The Black Palace

by Josh Woods

  “You are not one of them,” he said. “You never were. There is nothing there for you among anyone else, not anymore.”

  “But he’s my partner,” she said.

  He grabbed her face, hard and fast, and his calluses were rough against her skin, and she did not know what to do. It scared her.

  “I can see that my words have done nothing, so I must let you glimpse for yourself. You will stay still and give me one of your eyes. I shall give you a better one.” With his palm, he cupped the socket of one of her eyes.

  She did not move. She did as she was told. But she could see now that in his own sockets was only his warm light, not human eyes. He had long since rid himself of them.

  And his hand was hot on her eye. She felt sure of that temperature, but not of the pain, which was there but vague. And then she felt an airy emptiness, and her father drew his hand away from her face. He set her eyeball aside on the tile floor. Then again with his hand he returned something to her socket, refilling it with glowing warmth. And then it was done. He let go of her face.

  And then she could see it. It was like seeing with all of her senses at once, with a hundred forty-four thousand eyes. She could sense the sight of the Hollow just ahead, even though she still did not even know what it was. She could tell its tall depth, and she could feel the primordial silence of its call, the long open air that rose with a vitality of its own, that had inspired the witches of old to scaffold their way up its strange bole, to set their throne at its crown, to build the Black Palace around it. Somehow, she saw all of this.

  And she saw that stairs wound round its cavity, and she knew that no one had ever counted their steps, and somehow she saw that she was going to climb them this very night. She saw that her father had not ventured into the great room at the top of them but that she would climb those steps even if they would be her last.

  “We will broadcast his dying screams,” the bullhorn voice said, interrupting her vision. “He does not have much longer, Miss DiFranco. Come to us and surrender, and he will live.”

  “Now tell me,” her father said. He was grim, and he was pleased. “It is different now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you can see now, can’t you?”

  “Yes, I can see now,” she said. “But I’m the only friend he’s got left. I think he’s the only friend I’ve got left. I have to go do something to help him.”

  “You would leave all this for what?” he said. “You would lose the chance to suckle from the roots of the Yggdrasil? Your mother taught its name to be the Yaxche, and she was never wrong about those things she named, for it is indeed a tree that grows the very worlds and gods that it eats, and I can show you. And you would deny that for what? Now it is your turn to answer me. Tell me. Tell me now.”

  She was not sure, but part of the answer was for Jan, and part of the answer was somehow for herself. He asked her to name her reason because he knew that she couldn’t see it clearly enough to speak it. But she did know that it was wrong to go with him. She could see that now as clearly as she could see the Hollow, just ahead, waiting for her to choose her way. She was not his. She would be his no longer.

  But he pulled at her wrist, as tender as he was, and she found herself resisting. She was deciding to resist.

  He held tighter. “If you deny me, I will never offer you such a chance again, and I will not forget this. I will come back for you. It will no longer be to guide you, for then I will come to you not in kindness but in wrath. Do not underestimate the will of a man like me. I will find you anywhere.”

  She was frightened, and still she said, “No.”

  But he would not turn loose of her hand. He pulled more, and she pulled away, but she could not get free.

  He got close to her face and screamed her name at her. And his voice terrified her. He screamed her name as if only he could use it, for none other had dared to speak her name since the day he had slaughtered her mother.

  But that would not be, not any longer. It was her name, and it was her gift from another. She was Itzpapalotl, and she would not fear him. She roared back at him.

  She kicked his arm, and it tore his grip away from her.

  He tried to grab her again, but she kicked his arm away again. She slid backward from him, yelling.

  And then he came crawling fast at her along the floor.

  She yelled and kicked. She stomped at his shoulders and at his face and tried crawling backward as fast as she could, and he kept coming, and nothing she did hurt him enough to notice. She screamed harder and kicked harder and pushed herself up into a bounding run from him. She sprinted toward the light of the lantern she had left by the Gate of Thorns. She felt him crawling fast on the floor, knowing that he was grabbing at her ankles in complete silence. She kept running. And she grabbed the lantern, and with that illuminated weight of sharp iron, she swung round to face him, to stand her ground and fight him with it.

  But he was not there.

  She saw him far down the corridor, about to crawl around the corner away from her. He held her eyeball between his fingers like a jewel, and he gave her one last look of utter scorn, and then he left. He was gone.

  She had lost him.

  So she left through the Gate of Thorns, and with a quaking hand she closed it behind her. And she stood there shuddering, trying to sort out what had just happened, what she had just done. She had lost her father a second time, and she worried that she had been wrong to fight against him, wrong to fight for herself. She blinked, and looked around the gallery. One of her real eyes was indeed gone, and though with only the other she was blind in a wink, she saw so much more with it than darkness, for she could see the nature of the Black Palace, and it was all around her, and it was no longer alien to her. It was no longer separate from her. And it was so much to take in. She drew the headband over that glowing eye, but she felt it glowing through the fabric anyway, and she saw through it with all her senses nonetheless.

  She decided that, no, she was not wrong to fight him off. But her father was right about her in one way: it was different now. She was different, but not so that she could follow along in his world any more than she would follow along in those worlds of others. A sun had ended in the very socket of her skull, yet a new kind had risen in its place, and though he had given it to her, she would decide what to see with it. Her tlepapalochihua was not yet at an end. And she would choose to continue forward, even if plunging deeper into the fire meant that her time would be brief and then done, because a single night—a last night—could be time enough for a whole world. She was Itzpapalotl, and her world would be a kind of its own, and she would bring it to pass.

  And the bullhorn called again. “Surrender, Miss DiFranco,” it said. “You are running out of time. Or should I say, Mr. January is running out of time.”

  The voice sounded familiar now that she heard it from out here, but she could not identify who it was; she could only see the direction of its sound, so with new clarity, she rushed toward it. For though she would be a thing unto herself, she would no longer have to remain outcast from all others. She had one friend, and she would save him. She would save Jan.

  “I know you’re out there, Miss DiFranco,” the voice said, now having sick fun with its tone like playing hide-and-seek. “This is Mr. Eisenheimer.”

  She halted.

  She had heard it clearly. She would have to defeat a unit of fully armed Witchfinders and, now, Mr. Eisenheimer too. And of the many worries and revelations she had to face about that, the most immediate was that she had little if any weaponry of her own. But she would do it nonetheless, no matter what else it would cost her, for even if she were going to die tonight in the Black Palace, she would do so her way. So she stayed halted not for fear or indecision, not anymore. It was only for the moment. It was only to prepare. Those men who threatened to kill Jan knew nothing about facing their own doom, not like she did. Only here, in the clarity of the Black Palace, had she been able to see
her doom, and now she would show them theirs.

  Chapter 16

  Hava stood in the upper hall of Lenka’s house, looking at the closed door that was supposed to lead to the valley where La Voisin waited. It was different from the one that she had opened to find Moses the Golem, and it might be rigged with a deadly trap as the other one had been, and even if it weren’t, she had been told that there was still a wrong way to open it, all of which she stood there considering, humming softly to herself in thought, slowly turning her grip on the snapped steel bar that she rested over her shoulder.

  At her hip, hanging from a rope belt, she wore a glass float that she had found in Lenka’s kitchen. She had seen such things in use by the fishermen with their nets in the sea, a globe-shaped jug wrapped in a tight web of rope. This one had a mouth like a bottle, which Hava could soon close with a wine cork she had found. Some of Seph’s etheric mist lay inside it, swirling slowly, and Seph would be able to pull herself entirely into it when she was ready, but she remained partially formed, floating beside Hava, a white shadowed face, cold arms hanging loose in the air.

  Beside Hava and the half-image of Seph stood Moses, unmoving, and a wolf who sat all-fours on his haunches, wagging his tail, now with a filled belly and a lazy-eyed look of contentment, and another wolf who stood on his hinds and wore a long skirt and a loose blouse with a scarf around his neck. He had been successful in his upstairs search for clothes. Apparently he had found only Lenka’s clothes, but they were pretty, and he wore them with pride, his skinny arms folded along his ribs, his head held high. He could have been a pirate captain of a ship of beasts, gazing across the bow at the horizon.

  Nachash was happily fed too, and he lay his head on the top of her shoulder and wound his body down her arm.

  Shamir slept cradled in the little globe pendant Hava wore around her neck by the silver strand.

  Seph’s ghost had told Hava that this was the door to take. La Voisin was the one who had informed Seph of this through a mirror—during their phases of scheming—telling her to work her way through that door if for any reason in the course of their plans Lenka was missing. Seph had been told it was supposed to be opened backward.

  Hava didn’t know how to open a door backward, and neither did the ghost of Seph.

  First, Hava decided, they needed to open the door in regular fashion to clear any potential traps. Moses would be best at this, since he was made of stone, and he would be able to absorb a shotgun blast better than she or the wolves. But she wouldn’t have him take the blast at all if she could help it. She would instead try the method that she used earlier with Lenka. She said, “Moses, would you please turn the knob on this door so that I may knock it open? But only unlatch the knob. Do not push it open yet.”

  He thought about it. He scratched at his shoulder where some of his multitude of words were carved, stone grinding on stone, and he moved his lips around.

  Hava did not expect this pause. She expected him to simply say yes and turn the knob. “Moses?” she said.

  “Is this stealing?” he asked.

  Hava said, “What do you mean?”

  “We were not invited into this room, and the door is closed.”

  “Moses, opening this door is not stealing.”

  “How do you know?”

  Hava thought about it for a moment. She said, “Because I’ve already stolen the whole house. I’ve claimed it and everything in it as my own. It was stealing for me when I took ownership of this door, but it is not stealing for you now to open it at my request.”

  “Very well,” Moses said. He leaned his ear to the door, and he reached forward with his enormous battering-ram hand. With his stone thumb and forefinger he pinched the doorknob and delicately turned it like a dial.

  “Don’t open it further. Stand back,” Hava said.

  He stood back.

  Hava guided everyone back away from the door, and she threw her steel rod at it. The door cracked open, but only slightly. There were no gunshots, no signs of a trap. Hava eased toward the door and pushed it open further. It was a bedroom, decorated much like the gypsy style downstairs. Nothing was really remarkable about it besides the wardrobe that stood with its doors opened and its clothes scattered before it on the floor.

  The wolf in the skirt said, “That’s where I found my clothes.”

  “You’ve already opened this door?” Hava said.

  He nodded and let his tongue wag. The blank look on his face said that he had no idea what was going on. He may talk like a man and stand like one, but Hava would have to remember that he still had half the brain of a wolf.

  Hava huffed and closed the door. She set her steel bar aside. She re-focused: The door had no traps; this she now knew. Now she would have to figure out how to open it backwards, or at least figure out what that meant.

  She considered the door hinges, the pins that held them buckled together. She said, “Seph, do you think we should unlatch these hinges and try to swing open the door the other way?”

  But Seph had receded into the glass globe. Her voice came out of it, weak and hollow. She said, “I am tired.”

  Hava felt sympathetic. She too was tired, but at least she had the ability to eat and to decide to keep pushing her body, for at least she had a body. She said, “Rest, dear Seph. Regain your strength for later, if that is possible. I will close you in so you don’t have to strain to hold your mist together.”

  Seph was now a ball of smoke inside the glass float, and Hava wedged the cork into the mouth to seal it. Hava had never seen a ghost stay in the form of witch-vapor for any extended period of time, so she did not know how long Seph could stay with her, or whether Seph could actually rest and recover in any way. She would need to find out soon if there was anything she could acquire to help Seph, but all Hava could do at the moment was be glad that she had Seph by her side.

  Hava considered taking out the pins of the hinges and pushing open the door that way, but that seemed like it would take a lot of time and effort, and it would needlessly risk hurting the blade of Nachash’s tail, which she would have to use on the pins. So she said, “Moses, could you please just use your strength and open this door backwards?”

  “Yes,” he said. He bent forward and reached for the knob again. He was going to do it wrong, since what Hava meant was for him to pull open the hinge side of the door, and as Hava was in the process of trying to tell him what backwards meant, he pulled the doorknob rather than pushed it, and he swung the door open the other way—out rather than in. It opened as smoothly as if it were built to do so. And beyond the door was a cavernous hallway, an exit of light weakly visible at the far end.

  Hava laughed, and her voice echoed. “Great work, Moses.”

  “Thank you, Hava,” he said.

  While he was still bent over from opening the door, a position much like a hotel servant, she kissed him on the head. He stood straight and looked down at her with the same frowning frog-mouth he always had. She liked Moses.

  They were struck by a deep sound of cracking and scraping, and the house quaked around them. It did not come from the new path they faced through the door. Instead it seemed to come from the basement, as if the house were being torn off of its foundations.

  Hava had no desire to stay and find out what it was, and she had every reason to go forward.

  She looked down the long cavern ahead of her and thought about what she was about to do: lead her friends into a battle against a coven of harsh and powerful witches, and if Ashurbanipal had been wrong about fate, about her destiny to be a conqueror, then she was about to die a horrible death. With an uneasy breath, she said, “Follow me.”

  And they all went forward into the cavern.

  In a short space, the strange floor of the cavern was dirt, and the far end seemed to be handmade.

  Hava emerged from a wooden frame and found herself on the slope of an old hill thick with leaning hardwood trees and the knees of roots pressing up from the soil against scattered stones.
It was night, but the moon was bright through the trees. The air was heavy with moisture, and moss dabbed the edges of almost everything she saw, the bark of tree trunks, the faces of crags, the soft ground. And the crickets called everywhere.

  She was looking down into a steep cleft of a valley, unable to see very far through the dark lace of branches. She saw no one else immediately as she half expected to, so she stepped fully out of the door frame and turned around to see what she had emerged from. It was a small, leaning shed, the size of an outhouse, its wood planks gray and gapped from the weather of years. The hill continued above the outhouse, so she was somewhere midway along an old mountain. She noticed no other clear signs of man or witch having been here for a long time.

  Hava called for her friends to emerge with her. Moses came forth first, struggling with his own size through the door frame and shaking the structure. The wolves came next, sniffing as they edged forward.

  “I wonder where we are,” Hava said, looking around, guessing that the only right way to go was down into the valley, but wondering whether she was even in the right part of the planet.

  “This is an old mountain,” said Moses. “The stone was split at the breaking of the world, and now it is weary.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It groans,” Moses said. “And I must honor it. It was here far before my time.”

  “Can you ask it where the witches are?” Hava said. “Or who waits in its valley?”

  “Mountains have never been known to answer questions,” he said.

  Hava noticed that the wolves still sniffed with great interest. Both were now on all fours and moved close to the ground as if they were trying to smell for mushrooms. She asked them, “Do either of you smell anything that could lead us to witches?”

  “Squirrels have been through here,” the one in the skirt said.

  “Yes, but what about witches?”

  “The smell of a fire comes from below,” he said, nodding down toward the deep valley.