by Josh Woods
Hava called out to them by name, and she saw surprise in the face of Seph. Perhaps she was not yet visible in the dark of the cave and was only a voice to Seph. Or perhaps Seph still believed that Hava would never return. Hava went farther toward her and emerged, and the light of the stars and the moon and the gray night sky made her squint. The embers that smoldered in the stump-fire were too bright to look at directly. Hava figured it was a possibility that her enemy was waiting here for her, but she could see no immediate signs of it. She said, “Has La Voisin arrived yet?”
“Are you alive?” asked Seph. “You have your flesh.”
Hava was not sure exactly what Seph was getting at. She looked herself over and found only that she was dirty, with a scattering of scrapes and bruises, in addition to the dozens of skin-pricks and tears from the witch’s needle. She said, “I am well. Was I gone long?”
“I cannot tell time in this place,” Seph said. “Did you go far? Tell me what you found.”
“I went all the way, or as far as anyone could. But I have returned empty handed.”
A witch laughed. Under a tree she sat on an end-table that had a single leg post and scrolled feet, as if it should have been sitting beside a fine sofa in a fine house. Around her sat cooking pots, and rolled rugs, and small cages made of sticks, and bags of grain, and a tall wooden cabinet. It was the camp that the three witches had made, and Hava guessed that all these items had been there all along, that they had been in the shadow of the tree in the night which had been too dark for her to see before. Her night vision had grown strong in the cave.
The witch held a rope around her wrists and a tight scarf around her neck, ready to look like a bound hostage as soon as need be. In her laugh she said, “You are empty-handed, and I am not surprised. La Voisin would have come out with something to show for it.”
Hava’s two wolves sat like guards and growled at the witch. The witch hissed back at them. Hava was happy to see that the wolves had returned and were no longer bothering Gróa’s goat, Buck-Tooth. Actually, he was her goat now. Gróa had given him to her.
Hava began to make her way to Buck-Tooth, but Seph called her back.
“Tell me what was in there, Hava. Was I wrong? Is it not perilous?”
Hava said. “It is perilous indeed. If what sits in there wanted to be perilous, or had a change of mood, I think this could be the most perilous place left in the world. And if this place remains undisturbed, it might be the most peaceful place left in the world. Let us leave it undisturbed.”
Seph kept looking into the cave, nearly charmed, yet she would not move past its threshold. She said, “Still you have not told me what was in there. Tell me.”
“I do not wish to tell about it to anyone. You may go in and see for yourself if you must, Seph. But I advise against it.”
“I could not make myself go into that place before, and your words have not changed my mind. There, great Hava, you are bolder than I am. Even as I am now, you are bolder. I have said it. Are you happy?”
Hava felt no need to respond. She was in no competition with Seph. She walked away again and made her way to Buck-Tooth, having to climb out on the roots of the tree as the goat had done.
Buck-Tooth stood and watched her with a tilted head. His hot mouth was closed, but his bottom teeth stuck out like a bucked underbite, and his nostrils smoked, and his tongue burned bright.
Hava took hold of the rope that tethered him to the tree, and drew out Nachash as a blade.
The witch on her table under the tree was watching Hava’s preparing to cut the tether. She said, “That cannot be done. Not with a serpent familiar, and not with any knife. You’re wasting your time.”
“Time? Am I out of time?” Hava asked coyly. “Has La Voisin arrived? Is she coming?”
“If she were going to return to this place, she would have been here by now. From what I guess, my sister has reached her and told her of your doings here. If you still want La Voisin, you’ll have to go to her.”
“As I thought,” Hava said. “La Voisin wants only easy fights, and if she can’t have one, then she is afraid to leave the safety of her throne.”
“She takes more chances with her own safety than you do, as reckless as you are,” the witch said. “La Voisin has never feared anything in this world.”
Hava said, “Yet can she know what is to come? For there might be more to fear.” And she cut through the rope with Nachash, freeing Buck-Tooth. She wondered if goats got along with snakes.
The witch said, “How did you do that?”
Buck-Tooth shuffled and stamped his hooves but did not much move otherwise.
Hava tugged his leash and clicked her tongue for him to follow, as she had done with sheep that she once tended in the House of Limestone. She climbed down off of the roots and on to the ground, and Buck-Tooth followed her.
“How did you do that?” the witch said. “What knife is that? Did you find it in the cave?”
Now that she and Buck-Tooth were both on solid ground, Hava held out her palm low with the hope that it would help him accept her. She had no real food to give him. He was rather large and stout for a goat, with a fat belly, so maybe he was not hungry at the moment. She would find him hay or alfalfa when she could. She also saw that one of his horns was chipped, and that he had some ashes in his white coat. Hava did not look at the witch, but she answered her by saying, “He is my goat now. His name is Buck-Tooth.”
“I know his name,” the witch said. She was insulted. “I know his pedigree back to Gap-Tooth the Chariot Puller. But what is that knife? Tell me. Is it the Carnwennan? The Thigh Pick of Ehud ben Gera? The Des of Tauret? Tauret wasn’t in that cave too, was she?”
“Unless you plan to take it from me, you should not concern yourself with my knife,” Hava said, and she returned Nachash to his coiled form around her arm. The goat sniffed Hava’s hand, and his breath was hot, and he seemed to take to her well. But Hava wondered at the witch’s words. She said, “He once pulled a chariot?”
“No, not him. A grandsire of his,” the witch said. “Not that you would know the significance of that, you who fiddles with the treasures of the world on your fingertips like playthings.”
Hava could not let herself be bothered by the witch. She walked to the side of the goat, behind his head, to test how comfortable he was with her, and he seemed to be fine. He had lowered his head and pushed his nose through the dead leaves, some of them beginning to smolder.
“Then I wonder if he will let me ride him,” Hava said, not really asking the witch as much as thinking to herself.
“I imagine you think that if you do he will lead you to La Voisin? You know so little.”
“I might know a thing or two. I know that he has souls kept inside of him.”
The witch laughed again, but falsely. “That is no secret. And it takes more knowing than that before you can put them to use. Do not think that I will tell you.”
Hava knelt beside Buck-Tooth, and lowered her head down like his, and put her mouth close to his ear. She said softly, “Are you in there? Can you hear me? Are you in there, Ashurbanipal?”
Buck-Tooth’s head bolted upright, and he stood stiff. His muscles twitched as if unseen flies nagged him. His mouth opened, and he breathed hot fumes, and molten froth drizzled down his beard.
Hava said, “I call on you now, Ashurbanipal. Come to me. I shall fight a battle tonight, and you will help me. It is a night of conquerors.”
Buck-Tooth looked at Hava with eyes that were not his own, for only a moment, and then he shuddered and snapped out of it. He licked the magma from his chin with his long tongue and went back to sniffing the leaves.
Hava sat upon him in a sidesaddle style, and she held his rope like a rein. She clicked her tongue and tugged Buck-Tooth to the left, and he took her left. She clicked and tugged him right, and he took her right. He would do well as a mount. She looked up at the witch, who was now standing on her table with a strange look on her face. Hava said to her,
“He will bear me, but he won’t have to show me the way to La Voisin. You will do that for me.”
“Well,” the witch said, bemused. “The winds seem to be shifting that way, it seems. And maybe the weather is changing. Perhaps I was a little wrong here or there, but I was nevertheless wise to hedge my bets. I was wiser at least than my two older sisters, as I always knew I was, though they would not hear it. This shall be a strange night indeed.” She leaned over from her table and picked up a lantern, and with a soft whistle from her lips, it lit. She turned away from Hava and set the table far out ahead of herself, and then she leapfrogged toward and past it, and then she did the same again, swinging the table out in front of herself and then leaping with it, long and slow, like a deer through the grass. She halted for a moment and looked back at Hava. “Follow me,” she said. “This way.”
Hava paused at the witch’s camp only long enough to take a wine bottle that was half drunk, which she uncorked and poured onto the ground. Maybe it was not wine but blood; Hava was not sure, but the wolves lapped at it. Then she waved and called for everyone to follow her, and she clicked Buck-Tooth forward.
Moses followed. Seph pulled herself reluctantly from the cave, and she moved alongside Hava, resigning her own mist into the wine bottle along the way in wisps. The wolves, now purple and muddy around the mouths, trotted along. Hava found one chicken keeping pace beside her, so she picked it up by the legs, surprised that it only flapped rather than also screaming, and she offered it to Moses for his own.
He said that he could not accept it for fear that it was stealing.
She told him that she had inherited the chickens along with the witches inside of them, and that this chicken was part of the wages he had earned in his labors for her.
Then he accepted it and set it on one of his wide shoulders, where it roosted. The expression on his mouth was the least grumpy Hava had seen from him.
Hava held Shamir in his globe close to her chest, and she looked back to see the other chickens following too, which she welcomed. She would take all the friends she could get on her way to her final battle with the great and terrible La Voisin.
The way was winding and strange. The witch led them along the creek of the valley for a ways. At a distance, the stones sounded as if they were cracking behind them, perhaps some landslide that Hava had accidentally caused at the mouth of Gróa’s cave, or perhaps it was not stone but the atmosphere itself that she heard splitting.
She did not want to go back only to find out what it was. She wanted to keep going forward.
They continued away from the sound, up the valley, and then into another cave-like entrance, one that was quite different from Gróa’s, for it was small and had a wooden frame like a door, and it had a sign with Latin letters that Hava could not read. The witch had told her that it had been a mine for coal, that the men who had carved it out of Gróa’s Mountain in Two—which they called on this side of the ocean the Appalachians—had abandoned it generations ago because of the kobolds that the witches had set loose in there to do mischief. Once the mine had been cleared of its men, the witches had gone inside, putting the kobolds back to their slave labor, and had found some useful minerals, and had built yet another witch-door to the Black Palace.
It was through this door that the witch led Hava and her followers, and it took them into a stone-worked room, which then led them out to a hall, and then beyond through a web of turns and doors and corridors. Several times the witch stopped to consider their route, and she chewed on small things of flesh and bone from a pouch she carried—things that looked to Hava to be the fingers of children—and she consulted a map that her lantern projected on the wall with its light, and then they continued.
Then they came to a strange space indeed.
The hall they traveled opened up with a warm breath of rising air, and they stood on wide spirals of stairs, which ran along tree-bark walls on the inside of what seem to be a great well-like place, but it was too vast for Hava to see the top, or the bottom, or even the far side. The witch said that this was the place called the Hollow that Hava had heard tell of, but Hava had not heard tale of it. The witch said that La Voisin waited at the top, where her throne room perched.
So they climbed upward. They went up, and up, and they passed landings that opened to other halls to other places away from the Hollow. The place smelled like a cooled campfire, yet the air continued to blow upward, as if to help their climb, and they continued up, and up, for a time they could not tell.
When the witch pointed to a spot above them, saying that the doors to the throne room were in sight, Hava had them halt, for she thought she spotted something else coming up the stairs of the Hollow beneath them.
Hava sat on fat old Buck-Tooth as she waited, beside the two wolves, with Seph in the bottle at her side, and Nachash wrapped around her arm, and Shamir at her breast, and Moses, who petted the chicken roosting on his shoulder, and the other chickens by her feet who had followed her, and the witch sitting on her small table.
What Hava had spotted was two figures making their slow way up the stairs toward them. She said to the witch, “We will wait here for them.”
“Do you know who they are?” the witch said, sounding unsure herself.
Hava could not tell who the two figures were either, not yet, not by the weak light of the witch’s lantern. “No,” she said. “But we will wait nonetheless.”
The witch said, “I have never before talked with someone as reckless as you. On the way to your impossible battle, you wait to meet those you do not even recognize. You must think the Black Palace is safe for you. No, there are many dangerous things that wander these halls, and it is death to tarry.”
Hava said, “If they are enemies, I would rather face them high on these steps than have them at my back while I confront La Voisin. If they are allies, I will be glad to welcome them.”
“I do not think that I like you,” the witch said. “I hope you are not victorious.”
Even with such an attempt at insult, the witch sounded juvenile. Hava was indeed far younger than the witch, but after having spoken with Gróa, after having received the scars of her blessing, Hava could not help feeling that to explain herself to such a one was to deign, yet she had kept doing so, perhaps out of some kind of politeness. After all, she was, as Seph had called her, Hava the merciful.
The witch slipped her rope back over her wrists and pulled her gag up to her mouth.
“I did not say that you need to bind yourself,” Hava said. “Are you frightened so soon?”
“Of course I am frightened,” she said. “And you are mad.”
The two figures climbed closer. Buck-tooth made strange heaving sounds.
“I am not mad,” Hava said. “Though it would seem to you that I am. I am but favored by the stars, if only because by chance I was the last to stand at the fringe of an age.”
“It is not too late for me to do something about them,” the witch said, meaning the two figures who neared. “I can find a way to strike at them from here.”
“No, keep your peace,” Hava said. “Whoever they are, I shall deal with them in my way.”
Chapter 22
The rubble was everywhere. It lay over them so heavily that it felt as if Itzpapalotl had brought down the very sky. The destruction settled around them, the final stones clacking and rolling, the last pebbles raining, the dust clouding the air.
She no longer heard Valentine or Jan. All was silent.
She might have killed them both. She might have killed herself too. They might have all been crushed and dead under the collapsed wall, merged as one with the Black Palace.
The weight of stone on her felt like a lid closing her in, but, once more, she was alive. She writhed against it to crawl away. But her hands remained tied behind her, and she couldn’t push with one of her shoulders, for it rang with pain. It was dislocated. But she still had one good shoulder and two good legs, and she still had life, so she pushed against what she coul
d, and she kicked against what she could, and she kept writhing away from the weight. She emerged from the rubble and sat up.
Jan was conscious and no longer speaking in tongues. He was sitting up too, though not moving, only grunting and cussing with pain.
Valentine was pinned on his back under a large slab, and he wheezed.
She got up to her knees and skidded forward for some footing, but it was difficult. Crags of broken wall were strewn everywhere. She saw the changed structure of the place all around her, now more of a quarry than a gallery. It was a disaster.
She worked her way up to her feet. Every slight movement seemed to jar her dislocated shoulder. It hurt like hell. She went to Valentine. She stood over him.
A rock stood balanced by his face like a headstone.
She stepped a foot on top of it.
He coughed blood, and she could tell that he was looking up at her. She could see that he knew she was about to kick the stone over to crush his skull.
“I’m not the only one after you,” he said, struggling for air. “You didn’t win. I want you to know that. You can’t just walk out of this right back into the world. Not after tonight.”
“I’m not going back to that world,” she said. “I am changed, and I will go into my own world.”
“You crazy bitch. You just don’t get it,” Valentine said. “You don’t get how big this is. They’re all coming after you. You can’t hide. Not even in here.”
“Then I will see their world change, and then they will hide.” And she kicked the stone over.
It killed him.
She knelt beside him and found that the slab had a sharp enough edge where it had broken, so she put the ties of her wrists to it and sliced the plastic against it. In her shoulder, the movement made bone grind against bone, and the pain shot up through her teeth, and she had to stop three times just to breathe, but she cut through most of the tie, so she finished the job with a standing hop that popped the remaining plastic apart. The pain of it knocked her to her knees again, but her hands were freed.