The Black Palace Page 16

  DiFranco loaded more molten goo onto the wolf’s leg and flung it in the direction of the path she needed to get to the witch. She could see the salamander still alive under the corpse of the wolf. He had sunk into the stone, and he moved his feet slowly, getting nowhere.

  The spiders scattered away from the blobs that DiFranco had cast on the floor, and she skipped near one to the other until she was at the archway. The Temacpalitoti danced as near as an arm’s length and then away again, her eyes closed in a trance, her face full of joy. DiFranco decided that she would execute her later after the real threat was cleared. DiFranco stomped her way over spiders a bit closer to the kneeling witch, and she was about to shoot her with her sidearm, but to conserve rounds, she first checked by using her boot to turn the witch’s head. The eyes were open and peppered with grit from the floor, and her locked-open jaw was empty, producing no more spiders. She was already dead.

  DiFranco saw no other attacking witches, and the remaining spiders were scattering out of the arena.

  Sledge and Jan had stepped out of the molten circle now, cleaning themselves off and nodding to each other.

  DiFranco breathed heavily, her pulse still fast with war. They had done a damned good job for being outnumbered in enemy territory. The wolves that were capable of attacking them were all dead, and the summoned creatures posed little continual threat, and the witches who could attack them had already tried their best, having now died, fled, or having not presented a threat in the first place. Feeling full of Witchfinder zeal again, however briefly, she was ready to kill the dancing Temacpalitoti nearby.

  But as she turned to do so, feeling as though she should instead let that witch be, it was already too late. She saw that the witch’s feet hovered above the ground, where her collection of forearms lay, no longer in her grasp. Out of her sternum stuck the blade of an old sword, long and curved. The man who held the sword let the witch slide off of it and fall lifeless to the ground, and he knocked the pistol from DiFranco’s hand before she knew what was going on. She was pinned to the wall by her throat, and, choking, saw him move his bloody and bearded face close to hers. And, once again, as horrible as a memory, the ancient warrior grinned.

  DiFranco refused to get strangled to death against a wall like this. Even if she were fated to die in the Black Palace tonight, it would not be like this. So she threw her legs to his face, turning her whole body against the hinge of his already straightened elbow joint, and then she thrust her hips forward. The elbow snapped, giving in the wrong way to the leverage of her arm-bar. DiFranco braced herself to hit the floor, but she remained pinned against the wall, still struggling to breathe. The warrior grit his teeth, and even with a broken elbow he held her and would not let her go. He had the edge of his sword to her face.

  Sledge was screaming, but the sounds of everything were fuzzy and fading.

  DiFranco’s legs fell back under her. She felt as though she were breathing through a straw. The bastard was giving her just enough air. He wasn’t trying to kill her yet. But his grip slowed the blood to her brain. It was not a painful sensation. The world merely turned gray at the edges and began filling with sparks. She even began losing the sensations of fear, and of defiance.

  She fumbled to retrieve her single-shot, and then to grab a shell from her exotics bandolier, but her fingers weren’t seeming to do what she had trained them to do, and something unlatched, and the bandolier fell from her, sending the shells clattering away, and then the single-shot was lost from her hand too as the world came in and out of sight, and she realized all of this almost calmly now.

  She watched almost calmly as Jan screamed and shot the warrior, who only flinched and grunted at the bullets that entered his stomach.

  She watched almost calmly as Sledge drew his Saxon blade, and sliced his pack off of himself, and screamed wide-armed in challenge.

  And the warrior saw Sledge do this. And he brought his sword up to the side of DiFranco’s turned face. He used his own face to brush her hair out of the way, and she felt him bite the rim of her ear to hold it, and then she felt him slice her ear clean off.

  There was pain, and she saw him hold her own severed ear out to Sledge, between the fingers of his sword-hand, but it was all so distant, for she was fading.

  And she watched Sledge scream. He sawed off his own ear. He threw it at the warrior.

  And at that, the warrior let her drop. And he walked to Sledge, he too holding his arms wide, holding his sword wide, acknowledging the duel.

  DiFranco’s senses began to return to her in pulses, but she stumbled back to the ground with every attempt she made to stand and to hold on to the spinning world. She had to go help Sledge fight, but she couldn’t get her limbs to work, and she didn’t know where her weapons had gone.

  Sledge back-stepped to the center of the arena, drawing the ancient warrior with him, and he yelled at Jan, “Get her out of here while I have him.”

  Jan had lowered his pistol, and he had backed away from the warrior’s slow path. He said, “He’s going to kill you, Sledge.”

  “Then get her out of here before he does.”

  Jan reached DiFranco and hoisted her to her feet, making himself a crutch under her arm and lifting her by her belt. She was surprised at how small and light this made her feel.

  He was putting pressure on the bleeding side of her head as he dragged her away. But she pulled against him and halted. It was going to take her a moment to speak, to get her throat working enough to tell him that she wasn’t leaving. She wasn’t going to let Sledge sacrifice himself like this. No, she was going to stay and fight. “My gun,” she struggled to say to Jan. She needed it to put more rounds into the warrior and weaken him. She looked for where it must have fallen on the floor.

  Jan was saying, “We need to run. He can’t die. He’ll kill us all.”

  But DiFranco would not listen. She kept pulling against Jan and looking for her pistol. Then she saw it, or what remained of it. It lay warped and melting over the edge of the floor, down toward the salamander.

  Jan kept pulling her toward an archway. He was yelling at her, “We need to go.”

  Sledge and the ancient warrior now circled one another in the center of the arena. They kept their distance, but they had readied their swords, and Sledge his shield, and they side-stepped and pivoted around each other, both of them slow, making adjustments to the other’s posture and angle. As they orbited each other, their bodies seemed to fall into tune with the old harmony of combat, a thing older than the names of the stars, a music of the spheres.

  DiFranco pushed Jan away and stood precariously on her own. She reached for the tomahawk in her pack. If she had no pistol, she would jump into the blade-fight herself. “We can swarm him,” she tried to say. But she lost her balance and dropped the tomahawk and fell to the ground again. Maybe it was all the blood pouring into her ear canal.

  Jan picked her up and now yelled in her face. “You can’t do anything, DiFranco. He’ll kill us. He’s just playing with Sledge. We’re going.”

  “I told you to get her the fuck out of here.” Sledge had apparently realized that they were at the edge of the arena still and had not left. He kept his eye on his circling opponent, but he screamed, “DiFranco, if you can hear me, you put up a good fight and now you’re done, okay? No more. I know what I’m doing. So just run, goddamnit. Run!”

  It was what her father had said. She was trying to yell back, but her throat was catching her up, and she couldn’t hear whether she was saying anything at all, just as she couldn’t remember what her last words to her father were either. She wanted to be screaming no, and she wanted this moment to be different, but everything seemed so far and getting farther, and she wanted everything in the world to be different.

  Jan paused only long enough to take a hooded lantern off the ground out of the grip of a dead witch, and then he pulled DiFranco with no intention of being halted this time.

  She kept struggling against him, but she was gett
ing dragged into an archway regardless. She couldn’t let it end like this. If this happened again, it would be the end of everything, and nothing would be worth fighting for anymore, and nothing would be worth saving, and it would all be her fault.

  But with her feet only reaching the stone of the floor in brief skips, she saw Sledge going from her, and the corridor came slowly over her like the hood of a cloak, and the sight of the arena began closing in the archway like a slow eye.

  And as they turned a corner, in that last glimpse, the warrior lunged at Sledge, and they clashed and struck and spun away, and Sledge was already slashed deep through the guts.

  And then he was lost to her.

  Chapter 12

  Hava backed against the bars away from the wolves, still hunkered and holding herself, and they crept forward, salivating, and she realized that she must have looked like a cornered rabbit to them. She felt like one. But she would not meet death like that, so she stomped her bare foot on the floor and stood tall and yelled wordless sounds at them, commanding them to halt, to heel. She no longer covered herself but instead smacked her hands as she yelled. Two of them hesitated for a moment. The three others didn’t seem to notice and kept creeping in.

  Hava reached back and grabbed one of the thin strands of silver chain that wrapped down the cell bars. There was slack in it, so she tugged as she stomped her feet, and the end came loose. She unwound as much of it from the bar as she could in that quick motion, and then she whipped it at them. The strand cut across the nearest wolf’s snout. He buried his face in the crook of his arm and howled, and then he shivered as if something was still biting through his skull. The others halted just beyond the short swing of the strand in Hava’s hand, but they did not retreat.

  She said, “I will not be your meal tonight.”

  One of them, one who had hesitated when she stood tall and stomped, struggled to speak over his long mouth of gums and teeth. He looked at her grip on the strand and said, “Oh, yes you will. That pretty little hand, I’m going to suck it down to the bone.”

  She said, “Hold your tongue.”

  He giggled.

  These were wolves accustomed to being prisoners, slaves, and as such, they would take anything they could get, especially small rewards, especially orders. She would give them both. She said, “I am not your meal. I am your liberator.”

  Two of them scoffed, and the one she had sliced had stopped writhing and howling now, but none of them moved closer, seeming to be wary still of the whipping strand.

  “This is what will happen tonight,” Hava said. “You will all face the back wall and not turn around until I say so. I will break these bars open and clear this silver from your path. Then you will help me defeat the witch Lenka.”

  “You are going to break the bars?” one of them said with a lupine impediment, lots of slobber and clacking. “What, with those scrawny little arms of yours?”

  Hava said, “I will break them, and then we will break Lenka.”

  One of them laughed, “She will not like that very much.”

  “You will stop worrying about pleasing her tonight. Tonight you will concern yourself only with causing her pain. You will give back to her what she has given you. Could you not rip her limb from limb if you had her in your paws?”

  “She’s got silver leashes and silver whips,” one of the wolves said.

  Hava said, “She cannot use them if you tear off her hands.”

  They seemed to like the sound of that, cackling and elbowing each other, all except for the one Hava had lashed. He crouched on his haunches, checking the wound on his face with his wrist and licking the blood. He said, “Do not toy with them, girl. They are simple-minded, and hope has abandoned us. We men have been made into starving dogs.”

  She said, “If you come with me and sink your teeth into your mistress, you will get to feel like men again. And like wolves.”

  “We’re waiting,” he said. “The bars still stand, and the smell of its silver is still burning my nose. Though I cannot sense deception as Lenka can, I know enough to doubt your words.”

  “Back to the wall then,” Hava said. “First you shall see, and then you shall believe.”

  The wounded one loped back into the shadows, and the other four followed him with varying degrees of uncertainty. She couldn’t see for sure whether they had followed her orders completely and stood facing the wall, but it did not matter, for she had bought herself a little time to figure something out. She had to get Nachash to come to her.

  She knelt at the bars, and put her arm through, and tapped at the concrete floor. She called Nachash’s name, and she called again and again. She watched the exit, its rotten door still hanging open from Lenka’s kicks. She wanted to see Nachash slither across the threshold and come speeding toward her with the egg in his belly, and the iron-breaking worm in the egg. She wanted to see it so badly, and if she didn’t, she knew she was a minute away from being torn apart and eaten alive. She kept calling his name. But she saw nothing coming through the door.

  In that moment, she felt sorrow for herself, much like she had as a child on the streets, and that feeling brought a song into her memory. It was a song that she had used to sing to herself. She had at that young time pretended to be her own mother, a caring and ever-present mother, and she had sung hugging herself, pretending to rock her own infant self to sleep. And she also remembered that she had sung this song to Nachash as she tended to him at the House of Limestone. She had sung it to him to calm him when they had fled the Witchfinders earlier this night.

  She began to sing that song. Her voice filled the bareness of the concrete room, and it seemed to echo off of the far places beyond, off of the surfaces of the stagnant puddles, into the drains, through the open pipes. She sang and let the sorrow come out of her. She thought of Seph, how kind Seph had been to bring her to the House of Limestone, how kind she had been in helping her learn the ways to serve a witch. None of the other maidservants had been kind to her. None of them had ever even talked to her beyond passing along lowly orders. Only Seph had helped her. Hava mourned Seph, and she regretted killing her. She wanted to talk to her just one more time.

  Then Hava saw small movement in an open pipe near the floor. The movement was slow and lengthening. It was Nachash, and he was coming to her.

  Hava wiped at her eyes, clearing them. She felt fresh and done with sorrow for now. Nachash came to her hand, and she picked him up and apologized for the pain that Lenka had caused him and the general unpleasantness of the circumstances, and then she told him that she needed him to regurgitate the egg. She promised him many real eggs and many mice for his help.

  Nachash seemed happy to be at her hand again. He unhinged his jaw and lurched, but the bulge in his belly was not moving quickly enough. Hava placed her fingers behind the bulge and massaged it toward his mouth. It was coming.

  At her back she could feel the wolves watching from the darkness. She could sense their confusion. She kept working.

  The egg finally cleared, and Nachash reset his jaw and moved quickly in spirals around her ankles. Hava cracked the egg open and pulled apart the cotton inside it, and she found the worm there. He was fine. She kissed him to wake him up. She whispered happy greetings to him, and then she asked him for another favor. She took him from his cotton bed and placed him on the silver lock. Then she stood, with Nachash holding around her leg, and she took several steps back. She bumped into something hot and hairy. It was one of the wolves, and despite the bump he remained standing where he was, looking at the worm on the lock, tilting his head side to side in curiosity.

  “You will want to stand back,” she told them. She took a few more steps back even though they didn’t.

  She thought for a moment about the warning that Ashurbanipal had given her twice, about the need for a Circle of Solomon to contain stranger damage to the fabric of the world, but she could not worry about such things now, not when her life was a moment away from being either saved or destroyed.<
br />
  She asked the worm in her native tongue to break the door.

  Then everything was ablast with sharp light and noise.

  And everything was scattered.

  When the smoke and dust began to clear, and the building quelled its shuddering, Hava could see sticking up here and there out of the rubble the severed ends of cell bars still glowing red like candle wicks. Jagged slabs and plugs of concrete had come down from the ceiling and out of the walls. There was no more cell to contain them.

  She found that she was on the floor, as were all but one of the wolves. He stood on his hind legs past the rubble, in the free part of the room. He said, “There’s dust in my nose, but I can hear her coming. Get up. Hurry.”

  Hava hurried to her feet and pulled on the shoulders of the wolves nearby so as to nudge them up too. They joined her.

  She found the worm sitting peacefully on half of the silver lock among the rubble. He almost seemed to smile, or at least Hava pretended that he did. She could not discern his mouth or eyes, but she liked to think that he enjoyed breaking things almost as much as he enjoyed sleeping. She picked him up quickly, and, with nowhere else to safely keep him that she immediately saw, she placed him behind her ear, under her hair. She hoped he would not suddenly decide to break her skull apart too.

  She saw nothing other than the obvious destruction of the cell, nothing to make her worry about disregarding Ashurbanipal’s warning. Maybe she had risked damage that she could not yet perceive, but she told herself that she had no plans to do so again.

  Then Hava picked up a broken rod of cell bar, still hot but bearable. The weight in her hand felt like a good weapon. She also picked up a length of the silver strand—for whipping, just in case the wolves turned on her. She joined them near the door. She was about to tell them what to do once Lenka came into the room, but before she could, Lenka came into the room.

  Lenka jolted to a stop just past the threshold as if she had been in a sprinting flight to investigate the blast.