The Black Palace

by Josh Woods

  “You have five minutes to comply,” he announced.

  She could be ready in three. She had a ball of plastic explosive and a lantern, so she would use them both. She molded the ball to the side of the lantern, and she closed the hoods so they would not spot her approaching. Then she would set it near them in the dark of the gallery, open the hoods so that it worked like a beacon, maybe toss a pebble toward it if the light wasn’t enough to catch their attention at first, and then she would blow them up and rescue Jan.

  But she would also need to set up for independent detonation, since the trap would fail if they noticed the wires running from the lantern. Her wristwatch was customized to accept the wires in two of its ports, and to function as a timed detonator, though it would be the very last use the device could have. She unstrapped it from her wrist and tapped at its cracked screen to wake it up. The cruel little headlines still scrolled across, saying things like, Satellite Hits Sphinx and Do Nations Mobilize for Armageddon? She readied the watch’s detonator application, hooked up the wires, secured it into the C-4, and set it for three minutes.

  Then she rushed forward.

  She stayed deep in the dark, well beyond their lights, surely invisible to them through their own night-blindness. But as she neared them, only then did she worry that this might be part of an elaborate set-up too. Only then did it occur to her that maybe Jan had been undercover all along, and that now he was pretending to be bait just so they could capture her. He had even used the name January—a reference to Janus, the god who saw both ways at once—and maybe that was an obscure hint, something a double-crosser might do. She had been so convinced by his sincerity for so long that she had never stopped to consider how good of an actor he might have been. No, that did not seem right. She could read people well enough to know whether there was something dangerous about them, as she had noticed in guys like Turenbor, even in guys like Valentine, as maybe she should have noticed in her father.

  But she had fought off her father and had chosen this path, so now she would see it through. She continued hurrying along the wall farthest from their lights, in the dark, and she had trouble gauging the distance through the flat perspective of her single eye. More was coming to her through the uncanny glow of the other, but she was short on time and fought to ignore it for now.

  Soon she drew close enough to make them out. They had set up in one of the wings, near the edge of the gallery. They had so many lights that it hurt to focus, making it difficult to distinguish what she saw. There were several men wearing field packs and carrying guns. One of the men stood at the lead with the bullhorn, and at a slant on his head he wore the short-brimmed fedora of a commissioner. She tried to see whether it was truly Eisenheimer, but she was still hampered by the light-blindness of her remaining eye.

  So she closed it, and focused through the other.

  And it took a moment, but then she saw. She saw not his weapons or clothes or features but instead who he was, a man who had never felt enough sorrow or love for a family that he would cry or kill himself. This was not the same Mr. Eisenheimer, but she knew him nonetheless. It was Valentine.

  She could make plenty of guesses at what kinds of power grabs that bastard had taken in the tumults and vacuums of this night, guessing even that he had taken the hat off of the real Eisenheimer’s dead body, but she had no time for that, for now she could see the other, odd figure among them. She opened her remaining eye again and saw that this one was on his knees, his arms pulled behind his back as if he were cuffed, and his head was strapped into a witch-muzzle. His face was hard to recognize at first because of that bar between his teeth, stretching his features, and because his eyes were wide and white with terror. But his shirtless skin was covered with the intricate patterns of the Black Palace.

  Valentine looked around cluelessly into the dark ahead of him, still not seeing her, and he called through his bullhorn, “You have less than four minutes, Miss DiFranco. Then we will begin by removing Mr. January’s feet. I can promise that you’ll hear it.” Then Valentine lowered the bullhorn to Jan’s face, and he punted Jan in the gut.

  Jan’s winded bellow of pain was amplified through the gallery, and he buckled forward and vomited orange liquid through his muzzle onto the floor. It was the energy-drink mix that she had shared with him in the hut.

  At the indication of Valentine, two other Witchfinders grabbed Jan’s arms on either side to bring him back up to his knees. One of the men already had a butcher’s saw in his hand. Valentine really was going to have them chop Jan apart piece by piece, and broadcast his screams while they did. She had been right from the beginning about that sick bastard. And she had been right about Jan, that he was no double-crosser. And the thought of Jan’s running to them in desperate joy, so happy to be saved by them, and then the thought of their beating him, interrogating him, and muzzling him, and kicking him while he was helpless—it filled her with wrath. Jan had certainly been wrong about them, but he was right about one thing: Witchfinders don’t hunt Witchfinders. These men weren’t Witchfinders anymore. They were monsters in the Black Palace, and they deserved to die.

  She set the lantern out on the floor of the gallery, leaving space for several of them to gather around it, and then she opened the hoods so that it projected the map on a nearby wall, so that it would draw them to the trap.

  Any second they would notice it, and come running to inspect it, and then it would blow up and take them out.

  She sprinted away from the blast zone that was soon to be, at least as far enough as she could guess, for she was still having trouble with the loss of depth perception. She hid behind the base of a statue. And she waited. And she listened.

  She heard Valentine asking why that fucking bitch hadn’t shown up yet, and saying that he couldn’t wait to get her tied up and stripped down and bent over, and then trying to spur the other guys to laugh along with him, saying he’d give them a turn at her too. And then Jan made a harsh noise at him, and she saw him kick Jan in the back of the head, which laid Jan out cold on the floor. She hoped he was only knocked out, but she couldn’t do anything about it until they were hit by the blast. Yet they still weren’t coming to the trapped lantern. They hadn’t noticed it.

  And her time was running short. The watch would detonate the explosive any moment now.

  All she had to do was throw a pebble in its direction to make some noise. Then they would notice and come close enough to it. She felt around the floor at her feet, but she found nothing but bare, flat surfaces of tile and dust.

  It had not occurred to her that there would be no pebble to throw. Out of every element of this plan, this was the part that was going to fail. But she had to make noise enough for them to come inspect the lantern somehow. She considered screaming, but a human voice would only alert them to a trap, not draw their curiosity. She had to throw something, anything. She reached back along her belt blindly, and she got hold of something. She brought if forward. It was the Trident of Paracelsus that Sledge had given her. She didn’t want to give that up and nearly reached again for something else to throw, but there was no time.

  She hurled the trident across the gallery, not bothering to determine what she was throwing toward. She heard glass shatter.

  They heard it. Valentine barked orders for men to come with him, and then he called out, “Witchfinders Union. Anyone out there hit the floor. Face down, palms up. If we find you any other way, you’re executed.”

  They walked out of their wing into the gallery in a three-man formation. Apparently one man had stayed behind to guard Jan.

  They swept their lights and firing lines, and then they clearly noticed the lantern, for they trained their muzzles on it and neared it cautiously.

  One of them said, “Look at the wall,” and he jogged closer to the projection. Another followed him, but Valentine remained focused on the lantern.

  They were close to it, close enough to be hit by the blast, whenever it would come. Her plan was working. Now all t
hat was left was for the plastic explosive to detonate. It would happen any second now. But it still wasn’t happening.

  Now she feared that something had gone wrong with the timer and that it would not detonate. And she feared that they would spot the trap, and disable it, and then they would spread out and find her.

  “Who left this?” Valentine said of the lantern.

  “It’s a witch’s lantern. It’s a message,” said one of the men who stroked the image of the map on the wall. “It’s a message from the Black Palace.”

  “No, it’s not from the goddamned Black Palace. Somebody put it here,” Valentine said. He began circling the lantern. He was going to spot the plastic explosive. He was going to spot it any second.

  It wasn’t detonating. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t retreat, and she was so close that she would be found very soon even if she tried to keep hiding. She would get caught by them, and because they would find her hiding without a weapon, they would be able to tie her up alive, and then it would get terrible. Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted putting her watch so close to the map of the Black Palace. Maybe it was the Black Palace that had sabotaged her, one more of its many trials. Or maybe it was her father somehow working things against her. But she would not be a victim to any of them, not the Black Palace, not her father, not these men.

  She retrieved the cyanide pill from her shoulder pocket. She was going to sprint after Valentine and tackle him and shove it in his mouth and take his weapon while they all tried to shoot her to death. And they would probably win, and she would probably die, but she would fight.

  She loaded her limbs for a sprint, and she took off toward them.

  And Valentine said, “What the fuck?” and took off running away.

  And then, in a blast, the world went white.

  And then the world was utter dark.

  It had exploded, and she thought that she was dead. She lay somewhere flat on the ground. And there were no lights. But there was noise. Her head was an alarm of a ringing pitch, and it hurt. So she couldn’t have been dead—she felt too much pain and exhaustion to be dead. And she was getting her breath back, which had been knocked out of her. But she could not be sure that she was fully alive, because the only things that were clear were the sounds and the pain. There were no lights. There was no vision through her remaining eye. Everything was black.

  She moved her limbs. That was some life. And any life she had left in her she would use to fight.

  She scrabbled to her feet and charged forward. She clawed her empty hands at the air in front of her, and she heard herself screaming, a warrior’s din. But she could not see her enemies, nor could she see any of the world around her. And as she charged and screamed, she realized soon enough what had happened. She had been too near the explosion, and it had ruptured the inner workings of her remaining eye. She was blind.

  Her feet hit something mid-stride, and she tripped. She caught herself on the ground, whipped her body back around to grab at what tripped her, and she found that it was a body. She patted it down to find a gun.

  She felt a pistol grip in a holster. She unlatched it, but a hand grabbed hers, keeping the gun trapped. She screamed from surprise, but she kept hold on the pistol as the hand kept hold on hers. She used her other hand to try to peel off his grip, but he too grabbed with his other hand, and now they wrestled for control.

  As they struggled, he spit thick stuff in her face and called her horrible names, but not one of them was her true name. She rolled her weight onto his chest side-control style and lifted her leg and brought the heel of her boot down where his head was. She felt it, and he went silent. She stomped again, and again. His grip slackened. She drew the pistol, pressed the muzzle to his center mass, and tugged at the trigger. Nothing happened. So she flipped the safety with her thumb and tried the trigger again. She felt the shot, and it made enough noise to confirm that her hearing still worked. She had put a round into his heart, and he no longer struggled underneath her.

  She got back to her feet and felt more pain and pressure and disorientation. She wiped his spit away and held her temples for just a moment to clear the dizziness. Hot tears kept running from her blinded eye, maybe blood, so she pulled the headband down to cover both of them.

  And in her glowing blindness she saw with a dozen senses the shape of another body on the floor nearby, someone fading. She saw many things about him but searched the sight for what she needed in the moment. His lungs struggled. His blood was leaving him in a panic. He wanted to kill in his last moments. And then she finally deciphered where he was in the space ahead of her, so she ran to him, kneeled on his stomach, and ended him quickly with two rounds into his chest.

  She felt for his weapon and found that it was a submachine gun. She took it and felt for the chamber slide and the safety, making sure it was ready to fire, having holstered the sidearm she had also taken. She patted him down for anything else she could find, and she came across a knife on his belt, so she took that too.

  She paused for a moment and lifted the headband to find out whether her normal sight had come back yet, hoping that she had not gone fully blind to the normal world. But there was nothing from that eye. That was it. The realization hit her in the stomach like the sensation of falling, as if she had taken an irrevocable plunge. But the plunge was not over yet. She pulled the band back down, and she focused on the gallery around her. Although the pain and adrenaline and rushing pulse made the world seem to spin, the Black Palace helped settle things around her. She saw that she was oriented in the gallery, that her immediate location was cleared of threats, that no other living man would have been in direct sight. And she saw the direction of what could not have been seen: Jan and the last guard.

  No sight came to her of what had happened to Valentine, so she had to assume that he had escaped from her for the moment, and that he was capable enough to have survived, and dangerous enough that he would come back for her soon. And she still had to take out the man who guarded Jan while he was still surprised by the blast. So she went to them.

  She ran for cover against the wall at the corner of the wing and tried to listen for Jan’s guard running her way, maybe to come check the blast, but she heard nothing from him. She could get no further sense of them around the corner, not like she had sensed the lungs and panic of the man on the ground, so she decided that she would peek her head quickly in case that would help.

  She popped her head around the corner far enough to clear her banded eyes, and then back again.

  “What the fuck was that?” said the guard.

  The scene had come to her. She saw the feeling of one man lying face down, the other huddled helplessly against the walls of the corner. Their bodies were warm against her feet, though it was the floor of the Black Palace.

  The guard wasn’t firing or coming forward, and he hadn’t retreated, so he was probably clueless and scared stupid. So she would use that. She yelled, “You have angered the Black Palace. Toss away your weapons, lie face down, and beg forgiveness.”

  And if he didn’t buy that, she didn’t know what she would do, because she couldn’t just fire blindly at him while Jan was in the way. It was frustrating to be able to see so much as the rhythms of their hearts but not even the gun in her own hands, let alone its sights. She just had to hope that he would surrender, or that he would come out to attack her.

  She heard the scrape of weapons sliding across the tile floor.

  He yelled back, “Okay. I’m down. I’m down. I’m sorry.”

  Now she felt him lying face down, he and Jan both. She saw their breathing like hot fog right against the tile.

  She called out, “If you so much as lift your face to behold me again, you will die.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m face down. I swear.”

  She turned the corner and went into the wing with them, but that gave her little more information. Though she had heard him slide his guns away, she could not tell whether he still had a weapon
in his hands. She knew for certain that two men lay on the ground before her, but she was completely blind to the equipment, wherever it was. So she said, “Flatten your palms on the floor.”

  The guard did so. She felt that he had pressed his palms against the floor even before he told her.

  That was going to be as much guarantee of his surrender as she could get for now. She went to the body that she knew was Jan.

  She felt for his head and unlatched the back of the witch-muzzle they had put on him, and she slid it off. His hands were locked behind his back with zip ties, and she had a knife now, but she would have to use both hands to feel through the cut on the ties without also blindly cutting him, and she didn’t want the guard to hear her setting her gun on the floor. She set it silently on Jan’s back. Then she sliced carefully through the ties, freeing his arms.

  She retrieved her gun and pointed it toward the guard again. She felt him still on the floor, so she assumed he wasn’t watching her. She could choose to spray him with rounds where he lay, now that Jan would not be in her way, but he seemed no longer to pose a threat, and maybe she could get information out of him.

  She pulled Jan’s shoulder to roll him over, facing her.

  He was still breathing steadily. She felt his face and found that some of his stitches had been ripped open, and one of his cheekbones was swelling, and his eyes were half-open, his eyeballs rolling under his lids as if he were dreaming. But he wasn’t dreaming. She somehow saw that he wasn’t. No, he was trying to come back to consciousness.

  She called his name to help him, but he was still in some deep, restless stage of drowsiness.

  It was difficult to focus on him. There seemed to be so much more that she could focus on instead, now that the immediate fight for her life had paused. She saw the Black Palace all around her in ways as familiar as a home, and she saw the doors at the top of the winding steps in the distance, the one great room her father had not dared to venture into, for it was held by the queen of this place, she who wore the Crown of Bones. There was so much coming into her sight that it felt like trying to keep watch on one butterfly within a cloud of them in flight. But she would focus on Jan right now. She forced her mind to do it. She patted him down elsewhere for signs of other wounds that might prove fatal. He was bruised badly, inside and out, and some of his floating ribs were busted up, as one might expect after taking a beating, but those injuries at least wouldn’t be what killed him. That was clear within the short time that she could see in front of him. She also felt the rooms and the hallways he had drawn on himself, knowing which were familiar, which she had stood in. She felt their images in three, four dimensions. And though he had not drawn the steps that so clearly wound round it, she felt the image down the center of his torso, the Hollow.