The Black Palace by Josh Woods

Author:Josh Woods [Woods, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-27T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Alone now as they were, Jan helped DiFranco through winding halls, and through doors that seemed the wrong shape, and up staircases that seemed to sap her weakened legs unnaturally, which she could not understand until Jan told her that it was because the dimensions of the treads kept changing here. He said the place had grown even stranger. But they continued upward, and the clanking lantern that he had taken from the dead witch lit their way now that they had only one unbroken flashlight between the two of them. DiFranco had torn fabric from her own sleeve for padding under the headband to help bandage the slice where her ear had been, for they would not stop for the medical kit until they were far from the arena.

They came to a dizzying array of spaces that did not match the eye. A corridor would look long, but it would quickly come together at an acute dead-end. Every way they backtracked looked different from their first pass through. Some staircases seemed to press at their shoulders with claustrophobic walls, but before they had realized it, there was nothing to stop them from tumbling over either side into an open crevasse below.

Out of a series of hallways, they stopped at an overlook atop pyramidal steps, and they saw a maze of empty ruins stretching out beneath them like a village within a cave, lightless and quiet. They could hide somewhere down in there for a while. But Jan said that he did not want to lose his way back out again, so he resorted to using the silvered yarn that he had kept, which had been their tether until the Black Palace cut them off anyway. They descended the steps and then unrolled the long clew from the base as they threaded their way through the village of ruins along tight paths, between those stone mounds and beehive huts, which Jan called oversized Clocháns. DiFranco said that they would not be hiding if someone else followed their yarn. But as they struggled along, looking for a hut to choose, Jan answered by saying, “I’m beginning to fear that there was no Minotaur in the Labyrinth when Theseus was not also inside. That by the time he reached the center, Theseus was the Minotaur he found.”

And then they chose a hut and went in to hide.

The sloping walls were blank. The floor was a carpet of shell and fingernails and dried honeycomb, and every footfall was dust. Jan swept his boot across the ashes of a fire pit to find that they were cold, and he revealed a kabob of tiny primate skeletons that once had wings. Other than that, the place was as bare as an abandoned cocoon.

Jan helped DiFranco sit against the wall.

They were weak and spent. They needed to rest. DiFranco removed her pack with a struggle, and set it on the ground between her legs, and produced her canteen. She gulped water, but she needed something more.

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