by Josh Woods
The spiderlike fingertips of her creeping enemies were within her reach.
Hava knelt low to the floor, and she said aloud, “La Voisin, know that I bring forth Shamir to crack the very floor from under us.”
The circle of enemies paused.
Hava continued, saying, “My allies will flee down the steps, and your servants should flee likewise if they can, but you and I will not escape it, La Voisin. I will send us tumbling down the Hollow. And if we are caught by any net along the way, I shall break that too. And should we land in Hell, I shall break its very foundations too, and send all of Hell tumbling with us, and our fall shall know no end.”
The circle of enemies waited.
If La Voisin had any wisdom in her ears, she would know that Hava spoke true. Hava had opened the globe pendant, and now she lifted Shamir on her finger, and touched him to the floor that she was going to have him break. She whispered to him softly, “Are you ready, Shamir?”
He seemed to anticipate it, for he wiggled, nearly giddy.
Then Hava filled her lungs to yell break!
“She has it. It is real,” called the voice from the bed. “Back away from her, you fools.”
Hava caught her breath short. She did not yet tell him to break.
The enemies around her lowered their hands, but they did not yet back away. They seemed confused.
The voice from the bed cried, “I said back away from her.”
The witches and demons receded from her, past even the canopied bed, toward the edges of the room, near the many closed doors. The bed stood alone before Hava, the voice behind the canopy trying to control its pain.
It seemed that she would not tumble down the Hollow just yet. Hava stood and returned Shamir to his globe. With the way now cleared of all others, she went to the bed.
Through the canopy she saw the shape of the woman who lay there moaning in pain. Hava said, “Listen to me, La Voisin. I am Hava, and I am come. You have betrayed the witches of the world and plotted against your own kind. You arranged the murder of Ziggurat, who was dear to me, and you have allied yourself with Witchfinders, and you have turned sister against sister. By my hand you will atone for these crimes.”
Hava held the blade of Nachash ready. She drew back the canopy.
Lying there, writhing in pain, was an old woman. She was so very old. She was withered and gray-haired and toothless, and all her skin was thin and wrinkled beyond the years of many generations. And she was enormously pregnant.
“La Voisin?” Hava found herself asking out loud. This was not the image that she thought she had seen come through in the mirror of Lenka. This was not the glorious and beautiful and vicious queen that she imagined she would see atop a golden throne. All that was similar on this woman in the bed was the bridal dress she wore, and the Crown of Bones still on her brow, its fence arching high above her hair, and low over her eyes. Hava said, “You do not seem to be the La Voisin I saw in the mirror of Lenka.”
“I was soon to be even more, were it not for you,” she said back with struggling breath. “I recognize my gloating assassin despite the clothes you now wear, you, whom I laughed off too soon. Mine was a great and delicate work, ruined by the blunders of a few fools, as a dog’s tail can tip a candle and burn a temple. Do not seek to slay me now, you wretched little thing, for soon enough you will have my defeat handed to you and whatever masters are in command of you. Leave me. Go. And if you wish to break my floor, wait until after I die. I cannot fall there like this. No, I cannot die like this. Do not kill me. I cannot die like this.”
Hava held the blade in her hand, and she had La Voisin at her mercy, crippled and powerless in her own pain, now that her guards had retreated. La Voisin was able to do little more than cast blame, and curse, and cry. Hava could strike now and be victorious, but she did not.
“I will not leave,” Hava answered. “I have come by my choice alone, for I have no masters any longer. I have come to make you atone. I have come to conquer.”
“You are but a yipping jackal who has found a lion caught in the tar,” La Voisin said, wincing as she breathed. “You are here only to add to my suffering. The Fates sent you, for they conspire against me. The stars conspire against me.”
“You are at my mercy nonetheless,” Hava said. “Surrender willingly to me, and I will let you live.”
“You are not worthy of my surrender, no matter what you brandish. You are no witch. And you do not have the power to let me live.” And she cried out and held her swollen belly as she was hit by another great pang.
Hava said, “If you do not surrender to me, even as you are, then I shall follow through with what I came to do, and I shall slaughter you now where you lie. Perhaps it will put you out of your suffering early.”
La Voisin screamed again in pain. She tried to speak but failed. She breathed fast, and then she tried to speak again, saying, “If I die again, if I die like this, it will not be the end of my suffering, but the beginning. I am too deep in debt to die. I am too deep in debt to die like this.”
“Then you do not wish to die?” Hava said.
“It is too late for my wishes. All is despair for me,” she said with heavy breath, the pain subsiding for a moment. “The timing is thrown off. It was you who threw it off. No, it was the stars. Everything is lost. It is cruel that I, who have slain so many in the womb, can do nothing for myself. The stars are against me. The syzygy of Wormwood came too soon. Yes, that was the reason. It came too soon.”
“No, it came when appointed,” Ashurbanipal said. He had come into the room to join Hava. Her companions had come nearer too.
La Voisin said, “No, you mere man, it came too soon.”
“You are wrong,” Ashurbanipal said. “It came as appointed. I knew the right time because I listened as you would not, you haughty witch. I waited for ages, and it saw me to my freedom by means unlooked-for. If you wish to align your schemes with it, you will have to wait another two thousand years. But now I do not know whether the world will last, for what I have just witnessed of my conqueror makes me certain that I heard right. My warnings were not heeded, and the world has been sundered twice this night.”
“No,” is all La Voisin could say.
Ashurbanipal certainly had great education. And there was no reason to doubt that he knew anatomy as well as he did weapons and chemicals and stars. So Hava said to him, “Could you deliver the child that is killing her? Could you deliver it and keep her alive?”
He thought for a curious moment, as though the thought had not occurred to him. “Perhaps,” he said. “If I could, would you be finished with my service, my world-breaker? Time seems all the shorter now for my many works.”
Hava said, “If I will have my way, in a short time, you will never have to be in service to another again.”
“If it is to be done, I must first know who fathered this abomination,” he said. “Tell me, witch. How many years have you imprisoned this thing in your womb? And who bred it?”
“Only this night,” La Voisin said, delirium coming into her voice. “Only this night.”
“Is this true? One night?” Ashurbanipal leaned closer. “Do I suspect right?”
Hava said, “Does that mean you know who the father is?”
“That which is hidden is not lost,” La Voisin said. “The fetters that bind him cannot break, but he does not lie impotent. He waits with fury in that pit, beneath the House of Limestone.”
“That is my house,” Hava said. “Who is under there?”
“It is my house now,” La Voisin said. “It is mine.”
“Who is it?”
“I went to him,” La Voisin said. “He lost his name at the Jabbok. He has no name.”
Ashurbanipal said, “Then you are mad. You should know that none can survive giving birth to a Nephilim. Witch-queen though you are, you are not a Dread Sister.”
“I need no lecture from the toy of Gróa,” La Voisin said back to him. “It was my prison that kept you, and I d
id not give you leave of the Black Palace, but I tell you now, leave me and be gone, Ashurbanipal the Years-Stretcher, Ashurbanipal the Lingerer.”
Hava asked Ashurbanipal, “Tell me who it was. If he was under the House of Limestone, under the very bed I slept on, I must know.”
“As she has told, he has no name,” he said. “And he of all things should remain bound for all time. She was mad in her schemes.”
“Can you deliver the child?” Hava asked him. “And could her own life be saved?”
“Never has such a thing been done,” he said. “A Nephilim child of his, to a witch like this. It has never been done in all of time.”
“Not until now,” Hava said. “The ways of the past are over.”
“Most true.” He pondered peacefully during the renewed screams of La Voisin. “If I could not do it, no man could. Yes, I shall try.”
Hava held La Voisin by her old shoulders, so thin, so weak. The Crown of Bones shifted over her hoary hairs. Hava said, “La Voisin, I will have your child delivered from you, and I shall have your life saved as it is done. As payment, you shall surrender all you own to me. You shall give to me the House of Limestone that you stole from Ziggurat.
“What would you do with that?” La Voisin said. “You cannot go down there to command him. You will not survive it no matter what you plot.”
Hava said, “You think that others plot as you do, and for that you are blind. I do not go forth to command, but to loose. And the House of Limestone is not all I demand. You shall also hand the Crown of Bones to me. You shall surrender your claim on the Black Palace.”
La Voisin writhed and shook her head, but could not speak words. The gray sheets beneath her began to run red.
“Do you agree?” Hava said. “Will you surrender and be spared?”
“The Black Palace will break you,” La Voisin said. “That was why I failed. Yes, that was the reason. In only three nights it seeped into my mind from this crown, and I fought on too many fronts. I could have won. It would not tame for me, and it would break any other who tries. I will not hand over the Black Palace. It is mine. You do not know what it took to recover this crown. I will have victory or death with it on my brow.”
“Then you choose death?” Hava asked.
“No, I cannot die like this. I am too deep in debt. They are waiting.”
Hava said, “Then hand me the Crown of Bones, and give unto me the Black Palace. And then I shall have him deliver your child and spare your life.”
La Voisin screamed at another pang, and then caught a brief breath, and said, “Yes. Do it. Take it.”
Ashurbanipal said, “I advise that you do not wear that crown. This witch has many lies in her, but not about the Black Palace.”
La Voisin peeled the Crown of Bones from her head, and held it out to Hava with thin, trembling hands.
Hava took it. She slid its band down onto her brow, its bars of bone biting down over her vision like the guard of a helm, and they stretched high on her head like a plume.
She felt the Black Palace all around her. She lifted her head and spread her arms. She felt as tall as its peaks. She felt as vast as its wings. Gróa’s presence at her back was still there, but it was not the only other presence she felt now. Nor did she stand alone in herself. Within her now there were kingdoms.
Ashurbanipal said, “Shall I begin this terrible work, Queen Hava?”
“Yes, let it be so,” she said. She would have Nachash be his blade in this work, so she lent him. At her words, in the hands of the Assyrian king, her serpent would deliver the Nephilim child.
Ashurbanipal said to Hava, “You might wish not to watch this. This womb will be larger on the inside. It will be an event of horror, one that has not been seen in this world since the time of the Flood.”
“I will know what happens here,” Hava said. Already the walls around her felt as familiar as her own skin. Already she felt the countless hinges as if they were her own joints, wanting to move. “It will be the first of many such things that I will set forth.”
“As you wish,” Ashurbanipal said. And he set to work on La Voisin. And her screams grew worse.
And the witch who sat on her table at the threshold announced over the noise, “Hava, my Queen, there are the shapes of two who are limping toward us up the stairs. I cannot tell what they are. What do you wish me to do?”
Hava said to her companions, “Set yourselves to receive them at the door. I shall have my guests welcomed as they deserve.”
“But, they could be enemies, my Queen,” the witch said. “We should barricade this doorway to keep them out. There are many unknown things wandering here. The Black Palace is dangerous to all.”
Hava said, “I am the Black Palace.”
Chapter 24
She and Jan were already knocked apart and pinned to the ground. They had been struck the moment they had rushed through the door. They had been foreseen.
Whatever had pounced her to the floor was hairy and huffing, and her pistol had been ripped from her hands by those of another. It was some witch, who whip-stitched her wrists and wrapped them with thread, making her fingers numb and useless. And she could not struggle against this because she was held at the throat by the jaws of a wolf. Though its teeth were tight on her, threatening her arteries, the wolf had not yet torn through and killed her. It waited, probably for commands from its master.
Jan had been lifted in the air, shaken, disarmed, and was now held on the ground by great hands of stone.
They had both been bound and captured that fast. It was over for them. She knew this. She knew these would be her final moments, but she did not focus on that, for she had known already that she had stood no chance in battle here. To plunge into the fire was not to destroy it, nor did she any longer seek such victories. She was here for something else, even if she could not see it clearly yet.
So she focused ahead. And then it was revealed to her within the dream-visions of her blindness. Before her stood the Queen of the Black Palace. Nothing had been as radiantly clear to her as this was now, nothing in all the days of her sight. And upon the Queen’s brow was the Crown of Bones, the dread helm, the nexus of this vast domain.
And although the presence of this Queen nearly overwhelmed all that she could see, there was something else. There were others in this wide room before her, accompanying their Queen, not all of them alive, not all of them recognizable. Two of them in particular came to her in waves. One of them stood on the floor with sandaled feet, and he labored at something, and the shapes of his face were too familiar. She had last seen him when he had been close to her own face, when he had sliced off her ear. It was he who had killed Sledge. It was the ancient warrior. But he was now adorned with the chimes of gold and the sweep of silk, and at his belt, a chain, and at the end of that chain, a kneeling slave trapped in huge and horrid armor. Its plates had been forged in alchemy from some heavy mineral of the deep, and its back was burdened under mechanisms of nodes and boiling cylinders that governed its joints, and its head was only the blank prow of a stechhelm, locked shut for all time like the rest of its body. Its shoulders were the rising horns of the ox, and its torso was the face of the ox. It was one of the four kherubim suits she had seen standing along the wall of the warrior’s room, and now it was charged with life, filled with someone. And she forced her vision into the armor, for though he was welded into silence, there was someone calling from inside it nonetheless. She saw him. He was calling an old name of hers.
It was Sledge.
It was him. He strained to call for her from that prison. He screamed in silence. And his screams were silent even to his own ears, yet still he screamed for her. And though he could not make his voice heard, she saw it.
So she screamed for him. The jaws of the wolf did not stop her. She called his name with a quivering frenzy, helpless and bound, unable to get to him, but reaching out with her voice nonetheless.
He heard her. Clearly, he heard. Her voice echoed in the cham
bers that bound him. Still kneeling with joints that were not his, he lifted his iron chest with praise, for he was known to her. His bonds were heavy but he shuddered with weeping laughter that could not be restrained.
They were together. They were together, but they could not reach each other, and they never would. She could not free him from his chain or his armor because she could not free herself. She could not comfort him in his suffering, nor could she know exactly what tribulations he had faced since they were parted, and neither could he know these things of her. But even at that distance, they were together for just this moment. It was a bitter union, but a joyous one. And Jan was confused, asking how that thing could be Sledge, but he trusted her eyes more than his own, for he then made his voice known and called for Sledge too. And the three of them were together.
A baby cried.
It startled her.
It was brought forth into the room with them from some strange space. It came from a bed with an old witch lying in it.
The Queen of the Black Palace, standing apart from the bed, greeted that child with a touch and a word, as if giving it a name. Then the Queen must have turned toward them—toward her and Jan—for the first time, for Jan was shocked and called out to her. His was a voice of depth, the rattle of tears in the back of his throat. He called the name, “Hava!”
Jan was still held prostrate on the floor by those heavy hands, helpless as well, but like she had to Sledge, Jan called out to her nonetheless. “Hava,” Jan called. “It’s me. Hava, it’s me.”
But Jan was not making sense. It was not Hava. She could see that this was the Queen of the Black Palace.
The Queen strode toward them. Blood dripped on the floor from the tip of a blade, a brazen serpent in her hand, and at her neck hung a globe of old power that seemed as if it shone like the faded trace of lightning. And along the Queen’s young back, down the length of her spine, was the fingerprint of a giantess. And her Crown of Bones—that mysterious cage—was a thing of terrible awe. She herself was a thing of terrible awe. She went to Jan.