by Josh Woods
Seph said, “Lenka’s is a witch-house. She has a door that can lead from the place in the Black Palace near the halls where Ashurbanipal is chained. This is the door I guess you have taken to reach Lenka’s house. Another door in her house is supposed to lead to a mountain valley, outside the Black Palace. That is where we were to meet.”
Hava had not known that any door led from those catacombs to this house. That would have saved her a long, cold ride in the back of the chicken truck, and it might have saved her from being captured by witches and thrown in a cell as food for wolves. But it was handy to know that she could re-enter the Black Palace with much more ease. Hava said, “And is La Voisin herself waiting for you in the mountain valley? Waiting for you to deliver Shamir?”
“Her attendants are,” Seph said. “They were fetch her back at the right time. She and her Malandanti have found a cave, and in this cave lies something she will use to cast down one of the Three Arch-Witches of the World and take her place, one far older than she herself, far older than all. I know not how she will manage this usurpation, nor what she will take from the cave to do this, nor how she will use the Shamir. Such is the knowledge and foresight and power of La Voisin. She has found a way to become greatest of all, and I was going to be rewarded for playing my part in it, Hava. We both were.”
“You can stay with me now, if you wish,” Hava said. “I will go through that door, to this mountain valley with its cave, and there I will kill La Voisin and any of the Malandanti that stand against me.”
“Please, Hava, I beg you. Do not attempt this.”
“You would happily let dear Ziggurat die at the hands of Witchfinders, but you beg for the life of La Voisin? Is she that beloved to you?”
“No, Hava. I beg you for your own sake. Run away from all this while you still can. Leave the Shamir and everything else you have taken. La Voisin will find it, and if you are lucky beyond your merit, as you have been so far, then she might forget about you once she has what she needs. You can flee to some other place in the world. You can go to some place in America, where no one goes hungry. You do not know it, but you were there already tonight. You can live the life of a young lady, like you are meant to. You can play games and kiss boys and all the things that mundane girls are supposed to do. There is no reason for you to go after La Voisin. You have already had your vengeance. You have killed me. You have beaten Lenka. There is nothing left for you to gain.”
That life of a mundane girl sounded useless to Hava. She said, “There is indeed something for me to gain. I will go forth, and I will find La Voisin. Now I simply invite you to come with me if you wish, such as you are.”
“Hava, you stand no chance against La Voisin. You are no witch. You are an orphan, just a lonely young lady. You are nobody. And she is great, and she is cruel. I do not know if you know what I mean by cruel, Hava. She will drag you beyond the clocks of this world, and she will torture you inside and out in ways you cannot yet conceive, and there will seem to be no end. She will peel off your skin and hold you against the firmament. She will lay you bare to the terrible crystals there. I have glimpsed them beyond the wheels, and they are terrible, Hava. In her hands, your pain will seem to have no end. Do not go after La Voisin, dear Hava. I beg you.”
“You are right, Seph. I am just an orphan. I am nobody. And that is also why you are wrong when you say I have nothing to gain from it.” Hava stood and held out her hand to Seph, much like Seph had once done for her. “Come with me, Seph. Come and watch as we change the world. The witches’ breath that you use for your form right now, it is their payment, so keep it for your own, and follow me. I will find a glass jug to keep you in, if that will help. Come with me. If I succeed, I will do right by your ghost as well as I can. If I fail, I will have you there to weep at my suffering, so that in those endless moments of pain, at least I will not be alone.”
Seph spoke no more. She only looked at Hava with pity and with wonder. Then she stepped toward Hava, and with a grasp of mist she took her hand. And they went forth together.
Chapter 15
DiFranco crawled down the corridor of the Gate of Thorns, past the black mirrors, toward the sight of her father, who crouched there on the tile, waiting for her. As she neared him, she saw that a strange light left his body where he was not concealed by his wooly beard and the tattered remains of his clothes. He kept singing that soft lullaby for her, sueñes, mariposa, letting her know that it was okay to come nearer, that it was all okay now.
This corridor was filled with a gentle draft, and the air was warm. There were no more sounds from those Witchfinders farther up the gallery. There were no more sounds than her father’s singing, and the place was so quiet that he could have been using a whisper.
And he watched her as she drew slowly closer to him, and it was his eyes that had light in them like warm embers. And his veins had it too. When he would come home between adventures and sing that same lullaby to her, when she had been a child in bed, she had pressed her flashlight to her hand to see the red glow of her own flesh around that fascinating architecture of bone, and that was how her father looked now.
She came near enough that she could have touched him, so she stopped.
He stopped singing. He stayed there on the floor too, looking back at her. He smiled to see her again.
She reached out for his hand, and he held her hand in return, like he used to. They were still wide and tough, his hands, and she felt that callus on his palm that she had rubbed for its texture when she was young, that spot in the fold of his pinky. It was him. “It’s you,” she said.
“It’s you,” he said back with a pleasant voice, his mouth filled with that soft light too. “I sang because I knew it was you I heard, and I wanted you to hear me.”
“And I did.”
“And it really is you,” he said, fascinated by the sight of her. And then he called her by her true name. “Itzpapalotl,” he said. “My beloved Itzpapalotl.”
It was a shock to hear it again. It had been so many years since she had heard her true name spoken aloud. She remembered no one else but him ever saying it, except, of course, for the one who had given it to her, her mother, who had called her by name even from the depths of death. But now that he had said it out loud, the Black Palace heard it too. In all that silence, in all the hidden places of the world, they were the only living minds to hear it—she, and her father, and the Black Palace—but the sound of it seemed to resonate like the chanting echoes of prophets as distant as a dream.
Yet she was not certain that he was alive, for though she knew it was him, he had been so changed in here. She had to ask him, however fearful she was of the answer. Maybe the answer would make him disappear, and this moment would be lost. Or maybe the answer would turn him against her, and he would get angry with her. She didn’t want to ask. But if this were not her moment of revelations, whatever they might be, then there would never be such a moment for her again. So she asked him, “Dad, are you dead?”
As if she had said something silly, he tilted his head and sighed. “Oh, my little mariposa,” he said. “I have so much to show you.”
He was seeing her as the child he remembered, but she was not that child anymore, and she would fight for an answer. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Are you dead?”
He looked past her at what was not there, with the soft embers of his eyes, and he said, “I have seen things that are too much to keep a man mortal. Slabs of emerald still gleaming with sweat from the backs of drowned giants. The breaths of steam that rise through the Niflheim Gates. I have seen the glint of stars far below Hell. There is no time to die.”
At hearing that, she wanted to cry, and she did not know why.
“Let me show you,” he said. And he reached forth his other hand to hold her wrist. His grip had an unearthly heat. She felt the warmth trickle up her veins. It was nice, and she had missed him. She looked down at the warmth there in her arm that was missing its sleeve. She had been through a lot. She
had been through so much that he didn’t even know about.
“My mother came to me,” she said. “She spoke to me.”
“No, she is dead,” he said. “She does not matter anymore. Now I can see what she saw, and now you need only me. Come with me. While there is still time, I can show you the seams of the world, and what sews them shut, and we can peek at what they keep back.”
“I was dead too, Dad, and she came to me. She told me of my tlepapalochihua. I was meant to plunge myself into the fire like a butterfly.”
“Do not listen to her. She herself was danger,” he said. “Come with me, and nothing has to change. Come away from all that. I can show you a vast nautilus, and we can crawl along its smooth ridges of white for silent spans of time, toward the origin of its golden path, and once at its center you can press your ear against the tiny heart of its spiral, and there you can hear the dreams of the Dread Sister who sleeps in a trench under the sea. She is Khlûl’-hloo, not eldest, and not highest, but the most feared by all.”
But she would not go with him until he told her the truth about her mother. For he had told her a story of her own recovery as an infant, and that her mother had been slaughtered at that same time, but he had never quite said what she had feared to ask. She had feared to think about it for most of her life. But now she would plunge nonetheless. She said, “Did you kill her, Dad? Were you the one who killed my mother?”
He lowered his head, disappointed. “Who is it you seek in here? Your mother, or me? She is dead, but I can show you a chasm filled with far more void than mere death.”
“You,” she said. “I came for you, Dad. I knew you were still in here, and I thought that maybe if I found you, maybe I could lead you out of here, or help you.”
He laughed softly at that. “How can those with sight be led by those that are blind?”
And at his laughing, she felt naïve for having thought that he would even want to leave the Black Palace in the first place. He had wanted to enter for as long as she remembered, and he had surely wanted to stay behind for more reasons than just to save her and the team, and he always had. He was right: she had not, she realized, come in here for her mother, nor had she fully come in here for him. Yet she still felt as though something was concealed from her by both of them, somehow. They did owe her some kind of sight. “Tell me,” she said again. “Did you kill her?”
“Must I clear your mind of such trifles? Those times cannot touch us here.”
“Those times are here,” she said. “I am those times.”
“I would not fear her,” he finally said. He seemed distant now not in the dark beyond but in deep memory, a place of old fury. “I would lose every man on board if I had to, and I would track her up that river if it spilled from the very throat of Hell. You were not theirs to raise into prophecy and apocalypse. They underestimated me. I would not be stopped by poison, or flame, or falling star. Oh, how they underestimated the will of a man like me. I did not recover the greatest treasures of the world just to surrender up my own child. And I would not fear her.”
“You did kill her,” she said.
“Is it not enough that I honored her for the rest of my life’s work? She was unlike all others. I alone deciphered what she taught, and I opened the way, with our daughter by my side. And now you found a way without me, for here you are, and you are mine again. You are a treasure, Itzpapalotl.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
He kept her wrist, but with his other hand he touched her face gently, and moved her hair, and felt the feather, and said, “You are wearing it again. She left you with a strange inheritance, you know. It was not from any bird. Your mother plucked it from the neck of the Quetzalcoatl while he drowsed from a feast of missionaries. It’s pretty on you.”
She said, “But you lied to me about everything.”
“Lied?” he said. “There are no lies. Everything is true. There is nothing but truths, too many of them. And I kept you from choosing the wrong ones. And here I offer you even more truths, if you would but choose to come with me.”
“But you kept me from choosing anything,” she said, trying to get clear in her reeling mind about how he had done that exactly. He had only ever shown her those worlds that were so stark: the cruelty of witches versus the stalwart work of those like himself. That was all there was. He had taught her that her time stolen away among her mother’s people—among her own people—had not been the beautiful mystery she had thought it to be. Her people had taken her to a doorway during their torchlight revelries, and it was fashioned like great stone wings, studded with obsidian and moths caught in amber, and they had told old stories about how it would one day open, and she had loved that moment most among the many. But her father had rescued her from them and had taught her otherwise, and she had learned that lesson with tough finality. He had struck her across her little face, three times, without saying a word, and the blood from her split lip had ruined her softest shirt, and that had been the last time she had ever said aloud that she wanted to return to them, for he had taught her better. She had been a good student. She had been a very good student, until this night. And now that he said all this, nothing was clear, and now she was overwhelmed by it, and now, more than anything, she was sad.
She said, “It just seems like you kept my own life a secret from me.”
“What she meant you to be is not the right truth,” he said. “I have told you what you are. You are my treasure, little mariposa. You are a key unlike any other. That is all there is to know.”
“A key to what?” she said.
“Listen to me, Itzpapalotl,” he said with sudden sharpness, not at all kind. “I do not need you anymore. You are the one who needs me.”
“Why would you say that?”
He said, “Because I will not have you deny me like a fool. You are more than that.”
“But I don’t feel like I’m anything, Dad. That’s why I’m trying to ask you. I don’t feel like I’m your treasure, or key, or anything. I just don’t know.” She did not want him angry with her, and she did not want to fight with him, and she did not want to lose this chance with him. She shouldn’t have pressed him for answers. She had wanted this to be a sweet reunion, not a fight. He was the last shred of the life she knew, a life that had been falling away from her, piece by piece, like a tree shedding leaves that hit the ground like shattered glass. She just wanted him to make everything all right. She felt weak in the lungs, and she said, “I just don’t know, Dad.”
“This is good,” he said, softly again. “Do not be upset. This is the end of your tlepapalochihua. There is no more change to seek, for you are now exactly as you were meant to be.”
“No,” she said. “I know that I’m here with you again, and that’s what I wanted, but there’s more. I just don’t know. Everything’s been pressing in on me tonight, like it’s all waiting for something.”
“This is good,” he said, softly again. “I know exactly what presses in on you. I know what awaits. I can show you, and I can lead us there. Its black seas are grander than any other sight I can speak of. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to come with me?”
“What is it?” she said.
“Oblivion,” he said with a smile. “Oblivion awaits.”
He said it so warmly that it made no sense to deny him any longer. He pulled ever so tenderly at her wrist. It was only natural to go with him into oblivion. Maybe the Black Palace wanted her to learn this. Maybe she should have known this all along but could not face it until she had become free of Sledge and Jan. Maybe her father had been waiting around each corner all night for her to be ready for this moment. She would go with her father, and she would never return, for she knew that there was no returning.
“Okay. I’m ready,” she told him. “I will go with you.”
“Of course you will,” he said. “The way is waiting. But we must hurry, for I have already heard a fissure in eternity itself, and if I do not keep you f
rom it, all around you the world will yawn like dawn.”
And with bound hands they began to crawl away together.
But a sound stopped her, a horrid thing, harsh and mechanical, raking the walls about them in echo. She realized why it seemed so painful: it was a human voice from a bullhorn. “Miss DiFranco, we know you’re out there. We have Mr. January. Surrender yourself now, and we will let him live.”
She could not go with her father, not yet. She paused. She had to think.
Her father lifted her arm at the wrist again and said, “Come away from them. Just ahead is the Hollow. Let me show you, for it is a beginning, and it is so near, and then you will want to see more. It is the heart of the Black Palace, and it is older than the witches themselves, and we will wind down its stairs, and you will see why those others do not matter anymore, not to me, not to you.”
“Wait,” she told him. She had to think, though doing so seemed like remembering some other world. They had captured Jan. Those Witchfinders had him as a hostage, and they were going to kill him. She had to do something. She had let him walk right into a trap that she had known would be waiting for him, and she had only let him do so because she had been upset and conflicted and he had simply made her angry. And now he was going to die because of it. She couldn’t just leave him like that. She had torn herself apart for leaving her father, and now for leaving Sledge, and she could not do such a thing a third and final time. The poor guy was just scared and hoping for help, but everyone had done him wrong, and now she had done him wrong too, and if she didn’t do something to save him, then she really would become nothing, and now she knew that she did not want that. She told her father, “I have to go help him.”