”

  “Then don’t worry about it. Just come here and take a breather for a few minutes.”

  DiFranco went to the table and nodded at Jan for the go-ahead.

  He held the blade of his pocket knife to the skin of the white lime, and with his face pulled away, grimacing as if it were going to explode, he cut it in half. He let it go.

  All three of them leaned close to watch the two halves wobble on the table.

  “It’s just a lime!” Jan said with amazement. “Can you believe it?”

  Sure enough, the inside looked like ripe pulp, as normal as could be.

  Jan proceeded to cut it into slices. “I’m going to taste it.”

  “Don’t you dare,” DiFranco said. “You have no idea what it could do to you. What do you think the chances are that it’s really just a lime?”

  Jan said, “I’ve been doing some thinking, DiFranco. What are the chances that I’m going to live through the night in here? Zero, isn’t it? It’s starting to hit me. I’m still young, and I’ve been so busy with everything. I never got the chance to fall in love, you know? I never even had any real friends, to be honest.”

  “Give me a slice too,” DiFranco said. “Let’s taste this damned thing.”

  Sledge said, “Hold on. We need some tequila.” He got his flask back out and unscrewed the lid.

  “Tequila?” DiFranco said. “I always assumed you were a Kentucky straight bourbon guy.”

  “We all have our dark secrets.” From his tactical vest, he produced a vial filled with warding salt that had been gathered from dried tears of the bereaved, poured some on his wrist where he had licked, and passed it around for them to prepare as well. “Go ahead and take two swigs. Might as well empty it and lighten the load.”

  In turns, they each licked the salt, swigged the tequila, and sucked on a slice of the white lime.

  It was pretty good. Each could see it on the others’ faces. They smiled and laughed quietly together like schoolkids breaking the rules. It was pretty good.

  Jan sat back down and looked at the ceiling with his hands behind his head, smiling.

  Sledge started toying with his uzis.

  DiFranco unlatched her pack and set it on the table with a thud. The shedding of weight gave her a sensation of floating for a moment. She hopped up and sat on the table. She let her feet swing back and forth.

  Sledge said, “Okay, so I kind of blew my wad down at the seafood buffet, so I’m leaving the second uzi and the belts here. I still got enough ammo left to give somebody a bad day. And a grenade. But I’m getting low on hot mommas.”

  “Hot mommas.” DiFranco laughed. “It certainly has been a while since we’ve worked together.” It was nostalgic to hear his outdated slang for exotics, a reference to the fact that each round was essentially a shotgun shell loaded with a pouch of pantyhose, an effective fabric for holding together until it hit the target, dispersing white oak slivers, or wolfsbane, or whatever the pouch was filled with.

  Sledge said, “So tell me, DiFranco. What brought you back?”

  She wanted just a few more moments of not thinking about their troubles, but she answered him anyway. “To find my father.”

  “No, I mean back to the Witchfinders Union. What’s the story with going civilian?”

  “I moved back to Santa Fe,” she said before thinking that she should have avoided the question. “Got married. Tried to start a family of my own.”

  “The hell you say. You didn’t get married. Tell me you didn’t get married. To a civilian for christsakes?”

  “It was unfair of me,” she said. “I just hope he’s happy now. He was a nice guy.”

  Sledge said, “Well I hate the bastard already. Who is he?”

  “He was just a guy.”

  “Well what does he do? Don’t tell me. I bet he’s some perfect, rich, handsome prick. I knew it. You didn’t tell him, did you? About witches? About what you do?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything about me. Everything was stable and nice. I was going to have a girl.”

  “The hell you say! What happened?” But as soon as he said it, his face changed. His hands started sorting out his inventory again, and he said, “Never mind. Forget it. It’s none of my business. I’m buzzed is all.”

  She really wished she hadn’t said anything. Sledge was trying too hard to avoid looking at her, and now Jan was watching her with too sad of a face. She just needed to clear the air and focus on something else. So she went ahead and told them. “I died in labor. She didn’t make it. One of the doctors that brought me back said ‘everything happens for a reason,’ like I don’t know that all too well. I got the message. So here I am.”

  Jan looked even more upset.

  Sledge shook the flask and held it out toward DiFranco. “There’s about a shot left each, I think.”

  Jan took it from him without hesitation, and swigged, and sucked on another slice of lime.

  Sledge took it back from him and handed it again to DiFranco. She swigged and then savored a slice too. Then Sledge finished it off.

  “What do you got there?” DiFranco leaned over his gear on the table and picked up a wrap of rich fabric with the pattern in the weft of the sun cut halfway by a horizon, a golden design amid deep red. It was beautiful. The texture was smooth on her fingertips, and it had a sheen that played in their lights as she unfurled it. A tool had been rolled up in it, but she set that aside. “This is real samite, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, be careful with that,” Sledge said, retrieving only the tool.

  DiFranco folded the fabric into a long strip, showing the sun in the center. “This could be fourteenth, maybe thirteenth century. How old is this? What does it do?”

  “Let me show you. It’s a secret from Istanbul.” Sledge took it and wrapped it across her forehead like a bandana, and he moved her hair softly so that her quetzal feather was out of its way, and then he tied it at the back. The design was in the center of her forehead like a third eye. “There,” he said. “Now, like magic, what it will do is probably absorb some sweat so it don’t drip down in your eyes. I think I’ll call it a sweatband.”

  “Genius,” she said. “Did you patent it yet?”

  “No, but speaking of, check this out. I’m serious.” He handed the tool back to her, a small trident the size of a spatula, with a wooden handle. He said, “A Trident of Paracelsus. Made it myself.”

  “It’s really good craftsmanship,” she said, turning it over, tracing the engravings on its forks, one for each of the ranks: sulfur, mercury, salt. She did remember reading about these tridents in some old Union literature. Supposedly they didn’t actually do anything in controlled testing, but she didn’t want to say that. It was so finely wrought, down to the hand-carved scrolls in the handle.

  “Keep it,” he said.

  “No, I couldn’t. It must have taken you forever.”

  “Just keep it, no charge. The only benefit you get for working with a loudmouth asshole,” he said. “Nobody else makes them right, you know. Forged iron from a horseshoe that came from a stallion that was never put out to stud. And you see there,” he said, pointing out each of the three engraved forks. “You got to dip it in each one, the raw substance, but the time of year has to be just right. If you do it all right, it works like a charm. It’s good luck. I think we should all be required to carry one.”

  “And we’d all buy them from you, I’m assuming?” she said.

  “I’d give my friends a discount.”

  Jan had begun trying to go through his inventory like Sledge was doing, sifting through his valise. He said, “Hey, my tablet’s not in here.”

  Sledge tilted his head curiously, and he went over to the far door, saying nothi
ng.

  DiFranco slid the trident into a utility loop on her belt, and then she tilted her pack to herself and dug into her own inventory. She was low on ammo too. She set aside her submachine gun, essentially useless now, and consolidated its remaining rounds into her handgun clips.

  Jan said, “DiFranco, what do you think happened to Hava?”

  She thought for a moment about how to put it. She felt bad for him.

  “Hopefully she’s dead by now,” Sledge said over his shoulder.

  “Goddamnit, Sledge,” DiFranco said. “A little consideration?”

  Sledge said, “What? Being dead is a lot better than if the witches got ahold of her thinking she let us into the Black Palace. She’d even be better off if she got all chopped up by that bear-hide motherfucker down there. God, I hate that guy.”

  “Oh, god. She was just so scared and sweet. And the way she looked up at me.” Jan held his head, then turned to DiFranco. Despite his brutal-looking scar, his face seemed full of fragility. “He’s right. She is dead, isn’t she?”

  “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “He doesn’t know. Maybe she got away. She could be hiding somewhere safe and sound for all we know.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Jan said. “I know better. The witches would catch her. I can’t even think about what they did to her. I read about the kinds of things they do to people they capture alive. Oh, god. Oh, god.”

  “Shut up,” Sledge said, rushing back to the table. “And pack your gear. Fast.” He hurried to get his weaponry back in place.

  DiFranco followed his lead, getting her pack readied again. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  But then she heard it herself. She latched her pack on her back and readied her sidearm and ran to the far entryway to hear it better. The sound was cold to the stomach and sobering to the head. Through one of the corridors, at a distance, she heard the rattle of chains, the crack of whips, the shrill cries of witches, the howling of wolves. It was a hunting party. And it had caught their scent. And it was coming for them.

  They had to leave. They had to leave right away.

  Jan and Sledge were by her side in no time. They kept close together as they left the pale conservatory, and they took the corridor that led them away from the sounds.

  They held to a steady pace and chose from the forks in the hallways quickly and made their way up some stairs, across a long entryway, and through a gateway of stone shaped like the mouth of a great toad with teeth. The air smelled wet and heavy, and Jan took frantic note of their path on his arms, having already torn off his sleeves. He said as if it were urgent that the architecture here was no longer European.

  They passed stalls and cages on either side of the corridor. Their movement stirred mice and leaf-nosed bats that skittered crossways from one cell to the other. A human skeleton lay slumped against the wall in the rust of conquistador armor, the remains of a sword in one hand, the remains of a jaguar’s head in the other.

  Then the corridor led out of an arcade into a wide-open space. Their lights could not even reach the far end of it from where they entered. The walls were all of stacked stones cut and ornamented into geometric spirals and grinning, square-shaped faces, too many to count. DiFranco recognized the style from long ago. They moved under vertical stone hoops along the walls as they curved in angles to other arcade archways. The wall had a brim well above their heads and then nothing but space until the high ceiling. With a stretch, DiFranco could see past the brim with her light. Stadium benches of stone sloped away a dozen rows high.

  Sledge was scoping the gouges cut countlessly and at random into the stonework on the ground, and then he kicked at a long dead centurion covered in the skulls of rabbits still latched onto his bones at their teeth. Elsewhere, also long dead, was a musketeer still in grips with a many-limbed mermaid. Sledge said, “This place has seen some use.”

  “It’s an arena,” Jan said.

  DiFranco said, “And that’s not good.”

  Jan drew the place on his shoulder, the last of the space on his arms, and he said, “All these archways have sliding doors in the jambs. They were closed before we got here.”

  “What do you mean? They were just now opened?” DiFranco said. “What are you trying to say?”

  He said, “The Black Palace wanted to funnel us in here. Mice in a maze.”

  “Then let’s not play along,” Sledge said, and he left the arena through one of the archways.

  DiFranco and Jan went with him.

  They progressed a short way down that new corridor when they heard something ahead. They stopped. It was chains again, the sound of panting and groaning canines, voices of witches different from the ones they had left behind them.

  “More ahead,” DiFranco said. “Back to the arena for a different way.”

  Sledge cussed about it and said, “I don’t want to backtrack. I say we push forward and fight.”

  “I’d rather evade them,” DiFranco said.

  “Me too,” Jan said.

  Sledge gave in, and they all three went back to the arena, where they heard echoes of the original hunting party getting nearer. It meant that the party hadn’t passed them by. It meant that they had indeed caught scent and were pushing their prey hard. They were hunting the Witchfinders who were loose in their Black Palace, but these Witchfinders were only three in number, and were low on ammunition, and were tired, and one of them was only a rookie and a scholar, and one of them was slowed by injury and age, and one of them worried that there might be no point in continuing. Everything was closing in on DiFranco. And she had doomed herself in every imaginable direction. Even if they found a way out of this attack, and then out of the Black Palace, there would be no home to return to, not among the Witchfinders Union. And even if she found her father in here, even if she weren’t terrified now of actually doing that, she could not rescue him or lead him to safety or do anything except join him in whatever strange survival he had mustered, for her unknown years ahead, which was just as terrifying. And even if she stood her ground and fought the witches while she could, she would run out of fight sooner or later, giving them a chance to get her. Then she would no longer be an enemy combatant in the witch’s territory but instead a captive. Maybe it was time to consider a final option. Sledge had said it himself: being dead by any means was a lot better than being captured alive by witches.

  They made their way back across the arena, moving together shoulder to shoulder now, and they took a different corridor away from their hunters. And it wasn’t far before they stopped in that one too. “Of course,” DiFranco said in response to the sounds ahead, more chains and more whips and more cackling and howling.

  They backtracked to the arena again, hoping for another way out. And they stood in the center of it for a moment.

  “I’m telling you,” Jan said, whispering now. “The Black Palace wants us here. It’s funneling the witches too. It wants them to find us.”

  “Since you seem to have it on the phone, I want you to tell it something for me,” Sledge said, echoing around them and getting louder. “Tell the Black Palace that I said it can go fuck itself.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Jan said. “They’ll hear us.”

  But Sledge’s defiance sounded somehow right again to DiFranco. She knew that as agents of the Witchfinders Union they were wrong to be in the Black Palace like this, but that’s not what they were anymore. They were just a team, and all they fought to preserve now was themselves. And Jan was right too: if they were loud enough, the witches would hear them indeed. So she put two fingers to her tongue, and she whistled. It was an alarmingly sharp pitch in that space, and it went through the corridors beyond them, and it got the wolves howling in response, on their way even faster now.

  Sledge flinched and said, “What the fuck, DiFranco?”

  Jan said, “Are you crazy?”

  “You can’t sidestep a closing circle,” she said. “And you can’t lose somebody if they’re always ahead of you.” />
  Sledge brightened at the idea. “The old hippogriff maneuver,” he said. “We bait them here and fight a little, get them bunched up, then we haul ass on a clear path.”

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Hell, who knows?” Sledge said. “We still have some fight in us. Maybe we can take them.”

  They stood their ground in the center of the arena, the many dark archways in sight, and they huddled their backs together so that they each covered a third of the place.

  DiFranco loaded her break-down pocket shotgun with an exotics shell of silver shot, and made sure it was ready for a quick draw, and then she pulled the hammer back on her standard sidearm to make the first trigger squeeze that much lighter when it came time.

  Sledge loaded silver-shot shells as well and similarly got himself ready for quick draws and swift firing.

  Jan dumped the empties out of his revolver and then dropped a speed-loader into the cylinder. He had been empty and had not reloaded until now. And after he was locked and ready, DiFranco heard him rolling out the cylinder again and then locking it back into place again.

  “Just check it once,” DiFranco said. “Then trust the equipment. You don’t want to get caught with your pants down.”

  He said, “Okay. Sorry.” His voice sounded shaky.

  The howling grew closer. High female voices cursed the wolves onward with strange words, and the cracks of lashes made echoes through the halls like lightning strikes. It wouldn’t be long.

  “But make sure you know where your reloads are,” she told Jan.

  He rustled for them.

  “Check,” he said. “But I can’t see well enough in here to know which are my silver loads. Those are werewolves coming for us, right?”

  “Shoot them anyway,” DiFranco said. “They won’t like eating hot lead at twelve hundred feet per second. But shoot for the witches if you can. And stay tight, even when we move, no matter what you see.”

  The pitch of one howl among the oncoming barking made DiFranco’s skin tingle.

  “I know. From training,” Jan said. “Sometimes they make you see things. Friendly fire.”