The Black Palace Read online

  But Sledge was hurt and yelling and shooting the priestess in the back, and she had hold of DiFranco at her pack straps, her arm through the smoldering portal, her other hand stroking DiFranco’s face, considering her flesh perhaps for the taking, and Jan was at DiFranco’s side screaming and firing useless rounds into the priestess and getting nothing but more honey-like blood from the wounds he made. And only then did DiFranco cease her hesitation and load and fire an exotics round, phosphorus, muzzle to breast, straight into the priestess’s heart.

  The priestess let go and stumbled back.

  Her cats cried from far down the halls in varied directions, free.

  DiFranco drew another from her exotics bandoleer and fired into the woman again, this one, iron shot, having no real effect.

  Sledge came up and dragged the priestess down by her hair, out of sight behind the altar, and he hacked away at her. He stayed at it a while, and then he carefully selected two exotics rounds and fired them both down into his work after he had seemed to be finished.

  An artwork of lifetimes lay cut to pieces on the floor behind that altar, a perfect thing preserved for so long until DiFranco had broken into this tomb. Yet the human beings—blemished and impermanent—had succeeded. They had won and saved the day, all for some reason that had always made clear sense before. And yet it didn’t seem natural to think that this priestess had less right to DiFranco’s skin than a cat had to its mouse. It was DiFranco who was unnatural here.

  But it was over now.

  Sledge tried wiping off the thick yellow stuff.

  DiFranco knew she needed to explain her inaction and hesitation to Sledge, to of course apologize too, but mostly to explain. And she did not know how to do such a thing.

  Sledge looked at her, steaming. He came at her, back through the portal, into the hall with her, saying, “What the fuck, DiFranco?” and saying, “Where were you?” and saying, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Then he shoved her with enough force that she stumbled backward.

  She felt weak enough in this moment, and she would not be made to feel more so. She would not be shoved by him. She came back, yelling that he had better never fucking lay a hand on her again, and she stomp-kicked his knee at the brace. It sent him spinning in pain, and he fell against the wall to keep from hitting the floor, and he sucked air heavily through clinched teeth. She immediately regretted it, wishing she had merely punched him in the face. But he was drawing his pistol on her, so she drew on him, and they were ready to shoot each other, both screaming, “Fuck you,” again and again.

  Jan jumped in between them and begged for them to stop. His eyes looked watery in the flashlights. He begged for them to calm down and just put the guns away for a second, to just calm down, please.

  She wouldn’t lower if Sledge didn’t, but she felt bad enough to try just a little, so she moved her pistol down in millimeters, still ready to raise again or shoot if he gave her any further reason. He lowered likewise. They both lowered more, and they holstered. And then they both leaned on walls away from each other, looking away, breathing, not answering Jan’s questions as to what the hell was going on, because neither one of them could.

  They were losing ground on the maidservant by the moment, wherever she was now, and they would have to keep falling behind because DiFranco didn’t have it in her to clear things up and get them focused as a team and get them all motivated again. They were simply going to have to waste time sulking and wondering just how things had gone so wrong so damned fast.

  DiFranco looked at her watch, naturally without any hope of a signal for a location. But her original time settings remained functional. It had been under an hour since she led them out of the vehicle and into the cedar house. And now here she was, lost in such a sudden night, with nothing about the normal world seeming recoverable ever again.

  A snapping crack like a thunderclap startled all three of them.

  It was at a distance, without any manner of precursor. They stood in readied stances, sobered with shock, all looking toward the sound deeper down the corridor. It made the walls quake around them as if DiFranco’s plastic explosives had been mere firecrackers, and dust rattled down in layers. Even after the sound, the place seemed to reverberate as if unsettled.

  “What in the holy fuck was that?” Sledge said.

  Jan held the map drawn on his arm and said with a strange voice, “The whole Black Palace felt it.”

  “I’ve got a feeling it has to do with our little runaway,” DiFranco said. “Let’s move.”

  And they took off toward it.

  Chapter 6

  Hava saw light far in the corridor. It must have been faint and flickering, but in these endless catacombs it looked like the light of day, the light of escape from this place. Hava moved toward it, seeing now enough to know that she had been passing a series of closed doors in the walls. Around one arm she wore Nachash, and in the other hand she carried the bag, which held the hand of her witch-mother and probably other supplies that Witchfinders carry with them, supplies that might be useful in helping her survive long enough to reach the Malandanti and their queen, wherever she kept her throne, whoever she was. Hava had not stopped to go through the bag. For all she knew, the Witchfinders were gaining on her, maybe even right behind her.

  As she neared the light, which looked warm and slow, she saw that it came from the open door of a chamber. It looked welcoming, as if she had been expected. The door was old iron, surely wrought ages ago by slaves under the whips of witches, sturdy enough to withstand a battering ram, but fully open for her now.

  She might as well go in, for her choices were limited. If what awaited were a creature with intelligence, it might know a way out, and such information could be gleaned—though she knew not how—even if the creature meant her harm. If it were a mindless beast, it could be lured back to kill the Witchfinders. If the chamber were empty, she could take a light with her until she were presented with these same choices again. She marveled for a moment at this clarity of thought, which she once had as an orphan in Tel Aviv, the clarity that is lent by the need to survive. Over the years she had become so safe in her servitude that she had forgotten that she possessed such instincts.

  So she walked into the chamber.

  What she saw frightened her. Though she had seen many strange sights since being accepted into Ziggurat’s House of Limestone deep in the Qumran wilderness, she had never seen anything like this. A chain hung slack from the heights of the ceiling, and it coiled in piles, and it came up again at a single metal band, and a man wore the band like a crown. He sat on a wide seat of polished black stone, resting his beard on his knuckles. He was robed in a great coat of fur. It was made from a bear, and the head of it arched over his brow like a hood, and beneath that coat, hints of a richly embroidered tunic. He looked as though he could have been sitting in this state of contemplation for centuries.

  He saw her too, but he had no reaction.

  On either side of his seat perched terra-cotta statues of lion bodies with wings and with the heads and breasts of women. All about him fanned racks of savage and ornate weapons. Books and sheets of vellum and tablets of clay stood in stacks around the room, and dizzying charts of stars were burned into the stone walls. Though the hearth looked cold and the pallet in front of it was covered in long undisturbed cobwebs, oil lamps provided light, and an enclosed furnace burned. The tables near it held vessels and flasks filled with wide spectrums of liquid color, but one of these was covered by an embroidered sheet. Dozens of mortars and jars held spices and powders that she could smell from where she stood, and a tower of golden coils buzzed, and a funny little brass globe turned ever so slowly on its spit as small wisps of steam issued from its bent nozzles. Beyond the man’s alchemical stations, against the far wall, stood four terrifying suits of armor that were too large for normal men. And around these sat old torture devices arranged with an almost aesthetic eye, a crow’s cage here, a rack there, an iron maiden hiding against the far wa
ll like a patient servant.

  Hava waited for the man to speak, but by the depth of his brow, his shadowed and steady eyes, she feared she could be waiting for years. She finally decided to speak first. She tried what she knew of the Persian language.

  His mouth moved with discontent under the mustaches of his beard, which was tiered and curled with ringlets. He must not have understood her. Maybe her Persian was all street slang.

  She tried Turkish, and then Greek, and his eyes reacted slightly to that, but he did not answer.

  Finally, she tried her own native language, the language of Ziggurat and of her fellow maidservants. She said, “I am seeking an exit. I need your knowledge of this place, if you have any.”

  He lifted his head in a sign of comprehension, and he spoke back in the same language, though his accent was alien. “Then you do not have the messenger Seph with you?”

  She almost answered without thinking. She almost asked him how he knew Seph, or why he had been expecting her. Neither of those questions would likely inspire someone like him to help her. He was clearly a warrior, or a king, ages ago, the bridge of his nose broad from breaks, his knuckles like forged iron. Instead, Hava decided to say to him, “I killed Seph.”

  “This is interesting. Though she claimed to be only a messenger, she sounded bold and treacherous,” he said. “Therefore you must be more so, since you stand in her place. Do you also have the tablet that she promised me?”

  “Indeed she was treacherous,” Hava said. Until now, she knew only of Seph’s betrayal with the Witchfinders this night. She knew nothing about Seph’s arrangements with anyone who was not either a witch or a maidservant, no arrangements with anyone like this man. But he did not know that Hava was so ignorant. She said, “Tell me of the entire promise she made to you so that I may know the truth, which would not come from her lips.”

  He seemed bored, or at least not in any hurry to get excited. “She promised me a single tablet. She spoke of it as a tablet of glass, a black mirror. When studied with a wise eye, it could reveal an entire library of knowledge, all the knowledge that I have missed in my ages chained here. To have such a thing of magic in my hands, after so long, to have new knowledge, that would be like fruit to the lips of the starved. I suspected that she lied of such a thing, but an old man can hope even in a lie.”

  “And in return?” Hava said. “What was Seph’s price?”

  “I had only to kill a handful of men that she would lead here. For such a tablet as that, I would kill a thousand handfuls of men. I would kill generations.”

  “Did she call them Witchfinders? She was to lead them here, to you?”

  “She said they were a small band of soldiers, which I see you have not with you. She was to lock us all in together, and I was to slaughter them however I pleased, and maybe get to keep a suitable one for my work, which I see I will not get to do. Then she was to leave the tablet for me, which it seems you do not have. All as I predicted. I am all too seasoned to deals with witches and their agents. Yet the stars told me that this night would be a strange one. I have been watching it come for ages, and I know not what it means. And here you stand, a curious little thing to my eyes.”

  Hava let her gaze follow the chain from the iron band on his brow, up to the figure in the ceiling that held the end in its mouth. It was an iron head of a bear bolted into the peaked stone. She said, “Seph offered only a gift? She did not offer to free you from bondage?”

  The old warrior laughed at this, and his voice was broad. He rattled the chain attached to the iron band on his brow. “Gróa herself has set these bonds on me. There are none in the world who are older than she to break it. And even if they could, they would not be willing. My crimes and ambitions are known to the Three Dread Sisters. They do not like me.”

  Hava wondered whether this might be a clue to lead her to the Malandanti, so she said, “Who is this Gróa?”

  “You know not of Gróa?”

  “No,” Hava said. “I admit that I do not.”

  “Then may you never meet her however long you live. For she is antediluvian, and she is as fickle as the gods that she herself has slain. Of all my glorious and awful deeds in her service, it was poaching that set her against me. Who was to know?” He showed off the sleeve of his bear-hide coat. “She has a love for her beasts. Ah, but what a fight we put on! Ah, but what a show! It was the last she-bear of its kind.”

  “But is there no tool that can break that bond?” Hava asked. “There are many new tools in the world now. There are cutting torches. They are like saws made of fire.”

  “Cutting metals with fire is nothing new. Alas that I have seen nothing new under the sun. No, my little witch. None may break the bonds that Gróa herself has set unless they are older than she, which none are. I will remain in these dungeons that I myself had a hand in building until the ending of the world. Of which the stars tell me strange things.” His gaze wandered off toward his charts in the walls, and he was getting lost in his thoughts. “I have listened closely to them. I have listened through the ages more than any man…”

  She did not want to correct him lest it anger him, but she had to. She said, “I am not a witch.”

  “You are no witch?” he said. His attention was back to her again, and he was curious.

  “I am not.”

  He said, “Then you have tried to know more than you should. That is dangerous business, especially in the Black Palace. If you are no witch, then you do not even know with whom you speak, do you?” He was coming more and more to life now. He was amused by his own question, which he clearly already knew the answer to.

  “No, I do not know much, and I do not know who you are. And I am not a witch, not even an apprentice. I am merely a maidservant. Or I should say that I was a maidservant, until this night.”

  “Then you are a slave?” he said.

  “A servant for life,” she said. “As lowly as a slave. But I was treated well by my witch-mother, whom I loved, and who is now dead.” The words were heavy for her to hear from herself. None of this should have happened. The world was not just. The world was not the orderly house of Ziggurat. It was merely a tree that drove everyone, like beasts, to claw for the top.

  He seemed pleased. “I began as a slave myself. But in my time I became a conqueror and a great king. And above all I became a redoubtable scholar, such a one as the world would bewail were I not chained. Such was my destiny, for destiny gives and takes with a blind hand, to old kings no more than to young slaves.”

  Hava said. “I do not believe in destiny. Not after this night.”

  “Those most bound to it seldom do, not until after they have conquered in glory and are left with nothing but time to sit and think. I believe I see a conqueror in your eyes.”

  Hava was taken aback and found herself wanting to look away from his stare, but refused to let herself do so.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see it indeed, as one may know another, for I once had the same look in mine. And since you slew your beloved witch-mother, such a destiny may be in store for you, little one.”

  “I did not kill dear Ziggurat. I killed only Seph.”

  “Was she your first kill?” He leaned in on his seat, and his eyes slanted keenly on hers, as if he were reading her answer against her will. He seemed to be smiling.

  She had not thought about killing in such terms, as if it were indoctrination, a stepping across a threshold. And she did not want to say that, yes, it was her first kill, for fear that it would make her cry in front of him. She had loved Seph, and she wished that Seph had not needed to be killed. She wished that whoever put Seph up to her actions—whoever had helped Seph betray her own family—would soon be under the blade of the tail of Nachash too, and that their blood would soon be on her hands as Seph’s was. She decided to answer him by saying, “I will kill more. I will kill those who conspired against us, those who betrayed us and turned Seph against us. And I will kill all those who stand in my way.”

  He enjoye
d that. “So it is revenge you seek. I spoke similar words in my youth. I may be right about you after all. Tell me, little conqueror, do you plan to kill me as well?”

  “If you conspired to betray us, to betray Ziggurat,” she said, hesitating to check her own resolve. “Then, yes, I will kill you too.”

  He laughed again, much hardier now. “If only you could, I would do anything in your service to make that happen. Alas that it is impossible. No, I know nothing of your Ziggurat or your conspiracy, only of my trifle of a deal with the one who was destined to be your first kill. But are you sure you do not have the tablet she promised me in that sack? Was that her sack?”

  Hava held up the bag. “It was not hers. It belonged to the gentle servant-boy of two Witchfinders.”

  He sighed in disappointment.

  “But I will search it to make sure,” she said.

  “If it is in there and if you give it to me, I would gladly kill any you lock in here with me.”

  She set the bag on the ground. She removed Ziggurat’s hand from the bag with care, setting it aside solemnly, and then she sifted through the Witchfinders’ supplies.

  Blood from the severed hand had soaked through the bag and covered much of what was in there. She found envelopes full of papers, and a medical kit, and plastic cylinders loaded with rounds for their horrid guns. She found a small tackle box full of vials and dried herbs, not unlike what a witch might keep. She found manuals written in Latin letters, likely in the English language, which she could not read, and she found batteries and matches and other useless items. But what caught her eye finally was a strange little thing, unassuming. It was a small lead box. It sat on a black tray. She lifted it from the bag and found that the tray was an electronic tablet with a blank screen. She took the small lead box off of it for herself, and she held the tablet up to show him. “This might be it.”