The Black Palace Read online

  “What was that?” Sledge said. “What was that you just said to her?” He came at that maidservant with his pistol, looking ready to hit her with the butt of it if she did not speak in English as she revealed herself to be capable of.

  The maidservant flinched at Sledge. “I said to her if she stays quiet and does what I say then we shall go free.”

  “And what makes you think that?” Sledge said.

  “Hey, why didn’t you say something?” Jan said to the maidservant. “He was about to shoot her and you could have said something the whole time.”

  “He was not about to shoot me,” the maidservant said with a smirk.

  DiFranco did not know what to make of this little schemer. She was no witch, but she would certainly prove dangerous if they let her. She said, “I was warned about you earlier tonight.”

  “Warned about me?” the maidservant said. “I doubt that is true.”

  “I have my own doubts,” DiFranco said. “Your witch-mistress couldn’t get the Black Palace to open for her. And if you could have, you would have been long gone. Why should I believe that you can do it now? To let in a Witchfinder, no less?”

  The maidservant said, “First you shall see, and then you shall believe.”

  DiFranco waited for more, but this maidservant was more patient than she was.

  Sledge started in on what he didn’t like about this, but DiFranco wouldn’t listen to him just yet. She asked the maidservant, “So what’s your angle?”

  “I do not understand that.”

  “Your price,” DiFranco said. “What price do I have to pay?”

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “Once we cross over, you shall guard us both for a thousand paces, and then we want to escape from you. Nothing more. Then you may do what you will in there. But we must hurry. Word of this will ride as fast as the dead.”

  Jan said, “But if you just came through there, why would you need guards like us?”

  “When we must pass through, we pass but quickly,” the maidservant said. “The Black Palace promises safety to no one, not even to the queen who wears its Crown of Bones.”

  “No shit,” Sledge said. “You’re talking to a couple of vets. Listen, there’s the fun kind of danger, and then there’s stupid-ass danger. DiFranco, you know this is stupid, right? She’s up to something. We’re not going to do this. We don’t stand a chance over there like this, just us three. It’ll be the last anyone hears of us. You know that, right?”

  DiFranco didn’t answer right away, so Sledge tried to get her to look at him by saying her name again, loudly, and again. But he wasn’t capable of calling her by her true name. The only ones to know it were DiFranco, and her mother, and her father. This was between them, not Sledge or Jan or the Union, just them. This was going to be DiFranco’s only chance to find her father, a chance as bright and brief as a fire. But this wasn’t a last chance just for him. Nothing else in DiFranco’s life fit together; nothing was whole. No matter how hard she worked at everything she did, she had not been able to figure out where she belonged, or even what she was really meant to be, not until right now. As mysterious as it still was to her, the vision of her mother had to be right. This was her moment of tlepapalochihua.

  “I’m going in alone,” she told Sledge. “I’ll take the two maidservants, and then once they split off, I’m going to keep going. I want you and Jan to stay here, keep watch on the door, wait for back-up. You can tell them what I did if you want, but they don’t have to come in after me. I’m going alone.”

  “Then we have a bargain,” the maidservant said, holding up her zip-tied wrists. “First I need you to cut me free of these shackles.”

  “No, no, no. Just hold the fuck up,” Sledge said. “DiFranco, look at me.”

  She did, because now there would be no dissuading her.

  And his eyes went kind of sad. She could tell he was seeing the young version of her, years and years ago, that teenaged kid living on base, back before she became a Witchfinder herself, just like her father, back when she wore her dead mother’s quetzal feather in her hair. Tonight was the first time Sledge had seen her wear it since then.

  He said, “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m not asking why,” Sledge said. “But I am telling you, you’re on your own on this one, girl. I’m not going in there to cover your ass. I don’t owe it to you, or your old man. Not to be a dick about it. I just need you to realize that.”

  “I do,” she said. “You don’t owe me a thing, Sledge, and I don’t need you to protect me. I have to go it alone. I’ve always been the outcast, and it’s finally time for me to face it.”

  “I never let any of them talk bad about you,” Sledge said. “At least they never did a second time, where I could hear it.”

  “I have to go it alone regardless. I don’t want to drag you down with me, and there’s no way Jan could handle it.”

  “Hey, why do you say that?” Jan said.

  DiFranco drew her silver-plated stiletto from her boot sheath, and she went to the maidservant, holding its edge to the zip-ties at her wrist. She said, “So what’s your name?”

  “My name is Seph.”

  Jan asked what the other’s name was.

  DiFranco said, “Seph, after I cut you loose, if you try anything, if anything goes wrong, you’ll die first, and you’ll die quick. There won’t be a debate about it. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” Seph said.

  “And if you’re lying and you can’t open it—”

  “Trust me,” Seph said with a smile.

  DiFranco didn’t like that at all. But she cut through the plastic and freed her wrists.

  The other maidservant was cursing something at Seph.

  “That one’s not too happy about it,” Sledge said.

  “She knows nothing, but she is my responsibility now, so I must have you cut her shackles as well.”

  “Not part of the deal,” DiFranco said.

  Seph said, “I will do nothing more for you until you free her.”

  “A word of advice,” Sledge said to Seph. “You’re trying to fuck around with a dangerous woman. You said you’d open the goddamned doorway for her, so you’d better open the goddamned doorway for her.”

  Seph didn’t ask again. She left her fellow maidservant bound at the wrists, and she went to the corpse of her witch-mistress.

  DiFranco and Sledge followed her with the muzzles of their handguns.

  Seph grabbed the witch’s arm and laid the hand out on the table like some slab of butcher’s meat. It was the hand with the ring. She said, “Give me something with which to chop.”

  DiFranco and Sledge each reached back to their packs, but Jan had produced a hatchet from his valise faster than they had gotten to their own hacking implements.

  Jan looked at DiFranco for permission, and she nodded, so he handed the hatchet to Seph, who took it from him. DiFranco and Sledge were ready to shoot her if she hinted at doing anything stupid with it.

  The other maidservant was saying something with heavy emotion, maybe asking something.

  Seph raised the hatchet and brought it down at the thin of the witch’s wrist, that fast and heedless. The hand went smoothly.

  The other maidservant cried out. It was a terrible pitch of lamentation.

  Jan tried uselessly to calm her, explaining that the witch was already dead.

  Seph left the hatchet wedged in the wood of the table where it stood by its edge.

  The other maidservant was still wailing. She was horrified.

  Jan was shushing as best he could and said to Seph, “What’s her name?”

  “Ziggurat she was called,” Seph said. “A Witch of Endor. Hers was the House of Limestone. She was endearing, and she was entrusted by the Three Arch-Witches of the World, but she was old of mind, too much of the past.” She held up the witch’s severed hand and admired her work, the ring reflecting in her own eye. “She had no vision for the fu
ture.”

  “No, I mean her,” Jan said, holding the other maidservant’s arm delicately as if that would keep her from weeping. “What’s her name?”

  “Oh, her. That is Hava.”

  “Hava,” Jan said to her.

  It caught her attention and paused her crying for a moment.

  “Hava, my name is Jan. Jan. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay now. She was already dead. I won’t let them hurt you anymore.”

  Hava was trying to calm her breathing, trying to stop herself from crying. But she was watching Seph with a furrowed brow. She did not like what she was seeing.

  Seph went to the wall with the hand, blood dropping in slops from the end, and she brushed the fingers on the wall until the palm pressed flat. She leaned in and kissed the ring. She kept her head there and whispered while she caught some of the blood.

  Hava was cursing something at Seph. She wanted her to stop.

  Seph drew on the wall, but not arcane symbols as DiFranco was expecting. Instead, she caressed it with blood, streaking it softly and without design, pressing herself against it, whispering like a lover, whispering things the rest of them could not hear.

  Then she kissed the ring one last time, removed the hand from the wall, and took a step back. “Now it will open for you,” she told DiFranco. “If you have enough desire to make it.”

  Nothing looked any different, except for the streaks of blood.

  DiFranco went to the wall and took hold of the curtain. It was heavy. She heaved it across, drawing it closed.

  She stepped back and waited. She was willing it to open. She needed it to work. This whole night had been funneling to this moment, and now if this didn’t work for her, she felt that nothing ever would.

  The curtain had fluttered from being pulled, but even now it stayed bellowed. A draft was coming from the other side.

  A layer of water came rolling along the dry floorboards from the bottom of the curtain, finding cracks to leak through, into the lower stories of the house. And it spread across the room, reaching their boots.

  They said nothing.

  DiFranco stepped through the water and pulled the curtain open again. The wall was now a yawning dark, and clammy air breathed at them, and it swallowed the beams of their flashlights with vastness.

  Seph stood by DiFranco, smiling, and she extended the witch’s severed hand in invitation. “The Black Palace has welcomed you.”

  DiFranco snatched the witch’s hand from Seph, who dared not protest, and she went up to the threshold, alone. She took one more heavy breath to confirm for herself that she was going to do this, alone, even if it meant never coming back out again. “Tlepapalochihua,” she whispered to herself, and then she took the long step across.

  It was cold. The water rolled softly at her heels. She looked up, and the cavernous vault above hinted here and there of columns and ragged outcroppings and stairless stone lofts beyond. Any limits ahead of her were covered in darkness so thick that she would have felt claustrophobic if not for the blowing air from distant spaces and the groans and droplets of echoes from far, unknown chambers.

  “What’s it like?” Jan called.

  “Not like I remember.” This was nothing like the strange hallways and galleries where she had last entered and escaped the Black Palace, among the doors that the Witchfinders Union teams had breached, nothing like the place where the Gate of Thorns stood. But that raid, despite how far in they had seemed to penetrate, had glimpsed only one small segment. Little was known about the Black Palace except that there was more of it than they knew.

  Behind her, Sledge was hurrying to attach holy wafers along the jamb of the opened wall with strips of duct tape. And he ordered Jan to secure one end of a thread of silver-woven yarn to a leg of the medium’s table. “Got to have a tether,” he said.

  Jan unspooled the thread as he stepped backward toward the threshold, seeming to get the idea without more explanation, having surely read the old reports of how they had kept one of the doorways open on the previous raid.

  Sledge hurried, biting the tape apart at the right lengths because with his other hand he opened a small plastic bag from a pocket on his tactical vest and sprinkled its contents—frankincense—along the threshold as well. “That should do it,” he said. “We don’t want this closing up on us.”

  “That should not be what worries you,” Seph said. “I was given authority only to open the doorway, not to close it.”

  “Sure. You seem real trustworthy,” Sledge said. He finished with the frankincense and the duct-taped wafers, and he took the spool from Jan.

  But he looked like he was going to step across to join DiFranco.

  “What are you doing?” DiFranco said. “Stay back. It’s just me and the maidservants. I need to do this alone.”

  “Maybe I don’t give a damn about my partners, but I can at least cover your ass for a little while, for old times’ sake, just until you’re rid of those two,” Sledge said. “Then I’ll come back over here and make sure this stays open for you.”

  DiFranco was telling him no, but now Jan looked like he was on his way across too. “Damn it, Jan, just stay back,” she said. “You won’t be ready for this. You’ve been through enough already for your first night out.”

  “I know you two think I’m weak,” Jan said. “Maybe I am. I can’t help that. But I’m not a coward.”

  “No, I don’t think you’re a coward,” she said. That was the truth. He had earned that much by being willing to take a bullet, no matter what she thought of his reason for it.

  Sledge told Seph to come on, and he shoved her with him as he stepped across to join DiFranco.

  Jan retrieved Hava, and they stepped across too.

  Sledge looked above him, all around, and said, “I guess this is the bottom floor.”

  Seph laughed at that.

  “I can’t believe it,” Jan said. He was full of uncanny joy. “You can feel it.”

  Sledge said, “So what now, DiFranco?”

  “I said I’d guard them for a thousand paces,” DiFranco said. “After that, you two go back across to the house, and I look for a way up to those galleries. Where I left him.”

  “Where we left him,” Sledge said.

  They walked forward, the ripples of their footfalls, like their lights, playing off the shallow surface of water. Stray drops fell from the boundless ceiling infrequently, and looking up for the sources revealed the glitter of ornaments and hinges too far away, or perhaps just the reflection of other falling drops.

  Their lights seemed to scare insects at every glance they made, sending beetles scattering up the rough walls, spiders running along the water, moths passing overhead in waves.

  DiFranco gave the severed witch-hand over to Jan and told him to put it in his valise. He protested twice that he did not want it, that it would soil his papers and tablet, before finally accepting it. Sledge unspooled the thread behind them as they sloshed along.

  From a distance they must have looked like a few little fireflies on the surface of a still night pond. And though their lights were necessary, DiFranco hoped that they would not be seen at all, that they could pass through this place as unknown to it as it was to them.

  The twinkling soundlessness lay around them so heavily that the sudden ignition of one of their signal flares nearly hurt DiFranco’s ears. Sledge had sparked it, and he tossed it behind them. Its magnesium compound burned as a wide, glowing pink under the short layer of water.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” DiFranco said. The flashlights they used were already risky enough.

  “Maybe you want to use your GPS do-dad to find your way back instead? They got a map you can pull up for this place?”

  Jan said, “No one has ever seen a map of the Black Palace. I’m telling you, I’ve studied every paranormal map extant. No one has one, except maybe for witches, and even then maybe not.”

  In his enthusiasm, he didn’t get that Sledge was being a smart-ass, but DiFranco d
ouble-checked her watch for a location anyway. They had to be somewhere in the world, and maybe she could get some kind of reading. It said only that it was calculating, calculating, with no sign of making sense of where they were, except for the briefest flash and glitch of what looked like Cyrillic script at the bottom of the screen. There would be no getting a signal here.

  With eureka-like quickness, Jan used his fingers around his revolver to pull a marker from his shirt pocket, and he hiked up his sleeve and began drawing their path on his arm.

  Sledge sparked and threw another flare on their backtrail.

  “You should not do that,” Seph said. “They will not like such flames.”

  “Who won’t like it?” DiFranco said.

  “I do not know. Any here who see it.”

  Sledge said, “I don’t know. Maybe they’d appreciate a little light. Spruce up the place.”

  “If lights and flames were wanted here, there would be lights and flames,” Seph said. “I do not know what hides along the path of our thousand paces, but I do not want it disturbed, and I do not want it angry.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe we want these lights here,” Sledge said. “And maybe whoever doesn’t like it should be more worried about making us angry. They’ve got a couple of serious motherfucking Witchfinders to deal with now.”

  Sledge’s defiance stoked DiFranco’s as well. The feeling was something closer to the earlier years, when she would talk like that too. So she produced a signal flare too, sparked it, and tossed it toward the ground so as to light the way ahead of them.

  It hit the water. But, slowly, it sank out of sight.

  DiFranco called for them to halt.

  They stopped and waited for her.

  She sparked another flare and tossed it toward the same place. It rolled under the surface, tipped, and dropped out of sight too.

  “We have a problem,” she said. “No more floor.”

  “There must be a path around it,” Seph said. “We must keep going.”

  “Why is this a surprise to you?” DiFranco said, “Have you been here before or not?”

  “I have not been this way,” Seph said, as if she was admitting something that made her foolish, even sounding worried for the first time.