by Josh Woods
She went to Jan, who still grunted with pain. He sat struggling with a stone that pinned his leg. She tried lifting it with her good arm, but it was too heavy.
He asked her to cut the ties that bound him, though she had not realized that Valentine had bound him that second time. But she would need both arms to find a knife, so she told Jan that he would first have to help her set her shoulder back in its socket.
She walked behind him where his hands were tied, and she interlocked the fingers on her dislocated arm with his fingers.
They agreed on the count of three to keep ahold of each other while they pulled away as hard as they could. They counted, and then pulled.
It popped. She screamed. She fell onto the floor, lying on spikes of broken stonework, trying to catch her breath.
Jan asked if she was okay.
It had worked. Her shoulder was back in place. She could move it. The pain was only cloudy now, not sharp, which was good enough.
Jan talked her through directions to a gear bag under some stones, and she felt blindly through it until she held a box-cutter, so she went to Jan and cut his hands loose.
Then she positioned herself by the rock to help free him. He told her to pull while he pushed, and he guided her hands to show her the direction he meant. They counted to three and heaved together. Then the stone shut flat against the floor. They had cleared his leg. He hissed as he tried to move it.
“Is it broken?” she asked him.
“What isn’t?” he said with a light laugh. “I wish you could see this place.”
“Try to stand on it,” she said. “And try not to get captured again for the rest of the night.”
“I figured the night was about over by now.”
“I think it’s about to be,” she said.
He groaned in his efforts to stand.
“Need my help?” she said.
“No.” He grunted a little more, and sucked air, and said, “Yep, I do. Come here.”
She reached out for him, and he tried leaning on her shoulder like a crutch, but that hurt and made her hiss involuntarily too.
They adjusted themselves around their injuries, him to her good shoulder, his weight off his busted leg, and together they hobbled out of the rubble, back into the wider gallery, where their feet kicked around pieces of broken glass like chimes.
Standing there, holding on to each other, they paused. Everything was quiet.
She could see all the dark around them. Nothing moved. Nothing screamed. Nothing attacked. They were at peace for a moment.
She looked deeper ahead into the Black Palace, and it showed her a dozen doors, a hundred of them, a thousand of them. She searched through the sights for the doors that would lead her to the Hollow, and she saw the Black Palace wanting her to go there too. At the top of it was the queen with her Crown of Bones, who burned as bright as a flame in the distance, the final danger, the end of her tlepapalochihua.
“Want some gum?” Jan said.
“What?”
“Gum,” he said. “I found a piece in my pocket. I’ll split it with you.”
“Out of all the things you’ve said tonight, that’s the weirdest.”
He tore the stick of gum in half, unwrapped it, and put a piece to her lips.
She chewed it. It wasn’t bad. “Thanks.”
“Trying to get the taste out of my mouth,” he said. “We’d look a lot cooler if we were smoking. I wish I would have been a smoker. The only vice I really had was binge watching old TV shows.”
“I did too sometimes.”
“Really?” Jan said. “What was your favorite?”
“You’ll think it’s stupid,” she said.
“No I won’t. Just tell me. I want to know.”
She said, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m serious. It was the only show that made sense to me as a kid,” she said. “It took me a long time to realize it wasn’t real, which is understandable, I suppose. It was the only other thing like being back with my mother’s people. We danced with ocelots and talked with the river. Even the apetlatl platform where I was born had his own name. Everything was alive. Everything cheered together. You could open your arms and live in the wild center of the mysteries of another world.”
“Who knows,” Jan said. “Maybe the Playhouse is a part of the Black Palace too.”
She said, “Then let’s go find it.”
He laughed.
“The truth is, we could probably find any place in here now, between the two of us,” she said. “We could find that exit of theirs for you. You might still have a chance out there, Jan, even with the Witchfinders Union after you. You could take off somewhere, buy a pack of cigarettes, fall in love. I understand if you want to leave.”
“So you still want to get rid of me?”
“No,” she said. “I was wrong about that. I don’t want you to die in here with me, but even still, I’d honestly want to have you by my side.”
“Like I told you,” Jan said. “Now I’m with you to the end.”
“You might not think that after you hear where I plan on going.”
He said, “I have a guess.”
“I’m going to climb the stairs of the Hollow. I’m going to face the queen of the Black Palace.”
“How do you know there’s a queen up there?”
Like a memory, she said, “Won’t there always be one last queen?”
“It seemed like we were heading there. I’ve felt it like it was calling.” He pulled her hand to his chest.
She felt the image of the Hollow running from his throat, over his heart, down to his gut.
“I’ve heard myself talking about it,” he said. “I only mapped the top of it. Otherwise it would go way past my feet, down, down, down. Its roots grow deep. They reach far past Hell. Actually, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Once I go, I don’t see myself making it out of there,” she said. “Are you certain you want to come with me?”
“Yep,” Jan said. “Let’s go.”
She held them from moving and said, “No.”
“What do you mean no? You asked me, and I said yes.”
She said, “You can’t just go along with me to die like that. I know why I’m doing it. I should have done it a lifetime ago. But you can’t just come along with me and plunge into danger if you don’t even really know why you’re doing it.”
“I do know,” he said.
“Then why?” she said. “Tell me the truth.”
“The truth?”
“The real truth.”
Jan said, “I’m doing it for Hava.”
It took her a moment to absorb it. The maidservant, the scared little thing, the one who had slashed Jan’s face and had run off with the Shamir and was, in a way, at the heart of a lot of their trouble in the first place—that was Jan’s reason. It wasn’t sinking in for her.
Jan could probably see the surprise on her face, or the confusion. “She had no idea what was going on,” he said. “She was just scared, like me. And now she’s dead, or worse, like you and Sledge said. The witches got her, but she was innocent all along. It wasn’t her fault. The least I can do is try to do something for her. Even if it’s pathetic and useless, I would at least be trying for her. It’s for Hava.”
There was no wavering in his voice. He had come to a state of certainty about her, and therefore about himself too. She said, “You really did fall in love with her, didn’t you?”
“You think it’s stupid,” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
Jan said, “I know you think I’m stupid. I’m too young to know what real love is, and we didn’t even know each other, and it doesn’t make sense and all that. But in a different world we could have been in love. And I still am in love, even in this world. There was something there. And just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
“I get it,” she said. “It’s a good reason.�
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“Are you serious?” he said.
“Yes. You’re going to face your doom for love. So you’re ready to come with me?”
He was quiet for a moment. And then he said, “I’m ready.”
She nudged him along. Just in case they could put them to use, they collected a few of the firearms from the gear at the edge of the rubble. Jan used a shotgun to help himself walk, which took some of his weight off of her shoulder. Her off-hand was the best one now, so she adjusted the holster on her belt to be able to draw the pistol when it came time.
They limped along, and Jan directed them through the gallery and then off into a new wing. She saw that they were going the right way. She felt the Hollow growing nearer.
They passed through halls and corridors and long rooms, and then they were stopped by two towering doors. Jan tried them and said they were locked. It was the way they needed to go; he could tell that by the map on his skin, and she could tell that by seeing far past the doors. But the doors were locked regardless, and they would be too heavy to budge. So she checked for herself, and they would not move.
She ran her hands along the surface of the doors, seeing in that strange blindness that they were painted with the flaking remains of images from stories of past witches that had never made it into the pages of men. And she saw those doors before her clearly, and she wanted them to open. And then, at Itzpapalotl’s touch, the doors opened.
She should have been surprised. So she expected that Jan would be surprised for the both of them.
But he began speaking in his distant way again, saying, “The Black Palace presses us onward.” And he said, “We stretch out like a web. We are stirring awake. We are seen.” And he said, “Ca iooan in titlatoa. Njcan tetemjquj. Ticochitleoa.”
She shook him out of it, and he apologized. She thought about what he had said: We speak in darkness. Here we dream. Here we see in dreams. That was it. She had so far been unable to pinpoint the sensation of her new sight, but now she knew that she had already known the words for it, ayatemico nicmati—not to sense something, but to see it as though it is being dreamed.
Merely understanding that was already helping her see more.
Past those doors, with slow difficulty, they climbed over ceiling beams along the floor, and Jan said that aisles of pews were above them. She saw that they were filled with silent onlookers, staring ahead at the upside-down altar, listening to sermons that she could not hear, waiting for something. She did not know whether Jan could see them, and they did not talk about it. They simply made their way out of there, disturbing the place as little as possible.
And they continued winding through the halls.
They came to another locked door. She looked at it in her dreamlike blindness, knowing now not to try sensing it but to try seeing it as though it were a dream. And Itzpapalotl could see this door as she could now see all doors in the Black Palace. But she knew that she was powerless over the others, for this was the only door she could reach to open. So she put her hand to it, and it opened.
Inside felt like the arctic, and she saw large shapes hanging on meat-hooks from long chains, but she was blind to what they were, for they were not anything she had ever known with her old eyes. And Jan said that she had better not touch anything as they passed. He would not tell her what hanged there, and to look deeper at them was closer to a nightmare than a dream, so she did not ask.
They left the hanging things behind and continued onward.
And they hobbled against each other along that path, and they did not know how long they traveled, only that it felt slow.
And they took their loping way down a hall that seemed to narrow, but a warm draft blew at them. And they came to a threshold that felt like the end of closed space toward an open one, and they walked across it, and there they stopped.
They stood on a landing that overlooked, it seemed, the end of the world. The place was all the openness of a vast well, a keep, with no sense of a ceiling or sky and even less of ground below. A stream of warm smell like charcoal rose at them from the unknown roots in the low fathoms beyond. They had reached the Hollow.
She had trouble gauging just how big it was except that it was bigger than she had imagined. She felt too small to be here.
Jan breathed words of awe.
He told her that the steps spiraled the inner wall as far as he could see up, and as far as he could see down.
She did not want to travel even a single step downward. What the Black Palace let her glimpse down there, even the witches wished to keep back. She saw the gates they had fashioned down there, nine of them, one stacked above the other, the Niflheim Gates, which locked out all but the steam of breaths. But she felt the waves of power that came up in columns like falcons in gyres through the Hollow, not just the place at the heart of the Black Palace but the very reason for its construction, the very breath that had given it a life of its own, in spite of what the witches had ever wanted.
They went up.
Climbing the stairs was hard for them, hindered by injury and fatigue as they were. The steps were uneven and, in places, as narrow as a Roman road. She tried to steady herself with her bad arm against the curving walls, and there she felt scales of bark. Though she could not tell whether it grew there or merely hung like wild tapestry, she saw for certain what tree it was from, the tree of many names, Yaxche, Yggdrasil, Ashvattha, Bíle, Etz Chaim, a thing of worlds.
At times they sat for rest at some of the landings, among small totems left long ago along the steps, pedestaled skulls warmed from the inside with candles that would not snuff, crystalline gargoyles set perching over the edge with their tongues licking the abyss, corked bottles that held little wisps of smoke that sang with light voices, arrangements of spoons.
When they would rest for too long, and breathe that warm rising air with too much peace, Jan would begin bleeding at the mouth and whispering in tongues again, “Ca mjctlan, ca ylujcac, in otontemoc, in otontlachix,” and, “Kai ēnoixen to phrear tēs abyssou kai anebē kapnos ek tou phreatos hōs kapnos kaminou megalēs kai eskotōthē ho hēlios kai ho aēr ek tou kapnou tou phreatos,” And, “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh L’VwYacHtaaN CitlalCuitlatl’calli wgah'nagl fhtagn.”
She had to shake him out of it, and the only way to keep him from babbling was to keep continuing up that strange tower. He would not ask what he had said, and what little she did know of it she would not tell him.
Each time they started again, it seemed to hurt worse than not to have rested in the first place. Their muscles were bruised and long-since spent. They had dumped all their adrenaline several times over through the night. Their limbs felt filled with gravel. She and Jan agreed that they would not relieve their feet again until they reached the top and faced the queen of the Black Palace, who now burned above with strange new colors in the flames of Itzpapalotl’s blindness.
And though they did not sit, farther up the steps, they noticed something worth pausing for. They bent over it. She smelled it, and Jan saw it. It was fresh animal droppings.
Jan said they were scattered some and carried over a few steps as if by the treads of others.
That meant they were coming up the Hollow right behind something and someone. They knew not who or what, but that knowledge nonetheless seemed to fill them with new life, probably for the last time. They climbed the stairs faster, shoulder on shoulder, a rocking rhythm of stiff joints and clacking gear.
They could not guess how many flights they had cleared, or how much altitude they had gained. And there seemed to be an end to the stairs within reach. She felt the image of light from a doorway that was already opened for her. They heard some kind of clamor from beyond it, but she could not see into the sounds well enough to know what it was.
They kept climbing toward it, toward the top of the Hollow. And distinctly now they heard yelling voices, and above those sounds, cries of pain, wailings of great lamentation. They had no idea what it might be, and they should have been scared of the danger,
and they kept climbing.
And they were stopped by something laid out on the steps, something broad and flat, not far from the final landing, that final open doorway. Now the noises from that room had all but quelled. She reached down and felt what lay before them, the wood of its planks, the iron of its hinges, the gouges from the grip of some huge hands. It was a great door. Jan said in a quiet voice that it had been ripped out of its place from the portal just beyond them, that they were almost there.
She saw the gulf of stars overhead. They were resplendent. She asked if Jan could see them too, but he said there was nothing there. In a way he was right, for there was no more Hollow above this place. They were at the top, and the final room lay open for them, only steps away.
“Are you ready?” she said.
“At least draw your gun,” Jan said.
She saw now that her weapons were nothing here, but she drew her pistol because he wanted her to. “Now are you ready?”
Jan paused. “Yes,” he finally said. “Are you?”
“Even when I was dead,” she said. “Even though my daughter died with me, even though my mother came to me, I was still alone. But I’m not alone now. I’m glad to have you here by my side, Jan.”
He could find no more words. He held her tight.
And at that, they climbed across the face of the door, and up the last steps, and to the landing. And slung on each other, limping and fey, they rushed through the open doorway, into that room, at the top of the world, at the end of the Black Palace. And that’s where they were met.
Chapter 23
The two figures began to reach the edge of Hava’s lights up the steps of the Hollow, and still she waited for them to come nearer.
The witch sat on her table, fidgeting with the small bones that hung from her necklaces.
Hava now realized that the heaving sounds Buck-Tooth made were due to the molten froth that fell from his mouth. He stood stiff again. This was what Hava had hoped. She told the witch with joy, “I believe it is Ashurbanipal. He is called to me.”
“If so, then who is the other?”