The Black Palace Read online

  Sledge yelled, “You’re better off on that side. I’m sorry.” And he lifted his shotgun, aiming at Horace.

  “You coming with me, man?” Horace said.

  “Soon enough,” Sledge said. And he fired.

  And he fired again.

  Horace broke apart, thinning in streams through the air of the room, fading in a distant scream.

  The senseless figure of the arm behind him dissipated as well, leaving the curtain still.

  The witch groaned, though unmoved, and vapor continued to pour from her veil. In addition to having taken some of the mirror shards and salt-shot from Sledge’s shells, she bled from three previous gunshots in the chest.

  DiFranco moved in to finish her. She stood close to the witch, whose fingers still needled the breath as it came from her. DiFranco readied her single-shot for the execution, but she felt slower than normal. The feeling of being so close to this witch was drawing on something inside of her, something old and in the distance, as if she were some other self on the steps of an unmapped pyramid, its stones hidden from the ages in vines, its vaults newly opened and deeper than the night sky. She wanted to step into that otherworld, but she came back to herself as she noticed wisps of breath gathering around her pistol. It began to frost over, as if the mist grasped at it with waning strength. DiFranco was hesitating too long. She fired into the witch’s head.

  The witch’s fingers slowed and her breath thinned, but she did not entirely cease.

  “What shell did you use?” Sledge said, noticing that, somehow, the witch was not yet dead despite the point-blank shot.

  DiFranco was confused. She double checked the empty slot in her bandoleer. She had used the right one. “White oak,” she said.

  “Damn,” Sledge said, coming over with a newly loaded round. “How about a skull full of salted myrrh?” And he fired an execution shot too.

  The witch’s fingers slowed, slowed, and finally ceased. She fell forward, cracking her head on the table. The last of her breath faded.

  “That’s that,” Sledge said. “Good work.”

  But it didn’t feel like it. It didn’t feel like that was all there was to it. And it didn’t feel good.

  Jan was yelling about seeing a snake run off somewhere in the room, then correcting himself by yelling that he meant it was slithering, not running. DiFranco ignored him. He could handle it on his own.

  She used her pistol to turn the witch’s dead hands over on the table to and fro. They were ancient hands. The wrinkles and calluses were not unlike the kind of dry wilderness—canyons and sands—that would cause such weathering. One of the fingers wore a bronze ring with a small piece of bone inset like a diamond, and DiFranco dared not touch it. She said, “I don’t think she was a local.”

  “I’d have heard about this one if she was,” Sledge said, agreeing.

  DiFranco leaned in closer to the witch, glimpsing at the open eyes through her coin veil, cataract and lifeless. She looked closer. She jumped at Sledge’s voice.

  “Never seen it take two botanicals at point-blank,” he said. “Along with everything else we put in her. Guess she was old. Real tough, and real old.”

  Jan was saying that now he had lost it, that he had lost the snake, and he was asking what to do about that.

  “Don’t let it bite you in the ass,” Sledge answered.

  DiFranco stepped away from the body. She was running through her head, trying not to think about why the witch didn’t call her father up from the dead. And it would have worked on her, maybe not the way it had on Eisenheimer, but if she had seen her father—a ghost of him—she would have wanted to talk with him more than anything, and the witch would have bought herself a second chance. Yet it hadn’t happened. But she was trying not to think about that. She needed to focus on action. She had been caught up in this whirlpool of a night, and she needed to figure out something to do to fight back against it, to do what she was meant to do. The place to start would have to be going back to the Witchfinders Union with answers, answers about a house that wasn’t supposed to be there, about a dead witch who remained a mystery, about the first commissioner casualty in the field since—she had to think—since that raid on the Black Palace. That was where she should have been tonight. That’s where she could have sorted herself out. Everything was wrong, and she needed to make it right.

  Sledge patted her. “You okay?”

  She snapped to. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry about your buddy Horace. An old teammate of yours?”

  “Yeah, he taught me a lot. Years back. He was with me on this house. Guess that’s why I had him on the mind. I don’t think you ever met him, but your old man knew him. Hell of a Witchfinder, Horace was.”

  “What was the knocking he was talking about?” DiFranco asked.

  “Best not to think about it,” Sledge said. “But what’s wrong with you?”

  She thought about her father again. She couldn’t help it. She said, “It’s just that—if she could bring back your friend for you, and bring back Eisenheimer’s family—why couldn’t she bring back my father?”

  “Maybe because he’s not—” But Sledge stopped himself.

  He didn’t have to say it. She was already thinking it. She needed to think about something else. So she said, “If she was so old, why’d we catch her so unprepared?” She looked around the room, seeing nothing else of note than the two maidservants still on the floor, one of whom was crying, apparently, from the heaving of her back. It was those two and the curtain that revealed nothing but a wall, and that was it. “Why didn’t she have some witch-pets to throw at us? Werewolves, a vampire, a plague of frogs, something. We caught her off guard.”

  “Then I guess she did a pretty good job on the spot,” he said, indicating that they were now three of a four person team. “I don’t know. Maybe someone told her the coast was clear.”

  DiFranco doubted it, but everything was in doubt tonight. If Sledge was on to something, maybe there was supposed to be a hand-off here, maybe the stolen artifact. She tried to put the pieces together, thinking through the things the Haruspex had said. “One of these maidservants is our only lead.”

  Jan had gone to inspect the curtain and the wall, having given up on the snake. He looked back and said, “What are we supposed to do? Interrogate them?”

  “I say just shoot them and call it a night,” Sledge said.

  “What?” Jan said, aghast. “You can’t do that.”

  “He’s fucking with you,” DiFranco said.

  Sledge said, “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “They surrendered,” she said. “We take them in. It’s protocol.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Sledge produced two riot zip-ties the width of handcuffs and tossed one to DiFranco.

  They zip-tied both maidservants’ hands in front of them—only because the two girls posed no threat and would be easier to lead back through a house like this than if tied from behind—and they did a quick pat-down to confirm neither had any hidden weapons. Then they walked the girls toward a wall.

  DiFranco’s prisoner, the one crying, swooped the deep hood of her bonnet over the whole scene, and, at seeing her witch-mistress, she choked herself up into silence, gut-punched with grief. DiFranco recognized the feeling. She shone her flashlight in the maidservant’s bonnet to better see her face. She looked young, somehow fresh and hard all at once, a strange kind of foreign beauty, a kind that DiFranco might have seen in old photos but no longer expected to encounter in the modern world. Her mouth was trembling and vulnerable, and her eyes were almost too bright for her face, or maybe something else, maybe a certain defiance in the midst of her sorrow.

  DiFranco noticed Jan looking at her too, but he was doing so a little strangely. Then he quickly returned to inspecting the wall and insisted that DiFranco come look at something with him, that it was something she would want to see.

  The other maidservant did not cry, nor did she look at the body of her witch. She was softly giggling.

  “What a
re you laughing at?” Sledge said.

  She didn’t answer, and she didn’t seem worried about it.

  DiFranco let Sledge watch over the maidservants for a moment and went to Jan.

  Jan told her, “First off, you noticed that someone moved this house here, right? The tracks in the yard?”

  “Guess I missed it, but duly noted,” she said. “What else you got for me?”

  Sledge said, “They moved it here, no shit? I knew I knew this house from somewhere else.” Then he got close and mean in the face of the crying maidservant, an obvious tactic of going after the weaker of the two, the one more likely to crack and start telling them what they wanted to know. He said, “So it’s time you started talking. What’s with this house? Who moved it here?”

  She didn’t say anything. She looked around, at the corners of the room, at the curtain along the wall, at her dead witch-mistress. She couldn’t have been much older than seventeen, and it looked like it was breaking her little heart.

  So Sledge pulled her away from the wall and slammed her back into it, knocking some breath out of her, and he barked at her again to start talking.

  Jan called out, “Hey, stop that. You’re hurting her. She didn’t do anything.”

  She winced. Then she spoke back in some kind of Semitic language, maybe a kind of Arabic—DiFranco wasn’t sure. But as the maidservant talked, she stared back at Sledge with something that was not so much grief anymore as anger.

  It concerned DiFranco that she wasn’t speaking English. American maidservants rarely knew any foreign language anymore.

  But Sledge didn’t find it nearly as interesting. He said to the maidservant, “Stop fucking around. I’m only going to tell you one more time. Start talking. And speak fucking English.” And he pulled her away from the wall and again slammed her back into it.

  And Jan again yelled for him to stop hurting her.

  But this time the little maidservant dropped to the ground, and she crawled after something. It was the snake. It was an odd bronze color, and it was slithering to her, and she lunged over it, hugging it to her.

  Sledge drew his pistol on her and yelled, “Weapon.”

  Jan was yelling, “Don’t shoot her! Don’t shoot!”

  DiFranco drew on the maidservant too, but Sledge hadn’t fired yet, so she didn’t yet either. The maidservant wasn’t making a move with it. She just stayed huddled on the floor, shushing the snake softly.

  “Don’t shoot!” Jan kept yelling. “You can’t just kill her.”

  Sledge remained ready to fire, but didn’t yet. “She went for a weapon. That means she dies right here. Are you seeing something I’m not, salt?”

  The maidservant turned to look at the pistol aimed at her face, and then at the face of the man who held it on her, and there was no doubt that she knew what was about to happen to her if she did not drop her snake, yet she held it close to her anyway, and she was terrified.

  Jan jumped in Sledge’s way. He stood his ground in the line of fire, between Sledge’s pistol and the maidservant, and he said, “Don’t do it.”

  “This your first night in the field?” Sledge said over his pistol, not lowering.

  “Yes.”

  “And what’s your name again?”

  “Jan.”

  “Jan,” he said slowly. “I suggest you re-think whatever the fuck it is you’re doing right now.”

  DiFranco was equally surprised, and she just wanted Jan to stop whatever it was too before things went really bad. She half expected Sledge to shoot through him without another word. She holstered her own pistol and said, “Get out of his way, Jan.”

  “He can’t just shoot her.” Then Jan stuttered for an explanation.

  “She’s just a witch’s maidservant,” Sledge said. “And she’s useless, and now she’s noncompliant and combative. Don’t they train you guys for that?”

  “She’s just trying to protect her pet,” Jan said. He wasn’t moving out of the way, but he looked just as afraid as the maidservant was. They didn’t look all that far apart in age, actually. “She’s just a girl. She doesn’t know what’s going on. Look at her. She’s innocent. You can’t just kill her.”

  “You don’t know what that snake is,” Sledge said. “It’s probably that witch’s familiar. You don’t know shit.”

  “You don’t know either. And the witch is dead, so her familiar doesn’t even matter,” Jan said. “You didn’t have to throw her around, and you don’t have to shoot her. She didn’t do anything.”

  Sledge growled in frustration. He still didn’t lower his pistol. He kept it aimed right at Jan’s heart.

  DiFranco said, “Just ease up a second, Sledge. He’s making it his call, so let it be his call, not yours.” She still wasn’t sure whether he was going to kill Jan. It wouldn’t have caused him any more problems to do so, not at this point, not more than an extra page of paperwork explaining that a salt-grade Witchfinder had gotten turned by a witch’s head-trick and had to be put down, even though, in truth, it didn’t seem like Jan was under any kind of occult influence.

  Sledge said to Jan, “Are you seriously telling me that you are about to take a bullet for this?”

  Jan looked back at the maidservant huddled on the ground, who looked back at him. They saw something in each other. Then Jan faced Sledge again and said, “If I have to.”

  Sledge waited for a moment longer. Then he said, “All right.” He moved his thumb to the hammer of his pistol, but he eased it down. He lowered and holstered. “You got balls, kid, but you got them all twisted up. Sooner or later you’ll figure it out. Everybody’s got to die, but not everybody’s worth dying for.”

  Jan’s shoulders lowered in relief. He turned and helped the maidservant up and told her it was going to be okay.

  And she was watching his face and trying to understand his words, which she did not.

  DiFranco, too, was relieved. She hadn’t expected such a standoff—couldn’t even recall a similar one in the field—and she hadn’t fully expected that it would end with Jan alive. This night was getting weirder.

  “She’s your baggage, kid,” Sledge said. “Anything she does now is on you.”

  “She’s not going to do anything,” Jan said, leading her lightly back to the wall that Sledge had slammed her into.

  “At least contain that snake,” DiFranco said. She went through a pocket on her pack and produced a small canvas bag that she tossed to Jan. “Keep it in there. And if you let her hold the sack, keep an eye on it.”

  Jan gave the sack to the maidservant and told her, but she didn’t understand, so he gestured with his hands to show her what he wanted her to do with it. She complied and helped the snake into the sack. She held it to her breast, and she said something to Jan in her language, and her mouth was still quivering.

  Sledge paced away for a moment to cool off. He didn’t like backing down or changing his mind after he had made a call on something, on anything. He never had liked it. It pleased DiFranco in a small way to have seen him give in just then.

  Jan tried to hide the shaking of his hands as he wiped at his face.

  DiFranco guided Jan away by the shoulder to help him calm down, and she tried to get him focused back on the wall. “So what was it you wanted to show me?”

  Sledge yelled at the other maidservant, “How about you? Hey, you!” Through his pointing and volume and eye contact, he had quickly gotten the other maidservant’s attention.

  “You want to learn English real quick and tell us what the fuck is going on?”

  But that maidservant only smirked, and giggled.

  Sledge sighed. “Nope? Didn’t think so. Guess I’d have to shoot Jan over that one too.”

  “I think this wall is a doorway,” Jan said. “I think it’s why these three got cornered up here. They couldn’t get back out the way they came.”

  “Doorway to what?” DiFranco said.

  “Well, the thing is, this house was designed by Ardo Vihns. A mad genius. Worked for w
itches, obviously. We even know why, from all his journals. That’s clue number one. And two is, I don’t think these maidservants are even from this continent, probably not the witch either.”

  DiFranco said, “A doorway to what, Jan?”

  “I think that it’s a doorway to the Black Palace.”

  DiFranco heard her pulse rushing in her ears. She wanted that doorway opened. Her father must still be alive in there, where they had left him in those high gallery halls, where he had held that gnarled gate so the rest of them could retreat, the Gate of Thorns, the image of which still haunted her. She tried to stay cool and collected. She said, “So how do you open it?”

  “Open it?” Sledge said. “Are you nuts?”

  “I would have no idea how,” Jan said.

  “You’re the paranormal architect,” DiFranco said, trying not to sound too desperate. “Can’t you figure it out?”

  “Not an architect,” Jan said. “A scholar. Listen, just because an astronomer studies the stars doesn’t mean he can move them.”

  “So that’s that,” Sledge said. “None of us know how to open it, and the witch who could do it is dead. This job’s done. Let’s call it a night and get the hell out of here.”

  Jan looked into his valise again and said, “The VP sent something with me that we could try.”

  “I can open it.” The voice came from behind them.

  DiFranco and Sledge and Jan turned to look.

  The voice had come from the other maidservant, and she giggled again.

  Chapter 3

  The maidservant was looking right back at DiFranco and enjoying her surprise. She seemed ever so pleased with herself, as if waiting to hear an offer on something she didn’t have to sell, something priceless. Entry back into the Black Palace—it was priceless to DiFranco.

  But the other maidservant with the snake looked just as surprised. She was saying something to her fast in her language, sounding confused.

  She was hushed by the other with harsh words that had switched to that foreign language too.