The Black Palace Read online

  What did she know for sure? Her only lead was the Malandanti coven. If everything about tonight had been a web of lies, that at least was one real name caught in the web. Hava would make her way back, somehow, and she would seek out the Malandanti coven, seek out whoever led them, whoever had plotted against dear Ziggurat. And she would set things right, as she had set Seph right, the first of many reckonings to come.

  She looked around. She had a kind of luggage bag in her hand. She had almost been unaware of it in her flight, but she had taken it because it held poor Ziggurat’s severed hand. She had saved it in the rush when the servant-boy dropped it to hold the wound she had given him.

  Now, stopped here in this dark corridor—she still knew not where—she set the bag down to care for Nachash. He was wanting to coil closer to her than just being held against her chest, so she helped him wrap around her arm, like a bracer. She kissed the top of his head. “We lost a mother tonight. We lost a great witch,” she told him. “We are orphans again, and we are alone and weak.”

  The pity she felt for him she almost felt for herself, but she would not cry. She was making herself hear the truth, and if it were too much for her to accept, she could slit her own throat as easily as she had Seph’s. If her path had become unbearable, she could end it now.

  She thought about having Nachash turn to a blade once more and doing it, slitting her own throat. She had nearly done it several times before, at those times considering it with a sharpened letter opener that she had kept, which she had stolen from a clerk in some shop in Tel Aviv, in that city she remembered through a haze of years. She had stolen it as a little girl, and she had sharpened it, and she had learned how to conceal it against her skin by the bands of her undergarments. It had evaded discovery from the frisking of street police, from the gropings of shop clerks. When Seph had found her on the streets, starving and dirty, and brought her to the house of the maidservants of Ziggurat, the little blade was all she had brought with her except for the rags she wore, but she had promptly shed those, along with the blade, mementos of such unhappy times, a reminder of the times when she had nearly killed herself in despair.

  Perhaps it was time to follow through, time to meet death on her own terms.

  She uncoiled Nachash from her arm and tried to straighten him out until he took blade again, but this time he did not do it. He stayed a smooth snake. So she asked him. She asked him whether he would make a blade of himself again to help her. And then he did. His brazen tail was razor sharp. She held the edge to the side of her own throat, right against the pulse, the same spot she had slit on Seph.

  But she would be killing herself for the past, not the future. She did not want to think of those times any longer. No, she would not be beaten by the grief of having lost her chance at a safe and comforting life in the service of Ziggurat. No, she would focus on what little she had left, and she would go forth through the world with abandon, to get vengeance, perhaps to do even more than that.

  With the blade at her own throat, she made a quick twist of the wrist, and she cut the ties of her maidservant bonnet. She shook her head and let it fall away. She tugged and cut her collar away. Her long hair remained pulled back in a bun, hair that she had not cut since being adopted off the streets by Ziggurat. She took hold of the bun and severed it. She tossed it away and shook what was left of her cropped hair. Since she no longer had a mistress to serve, she would no longer wear the habiliments of a servant.

  But if she were no longer a servant, and certainly not a witch, what was she? At one time she could have been merely a young lady, and she could have been given a husband, maybe a job, maybe a family, and could have done whatever young ladies do, but she had already been introduced to the other face of the world, and she stood alone now on that other side, in the abandoned depths of the Black Palace, with Witchfinders behind her and unknown dangers ahead. Yes, she did know what she was now: helpless, weak, and alone.

  No, she was not alone. She had a friend. Nachash was her friend. She would cherish any who would be her friend.

  She urged him to relax again and to coil, which he did. And she thanked him and apologized for disturbing him. She helped him coil bracelet-like around her arm again to let him rest in comfort for a while longer.

  She spoke softly to him, saying, “If being alone and being weak are our only problems, that is simple enough, isn’t it, Nachash? We need only to gain more friends.”

  He licked at her with a flicker of his tickling tongue. She had calmed him and made him unafraid. And she was beginning to lose her own fear too. And she would stop acknowledging the fact that she happened to be such a weak little girl in the vast schemes of the world. She had too much to do, too many to punish, too much to set right, too much to gain. She would not let something simple like her own helplessness stop her. She was no longer a maidservant. She had once been in bondage and she had been loosed by herself, and now she herself was free to bind and to loose. No, she was no maidservant. She had a name, and she would be proud of it, for it could one day be a thing of glory. She was Hava.

  Chapter 5

  DiFranco focused only on Jan’s stitches for the moment. Those needed to come first, and working on them would do her as much good as it would him. With the curved needle, she threaded the suture through the skin of his face in wide and fast loops while Sledge stood over him and held him steady, compressing Jan’s head vise-like to keep him from squirming from the pain.

  In short order DiFranco looped him up, cut the suture, and lifted her hands. “Done,” she said. “You can let him go now.”

  Sledge released Jan with a shove and walked away from him. He was pissed, probably blaming Jan for the fiasco with the maidservants, and for the shut doorway.

  DiFranco blamed herself.

  Jan dabbed at the stitches with his finger. “That hurt like hell. I thought you were supposed to be good.”

  “The bleeding stopped and I was fast,” she said. “In the field, that’s called good.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jan said. “I mean thank you. I’m just really scared. We’re going to die in here, aren’t we? Maybe you two will survive, but I’m going to die in here, aren’t I?”

  “Everybody dies,” Sledge said.

  That clearly didn’t make Jan feel any better, so DiFranco said to him, “Just focus on the immediate, task by task, and keep doing your job. Don’t let your mind wander. The dark is no place for that, especially not in here.”

  She snapped her medical kit back into place in her pack.

  Jan stood on his own and worked on drying out his revolver, which would be easy enough. It was one of the few advantages of simple equipment: even though they weren’t perfect, when things went wrong, you could rely on them.

  Sledge said, “Well, I got a few ideas, DiFranco. One of them involves shooting Jan and leaving his body here.”

  “The maidservant has a head-start on us, but she’s no match,” DiFranco said. “I bet we can find her if we move out now.”

  “Why bother? She’s no good to us,” Sledge said.

  DiFranco said, “The witch’s hand was in that valise. It’s our only shot at reopening the doorway that I can think of.”

  “I don’t know if that will work,” Jan said.

  “You two aren’t even supposed to be in here with me. I’m not going to have you on my conscience too. I have to get you out,” she said. “So if you have any other ideas, let’s hear them.”

  Jan lowered his eyes and said, “We need to get that bag back. You’re right.” He got his marker back out and focused on the map he had started on his arm.

  Sledge shrugged. “Fine. Let’s go get her.”

  Jan showed them the direction he had seen Hava run off, and they took the footing ever so cautiously, knowing that the floor dropped off somewhere nearby under the murky surface. The path took them alongside the dead foam, and safely past. They soon came to a far end of the cavern, where three arches stood in the wall, stone-worked and carved with glyphs, ea
ch leading to ramped corridors that would take them out of the water.

  Jan made note of this on his arm, looking almost like he were drawing a new set of arteries for himself along with their anatomical notes. He said, “The glyphs on that one seem to indicate mountains, the other one the night sky, and the last one the sea.”

  “I had my fill of seafood for now, so let’s pick a different one,” Sledge said. “That defiant little bitch probably went for the sky.”

  Jan said that he guessed Hava wouldn’t know which way was which, and that she didn’t have a light with her anyway, so they might as well choose randomly, but DiFranco scouted enough into each archway to spot a reflection on the floor of one corridor. Her light shone off of small puddles of water, as if left by the soaked dress and boots of a maidservant. “Up this way,” DiFranco said, taking them through the arch that indicated mountains.

  The ceiling was now visible, and the walls were smooth and within reach, something closer to a dungeon. Even though DiFranco and Sledge stayed disciplined with their firearms as they went up the corridor, they quickstepped it—Sledge bounding fairly well on his stiff leg—and they covered good ground, and Jan kept tight behind them.

  The small spots of water on the ground soon became unreliable, no longer looking like the trail of a fleeing girl, instead looking just like all the scattered condensation that collected on the floor, even on the walls and the ceiling. Molds grew yellow and red in the myriad crevices of that place, but none of it was thick enough to have held impressions of passing footfalls. None of the roaming roaches were any further clue, and the bats that huddled like tufts in the corners of the ceiling would not stir even at DiFranco’s beams. The trail had gone cold. But she had been sure that Hava took this direction initially, so they kept going.

  They came to a series of doors in the sides of the corridor, and beyond them the hall forked in threes again, where more of these doors continued. DiFranco dreaded having to choose from another set of three ways, this time without tracks. So she stopped, and they inspected the nearest door. It was heavy, windowless iron, pitted with rust at the hinges from the unknown years it had stood here, closing off they knew not what. In place of a handle it had a curious little mechanism. DiFranco knelt close by Jan to inspect it with their lights. In glass behind a nearly keyhole shape, a fittingly carved fragment of bone floated in oil.

  “A sympathetic lock,” Jan said with enthusiasm. He noted this on his arm too, having covered down to his elbow already. “I bet it’s the real deal, a Lazarus lock.”

  Sledge strained against the door to see if it would budge, which it would not.

  He readied himself to smash into it, but DiFranco stopped him. She wanted to hear what Jan knew about it. “Go on,” she told him.

  He said, “It requires a like item to draw the fragment. In this case, another piece of bone from the skeleton that wants to pull itself back together. The story goes that it’s his actual skeleton, Lazarus, after, you know, the resurrection, and the witches catching him and peeling him down to the bones and all that. They made a certain number of locks out of the shards. And a certain number of keys. I guess the poor guy’s still not really dead. Some scholars have posited—”

  “I get it,” DiFranco said, interrupting him in case he was about to go into lecture mode. “The witch’s ring. Do you think Hava used it, maybe through one of these doors?”

  “Looks like prison cells to me. Takes me back to my younger days,” Sledge said. “Let’s find out where she’s hiding.” He banged his fist on the door, sending echoes through the hall, and he yelled, “Pizza delivery. Open the hell up.”

  DiFranco wished he had not done that. But he seemed happy, as if it were funny to him, and no matter the reaction from the other side, it would give them some kind of information, which was better than none.

  She produced one of her pucks of C-4 for blowing open locked doors. She might need two of them for a door this heavy.

  “We know you’re in there,” Sledge yelled.

  And from the other side of the door came a far roar. It grew louder, racing closer to the door, and all three of them stepped back as it did. It hit with a thud that sent flakes of rust onto the floor, and the sound raked the other side with claws or teeth or something sharp and continual, and it kept roaring.

  “Wrong door,” Sledge said.

  “Are you thinking these are cells too?” DiFranco asked Jan. “And she could be hiding in one?”

  “It’s plausible,” Jan said.

  “Then we might as well go door to door.” DiFranco led them to the next door, and she knocked, and listened closely, and Sledge and Jan spread out and knocked on other doors and listened. She heard inhuman sounds from the other side of hers, and the guys must have as well, for they quickly moved on, and she did too. DiFranco knew, of course, that they worked on a shaky assumption: if the sound on the other side of a door was scary, Hava would not have gone in that cell or would have died after having done so. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was worth at least a few minutes of trying. They kept knocking and listening.

  Sledge called, “This one sounds like a chick.”

  Jan went to it and yelled, “Hava, is that you? Let us in. I know you’re scared.”

  DiFranco got to the door, and with her ear against it she heard a human voice singing softly in foreign words. “Stand back,” she told them both. “I’m blowing the door.”

  “Do you think Hava will know to stand back?” Jan said.

  DiFranco pressed the plastic explosive into the corner where a latch would be for the Lazarus lock, and she wired it for detonation. She thought twice about it, and then pressed in a second puck of C-4 as well. She had a few more in her pack after these, and she would use up whatever supplies she had to in order to get Sledge and Jan back out of the Black Palace, back to the house. She needed her head clear of them. And after they escaped, as for delving back in to find her father, she had new hesitations about the reality of that, and she did not want to think about it at the moment, because this was no time to hesitate.

  She walked backward, unspooling the detonation wire with her, and she crouched against the wall at a distance with the guys. She plugged one ear and blocked her other with a high shrug of her shoulder. She looked back at them, and they both nodded.

  She let it blow.

  The concussion felt like a wreck, and DiFranco blinked and shook her head in an attempt to regain her sight and her balance. Through the smoke she saw craters knocked into the opposite stone wall, and she saw rubble on the floor. The iron door stood in place, unmoved. But in the wall, at the door’s side, the explosive had torn out a smoldering portal. Light from the room beyond filtered out through the falling dust.

  DiFranco readied her sidearm again and went forward, and Sledge was right beside her, and they took low cover at the edges of the hole. She tried to shake the lingering dizziness, feeling as if the world attempted cartwheels around her. They waved the dust away and shone their lights to see who was inside.

  The room flickered from the warm light of oil lamps against white stone and gold foiling. Claw-footed tables and racks, draped with mats of woven reed, held granite jars with the graven heads of jackals and hawks, and tubes ran from great glass cauldrons filled with golden and silver liquids. They saw in the scattered nooks of the room that their flashlights reflected green and glowing in the eyes of a dozen or more cats, hunkering from the disturbance but emotionless. Behind a wide altar decorated with painted stories of sphynxes as bright and intricate as a sarcophagus, a woman took shelter, looking at DiFranco as coldly as her cats.

  The woman moved aside some of her shining black hair. Her face was beautiful. It was not the face of DiFranco’s mother, but it had a startlingly similar grace, the same calm rapture of a priestess, eyes as compelling as her mother’s, which had been enough to inspire her mother’s people, her cult, to continue searching for nine years after her death, to find DiFranco as a child in a mundane neighborhood in Santa Fe and kid
nap her, to take her back to the huts and temples of their hidden mesoamerica, until, a month later, she was tracked down and rescued by her father and his team of Witchfinders.

  And DiFranco was hesitating at the edge of that portal. Time seemed to hesitate around her. She felt outside of herself.

  Sledge was yelling something at the priestess, who stood in slow response and walked toward them on bare feet, the smoothness of her body hidden in places by the thin swathes and streaming hair that flowed over her like a gown. DiFranco had seen deeply old witches before, even Ziggurat earlier this night, but this was the first of such creatures whose body did not tell the years, despite the cavernous age in her eyes. Nor did DiFranco’s mother any longer age in that vision-world of the dead, where DiFranco had visited for less than three minutes, but feeling as she had during that month among her mother’s people, a month of absolute joy, dancing barefooted in congregation among the firelight of the otherworld, learning to sing strange words, being adorned with plumes and gold, feasting on pumpkin and chocolate, hearing old tales of future times, of the herald of the great opening of doors and the ending of the sun. Her longing for that again had always been childhood fancy; she had learned that as surely as she had learned how horrid and cruel the world of the witches was, for she had also seen that for herself over the years, making her so sure of being a Witchfinder, yet in this long moment, DiFranco was sure of nothing.

  The priestess reached out to them as she walked, and her cats came leaping by for escape, and Sledge was yelling something at her and threatening her with his pistol and then started shooting. Her blood was yellow. She did not appear bothered by the gunshots, and she kept walking to them, saying old and shrouded things. Sledge called for DiFranco to act and he drew his single-handed Saxon blade from his pack and clambered through the hole into the room and began swinging at the priestess. She tossed him across the room into a vessel, smashing it and covering him with its fluids, and she strode away from him, toward DiFranco again. There was no spell on DiFranco. She knew the difference. She could act, and could choose to, but she was all hesitation. Action seemed now too vague. To act now would be to destroy this priestess, yet the drive behind being a Witchfinder was to preserve. Everything they did was to save and preserve what witches endlessly sought to bind and destroy, but now DiFranco didn’t know what she was preserving, or why.