The Black Palace Page 6

  They scanned their lights along the surface, looking for any indications of a floor ahead. They saw plenty of ripples in that black water. And they saw bubbles. These seethed from the spot where the flares had dropped, and they grew thicker and more numerous. And the water spumed. It grew so violent that it seemed to boil, and now they could hear the sound, a great winding cry, something long and horrid, a mew from the deep.

  “Something’s coming,” DiFranco said. “Sledge, take Jan back to the house now. And stay over there.”

  Sledge laughed. “Are you telling me to run from a fight?”

  “Then did you bring enough gear to set up a chimera with me?” she said.

  “I’m the lion and you’re the serpent.”

  So DiFranco dropped to one knee and from her pack produced a short slab of ergonomic polymer, her submachine gun, and she threaded a suppressor on its muzzle, and she snapped a fifty-round magazine into its bullpup stock. She readied two more magazines into the quick-loops on her belt. “I’ll flank right, two o’clock, ten yards,” she said, switching off her lights and edging off like a shadow.

  “Check,” Sledge said back. He tossed the spool over to Jan, and then he produced an old uzi, customized and spot-welded, and from his pack he also drew the beginnings of a belt of ammunition that he fed into the chamber. Then he produced a second uzi and a second belt of ammo that he readied in the other hand.

  “What should I do?” Jan asked Sledge.

  “Go back like she told you.”

  “I’m part of the team.”

  Sledge said, “Then control the prisoners and stay behind me.”

  The pink glow from one of her lost flares was returning in the water, brighter, brighter, and some anomalous form of liquid globe enveloped it as it swelled above the surface. Its cry grew as immense as the space around them, wailing like pained birth. The flare was suspended in the jelly head that climbed out of the water, dragging its tendrils beneath it, pulling thick-jointed limbs behind it. It crawled level onto the floor with them, then strained the tendons of its bulk. It shook its shaggy head with wildness—the flare quivering inside—and through its tubes it screamed at them.

  The maidservants shrieked with fear.

  Jan said, “I think I should go back.”

  “I think he should go back,” Sledge said. “Fuck this guy.”

  The thing crouched ready like a predator, and focused its countless pustule eyes on their lights, and came at them.

  Sledge let his guns tear loose. He buried his triggers into the guards, laying down a leaden line of hot hell into the thing. It tried lumbering forward at him, but kept getting cut down at the limbs with each step, unaware that it was DiFranco, close and invisible at its side, picking it apart.

  The creature’s body gave away in rends, and it fell back into its lagoon, where more bubbles seethed, from one side, and from another, and from another. More of those things were coming.

  “I’m hot. Keep me covered for a second,” Sledge yelled toward DiFranco’s location.

  “Check,” she said from the dark. She stayed on target and readied a grenade with her off hand.

  Sledge lowered each uzi by their ammo belts into the water. The barrels steamed and cooled.

  The maidservants screamed in their language somewhere behind their firing lines, and there was splashing. Jan began screaming something too, but there was no time for DiFranco to look back, for the many jelly heads reared out of the black water, and they clamored forward with the translucent breadth of their arms, and they yowled.

  DiFranco twisted out the pin and lobbed the grenade. It went up with such a spray of thunder that the Black Palace itself might have shuddered.

  Sledge resumed firing, and the place was all strobe and noise and heat. DiFranco finished her clip, changed out, and kept firing in quick bursts, strafing at better angles and slicing them apart. The creatures came in droves, but they gave ground as soon as they gained it, leaving gelatinous trails of their own gore on the way back into their lagoon. One of the things came up with its jelly-head filled with the clattering of a dozen armored crustaceans that it set down as if to undock, but Sledge sent a grenade of his own at it, and it was gone in the blast. And DiFranco kept zipping through that clip and into the next, and Sledge kept mowing them in waves.

  DiFranco was about to dig deeper into her pack for more artillery by the time she saw enough stillness and smoke to stop.

  Sledge stopped firing too.

  The creatures were dead or fled, and their fatty remains floated on the water like weird clouds.

  DiFranco’s ears rang, but she could hear Sledge whooping with delight. He waved his middle fingers downrange and hollered that they had kicked ass.

  DiFranco went bright again and returned to him. He was right. They had kicked ass. They had not even known what kinds of creatures they had destroyed, yet they had done it without question in blazing fashion. And now maybe it was the Black Palace that should fear them. And DiFranco should have been proud of that, but now that seemed like a very bad thing. It was wrong for Witchfinders to be here. She couldn’t even sort out exactly what was wrong about it, but now she knew that it had been somehow wrong when her father had broken in, and now, coming in here like this, she was wrong too.

  But as her hearing was coming back, she could make out Jan’s yelling behind them. She turned to see him sitting in the water with his hand over his eye. He was pointing ahead and saying, “She’s getting away.”

  DiFranco had not noticed any human movement go past her in the fray, but he must have meant it was Seph who was getting away, for the other red dress lay nearby. It was face down, the body not moving, in water that was being stained with the slow spread of her blood. DiFranco felt bad for Jan already since he had seemed so smitten with that one, Hava. But as for Seph getting away, it didn’t bother DiFranco. It just meant that she was no longer their responsibility, and that she couldn’t do them any harm because she wouldn’t last long enough to do so, in the Black Palace, alone.

  Sledge said, “Fuck her—let her go,” already concurring with DiFranco, even though he was still scanning with his light in the direction Jan pointed, looking for a shot at her back if he could spot her.

  But DiFranco was worried about Jan’s eye being injured. That could be bad. She went to him and knelt, realizing that, with his one hand on his eye and his other pointing, he was not holding his revolver anymore. And she couldn’t see whether he had other injuries. “Are you wounded anywhere else?” she said. “Are you dying?”

  “No, I’m not dying. Didn’t you hear me yelling?”

  She said, “If you’re not dying then where’s your weapon, Witchfinder?”

  He looked around, unsure of what he was doing.

  She looked around too and thought she had spotted his revolver lying in the water, but Sledge was turning the dead maidservant over with his boot, and the face tilted up, dripping, the eyes wide in a frozen moment of surprise. The throat had been slit on either side like a slaughtered lamb. She was a goner. It was Seph.

  Jan said, “I tried to stop her. But she got me. It all happened so fast. I didn’t know what was going on. We are so fucked. Why did she do this? I saved her life. Oh, we are so fucked.”

  “Focus and listen to me,” DiFranco said. “Did she take your eye?”

  “What?”

  “Did the maidservant run off with your eye? Or any of your blood? Hair? Anything she could get a witch to use against you?”

  He took his hand off his eye to show that it was intact. A deep slice ran down his forehead, across his orbital, barely skipping his eye, continuing down his cheek. “No, DiFranco, I can see. I think I would know if she took my fucking eyeball.” He returned to putting pressure on the wound, smearing more of his blood all over his face. His tone no longer ringed of hospitality. It was the first bit of anger that she had seen from him so far tonight.

  “Just try to calm down,” she said. “I’m going to have to stitch that up, but other
wise are you operational? Can you continue?”

  “Oh, god, where’s my bag?” he said in a panic. He scrambled to try to get to his feet, but DiFranco sat him back down before he stood. She didn’t need him working himself up into shock.

  “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,” DiFranco said. “Just sit still and calm down.”

  “Nope,” Sledge said. “She must’ve took off with it.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Jan said. “Are you sure? Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. We have to chase her down. We have to get it back.”

  DiFranco produced the medical kit from her pack. She was going to need to stitch him up on the spot, and she was probably going to have to waste some pain killers on him just to calm him down. If need be, she would just have Sledge carry him the short distance back out of the Black Palace.

  “Let it go, kid,” Sledge said. “That little bitch is not worth chasing in this place, and neither is your man-purse. Just be happy she left you with two eyeballs and a gun.” He picked Jan’s revolver out of the water where it lay a short distance away as if it had been knocked out of his hand.

  “I concur,” DiFranco said, preparing the alcohol and suture. “Could have been worse.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jan said. “How the fuck are you two so fucking calm?”

  Sledge laughed. “This one’s got a mouth on him as soon as he gets a little scratch. Don’t worry, salt. If you live long enough, you’ll toughen up like us big kids.”

  Jan held up the spool, and then let go of his eye to grab the other end of the silvered yarn that he had already pulled to himself at some point during the firefight, and he shook the fray at them in anger. “Were you not listening to me? The fucking doorway shut. You two do realize that, yes? The doorway is fucking shut. We’re fucking trapped in here.”

  DiFranco stopped with the needle. She stood and searched with her light. She looked for the doorway. She ran for it, ran where they had come, past the back-trail of signal flares, back to the open doorway to the house, but it was not there. There was nothing more than a rough cavern wall, and she ran her hands over the uneven rock where she could, searching, but no single part of it was distinguishable from the rest, not the slightest indication of any portal ever having been there.

  Sledge just stood where he was and said nothing more than “uh-oh.”

  DiFranco swung her fist hammer-like into the wall and screamed, and then again, and then again, as if anyone would hear her knocking from the other side, as if anyone could help them. It cut the heel of her palm. She stood back from it. She took long, slow breaths. She had made the decision to enter danger, but not like this. She had not planned on bringing them along, and she had not planned on being cut off like this, right away, trapped alive. This had only ever happened to one other Witchfinder, and he had been written off as dead, immediately. So that’s what they were now: left for dead in the Black Palace.

  Chapter 4

  Hava ran.

  In that overwhelming darkness and those flashes of gunfire and explosions, she did her best to give a wide berth to the Witchfinders and the creatures that slopped and screamed in the water. She did not know where she was, but she had to keep running, running, far from the body of her beloved adopted sister, Seph, who had betrayed everything that Hava knew and held dear. She tried to work out exactly how deep Seph’s betrayal ran, but making sense of a betrayal that has been long-running—betrayal from a loved one—was like being suddenly upside down, eyes shifting and brains spinning, like one’s first step into the maze of the Black Palace.

  What had happened? They had been waiting in that odd house for a courier, who was supposed to have tapped on the second-floor window and be let in. It was for some artifact that Ziggurat had agreed to take for safe keeping, as she had been entrusted to keep other things, such as the forbidden seal underneath the House of Limestone, but Hava had not heard what exactly this artifact was supposed to be tonight. They had been promised no Witchfinders. That was certain. There was mention of the pathway taking them to that confused house in the United States of America, but they had been assured that the house was safe from Witchfinders that night, and that there would be no need to leave the house except to return home. The Malandanti coven had guaranteed it. But Witchfinders had come. They had come as if they had known all along. They had chased them through that strange house, finding their way too quickly. And then the doorway home would not open for Ziggurat—dear Ziggurat, poor Ziggurat, great Ziggurat, who was now dead.

  Seph had told Hava to stay quiet and do as she told her so that they would go free. Even before the Witchfinders had cornered them in that room, Seph had told her to surrender, and how to do it, and had told her that they would be safe. Hava had taken that to mean that they would all three be safe. Maybe the doorway would have opened again for Ziggurat if given only a few more moments, but something had gone wrong on the other side. Someone had been working against them.

  With their horrid and thunderous guns, the Witchfinders had taken ages away from the world in a few second’s time. Seph had not wept. And that had hurt Hava as deeply as the death of Ziggurat. Seph had laughed. She had known somehow that the Witchfinders would come. It was she who had allowed them to slay Ziggurat. She had even butchered poor Ziggurat’s dead body herself. And somehow she had opened the doorway for them, as if she knew all along how to do it, betraying all their kind by helping Witchfinders, not to mention having left Hava in this strange, blind place of coldness and stone.

  Hava ran up the incline of an open corridor, one of several at some far wall, and she kept running. It was all dark now, the cacophony of beasts and battle far behind her, perhaps finished. However much they had first frightened her, she felt bad for those slaughtered lagoon creatures, who seemed angry simply out of ignorance and confusion, though she knew not what they were nor why witches would breed them. She knew even less now of where she was, but there was still a floor under her heels, so she kept running.

  She held Ziggurat’s snake close, and she wished he had not been put through all this. He was only a poor little animal, and he had been so frightened that he had hardened himself into a sharp brazen blade, which he had sometimes done for Ziggurat when she had needed a knife for something special, such as a sacrifice. Maybe he had made himself into a blade for Hava because he knew he would be helping her, helping her to cut her plastic binds, helping her to deal with Seph. But now as she ran far from those horrid Witchfinders, and as she held him to the warmth of her chest, he was relaxing again and beginning to coil. He was just a poor animal. His name was Nachash.

  Hava had fed Nachash every week herself when she had been in Ziggurat’s service. One small mouse was all he had needed, and Hava had harvested a seemingly endless supply of those mice from the box traps that she had set along the pathways in the cliffs and hills that surrounded Ziggurat’s House of Limestone. At those times when Ziggurat’s chicken coop was particularly productive, Hava had treated Nachash to an egg, which he had always liked to swallow whole. Seph had once told her that Nachash knew language, any language ever spoken, and the other maidservants in Ziggurat’s house had confirmed that, but Hava had never heard him make a noise. Perhaps he spoke only for dear Ziggurat, and if so, he would never speak again. But Hava used to sing for him when she had come with his meal, and she liked to think he understood her. She tried singing that same song to him now as she ran, hoping that he could feel the humming of her chest even if he could not hear her through her faint breath, hoping to keep him from fearing, hoping perhaps to do the same for herself.

  And Hava kept running. There must have been light somewhere, however weak, because she began to make out the edges of structures around her, but she kept having to take forks in the corridors arbitrarily, and turn around at dead ends, and keep running. She was out of tears now. She would no longer grieve. She would act.

  In less than an hour, Hava had lost everything she knew. The trajectory of her remaining years, once so certain—a simple maidservant at
a homestead in the wilderness for all her years to come—now veered she knew not where.

  The unassuming details of it all began to fall into place as she ran; the dark labyrinth was almost a meditation for her, a clearing of the mind. Who had delivered all the messages about going into that house, about waiting for the courier, about the guarantee against Witchfinders? It had been Seph. It had been Seph who had not seemed surprised at the Witchfinders, who had seemed to enjoy all that transpired, who had given herself over to captivity and then who had volunteered her help. And when the doorway opened not home and not to the same hallway in the Black Palace but instead to this cavernous darkness, Seph had not been surprised at that either. Seph had set them up. She had been part of a plot against Ziggurat and the coven of the Witches of Endor, her very own masters, her very own family. Hava suspected now that the treachery ran as deep as an arrangement with those Witchfinders themselves, but she did not know for sure.

  Seph had promised to keep Hava safe while it was happening, so maybe she had meant that. Maybe Seph had planned to save Hava and care for her. But, no, Hava had nearly been killed by that wretched Witchfinder, that filth of a man who had smashed her into the wall and knocked the breath from her. Seph had not stepped in to save her when that Witchfinder had his gun in her face, ready to kill her as they had killed Ziggurat. Seph was going to let her die. No, it was that boy who had saved her life, the servant of those Witchfinders. He had stood against his own slave-masters and had offered his own life in forfeit for hers—she had seen that in his eyes and had heard that in his voice, though she did not know his words. It was love that Hava had seen in his eyes, and she lived now only because of that. But later he had gotten in her way when she was getting her vengeance on Seph, when she was slicing Seph’s throat with the blade that was Nachash, so she had been forced to slice the boy’s face as well.

  Hava finally stopped running. She had never run so hard in her life, and now she felt stricken. She sucked wind and tasted bile. Her legs trembled from exhaustion, but she would not kneel, never again. She braced her arms on her knees, bent and trying to rest.