The Black Palace Page 17

  What Hava wanted in that brief moment was for the wolves to pounce on her, to swarm her with their teeth and claws and drag her down to the ground and rend her apart in strips of flesh. But they did not do this. Lenka was delaying in a second of shock, processing what she saw, and they could have already taken her down, but they didn’t. The wolves feared to attack their cruel and powerful mistress, even now, when they had chance and advantage.

  So Hava swung the steel rod at Lenka’s face. Blood and chips of teeth flew from Lenka’s mouth, and she fell back through the door, out of sight. Hava called for them to go after her, but it was she who was through the door first.

  In the passage, Lenka scrabbled on all fours to stand and run away. Hava pulled her ankle, collapsing her back to the ground. Then she brought the steel rod down on the side of Lenka’s skull.

  Lenka took the blow heavily. She kept trying to move along the ground in a sluggish swim, but she was going nowhere. In an attempt to speak a curse, she only gurgled blood.

  Hava strode in front of the prostrate witch, and she placed one of her bare feet on the side of Lenka’s head. Nachash revolved around her ankle. Holding a rod that dripped dark with blood, she stood there in the dim light of the corridor, dusted in a layer of rubble soot, clotheless, her own sweat dripping down her uplifted brow, over her smile, onto her own bared teeth. She was a thing of raw triumph.

  She ordered the wolves to come into the passage.

  Two were already peeking around the door at her, but, quickly, they all came as she told them to.

  Lenka groped impotently at Hava’s feet.

  “Pick her up,” Hava said. “Bring her in here. Keep her hands apart.” Hava walked away, back toward the room where she had not long ago been collared and leashed, knowing that the wolves would do as she had said.

  She could hear them dragging Lenka and already lapping at the blood on her face as they did, refraining from biting her, for Hava had not yet told them they could.

  They all came to the room.

  Hava went to the table and used the rod to scatter the knives and fire-pokers to the floor, leaving the table empty. “Spread her hands flat there,” she said, pointing the rod at the table.

  As the wolves did so, Hava swung at the mirror. It shattered in a thousand pieces, and Lenka cried out through her own blood worse than when she had been hit herself.

  The wolves were restless and panting, but they did not eat, and they did not attack. They held Lenka’s hands flat on the table with their teeth and elongated paws. Lenka had regained some of her senses, and she writhed mightily, though her witch mouth was useless.

  With both hands, Hava raised the rod above her head, and she smashed one of the witch’s hands.

  Lenka screamed, and the wolves liked it. The wolf with the lash across his face lifted his head and howled with her.

  Hava couldn’t tell whether he mocked her or cried in cathartic victory. Maybe it was both.

  Lenka’s knuckles on that hand were crushed and mangled, but her index finger looked fine, so Hava brought the rod down onto it in a second swing. The finger broke.

  Hava broke the other hand too, catching the index finger on the first swing. Lenka would no longer be able to execute the power she once had. There was less precision in the fingers of the finest seamstress in the world than in those of any witch, and once that was gone, it was gone. Hava said, “She cannot curse us now, not like this.”

  “Will we eat her?” said the lashed wolf.

  “Not yet,” Hava said.

  “Will we eat her soon though?” said another.

  “That will depend,” Hava said. “If you five do as I command, then soon you will go free. Before you do, you might eat her, or you might find your meals elsewhere, whether she does as I command. Now strip her and lay her on the table.”

  The wolves ripped off her purple dress and threw her roughly onto the table.

  Hava set aside the rod and the silver strand, and she gathered the purple dress. She put it on. It did not fit her well, and it was shredded in places by the wolves, but she folded the fabric around herself and tied it here and there and knotted some of the excess at the base of its open back. It worked well enough for tonight. Without any other kind of jewelry of her own, she took the silver strand, let it hang around her neck, and tied it to make a rough necklace. She picked up her boots that still lay beside the pile of her old rags, and she put them on and laced them up. She was fully clothed again, not in the least a maidservant.

  She went to Lenka, who lay naked on the table like an old-world sacrifice, her limbs held apart by the hands of wolves. Lenka looked furious.

  Hava took Nachash from her leg and drew him into a long, pointed bronze blade. She said to Lenka, “Do you remember my name? Not Seph, but my true name?”

  Lenka spit blood in Hava’s face. Another piece of tooth came out of her mouth.

  Hava didn’t wipe it off. She held Lenka’s turban to keep her head steady on the table, and she touched Lenka’s eyelashes with the point of the blade. “My name is Hava. Hava. I want you to say it now, and I want you to say it with fear. If you do, you will save this eye.”

  Lenka’s chin quivered. Though she was angry, she did not seem eager to have an eye cut out. Through the gurgle of blood, with a swollen tongue, she made a throaty sound much like the word “Hava.”

  “Good.” Hava moved the point of the blade to Lenka’s other eye. “Now to ransom this eye, you must give the right answer to my question.”

  Lenka looked at her. She was listening.

  “You told me that you have a golem. If that was a lie of yours, it will cost you dearly. My question is this: Will you lead me to your golem and disarm any traps you have around his place of storage?”

  Lenka looked away and closed her eyes. She would not answer.

  “If your answer is no, you can shake your head if you like. You will lose only one eye for it, and you will still have the other. But next will come ransoming your life from me, and that will be easier for you by nodding your head yes right now and keeping both eyes.”

  Lenka, with her eyes still closed, nodded yes.

  “Good,” Hava said. “Now, the wolves will carry you as you guide us to your golem. Once we reach him, you will help me animate him. Me, Lenka. I will animate him, and he will be my golem. If you do all this, you will have ransomed your life. It will no longer be the life of a great witch. It will no longer be the life of a mistress over slaves more worthy of freedom than yourself. But it will be life.”

  Lenka nodded.

  “What about us?” said the wolf with the wound. “Will you give us our lives too?”

  Hava found it curious that they had transferred their servitude completely from Lenka to herself. They were certainly not used to being free. She wondered how long it had been since they were real men, normal men, not Lenka’s dogs, not cursed by the fang and the moon. She wasn’t sure how they would handle their freedom once they found the golem and she told them officially that which they could already realize right now if they were capable, that they were free. She knew of many creatures similar to these wolves, but she knew of none who were free, none who weren’t the possessions of witches in one way or another. Maybe it was time that things started running loose in the world again.

  “Yes, you will have your lives. And you will get to run free soon,” Hava told them. She had some pity in her heart for them, and she let it come through in her voice.

  One of the wolves lowered his head to her.

  She petted him behind the ear. She said, “But before you do, help me haul her where she points us, and as you do so, think about what you will do with your freedom. Think about how you can best serve yourself, and think about who is out there that you would like to set free as well.”

  The wolves hoisted Lenka up on their backs and shoulders. She was bloody and limp, looking like the broken and tortured mess that she was, but she nodded to the far door. They went that way, toward Hava’s golem.

/>   Lenka’s nods led them upstairs into far better-tended quarters. The electric lamp lights were low and hooded in emerald. Strings of beads dangled in the doorways. Chestnut tables and stands of shelves were covered in arrangements of stained-glass lamps and crystal dining ware and busts wearing jewelry, everything with little paper price tags. In the center of it all, curiously indoors, sat a complete gypsy caravan. It was all wooden from its round roof down to the wheels, and it was still painted the rich purple of flowers one would find in the hills of the wilderness where Lenka might have had her humble start as a witch. It had a price tag as well.

  They went higher through the old house, and Lenka led them weaving through off-angled hallways and sets of twisting stairs that left Hava uncertain of which floor they ended up on, or where in the house they had actually gone. The architecture reminded Hava of the house where Ziggurat was betrayed. Because of this, she had reason to believe this place could lead elsewhere, such as back to the Black Palace, maybe even directly to the throne room of La Voisin.

  They came to an unremarkable door. Lenka nodded at it. Her jaws were swollen shut, her lips thick and turning black, but much of the bleeding had slowed. Since she could not so much as gurgle words now, Hava had to take the nods as a signal to enter.

  Hava reached for the door handle and turned it. But one of the wolves barked, and it startled her. She let go of the handle and looked back.

  The wolf who had barked struggled to find the words he wanted. But he didn’t need to speak, for Hava saw the signal. Lenka blinked rapidly, her gaze upward to the ceiling above the door.

  Hava looked there expecting an attic entrance, a door, a lock, anything like that. She saw nothing but a regular ceiling. She shrugged and said, “What is it Lenka? A trap?”

  Lenka nodded.

  “Can you disarm it?”

  Lenka narrowed her eyes in contempt. Then she nodded at the rod that Hava held, then at the door with a quickness of her eyes, her neck seeming unable to move well side to side. She did it again, her gaze quick from rod to door.

  “You want me to throw this at the door?”

  Lenka nodded.

  Hava told the wolves to back up as she backed up herself, pushing them in reverse through the hallway. Then Hava reared back with the rod and tossed it end over end. It knocked the door open and let off a simultaneous thunder through the hall. The wolves flinched and cowed. Hava didn’t. It was nothing compared to the worm. She checked to make sure he was still secure behind her ear, which rang from the noise.

  He was there, though she would need to find a safer and more comfortable home for him soon.

  She leaned in to inspect. The surface of the floor at the threshold was eaten and chipped. The ceiling right above it showed a smoking hole, and positioned in it, a shotgun. Hava could now see the trip wire pulled out of place by the opened door. This was the witch’s trap: not magic, but instead a simple shotgun on a simple trip wire.

  “That’s it?” Hava said to Lenka.

  Lenka nodded.

  She stepped into the room. It was the dusty storage for the antiques shop below. There were hutches and chairs and stuffed birds mounted on stands, more displays of jewelry on plaster busts. But nothing looked especially fabulous at first glance. Hava didn’t know exactly what she had been expecting for the storage place of a golem, maybe something more like a sanctuary in a synagogue, or an alchemist’s observatory.

  She didn’t immediately see a golem. She went to a tall shape covered in a painter’s sheet, and she pulled the sheet away. It was an empty coat rack made of a brass staff looking as old as the desert. She went to another and pulled the sheet away. This one was the sculpture of a strange man. He was carved out of some ruddy mineral, and his limbs were broad, his arms and fists exaggerated like two great battering rams. He had a wild and curly beard hanging low from his jaw, and his thick face was grimaced. Two wide knobs protruded from his forehead like blunted horns. Up and down his naked body, like tattoos, a multitude of words were carved using the letters Hava recognized from the House of Limestone. But on his head, across his brow, one word only was carved. It was one that Hava knew: met, death.

  “This is the golem,” Hava said. “And he is beautiful.” She traced her finger along the letters on his forehead. He was rough to the touch like pumice. She could tell that the space to the right of the word had been scraped off and plastered in with some kind of cement that had long since hardened. It must have been where he had last been animated and then returned to stasis. It was where they had carved in a new first letter to make a new word, the word that brought him to life by adding the letter aleph to the word met, making amet, the word for truth. And to return him to this state, a statue in antiques storage, they had erased that first letter and brought back his death.

  She felt fortunate that, although she was mostly illiterate, she had learned the important words. She wished to know what all the other words said along his body, but there were many, and she had no hope of deciphering them on her own.

  She tapped her own forehead at Lenka and said, “I add an aleph here?” She had been confident about that from Ziggurat’s tales of golems, but she wanted to make sure.

  Lenka closed her eyes and lowered her head. She was losing a great treasure.

  Hava put the brass blade of Nachash to the golem’s forehead, looked down his body to find another letter aleph to use as a reference so she would not accidentally draw it backwards, which she was poor enough in skill to perhaps do, and once she found it and studied it, she pressed the blade into the concrete filling. It was too hard. The blade would not notch it, not unless she wanted to risk hurting Nachash’s tail, which she did not. She petted Nachash back to his soft, coiling form and let him curl around her arm.

  She looked around the room and picked the steel rod back up, its end sharp from being snapped in the cell. She placed it on the golem’s forehead and used a nearby bookend as a hammer to chisel the letter. Then she stood back like a sculptor to admire her work. She had spelled truth.

  But the golem didn’t move. He was as inanimate as the coatrack.

  Hava looked back at Lenka, whose head had fallen limp. Maybe she was filled with sorrow, or maybe she had finally lost consciousness. She was no help, and she could not speak even if she were attentive. Hava looked to the wolves, who stared blankly back at her. They could do little for her in this circumstance, and they seemed to have more trouble speaking the closer they got to their freedom and food. Hava was the only one in the room who could truly speak. That was a power in itself, she realized. So she spoke, “Amet.”

  The golem turned his head and looked at her. He grimaced but then stretched his features and tested out his jaw by ruminating like a cow. He pivoted his shoulders and his hips, and dust feathered off of him. He was alive.

  Hava knew that golems could not speak, from the stories of Ziggurat, since it takes will and soul to do so and golems were only machines, but she figured he knew how to hear, how to take directives and commands. So she said, “I am your new master.”

  “I understand,” the golem said.

  Hava was taken aback. She had heard wrong. There was much for her to learn in the world.

  The golem returned to his natural scowl, frowning through his beard like a roughened and salty old fisherman. His head was mostly balding, his nose was wide, and heavy brows nearly hid his little eyes. He looked like a grandfather Hava would have liked to have had, someone to take her on far sailing expeditions, or on treks into the wilderness to cut and haul great trees. He said, “Am I to address you as Master?”

  Yes, the thought had crossed her mind of having powerful creatures call her Master, but now that it came to it, with this fellow, it felt inappropriate. She said, “You may call me by my name. I am Hava.”

  “You are blessed with a beautiful name, Hava. I was named Moses when I lived last. I remember that and only a little else. Shall I keep that name? Or do you wish to rename me?”

  She wondered why Mose
s the Golem was so interested in names the moment he came back to life. She herself would have been more interested in other things, she supposed. But she also wondered how he came by his name. “Were you carved in the likeness of Moses?” Hava asked. She could see how his appearance would be a valid guess at what the original Moses looked like, especially with the horns.

  “I do not remember,” he said.

  “I will not change your name. I am happy to meet you, Moses. We have a lot of work to do.”

  “I am happy to be alive and at your service, Hava. And I am built for work. I see I did not come to life on the Sabbath, so let us begin this work.”

  Hava told the wolves to lay Lenka down on the floor. They did so, and Hava covered Lenka’s nakedness with the sheet she had pulled from Moses. She said, “You have ransomed your life, Lenka. I do not know whether you will live through your wounds, but in case you do, I tell you this: Do not seek me or concern yourself with my affairs further, unless it is your choice to serve me and gain my favor. Do not speak my name unless it is with fear. If my enemies seek you for counsel, tell them only that Hava comes for them. Do these things, and be free of my wrath.”

  Lenka only groaned in response.

  The wolves waited loyally, and Hava spoke to them, saying, “Harken, wolves. You are free. Go about the world, and free others, and tell them who it was that broke open your cage. Tell them who it was that defeated your mistress and turned you loose. Tell them her name is Hava.”

  The wolf with the lash on his face slapped his jowls and sauntered out of the room. The others watched him go and considered warily what to do. One of them tried to say something but only hacked as if he were going to vomit. He kept trying to talk, and the whites of his pitiful eyes made him look a little more human as he did. He finally managed to ask, “Food?”

  Ah, she had denied them the pleasure of getting to eat Lenka, so she should at least help them find their first meal in their new state of freedom. She hungered too, actually. She said, “I plan to descend to the kitchen of this house and eat my fill of whatever I find there. If you come with me, I will help feed you too if you want such help. If you do not come with me, then go forth, and hunt how you please, and eat a third of the world if you wish, as long as you do not cross me.”