by Josh Woods
Two more of the wolves left her. Now just two remained, waiting for her.
She looked back one more time at the broken witch on the floor. She considered the freedom she had given to the wolves and the cruel mercy she had given to Lenka, and then a great regret pressed on her heart. This was how she should have handled Seph. She should not have killed her. Certainly Seph had deserved to die, but that did not mean she had to. Hava should have captured Seph and made her feel the pain of what she had done. She should have wrenched information out of her. She should have found out about La Voisin much sooner. She should have found out where this La Voisin actually was, and how long she and her Malandanti had been working with Seph to betray Ziggurat. She should have found out why they were doing it in the first place. And after all that, maybe Seph would have repented, maybe even aided Hava in revenge. Hava had been full of rage and helplessness when she had slit the sides of Seph’s throat. But now she wished she had not done it, and now she wished she could talk to Seph one more time.
Before she left the room, she picked up a necklace off a nearby rack. It had a heavy locket that she liked, a tiny little globe that would slide onto her silver strand, one that would fit the worm perfectly. She took all that was now hers, and she called on Moses and the two wolves to come with her to find the way downstairs. They would eat, and they would call on the Witches of Endor who had kidnapped and sold her, witches who could speak with the dead.
Chapter 13
Alone now as they were, Jan helped DiFranco through winding halls, and through doors that seemed the wrong shape, and up staircases that seemed to sap her weakened legs unnaturally, which she could not understand until Jan told her that it was because the dimensions of the treads kept changing here. He said the place had grown even stranger. But they continued upward, and the clanking lantern that he had taken from the dead witch lit their way now that they had only one unbroken flashlight between the two of them. DiFranco had torn fabric from her own sleeve for padding under the headband to help bandage the slice where her ear had been, for they would not stop for the medical kit until they were far from the arena.
They came to a dizzying array of spaces that did not match the eye. A corridor would look long, but it would quickly come together at an acute dead-end. Every way they backtracked looked different from their first pass through. Some staircases seemed to press at their shoulders with claustrophobic walls, but before they had realized it, there was nothing to stop them from tumbling over either side into an open crevasse below.
Out of a series of hallways, they stopped at an overlook atop pyramidal steps, and they saw a maze of empty ruins stretching out beneath them like a village within a cave, lightless and quiet. They could hide somewhere down in there for a while. But Jan said that he did not want to lose his way back out again, so he resorted to using the silvered yarn that he had kept, which had been their tether until the Black Palace cut them off anyway. They descended the steps and then unrolled the long clew from the base as they threaded their way through the village of ruins along tight paths, between those stone mounds and beehive huts, which Jan called oversized Clocháns. DiFranco said that they would not be hiding if someone else followed their yarn. But as they struggled along, looking for a hut to choose, Jan answered by saying, “I’m beginning to fear that there was no Minotaur in the Labyrinth when Theseus was not also inside. That by the time he reached the center, Theseus was the Minotaur he found.”
And then they chose a hut and went in to hide.
The sloping walls were blank. The floor was a carpet of shell and fingernails and dried honeycomb, and every footfall was dust. Jan swept his boot across the ashes of a fire pit to find that they were cold, and he revealed a kabob of tiny primate skeletons that once had wings. Other than that, the place was as bare as an abandoned cocoon.
Jan helped DiFranco sit against the wall.
They were weak and spent. They needed to rest. DiFranco removed her pack with a struggle, and set it on the ground between her legs, and produced her canteen. She gulped water, but she needed something more. So she dug through the side pockets until she found packets of powdered energy mix, full of caffeine and calories. She struggled with tearing open the wrapping but soon had the orange stuff poured into her water and shaken up. She swigged it.
Jan was slumped beside her and drank from his canteen too.
She offered him a mix packet, which he took, prepared, and drank from. “Thanks,” he said. “It tastes like crap, but thanks.”
DiFranco hadn’t noticed any taste, or could not care to.
“I didn’t think about bringing any food,” Jan said. “I didn’t think I’d need it. How long have we been in here?”
“Not as long as it feels,” DiFranco said. The screen was cracked on her watch, but she flicked it to wake it up in case it still worked. The settings were all wrong. The time said zero, zero, zero. Strange little messages scrolled across the bottom where headlines might have been had it worked right, but when they were in English, they said things like Magnetic Field Shifting and Horrors on Streets of Prague. It had to be the Black Palace trying to torment her mind, as if breaking her down in every other way were not enough. She shut it off and just told Jan, “I’ve got nothing.”
“We should get a real bandage on that,” Jan said, meaning the side of her head. “And some antiseptic. Probably some holy water too, just in case.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, DiFranco. It’s serious. It’s your ear.”
She said, “I got a spare.”
Jan laughed. “You sound like Sledge.” And then he stopped.
DiFranco didn’t laugh. She found energy bars from a side pocket, tossed one to him, and then tore open her own with her teeth. She took a big chomp.
“I’m sorry,” Jan said.
DiFranco threw the rest of the bar across the hut. She didn’t feel hungry. She pulled the samite headband down over her eyes so that Jan couldn’t see them, and she pulled her knees to herself, hugging them. Sledge was dead.
Jan said, “Don’t you think we should keep our trail clean? I’ll go pick that up if you want.”
She lowered her head to her knees and said nothing.
“Those werewolves that we took out, if they’re Medievals, they’ll rise as vampires soon. Then they’ll be after us again, tracking us,” Jan said, trying to distract her with useful thinking. “Or maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe they were another kind. What’s your assessment, DiFranco? You’re the sulfur-grade field agent.”
She grabbed the rim of the sigil patch on the chest of her jacket, and she tore it clean off. She threw it away from her.
“What are you doing?” Jan said. “Don’t do that. You’re a Witchfinder.”
“Not anymore. I was never meant to be one in the first place.”
“Don’t say that. You’re one of the best on record. And I saw what you did back there, taking them out left and right. You’re a warrior goddess.”
“And you saw how it ended, so I guess you picked the wrong warrior to follow tonight. We’re not doing so well, Jan, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Jan said, “We’re still a team, though, right?”
“Not anymore.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jan said. “Sledge knew what he was doing.”
“Why didn’t you two just stay behind like I told you?” she said. “Why didn’t you just stay behind like I told you?” And then she wept. She tried to keep it quiet, but she wept.
“But then you’d be in here alone.”
She wept and said nothing. There was nothing to say about it. Sledge was dead. She did not expect that to hurt as much as it did. She would have been better off alone in the Black Palace. And now she did want to be left alone in this place, but not like her father, being a hero and laying down suppressing fire and holding those beasts at bay at the Gate of Thorns so that the rest of them could escape with their lives. No, she was better off alone
now so that she could be nothing.
“DiFranco? Say something,” Jan said, nudging her at the shoulder, then huffing and scooting away. “If you didn’t want us along, then why did you even want to come into the Black Palace in the first place?”
She would not answer him, because the true reasons seemed to have fled so far from her. It sounded stupid to her now that she would come in here to find her father, as if she could rescue him. It sounded even worse to admit to herself that she had thought that the vision of her mother—and that her own tlepapalochihua—had something to do with becoming what she was really meant to be, or finding her own new world, or that it had anything to do with the Black Palace. Since the moment she had stepped across that threshold, she had not been transforming but instead shedding, losing parts of herself, facing that some parts were already long gone, being broken down to nothing. That’s what she was now—not a normal person, not a Witchfinder, not a teammate, but simply nothing.
“Fine. Don’t talk to me,” Jan said. He made grinding metal noises.
DiFranco lifted the headband from her eyes and saw him fiddling with the lantern. It hung from a heavy iron handle, and the hoods that closed its light or shifted to direct it were nearly a puzzle-box of thin plates with cut-out designs, and hinges, and latches. He watched the patterns it projected on the wall, and he worked his way through the plate slides.
He could tell that she had lifted her head again, but he didn’t look at her.
And she didn’t want him to look at her. And she didn’t want to think about anything anymore. So she started digging through her gear. She had some clips for her handgun, and the ammo in them could have worked for her submachine gun too, but she had no firearms left at all, not even her single-shot for any exotics shells, which she did not have either. She had used up her grenades; she had lost her stiletto; she didn’t even have her tomahawk anymore, though she did not exactly recall where she had lost it. The closest things she had to weaponry were her pucks of plastic explosives for blowing open doors, so she pressed them into a single ball. She opened her medical kit and retrieved the cyanide pill, and moved it into an easy-access pocket on the shoulder of her jacket. Her options were few now.
Everything else was dead weight that she decided to shed as well, from medical supplies to back-up batteries to the pack itself. She kicked it all away.
“It’s a map!” Jan said.
DiFranco flinched at his sudden voice.
He dug his way across the floor to the wall where the lantern’s plates projected their patterns.
To DiFranco, it looked like an incomprehensible maze of arteries and cells and unreadable symbols. It looked like the drawings covering Jan’s arms. “Of the Black Palace?” she said.
Jan ran his finger along the patterns on the wall, trying to stay out of his own light. He was saying, “There we were. And then there. And we came up through there,” and then he began laying his own arm on the wall to attempt matching his skin with the projected image.
“I thought this place didn’t have any maps,” DiFranco said.
Jan ran back to the lantern, changed a slide, and ran back to the wall. “Now it does, and now we’ve got one. Actually, mine’s a little better, I have to say, but way incomplete. This has more.” He tore off his shirt and used his marker to copy the image onto his chest.
DiFranco said, “Why did those witches need a map?”
“Maybe they’d never been in that part before. This place has been asleep for a long time. In disuse, I mean. Hell, I don’t think these witches know their way around much better than we do. Like look at this.” He ran back to change a slide and ran back to the wall again, and he drew her attention to a shaft-like shape running through the center of the Black Palace, or maybe it was a tree-like shape, with roots extending down past what the map would dare cover. “What could that be?” he said, but he wasn’t really asking as much as admiring. He began drawing it down his own sternum.
“You read the reports on our last raid, right? You’ve seen where we entered and left, the galleries?”
Jan kept working the marker all over himself and said, “Do you think you could draw some of this on my back?”
“Jan, where are the galleries?” DiFranco said. “How can I get you there?”
He paused, and he looked over the map. Then he hustled between the lantern and the wall again for another slide, and he pointed to branching shapes that made no clear sense to her. “There,” he said, still happy. “The galleries. We’re not far away, actually. Maybe the Black Palace wants us there.”
“No, it wants us destroyed,” DiFranco said. “And it’s winning. How many rounds do you have left? Do you still have your weapon?”
“Check my bag,” Jan said, drawing with furious speed. He couldn’t have cared less about weapons.
DiFranco checked it. He still had his revolver, but only one speed-loader left, just six shots. There was nothing else in his valise that they needed, so she kicked that away too. If she could get Jan back to those galleries, maybe she could shed him too, the last remnant of a lost team, or at least she could be rid of guilt, the only thing she had not yet been able to shed. Then she would be free to fade away into oblivion and be done with it. “Let’s go,” she told Jan. “We’re leaving.”
He was saying, “Okay, okay,” as if he were not yet ready, trying to finish with the marker quickly. He had made himself into a map all the way over his shoulders and up his neck, where he could reach but not see. He hadn’t yet removed his pants to continue, but he probably would have, given the time. He said, “I think I can get us there.”
DiFranco handed him his revolver, which she had loaded with the last six shots, and also handed him her flashlight. “You take these and point the way. I’ll stay right beside you.”
“You should take them,” he said. “You know what you’re doing better than I do.”
“I’ve got some C-4 and a cyanide pill. I can make do with them better than you could if we switched. Besides, it’s your weapon. You didn’t lose yours. I did.”
“You have a cyanide pill?” Jan said.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll let you have it if you need it.”
“That’s not what I mean. And what if we get separated? You won’t have anything. You’ll just be in the dark. That will not be good. Trust me. The dark makes noise now.” His voice was growing distant again. “I feel every bit of it. This place is in my pores. It feels both of us.”
She worried that he was talking like that again, but she knew he would still be better off without her. She said, “I’ll take the lantern if it makes you feel better.” She retrieved it and then pushed Jan to the door of the hut with her, telling him that he didn’t need his valise or any of his papers or supplies, that they were just going to flee as lightly as possible.
Jan stood there nodding, readying himself for a bare run with nothing more than a gun and a flashlight, looking like some young medicine man, all tattooed and ready for a vision quest. “Do you think there’s any chance we’ll find Hava?” he said.
The thought had not even occurred to DiFranco, nor should it have occurred to Jan at this point. It was odd to see him as he was, looking strangely savage, yet to hear that he was still so naïve. He would learn the harder truths soon enough. She ignored his question and instead said, “We’re pushing all out for those galleries. If I fall behind for any reason, just leave me. Don’t even look back.”
“Is that what you’ll do if I fall behind?” he asked. He didn’t seem to be trying for an insult. He was simply worried, maybe about being alone.
She said, “I won’t leave you helpless. I’ll make sure you can off yourself. Or I’ll feed you the pill if you can’t do it.”
“Why would you say that?” he said. “That’s horrible.”
“I was trying to be nice.”
“It’s horrible,” he said.
She was tired of waiting. She stepped out of the hut and said, “You coming or not?”
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br /> “None of this feels right, DiFranco,” Jan said. “What’s wrong with you? Shouldn’t we be talking about kicking ass and setting things right? Shouldn’t we at least try to get the Shamir back? What happened to being Witchfinders?”
“I told you already,” she said. “I’m not a Witchfinder anymore.”
“Then what, DiFranco? Are you going off to be a witch?”
“No,” she said. He sounded serious, but he knew better, and she did too.
He said, “You just want to end up like your father, don’t you?”
“No,” she said, although she was less sure about that. Maybe her father had found his own oblivion.
Jan said, “Are we at least friends anymore?”
She didn’t know how to answer him. So she pulled him along, and they left the hut, following the silver line they had left for themselves.
They backtracked their own twists and turns through that maze of paths in the village of ruins, knowing that they would not have found their way back out with any certainty had they not strung the clew along the way. They climbed the pyramidal steps, and reentered dungeon-like thoroughfares of hallways, and Jan led them up a way that seemed arbitrary to DiFranco but that he seemed sure about. The stonework of the floor turned to old tile as if they were crossing the patterns of scales running from belly to crown of some vast reptile.
Jan consulted the map on his ribs and then led them through a turn, through an occasional door to the side, through a decision fork in the halls.
The air pressure seemed to shift as they passed across a threshold buttressed with pillars of cedar, the logs so thick that they could have stretched to the night sky above the Black Palace, if there was one. Dragonflies skimmed the air at each other, sustaining their generations in these halls on pure cannibalism. The way opened to a ballroom that Jan called Baroque. Their lantern and flashlight could not illuminate the far ends of it, but they soon came to a wide staircase leading up to some open floor they could not yet see, and overhead a lightless chandelier glittered at them in reflection like a hundred watchful eyes. And their footfalls echoed off the tile like the sound of dancers without music.