The Codex of the Witch: Fantasy Novel

by Federico Negri

  Kasia halts suddenly. “Hey, no! The bill of lading first. And I want to see the money. At least an advance.”

  “Kasia, Kasia.” He’s losing patience. “It’s a big opportunity, believe me.”

  She pulls away her hand, freeing herself from his grip. “Oh no, Mister! Prepare the papers and the money. I will wait for you until eleven, then I’m going.”

  “Wait.”

  Kasia steps back and says “Eleven o’clock, that’s two hours from now. Then I’m taking to the wind. I’m at the West Zoo docks.”

  “Kasia,” he says taking a half step forward. “This is important.”

  “Well then treat this affair as if it were something important and not like a joke. All this feigned secrecy when anybody could have seen us walking and talking together in the market? There were a thousand other ways of being more discreet. It seems to me you’re in a great hurry to unload a hot potato you can’t hold on to any longer.”

  He limits himself to staring darkly into her face. “I put my faith in you,” he says to her, after a few seconds’ silence.

  “Listen,” she continues, “I want to trust you. However I cannot take a person on board, without a modicum of assurance. You saved my ass two months ago, and I won’t forget it. But give me something, for hell’s sake! I’ve had a travel permit for such a short time! I can’t take on too great a risk, not yet at least.”

  “It will be difficult to get what you ask for and two hours might not be enough time. It’s a hundred and twenty thousand, Kasia. All for you.”

  She lowers her hands and turns her back on him, heading up the alley. “You know where to find me,” she says to the empty street ahead. She expected him to chase after her, but he stays there, silent and invisible at her back. Kasia travels the length of the alley, her boots pattering on the irregular stones beneath her. Having made it to the stalls, she looks over her shoulder, but Leo didn’t follow her; he’s still hidden behind a bend in the road.

  “Dammit,” Kasia whispers. She would have liked to return and try to negotiate some more. One hundred twenty thousand pieces. This deal is too good to be true and Kasia has too many voyages under her belt to believe in anything too good to be true. Traps, on the other hand, are much more common, even between friends. Or perhaps from someone who’s already fallen into it and is now desperately trying to escape.

  “Aye, Captain!”

  Kasia spins around with a start, following the booming voice.

  A tall man with wavy reddish-brown hair watches her, stuffed in a jerkin embroidered with thick braids of dark silk. He has a shadowy gaze, sharp as a nail. An inhabitant of the upper terrace, but not a bureaucrat or a military man. A warning bell starts ringing persistently behind Kasia’s ears.

  “Sir, do we know each other?” Kasia forces herself to not look behind her where she’s just left a dangerous deal.

  “Not yet, although the first witch to leave Gothland after the war is sufficiently famous that she needs no introduction.”

  The danger is clear, there’s no more need for intuition. Kasia displays her best smile and bows her head bringing a hand to her chest.

  “Sir, you flatter me. But I must beg your pardon. May I be of some service?”

  “You have an… item which… um… interests me.”

  “Indeed? If I may send it to your residence, it would be a pleasure to do business with a gentleman such as yourself.”

  “Yes, sending it to me might be appropriate. All the same, I would feel safer if you would deliver it personally. If you would escort it.”

  Kasia narrows her eyes slightly. “Pardon me, sir, I must have missed something.”

  “You understand perfectly. Anyway, you know, in dealings with witches one must be cautious. Thus I have taken the liberty of holding something of interest to you, something altogether different certainly, but similar in... ahem… nature.”

  “Sir, I—”

  A woman with her eyes obscured by a mask slips out from behind the stacked crates, close to Kasia. A mane of blonde curls covers her shoulders and in her hand she holds a powerful blunderbuss, with an arabesque brass barrel, an illegal weapon. Right behind her walks a young man with long, raven-black hair carrying more blades than a butcher. The two line up next to their master, challenging her with gazes laden with threat.

  “On the upper terrace, Dietrich mansion,” the man concludes. “You should have no problem finding it. Give your name at the door.” He is about to turn, but then he clarifies, “And obviously do not show up without your passenger.”

  He walks off among the market stalls, trailed by a flourish of his dark cape.

  His two henchmen on the other hand don’t move a muscle. The man gathers his lips into a sharp smile and tosses his head, making his luminous hair bounce.

  “We’ll meet again, Santuini,” he cackles. He places his hands on the hilts of two long knives hanging from his belt.

  The blonde obscenely strokes the shaft of her blunderbuss, letting it roll around until the black aperture is pointed in Kasia’s direction. She opens her full lips in a silent “Bam” and then smiles maliciously.

  Kasia bends her head down a bit and turns, moving toward the Walkway, with the weight of those shadowy threats on her back. She lengthens her stride, passing the stands that sell meat, both alive and dead. Above the street loom the elevated glass and steel structures of the upper terrace, the stratum of the city’s nobility, reminding her a merchant is just a pawn in the game where German and Dutch chamberlains play out their glory. An English merchant is a pawn easily sacrificed.

  Further away, lost against the haze of sunset, one can just make out the curved shapes of the mechanical airships. Kasia counts six piers, trying to identify the elongated silhouette of the Needle, her ship.

  Against her face she already feels the midday wind, which blows in punctually from the distant Alps. They must raise anchor today; the docking fees are almost as much as their profit margin on the cargo and, furthermore, the atmosphere in Frank Fort no longer seems good for her health. She wracks her brain trying to make out what the mysterious gentleman meant.

  A figure in a black hood and a coat of the same color comes to meet her from the side of the Walkway. There’s something familiar in that gait. The light off a tavern window illuminates the face under the hood.

  “Silla!” Kasia bursts out. Her first officer, Silla of the Blue Mountains. If she’s walking around, who the hell is manning the ship in her absence?

  “Hey,” she says, spreading her arms out with a great show of calm, so as to alert her companion someone might be watching them.

  Silla sees this and walks toward her. When she gets within a yard, she lowers her hood, displaying her dark blonde curls. Her elegant face is marked by a worried grimace.

  “Captain,” she says, eyes open wide, “I’ve finally found you.”

  “Holy hell, what are you doing here?” Kasia takes her by the arm leading her toward the edge of the Walkway.

  “Alina,” the other woman answers.

  Of course she would be the problem. Alina was her youngest adept. A witch for less than a year and already forced to set sail on an airship. She couldn’t have left her in Gothland to become an orphan a second time over.

  “Silla, we’ve run into some problems,” Kasia says. “Some guy has us in his sights, we need to make tracks. What has Alina gotten mixed up in?”

  “A Dutchman showed up at the airship. I was on the bridge and she was below with Riger to check the belt on the mid-axle. Riger told me this guy introduced himself, well dressed, black velvet and leather shoes. She was hanging from the belt, off the ship, while Alina was on the pier holding the line.” Silla continues to look left and right, wringing her hands and involuntarily clenching her jaw between one sentence and the next. A long shiver raises the hairs on the back of Kasia’s neck. This setback couldn’t have happened by chance.

  “Then,” Silla continues, “the guy started to talk with Alina. Riger couldn’t hear
them well, she was suspended from the overhang with the wind and everything. She shouted for her to have the man wait and call for me, but instead Alina continued to talk with him. In the end Riger... lost her patience and started to climb back up the line.”

  Kasia can imagine the echo of Riger’s soft words, she is a witch of almost eighty, worn down by two wars and with more scars on her body than thoughts in her head. “Go on,” she says.

  “Before she made it to the pier, however, Alina told her the man was an officer of the magistrate and it was just a matter of going to get some documents we had forgotten. Authorization to transport the baskets of lime. Riger put two and two together, we had indeed forgotten them and, well, Alina went off.”

  Little Alina in a Dutch magistrate’s office. She could definitely do a lot of damage there, offending officials in just a few moments, compromising relationships established over the course of months or years with hard work and costly bribes. However, Kasia also needed to start giving her some responsibilities. She was sixteen; within less than two months she’d be participating in her first Sabbath.

  “You shouldn’t have let her go! I’m afraid someone may have bribed the magistrate to impede us. But you couldn’t have known that, it all happened in the last five minutes.”

  Silla passes a hand through her hair, her eyes frantic.

  “There’s more isn’t there?” Kasia presses her.

  “Ten minutes later another officer from the magistrate presented himself. The real officer.”

  “Infernal powers! Who’s at the ship right now?”

  “I woke up Lili. She’s in command and I told her to stamp everything and not to drop the gangway to the pier even if the devil himself shows up in Bermuda shorts. Riger went to the magistrate’s to see if by chance that man actually did bring her there.”

  “Useless!” Kasia shouts. “There’s some dandy, a German or Dutch nobleman, who’s convinced we have a passenger on board. And I think he’s kidnapped Alina as goods to exchange.”

  “But, Captain—”

  “We have no passengers on board, I know. But they tried to sell me one earlier.”

  Silla questions her with her eyes.

  “Not here, I’ll explain it all to you later. We need to get Alina back.”

  “The only way is to try to see.”

  Kasia stares at her for a few seconds. To utter a spell in the heart of the Palatinate, defying the ban on magic, would at best risk their licenses and at worst their lives. Nevertheless, Alina is in grave danger. The architect of a trick like this, who’d risk being discovered by the magistrate’s true agent, must have a clear goal and few scruples. And all the while Leonardo might show up on the pier at any moment with his mysterious traveler and Lili, so fragile these days, in command alone, unaware of his plotting.

  “Very well, let’s do it.” Kasia grabs the other witch by the arm. “Let’s go, but without running. We’ve already drawn enough attention.”

  The walkway goes on for several hundred yards before it reaches the gates granting access to the docks. Kasia keeps her eyes lowered, desperately trying not to draw unwanted attention. Some other seller calls out to her, but she keeps straight ahead, skirting the edge of rudeness. It’s difficult for a merchant to be in a hurry, deals require time and negotiation.

  With each step, the crowd grows denser. A large number of patrons group near the gates to intercept the best ventures. That’s without counting the host of onlookers and time-wasters who linger in the thick of the docks hoping to overhear a juicy bit of information to sell on the market in gossip, as flourishing as the one in goods. Two young boys, with similar features and equally dirty hair, appear in front of her, their expressions lost and cheeks gaunt with hunger.

  “Captain,” says one of them, “sterke armen, sterke armen!”

  Kasia shakes her head and moves on. She doesn’t know Dutch, but it’s not hard to guess what the two boys want: passage, a job, a bowl of stew. There’s a crowd assembled near the gates. She gets up on her tiptoes to catch a glimpse over the shoulders of her portly neighbor.

  A man is shouting at the soldiers on watch. His face is black and blue and copious blood is dripping from his nose, making his beard red and slimy. He has a curious turban of gray cloth wrapped around his head and a shabby army uniform full of holes as if chewed by rats.

  The guards watch him enraged, muskets raised in front of them. Perhaps the butt of one of their weapons has already probed the shouting man’s face, causing the injury to his nose. Kasia tries to pick up the conversation but too many words allude her, even if his gestures are unmistakable. He’s pointing at their airship spitting and making threats.

  She turns to Silla who knows Dutch much better than she. Silla stretches out her neck, pressing it against her own full red coif.

  “He has it in for us,” Silla whispers. “He says we’re witches and we should be burned. Some relatives of his died in the war, during the bombing I think.”

  A shudder runs down Kasia’s spine. It’s one thing to have their papers in order and it’s another to have to face an angry mob of Dutchmen dead set on making them pay for their children who fell under the English bombs, which were keenly guided by her sisters. These soldiers surely know they’re witches; they had to present their documents as soon as they docked.

  To enter on the other side of the docks they would have to back track across part of the Walkway, ascend to the upper terrace, hoping they don’t run into a patrol, and cross the entire first terrace to then climb back down again—a forty minute walk, with Alina in the clutches of who knows what sort of captors.

  Kasia moves away from the pressing throng of humanity, pushing Silla in front of her. They distance themselves from the primary thoroughfare, taking cover behind a pile of metal boxes. Kasia leans against the stonewall on the side of the apothecary’s shop. She takes her black scarf from her pocket and wraps it around her hair, too red to avoid being noticed and remembered.

  “Shall we try to get past?” Silla asks, drawing her head toward Kasia, her voice almost inaudible.

  “It’s not a good idea. With a stroke of luck we might perhaps be able to hurl ourselves beyond the soldiers to the safety of the docks. Assuming of course they hold their position and don’t open the gates and allow those madmen through, as I fear. They’d rather manage a small mob incident, where two English witches end up wounded or killed, than face off with guns raised against a wild crowd of their compatriots.”

  “Yeah, damned carrot-eaters,” Silla adds, through her teeth.

  “Regardless, the problem is then we’ll be unable to leave again. And thus our hopes of finding Alina would be reduced to almost zero. Not to mention Riger is also still outside.”

  “If this chaos doesn’t die down, as soon as we set foot in the airship we need to take to the sky. We can’t risk another night on the docks. Should we call Lili out here?”

  Kasia turns to look over her shoulder, following a jolt in her sister’s gaze. Just two men arguing over the price of copper, a few yards behind them. “We’d need to find a messenger, and with all this bedlam it won’t be easy. And then should Lili come? I saw her, she really has been stable this week; I think a bit of the color’s returning to her cheeks, but she hasn’t set foot on terra firma for almost two months. We can’t ask her to do it here, in the midst of such chaos.”

  “I think she should come. It’s a question of life or death. At least for Alina.”

  “Yes,” says Kasia, looking down, “but holding the ship is also a question of life or death, right? With no one on board all it’ll take is for any one of those homeless bastards to throw a grappling hook with a rope and—poof—our butts are grounded. In Frank Fort!”

  “We need to change plans,” Kasia adds and bites her lip, which is already painfully cracked. “We’ll do it out here. We can’t return to the ship without Alina. Let’s find Riger.”

  “You want to do the spe—” Silla stops herself, noticing the two men have finish
ed their negotiations. “You want to do it here?” she says in a whisper.

  “Yes, right here in front of these fifty maniacs. Why don’t we just build a pyre and we can do it on top of that.” Kasia rolls her eyes. “Obviously, sister, we must find a secluded place. But before all that we need to fetch Riger to be our third. Let’s go.”

  She takes the other witch under her arm and they start off, heads lowered, alongside the gray stone warehouses to the cobblestone incline that leads to the upper terrace.

  ***

  Kasia’s heavy leather boots squeak against the terrace’s rose marble. Polished wood doorways line both sides of the street over which dragons, warriors, or geometric embellishments are carved. The buildings are all made entirely of light-colored stones, crossed by carbon black or brushed aluminum frames. Brass plaques alternate on either side of the entrances, indicating the names of the doctors, pettifoggers, or government officials who work inside.

  Kasia and Silla keep their heads down, trying to avoid the eyes of the terrace’s bustling inhabitants. Everyone is dressed in elegant clothes, predominated by expensive pastel colors. Every few steps the witches need to move from the center of the street to make way for a band of representatives of some guild. The bigwigs advance, surrounded by their young assistants, and often are encircled by guards with menacing gazes, taking up the whole thoroughfare. Some merchants pass by as well, on whose clothes resides dust of the lower levels, having come up to complete some bureaucratic paperwork in the government offices.

  To their right, leaning against the side of a hill, the street opens into a small square ornamented by a circular fountain constantly replenished by a sinuous dolphin sculpture. The aluminum inlay of the pavement shines in the pale morning sun. The far end of the square is occupied by a four-story building supported by heavy columns and surrounded by an iron gate. A long line of people, mostly merchants in dark suits, waits patiently to step up to the guard post where the magistrate’s personnel check their right to enter.

  Kasia and Silla search the line and finally see Riger behind four Italian cloth merchants dressed in gaudy colors.